Episode 69 – How to find gainful employment, with Dr Colby Jubenville

February 4, 2018 Podcast

In this 69th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast, I continue in my quest to bring you the best and most interesting people to speak to about getting a graduate job, as once again I’ve gone transatlantic and am this week speaking to Dr Colby Jubenville over in the USA. In this episode we delve into finding fulfilment at work, examining questions such as why you should look for gainful employment and not just employment, and why you need to find your ‘voice’ in what you do. We also cover why your 20’s in the most important decade of your life, and how conducting a personal assessment is so important to your long term career success. Amongst other topics we also touch on why you should be thinking about personal change and not personal development, and how natural curiosity can turbo-charge your job search. No matter what type of graduate job you are looking for, and no matter where you are on your job search, you will find nuggets of wisdom in my interview with Colby. Don’t forget, as always, all links to everything we discuss including a full transcript and book recommendations and web links can be found over in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/Colby.

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher radio.

 MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • The difference between employment and gainful employment
  • Exactly why it is so important to conduct a personal assessment
  • Why your 20’s are the most important decade of your life
  • How harnessing your natural curiosity will turbocharge your job search
  • Why you should try and get paid for your value and not your time
  • Why people don’t need personal development, they need personal change
  • How finding gainful employment is one of the biggest challenges that you will face

SELECTED LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Transcript- Episode 69 – How to find gainful employment, with Dr Colby Jubenville

Announcer: Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, your home for weekly information and inspiration to help you get the graduate job of your dreams.

James: Hello and welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each episode I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, entrepreneurs, coaches and bloggers who bring decades of experience into a byte size weekly 30 minute show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had a decade ago when I graduated. I’m back as well after a Christmas and new year break, refreshed, re-charged and with some cracking interviews recorded and ready to go to help you make this year the one where you bag that dream graduate job. Thanks for all the emails and tweets over that time with recommendations for companies to chat to, especial thanks to former guest Brian Sinclair for coming up with some brilliant ideas for future shows, so stay tuned. There are some goodies on the way. Now turning to the present, in this 69th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast I continue in my quest to bring you the best and most interesting people to speak to about getting a graduate job, as once again I’ve gone transatlantic and am this week speaking to Dr Colby Jubenville over in the USA. In this episode we delve into finding fulfilment at work, examining questions such as why you should look for gainful employment and not just employment, and why you need to find your ‘voice’ in what you do. We also cover why your 20’s in the most important decade of your life, and how conducting a personal assessment is so important to your long term career success. Amongst other topics we also touch on why you should be thinking about personal change and not personal development, and how natural curiosity can turbo-charge your jobsearch. No matter what type of graduate job you are looking for, and no matter where you are on your job search, you will find nuggets of wisdom in my interview with Colby. Don’t forget, as always, all links to everything we discuss including a full transcript and book recommendations and web links can be found over in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/Colby.

Before we start a quick request from me, your feedback helps me to create the episodes you want to hear, so I’ve set up a super simple and very quick survey, as I want the show to best serve your needs. It’s got 5 questions and will take you a minute, so please check it out at http://www.graduatejobpodcast.com/survey. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. But in the meantime, let’s crack on with the show.

Just before we get to Colby let’s have a little message from today’s sponsor who are CareerGym.com. Career Gym is the number one place for you to undertake all of your psychometric tests which you will face when you apply for a graduate job. No matter what graduate job you apply for you’re going to have to face some type of verbal reasoning, situational judgment, and working style tests. You can practice these at CareerGym.com, as well as numerical, and abstract reasoning tests. They are all produced by testing experts, and exactly the same as the ones you will see in the real graduate job tests. You can just practice them as you want, or you can do them in exam mode, under time pressure, and they come all with detailed explanations and solutions, and you can track your progress and see how you compare against your peers.

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James:  We’ve gone transatlantic in our quest to bring you the best job search talent, as this week we head all the way over to Tennessee in the USA and I am very pleased to welcome author, international speaker, professor, entrepreneur, inventor and consultant…wow! Dr Colby Jubenville. Welcome to the show

Dr Colby:  Hey, thanks for having me, thanks for letting me be a small part of your audience, with your audience today and I look forward to sharing some of the things that have happened along the way for me and that may be valuable to the people that take the time to listen to me. So thank you.

