September 19, 2018 • 42 mins
Career strategy expert Julian Mather says even extreme career shifts don’t have to be hard.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
And it was interesting. I was reading on the blurb
for your podcast here you were saying that change was
incredibly hard, and I completely disagree with that. Why okay,
because that's the one thing I think most people can
agree on. Yeah, change is simple, but it's not easy.
But in no way is it hard. Hey, guys, thanks
(00:40):
so much for listening. This is you Jones the podcast
where we talk about change are kinds of change is
big and small, positive and more challenging, and we figure
out how to do it more productively. UM only saws
I'm figuring out and I'm here with my co host. Hi,
I'm Jill Herzig, and today we are talking to an
expert on change, and we definitely are. Our guest is
(01:02):
Julian Mother. We are so excited to have him here
joining us from Australia where it is a completely different
time of day or night or night exactly. Thank you, Julian. UM.
Julian's a career strategy expert who has had more careers
himself than you can shake a stick at UM, and
now he's arrived at maybe maybe the career that's gonna
(01:22):
going to be the keeper. He speaks and coaches clients
all over the world and is an incredibly wise person
on this notion of career strategy. So thanks so much
for being here, Julian, Well, thank you very much, and
you've just given me a big build up there. It's
not many people call me that, but thank you very much.
(01:43):
And maybe that's because you started out as a sniper.
Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, Essentially,
when I was at school, uh, you know, I did
really well at school. If you don't count learning, I
wish they didn't count learning it. And when I moved
out of school, I actually repeated my my final year
(02:05):
of school, and I did so bad in my second
year of repeating that I actually truant, you know, WAG school.
It was truant from school for a good third of
the year. But I used to take myself into the
State library because I wanted to be a photo journalist
and I used to pour over all these photography books,
black and white, grainy photos, and you know, the secrets
(02:30):
are always been written between the lines. And I worked
out that to be a great photo journalist, essentially, I
needed to not be in Brisbane in Australia where I was.
I needed to be around the best you know somewhere
around the world, so I need to get out, and
I planed these ways of getting out. I couldn't get out.
And one day I was walking down the street and
(02:51):
I saw a bus shelter and on the side of
the bus shelter was an army recruitment poster and had
had these soldiers walking through a pine forests. Now in
Australia we have eucalyp forest, so this pine forest looked
very exotic to me, and I thought, that's my ticket out.
So a week later I'd signed up with the army
and that's when the yelling started. It didn't stop for
(03:15):
quite a while. And when I was in the Army,
I just decided to look. I've I've got to get
somewhere that's smarter for for me to be, and I
looked around, and essentially being an army an army sniper
suited me down to the ground because essentially what it
let me do was indulge in my anti social behaviors
(03:36):
and you know, sort of move off off by myself
and work by myself. So that's essentially how I ended
up doing that. And also look through a lens, which
apparently liked because of the photography, the shooting is very
different though, Yes, it's completely different, and it's very much
focused down onto you. When you're looking through a sniperscope,
(03:56):
you're actually taking confusion down to a point of clarity.
And that's both visually, but it's also mentally and psychologically.
You've got to make some very um quick decisions. And essentially,
when I just realized that this was not going to
be my future, and when I was sitting there and
in wait, I was looking through the scope and I
(04:18):
started to use it almost like a little camera and
started to make these little movies in my head. Whether
you know the recording medium was was just my imagination.
And that continued on. I trained myself up in filmmaking,
and you know, when I left the Army, I had
(04:38):
a a year or two just trying to find my
way and then eventually got into doing what I wanted
to do, and that was being a photojournalist. So it
sounds like you're self educator. That's that's your band, huh,
very very much. So it's all about there's so much
opportunity out there. You know, even back now you've you've
(04:59):
got this opportunity, you know, you just carry it around
in your pocket, it's your phone. And this podcast like
the one we're on now. You know, there's so much
information that's available to you. Back back then it was
you know, this was all pre internet days, and it
was it was difficult to get but I always found
there was information available anywhere I traveled. Uh, you know,
there there would be a library that be a state library,
(05:21):
would be a local library. It's just you know, if
you put your mind to it, there's so much information available.
So you've used it to make a bunch of shifts.
I mean, you did eventually become a cameraman, which you know,
you sort of describe as if it as if it
just sort of happened, But I bet there was a
lot of self education and a lot of determination often that,
(05:41):
and then you wound up thank you for admitting this
being a failed entrepreneur, but you you started and you
tried um and then an accidental YouTube personality, and then
you became an online entrepreneur, and then you started this
sort of speaking and coaching, which has flourished amazingly. So
it's all career strategy. Didn't that really have a strategy
(06:02):
because those things don't totally seem connected. You know, they
seem pretty pretty much different wheelhouses. Yeah, definitely, there was
a strategy, and this is something that I've developed and
refined over the years, and there were bits and pieces
of it, and it's taken me decades to put this
two together into a usable and teachable form. But essentially
(06:26):
what I worked out is people start up out there
with three problems, so they believe their powers to change,
they don't think they're good enough to change, and they
don't know what to do. And that's three mistakes because
you know, people say, look, you don't understand I can't change.
I don't have a choice. You know, my situation is
(06:49):
completely different. But essentially everyone is like that. And if
you go down that route of blaming circumstance, um, it
doesn't absolve you from responsibility. And as all comes back
to personal responsibility about you making the choices. And when
people think they're not good enough, they start to think, oh,
someone else out there will fix my problems. There's an
(07:11):
external solution for my internal problems. And then when people
don't know what to do, quite often they get stuck.
But they get stuck because they say, I need to
feel inspired first, and they get locked into this this
problem with thinking that feelings give birth to actions, and
it's absolutely not true. It's completely reversed. So when I
(07:34):
started to to look at all those three problems, I
realized was actually a process that I had intuitively followed
over the years. And it comes down to a simple ABC.
What I call it's it's accept responsibility, banish assumptions, and
control change. It's literally the ongoing ABC um you know,
(07:56):
point of references I always go back to, and my
little motto that I use is own up, wise up,
step up. So you know, you've got to own up
except responsibility, wise up, Realize that a lot of the
knowledge that you've got in your head is bad knowledge
and you need to replace that with a better version
(08:17):
of it, and then step up. It's all about controlling change,
and you can learn to control change. And it was
interesting I was reading on the blurb for your podcast
here you were saying that change was incredibly hard, and
I completely disagree with that. Why okay, because that's the
one thing I think most people can agree on. Not
(08:37):
change is simple, but it's not easy. But in no
way is it hard. But I mean hard is when
you lose someone in your life, you hard of the
big events in life that we have to struggle through.
I'm not talking about those sorts of change, but other changes,
essentially breaking it down into component parts. I was think
(09:00):
of it like a movie film, you know, like the
old projectors, and you you you're gonna watch a movie
and you lace up the big role of film. And
if you roll down the film and you look at it,
there's each individual frames, twenty five frames for every minute,
and you look at each of those frames and it's
just minutely different. You know, the hand will be moving
up and one hand will be moving down a frame
(09:22):
at a time, and that's essentially what changes. It's broken
down into these little component parts that a little bit
different from the day before and are going to be
tomorrow is going to be a little bit different from today.
And that movie film is actually a story and it
has a start and it has an ending. Now, if
you thread that through a projector gate, have you ever
(09:46):
seen that? You know, it's it's it's like a video
or effect. You know when a film gets stuck in
a projector and it burns out. You know that share? Yeah, Well,
essentially why that is because the sprocket holes jump out
of the claws and pull it down. And a career
(10:08):
strategy is what I think of as sprocket holes. It's
self determination, it's self belief, it's self awareness, it's self discipline,
and they're like sprocket holes. And if you have your
story and you don't have these sprocket holes down the side,
your story literally gets stuck in the projector gate and
and burns out. And I guess what I when I'm
(10:30):
hearing and what you're saying, is that it takes a
lot of focus. Um, you've got to focus on all
those little steps that are going to move you forward.
