77 : Being Bold On The Path To Financial Independence with Jenny Wood

Adam Coelho: Welcome to the mindful fire podcast a show about crafting a life you love and making work optional using the tools of mindfulness envisioning and financial independence. 

I'm your host, Adam Coelho and I'm so glad you're here. 

On today's episode, I'm joined again by my friend, Jenny wood, who joined us on episode 76 of the podcast a few weeks ago.

Jennie is the founder of Google's own your career program which helps Google employees increase their impact and influence in their current role and or land their next role. 

In just a few months, the program scaled from 153 Googlers to tens of thousands of Googlers across Google's global offices with 97% positive feedback. 

Jenny is also a Google executive leading a large operational team that helps drive tens of billions of dollars in revenue per year. Jenny loves improv, tap, dancing, hiking, and flying airplanes as a private pilot. 

She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and two children. 

Today in part two of our conversation, Jenny shares her FLIP model for knowing when it's time to find a new role. 

And things get pretty personal for me when I admit to Jenny that I think I might actually fail her flip test. 

I really enjoyed this conversation with Jenny and I learned so much that I'm already applying in my own career.

This conversation has also made me think about my mindset about my career and how my career fits into my overall pursuit of financial independence. 

As always you can find the full show notes for today's episode, including any books, links, or resources we mentioned in the episode at mindfulfire.org/77. Let's jump into today's episode. 

[00:01:53] Interview

Adam Coelho: Jenny welcome back to the mindful fire podcast. I'm so glad to have you here. 

Jenny Wood: Thank you so much for having me, Adam. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

Adam Coelho: So Jenny, in our last conversation on episode 76, you shared why it's so important to let happiness guide your career. 

What comes up for me is how do we actually know when it's time to switch roles? 

Jenny Wood: Great questions. I actually have a little acronym on this one. How do you know when it's time to change roles, Adam, or I like to say, how do you know when it's time to flip roles? Flip stands for F L I P fun learning impact that's business impact and personal.

So am I having fun? Am I excited about the challenges we have? Am I showing up at each team meeting, raising my hand with new ideas? Or am I rolling my eyes? When somebody comes off mute to speak saying, oh, we tried that four quarters ago. It's never going to work right. A little bit cynical. That's not fun.

I know what fun feels like in my body. And that doesn't feel fun in that meeting. Oh, am I learning new things? And I don't just mean incremental learning. Step function, learning like real big incremental steps in my learning. And by the way, I don't just mean learning about a product. Learning about yourself too.

So I just went through this experience. I just started a new role 10 days ago and I had been in my old role. For almost three years. And I thought he was still learning, but it was like real small learning day to day. It wasn't big learning. And when I think about the personal learning, I realize now that I'm in this new job, how much I am making massive learning leaps and bounds every day, one example is I used to struggle with decision-making and being quick about decision-making and now I'm finding myself being much, much faster.

And I realized in this, new role is giving me an opportunity to be faster. And that decision making, who are we going to hire? Who are we going to pass on? How should I set up the structure of the team? These things are much faster now for me. And that used to be a real development area. So I realize I'm learning not just about new products and new systems and new team.

I'm learning about myself in this new role and how I've grown professionally in my ability to make decisions faster. So that was L learning. I impact the business impact that was making some business impact in my past role recently, but not nearly as much as I was making two and a half years ago when I started on that team and had new goals that we defined a new processes and structures and built a new C suite for our leadership team.

Like that was real impact. And I think it had frankly tapered off if I'm being honest with myself and then finally the P stands for personal, what is going on in my personal life. And this can be two things it can be do I need to change cities because my fiance is in Ann Arbor and I'm in New York. And that happened to me at the time.

In a previous life at Google or personal could also mean, is this job so stressful that I'm staying up at night? Worried about it or am I so unhappy in this role that I am not even showing up for my friends or am I so overworked that I don't have time to go to dinner with my boyfriend, whatever your case is in your own individual situation, all those things fall into personal.

And that is okay to consider when you're thinking about, do you stay in a role or do you go, so again that's how do you know when it's time to flip roles? F L I P fun learning impact personal.

