Latest / Wired For More - ADHD & Self Mastery / No Rules for Career ADHD; Athlete, Engineer, Sales, Sales Coach with Bailey Laban

Transcript

No Rules for Career ADHD; Athlete, Engineer, Sales, Sales Coach with Bailey Laban · Wired For More - ADHD & Self Mastery

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, Ian May here with the Wired for More ADHD in Self Mastery podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I have my good friend Bailey Laban on the line.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Bailey and I have crossed over because of the fact that we have both navigated plenty of sales cultures.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: She is actually a professional sales coach, working with sales teams, sales leaders, being able to help them implement really successful go-to-market motions, and also has had some success as a college athlete and speaks quite a bit to how many people come out of athletics into sales and even some of the culture of that experience.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Bailey, super excited to have this conversation with you and appreciate you coming on.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Ian.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited too.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: So from even like starting in your sales background, your first sales gig, you're bright-eyed, bushy-tailed coming out of college, you're a pretty successful credentialed athlete in swimming.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: What was it like for you coming out of that very structured environment?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Everything structured with your training and your programming and workouts and diets, all the stuff to then you're on your own, you're now a professional and have to go be uh a pro in sales.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like what was that transition like for you?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was probably equal parts exhilarating and devastating at the same time, right?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a massive identity shift.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're used to having all of this coaching around you and suddenly it's gone.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that it's talked about enough is how much support athletes get while they're in school.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the second you step foot off that campus, there's not much left for you.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're no longer priority, you're no longer representing the school in the way that you once were.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you are spiraling a little bit.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're kind of like an octopus with tentacles out there trying to just grab on to anything.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I was actually still an engineer at the time.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd done my engineering degree and I graduated and I was kind of like, I have to go do this now.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oops, I didn't realize like this was going to be my full-time job, even though I'd, you know, essentially been training to be an engineer for four or five years in school and with my internships.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was a huge, hugely gray area for me to navigate and pretty solo at that.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, and I apologize, you and I had this conversation about being an engineer by education and falling into the trap of the money and acumen that comes with getting into sales.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so that first, you know, coming out of college, going into engineering, what was the first engineering role that you that you held?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Consulting, really vague.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: They were starting a, it was an environmental firm out of our team was out of Toledo, and I was physically in Cincinnati, and they were starting the electrical arm, electrical engineering arm out of the Cincinnati office.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we were doing substation design work for Marathon Petroleum.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was kind of straight into the oil field.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: That was all I knew was, you know, if you drive, if you drive in any given neighborhood and you see kind of a whole lot of metal infrastructure around a fenced in area, it almost kind of looks like a playground.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very dangerous equipment, and it's what helps feed either the oil or the electricity down into the gas stations or into your home.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I was working on all of a sudden.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And there was not a lot of dopamine for me in that.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what you're talking about.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds like extremely stimulating work.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing like oil pipelines with an electrical engineering degree and throwing yourself in the deep end, uh, very literally.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: At what point did you start to, I mean, even just experience that blah mundane, this isn't for me?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how quickly was that?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Was it literally just kind of like, hey, day one, you're like, crap, I have made a mistake.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was before that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna date myself.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember in it on Instagram, memes had just started becoming a thing, right?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: This was back when you can post, and this I had I had not even graduated college yet, true story.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was maybe a few weeks out from graduation, and I remember seeing this was back when you can like post your plate and post the Noah Flower and it gets a million likes or whatever, because that's all people did at the time.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And someone started creating a meme, and the meme was just words, right?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was just text, and it said, make your passion your paycheck.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, dang, I messed this one up, right?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: But like, I gotta go try, I gotta go figure it out.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I had had a really great internship.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I had interned with Duke Energy out of Cincinnati, Ohio, and I was not a classroom girl whatsoever.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I hated being in the classroom.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: But once I got into my internship while I was still in college, that changed everything for me.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: I had a really great support system with my bosses.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: They were super understanding of me trying to do the athlete and the engineering and the internship thing, all wrapped into one.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: They used to come to my Siswim meets, like they were what they were, they were more than mentors for me.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so that really changed my idea of what work culture could be and what the possibility for engineering could be.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something I was trying to hold on to during that first role that I was out of school.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody ever gets their dream job straight out of school.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still kind of this idea of like learn and earn.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You got to be in sponge mode.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: How much can you soak up and how much can you get out of it?