After the break, we're gonna talk all a bit more
about that. For the break, we were talking about change
(10:53):
and our guest Julian says it's easy, and I the
way that you broke it down, it does didn't make sense.
I think for a lot of us, myself included and
probably Jael. Once you start the change, once that film
you were talking about starts rolling and you can go
from step A to B to see there's a momentum there.
(11:16):
I think for a lot of people it's the A.
So it's like we're going to the gym. Once you're
on the treadmill. It's not that terrible. It's the getting
into the car to drive to the gym that giant
and getting out of bed. So how do you get
yourself to start that film. It's the initial impetus to change, right.
(11:38):
So when I was a documentary cameraman, I did that
for twenty five years and it was literally the second
best job in the world. I wrote a book called
that the second best job in the world because I
literally put a plane ticket in one hand money in
the other, that kicked me out the door and say
go tell people's stories. It was a great gig, but
what it let me do was get behind the scenes
(12:00):
with a lot of people who have successful in all
different measures in life, and I got to see that.
The big takeaway from that twenty five years was extraordinary
people are ordinary people who do extra It's amazing how
(12:21):
ordinary a lot of successful people are. But they just
get there and they pushed through and just keep taking
all these small extra steps. So the first thing before
even thinking about starting that is that you've got to
accept you're actually better than you think. I mean, we've
been sold a lot of stories about that we're not
(12:46):
as capable as we are And I call this the
great discouragement. There's where were there. There was a time
when courage and courages yourity to face difficulty, to overcome difficulty,
where it was passed down from father to son, from
(13:06):
mother to daughter, from priest to congregation, from uncle to
all the kids in the village. And here we are
in the global village. But where are these wise storytellers
who would pass on these stories? And it's been replaced
by this twenty four seven message that essentially is a
discouraging message. You know, it's our addiction to comfort. We've
(13:30):
got this misplaced sense of entitlement. We've got this failed
instant gratification experiment. You know, we've we're pushed to compare
ourselves on social media, and we've got this tyranny of convenience.
We're addicted to comfort. We've got the rise of the
nanny state. We've got all these things which basically say
(13:50):
to us that there's an external solution for our internal
problems and as actually not true. This this this is
pick through the world that's painted and it's a lot
grimmer and worse than the world actually is. If you
read the you know, the likes of Stephen Pinker and
(14:11):
hands Rosling. I mean, you know, it looks statistically the
world is in the best shape it's been in for
a long time, and the opportunities that are facing us
over the next coming decades are fantastic. So first of all,
you've got to get your your head in order. You've
you've got to accept that a lot of this information
that you've been given is sending you down, you know,
(14:33):
the wrong path. And look, there's there's there's a reason
for it is because they want you to be unhappy.
And it's not a conspiracy. It's just smart business on
their part because unhappy people by more. I just need this,
buy more. So you've really got to come to terms
with that before you even start looking at you know what,
(14:56):
you know what steps I can do to get me
to the gym. A lot of it is getting at
your head in order first, and the number one way
I tell people to do that is joint footpath University,
and that is simply get out at any time of
the day and trade an hour or half an hour
whatever you can give of the time that you're listening
(15:18):
to this conventional media with these messages and listen to
podcasts there's you know, there's something like four hundred thousand
podcasts out there. There's great ones out there called there's
one even called You Turn. But you can get a
different point of view and it's going to give you
a different perspective on the world. And this is incredibly
important to start this shift in your thinking because when
(15:42):
the shift in your thinking starts, then your actions are
going to follow as well. Sort of a lovely image,
the idea that you can just get out there and
walk for an hour and listen to our a podcast
or any podcast that you feel like. And you know,
if you're living in New York there and it's it's
terribly cold and everything, you know, you can do it
when you're you when when you're rning, you can find
(16:02):
time to do it. Yeah. Yeah, well I have to say,
I mean I am I don't even want to call
myself a runner. I just jog people. I jog and
and it changed sort of changed my whole jogging life.
When I discovered podcasts, just felt like this exercise for
my brain as well as my body. And I think
(16:23):
I accidentally went enrolled in Footpath University. And it makes
you smarter and better looking. I don't know about about
the last part. What about when the change feels like
it's externally imposed. So like your situation, Joe, it's not
because of any lack of impetus on your part. Career
(16:44):
change completely thrust upon me so out of magazine publishing
into blank anyone, anyone want to fill in that blank
for me? I open when you don't know what to
do and you're no longer doing you don't have the
identad that you had for a long time, and you've
been in that situation, how do you keep your feet
(17:05):
moving and where? How do you know which direction to
point them in? Okay, Well, the first thing is to
um is to think about the time frame you're going
to do this in, because you know, we live in
this world where it's all now, you know, we need
a hack for everything, and it's you know, it's twenty
one easy days to this, and that and and and
and that. Essentially is is never going to work from
(17:28):
from from my perspective, every change that I undertaken in
my life, like major reinvention of myself, I essentially work
in a five year time frame. And when I say
to five five year, multi year, three to five year,
it could be longer. But that's that's essentially what I expect.
It's going to take me now then, So if something
(17:49):
is thrust upon me and change is thrust upon me,
then I just know, Okay, well then it's not going
to happen, and I'm going to have to do some
stuff that I don't want to do, but I will
get where I want to get, but it's just going
to take me longer. So that's, you know, the number
one strategy. Yeah, I actually find that incredibly comforting. I'm
sure some people would completely freak out thinking five years,
(18:13):
three to five years, but you know, to me, there's
something generous about that. It's generous to yourself. It's you know,
realistic on on some level, and also tells tells you
you know, I've got some time I'm going to explore.
I'm gonna work on this. But did you have a plan,
I mean you don't. You have some general ideas of
(18:34):
what you want to do, but you don't have anything,
no specific goal. When you transitioned from cameraman to um
what came next? Public speaker? No? Actually, well no, I
didn't see what What what happened is when I transitioned
from being a cameraman. I had this great idea that
I was going to teach philanthropy to school children. So
(18:57):
I um this great project of social change, and I
essentially walked away from my job in television. I was
pretty much stoped on my game and I walked away,
and I walked into this career and beat and I
sort of checked it out before I went. I ran
it past the government, I ran it past principles, I
ran it past parents, I said, and they said, oh,
(19:19):
this is a worthy idea, fantastic, And so I walked
away my TV career and I took this program into
schools to deafening silence, and I said, ah, hang on
a minute. You said you thought it was worthy, and
I said it is worthy and I said, I thought
you said you liked it. They said, we do like it.
And I said, well, why won't you book it? And
(19:41):
they said, well you never asked us that. That was
a completely different conversation that we never had. And essentially,
I mean when I was in television, I I was
a public servant. I worked for a government network that
focused on it was sort of like p your PBS
or something, you know, it's similar, And I was a
public servan and I didn't know anything, and I learned
(20:01):
a very very fast lesson about running a business and marketing.
Never open a restaurant unless you've got a starving crowd.
And I essentially fell flat on my face and there
I was. My TV career was sailing off into the distance,
and I had to reinvent myself and that failure did
that failure tou tou alart? Was? That? Was that one
of the one of those kind of key moments where
(20:24):
you realize these are the principles of change that I
learned the hard way and I'm going to It wasn't
it wasn't a particular key moment, but it was part
of the journey I was. Is what I tell my kids,
who are both moved on and out a home now,
is I've always said to them, it's all about momentum.
And you mentioned this before. It's about momentum and it's
(20:46):
not about going straight ahead because you get this idea
that you know, we we get kicked out of school
into five decades of a working life and they give
us a pad on the back and a good luck
and that's about it. And you've got this sort of
idea that I have to make this work, and it
has to go from this to this, and it has
to be this direct line. But life is a zig zag,
(21:09):
and all my life has always been a zig zagg.