Yeah, that's definitely helpful to remember and flipping rules. I feel I'll speak for personal experience here at I might fail the flip test in some ways. With my role, I've been doing it for about six years. 

Adam Coelho: We've gone through a gazillion reorgs so there's been some new challenge, some new learning each time, but I don't know if the fun is there as it was in the beginning, the learning impact, it's incremental but there's this other element of comfort, I guess it's comfort.

I know, it's always about stretching yourself and getting out of your comfort zone, but especially in the pandemic, it's been like, I got it good, I've got a good situation going right now. I have flexibility. I know what I'm doing. I can get my work done. I can parent full-time and work full time.

It's a challenge for sure, but I'm able to manage it. 

[00:05:54] The thought of going and putting myself in a new environment stresses me out. What do you counsel to someone in that situation? 

Adam Coelho: The thought of going and putting myself in a new environment, taking on. New expectations and new products and challenges and everything stresses me out. So it's kept me. maybe I'm not thriving as much as I could in a different role, but I'm in a spot where I'm more than good enough for now.

What do you counsel to someone in that situation? 

Jenny Wood: Adam. I love what you're saying here. And there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are going to be right in your boat, identify with what you're saying.

Especially during a pandemic I'm comfortable. I've got a good thing going. I can balance somewhat reasonably, depending on the day, my job and my family and being a parent or being a partner or a friend. And first of all, I would say. Go easy on yourself, right? We aren't in an incredibly unprecedented time where we have enough on our plate just trying to eat by every day.

So not every day is the day to be moving and shaking. I tend to be a little bit of a mover and a shaker There's plenty of downsides to that as well. what you're talking about, I think is the P of the personal, right? Like your personal situation right now with the pandemic, being a parent, having a small child, who's not napping right now when your plan was for him to be napping during this podcast interview, that stuff is all legit and valid and needs honoring.

And as we think about the mindful piece of your mission. Mindfulness is also being aware of what's right for you right now. So if this feels right, it's all about taking the pressure off of yourself to feel like I have to go after the next thing, I've been in this role for X amount of time.

That's too long. Now all this being said, because I do tend to encourage people to be the mover and the shaker, and to go after the things that they want. I will just speak for a moment about

rethinking the impossible. I'm going through all this too, with the pandemic in two small kids. and I've got the side hustle, just like you. Do you know yours is this podcast and mine is the on your career. We know these things can take plenty of time, personal time.

And I thought it's crazy Jenny, to think about pursuing another role right now, this was my Q3 Q4 thinking. You have so much on your plate. There's no way you could possibly handle anything else. And I went through my own flip framework and for me, I realized that there were enough reasons that I should think about pursuing another role, but here's where I bring a rethink the impossible.

It seemed impossible to have another role and to also run the own your career program. But then I thought about a couple of things. I'm a hard worker, let's say I work X number of hours a week. If I stay in my current role, I'm probably still gonna work that same number of hours a week. I'm just going to replace it with different, things I'm doing.

If I stay in my job or if I have a new job, number two,

 we as humans and I believe there's a social, psychological principle about this, tend to think that an uncomfortable situation is going to be more difficult than it actually is that the pain is going to be more intense and that the duration of that pain is going to be more.

So I was thinking, oh my gosh, if I take a new job and building a whole new team, I had this one job. I was more strongly considering than the others. It's the one I happen to be in. And there was a ton of fear in that. For me, it's all new stakeholders, it's all new teammates, it's all new processes.

We have to figure out our strategy and write our goals and hire a ton of people. This all sounds exhausting and time-consuming and scary and overwhelming. And what if I can't do it? What if I'm not good? What if they don't like me? All the imposter syndrome that just comes in with all that fear.

But now I'm in this job 10 days in nine days. If you don't count the Monday holiday, we just head off. And by the minute I'm getting up to speed. And not only that, Adam, but I'm loving it. So I don't feel fully ramped up yet. But when I was hearing that the rampant period was going to take two quarters.

