Welcome to the 30th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast.
This week I speak with author, blogger, and former financial advisor Kim Stephenson, who shares with us his insight as we cover a wide range of topics. We touch upon ideas of money, the stories you might have been telling yourself about money and the impact that they might be having on your job search. We also cover evolutionary biology and touch upon our old friend, yes the importance of understanding your values. No matter where you are as you look for work, be it unsure of where to apply, through to getting ready for an assessment centre, make sure you listen on as Kim’s thoughts on money will definitely get you thinking.
I love to hear your feedback so do get in touch either by email or Twitter, on Twitter I’m @GradjobPodcast, and email is hello@graduatejobpodcast.com. What you love, people or companies you’d like to see on the show, please do send them all my way.
Don’t forget you can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via Spotify, iTunes or Stitcher radio.
MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:
– Why your brain is like a jungle, and you might need to get the machete out
– Why comparing yourself to your peers could be holding you back
– How to use a mock television interview to plan your future
– Why your existing ideas about money could be holding you back
– Why it makes sense to go where your interest is, not where the money is
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Check out the ‘How to Get a Graduate Job’ step-by-step online course at https://howtogetagraduatejob.com/
- Don’t even think about applying for graduate jobs until you’ve read my free guide, ‘The 5 steps you must take before applying for graduate jobs’. Click here NOW. It will completely change the way you apply for jobs!
- Would you like a free 30-minute video coaching call? Simply select a time that works here https://calendly.com/gradjob/ We can go over your CV, application, or anything that you are struggling with.
- Assessment Day – One of the top providers of psychometric tests. Click HERE and support the show
- Career Gym – Use code GJP to get 20% off all of their tests!
- Job Test Prep – One of the top providers of psychometric tests. Click HERE and support the show
- Kim’s excellent first book – Taming the Pound. Click on the image below to buy NOW from Amazon!
– Kim’s superb recent book – Finance is Personal. Click on the image below to buy NOW from Amazon!
– Kim’s website, where you can find information on his books and his work – Taming the Pound
– Kim’s website recommendation – Values In Action tool
– Kim’s book recommendation 1 – Matthieu Ricard – Happiness. Click on the image below to buy NOW from Amazon!
– Kim’s book recommendation 2 –Gerd Gigerenzer – Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making
– Kim’s book recommendation 3 – Richard Bolles – What Colour is your parachute
– Kim’s book recommendation 4 – Martin Seligman’s books
– Strengthfinder 2.0 by Rath – Similar to the VIA website and one of my recommended books in episode 14
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS EPISODE, CHECK THESE OUT:
Transcript – Episode 30 – Money and Your Career with Kim Stephenson
James: Welcome back to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your weekly home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each week 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.
In episode 30 of the Graduate Job Podcast I speak with author, blogger, and former financial advisor Kim Stephenson, who shares with us his insight as we cover a wide range of topics. We touch upon ideas of money, the stories you might have been telling yourself about money and the impact that they might be having on your job search. We also cover evolutionary biology and touch upon our old friend, yes the importance of understanding your values. No matter where you are as you look for work, be it unsure of where to apply, through to getting ready for an assessment centre, make sure you listen on as Kim’s thoughts on money will definitely get you thinking. As always, all links to everything we discuss and a full transcript are available in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/money. Before we start don’t forget, I love to hear your feedback so do get in touch either by email or twitter, on twitter I’m @GradjobPodcast, and email is hello@graduatejobpodcast.com. What you love, people or companies you’d like to see on the show, send them all my way. But now without further ado, let’s dive head first into episode 30.
James: Today we have a very special guest on this show, he’s a qualified independent financial adviser, occupational psychologist to boot and the author of the excellent, Taming the Pound and Finance is Personal. Kim Stephenson, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.
Kim: I’m glad to be here.
James: Excellent. So I’ve given a very brief intro there, but Kim would you tell us in a few sentences, what it is that you do and why it’s relevant to our listeners.