I've always told my daughters said it's said, no matter
which way you're moving, it doesn't matter if you're zigzagging,
as long as you're never standing still and you're never
going backwards. So when I fell flat on my face,
that was okay. There was another pivot that I had
to make their So what I did was I reinvented
(21:30):
myself as a magician. Because the hook that I had
used to take this program into schools to teach philanthropy
as children, the hook was magic and juggling, something I
had been doing for a number of years, and so
I just took those skills and thought, well, it's going
to take me time, started from ground zero and worked
my way up to being a doing that for five years.
(21:52):
You talk about a coin track, which is I think
useful for people in transition. Were you not seeing what's
right in front of you? Can you tell us that?
There's a saying in magic, it's a technique. It's called
hidden in plain sight. And imagine this. I mean, just because,
like you say, I'm a magician, you know, and you
know I swore on Houdini's grave, on avals that are
(22:15):
never revery. All this stuff. So just hypothetically, if you
were to take a coin and take it and in
your one hand and put it into the other hand
and wave your hand over that hand that had the
coin in it and open it up and the coin
was gone, it would be quite amazing. But if I
(22:38):
broke that down to you, and this is just hypothetically,
and said that on the coin one side was silver
and the other side had a piece of fabric glued
to the back of it, and that coin was one
of the handful of coins in the world that was magnetic.
Because most coins aren't magnetic, but some coins are they've
(23:00):
got a high steel content them. So if that had
a high magnetic coin and it had fabric glue to
the back, and that fabric happened to be the same
pattern as your say, Paigeley shirt, you know, like a
busy pattern, the one you're wearing right now for example,
that sort of thing. And if you just happen to
have a magnet sown into that shirt. If I put
(23:25):
that coin into my hand, but still a sneaky move
and it wasn't really going into the other hand. And
as I waved my hand, I just moved this hand
with a coin across my shirt, and that coin stuck
to my shirt. It's hidden in plain sight, like you,
no one is looking for it there. It's completely invisible,
(23:47):
but it's right in front of your eyes. And everybody
always known the secret to this trail because I am
right now learning it. I am that kid who has
still is still amaze us through my trick until today.
That is just a hypothetical, all right, But there's a
big lesson there right for us in our lives where
(24:08):
what we're looking for it could be right under our
nose and we just are oblivious to it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
And that's exactly the point this strategy that I use,
which is own up, wise, up, step up. Most of
these these things are right under your nose, but you
can't see them. I mean to just give you an example,
(24:29):
ask you a question, how far when you're forty years old,
how far along your career path is that? Do you think?
So you know, when you leave work and you retire,
how how far long is forty years old? You know?
In percentage roughly almost right now, since you retire at sixty,
(24:51):
started to I know you two. Well, see, most of
the people are going to retire at I'm going to
retire at seventy now. I mean, you know the age
of time and it's going up in Australia here it's
getting really close to seventy in the next five years.
So forty years old, you're actually going to be two
fifths of your journey along. Yet most people think in
(25:11):
their career journey at forty if I haven't done this,
you know, like I've failed. But essentially you haven't even
reached halfway yet, and you're getting the maths wrong. Okay,
at forty years old, how much of your personal wealth
do you think you will have accrued at forty years old?
(25:32):
You know, over your life? Maybe the same Maybe I
don't know. There's all a big bills to pay for it.
Just just just roughly, just just take a stand. I
don't know, Okay, most people say about six when the
truth is of your wealth? Yeah, and if you just
(25:55):
look so like a lot of this is hidden in
front of people, it just has to be unwoven, unpacked,
gently shown to them and just start to realize, Oh okay,
this is where a lot of self awareness comes in.
And I've got a real thing about self awareness because
to me, it's it's pitched very badly. All right, I
(26:16):
want you to pitch self awareness to us better. When
we come back after the break, before the break, we
are just about to hear Julian's Keys to Self Awareness.
Can we dig into that a little bit. It's just
(26:38):
it's it's pitched badly. It's just when I explained self
awareness to a lot of people. If I'm sitting with
a group of people who really haven't thought about it,
and if you mentioned the word self awareness, you watch
them cross their arms like this, and you know they're
not receptive to it because immediately they start to think.
Or self awareness that's associated with meditation and self get
(27:00):
gets a little bit woo woo for people who haven't
thought about it too much, but essentially all self awarenesses,
imagine putting on a white lab coat and getting a
clipboard and stepping outside of yourself for a day and
just following yourself around and watching yourself and making notes
about yourself. Here go oh oh oh, I do that
(27:21):
when I speak to people like that, Oh, when people
talk to me, I react like that. And essentially, if
you pitch self awareness into two people, just is this
way that you can, um start unpacking a lot of
these blind spots and these assumptions mean ways that we're
(27:41):
getting in our own way or is it also a
way to figure out of Hey, this is this is
what you're good at, this is what you're meant to
be doing? All that? All that didn't worry. I mean,
I know there's a huge movement to get type executive
to be more self aware. That's kind of a buzzword
right now. Um, And we've certainly had bosses who didn't
(28:02):
seem like they were very self aware. I've never had
a boss. No, that would never happen. And I don't know.
I mean, I think it's sort of a fantastic movement.
I also feel like people, as they get older, we
should get wiser in this way, right, we should be
more and more self aware. And yet I feel like
sometimes it gets harder and harder. Why is that that
(28:22):
it gets harder? Oh, I don't feel you got me there.
I don't have an answer. You think self awareness gets
easier as you get older, I think so very much.
I think you have more time to apply yourself to it,
or you can just to honor, you know, and become
more interested in your habit for a living. You you can,
(28:43):
I mean, this is the way that self awareness. Okay,
I call this story bitter or better. It started when
I was going to hop on a plane and fly
to Indonesia, and I was actually feeling sorry for myself
because I'm getting a bit long in the tooth in this,
you know, being a photo journalist, being a documentary cameraman.
And I was actually standing in front of the mirror
and I was getting ready to go on this flight,
(29:04):
and you know, I said to my wife, I said,
look at these all these extra chins here, and look
at the hairs of the nose and a little at
the receding hairline, and look at that gut. It's getting
a bit bigger. And I said, is there anything positive
you can say about this body? And she said, at
least your eyesight's not failing. We got over that listle deep,
and I went and hopped on this plane. Now, if
(29:28):
you got to fly on a plane, you can fly
economy or coach class. Well we all do that, or
you can fly business class. But what's better than business class. Private, private, yeah, private,
what's what's what's what's even better than that? I'll tell
you the Prime Minister of Australia's plane I've got. I
(29:49):
got on one of his planes and we're going to
Indonesia with the Foreign Minister who was going to spend
three days with the President of Indonesia, Susulu bang Bang
Udon No. And when you go over on these flights, yeah,
it's a great name. When he go over these these flights,
they take a cohort of media with you. And I
(30:10):
was sitting down the back of the plane with a
journalist called Cynthia Banner. She was from the Sydney Morning Herald,
and we're making a bit of small talk and I said, oh, Cynthia,
what do you do in your spare time? And she
said I loved to run, And I went, oh, I
ran for decades and my knees gave out on me.
(30:30):
And I said, where's where's your running out now? And
she said, I'm training for marathons. Went oh, I used
to love training for marathons, and started to get into
a bit of this funk. I was actually feeling, you know,
like I was feeling sorry for myself at the stage
of my working career, so it was self pity one
and gratitude zero for the situation that I was in.
(30:51):
We got to Indonesia. One of the other journalists I
worked with over there was his foreign correspondent name Morgan Mellish.