I'm realizing it's probably going to take more like 12. So I was thinking like really long, scary ramp up period. It's going to be months of pain, months of time away from my family. I'm 10 days in, and it's actually feeling pretty great. I'm feeling really energized in ways that I wasn't even in my past Constable role.

And then in terms of the depth of the difficulty or the pain that I anticipated, it's been way easier and way more fun than I expected when I was in my fear-based place. So I'm not saying everybody is fearful of their next role, but I think that we do have a lot of anxieties that come into thinking about the next job change and what happens next, because it's so much easier to stay where we are.

And sometimes that comfort is appropriate. Given the pandemic, given where you are in life parenting, et cetera. But other times it's good to push through that because the real growth happens on the edge of uncertainty, little bit of anxiety, a little bit of stress, and that's what really pushes you. long-term, we're all better for it when we take the leap and make that exciting.

Adam Coelho: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I do agree with the fact that often the things we worry about are never as bad as we think they're going to be.

And I can relate to a lot of what you said, so it's good to hear that pushing through that and getting into that new role, you're finding it exciting and exhilarating rather than stressful. Overwhelming, right? 

Jenny Wood: And just to clarify, I was really stressed and really overwhelmed because my side hustle is a big side hustle.

that took up a lot of my time and energy in 2021. I have a lot going on family-wise, with having a four year old daughter and a six year old boy, I was really nervous and actually wondered if I was doing the right thing by my family and put a lot of thought into this.

And I just have to say, I wish I could have those months back of that fear and stress and anxiety, because it's truly exciting and fine. I don't think I'll be working any more hours than I was working in my old job. I'll just be working on different stuff and I'll be working differently. And it's a great opportunity by the way, to reassess my priorities, to reassess how I work.

I've just moved a bunch of weekly meetings to biweeklies. I've moved a bunch of 45 minute meetings to 30 minute meetings. I've thought about who I don't need to be meeting with regularly at all. I've thought about, writing a sentence back to somebody versus a paragraph back to somebody. So these are all ways that I'm giving myself time back to free up time for more strategic work.

Adam Coelho: Yeah. I also like what you said before, and you just highlighted again, you're going to be working a certain amount of hours. You're just going to be working on different things. And so I always have it in my head that it's going to be so much more time and so much more effort 

and yeah, and I think I'll just voice something that I feel.

And I know that some people that are pursuing financial independence often feel. I can just stick it out until I get to financial independence. until I get to that number that I have in my mind, 

say, I want to just voice something that I think that I'm certainly thinking about. And I think a lot of people on the path to financial independence might be thinking about with regards to their career. 

[00:12:30] What are the benefits, both personal and financial of pursuing an opportunity outside of your comfort zone. 

Adam Coelho: What are the benefits? Both personal and financial of pursuing an opportunity outside of your comfort zone. 

Jenny Wood: Oh, such a great question, Adam. They're pretty clear to me, the benefits financially of pursuing an opportunity outside of her comfort zone are the opportunity for more pay.

You might be a certain level at, Google or Amazon, or, a little startup of 15 people. And if you stay in that role, you might get a little more money each year. But if you move around, whether it's from one company to another, and then back to your original company, or whether it's just a new role you're pursuing at a higher level within your own company, that is going to be where you see the most financial gain you're going to get maybe small increases.

Maybe you'll get, single digit, low single digit increase depending on your company, if you stay in your current role. But if you pursue the next role, that's a bigger challenge for you. That is more responsibility. You're starting to see some real material gains in your salary each year, not to mention your stock opportunity depending on the company, your bonus, et cetera.

So from a financial standpoint, I think that staying where you are staying put it could actually be a headwind for making more money for pursuing that path to financial independence. Now, of course, there's always the flip side, right? If you're at a company like Google or an Amazon or Facebook, and you've got a bunch of stock options and you've got the golden handcuffs and the thing you're considering that's the out of your comfort zone is to go be a professional violinist.

Then we're talking something different where you've really got away the financial trade-offs and your ROI of staying versus leaving. So I think that's a little bit of a different situation, Now, let's talk about the personal gains here, because you asked about that too.

