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From Pajamas to 4 Million Views: The Rise of That Career Coach with Kendall Berg · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  In this video, I said, you know, the biggest lie about corporate is that you have to be good at your job to get promoted.
• 0:10
  And the reality is the better you are at your job, the more you're going to get stuck.
• 0:14
  Today's guest is Kendall Berg, a powerhouse entrepreneur and the founder of that Career Coach, a soft skills coaching business that helps professionals excel and get ahead in their corporate careers.
• 0:27
  And after an impressive run in the corporate world, where she rose through the ranks thanks to her technical skills, Kendall hit a ceiling until a life changing conversation about the importance of soft skills propelled her to transform her
• 0:41
  approach.
• 0:42
  What followed?
• 0:43
  Five promotions in six years, viral success on social media, a best selling book, and her very own TED Talk.
• 0:52
  In this episode, we dive deep with Kendall into her journey from overcoming burnout and imposter syndrome to building a thriving coaching business literally overnight, helping your clients achieve rapid promotions and even inspiring one to leave corporate for a
• 1:09
  very successful macaroon shop.
• 1:12
  You'll get a candid look at the messy, imperfect action, the surprising truth about the corporate advancement, and tactical tips on confidence, communication and networking for real career success.
• 1:25
  If you're ready for inspiration and actionable advice, this episode is for you.
• 1:30
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:35
  All right, Kendall Berg, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:39
  Thank you.
• 1:39
  I'm so excited to be here.
• 1:41
  Yes, we are excited to have you.
• 1:44
  So, Kendall, you are an entrepreneur and you're the founder of that career coach, which is a soft skills coaching program or business to help people excel in their corporate careers.
• 1:59
  And you've got quite a fascinating start to your journey and how it unfolded.
• 2:05
  And you had quite an illustrious corporate career before you became an entrepreneur.
• 2:09
  So just for our audience, if they haven't heard of you before, can you just talk about your backstory and how you got here?
• 2:15
  Absolutely.
• 2:16
  Thanks, Dave.
• 2:17
  So I started in corporate, very tactical, technical individuals.
• 2:22
  So I started in data science, very much a math person in my brain.
• 2:26
  And about eight, 10 years into my career, I kind of stalled out and I stopped getting promoted.
• 2:33
  I stopped getting these opportunities.
• 2:35
  And I share this story often, but I had an executive that I worked with at the time who I had a lot of respect for who pulled me aside and said, Kendall, you're great at your job.
• 2:45
  Nobody likes working with you.
• 2:48
  You do all the great work, you get all the things done, but you're too direct, you're difficult to work with, you don't collaborate well, you don't listen to other people and your soft skills are holding you back.
• 2:59
  And he was like, until you fix that, you're never getting promoted again.
• 3:03
  And I remember at the time thinking, but like, isn't this supposed to be a meritocracy?
• 3:09
  It's supposed to be the better I am at my job, the faster I get promoted, the more work I deliver, the better quality it is, the more I get promoted.
• 3:17
  And that's, frankly, just not the way it works.
• 3:20
  So following that conversation and he gave me this feedback in a really respectful way, he really wanted me to be successful.
• 3:27
  I really looked up to him and knew he was coming from a good place.
• 3:30
  And so I really leaned into building these soft skills, building relationships, communicating more effectively, establishing my network, learning to be a better collaborator.
• 3:39
  And following that year, I was promoted five times in six years.
• 3:45
  So very fast, rapid upward progression following that conversation.
• 3:50
  And as I was sharing right before we started recording, I then sort of became the dumping ground for anybody who struggled in soft skills.
• 3:57
  Right?
• 3:58
  My, my co workers, my leaders, they would bring me, oh, well, Steve is great at his job, but he's struggling to communicate.
• 4:04
  We'll give him to Kendall and she'll fix it.
• 4:07
  Or Susie's having a hard time building relationships.
• 4:10
  We'll give her to Kendall and she'll fix them.
• 4:12
  And so that career coach was really born organically out of the skills that I lacked myself, that I had to improve in, in order to find my own corporate success.
• 4:22
  That then translated into me giving this feedback and this coaching into other people and then ultimately starting my own business.
• 4:31
  Okay, all right.
• 4:32
  So you're in the corporate world.
• 4:34
  You kind of hit a wall with the promotions, and you're told by an executive you trust, it's because you don't have soft skills.
• 4:40
  And then you talks to you about how important that is to build.
• 4:44
  And you really go to work developing those skills the same way you did everything else very well as a hard worker and get stuff done type of person.
• 4:53
  And you have this radical transformation where you get promoted very fast thereafter.
• 4:59
  And then you go from not having the soft skills to being the go to coach for the soft skills at that.
• 5:05
  At that corporate company.
• 5:06
  And then it's your job to fix everyone that has problems.
• 5:11
  Right?
• 5:11
  They bring everyone to you, and through that, your company was born.
• 5:15
  Yes.
• 5:15
  Yep.