James:  Thank you for joining us on The Graduate Job Podcast, but I gave you a very brief introduction there, would you like you introduce yourself to the listeners and describe what you do in your own words.

Dr Colby:  Yeah sure, when I go out all over the country and I talk to people I try to keep things pretty simple but I was born to two educators who taught me that the way to take on the world was to become an educator and educate other people and marry an educator and that works all the way up. As we have these things called lifestyle and freedom and they still don’t pay educators what they deserve but in your introduction there you listed me as a college professor and I’m proud to be a college professor and I’m proud of the work that I do but there is a saying in the United States about college professors and it goes ‘those that can, do’ and you probably know the old saying ‘those who can’t do, teach’. That used to really bother me until I sat down and I really started to unpack that and the conclusion that I have come to is that if you can do as well as teach then you get paid for your value and not your time. I think we live in a new economy that commands that we ask ourselves, do you want to get paid for your value or do you want to get paid for your time? That’s part of what we can hopefully spend some time talking about today.

James:  That’d be brilliant and I know that saying well ‘those that can do, those that can’t teach’. My parents are both teachers so I would remind them of that phrase every so often when I wanted to make a point with them.

Dr Colby:  There’s that old Woody Allen joke that goes along with it ‘if you can’t teach, teach PE’ but that’s probably more of an American type joke. My background is in college coaching, in athletic coaching and so part of my story is looking back on my life and the people that had the greatest impact on me were coaches. If I look back on those coaches they really did three things 1. They made me have conversations I didn’t want to have 2. They made me do things I didn’t want to do 3. They made me become something I didn’t think I could become and as I sit here with you on this podcast all the way across the ocean I think it’s a great example of the kind of investment that those coaches in St Pauls High School in Mobile Alabama, Millsaps College in Jackson Mississippi, that when I started a football programme at (unclear) and the investments they made in me.

James:  Ah brilliant and we will probably touch upon some of the lessons that you’ve learnt as a football coach along the way as well. So maybe starting off, we will touch upon your work as an author later on as well, but as the Director of Student Coaching and Success maybe starting there; can you tell us a little bit more about the centre and what your role is as director?

Dr Colby:  Yes, the Centre for Student Coaching and Success, the vision, it’s something I’ve had inside of me my entire life and I think that it’s really a culmination of my unique perspective in education and experience but the centres vision is to help students become employed in their chosen career path prior to walking across the stage at graduation. I think what we are going to see in the next five or ten years in higher education is that the gain of employment, the ability for graduates to gain employment is going to become the benchmark for colleges and universities and so what I’ve seen that happens in the 20 years of doing what I do is that we tell 20 year olds that they have all the time in the world and then when they get to that challenging point of approaching graduation, graduation and the gain of employment, when they get to that point the gain for employment goes out of the window because they are too busy doing the necessary points just to graduate. So they get to that point, they get that degree, they think that they’ve accomplished something, and while in fact they may have accomplished something the reality is that college degree is the cost of doing business, it is the cost of getting the ticket to get into the game. Once you get into the game, it is your unique perspective, how you see what you do, how you know what you do, and your unique experience, how you connect and deliver what you do that ultimately decides your ability to secure that gainful employment. What I’ve figured out, one of my clients who I have worked with for many many years, John Floyd Ole South Properties, he sells properties, just because I began to drip on him the success stories that we have at MTSU and the student success that I created in the programme I ran there and so he became fascinated with those stories. John is probably one of the most compassionate, caring, generous people you will ever meet and he committed that gift. We built version one in February 2017, we launched it but built it prior to that. I’ve built online educational platforms before and what I’ve realised is that you’ve got to go through version one to get to version two and so now we are at version two and to me version two is so elegant and so simple. It works.