Now these, I think are hands down tremendous, any way you slice it. There are always going to be personal gains to moving roles, to pursuing the next opportunity, whether it's internal in your company or external. In fact, even if it's a lateral move, maybe you stay at the same level. Maybe you do something that others might perceive to be, something that doesn't create any obvious career advancement, but it's simply a different job with the same pay at the same level, but you're doing different things.

The benefit personally of this is massive for a couple reasons. One, your network to your skills and three, your. So I think network is the most important one. So let's say you're working with the same group of 20 or so people day-to-day right. That's your core working group, your team, and then your hundred people on your broader team in job, a you move from job to job B.

Even if it's a lateral move, that core people you're working with have 20 are going to be totally different. That second level of tier of a hundred, 200 people you're going to be working with could be totally different. And that network is going to pay dividends the rest of your career internally or externally.

I firmly believe Relationships are your capital when you go to apply for your next job, trust me, your future manager, who was doing the hiring very well. If they have your permission ping your existing manager or people you work with and say, Hey, how is it to work with Adam?

Tell me about Adam, what are the strengths? And what are the opportunity areas you want to lean on? As many people who will advocate for you as possible. And that's where doubling your network is something that happens naturally. When you change roles that was network. Number two is skills. You are going to improve your skills.

Let's say you're a people manager and you've been a people manager for two years in your current job, you go on to your next job. In that first job that you were new to people management. And so you were cutting your teeth for two years. Stumbling on things around difficult performance reviews or managing low performers or dealing with, tricky HR issues or just how to have a great one-on-one with somebody, how to lead a good team meeting that makes your team want to come to it.

You spend two years figuring out your skills there, and now you get to go to a new job and almost reinvent yourself, or tweak up what you're doing and just make these small improvements on your skills. And there could be other things you could be learning new products, you could be learning new systems, new processes.

You could be in sales, maybe move to a role. That's more operational. You could be an operations. You may be moved to a role. That's more engineering. You learn sequel, you learn Python, whatever it is, those are all developing new skills. And then finally growth. When you have a new role that's outside of your comfort zone, you're simply going to grow.

Anyway, you slice it. You are going to discover yourself in new ways. You are going to. Be able to leave your old brand behind and take on a new, personal brand, if you're able to apply everything that you learned in the past, you're going to steal new wifi. What do I mean by stealing wifi while you have the people in your life and your career, who are your mentors, your boss, or, your coaches we've designated as people who you want to coach you. Let's call those your internet providers, but you're also going to steal wifi where you might observe a leader. So I think of somebody Phillips Schindler at Google, who leads a meeting, that's open to 25,000 people in the Google business organization.

And he does such an incredible job with high energy leading this meeting every couple of weeks. And one thing I've noticed that he does is every time someone asks question on what we call a Dory, which is our internal system of ranking questions. Every time somebody has a question on there, he's so thoughtful before he answers.

He says, thank you, Shante. What a great question. Really appreciate you asking this. And it looks like we have 400 other upvotes on this question. So a lot of other Googlers are thinking about this too. What a beautiful way to honor somebody before you answer the question. If I'm in a new org and a Phillips Schindler is now, the VP or the president of my org, then I get to steal his wifi.

He's way more senior than I am. He is never going to take time to meet with me and mentor me, but I can steal his wifi and I can learn things from him without him even knowing that I'm taking it. So when you're in a new role, you're going to have all these new opportunities for growth, AKA stealing wifi, in addition to the official mentors and coaches that you have.

So to summarize so many reasons why it's beneficial to change roles, you double your network, you increase your skills and you experience a lot of personal growth. Just to name a couple. 

Adam Coelho: Yeah. I really liked that a lot. Especially the network piece that.

Just a mathematical fact, but it's easy to overlook the fact that you get a new job, you go to a new company, you have all new people. And I spent my whole career at Google basically so far. but some of the best friends I have in some of the most helpful people in my network are people I've met in different teams around Google.

And so that is a good reason to consider it. If nothing else, but the other reasons are quite compelling as well. let's talk a little bit about developing thought leadership, right? You and I both have these areas of interest. And on the job side hustles, I'm quite impressed at how you've packaged your offerings and how you.