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think because of the fact that you and I have had this ADHD career mirroring of each other, where every job kind of led to two or three years in one role.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then even if you stayed the company, you kind of started to like chip away at like, no, this other thing.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I actually I'm I'm gonna go tackle this other thing and I'm gonna play around a little bit with it.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I'd be very curious over let's say, since since graduating, roughly how many how many jobs or how many different careers would you say that you've you've fallen into?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think last time I checked, it's around six fields, something like that.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's two or three at the same time, just depending on how life was lifing.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: I I love that.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had a similar experience of like my engineering internship.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was a mechanical engineering role.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: I was working in SOLIDWORKS, doing 3D CAD design, but it was on these electrical components, and then I ended up getting a degree in electrical engineering, my first job out of college.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of fell into more of the software side of the engineering world, and inevitably that turned into sales engineering, full-time sales, consulting, web app dev architecture.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then now I coach neurobiology, right?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no rules.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: There, yeah.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: There, what is it?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Whose line is it anyway?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like the points don't matter and the rules are made up.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's corporate 101, right?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know for me, I really felt like I was, I did my due diligence in exploring if electrical engineering was really the career that I wanted for myself.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it took a good 10 years for me to figure that out.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: As far as like from a technical perspective, my degree was in microelectronics.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was the huge focus at the University of Cincinnati.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm an interned in power, had a few different, a few different roles in the power company.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'd done my oil and gas consulting.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I eventually went to industrial engineering.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time it was all said and done, I was like, you know, there's nowhere else that I'm trying to really kind of like tap on.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, it it was started to open up a bigger conversation of like, okay, well, wait, what are the things that I am energized by?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where am I getting the dopamine from?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: What do I absolutely dread doing in my day?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And how do I start moving that into the next phase of my life?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: You you brought up uh dopamine and stimulation a couple times.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: How self-aware were you about your ADHD experience during that time?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't start seeking a formal diagnosis until I was pretty deep into my engineering profession and things were speeding up.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the volume was getting very heavy.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was starting to get a lot of um responsibility at work.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: I came in day one at Procter Gamble with a lot of responsibility, because that's what they do, right?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: They give you a real world problem to solve on day one, which is wonderful in terms of like go figure it out.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna trust you.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the people they hire really do take a huge amount of ownership, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: But as you perform, you get rewarded with more work in corporate America, right?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what was happening.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the time I started getting that more, I was failing, I was falling to my systems at that point.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I was starting to understand like my brain isn't is starting to create a lot of friction and resistance here.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I started seeking out more of like a formal help system with psychiatrists and seeing what medication would look like and how I'd react to it.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really kind of the first introduction.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was probably 26, 27 at that point.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So just been running around unmedicated for years, right?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like undiagnosed, unmedicated, medicated and self-medicated.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's interesting too.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is actually something that I've talked a lot about with professionals who were former athletes.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the times when an athlete has just lived an athletic lifestyle, they have they wake up, they have morning training, they have a middle-of-the-day workout, they have an evening, you know, zone two cardio session that they have to do.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: So they're training multiple times a day, and it usually isn't until these sports stop that they finally start to have more of the symptoms of ADHD because they're not getting the depamine narpinephrine and blood flow from the exercise that they've just doing constantly.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's just it's interesting because that was essentially my experience in in high school sports, where I was playing, I was essentially in the you know, gym class, obviously, but ending the day with whatever school sport I was playing, and then immediately going to my select program.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then on top of that, I was playing semi-pro soccer.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: So at one point I was playing three different sports all at once, practiced twice a day, every single day, multiple games each each week, and yeah, I my brain was getting a huge amount of dopamine orpinephrine and blood flow from that.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, like once you get into a corporate life, other things happen.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: You can't just rely on that activity level all the time.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Some people try, they become ultra-marathon runners.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Did you find that like certain sports regulated you differently?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: I yes, hundred percent.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh football as an example.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: I actually didn't like football as much, specifically when it bec when it came to practice, because of the fact that football drills are so boring and mundane, and you spend a lot of time watching other people do drills.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I loathed football practice, like genuinely hated football practice because of the fact that it was so low energy.