Here is the conclusion I have come to, here is the first big takeaway for you audience. People don’t necessarily want personal development. They want personal change. When I say that to people they start nodding as if they understand what I’m saying but they don’t because if you really believe that then the question ultimately becomes, well what are you trying to change? So here is what I think we are trying to change. Colby has a narrative in his mind, it defines his relationships, it defines the choices he makes, it defines the opportunities he chooses, it defines whether he subscribes to the fear of failure and that script was either written by him or somebody else wrote it for him and if you don’t know truly what that script is, you can’t walk people out of the change they want to create for themselves. So in the end of the personal change the question becomes ‘how do you change the narrative?’ and what I’ve figured out is the simplest and most powerful way to create personal change within people is through personal assessment and personal coaching, and we’ve partnered with Harrison assessment, who is the number one assessment company in the world, that measures behaviour rather than personality because you can’t change people’s personality but you can change their behaviour and we use narrative based coaching templates along with that to drive the change, to change the narrative to create a new story along with new activity that creates the gain for employment opportunities that the students truly seek.

James:  I love that and you covered that in a lot of detail there Colby. So maybe breaking that down so that the listeners can truly implement that and maybe think about it themselves; how would you recommend that they go about identifying the scripts internally holding them back or directing their behaviour. How can they go about thinking what they might be?

Dr Colby:  The heavy lifting that we do is in the personal assessment, so if you are looking for the ability to start it’s the ability to have the access to some kind of assessment that can provide you some insight into ultimately the things that drive you. So for example with Harrison assessment the very first report that we pull is a traits and definition report. That traits and definition report, inside of it includes your life themes. So my life themes, if you pull Colby Harrison for traits and definition, my life themes are warmth, empathy, wants to lead and influencing and when I read those I thought to myself ‘wow these people have nailed this’. If you go down to prefer not to do, which is another section in this report, for Colby it says tolerance of structure and diplomacy and I said ‘man this computer must be in my head’ because that’s exactly who I am as an individual and it certainly reflects my childhood, much less my career. So I think that narrative starts with personal assessment.

James:  You talk about the Harrison assessment, it’s not one I have personally come across before, is this one listeners will be able to try themselves?

Dr Colby:  Well, there is a cost to it, but certainly if they would like to email me or go to the centre website and reach out to me then I can certainly put them in touch/we partner with a company out in Atlanta ‘Peak Focus’ and they are a certified Harrison provider and certainly happy to get them connected with Julie Scher and the work that she does. I met Julie at a conference, I was a speaker there and I sat in on one of her sessions and she opened my eyes to just how powerful the assessment piece is.

James:  And knowing yourself is the first stage to making any improvements and if there is an investment involved then it’s one worth making because it will last you a lifetime. So listeners, there will be links to everything we discuss today and a full transcript so you’ll be able to see the links that Dr Colby has mentioned in the show notes at graduatejobpodcast.com/Colby.

Dr Colby:  Let me say this too, so you can connect the dots here…I believe there is only one reason people decide to attend higher education and complete a higher education degree, at any type of formal education to be honest with you, they may not know it, they may not be able to articulate it but I think it’s really why they are there and it is for gainful employment. To start with I think we need to educate people about the difference between what is employment and what is gainful employment.

James:  That was going to be my next question, so you’ve read my mind.

Dr Colby:  Well good, I do that often, I’m really good at mind reading (laughs)…just ask my wife! So, in terms of trading time and money for gainful employment is that’s where you get some kind of psychological benefit; feeling purpose and contribution towards the work that you do. If we know that, gainful employment is why people come to a college campus then we have to back that up and say how did you uncover meaning and purpose and contribution and the way I think you do that is through some sort of assessment. It really taps into those pieces that are important to you.

James:  Do you find that one person’s gainful employment won’t be another person’s gainful employment. Do you find with your students it’s easy to tap into them what their particular gainful employment will be?