He was from the Australian Financial Review. And Morgan was
this guy who was about six ft three. He was
an axe handle across the shoulder, tapered down to a
tiny waist because he was a surfer. He had these
boyish good looks. He had his whole ascendant career in
(31:15):
front of him, and when I stood next to him,
I was like in my mid forties and I felt
like the lumpy sack of potatoes, and I just slumped
further into this self pity. So it was self pity
to gratitude zero. We finished up and we had one
more job to do, so we were flying from Jakarta
in Indonesia to a little place called job Jakarta, then
(31:35):
back to Australia. But the next day when we were
going to fly out, I didn't know whether I was
going back on the government jet on the Prime Ministers
play because it's a bit of a lottery and you
don't know. Well, that night slept like a baby because
I won the lottery. I got on the plane and
that meant Morgan Mellish and Cynthia Bannon had to get
(31:59):
up at four a m. Battle the Jakarta traffic, then
get into the queues at Jakarta International Airport and me
I got up about seven thirty quick breakfast, walked downstairs,
hopped into my police motorcade, went through the Jakarta traffic
like Moses opening the Red Sea, got to the government
(32:22):
wing at the airport. Eight am, my first ice tea,
and it was about that time that the news started
to come through that a plane, a gruter of flight,
had overshot the runway in job Jakarta, and the news
came through and then it became clear that two people
have died. And Morgan Mellish, with his boy's good looks
(32:49):
and his ascendant career, Morgan came back to Australia in
a coffin and Cynthia Bannum with her career in front
of hers, she came back at about a month later.
She had burns to six of a body and that
(33:09):
running career that I had coveted so much well that
was over because she had both legs amputated. And me,
I get to sit here and speak to you and
tell you that if you compare yourself against other people,
you kill a little part of yourself every time a
little flame inside you extinguish it. As I've worked this
(33:35):
out now that if you relentlessly compare yourself against others,
you become bitter. But if you relentlessly compare yourself against yourself,
you become better. So that world have worked out one
of these things that you know he's saying about being
you know, like right in front of you and not
being able to see it. I now know it's all
about staying in your own lane. So when I running
(33:58):
the race with the rest of us through life, I
get a sense of who's over my shoulder, and I
used that to propel me forward. But I don't focus
on those people anymore. And that that that is essentially
my secret to how I became reasonably successful on YouTube.
I've got a YouTube channel that in a short amount
of time got thirty million views and a few hundred
(34:20):
thousand subscribers on it. The reason that was was I
purposely did not look at any other YouTube channels because
I knew if I did that, I would start comparing
myself against them and that would be the end of me.
So I went on and I just did what I
wanted to do. I went on. It was in the
it was a magic channel, and it was all these
(34:42):
other young twenty year olds doing all this cool stuff.
And I went on, there is this dagg ee, you know,
late forty year old doing the stuff that I wanted
to do. And because of that, that was you know,
you become unique, you become different, and that that's really
my secret. Mhm. That is an incredible story. It is
an incredible story. Sometimes when we don't like our circumstances,
(35:07):
we just shift our job the way that you have
multiple times over. Other times we have circumstances that we
are not going to be able to change, like a
job that we can't really use. And you talk about
that a little bit, where you have to reframe your
drive and change your attitude rather than just changing your drive,
(35:28):
and you talk about going from um blame making too
responsibility taking, and how you can be successful no matter
what job you're doing. It's more about you than the job. Yeah,
look very much. So. I've always thought that most jobs
are either a university or a prison, and you're the
person who holds the keys, and you're the person decides
(35:49):
which way you're you're going to take. This one of
the problems I see, and and and and I when
I promote a career strategy and getting a career mojo back,
the first thing I tell people as please, do not
leave your job. Don't leave your job until you've looked
into that and seen is there more in this that
that I can't see? Is there stuff that I've been
(36:09):
skimming over? And one of the things I say to people,
if you want to be valued, be valuable, because people
spend a lot of time focusing on their horizontal skills.
You know, all those hard technical schools that we need
to advance, but but really, to me, it's the vertical
schools which are going to make you more valuable because
(36:32):
hard skills things that you can train on. If your
employer wants to get someone else, there's a factory it's
called university or college or whatever. There's more of those
people coming through. And what's valuable is what's rare. And
if you've got the same qualifications as everyone else, we're
not valuable. You're just a commodity. What's valuable is when
(36:55):
you're something special and what's different and what's different about
that is when you use those vertical skills. And I'm
talking really simple things here that you can take from
job to job. You know, can you improve your communication,
your presentation skills. Have you got a bit of a
bent towards negotiating? I mean I don't, but boy boy,
(37:16):
I've got a lot of friends, particularly females, who are
fantastic at it, Like you want to put a bit
of effort into that and try to use your work
as a bit of a gymnasium, a training ground, you know,
handling complaints, delegating, diplomacy, uh, speed reading, facilitating, greeting visitors, teaching,
grant writing, web design. There's all these things that you
(37:38):
can value add to the job you're doing and make
yourself an employee that your employer just goes, Oh, I
can't get rid of you. You're just too damned special,
because you know you can get any you know, you
can get another person with qualifications. So a lot of this, though,
it depends on natural curiosity, right, I mean, you're really natural,
(37:58):
or maybe it's not so natural, but you've got to
get curious about what's there for you and every little
corner of get out on footpath university and start listening
to podcasts. Honestly, what it took me twenty five years
of traveling around the world of the opportunities I got
to meet people. I can't believe. I listened on my
phone every day and ago, I don't have to go anywhere.
(38:21):
Now all these conversations that I was able to eave
drop on and now in my pocket. Do you have
a favorite podcast you come back to again and again
that really helps? It's going to be this one after
it's called you to. We're busily working to convert you. Yeah. Look,
I've got my my favorites. I'm a little bit circumspect
(38:41):
about recommending it because it's like trying to recommend a
TV program to someone. I mean, everyone's got their their
different taste. Really, just jump jump in and start start
listening and again take longer time frames. Um, I say,
a hundred is the new thirty. You know this idea?
You know you used to be thirty days to complete
(39:05):
success or twenty one days to this. I reckon you
need a hundred days. I reckon, you need a hundred
days before any meaningful change can happen. But what so
you you know, listen for half an hour a day
for a hundred days doesn't have to be a hundred
consecutive days. You know, this is not a big ask
at all. But but the rewards out of this for
(39:27):
people are quite substantial. I feel like I'm getting such
a great lesson from you that whatever time frame it
is i'm imagining for something, I should just lengthen it
and just stretch it out some be more generous with myself. Yeah, well,
just because longer time frames key and really well to
self discipline. Because you're talking about going to the gym,
(39:48):
and I can't get the willpower to go to the gym.
Willpower works on shorter time frames, self discipline works on
longer time frames. It's too it's it's it's like matching,
matching the right skill or power to the right time frame,
and self discipline right goes here. But I don't have
self discipline. Well I beg to disagree on that. Okay,
(40:14):
you drive down the road and I'm going to hang
le just think about this for the USA. Right, you
drive down the road, and you and you stay on
the right hand side of the road. Okay, what makes
you stay on the right hand side of the road instinct? Yeah, well,
well it's there's a small bit of the rule of law.
(40:35):
It's essentially self discipline. It's a contract you made when
you've got your your license you may and you made
this at a very very quick, um subconscious level, that
you said, I value my life to rat extent, and
therefore I will play by the rules of this game
and stay on the right hand side of that line.
(40:56):
Because that white line, it's not like an invisible barrier
that you drive up and your hits and sparks fly
up and it pushes you over. You are actually an
expert at self discipline, but you don't even realize that
you are, because, I mean, however long you've been driving,
you've been doing that you don't get back after a
day of driving. Ah today it was, so it's almost
(41:21):
zero effort. So if you can then start keying into
how self discipline works, and remember it works over longer
time frames, imagine if you could take that level of
effort and put it into other areas of your life,
maybe with your weight, maybe with procrastination, whole range of
places you can start approaching these things. Self disciplines are
(41:45):
far better tool than willpower. Will powers exhausting and self
discipline you're saying is kind of automatic. Julian, thank you
so much for these insucts. It's been it's been fantastic.