Distilled these ideas down into kind of talking points or takeaways that are very easy to grasp, right? Like the stealing wifi. I'm curious, how do you think about approaching building thought leadership in an area that you have interested? 

[00:19:27] How do you think about cultivating that personal brand that thought leadership on this area of interest for you? 

Jenny Wood: Absolutely. Adam, it sounds like what you're asking is how do you build something great, right? We all have these ideas, how do you make your side hustle? Something that takes off that sticks that people want to use.

That's helpful. And what are the steps to get there? So I'm going to throw another acronym at you, and I'm going to say, how do you pave the way for thought leadership? How do you pave the way for excellence? How do you pay the wave for something great. Pave P a V E standing for passion. Ask volunteers and engage.

So let me walk through these first all, so this is how I think we've made something pretty great out of own your career at Google. Again, growing from 153 users and March, just 10 months later, we're now having 23,000 users with 97% positive feedback. I'm really proud of it. I think it's pretty exciting.

I think we have paved the way for something great here. So here are the things I think about P a V E passion ask volunteers, engage. This is successful Adam, because I'm so freaking passionate about it. If this were about how to, build garages out of wood and paint, it wouldn't have taken off for squat because I'm passionate about that.

And I'm not that good at it, but I have a passion for this, and I think I have a knack for it. And through all the coaching, I had done a lot with underrepresented groups, historically in tech, at Google, a lot of coaching, a lot of people coming to me, one-on-one for advice, I realized Those were like my happiest 30 minute meetings of the week.

So I realized I had this natural passion for it. And when you have this unbridled passion, amazing things happen, people ask me all the time. Jenny, how do you make time for this? In addition to your very busy day job of leading a team I say, honestly, I sit down at the keyboard and the content rolls out of my fingertips onto the keyboard, like magic because I am so passionate about it.

It truly doesn't feel like work. And so I ended up putting a lot of time into it sometimes on the weekends and in the evenings it's, can be interrupted to my work-life balance, but I am passionate about it. Number two, a ask, I have asked for lots of help. I have asked for senior stakeholders to help.

I have asked for people to give me their opinion and some great things have come out of it. For example, I mentioned, part of what this owner career program. these four PDFs, for example, of how to own your career. I initially had that all in one large deck, like, a PowerPoint presentation.

And I, met with a wonderful peer of mine who I respect and admire so much Molly Williams, also at Google. And I asked for help. I said, Molly, how could I make this better? And she's like, oh, too much for one deck, just Chuck these out into bite sized pieces and have these be independent standalone.

One cheaters. And I was like, oh, what a great idea. So I asked a lot of people for help and asked a lot of stakeholders, a lot of senior people with influence at Google to give me their feedback because that feedback makes the program better. It gets them engaged. It gives them a sense of ownership. They are weighing in to buy in.

I love this concept. If you've got a way in to buy in. So I'm asking people to weigh in so that they then buy in, down the line, if it's ever useful for their team. And that's ask the P a V E we're on volunteers. Now I could not do this myself. I got to the point where I realized I don't have all the skills I don't have all the time.

I don't have all the ideas. I have my limitations. I'm good at a couple of things, but I'm really crappy at some other things. I need volunteers to help me make this great. So we put together 20% volunteers at Google, meaning they spend 20% of their time on this project. And then I leveraged our incredible network at Google.

We have these big aliases of like tens of thousands of people called misc aliases. it could be missed New York, misc, Boulder, where I am misc San Francisco. When people write about anything, I'm selling tickets to the Knicks game, I've got, a free car seat, if someone wants to drive by my house and grab it.

So I figure if people are posting about sporting tickets and free car seats, I can post about this. Allow people to see that it's out there and then also ask them to help. So we had a logo competition for the own, your career logo, and we had 40 submissions and we had 1,300 people vote and we've got this nifty little airplane logo that I love so much created by someone named Patrick in the Sydney office.

And, asking for these volunteers has made the program so much more than what it could have been on my. And then finally engage. I have not been shy to market it. I use those same MySQL aliases. I use our big women at alias. I know that this is a good program that I'm really proud of that people tell me is fantastic and helpful and useful people of color.