Dr Colby:  Do I find if it’s easy? No, that’s probably one of the biggest challenges we have, here we look at people who are 8 years old and we tell them that they can be anybody they want to be, at 18 years old we say ‘we don’t care what you do, just get out of the house’. The system is not built for people to tap into, what I call Voice, which is that inner section of conscience, talent, passion and need in the world. If you look at talent, passion, conscience and need in the world where is the opportunity for you to really engage those pieces and find those things and to me it’s a struggle. To me it’s in pushing yourself past your comfort zones. How is the world set up today? The world is set up to be noisy, distracted, blurry and we are going to remove every obstacle that we can for technology and prosperity and the quality of life and so what is the consequence of that? The consequence is that we bring about an entire generation of people who have had very little meaningful experiences that cannot articulate their value, much less turn within themselves and say ‘this is what meaning and purpose and contribution is for me’ and it reminds me of this time in my life when I was probably in the 10th grade and I was in St Pauls and I was coaching a basketball team and this is the moment that I found my voice. We were playing real basketball, it was a Coed league and you had to play man-to-man defence and the way you teach man-to-man defence to little kids, to 5th graders and my little brother happened to be on the team, is to say ‘you go wherever they go’ and kids take you literally, when you say those kinds of things. These quarters lasted about three minutes long, maybe five minutes, so if you scored one basket you could win the game. I sat there with 30 minutes a week to practise and I sat there thinking ‘what could I do to ensure that I could at least get one basket?’ and I thought to myself if Zack, my little brother, is the only kid on the team who can dribble the basketball, then I need to get everybody else off the floor. So I said to the team, we are all going to line up underneath the goal and when Zack brings the ball up the court and holds up the number one, you’re going to run up to the stands and give your parents a hug. If we do this right, the other kids will follow, so he sets it up, runs down, holds up the number one, they go running up to the stands and the other team follows, the crowd starts laughing, Zack steps to the left, goes to the right, lays it up with his right hand and scores in the basket. Both sides are going crazy and my freshman coach Sandy Santolli, he was the commissioner of the league and he comes out and he grabs the microphone and he says ‘that’s an illegal play, I’m waving the basket’ but the takeaway for your audience is he came down and leaned over me and said ‘Colby you’re going to be a great coach one day, just not today.’ See what he did for me that we don’t do for people that is so powerful is he affirmed and validated the worth and potential in me in such a clear way that for the first time I could see it for myself. When somebody does that for somebody else in that moment, here is what I said to myself as I walked out of that gym and I walked out on the sidewalk, I walked back to the car and I said to myself ‘I’m going to coach and teach on an ever increasing stage’ In that moment, for the first time in my life I had clarity and focus and direction on every decision I was going to make moving forward. Once that happens for you, you will not let anyone stop you. What I submit to you today is those opportunities for that to happen because of the culture that we live in, because of what society demands that we do and because of the law in the legal environment that we live in that those opportunities become less and less and less.

James:  Powerful stuff, I love that Colby. I like the way you break down the different aspects of finding your voice; talent, passion, conscience and need. I’m sure they are things that the listeners probably haven’t consciously thought about, and if they have its maybe been fleeting and not put in the time and attention on thinking about what they are and how they might shape the types of jobs that they apply to and go for. Stepping back and thinking on a practical level, are there any exercises you’d recommend to help people to come to the realisation to find their voice?

Dr Colby:  Well sure, I think the very first thing you have to do is number one…get around people who are better than you. That’s number one, that’s when things really started to change for me. I got around people who were better than me and I started asking them questions about how they did things related to that moment. Here’s number two, here’s what the research says. In our 20s, our most defining decade of our life is our 20s, and yet we tell people in their 20s ‘you’ve got all the time in the world’. When in reality what sociologists, psychologists, neurologists, what everyone says is that your 20s are your defining decade and so if it were me and you are looking for those exercises I think it first starts with being able to recognise when you are in those moments and being able to learn in to that adversity and struggle and not ask ‘why is this happening to me?’ but what is this trying to teach me? From there if you understand that this voice is the intersection of time of our passion, conscience, need in the world. Talent is God-given not man given, everybody was on boarded with some kind of talent. Passion I think, is a word that we have overused. I think it is shifting from passion to what are you naturally curious about? I have always been naturally curious about why does one person get to this level and another person get to this level; what’s the difference? What happens? Conscience is to me, what do you internally in you think about meaning and purpose and contribution? It’s never been about the money for me, it’s always been about the relationship. What’s going to happen in the relationships? I love the relationship. Then need in the world it’s based on your unique perspective, education, experience, and so if you are looking for an exercise, I use whiteboards. I love whiteboards. I am a visual guy, I’ve got to see it. So you put those things up on the board and then you say ‘talent, what am I naturally talented at?’ and if you don’t know the answer to that, then you go to somebody else who is close to you and say ‘hey based on what you know about me, what am I talented at?’ and you go through each one of those steps. That starts to give you an outline to intersect talent, conscience, passion and need in the world.