Thank you very much everyone listening. If you want more
of Julian may there, and I certainly do, go to
his blog Julian maythor dot com and check out our Facebook,
(42:06):
Twitter or Instagram Sites at You Turns podcast share with
us your stories. Julianne has some great stories, insights, experiences
through change
And it was interesting. I was reading on the blurb
for your podcast here you were saying that change was
incredibly hard, and I completely disagree with that. Why okay,
because that's the one thing I think most people can
agree on. Yeah, change is simple, but it's not easy.
But in no way is it hard. Hey, guys, thanks
(00:40):
so much for listening. This is you Jones the podcast
where we talk about change are kinds of change is
big and small, positive and more challenging, and we figure
out how to do it more productively. UM only saws
I'm figuring out and I'm here with my co host. Hi,
I'm Jill Herzig, and today we are talking to an
expert on change, and we definitely are. Our guest is
(01:02):
Julian Mother. We are so excited to have him here
joining us from Australia where it is a completely different
time of day or night or night exactly. Thank you, Julian. UM.
Julian's a career strategy expert who has had more careers
himself than you can shake a stick at UM, and
now he's arrived at maybe maybe the career that's gonna
(01:22):
going to be the keeper. He speaks and coaches clients
all over the world and is an incredibly wise person
on this notion of career strategy. So thanks so much
for being here, Julian, Well, thank you very much, and
you've just given me a big build up there. It's
not many people call me that, but thank you very much.
(01:43):
And maybe that's because you started out as a sniper.
Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, Essentially,
when I was at school, uh, you know, I did
really well at school. If you don't count learning, I
wish they didn't count learning it. And when I moved
out of school, I actually repeated my my final year
(02:05):
of school, and I did so bad in my second
year of repeating that I actually truant, you know, WAG school.
It was truant from school for a good third of
the year. But I used to take myself into the
State library because I wanted to be a photo journalist
and I used to pour over all these photography books,
black and white, grainy photos, and you know, the secrets
(02:30):
are always been written between the lines. And I worked
out that to be a great photo journalist, essentially, I
needed to not be in Brisbane in Australia where I was.
I needed to be around the best you know somewhere
around the world, so I need to get out, and
I planed these ways of getting out. I couldn't get out.
And one day I was walking down the street and
(02:51):
I saw a bus shelter and on the side of
the bus shelter was an army recruitment poster and had
had these soldiers walking through a pine forests. Now in
Australia we have eucalyp forest, so this pine forest looked
very exotic to me, and I thought, that's my ticket out.
So a week later I'd signed up with the army
and that's when the yelling started. It didn't stop for
(03:15):
quite a while. And when I was in the Army,
I just decided to look. I've I've got to get
somewhere that's smarter for for me to be, and I
looked around, and essentially being an army an army sniper
suited me down to the ground because essentially what it
let me do was indulge in my anti social behaviors
(03:36):
and you know, sort of move off off by myself
and work by myself. So that's essentially how I ended
up doing that. And also look through a lens, which
apparently liked because of the photography, the shooting is very
different though, Yes, it's completely different, and it's very much
focused down onto you. When you're looking through a sniperscope,
(03:56):
you're actually taking confusion down to a point of clarity.
And that's both visually, but it's also mentally and psychologically.
You've got to make some very um quick decisions. And essentially,
when I just realized that this was not going to
be my future, and when I was sitting there and
in wait, I was looking through the scope and I
(04:18):
started to use it almost like a little camera and
started to make these little movies in my head. Whether
you know the recording medium was was just my imagination.
And that continued on. I trained myself up in filmmaking,
and you know, when I left the Army, I had
(04:38):
a a year or two just trying to find my
way and then eventually got into doing what I wanted
to do, and that was being a photojournalist. So it
sounds like you're self educator. That's that's your band, huh,
very very much. So it's all about there's so much
opportunity out there. You know, even back now you've you've
(04:59):
got this opportunity, you know, you just carry it around
in your pocket, it's your phone. And this podcast like
the one we're on now. You know, there's so much
information that's available to you. Back back then it was
you know, this was all pre internet days, and it
was it was difficult to get but I always found
there was information available anywhere I traveled. Uh, you know,
there there would be a library that be a state library,
(05:21):
would be a local library. It's just you know, if
you put your mind to it, there's so much information available.
So you've used it to make a bunch of shifts.
I mean, you did eventually become a cameraman, which you know,
you sort of describe as if it as if it
just sort of happened, But I bet there was a
lot of self education and a lot of determination often that,
(05:41):
and then you wound up thank you for admitting this
being a failed entrepreneur, but you you started and you
tried um and then an accidental YouTube personality, and then
you became an online entrepreneur, and then you started this
sort of speaking and coaching, which has flourished amazingly. So
it's all career strategy. Didn't that really have a strategy
(06:02):
because those things don't totally seem connected. You know, they
seem pretty pretty much different wheelhouses. Yeah, definitely, there was
a strategy, and this is something that I've developed and
refined over the years, and there were bits and pieces
of it, and it's taken me decades to put this
two together into a usable and teachable form. But essentially
(06:26):
what I worked out is people start up out there
with three problems, so they believe their powers to change,
they don't think they're good enough to change, and they
don't know what to do. And that's three mistakes because
you know, people say, look, you don't understand I can't change.
I don't have a choice. You know, my situation is
(06:49):
completely different. But essentially everyone is like that. And if
you go down that route of blaming circumstance, um, it
doesn't absolve you from responsibility. And as all comes back
to personal responsibility about you making the choices. And when
people think they're not good enough, they start to think, oh,
someone else out there will fix my problems. There's an
(07:11):
external solution for my internal problems. And then when people
don't know what to do, quite often they get stuck.
But they get stuck because they say, I need to
feel inspired first, and they get locked into this this
problem with thinking that feelings give birth to actions, and
it's absolutely not true. It's completely reversed. So when I
(07:34):
started to to look at all those three problems, I
realized was actually a process that I had intuitively followed
over the years. And it comes down to a simple ABC.
What I call it's it's accept responsibility, banish assumptions, and
control change. It's literally the ongoing ABC um you know,
(07:56):
point of references I always go back to, and my
little motto that I use is own up, wise up,
step up. So you know, you've got to own up
except responsibility, wise up, Realize that a lot of the
knowledge that you've got in your head is bad knowledge
and you need to replace that with a better version
(08:17):
of it, and then step up. It's all about controlling change,
and you can learn to control change. And it was
interesting I was reading on the blurb for your podcast
here you were saying that change was incredibly hard, and
I completely disagree with that. Why okay, because that's the
one thing I think most people can agree on. Not
(08:37):
change is simple, but it's not easy. But in no
way is it hard. But I mean hard is when
you lose someone in your life, you hard of the
big events in life that we have to struggle through.
I'm not talking about those sorts of change, but other changes,
essentially breaking it down into component parts. I was think
(09:00):
of it like a movie film, you know, like the
old projectors, and you you you're gonna watch a movie
and you lace up the big role of film. And
if you roll down the film and you look at it,
there's each individual frames, twenty five frames for every minute,
and you look at each of those frames and it's
just minutely different. You know, the hand will be moving
up and one hand will be moving down a frame
(09:22):
at a time, and that's essentially what changes. It's broken
down into these little component parts that a little bit
different from the day before and are going to be
tomorrow is going to be a little bit different from today.
And that movie film is actually a story and it
has a start and it has an ending. Now, if
you thread that through a projector gate, have you ever
(09:46):
seen that? You know, it's it's it's like a video
or effect. You know when a film gets stuck in
a projector and it burns out. You know that share? Yeah, Well,
essentially why that is because the sprocket holes jump out
of the claws and pull it down. And a career
(10:08):
strategy is what I think of as sprocket holes. It's
self determination, it's self belief, it's self awareness, it's self discipline,
and they're like sprocket holes. And if you have your
story and you don't have these sprocket holes down the side,
your story literally gets stuck in the projector gate and
and burns out. And I guess what I when I'm
(10:30):
hearing and what you're saying, is that it takes a
lot of focus. Um, you've got to focus on all
those little steps that are going to move you forward.