• 5:16
  Okay.
• 5:17
  All right.
• 5:18
  And so let's talk about kind of what, what happened next, because a big part to you scaling into, you know, all the social media followers and writing a book and, and doing a TED Talk, which we'll get into,
• 5:32
  but all of that happened very, very fast.
• 5:35
  So how.
• 5:36
  How did you.
• 5:37
  How did you first kind of launch the company and, and get onto social media?
• 5:43
  So it's a funny story.
• 5:44
  I've said it before in many episodes.
• 5:46
  I'll say it today.
• 5:47
  My husband is wonderful.
• 5:48
  I'm very lucky.
• 5:49
  I have a wonderful spouse.
• 5:50
  And we were talking in 2021, and the corporate world has changed a lot post2020.
• 5:57
  I had become this space where we were, for lack of a better word, rehabilitating, underperforming employees.
• 6:06
  And while that was a huge passion of mine, it, it, it wasn't necessarily where I wanted to be.
• 6:11
  And I had kind of capped out my career, the next level with C Suite.
• 6:15
  And I wasn't sure that I wanted to do that.
• 6:17
  I had young kids, I had, you know, we were moving, we had a lot going on.
• 6:22
  We had just moved to Colorado in 2021.
• 6:24
  And so I was like, I don't know that that's the direction I want to keep going.
• 6:28
  And my husband and I were discussing it and he said, I think you're so great at coaching and mentoring people and how to improve soft skills.
• 6:36
  You should start a business.
• 6:37
  And I went, that's not a job.
• 6:40
  Like, that's not a, that's not a company.
• 6:42
  That's not a thing I can go do full time.
• 6:45
  You know, there's executive leadership companies, but there's not for soft skills.
• 6:48
  That's, you know, not a thing that I can do.
• 6:50
  And he, he kept encouraging me, kept pushing me, and finally he's like, just put a video on social media.
• 6:56
  Just record yourself talking about corporate and put it on social media and see if anybody likes it.
• 7:02
  And I was so resistant to the idea.
• 7:04
  I'd been on social media before.
• 7:06
  I had, like so many entrepreneurs.
• 7:08
  I was a failed entrepreneur.
• 7:10
  I had started other businesses that weren't successful or that didn't get traction.
• 7:14
  And so I was really, really hesitant to the idea.
• 7:16
  And finally I caved and I recorded a video.
• 7:18
  And I still remember it was at like 2 o' clock in the morning, I'm in my pajamas, I'm using a very heavy filter and have no makeup on.
• 7:26
  It's not a good, high quality video.
• 7:28
  Okay.
• 7:28
  It was just me kind of brain dumping at 2am and when I first.
• 7:34
  Jumped into podcasting, I had no idea what I was doing.
• 7:38
  I relied heavily on my sales background to do cold outreach and get guests.
• 7:43
  But let's be honest, that strategy isn't sustainable for everyone.
• 7:47
  And it's why we see so many podcasters quit before they get any traction.
• 7:52
  If I had it all to do over again.
• 7:54
  I'd join Pod Match right from the start.
• 7:58
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• 8:01
  Their AI driven matching doesn't just find any guests, it finds the right guests.
• 8:06
  No more chasing, just high quality, authentic connections and top tier support.
• 8:11
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• 8:17
  Just click the link below and start matching today.
• 8:21
  In this video I said, you know, the biggest lie about corporate is that you have to be good at your job to get promoted.
• 8:28
  And the reality is the better you are at your job, the more you're going to get stuck.
• 8:31
  And the better you are at people, the faster you're going to progress.
• 8:34
  And I put it in my drafts and I kind of debated it and I was like, I don't know, I don't know if I want to post it.
• 8:39
  I don't know if I want to be so controversial.
• 8:42
  And the next day we were going hiking in Utah.
• 8:45
  And right before we decided to hike, I'm like, okay, I'm going to post that video.
• 8:50
  Nothing's gonna happen, but I'll put it out there.
• 8:52
  So I post the video, leave my phone in the car.
• 8:56
  My husband and I go on this 10 hour long hike with some very, very good friends of ours.
• 8:59
  So we're going up this mountain.
• 9:01
  We were at Angel's Landing.
• 9:03
  For anybody who's familiar with Utah and the hike, I think we're gone six to eight hours.
• 9:09
  It's a long hike.
• 9:10
  We get back to the car and I turn on my phone and it's ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
• 9:16
  And it's so overwhelmed with notifications that I can't even get to any of my applications.
• 9:21
  And I remember thinking like, my, my children are in the hospital, like something horrible has happened because my phone is blowing up.
• 9:29
  And it turned out that that video had gotten 4.1 million views and I had over 100,000 followers by the time I got back to my car.
• 9:40
  And so we went from no business and no idea if this was going to be successful to basically a thousand person wait list by the end of that very first weekend, which was crazy.
• 9:53
  Okay, that's insane.
• 9:55
  That is.
• 9:55
  I've never heard a story like that in terms of that, that type.