James:  Do you think you need all four to find your voice? Or do you think you can do it with two of the legs or three of the legs?

Dr Colby:  That’s a really good question and here’s my answer. There’s a guy named Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan who is a strategic coach. Dan Sullivan uses the term called ‘unique ability’. Unique ability is when you get to this space that gives you unique energy and gives other people energy that creates new levels of challenges and new levels of results. I will tell you, at one time in my life I was the world’s worst speaker, some woman came and said ‘hey would you come and speak to us’ and I was like ‘man I can speak in my sleep, this is going to be easy’. I got up there and I absolutely said to myself ‘can I pull the fire alarm? Can I crawl underneath the table? Can I call and tell them I can’t come because I’m sick’ when I heard ‘here’s your speaker Colby Juberville and in that moment it created new levels of challenges and new levels of opportunities. So that what unique ability is. So when you get into that place you feel those things, so I don’t know the answer to that, but here’s what I do know, is that there are different levels of talk that Sullivan talks about up to unique ability and those are incompetence, and we all know what that is, and then competence and we know what that is, and then excellence. He calls it the excellence trap and the excellence trap is where you do work and other people go ‘man that person is really good at that work’, you might make enough money to take care of your economic needs but yet it doesn’t give you energy and it doesn’t give other people energy. So I think you have to decide, I have always been driven by ‘will this give me new levels of opportunities and new levels of challenges?’ and you have to look at what fuels that, and that’s the talent, passion, conscience and need in the world.

James:  You talked about getting round people who are better than you, I was fascinated by one of your articles I read in the Washington Times talking about how you persuaded Joe Calloway to be your mentor, would you share this with the listeners as a lovely story?

Dr Colby:  He agreed to meet and I said ‘man I’m not crazy, I’m not a serial killer, I’m just a professor that wants to be you’ and he was gracious enough to meet me. We met up in Nashville and in five hours, four hours I think I learnt more about what I wanted out of life and how I can go about getting it and Calloway has written some of the best books in the business and his books are so fundamental to my success. My favourite is ‘Be the best of what matters most, the only strategy you’ll ever need’ and I called him up and said ‘Joe your books are so good and the titles are so good you don’t even need to read the book’ and he says in Joe’s voice ‘I know Colby, isn’t that cool’. I was like ‘that’s really cool’ but if you turned to chapter two of ‘be the best of what matters most’, chapter two is ‘it’s not that complicated’ and the chapter is two pages Calloway has it figured out. I’ll never be able to get to that level but it’s a sure wake up and getting around people that are better than you certainly will push you every day that you chose to.

James:  What are some of the strategies you recommend for putting yourself in that position and does it matter if its paid, like paid mentors or coaches or more just about networking and getting out there and trying stuff out?