Magical and, career changing. Like those are big things people are saying. So I'm trusting that. And instead of feeling nervous and saying, oh, it's not that big of a deal. oh, I'm so glad it's helping a couple people, but it'll never be that big of a thing. No, it's a huge thing. I'm incredibly proud of it.

And so I am trusting this feedback and not listening to the gremlins in my head, in my heart that tells me that this will never be big. I'll never be able to do it. They'll never be more than a small thing. I'm listening to the data that is out there versus the story. I could be telling myself to naysay myself.

And because of that positive feedback, I am shouting from the rooftops on all channels, video channels and LinkedIn and writing entrepreneur magazine articles and using these aliases at Google to market it and to engage people because people are asking for this. they, final thing I'll mention on engagement is we have put a lot of intention around making it look polished. I think that marketing matters.

I think that look and feel matters. We have an incredible designer named Marta, K Tawny out of Italy, who it just has such. Unbelievable gift for design and simplicity. And if I put together a one-sheeter with a bunch of tips, it would look like a clunky, black and white document that is off-kilter and off-center, and doesn't use spacing bell, and she just makes it shine.

So people like the simplicity, people like the consistent branding people like the format and the layout and how practical it is, how bite-sized and useful it is. So I have a, I put a lot of focus on the content to make sure that it's practical, tactical, actionable. It's not theoretical. It's literally something you can apply that afternoon, like right in bullets, not prose or meet with your manager's manager twice a year versus never which 42% of people do based on a LinkedIn poll I did with hundreds of responses or, Thinking about your three superpowers before you go into an interview, right?

These are all things that I think about content-wise that make it practical and tactical and actionable, but then we also have this really nice layout look and feel and design excellence that makes it very attractive to people and makes them want to keep coming back for more tips. 

So to summarize what has made this such successful thought leadership and made this really grow very quickly at Google, how did we pave the way for this?

Through P a V E passion, asking stakeholders for help volunteers and engaging through our wide, aliases and then also really nice content and marketing and design. That was a lot on that one, Adam, but I'm pretty passionate about it. 

Adam Coelho: yes, you are.

That is clear. And I love that it comes through and that it's really. Energizing you to put in the extra work to do this. 

[00:26:26] Tips for me to pull this together into a cohesive message in that I want to build thought leadership in.

Adam Coelho: I really liked this pave acronym for paving the way to build thought leadership, but I have a lot of things I'm doing, that are I'm trying to figure out how to pull them together.

So within Google, I have mindfulness sessions meditations that I'm leading. I have courses that I'm offering some of which I've created, some of which I haven't. And then really, as I think about the podcast, the whole purpose of the podcast is to help people live. A life they love through mindfulness envisioning and financial independence.

Those are essentially the tools. And so how do I pull these together to pave the way to thought leadership in this area in a way that I'm not doing two different things, I'm just building thought leadership internally and externally, as you're doing with own your career. any tips for me to pull this together into kind of a cohesive, message or area that I want to build thought leaders. 

Jenny Wood: Yeah. It's a great question because what it sounds like is you have these disparate pieces, these widgets, you've got the podcast, you've got the meditations you lead, you've got the envisioning.

And you want to have this be more of an overall brand for yourself or something. That's more, user-friendly where it feels like one thing as opposed to three different things or five different things. The first thing that came to mind is calling it something as an umbrella. So maybe it's cohesive living or maybe it's, Adam's, I dunno, you're testing my creativity on the spot here, but Adam's approach or whatever it is.

And then you have these things under it, these three things under it. So I think, first of all, it's just up to you to literally do what you're saying. How do I do it? And literally just pull them together under some other name. And then once you have that, I recommend to. Someone said, oh, Jenny, you should have a website.

I was like, oh, that sounds like way too hard. And I don't have the skills and I don't know what to do. It's not that official. We did create a little micro-site. I asked somebody to volunteer, to do it. We had some people apply. It's amazing. The resources that Googlers are willing to offer you And we did pull it together under this microsite and then having that microsite, or basically the own your career, Homesite allowed us to really think about what we stood for and what our brand was and what our design was and our logo and our tagline, which is be bold. Be curious, be you. And I think you could do that pretty easily, Adam, and without a ton of effort.