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Football games, no problem.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Loved loved to compete in the games, loved the energy and intensity of the game.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: I went to a fairly small school, so I mean, at the time it was maybe a class of 2,000 students, but at one point I was the kicker, the running back, and the middle linebacker.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the only time that I would take a play off would be when we punted.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was very used to like just that constant go, go, go.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, the practices I hated.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: But soccer, because soccer was just constantly go, go, go all the time, you're just running the almost the entirety of the two-hour practice, that worked much better for my ADH2 experience.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: So important to learn those things about yourself.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sports are that's like the number one thing that's not coached when you are making that transition from being a student athlete into corporate or into entrepreneur or whatever it is.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like I remember having my heartbreak the first time I saw my entire 17-year swimming career reduced down to like two lines on my resume, right?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what do you mean?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is what what I have to show for this, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it was so much bigger than that.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, what pieces of what you learned through your sport do you now pull into your life as like a constant thread, right?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that's just knowing about yourself, hey, I like something that for two hours I'm deep in it, I'm hyper-focused.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's no interruptions.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: I get to physically push or pull, or I'm mentally stimulated, even if I'm, you know, a soccer player where I'm just standing in my corner waiting for the ball to come back over this area or if I need to go get it in this zone, right?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the same as some of these other sports.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing that about yourself is something to really pay attention to in your adult life.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't go away just because you stopped playing the sport and the game was over.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love even just that commentary around the entirety of your identity for 17 years was encapsulated by former college athlete.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Cool, interesting.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay, you swam in college, moving on.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like and I think that by itself is its own challenge of navigating anytime you make these big changes like that, of how much of your identity is rooted in that old thing, right?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, identity being rooted in being an engineer versus then then all of a sudden moving into a new role.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And who am I?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: How do I fit into the world?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: How do I one yes, create value, but also receive love and affirmation when this is the way that I used to do it, and I had standard operating procedures for for that.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And now all of a sudden I'm almost having to retrain my nervous system for here are the new ways that my nervous system feels safe in this environment.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'd I'll also say the thing that's overlooked a lot is the amount of trauma that can be associated with coming out of that season, right?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: It may not have not everyone has the luxury of finishing as a college, finishing, you know, in quotes, as a college athlete and feeling good about it.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your season might have ended early.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: There was, you know, someone I spoke with the other day, they graduated in 2020, had the NCAA tournament ripped out from under them their senior year when they had a run.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you might have a physical injury that is going to nag at you.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And now you have to figure out how to go make enough money to support the surgeries of the doctor, Bill rehab that you didn't know you needed when you're in college, but now you do.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many elements of trauma that can follow you into your young adult life, and you don't even realize them the role that they're playing while you're still identifying as a college athlete, but not actually a college athlete anymore, and trying to build that next phase of your identity.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So just having the right support system around you is everything, and learning how to go build that when it's not just a community that you're plopped into, because that's what sports are, right?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: You are gonna have to go figure out how to play with everyone in the same sandbox, whether you like them or not.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody else made that roster, you didn't get to do that.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Even just talking about the fact of whether you like them or not.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I hated my one of the the high performing teams that I was on.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: The coach is a notorious jerk.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: He more than a few times grabbed me by the neck and pinned me to the ground.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: But it was a state championship team.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: They very regularly pumped out Olympic Olympic athletes that were going to not World Cup, but to nationals and international play.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's there's somebody beside it, hey, if you want to be the best in the in the country at this thing, this is the team to be on.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I was obsessed about that.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right, yeah, exactly.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: That was something that you know I had told myself was important to me, and I made it to the state championship game, played maybe five minutes because, you know, relative to the other players, I was barely passable.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: I was a great athlete, but not even that that good, as good as they were.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, I gotta say, I was in the state championship game.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden it's done.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what's what's interesting for me is I didn't I didn't continue that on into college.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like I for me, everything I cared about was getting to college.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So in my mind, it was like, hey, I need to get a college scholarship either through academics or through soccer plus academics.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a vehicle for you.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was that was ultimately the goal.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like I d I was so myopically focused on just getting to to college.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: My family did not have a lot of money growing up.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like at one point, uh my dad worked for Boeing, Boeing strikes happening, all the different craziness around that.