After the break, we're gonna talk all a bit more
about that. For the break, we were talking about change
(10:53):
and our guest Julian says it's easy, and I the
way that you broke it down, it does didn't make sense.
I think for a lot of us, myself included and
probably Jael. Once you start the change, once that film
you were talking about starts rolling and you can go
from step A to B to see there's a momentum there.
(11:16):
I think for a lot of people it's the A.
So it's like we're going to the gym. Once you're
on the treadmill. It's not that terrible. It's the getting
into the car to drive to the gym that giant
and getting out of bed. So how do you get
yourself to start that film. It's the initial impetus to change, right.
(11:38):
So when I was a documentary cameraman, I did that
for twenty five years and it was literally the second
best job in the world. I wrote a book called
that the second best job in the world because I
literally put a plane ticket in one hand money in
the other, that kicked me out the door and say
go tell people's stories. It was a great gig, but
what it let me do was get behind the scenes
(12:00):
with a lot of people who have successful in all
different measures in life, and I got to see that.
The big takeaway from that twenty five years was extraordinary
people are ordinary people who do extra It's amazing how
(12:21):
ordinary a lot of successful people are. But they just
get there and they pushed through and just keep taking
all these small extra steps. So the first thing before
even thinking about starting that is that you've got to
accept you're actually better than you think. I mean, we've
been sold a lot of stories about that we're not
(12:46):
as capable as we are And I call this the
great discouragement. There's where were there. There was a time
when courage and courages yourity to face difficulty, to overcome difficulty,
where it was passed down from father to son, from
(13:06):
mother to daughter, from priest to congregation, from uncle to
all the kids in the village. And here we are
in the global village. But where are these wise storytellers
who would pass on these stories? And it's been replaced
by this twenty four seven message that essentially is a
discouraging message. You know, it's our addiction to comfort. We've
(13:30):
got this misplaced sense of entitlement. We've got this failed
instant gratification experiment. You know, we've we're pushed to compare
ourselves on social media, and we've got this tyranny of convenience.
We're addicted to comfort. We've got the rise of the
nanny state. We've got all these things which basically say
(13:50):
to us that there's an external solution for our internal
problems and as actually not true. This this this is
pick through the world that's painted and it's a lot
grimmer and worse than the world actually is. If you
read the you know, the likes of Stephen Pinker and
(14:11):
hands Rosling. I mean, you know, it looks statistically the
world is in the best shape it's been in for
a long time, and the opportunities that are facing us
over the next coming decades are fantastic. So first of all,
you've got to get your your head in order. You've
you've got to accept that a lot of this information
that you've been given is sending you down, you know,
(14:33):
the wrong path. And look, there's there's there's a reason
for it is because they want you to be unhappy.
And it's not a conspiracy. It's just smart business on
their part because unhappy people by more. I just need this,
buy more. So you've really got to come to terms
with that before you even start looking at you know what,
(14:56):
you know what steps I can do to get me
to the gym. A lot of it is getting at
your head in order first, and the number one way
I tell people to do that is joint footpath University,
and that is simply get out at any time of
the day and trade an hour or half an hour
whatever you can give of the time that you're listening
(15:18):
to this conventional media with these messages and listen to
podcasts there's you know, there's something like four hundred thousand
podcasts out there. There's great ones out there called there's
one even called You Turn. But you can get a
different point of view and it's going to give you
a different perspective on the world. And this is incredibly
important to start this shift in your thinking because when
(15:42):
the shift in your thinking starts, then your actions are
going to follow as well. Sort of a lovely image,
the idea that you can just get out there and
walk for an hour and listen to our a podcast
or any podcast that you feel like. And you know,
if you're living in New York there and it's it's
terribly cold and everything, you know, you can do it
when you're you when when you're rning, you can find
(16:02):
time to do it. Yeah. Yeah, well I have to say,
I mean I am I don't even want to call
myself a runner. I just jog people. I jog and
and it changed sort of changed my whole jogging life.
When I discovered podcasts, just felt like this exercise for
my brain as well as my body. And I think
(16:23):
I accidentally went enrolled in Footpath University. And it makes
you smarter and better looking. I don't know about about
the last part. What about when the change feels like
it's externally imposed. So like your situation, Joe, it's not
because of any lack of impetus on your part. Career
(16:44):
change completely thrust upon me so out of magazine publishing
into blank anyone, anyone want to fill in that blank
for me? I open when you don't know what to
do and you're no longer doing you don't have the
identad that you had for a long time, and you've
been in that situation, how do you keep your feet
(17:05):
moving and where? How do you know which direction to
point them in? Okay, Well, the first thing is to
um is to think about the time frame you're going
to do this in, because you know, we live in
this world where it's all now, you know, we need
a hack for everything, and it's you know, it's twenty
one easy days to this, and that and and and
and that. Essentially is is never going to work from
(17:28):
from from my perspective, every change that I undertaken in
my life, like major reinvention of myself, I essentially work
in a five year time frame. And when I say
to five five year, multi year, three to five year,
it could be longer. But that's that's essentially what I expect.
It's going to take me now then, So if something
(17:49):
is thrust upon me and change is thrust upon me,
then I just know, Okay, well then it's not going
to happen, and I'm going to have to do some
stuff that I don't want to do, but I will
get where I want to get, but it's just going
to take me longer. So that's, you know, the number
one strategy. Yeah, I actually find that incredibly comforting. I'm
sure some people would completely freak out thinking five years,
(18:13):
three to five years, but you know, to me, there's
something generous about that. It's generous to yourself. It's you know,
realistic on on some level, and also tells tells you
you know, I've got some time I'm going to explore.
I'm gonna work on this. But did you have a plan,
I mean you don't. You have some general ideas of
(18:34):
what you want to do, but you don't have anything,
no specific goal. When you transitioned from cameraman to um
what came next? Public speaker? No? Actually, well no, I
didn't see what What what happened is when I transitioned
from being a cameraman. I had this great idea that
I was going to teach philanthropy to school children. So
(18:57):
I um this great project of social change, and I
essentially walked away from my job in television. I was
pretty much stoped on my game and I walked away,
and I walked into this career and beat and I
sort of checked it out before I went. I ran
it past the government, I ran it past principles, I
ran it past parents, I said, and they said, oh,
(19:19):
this is a worthy idea, fantastic, And so I walked
away my TV career and I took this program into
schools to deafening silence, and I said, ah, hang on
a minute. You said you thought it was worthy, and
I said it is worthy and I said, I thought
you said you liked it. They said, we do like it.
And I said, well, why won't you book it? And
(19:41):
they said, well you never asked us that. That was
a completely different conversation that we never had. And essentially,
I mean when I was in television, I I was
a public servant. I worked for a government network that
focused on it was sort of like p your PBS
or something, you know, it's similar, And I was a
public servan and I didn't know anything, and I learned
(20:01):
a very very fast lesson about running a business and marketing.
Never open a restaurant unless you've got a starving crowd.
And I essentially fell flat on my face and there
I was. My TV career was sailing off into the distance,
and I had to reinvent myself and that failure did
that failure tou tou alart? Was? That? Was that one
of the one of those kind of key moments where
(20:24):
you realize these are the principles of change that I
learned the hard way and I'm going to It wasn't
it wasn't a particular key moment, but it was part
of the journey I was. Is what I tell my kids,
who are both moved on and out a home now,
is I've always said to them, it's all about momentum.
And you mentioned this before. It's about momentum and it's
(20:46):
not about going straight ahead because you get this idea
that you know, we we get kicked out of school
into five decades of a working life and they give
us a pad on the back and a good luck
and that's about it. And you've got this sort of
idea that I have to make this work, and it
has to go from this to this, and it has
to be this direct line. But life is a zig zag,
(21:09):
and all my life has always been a zig zagg.