• 10:00
  The first.
• 10:01
  So you don't even want to do this.
• 10:03
  Your husband keeps urging you.
• 10:04
  You don't even think it's a real like niche of a coaching business, right?
• 10:09
  And he says, just do it.
• 10:10
  Just post.
• 10:11
  You say, fine, I'll post it's.
• 10:13
  Not a high qual video.
• 10:14
  You're just, you know, 2:00am in your pajamas, just being real, like you said.
• 10:18
  Brain dumping.
• 10:19
  About what, what your thoughts on corporate.
• 10:21
  You post the video, you come back and I mean, 4 million views on your first time.
• 10:29
  So what's when that happens?
• 10:31
  And like you said, a hundred thousand followers off the bat and this huge wait list for this company, you didn't even think was could be done.
• 10:38
  Like, what's going through your mind at that point?
• 10:41
  So, I mean, there's a ton of overwhelm that came with that, right?
• 10:45
  You know, I.
• 10:46
  I am a person.
• 10:47
  I think so many entrepreneurs are.
• 10:49
  We.
• 10:50
  We strive to do things really well, right?
• 10:53
  We have these ideas, these big ideas that don't always make sense to everybody else.
• 10:56
  We want to execute them well.
• 10:58
  And this was the one time where I hadn't.
• 11:00
  I had no business plan, I had no strategy, and I'm like, oh, shoot, I need to put everything in place, right?
• 11:10
  I didn't have a tax ID number.
• 11:12
  I didn't.
• 11:12
  I had nothing, right?
• 11:14
  And so it was such.
• 11:16
  I always say this, it was such a God thing that, like, the video went viral, right?
• 11:21
  My first, I think 10 or so videos, all were over a million, right?
• 11:26
  It was.
• 11:27
  It was insane.
• 11:28
  And then after that, we kind of got stuck in like, the 100,000 to 500,000 jail.
• 11:32
  And, you know, things develop over time.
• 11:35
  And now I've been doing this four years, and my videos get probably 50,000 views on average, right?
• 11:40
  So if you're watching this and you're like, that's crazy.
• 11:42
  Did she maintain this all this time?
• 11:44
  No, but I.
• 11:46
  I built this rapid following, and I.
• 11:49
  I tell friends of mine and entrepreneurs all the time.
• 11:51
  I built everything backwards.
• 11:54
  So I had clients, I had this wait list.
• 11:57
  I had no idea what to do with them.
• 11:58
  I had no idea what coaches charged or how programs worked or how to structure it.
• 12:03
  So I put up a link and I said, if you want to work.
• 12:05
  If you want to work with me for 30 minutes, 50 bucks, book a call.
• 12:11
  And we sold a hundred bookings in an hour.
• 12:15
  And I took the link down, and I was like, that's not gonna work.
• 12:21
  Like, I can't.
• 12:23
  It's gonna take me two weeks to fulfill all of these calls, let alone, like, clearly there's too much demand.
• 12:28
  That's not sustainable.
• 12:29
  So I take the link down and I'm like, okay, well, wouldn't it be crazy if I was making 75 bucks an hour, right?
• 12:34
  Remember, I'm coming from the corporate world where like, you think very much in terms of hourly.
• 12:40
  And so I put the link back up at 75 bucks an hour.
• 12:43
  And this time I'm watching because I'm like, okay, I need to gauge this.
• 12:47
  And we sell like, 50 in the first 30 minutes.
• 12:49
  I take the link back down.
• 12:50
  I'm like, okay, this is clearly not working.
• 12:54
  So I come up with this bundle.
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  Like, hey, if you want to work with me, you can buy 10 sessions.
• 12:59
  It's going to cost X dollars.
• 13:01
  I think I sold my first bundle.
• 13:02
  It's 10 sessions for 1200, something like that.
• 13:06
  And I'm like, I have no idea what I'm going to talk about over 10 sessions with these people, but I'll figure it out.
• 13:13
  And I relaunch, and that sells at more of a standard rate.
• 13:16
  So I'm.
• 13:16
  I'm selling, you know, maybe one or two a day into that program in the very early beginning.
• 13:22
  After that, it kind of slows down, like, all volume does.
• 13:24
  Um, and so then I start coaching.
• 13:26
  I'm trying to get through this backlog of people.
• 13:28
  And by the time I made it through those initial sales, those initial three offerings, I had found that everybody was asking about the same seven things.
• 13:38
  Every session was about one of these seven things.
• 13:40
  It was so obvious to me where people were struggling.
• 13:44
  And so I shut the business down for, like, 30 days, and I created a program.
• 13:50
  Hey, we're going to talk about these seven things.
• 13:51
  I made a course.
• 13:52
  I figured out how I was going to do small groups and hot seats and when I was going to weave in one on ones and what that structure was going to look like.
• 13:59
  And then I relaunched.
• 14:00
  And the reason I share all of this is because in those early days, nothing was done the way that an entrepreneur thinks it should be.