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, 9-11 impacted our family significantly.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would imagine.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm very used to food stamps at uh not food stamps, but uh food lunches at at and high school and so on.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: So university was all on me.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like if I was gonna go to school, I had to make sure that I could get it paid for.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I essentially got an academic scholarship, I was like, screw soccer, I'm I'm not doing this.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't care anymore.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it was just funny, there was, and I apologize for taking the floor on this, but there was one point where another another player that I played with, he had a full-right scholarship to the university I went to, and he ran into me and he was like, Hey Ian, like, why aren't you walking onto the team?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I just said, because I don't like effing playing with you.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and he laughed and I was like, No, seriously, I don't like effing playing with you, and I walked away.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot of work to do at that age.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of maturity to get to.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: For being a jerk?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's not a lot of maturity.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's no, no, no, no.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, not that, but like just getting that understanding of like, hey, I'm no longer willing to tolerate this.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's I think it's okay to not be the soccer guy anymore.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's okay to not be on this team and figure out what else I can do with my life.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really hard jump to make mentally, emotionally, and from your peers, because you don't just make that identity, you lose friends, you lose community.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go build your community.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: To to that point though, too, like you you talk about the fact of like you do have an inc integrated system, support system.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's not actually something I gave a lot of thought to of how much that was impacting me as I was going into university and trying to just just be an academic, that essentially that's where my self-medicating in college started to happen.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I wasn't aware, again, I wasn't aware that ADHD was a thing for me.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so while I was studying, I was drinking two to three beers an hour.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Any more than that, I'd say, screw it, I'm getting drunk.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Any less, I couldn't focus.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, in the circles that I was rolling around in, rugby circles, I should say, that was celebrated.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like that was that was something that was you took pride in.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh your ability to drink and still be very high performing in your academia.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: But so, like working go moving that into the workplace, you went from engineering multiple different types of engineering, right?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: So even your microelectronics degree to then all of a sudden being in, you know, gas.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, there's some amount of electrical, high-scale power that's associated.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Where did the transition come where you started to get into sales, right?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: You worked for VMware for a time.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: You how did that jump happen?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: To right place, right time.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I had somebody quite literally pluck me off the street and ask me if I wanted to be a personal trainer.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, You don't understand, I'm not certified.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I've never done that before.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was a college athlete.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: I, of course, had transferred my excess energy into weightlifting six times a week, 400 reps a workout, just running myself into the ground.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, didn't I wasn't gonna go row 300 pounds because I was gonna protect my joints, but I was gonna go do the reps still, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I maintained some level of physique enough for this person to approach me.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: And they did bring me in, they did train me, I did get certified, all the things, and they taught me my first sales process about how to bring a personal training client in and to understand, you know, why this, why now, what's important, do the discovery.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: They gave me a framework, they taught me how to close, they taught me how to spotlight a client to make yourself be very important is as part of the workout, so that in the client's mind, they understand the difference between just coming into the gym by themselves and coming in with a quality, a high-quality trainer.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that first client, I had built my own framework off of what they taught me, and she lost 80 pounds in eight months.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just this huge breakthrough of like, I was doing my engineering job during the day.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing two hours, two to four hours a week of personal training, and this client was having massive success.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, I thought I'd really made it in my engineering career.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was being flown to Italy first class to go build to go oversee these assembly lines being built and then cut down, shipped to Canada, going to Canada, watching them be reinstalled and teaching them how to use the electrical portion of the platform.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in this very like niche, innovative project that was delivering a product to the world, that was winning awards, and like that's everything that I'd been working towards in my engineering career.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Should have, I should have been happy.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I had this awful sense of like guilt of being like, why can't I be happy?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why isn't this enough?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd never left the country until I worked for Procter Gamble.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was 26 years old before I'd ever even had my passport.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm being flown to Italy.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm being offered to go live in Italy for six months to go set all this up.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it should have been the dream, but it wasn't.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I started paying attention to how much I was growing, like how much more I was energized and what I was energized by in the personal training world.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: I knew enough that I didn't want to be a full-time personal trainer.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't the right course for me, that wasn't the correction that was needed.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I got really curious and I spent one summer at Procter and Gamble interviewing 40 of my peers, 40 one-on-one.