I've always told my daughters said it's said, no matter
which way you're moving, it doesn't matter if you're zigzagging,
as long as you're never standing still and you're never
going backwards. So when I fell flat on my face,
that was okay. There was another pivot that I had
to make their So what I did was I reinvented
(21:30):
myself as a magician. Because the hook that I had
used to take this program into schools to teach philanthropy
as children, the hook was magic and juggling, something I
had been doing for a number of years, and so
I just took those skills and thought, well, it's going
to take me time, started from ground zero and worked
my way up to being a doing that for five years.
(21:52):
You talk about a coin track, which is I think
useful for people in transition. Were you not seeing what's
right in front of you? Can you tell us that?
There's a saying in magic, it's a technique. It's called
hidden in plain sight. And imagine this. I mean, just because,
like you say, I'm a magician, you know, and you
know I swore on Houdini's grave, on avals that are
(22:15):
never revery. All this stuff. So just hypothetically, if you
were to take a coin and take it and in
your one hand and put it into the other hand
and wave your hand over that hand that had the
coin in it and open it up and the coin
was gone, it would be quite amazing. But if I
(22:38):
broke that down to you, and this is just hypothetically,
and said that on the coin one side was silver
and the other side had a piece of fabric glued
to the back of it, and that coin was one
of the handful of coins in the world that was magnetic.
Because most coins aren't magnetic, but some coins are they've
(23:00):
got a high steel content them. So if that had
a high magnetic coin and it had fabric glue to
the back, and that fabric happened to be the same
pattern as your say, Paigeley shirt, you know, like a
busy pattern, the one you're wearing right now for example,
that sort of thing. And if you just happen to
have a magnet sown into that shirt. If I put
(23:25):
that coin into my hand, but still a sneaky move
and it wasn't really going into the other hand. And
as I waved my hand, I just moved this hand
with a coin across my shirt, and that coin stuck
to my shirt. It's hidden in plain sight, like you,
no one is looking for it there. It's completely invisible,
(23:47):
but it's right in front of your eyes. And everybody
always known the secret to this trail because I am
right now learning it. I am that kid who has
still is still amaze us through my trick until today.
That is just a hypothetical, all right, But there's a
big lesson there right for us in our lives where
(24:08):
what we're looking for it could be right under our
nose and we just are oblivious to it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
And that's exactly the point this strategy that I use,
which is own up, wise, up, step up. Most of
these these things are right under your nose, but you
can't see them. I mean to just give you an example,
(24:29):
ask you a question, how far when you're forty years old,
how far along your career path is that? Do you think?
So you know, when you leave work and you retire,
how how far long is forty years old? You know?
In percentage roughly almost right now, since you retire at sixty,
(24:51):
started to I know you two. Well, see, most of
the people are going to retire at I'm going to
retire at seventy now. I mean, you know the age
of time and it's going up in Australia here it's
getting really close to seventy in the next five years.
So forty years old, you're actually going to be two
fifths of your journey along. Yet most people think in
(25:11):
their career journey at forty if I haven't done this,
you know, like I've failed. But essentially you haven't even
reached halfway yet, and you're getting the maths wrong. Okay,
at forty years old, how much of your personal wealth
do you think you will have accrued at forty years old?
(25:32):
You know, over your life? Maybe the same Maybe I
don't know. There's all a big bills to pay for it.
Just just just roughly, just just take a stand. I
don't know, Okay, most people say about six when the
truth is of your wealth? Yeah, and if you just
(25:55):
look so like a lot of this is hidden in
front of people, it just has to be unwoven, unpacked,
gently shown to them and just start to realize, Oh okay,
this is where a lot of self awareness comes in.
And I've got a real thing about self awareness because
to me, it's it's pitched very badly. All right, I
(26:16):
want you to pitch self awareness to us better. When
we come back after the break, before the break, we
are just about to hear Julian's Keys to Self Awareness.
Can we dig into that a little bit. It's just
(26:38):
it's it's pitched badly. It's just when I explained self
awareness to a lot of people. If I'm sitting with
a group of people who really haven't thought about it,
and if you mentioned the word self awareness, you watch
them cross their arms like this, and you know they're
not receptive to it because immediately they start to think.
Or self awareness that's associated with meditation and self get
(27:00):
gets a little bit woo woo for people who haven't
thought about it too much, but essentially all self awarenesses,
imagine putting on a white lab coat and getting a
clipboard and stepping outside of yourself for a day and
just following yourself around and watching yourself and making notes
about yourself. Here go oh oh oh, I do that
(27:21):
when I speak to people like that, Oh, when people
talk to me, I react like that. And essentially, if
you pitch self awareness into two people, just is this
way that you can, um start unpacking a lot of
these blind spots and these assumptions mean ways that we're
(27:41):
getting in our own way or is it also a
way to figure out of Hey, this is this is
what you're good at, this is what you're meant to
be doing? All that? All that didn't worry. I mean,
I know there's a huge movement to get type executive
to be more self aware. That's kind of a buzzword
right now. Um, And we've certainly had bosses who didn't
(28:02):
seem like they were very self aware. I've never had
a boss. No, that would never happen. And I don't know.
I mean, I think it's sort of a fantastic movement.
I also feel like people, as they get older, we
should get wiser in this way, right, we should be
more and more self aware. And yet I feel like
sometimes it gets harder and harder. Why is that that
(28:22):
it gets harder? Oh, I don't feel you got me there.
I don't have an answer. You think self awareness gets
easier as you get older, I think so very much.
I think you have more time to apply yourself to it,
or you can just to honor, you know, and become
more interested in your habit for a living. You you can,
(28:43):
I mean, this is the way that self awareness. Okay,
I call this story bitter or better. It started when
I was going to hop on a plane and fly
to Indonesia, and I was actually feeling sorry for myself
because I'm getting a bit long in the tooth in this,
you know, being a photo journalist, being a documentary cameraman.
And I was actually standing in front of the mirror
and I was getting ready to go on this flight,
(29:04):
and you know, I said to my wife, I said,
look at these all these extra chins here, and look
at the hairs of the nose and a little at
the receding hairline, and look at that gut. It's getting
a bit bigger. And I said, is there anything positive
you can say about this body? And she said, at
least your eyesight's not failing. We got over that listle deep,
and I went and hopped on this plane. Now, if
(29:28):
you got to fly on a plane, you can fly
economy or coach class. Well we all do that, or
you can fly business class. But what's better than business class. Private, private, yeah, private,
what's what's what's what's even better than that? I'll tell
you the Prime Minister of Australia's plane I've got. I
(29:49):
got on one of his planes and we're going to
Indonesia with the Foreign Minister who was going to spend
three days with the President of Indonesia, Susulu bang Bang
Udon No. And when you go over on these flights, yeah,
it's a great name. When he go over these these flights,
they take a cohort of media with you. And I
(30:10):
was sitting down the back of the plane with a
journalist called Cynthia Banner. She was from the Sydney Morning Herald,
and we're making a bit of small talk and I said, oh, Cynthia,
what do you do in your spare time? And she
said I loved to run, And I went, oh, I
ran for decades and my knees gave out on me.
(30:30):
And I said, where's where's your running out now? And
she said, I'm training for marathons. Went oh, I used
to love training for marathons, and started to get into
a bit of this funk. I was actually feeling, you know,
like I was feeling sorry for myself at the stage
of my working career, so it was self pity one
and gratitude zero for the situation that I was in.
(30:51):
We got to Indonesia. One of the other journalists I
worked with over there was his foreign correspondent name Morgan Mellish.