• 14:07
  Right?
• 14:08
  I didn't have a business model.
• 14:09
  I didn't know what I should be charging.
• 14:11
  I didn't do any market research.
• 14:13
  I just had an audience, and I wanted to capitalize on it.
• 14:16
  I didn't want to miss out on all these people being really interested all of a sudden.
• 14:20
  And so I didn't get my tax ID number, I think, until, like, six months after I started taking clients.
• 14:26
  I didn't get a business bank account until nine months after I started taking clients.
• 14:30
  Like, everything that you're supposed to do, I didn't do.
• 14:36
  And then about nine months in, we launched my.
• 14:38
  My signature program, which I then ran for three years.
• 14:41
  And my signature program launch was wildly successful.
• 14:44
  We had 25 people in our first cohort.
• 14:47
  This was my first, like, structured multi Month high ticket program offering.
• 14:52
  And I've basically run that ever since.
• 14:55
  But going back to your initial question, like, how are you feeling?
• 14:57
  I was feeling like I had no idea what I was doing and I was just going to start and I tell people all the time, like, the best thing I did for my business in those early days, because
• 15:06
  I did a lot that was wrong.
• 15:08
  The best thing I did is I took very messy, very fast action and then I adjusted very quickly on the fly just to make sure that we weren't missing out on this really rapid growth that we'd had in
• 15:20
  the beginning.
• 15:21
  And then we iterated.
• 15:22
  And I think the mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is we focus so much on delivering perfection out the gate.
• 15:29
  We're going to deliver the perfect product with a perfect process, with the perfect website, with the perfect accounting structure, and we're going to do all these things perfectly that by the time we get to perfect, the window has
• 15:41
  closed or the volume has passed, or somebody else has gotten to the market faster than us.
• 15:46
  And so I think the big learning for me as an entrepreneur in those early days was like, just do the thing.
• 15:53
  If it's wrong, you can fix it later and then very rapidly iterate on what you're building.
• 16:00
  Wow, love that.
• 16:01
  So messy, imperfect action, right?
• 16:04
  Instead of waiting for perfection, you have this audience, you have this, you have this viral moment and you, you know, you, like you said, you did everything backwards, but the one thing that you kept doing was, you know,
• 16:18
  taking care of customers, right?
• 16:20
  And taking care of, and engaging with the people that want your services and that are, you know, there's this demand for what you're offering.
• 16:28
  So.
• 16:30
  Wow.
• 16:30
  So you, you went from not even knowing what a coach like that should charge and kind of really underselling yourself 50 bucks an hour or maybe 75.
• 16:40
  I mean, right, you're coming from that, that corporate type of mindset.
• 16:44
  And then like you said, you develop the, the bundles and then the actual signature program.
• 16:50
  You, and you really have a remarkable run here.
• 16:54
  So, like, let's just talk about.
• 16:58
  So you're, you're, you're becoming this coach and you finally get the business stabilized and where you want it and you have the right program.
• 17:05
  I mean, what are you noticing, like, are the biggest, like you mentioned those seven things.
• 17:09
  What are the biggest challenges people are having within the corporate world that they're coming to you to help you help them solve?
• 17:16
  So what I found as I was talking to clients and I think for anybody who's listening, who has started a business or who is going to start a business?
• 17:24
  You have to understand not just what people are telling you, but what it is they want to feel when they work with you.
• 17:33
  And what I found in those early days is everybody who was coming to me was lacking confidence.
• 17:42
  They it manifested lots of different ways, but they lacked confidence in their communication, they lacked confidence in their ability to get a promotion.
• 17:49
  They lacked confidence in their leadership skills.
• 17:51
  They lacked confidence going into networking, conversations or meeting new people.
• 17:55
  But really what it came down to is people were coming to me because they lacked confidence.
• 18:00
  And they hoped that I would have a formula that would build their confidence, that I would have this magic wand in the middle that like, boom, Dave wakes up tomorrow and suddenly he's confident in every corporate meeting and
• 18:16
  being able to really hone in on what that root problem was, was, hey, yeah, maybe I'm frustrated, I'm not getting promoted, or maybe I'm being told I need to work on my communication, or maybe I need to expand
• 18:26
  my network, or maybe my career is not as successful as I want.
• 18:29
  A lot of that comes down to lack of confidence or lack of self efficacy.
• 18:33
  And then how do we translate that into them walking out of the program feeling like, oh my gosh, I know exactly what to do.
• 18:39
  Confidence in action, confidence and sense of self.
• 18:42
  And so that's really the transformation that my clients go through.
• 18:46
  And I think if you're listening to this and you've started a business and you're struggling to target the right customers or your marketing's not working, or your social media is not working, it's because we haven't honed in on
• 18:56
  like, what is that feeling that they're trying to get from you?
• 19:00
  Right?
• 19:00
  People who buy luxury cars, they want to feel fancy, they want to feel successful, they want to feel confident in themselves.