Kim: Basically a lot of my work, because I started off in finance, I changed careers in my 30’s which is interesting but I don’t recommend it. It’s easier to start where you want to end up. I would say I was more interested in the people than the money so I went into Psychology. Qualified as an occupation psychologist doing a lot of business stuff. Then I started getting asked by charities and non-profit organisations to help to guide people who have money problems. Might be people who didn’t have enough money, but they could be people who have plenty of money but have miserable lives. So it’s really grown from there and I now do a lot of coaching. I work with various organisations to try and educate people mainly about finance, but also about just leading a happy life and enjoying what they do.
James: Today we’re going to roll up your financial and psychology experience and discuss money and the way it shapes people decisions. Specifically in relation to their career choices. With people that I coach, often their career choices for jobs and also industries as a whole, are driven solely by money. Today we’re going to explore whether that might be the best idea and why. As you mentioned the reason is, if you can think about these things in the beginning of your career, it makes things so much easier than people who only tend to look at it 5, 10, 20 years down the line. Taking a few steps back, you talk about in your new book, Finance is Personal, about the need for students to really think about the why, and the why are you actually applying to University. How important is this stage of thinking when also applying for jobs?
Kim: I think it’s the most important to do. Just one piece of advice I give to people it’s, what do you want your life to be? Because there’s a lot of tie-ups with your money and professions and this, that and the other. People talk a lot about “oh, this is a really good job” or whatever. But the point is that each human being’s unique; Each of you listeners, there’s never been anything like you before; there’s never going to be again; you’re it. Even if you’re one of identical twins or triplets or something, you’re still unique because your life experience is different even from people with the same genetic make-up. Something that’s wonderful for other people might not be for you. And something that other people say “I wouldn’t like to do that”, you’ll love it. So the most important thing for me is, what do you want your life to be? That’s about why are you doing it? What are your values? What it is that really floats your boat? There’s various things that have been shown to affect people’s happiness in life. One of them is having a purpose and there was some interesting information on the Yougov site recently, something like 37% of people in the UK feel that their job is meaningless. I think that’s really sad because over a third of people think “my job doesn’t do anything”, I would say there’s a lot of evidence that that’s something that makes you happy. If you feel that what you’re doing benefits the world, it benefits the community, it has a value, you’re doing something you feel “yes, this is important”. You can finish the day and think “yes I’ve done something, the world’s a bit better place for me being in it”. That is something that makes you happy. Another thing that makes you happy is having good relationships. If you do a job, you like people, you like mixing with people and you’re stuck away in an office, even if you earn millions of pounds you’re going to be miserable. By the same token, if actually loads of people around you make you uncomfortable, you might manage to make a lot of money as a salesperson or something mixing with a lot of people, but you’d probably be happier spending a bit more time on your own. Another thing is doing something that you actually feel an aptitude for. Not necessarily you’re brilliant at now, but it’s something you like. In the book, because we’re talking about courses, one of the big things that I was emphasizing is, try and choose things that you like, whatever they are. Don’t worry too much about where you end up, because the things is, if you like something and the same thing applies to going into jobs. If you go into something say, accountancy or law or whatever, that’s well paid because you want it to be well paid, or your because mum and dad think you should, or because loads of your friends are going into it. What you end up doing, is doing something that you’ve got to work very hard at and you don’t particularly want it, because it not your dream it’s somebody else’s. So everything you learn is quite hard work, because you don’t really want to do it. It’s like anything you disliked at school, or if you were in the Scouts or Guides or whatever. Anything you did that you don’t really like doing, it’s harder work. If you go for something that you really actually enjoy, you’ll do all the extra reading, you’ll end up getting a better mark. Even if you start off, your totally pants at it, if you love it you’ll end up doing better because what happens is, you do loads and loads of practice, but it doesn’t feel like practice. You’re just doing it because you want to do it. You’ll read all the extra books, you’ll pick people’s brains, you’ll get good at it. As you get good at it people will notice that and they’ll say “how do you learn all that? that’s amazing. Yeah you’ve improved so much.” And of course that makes you feel good and you get a feeling of mastery and other people start asking you for help. And of course, the best way to learn anything is teach other people. … or program a computer because you have to break it down and make it pretty simple because it means you understand