Dr Colby:  That’s a really good question and people aren’t going to like my answer because either way it is difficult. I think we live in a world today where information is a commodity; knowledge isn’t but information is and so if we went to google today, you and I, and we are hanging out at your house and we say ‘I’m fascinated with how to build high performing teams’ and we type into google ‘how to build high performing teams’ we are going to get thousands upon thousands upon hits and out of those hits you and I are going to have to decide which article we want to go to first. It could be a podcast, article, video, blog. Now stay with me here because this is really important. I built a model called the ‘self-directed self-selective coaching model’. The self-directed piece looks like this, innovation means you go first, you go first to gainful employment. You innovate through new concepts and theories, concepts are big picture ideas, theories are big picture ideas that are tested to be proven true or not true. Those lead to frameworks. Frameworks lead to structure, predictability and efficiency. When I walk in to consult, when I walk in to coach, when I walk in to solve a problem I’ve got frame works that I’m ready to pull out at any point to give people structure, predictability and efficiency. Once I have that, then I can go to work. Now, how do you get that? You get that by going to google and you find an article, podcast, video or blog related to this concept or theory. So you and I are back now at google going through the high performance team and you find this one article and in that one article here’s what is said ‘78% of CEOs do not know, when asked, what the highest value of their time is’. So you go back to the whiteboard and put ‘number one, answer this; what is the highest value of your time?’ When you go to work where is the place that you can create the greatest impact? See that just lead you to one idea that now based on that will lead you to the next idea and point of discovery to the next idea and point of discovery. That’s a simple, easy, impactful way to coach yourself. I do that everyday. I become naturally curious about something, I go to google and I study it, it takes me to a podcast or a video, a blog or twitter, I get on twitter and reach out to the person, I say ‘hey I read this stuff that you wrote can I connect with you?’ I have a phone call and now I have new knowledge.

The other way you can do this is to hire a coach that holds you accountable, that has packaged up material, that can serve it up to you in a way that you can get it and that can demand and teach you towards the outcomes you want to create for yourself. So there’s the two ways I think you can do it.

James:  I really enjoyed reading about the SSSD, the self-selective, self-directed coaching model. It’s really clear and simple and really insightful as well.

Dr Colby:  You know what I think, if we can figure out how to get this model into the hands of more people, we can drive so much more success. That model is the perfect model for the generation that is coming after us. Tell me by saying that anything I’m saying isn’t 100% the truth and I start with reality. I say everyday you wake up as a leader manager and you get paid at the most basic level to do two things; solve problems and make decisions; that’s what you get paid to do. I’ll give you an example just last week what did we see in the NCA College Athletics, the FBI rolls up and says ‘you’ve been summoned up here to answer these questions’ so now the President has to make a decision about how he is going to solve this problem. How he/she solves that problem will define the results that are created for that organisation and those results will define whether that President moves up, down or stays right where he/she is in their career and that is how the world works. The reason that I can have this conversation with you today, the reason I can secure a seven figure gift and have a centre for student coaching and success on a college campus, the reason I can do all those things is because I know how to drive results. I’m not afraid to tell people that I’m going to do that and what it will take to do it. That’s where you have to start with people, they have to understand//people want to fight me on this, they say ‘no Colby they don’t just solve problems or make decisions’ I say ‘I didn’t say they just do that, I said that’s what they get paid to do’. Nick Sabin, the greatest coach in the history of mankind in the sport of football in America, gets paid what he gets paid because he uses culture as a competitive advantage. He understood that you can only develop people as far as they trust you and he built systems to create that. He started that 30 years ago and he’s used that system and built it to where it is today and so people look at him and go ‘oh he just recruits talent’…no! That’s not true. He does recruit talent but that is a by-product of the systems that he built because he looked at the sport of football and said there is better say to solve problems and make decisions. If you believe that you are really here in management to solve problems and make decisions then the question I always ask these kids is ‘has anyone in your college career every taught you how to systematically, using frameworks, solve problems and make decisions?’ and the answer every time is ‘no, no one has’, well today is the day, I’m going to teach you. I spend the first four weeks in class hammering it so that no one can hide from it and they stand up and go up there and draw the model up, then once you have do that they list all the problems within the industry, then once you done that you teach people how to develop effective problem status, so I appreciate you saying that and I think it is something that is so valuable and I need to do a better job of teaching it and getting out on the road to tell that story.

James:  Well you are doing it today and listeners you can check out that model for yourself if you go to the show notes at graduatejobpodcast.com/Colby, you’ll find links to the model there so you can see it and understand it for yourself. Colby, unfortunately time is running away with us, it’s absolutely flown one more question until we move on to out weekly staple questions, we’ve talked a lot about sport today and we’ve used a lot of sport references and sport analogies; you mentioned your time as a coach of basketball and football as well, what do you think has been the biggest lesson you have learnt from your coaching over the years?