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: So 40 hours worth of research and sitting down with as many people as I could network and connect with because Proctor and Gamble is very big on a promote from within company.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: They love that.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of this core culture, and that's why people love working for them and have these insane careers there.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept asking people, you know, what's fulfilling about this role?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's going to keep you in this role for 10 more years?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Where what originally excited you about this role, but what excites you now?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept getting a lot of like, well, it gives my family a quality of life because we get to move all over the world for these different assignments.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it gives us a level of financial security.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And just something about the way these people spoke about their roles didn't light me up.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I eventually narrowed down to sales.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: I went and interviewed.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: For sales at Procter Gamble.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in the most technical part of the company as a protection controls and information systems engineer leading a product award-winning delivery.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: I go and interview for sales and they reject me and tell me that I speak in too many acronyms.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: And or not too many acronyms, too many analogies.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it was.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Too many analogies.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, how am I supposed to describe what I'm working on now to somebody who doesn't know what an Ethernet cable is and interview well?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that was kind of a, it was an e they made it easy on me, right?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like I did my due diligence and I, you know, it wasn't the right fit, and it's important to pay attention to that.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I really opened up a giant can of worms and got very open to whatever came next.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: I love the fact that two things.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: I love that you had an environment where it was deeply encouraged for you to do that type of hyper-obsessive interviewing.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think a lot of people get enough of those opportunities, right?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: As kids growing up, you have some type of career development through your school, but it's very limited versus like when you do that exact same thing in industry, it looks completely different.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the questions that you asked, I think, are sometimes pretty existential questions.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what's interesting for a lot of the clients that I work with who go through burnout, they often don't really know what lights them up about the work that they do.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: I could probably guess like part of the reason why you love the work that you were doing is you loved being a thought leader.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: You loved being a subject matter expert.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: You got a lot of validation when people are like, Oh my gosh, you're so smart.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like super impressed by the way that you lead this thing, the way that you're teaching this part, and then even seeing that correlate to I'm not surprised at the coaching and that, there's so much crossover there.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: I love being able to help somebody and have them have these beautiful aha moments and getting to participate in that.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a lot of people just don't even know what about their work really lights them up.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: So when they finally get to a point where their nervous system is shutting down, like, I can't do the work anymore, it's because you you can't actually very clearly say what about this lit you up in the first place.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: I shouldn't say time off, but to delegate to soft skills training, even for their technical teams.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up in a training for like new moms or moms re-entering the root the workforce.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the entire, and I was definitely not a new mom at the time.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was nowhere near it.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the entire training was around make a list of the things in your day that do light you up.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this was down to like, would you prefer to be the person who does carpool and has that time with your kids in the car going to school every day?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or would you be prefer to be the person who feels like they have more control over their home and they are the one who's doing the dishes and the cleaning and making sure it's spotless for the family to thrive in, right?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Figure out which one you are and outsource the other.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a really important lesson for me to hear, even though I wasn't in that stage of life.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: But they did an extremely thorough and beautiful job at finding trainings that I that still resonate with me almost 10 years later.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't even that in that phase of life.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, seriously, that honestly, I I can imagine that that's still impacting you today, of just that level of encouraging your curiosity.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think what's interesting about some of the clients that I work with too, again, that a lot of their curiosity has been stifled.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're mocked or ridiculed for whatever random hyper obsession that they're leaning into, and they're like, no, uh this is the most exciting thing to me right now.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like this I want to enjoy this thing.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I hey, what are you up to lately, Bailey?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I actually joined this new mothers re-entering the workforce training, and they're like, wait, what?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: When did you have a kid?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no, no, no.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: I this is this is just what I found interesting.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the fact that like you've already I don't want to say that you've been fortunate, because I don't want to make luck part of it.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like what was exciting about that and being able to enjoy and take advantage of those resources that allowed you to just pull on every thread, be able to lean into every random idea of like, you know what, this actually just sounds interesting.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need to explain why it's interesting or why I feel motivated to do it.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to, and I don't have to apologize to that for anybody.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think anybody who's listening to this should just be encouraged by the fact of like you can just go do things.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, your free will.