it better. And you get better and better at it, you get this good feeling of mastery out of it, and you end up being fantastic because it’s a virtuous circle. Whereas if you end up doing something because there’s an expectation you should, or you ought to, or mum and dad want you to, or you don’t really know what else to do or your friends are doing it, whatever. It’s all hard work, it’s a bit of a vicious circle, you feel uncomfortable, you don’t really want to do it. That pushes you down a route of “I’ve invested years in this and I really don’t like it. But if I start again I’m going to have to go back to the beginning. I’ve got a lifestyle that I can’t afford to do that now.” Which is why you’ve ended up with 37% of people who feel their job’s meaningless. If they started off with different decisions, actually thought with what do I want my life to be? They would probably A) be a lot more successful, B) they would absolutely certainly be a hell of a lot happier in their life and be nicer to be around and have better relationships. Because their partners and their kids would like them better, because they’d be more fun and they’d probably earn a hell of a lot more money. Because whatever they did do, even if it’s technically on average, they’re not average. That’s the other thing, because you’re unique, you’re not average. What most people do, is not you. So you can be an exceptionally good person in an industry where it’s not on average well paid and you can be the best paid by far which is a hell of a lot more fun than being right at the bottom, bored out of your mind doing something that on average is paid well but you bring the average down.
James: That ‘s very true. You’ve covered a lot there and made some great points. I love in the book you mentioned the saying “go where your interest is, not where the money is”. It’s a really nice pithy little comment. You talked about accounting and I know personally friends who studied accounting; I’m not sure whether it was specifically for the money, but they went into accounting. I think accounting is a thing where you really need to study and you’re studying even once you’ve finished your degree. Then you’ve joined the accountancy firm and you’ve got your accountancy qualifications which are hard. If you don’t enjoy it and you’re not interested in it then it’s even harder. It really sorts the people who want to do it and enjoy it from the people who went into it for the wrong reasons.
Kim: Yes. Understand I’m not mocking accountancy. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fantastic, great. Do it, because you’ll probably enjoy it and on average you will get better paid than a lot of people. Terrific. But it’s more about, I got pushed towards finance basically because I was good at maths. I did Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Economics and English at A level. Because there’s a lot of maths and money in it. I didn’t actually choose to go to University, all my friends were going and I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do when I grew up, but everybody said “well if you’re good at maths, you can go into finance”. Well, that’s not actually true, because that’s only part of what you do. The big thing about the financial services industry, the bit I was in which isn’t really accounting, most of it is product sales. It’s still like that, it’s suppose to be professional but it’s actually very product… I didn’t like that because I felt I was pushing stuff on people, it was like being a second hand car salesman. Which is one of the reasons I changed, because I was interested in the people. I used to spend hours trying to find out, what is it you want to do with your money? Money is just a tool. This is like 30 years ago. When I learnt more about psychology, I realised, yes actually that’s right. The money’s not the goal, but it ends up as the goal. A lot of people get very hung up on that. The goal I think, is have a happy life and money’s a tool for that. It’s a lot easier if you’ve got some money, to have a happier life because you can afford to do more things. You don’t have to worry that the bailiffs going to come to the door and take your furniture away. You don’t have to worry to pay the rent. So it’s easier not to be stressed and it’s easier to do things that you can do with money, which give you pleasure. Like buying experiences rather than loads of material goods. It’s easier to give things to others. I’m sure Bill Gates used to have a lot more money before he put it all into the trust. But there’s no question he’s a lot happier now. He’s set up the trust, he’s given a load of the money away. He’s one of the happiest people in the world I think. So if you’re going to earn loads of money that’s fantastic. But get it by doing something that you want to do. Because if you do that, you’ve got a double-whammy. It’s easier if you’ve got more of this tool to play with. But you’re not saying “Oh, money is my God. I need to go and spend five years studying something I don’t like and then spend 40 years doing something I don’t like, 48 weeks a year, 50 hours a week, so that I can have 4 weeks vacation in Aruba or whatever. To me that’s really sad because it means you spend most of your time doing something you don’t want to do. It would be better to be in a situation when you’re comfortable, maybe you haven’t got masses of money, but you can still use it as a tool. You can still have nice holidays. And you spend most of your time doing something that actually, “yes, this is worthwhile, I like what I’m doing. I’m doing something I feel excited about”. A lot of professionals I know, don’t want to retire. I mean Warren Buffet is another example…
James: 85 isn’t he?