• 19:07
  People who buy glass water bottles want to feel like they're doing what's good for the environment.
• 19:14
  They want to feel like they're eco friendly, they want to feel better about their life's choices and how they're showing up from a materials perspective, right?
• 19:22
  And a lot of buying decisions comes down to identity and this emotion.
• 19:27
  And Pete Senna, who is wonderful, if you're not familiar with him, you should check him out.
• 19:31
  Pete Senna does a lot about identity marketing.
• 19:33
  He talks about this.
• 19:34
  He recently gave his TED talk with me, and he's a wonderful resource.
• 19:38
  But we were chatting about people buy things because they want to feel a certain way.
• 19:43
  And so when clients were coming to me in those early days, they wanted to feel confident and clearly the corporate structure wasn't providing that.
• 19:50
  So what I did in between is I built what I call my tool set, which is here's the template you're going to follow to feel confident in this situation.
• 20:00
  Here's the template you're going to use to navigate this specific situation.
• 20:05
  And in my program specifically, this includes everything from assessments to decision trees to literal templates like, hey, you're going to fill out this email template or the speaking template, or this meeting setting template or networking template.
• 20:20
  And so it's very, very tactical in, hey, you may not feel confident in this situation, but here's the tool that gets you confident and here's how you leave feeling better about it.
• 20:28
  And so what I did in those early days is really build the structure around each of those specific situations.
• 20:35
  And how does that translate from lack of confidence to confidence once you've learned kind of that middle step?
• 20:41
  So the big seven areas we focused on was what is the game?
• 20:44
  What are all the secrets in the career that nobody teaches you?
• 20:48
  How do you network effectively?
• 20:49
  How do you build your personal brand?
• 20:51
  How do you build effective relationships?
• 20:54
  How do you lead?
• 20:55
  How do you think strategically?
• 20:56
  And how do you navigate the job market?
• 20:58
  Those were the seven areas that everybody wanted to talk about.
• 21:00
  That was the main focus.
• 21:01
  And so that's really how we, we structured it, is here's the tools that solve each of those seven problems and take you from lacking confidence to clarity.
• 21:11
  Wow.
• 21:12
  Okay.
• 21:13
  And so what are some of the results like, that your clients have got and the, like the success stories that, that they've had, you know, since you've built this and have been delivering this, this coaching to the market.
• 21:25
  So overall, I have a 70% promotion or placement rate within six months of working with me, which is pretty high for the, for the market average.
• 21:34
  And that means that 70% of the people who come to me for coaching end up either getting promoted or getting an ideal role in the job market within six months.
• 21:42
  Now, not everybody comes to me for that.
• 21:44
  Some of them come to me because their boss is terrible or their co worker in accounting drives them crazy or whatever the issue is.
• 21:52
  But that's kind of the most tangible result.
• 21:54
  I have an average of a $25,000 raise across the entire population, including the people who don't get promoted.
• 22:01
  And then as far as, like, big success stories, one of my favorite is I had a client, she's recently come back to work with me again.
• 22:06
  She's one of my, my favorite stories to tell came to me because she was given an Opportunity where she felt she had imposter syndrome.
• 22:14
  So she's given this leadership role overseeing this huge team, and she's like, I'm not, I'm not ready.
• 22:19
  She comes into coaching because she's like, kendall, I don't know how to do this and I'm going to fail.
• 22:23
  And I need outside help to make sure I don't fail in this role that I've just been given.
• 22:27
  And we worked together for six months.
• 22:29
  We focused on identity, on building this confidence, on establishing your network.
• 22:33
  All of these things I just talked about.
• 22:36
  At the end of our six months working together, she got promoted again into an even larger scope role and came back to me and said, okay, I want to be a coo.
• 22:46
  How do we make this happen?
• 22:48
  So we went from stepping into a director level role where we felt overwhelmed, we felt like we didn't have clarity, we didn't know what to do.
• 22:55
  We were kind of scrambling to find purchase, to getting promoted into an even higher position, into a VP role overseeing a larger division, to being on track to be the COO in like less than a year.
• 23:06
  And so she is one of my, my favorite stories to share because I think it shows how powerful it can be to kind of build these tactical tips.
• 23:15
  And then my other favorite is I had a client who's, she's wonderful.
• 23:18
  We keep in touch to this day, Came in for some help with relationship building and networking and quit her job to start a macaron shop.
• 23:26
  And so our coaching evolved from, okay, how do I be successful in the corporate world?
• 23:31
  To how do I build a successful business?
• 23:32
  What do I need in place?
• 23:33
  How do I build this structure?
• 23:35
  And she actually announced yesterday that she's announcing a larger location because her macaron shop has been so successful and doing so well, which makes me really happy for her.
• 23:45
  But it's, you know, it's proof that the best laid plans, right, you have to adjust, you've got to iterate.
• 23:53
  She came in wanting to be successful on her corporate job and then went, nah, I think I'm gonna make macarons for the rest of my life.