And you could probably get someone at Google to volunteer, to do it for you. And then second, this goes back to the E the engaged piece of pave P Abe, which is spread the word. Share the gospel market. It right. Send it to a couple lists at Google. And instead of thinking, oh, nobody wants to hear about this.

The gremlins, remind yourself that you're doing something pretty incredible. And that there are a lot of people who can benefit from it. Myself included. I just wrote down, weekly guided meditations. I used to be really diligent about meditation and I would do it every day for at least 15 minutes and men have I fallen off the wagon and I need it right now.

And I just put 15 minute meditation daily on my calendar this morning to try to get back in the rhythm of it in this new job. So I'm reminding you that people really want what you have to offer Adam. And that we just need reminders marketing, what you're doing to people.

It doesn't mean you're spamming them. It means that you're making your useful content, your useful ideas, or useful leadership accessible to people at a time when they may need it. And people needed at different times. So even if you've sent it out to certain Google alias, one, six months ago, there might be a lot of new people now in the new year or a new roles who now need it, who didn't before.

And so having some kind of consistent messaging around it and not just messaging once I think is quite useful. The other thing I'll say here, because this reminds me. I heard, I think the best quote I've heard in the last year, a couple of days ago, I was listening to a podcast called free time by Jenny Blake.

And this quote is  you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your system. Oh my gosh. That is so powerful for me right now because I'm in this new job where I have lots of goals and aspirations and creating targets and our key results for this new team.

We're hiring an entirely new team. So I have the goals, but I have really poor systems in place to make myself successful right now. So those systems could be, how do I screen candidates in a way that are principle-based and doesn't make me take 20 minutes on every resume. But I simply say the system is if they have this they're in, if they don't have this, they won't get an interview.

What are the systems of my calendar? Am I just going to ask people to set up time Willy nilly or do I set up a system of clear office hours with 20 minute increments? So it reduces the amount of time I have to spend in back and forth about how to get people on my calendar. Do I have a system of meditation and this is what reminds me of it.

No, that had fallen off the radar. And I kept thinking, oh, I'll just use the Headspace meditation app whenever I get around to it. But that was a system that meant I was never doing it. That was a non-system. So I now have a system again just today, but 15 minutes meditations on Monday through Friday at one 30.

So we'll see if it works, but at least I have attempted a system so that I can rise to the level of my goals rather than falling to the level of my systems. 

Adam Coelho: yeah, I think it makes sense pull it together one brand in one offering 

[00:31:24] Conclusion

Adam Coelho: Jenny, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been really awesome to get to know you to hear about your work. And I took away a ton of tips that I'm going to put in my own life.

As I continue to navigate my career. 

Jenny Wood: The pleasure is mine, Adam, thank you so much for inviting me. You're doing great work.

These are things that people think about every day, financial independence, I love that you have a passion for that mindfulness. It is just, I think, at the root of happiness for all humankind, and I'm really, truly grateful and honored to be part of the conversation today because you're doing things that are so important.

So thank you for your time and your great questions. And thank you for having me here. 

Adam Coelho: Pleasure. 

[00:32:00] Outro

Adam Coelho: Thanks so much for joining me on today's episode of the mindful fire podcast. I hope you conversation with Jenny wood. The founder of Google's own your career program.. 

As Jenny mentioned, you can connect with her on LinkedIn to learn more about the work she's done, the tips she shared and receive any of the new career tips that she sends out.

If you enjoy today's episode, I invite you to please hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this, this just lets the platforms know you're getting value from the episodes and you want to be here. When I produce additional content. as a reminder, you can find the full show notes for today's episode at mindfulfire.org/77

 You're looking to craft a life you love and make work optional. I invite you to go to mindful fire.org/start to get a free journaling guide with the first three questions I recommend you ask yourself. 

To find out what the questions are and get the free guide go to mindful fire.org/start. 

 Thanks again, and I'll catch you next time on the mindful fire podcast.