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: I love to ask people what they're hyper fixating on, like on a LinkedIn platform or through a post and share what I'm hyper-fixating on.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: I get the coolest answers.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think the most recent one I heard was somebody commented on my post, I didn't know them, and they said that they have a hobby of going to dive and find megalodon shark teeth, and they put a picture of it, and it was a shark tooth the same size as your laptop.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, this is wild, right?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you never would have known that from just looking at their LinkedIn by doing a normal one-on-one with them.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's something deeply humanizing about giving someone space to show up as who they are outside of the role they've been defined as at work.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you just get to such a deeper layer and connection, and you're able to do so much more interesting, impactful work because of that.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that you have the curiosity to even pull that out of people, I think is beautiful.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think something that part of the reason why you and I very re very much have resonate in the work that we both do is the fact that we take a huge interest in people.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there is part of our brain that lights up.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: We feel very reinforced and stimulated, making someone else feel interesting.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And learning that it is in and of itself a skill.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually helped me with my inattentive ADHD patterns of the more I can help this person feel interesting and coming up with better questions to ask them, the more engaged I am in the conversation.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, what's lighting you up right now?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no, like that.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, not what important work are you doing at work.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: If maybe if that's lighting you up, then by all means, like gush about that thing.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the the hardest things that I struggle with is that if if somebody is just kind of like, eh, you know, just doing the thing.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you even bring up like, you know, parenting and and motherhood, fatherhood, that kind of stuff.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: There was a time where I was hyper-obsessed about swaddling my child and like coming up with as many weird, unique ways to swaddle a little human.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Comfort them, yes.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: And like that, it's like you can't you I don't know if you can necessarily train that level of just kind of giddy excitement about random BS.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't matter.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need anybody else to validate me that that is interesting.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, if you want to ask me about some really cool ways to swallow a child.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, have this really cool Kano one that makes her look like a little Japanese one, and it's awesome, it's fun, like it's totally random.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I think where where we can even struggle is people who just don't.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: They kind of ho-hum through life and don't know how to explore, live life through a lens of joy, curiosity.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I I came up with this theory during COVID times, and I've been testing it ever since.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's around.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right, exactly.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like just me on my couch or jump roping in my you know, seven by seven living room, like dark times, and you know, the takeout margarita down the street that they let us have in Texas at the time was wonderful.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: So here's here's what came out of that.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: I came up with this theory because I was really contemplating on the differences between motivation, discipline, and curiosity, the relationship between the three.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that so many people want to be successful in life.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the projection out there is that uh you just have to be super disciplined, right?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they think that this discipline is a straight line.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when we're put in a scenario where the line starts breaking, right?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath of that is your motivation of like it's going up, it's going down, it's going up, it's going down.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a sinusoidal wave.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna nerd out a little bit with waves, right?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then underneath all of that, because we've learned through times like COVID where discipline and motivation crash out.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: What are you supposed to do?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Underneath of that is almost like a dotted line, and those dots are little sparks of curiosity, and it's the smallest thing, it's very quiet, and you don't even realize that it's happening.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: But once you start learning to like teach your brain to look for that spark of curiosity you're experiencing, everything changes.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's this little tiny spark.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you recognize like it could be something as simple as being like, oh, here's a word I heard today and I don't know the definition.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna take the 20 seconds to go look it up.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting to you, right?
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, pay attention to those little sparks of curiosity that now like kick you back into the loop of the higher motivation and back into your discipline and those types of things.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: And just being learning how to pay attention to that is what ultimately you're looking for to figure out like what is giving you dopamine and the norepinephrine at work and and all of those things.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I even love that idea of finding novelty in trivial stuff.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Even like, oh, hey, here's a word.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think I know what it means.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Mind you, my wife is her bedside manner is phenomenal, which means that whenever I'm using a word incorrectly, she makes sure to let me know that, like, okay, keep using that word.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: That I don't think it means what you think it means.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: What is your brain telling you about?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but one thing that I've started to enjoy from a hyper-obsessive spark of that novelty is learning the etymology of words.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, where does this word actually come from?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Where did it originate?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: When did it first start being used?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: And even stuff like that.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, due to my faith, I do Bible reading and Bible studies.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: And every now and then I'm like, you know what?