• 23:59
  And both like this very successful business and community around that.
• 24:02
  So I think it, the best thing about working with my clients is that it goes a lot of different ways.
• 24:08
  Okay.
• 24:09
  Yeah.
• 24:09
  And so it's, they, like you said, they came to you for career coaching.
• 24:13
  And then she realized she wanted to be an entrepreneur, went that route, and the coaching helped her.
• 24:18
  I mean, who would have thought a macaron shop, right?
• 24:22
  And then to just, you know, Expand like that.
• 24:25
  That's.
• 24:26
  That's a fantastic story.
• 24:27
  One thing I want to go back to, because you mentioned imposter syndrome.
• 24:31
  So when you go viral and you're not even thinking this is a niche you can even sustain, and you instantly have this huge waiting list and this demand.
• 24:41
  And like you said, you tried some entrepreneurial stuff.
• 24:44
  Hadn't had it.
• 24:45
  Hadn't worked.
• 24:46
  You're coming from the corporate world and you're thrust into this.
• 24:50
  You know, there's so much demand for.
• 24:53
  For what you can offer.
• 24:55
  How did, like, you had to have some imposter syndrome?
• 24:57
  Because it's very.
• 24:58
  Right, it's very natural.
• 24:59
  How did you, like, navigate?
• 25:02
  And just because you, you know, take that messy, imperfect action, like, what's that inner conversation like?
• 25:07
  And how did you get through that?
• 25:09
  Yeah, I think it's.
• 25:10
  It's impossible not to feel imposter syndrome and that big of a switch.
• 25:14
  You know, even now, four years later, I was talking to a good friend of mine right before this call, and I was even telling her, I still feel imposter syndrome.
• 25:22
  Right.
• 25:23
  You know, I had a client come up to me or a potential client come up to me at a TED Talk with a copy of my book and ask me to sign it.
• 25:29
  And I fangirled more than he did.
• 25:31
  I was so happy somebody had bought my book and wanted me to sign it.
• 25:34
  Right.
• 25:34
  Like, you still have this.
• 25:36
  This sense of almost like, why me?
• 25:38
  Of all the people who could have built this business or who could have gone viral or who could be helping these people, like, why?
• 25:46
  What is it that I have that makes me uniquely prepared for this?
• 25:49
  And I think for me, faith is a big part of that.
• 25:53
  Right.
• 25:53
  So I believe in.
• 25:55
  In a God calling.
• 25:56
  And for me, I felt like God put me in this position.
• 25:58
  He made me go viral and he gave me this platform, and I intend to use it.
• 26:03
  But I also think that it's being able to overcome the fear and do the thing anyways and that that's, you know, so often I've talked with my spouse who, you know, is obviously part of my board and is
• 26:16
  constantly interacting with me and giving me recommendations on how to run things that there's all kinds of things I want to do in the future.
• 26:23
  And I still feel a little bit of imposter syndrome about doing that.
• 26:29
  And I think, especially in those early days, there was more fear about missing the moment than there was about not being prepared for it.
• 26:39
  That it was almost easier to handle imposter syndrome in the very beginning for me because I Had all of these eyes, I had all of this attention that I was like, I don't want to miss it.
• 26:47
  I don't want to lose momentum.
• 26:49
  I don't want to miss out on these potential sales, this potential opportunity.
• 26:51
  I'm building this business.
• 26:52
  And so it was.
• 26:53
  It was almost easier to ignore how out of my scope I felt in those early days, because it was like such a fast, fast thing that happened.
• 27:03
  And I think as the dust settled, you know, every entrepreneur I've ever talked to feels imposter syndrome feels a little bit like, I don't know that I'm the right person to be making this call.
• 27:14
  You know, I Coach founders and CEOs all the time on how to run their business.
• 27:18
  And I always joke, if you ever feel like you have imposter syndrome, go spend 10 minutes with a founder of a company because they have no idea what they're doing and they're still doing it, and it's great and
• 27:28
  they'll figure it out.
• 27:30
  But it is.
• 27:31
  I think for me, it was looking past my own fear towards great, I have to be able to deliver this next thing, and I don't want to miss those moments.
• 27:39
  But what I tell all my clients is imposter syndrome is defined as feeling as though you've been given an opportunity that you don't deserve.
• 27:46
  It's the way that it's defined in the dictionary.
• 27:49
  And the way that I define it as imposter syndrome is not trusting yourself to learn the next thing you have to know.
• 27:56
  And if you can reframe mentally, hey, I don't feel like I deserve to be in this position, or I can't believe my business is growing like this, or I don't know what I'm supposed to do next.
• 28:05
  If you reframe that as.
• 28:06
  Do you trust yourself to learn the next thing?
• 28:09
  You have to learn 99% of the time, my clients or my friends, they'll go, yes, I can learn it.
• 28:16
  And I'm like, great, then figure out what the next thing is and go learn it.
• 28:19
  Don't wait for you to feel confident in what you're doing, because you're never going to feel confident.