He was from the Australian Financial Review. And Morgan was
this guy who was about six ft three. He was
an axe handle across the shoulder, tapered down to a
tiny waist because he was a surfer. He had these
boyish good looks. He had his whole ascendant career in
(31:15):
front of him, and when I stood next to him,
I was like in my mid forties and I felt
like the lumpy sack of potatoes, and I just slumped
further into this self pity. So it was self pity
to gratitude zero. We finished up and we had one
more job to do, so we were flying from Jakarta
in Indonesia to a little place called job Jakarta, then
(31:35):
back to Australia. But the next day when we were
going to fly out, I didn't know whether I was
going back on the government jet on the Prime Ministers
play because it's a bit of a lottery and you
don't know. Well, that night slept like a baby because
I won the lottery. I got on the plane and
that meant Morgan Mellish and Cynthia Bannon had to get
(31:59):
up at four a m. Battle the Jakarta traffic, then
get into the queues at Jakarta International Airport and me
I got up about seven thirty quick breakfast, walked downstairs,
hopped into my police motorcade, went through the Jakarta traffic
like Moses opening the Red Sea, got to the government
(32:22):
wing at the airport. Eight am, my first ice tea,
and it was about that time that the news started
to come through that a plane, a gruter of flight,
had overshot the runway in job Jakarta, and the news
came through and then it became clear that two people
have died. And Morgan Mellish, with his boy's good looks
(32:49):
and his ascendant career, Morgan came back to Australia in
a coffin and Cynthia Bannum with her career in front
of hers, she came back at about a month later.
She had burns to six of a body and that
(33:09):
running career that I had coveted so much well that
was over because she had both legs amputated. And me,
I get to sit here and speak to you and
tell you that if you compare yourself against other people,
you kill a little part of yourself every time a
little flame inside you extinguish it. As I've worked this
(33:35):
out now that if you relentlessly compare yourself against others,
you become bitter. But if you relentlessly compare yourself against yourself,
you become better. So that world have worked out one
of these things that you know he's saying about being
you know, like right in front of you and not
being able to see it. I now know it's all
about staying in your own lane. So when I running
(33:58):
the race with the rest of us through life, I
get a sense of who's over my shoulder, and I
used that to propel me forward. But I don't focus
on those people anymore. And that that that is essentially
my secret to how I became reasonably successful on YouTube.
I've got a YouTube channel that in a short amount
of time got thirty million views and a few hundred
(34:20):
thousand subscribers on it. The reason that was was I
purposely did not look at any other YouTube channels because
I knew if I did that, I would start comparing
myself against them and that would be the end of me.
So I went on and I just did what I
wanted to do. I went on. It was in the
it was a magic channel, and it was all these
(34:42):
other young twenty year olds doing all this cool stuff.
And I went on, there is this dagg ee, you know,
late forty year old doing the stuff that I wanted
to do. And because of that, that was you know,
you become unique, you become different, and that that's really
my secret. Mhm. That is an incredible story. It is
an incredible story. Sometimes when we don't like our circumstances,
(35:07):
we just shift our job the way that you have
multiple times over. Other times we have circumstances that we
are not going to be able to change, like a
job that we can't really use. And you talk about
that a little bit, where you have to reframe your
drive and change your attitude rather than just changing your drive,
(35:28):
and you talk about going from um blame making too
responsibility taking, and how you can be successful no matter
what job you're doing. It's more about you than the job. Yeah,
look very much. So. I've always thought that most jobs
are either a university or a prison, and you're the
person who holds the keys, and you're the person decides
(35:49):
which way you're you're going to take. This one of
the problems I see, and and and and I when
I promote a career strategy and getting a career mojo back,
the first thing I tell people as please, do not
leave your job. Don't leave your job until you've looked
into that and seen is there more in this that
that I can't see? Is there stuff that I've been
(36:09):
skimming over? And one of the things I say to people,
if you want to be valued, be valuable, because people
spend a lot of time focusing on their horizontal skills.
You know, all those hard technical schools that we need
to advance, but but really, to me, it's the vertical
schools which are going to make you more valuable because
(36:32):
hard skills things that you can train on. If your
employer wants to get someone else, there's a factory it's
called university or college or whatever. There's more of those
people coming through. And what's valuable is what's rare. And
if you've got the same qualifications as everyone else, we're
not valuable. You're just a commodity. What's valuable is when
(36:55):
you're something special and what's different and what's different about
that is when you use those vertical skills. And I'm
talking really simple things here that you can take from
job to job. You know, can you improve your communication,
your presentation skills. Have you got a bit of a
bent towards negotiating? I mean I don't, but boy boy,
(37:16):
I've got a lot of friends, particularly females, who are
fantastic at it, Like you want to put a bit
of effort into that and try to use your work
as a bit of a gymnasium, a training ground, you know,
handling complaints, delegating, diplomacy, uh, speed reading, facilitating, greeting visitors, teaching,
grant writing, web design. There's all these things that you
(37:38):
can value add to the job you're doing and make
yourself an employee that your employer just goes, Oh, I
can't get rid of you. You're just too damned special,
because you know you can get any you know, you
can get another person with qualifications. So a lot of this, though,
it depends on natural curiosity, right, I mean, you're really natural,
(37:58):
or maybe it's not so natural, but you've got to
get curious about what's there for you and every little
corner of get out on footpath university and start listening
to podcasts. Honestly, what it took me twenty five years
of traveling around the world of the opportunities I got
to meet people. I can't believe. I listened on my
phone every day and ago, I don't have to go anywhere.
(38:21):
Now all these conversations that I was able to eave
drop on and now in my pocket. Do you have
a favorite podcast you come back to again and again
that really helps? It's going to be this one after
it's called you to. We're busily working to convert you. Yeah. Look,
I've got my my favorites. I'm a little bit circumspect
(38:41):
about recommending it because it's like trying to recommend a
TV program to someone. I mean, everyone's got their their
different taste. Really, just jump jump in and start start
listening and again take longer time frames. Um, I say,
a hundred is the new thirty. You know this idea?
You know you used to be thirty days to complete
(39:05):
success or twenty one days to this. I reckon you
need a hundred days. I reckon, you need a hundred
days before any meaningful change can happen. But what so
you you know, listen for half an hour a day
for a hundred days doesn't have to be a hundred
consecutive days. You know, this is not a big ask
at all. But but the rewards out of this for
(39:27):
people are quite substantial. I feel like I'm getting such
a great lesson from you that whatever time frame it
is i'm imagining for something, I should just lengthen it
and just stretch it out some be more generous with myself. Yeah, well,
just because longer time frames key and really well to
self discipline. Because you're talking about going to the gym,
(39:48):
and I can't get the willpower to go to the gym.
Willpower works on shorter time frames, self discipline works on
longer time frames. It's too it's it's it's like matching,
matching the right skill or power to the right time frame,
and self discipline right goes here. But I don't have
self discipline. Well I beg to disagree on that. Okay,
(40:14):
you drive down the road and I'm going to hang
le just think about this for the USA. Right, you
drive down the road, and you and you stay on
the right hand side of the road. Okay, what makes
you stay on the right hand side of the road instinct? Yeah, well,
well it's there's a small bit of the rule of law.
(40:35):
It's essentially self discipline. It's a contract you made when
you've got your your license you may and you made
this at a very very quick, um subconscious level, that
you said, I value my life to rat extent, and
therefore I will play by the rules of this game
and stay on the right hand side of that line.
(40:56):
Because that white line, it's not like an invisible barrier
that you drive up and your hits and sparks fly
up and it pushes you over. You are actually an
expert at self discipline, but you don't even realize that
you are, because, I mean, however long you've been driving,
you've been doing that you don't get back after a
day of driving. Ah today it was, so it's almost
(41:21):
zero effort. So if you can then start keying into
how self discipline works, and remember it works over longer
time frames, imagine if you could take that level of
effort and put it into other areas of your life,
maybe with your weight, maybe with procrastination, whole range of
places you can start approaching these things. Self disciplines are
(41:45):
far better tool than willpower. Will powers exhausting and self
discipline you're saying is kind of automatic. Julian, thank you
so much for these insucts. It's been it's been fantastic.
Thank you very much everyone listening. If you want more
of Julian may there, and I certainly do, go to
his blog Julian maythor dot com and check out our Facebook,
(42:06):
Twitter or Instagram Sites at You Turns podcast share with
us your stories. Julianne has some great stories, insights, experiences
through change
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