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I want to understand what the original Aramaic word was for this, or the original, depending how far back in the Bible you go, the the original Hebrew word.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, just cool moments like that where all of a sudden you realize of different random nuances that remind you of how interesting the smallest details can be.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: And to your point, how can I apply that back to the boring mundane things that I know are important?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Logically, frontal lobe, know that they're important, but they've lost their novelty.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: How can I reinspire some nuance and novelty to recreate that spark of okay, yeah, I've been going to the same gym for five years now?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: What is a way that I can bring back the novelty to this?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, maybe I go start saying hi to the other gym rats that have been going for a long time that never said a word to.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what would it look like for me to fist bump five of them?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or even for that matter, if ask him like hey, what why are you here?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like what what k what's keeping you here?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: I've been seeing you here for a long time.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: What's motivating you right now?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: What are you working towards?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: What are you struggling with?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I ask people that question, like, hey, how can I be pre praying for you?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Or for that matter, when people were like, Ian, how can I get triceps like yours?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, sure, the reps that's this, that, and the other thing, but more importantly, hey, where do you get your peace from?
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: What's keeping you from your peace out in the world?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden you start opening this door of the reason why I train now has much less to do with my need to stimulate hypertrophy and grow muscle and so on.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's no, it's to have these really deep, meaningful conversations at the gym.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: So when five o'clock rolls around on a Tuesday and I'm tired and I'm frustrated, and I like, why am I still doing this?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need to train.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I've built enough muscle.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've already achieved some accolades there.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Being reminded of it's it was never about the muscle in the first place.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: When you don't want to go, that's when you need to go figure out who you're supposed to be connecting with.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden you have these amazing stories, like a guy who says, I don't know how to be home with my wife because she miscarried two weeks ago.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: You're the reason why I showed up to the gym today.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: It had nothing to do with my need to work out.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, curiosity is such a powerful tool.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it can it can serve you in like two different ways, right?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: For the sales rep of you know, some level of sustainability, your relationship with joy will make or break you because you're so tied to a number in that and that delivery.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: And reserving space for your curiosity to kind of free flow and not be tied to a quota or deliverable or an attainment or achievement is so important to reconnecting with like just who you are and what your strengths are as a human being and not a sales rep.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then at work, being curious about the whole human in front of you and not just the person with the VP of infrastructure title that you're trying to sell your software platform to, right?
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: You need to see them as the mom that has three kids or the dad that, you know, just said goodbye to his childhood dog or whatever that is.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone has a life outside of work and understand having that curiosity about the whole human at work will serve you.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then on a personal professional level about yourself is paying paying attention to the things that like you enjoy doing and doing well.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: That was a big pivotal thing for me was when it came to working with my operational shift work team on an electrical engineering platform, I realized I enjoyed doing more of the meeting work and they enjoyed tinkering.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: I did not want to tinker.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And all they wanted to do was tinker.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I had this, you know, aha moment of if I can go to the meetings and keep them out of them and they get to tinker longer, we had a better working relationship when it came time for me to try to implement a new system on their assembly line, which was like their their child, right?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so paying attention to those little, it's curiosity's quiet.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's very quiet right up until you give it a microphone.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: So good.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: So because I promised that I'd keep us on time, would love Bailey to for you to share anything that you're working on that you're currently excited about, uh that the audience might enjoy or appreciate, or how they can find you.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've been very intentionally building up my LinkedIn platform.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: There are very few women in enterprise sales compared to our male friends, and the ones that are there are crushing it.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish that more women would post about their experiences because it's not an either-or of male or female of who's going to be successful.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's an and.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: And to figure out which gender is bringing what strengths to the table and how to pair them together creates this very beautiful algorithm of a very of a sales process that is welcomed at the C-suite level for these Fortune 500 companies that I work with.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll see me post a lot about all of the unconventional sales nuggets that I learned along the way.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: My I guess claim to fame right now in this time of my season is I closed$20 million in three years when I first got into the software sales industry.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I brought this engineering approach to sales.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I try to share as many of those nuggets as possible.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I just hope my ask is that when you come to my platform, you make a connection, you reach out to someone, even if it's not me, you leave your own unconventional sales nugget, and we continue to just move the needle forward.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Love that.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Bailey, thank you so much for jumping on.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate the time and the conversation and just getting to enjoy the nuggets and the nuance of your experience.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure talking with you today, Ian.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Likewise.