• 28:24
  You're always going to feel like you don't know how to do X.
• 28:28
  You know, I'm stepping into the next phase of my business in 2026.
• 28:33
  We've launched a lot of products, we're going into advertising, we're doing events.
• 28:37
  We're, like, really expanding our.
• 28:38
  Our footprint, our profile.
• 28:40
  And all of it feels scary.
• 28:42
  All of it feels like Things I don't know how to do.
• 28:44
  But I trust myself enough to learn that next thing that I need to do to go execute.
• 28:49
  So I think the answer to your question is yes, I was terrified.
• 28:52
  Yes, I felt absolutely overwhelmed.
• 28:55
  But I didn't want to miss the moment.
• 28:58
  And I had to have enough trust in myself that I could learn that next thing and I could figure it out.
• 29:03
  Because if you lack either of those, entrepreneurship is going to be a really challenging journey.
• 29:10
  Because if you do get the volume you want, then you don't know what to do with it.
• 29:12
  And if you do get the success you want, you're not going to know how to do that either.
• 29:15
  So being able to learn and really iterate rapidly is super important.
• 29:20
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 29:21
  And I'm sure all the listeners and the entrepreneurs out there can, can relate to.
• 29:26
  So often we don't know what we're doing and we are terrified.
• 29:29
  But you have to, like, you don't have a choice.
• 29:32
  You have to just take the action and do the thing.
• 29:34
  And I love that reframe of.
• 29:36
  Do you trust yourself to learn the next thing you need to learn?
• 29:39
  Okay, great, go learn it.
• 29:40
  I mean, that's, that's great advice.
• 29:45
  Okay, so you wrote along the way, you wrote a book, and the book.
• 29:50
  Is called Secrets of the Career Game.
• 29:53
  Okay, all right.
• 29:54
  And what made you write the book?
• 29:57
  There were a couple of reasons that I chose to write a book.
• 30:00
  So.
• 30:00
  One, it's always been a lifelong dream of mine.
• 30:02
  I think when I was a child, I used to, you know, fold paper in half and staple the spine and write books and give them to my mom for Mother's Day.
• 30:09
  But I think for me it was, there are a lot of self development books out there.
• 30:13
  There are a lot of self help books, there are a lot of leadership books, but none of them that really talk about the way it is.
• 30:21
  And the struggle that I had in my corporate career was nobody told me like, until, until that executive came to me and said, hey, nobody likes working with you.
• 30:29
  Nobody told me I was difficult to work with.
• 30:30
  Nobody told me they wanted me to work on my communication skills.
• 30:33
  Nobody told me I needed to collaborate well.
• 30:35
  Nobody told me to build strong relationships with advocates.
• 30:38
  It's all implied.
• 30:40
  And the issue with that whole ecosystem of bureaucracy being implied is you either have really good pattern recognition skills and you see other people doing it and you copy, or you fail.
• 30:52
  And more often you fail.
• 30:55
  And so the purpose of the book was to really peel back almost the shroud that covers working.
• 31:02
  And this is applicable whether you run your own business, or whether you are in the corporate world or whether you're doing both.
• 31:08
  The lie that education teaches us is that you have to be good at everything.
• 31:14
  And by being good at everything, you're doing well.
• 31:18
  And the reality of people is you have to be good at people to do well in anything, whether that's entrepreneurship or building a business or working in a business.
• 31:29
  If you don't understand people, you will not be successful.
• 31:33
  And so the secrets of the Career Game is for both groups, it's about what are all the things that are happening that we're not aware of, and how do you navigate them?
• 31:42
  And the analogy that I always use is it's like playing chess.
• 31:45
  So when I learned to play chess, I learned to play with my husband, and he only told me part of the rules.
• 31:51
  And we sat down and we start playing, and I go to move a piece, and he's like, oh, you can't.
• 31:54
  You can't move.
• 31:55
  You can't move that piece that way.
• 31:56
  It has to go this other way.
• 31:57
  And you're like, well, that would have been great to know when we started, but cool.
• 32:00
  Now I know.
• 32:01
  Then I move another piece.
• 32:02
  He's like, oh, also like, that piece can't go there.
• 32:05
  And that's how the corporate world is.
• 32:07
  You're playing chess, you only know some of the rules.
• 32:10
  You don't know all of them.
• 32:12
  And as a result, it's really hard to win, it's really hard to get promoted, it's really hard to be successful.
• 32:18
  It's really hard to build a scalable enterprise because you're not peeling back those layers to learn every single rule.
• 32:24
  And once you know the rules, you can choose how you want to play, you can choose your strategy, you can choose what moves you want to make or not make based on how they align with your.
• 32:34
  Your morals and your vision for your future.
• 32:37
  And so Secrets of the Career game talks about 36 different strategies for being in control and of your career, Right?
• 32:45
  So it covers everything from building a personal brand to building a network of advocates.
• 32:49
  How are you in sales?
• 32:50
  How do you sell yourself?