Kim: But he’s said before now. Yes he’s 85 I think now. He doesn’t want to retire because he loves what he does. He said before now, he feels he ought to have to pay to go to work, because he loves it so much and what I’d like, is that if all you listeners can get into that sort of position, because the money is largely irrelevant. If you love what you do, to the point you’d do it for nothing, fantastic.
James: You talk in the book about ‘Comparanomics’. What impact do you think the money that your friends might be earning, or the jobs that your friends might be applying to has on people and what they apply for?
Kim: It’s basically human being are very social. That’s why solitary confinement is a punishment. Even if people are quite introverted and like to spend sometime alone, nobody really wants to spend all their time alone. Human beings have that social link. I’ve got the sort of mind that finds it interesting. There’s a thing called Dunbar’s number which is about 150. It’s the average size of hunter-gatherer groups which is where human beings evolved. It’s the average size of a village in the Doomsday Book, so like a thousand or so years ago. It’s the average number of friends of Facebook, it pops up everywhere. Because people have links, they have brains that are geared to be able to cope with about 150 relationships, where we know a fair bit about people. That’s very important because we love that social contact. But it also means we need to conform to a certain extent; people talk about peer pressure and social pressure. When I was at school, it was when you were 13,14. “You’re not man enough to smoke, you were supposed to smoke”. I worked out ways around it because I didn’t want to. But you had to be pretty hard-nosed not to do what all your friends did. Pressure on teenagers now will be, everybody gets a new mobile phone, you have to get the 6th generation one even if your old one still work and you’re perfectly happy with it. People buy new cars because the bloke up the road got a car, even though actually they don’t want the new one, they liked the old one better. They’ll spend thousands of pounds. People will join golf clubs, they will do all sorts of things because we’re social beings and we like to conform. It’s one of those things where, it’s difficult, but if people want to be happy, they need to work out ways to say “well okay, that might be what you want to do” and you don’t have to cut off relations with people just because you’re doing stuff that’s different to them. But that’s the way it feels because that’s the way our brains are wired. Because in a hunter-gatherer group it’s very important that people are all on the same wave length. In modern society it’s not so important, you can just because other people hunt or gather or do everything in this particular way, you don’t have to. Because all your friends have gone on and are doing modern apprenticeships or their going into accountancy, or their doing supermarket management training or something like that and you’ve got similar backgrounds and everything else. You don’t have to. You can still keep contact with them. If you like those people you can still keep contact with them. Actually it’s an advantage in the sense that you then have a different perspective, so you can have interesting conversations with them. Because they might have common background and whatever, but you don’t have to be excluded from that. It feels as if you do but actually people will welcome telling you about, down the pub or wine bar or whatever, because you’re a new audience. A lot of their stories, the other people are doing exactly the same things “ah yeah we’ve heard it before”. You’re going “really, tell me more about that”. You all know the best way to be considered a good conversationalist, is to shut up and not say anything. It’s “The Good Lord gave you two ears and one mouth, and The Good Lord don’t make mistakes. The reasons he did that because he wants you to listen twice as much as you talk” as the old Bible-belt guys say. The things is, if you do something a bit different, you can tell people some little anecdotes that they don’t know and give them perspective they don’t have. You’re a good audience to them. So actually it’s a big plus. If there are people that you want to keep contact with and you value as friends, colleagues whatever, that’s great. You can do something different and you can keep in contact with them. If you’re going to get excluded by some of those people because you’re not exactly the same, you’re not going to wear the same clothes, you’re not going to wear the same t-shirt, you’re not going to go to the same band concerts because you don’t like them. Well, do you really want to mix with people like that?