Dr Colby:  I think the single greatest lesson; well there’s two. My coach in Millsaps College, Jackson Mississippi, he taught me how to use adversity to accelerate growth. It’s a mind-set. It’s about self-reliance and I used to think that that was the only thing that mattered but I don’t anymore. I used to think that was the case, then I went and worked with a guy named Norman Joseph and Norman taught me the simple idea that the goal is not to create independent adults but the goal is to create adults that can depend on each other. That’s straight out of Brene Brown’s stuff and so I think those two ideas married together. If you can start with the self-reliance, if you can start to depend on yourself and then you can learn you can depend on other people and other people can depend on you; those two things together there’s nothing that can’t be accomplished.

James:  I love that and that’s a great way to end the main part of the interview on. Using adversity to accelerate growth, I like that term, that’s a really good one if you are going through a difficult time just bear that in mind, keep it in the front of your mind. So, Colby shifting gears and putting you on the spot now, so first question, we have mentioned some authors already today, but which one book would you recommend our listeners should read?

Dr Colby:  I’ll go back to Calloway but I’ll cite his first book and its ‘Becoming a Category of One: How Extraordinary Companies Transcend Commodity and Defy Comparison’ and that book and his writing style and the message that is found within that is such a powerful and simple message that I think everyone needs to read. Of course, I could be a little self-serving and say ‘hey my book!’ my latest book is ‘Me: How to Sell Who You Are, What You Do, and Why You Matter to the World’ would be a good one as well.

James:  I’ll recommend that one and it is going to be properly linked through in the show notes. I’ve not come across Joe Calloway before so I’ll look forward to getting stuck into some of his works and you that is a good one to start with ‘Category of one’?

Dr Colby:  I do, absolutely, yeah. When I first got going that was a book that I was able to pick up and use and get going instantly.

James:  Which is always good, we like nice practical and useful books so thanks for that one. Next question, which internet resource, so it could be a website or an app, would you recommend that our listeners should check out?

Dr Colby:  This is going to sound kind of funny but I’m going to go with the GoPayment app. I love going places and selling books and scanning people’s credit cards and letting that show up in my bank account.

James: That’s a good one for all you entrepreneurs out there, go and check out the Go Payment app, that sounds like a good one.

Dr Colby:  That’s pretty tacky but hey it’s Friday I can say that.

James:  Yeah you can, we’ve put you on the spot so we will give you that one. The final question Colby, what one tip would you give to listeners that they could implement today to help them on their job search?

Dr Colby:  They’re going to come in and ask you behavioural based interview questions like ‘tell me about a time in your life when you had some adversity? What was that adversity? How did you handle that adversity? How did you get the other side of that adversity?’ and if you can’t answer those questions then you will not get hired, so I would go to google and type in behavioural based interview questions and start to review that process as that’s the predominate technique used in hiring today.

James:  Excellent advice there and we have had a few episodes just based on that topic so I will also link to them in the show notes, you can check them out at graduatejobpodcast.com/colby. Colby it’s been great having you on the show, you’ve left some brilliant insights today. What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you and the work that you do?

Dr Colby:  My Twitter is @DrJubenville and I have a Washington Times blog if you just search Colby Jubenville Washington Times and my website is drjubenville.com and you can find me there.

James:  Perfect, thank you for joining us on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Dr Colby:  Thank you, my friend.

James: Many thanks again to the wonderful Colby Jubenville. I hope that you enjoyed that one as much as I did. Lots to take in from that episode so have a listen again and check out the transcript over at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/colby.

So there you go, that is everything for me, one thing before we finish, if you would like to support the show one way is to buy your goods from Amazon via one of the links from the shownotes at graduatejobpodcast.com/colby. It doesn’t cost you anything extra but helps to keep the lights on here with hosting and like, so if you could do that it would be much appreciated. Got any questions, or need some coaching and help as you look or apply for a graduate job, then drop me a line at hello@graduatejobpodcast.com I look forward to hearing from you. Do join me next week when I speak to Korin Grant and Tristam Hooley as we discuss their new book, You’re Hired – The Graduate Career Handbook, it’s a goodie! All that remains to say is I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly, I hope you use it, and apply it. See you next week.