• 32:51
  How do you sell your product?
• 32:52
  It talks about building a culture.
• 32:54
  So if you're building a business, how are you hiring the right people under you?
• 32:58
  It talks about how to do performance reviews, how to navigate performance reviews as the employee.
• 33:02
  So it's really a.
• 33:03
  I joke, a textbook on how does the corporate world work.
• 33:07
  If you got to sit in every executive meeting, if you got to sit in every performance review, if you got to see behind the curtain, how does the company actually operate and what do you need to do in
• 33:20
  order to be successful within those confines?
• 33:22
  So it was really written as like a, a passion for how do I take all of this coaching and all of these things that I've seen and I distill it into something that can help everybody.
• 33:31
  Whether you're trying to build your own business, you work blue collar, you work white collar.
• 33:34
  It's all the same.
• 33:35
  How do you build the right people skills to navigate people within the career game?
• 33:41
  Okay.
• 33:42
  All right.
• 33:42
  And we will post the, the link for the, for your book in the show notes here so everyone can check that out.
• 33:49
  Another bucket list item of yours that you got to check off recently was giving a TED Talk.
• 33:55
  So let's, let's talk about that.
• 33:57
  How did that come about?
• 33:59
  So, speaking of labors of love, I applied for my first ted talk in 2023.
• 34:06
  I made it to the preliminary rounds and then wasn't selected.
• 34:10
  Applied again in 2024, made it to the second round, wasn't selected.
• 34:13
  And then in 2025 was finally selected as one of the eight speakers in TEDx Hartford in Connecticut.
• 34:21
  And it's been such a cool experience.
• 34:24
  So I will say I got very lucky.
• 34:25
  The location in which I gave my TED is really structured, so they assign a coach and a mentor who helps you really finesse your talk and make sure it's ready to go.
• 34:34
  They have a wonderful production team that makes sure we know how the tech is going to work and how the sound is going to work, how the stage is set up.
• 34:40
  So there was a ton of preparation.
• 34:42
  We started back in, I think I was selected in May, April or May.
• 34:48
  And then we started prep in June and then the talk was in December.
• 34:52
  So quite a bit of preparation into that.
• 34:56
  And it was such a cool experience because I love speaking, I love sharing this message.
• 35:00
  I'm clearly very passionate about it.
• 35:02
  And getting on that stage was such a unique opportunity to be in front of 300 people from all over the country who wanted to hear this talk and to share a message that's really, I think, apropos right now.
• 35:15
  And my talk is on the clash of the generation.
• 35:18
  So we talk about how Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Zs are all coexisting right now.
• 35:26
  There are huge differences in expectations in each generation.
• 35:31
  What Gen Z wants in the workplace is a lot of flexibility and they want to be more casual and they want to work remote.
• 35:38
  And what boomers want in the office is to wear a suit and tie and Have a corner office and work longer hours.
• 35:44
  Right.
• 35:44
  And you have this vastly different set of expectations across all four that make it really hard for us to work together.
• 35:49
  Whether you're in business, whether you run a business, whether you work in a company, you're dealing with these generations who communicate differently, they prioritize differently, they have different cultural experiences and norms.
• 36:01
  And so how do we navigate that in a way that's more beneficial for everyone?
• 36:07
  And so it was a really, really amazing experience.
• 36:09
  A huge shout out to my mentor, Jeremy, who did a lot of work with me and a lot of trial and error to make sure the talk was where we wanted it.
• 36:17
  But it was such a great experience.
• 36:19
  And I think that, you know, for anyone who hates or loves public speaking, the ability to do a TED Talk is next level.
• 36:27
  And it was such an awesome, awesome experience.
• 36:29
  Experience.
• 36:30
  I would highly recommend, you know, putting yourself out there, applying, looking for the right talk and figuring out how to get on that stage, because regardless of what it does for your business, for your platform, it was such
• 36:42
  a great personal growth opportunity for me, and really something I've been so excited about all year.
• 36:50
  Okay, love that.
• 36:52
  And it comes out.
• 36:53
  It comes out in just a few days.
• 36:54
  Is that right?
• 36:56
  Yeah, we should be out next week, which is wild.
• 36:58
  So excited to have that up on YouTube and on the TED website.
• 37:02
  Cool.
• 37:03
  All right.
• 37:04
  And, Kendall, if people are hearing this and the message resonates and they want to find out how they can work with you, what's the best way people can get in touch with you online?
• 37:14
  So I'm that career coach pretty much everywhere.
• 37:16
  TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, everywhere.
• 37:22
  Or you can find me@thatcareercoach.net and it's got all the links to my coaching information about my book, my TED Talk, anything like that.
• 37:29
  Okay.
• 37:30
  All right, we'll link all that in the show notes as well for everyone.
• 37:33
  All right, well, Kendall, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this val valuable wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 37:40
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 37:42
  Thanks so much, Dave.
• 37:43
  This is a wonderful chat, and I appreciate it.