James: That’s a really good point.
Kim: Who are going to ostracise you just because you’ve got different tastes?
James: So we had James Darley from Teach First on a couple of weeks ago now. Teach First is a brilliant scheme, brilliant graduate scheme. You get some amazing skills, getting into schools and teaching for two years. I can remember looking into it myself when I was looking at grad jobs, so a few years ago. One of the things that put me off is the starting salary is quite low. Even though it was a really interesting scheme and I knew it would be great in terms of the skills I’d learn, I was still put off initially just because I could earn £10,000-15,000 more with the other grad scheme, and I had a story in my head around the minimum amount of money that I wanted to be earning when I graduated and that swayed my decision. Talking then about stories that we tell ourselves with money, you term it ‘The Money Story’ in your book. Can you explain what these are and how they shape people.
Kim: Basically the money story; because human beings if I can look at the evolutionary biology again. Basically human brain is the single most complex thing in the known universe, it’s a fantastic bit of kit. It’s three of four pounds of gunk and it’s the most complex thing going. Black holes and hairy black holes and all that, don’t bare comparison with what everybody’s got between their ears. It’s only about 2% of your body weight, but it uses something like 15% of the blood flow, 20% of the oxygen and 25% of the fuel, glucose for the whole body. It’s a fiftieth of the body but it uses a third, a quarter, a fifth of everything the body uses. It is incredibly energy intensive, so of course when you’re a hunter gatherer which is where we all evolved, you need a huge amount of food relative to anything else you might do, just to power your brain. It’s what sets humans apart, but it’s also it’s quite easy to starve to death. So what happened is our brains evolved to be very economical and if you think consciously about stuff, what you tend to do is waste too much energy. It’s hard work. I don’t really have time, but there’s loads of really nice studies about, once people get tired or their blood sugar drops at all, their decision making goes to pieces. Their conscious decision making. What they do is they revert to automatic ways of doings things. You go on to automatic process basically and that automatic process is, what’s worked before. So if you imagine in your brain, it’s a bit like you start off when you were a small child. You have a little house in the middle of the forest and there’s various things around that you want to get to. Food, school and your friends and whatever. So what you do is you start to cut paths through that. It’s hard work and that conscious thinking, and you make conscious decisions and that’s blooming hard work. So you cut those paths and then basically you’ve got loads and loads of paths, well in the brain it’s billions of paths. When you get to a teenager, you get to adolescence, they get pruned back. The ones you haven’t used for a long time get cut and that’s one of the reasons that teenagers tend to be quite weird. Or maybe you just were, I was. Most of the people I know. But you get to adolescence, you behave pretty weird because you’re not like a child and you’re not like and adult you’re something in between. And the brain that’s had all these paths cut, it prunes them back and keeps the ones you use a lot. Of course those paths go where you have been going. Now they’re not necessarily where you want to go. If you imagine it, you had a route to primary school; now you want to go to University or you want to go to a job. Well you don’t have a path there. But what tends to happen is your brain thinks “Oh I’ve got a path this way, that’s the easy way to go”. So you tend to go down that and what you do is you follow a money story that are basically are names for, yeah you cut these paths that if you don’t think about where do I want to be, you tend to go down the path you’ve already got. Which is why I was saying I put so much emphasis in coaching people on “okay, what do you want to have? Where do you want to be? Because if you think about where you want to be, then you can cut new paths. But you have to think about it before you do that. Everybody knows how that works, in the sense that anybody who can drive you will have realised when you start to learn it’s really difficult because you consciously have to change gear, put the clutch down and change gear, accelerate and it’s really hard work. But after a while you can do all those things subconsciously. You can chat to somebody, you can change radio channels, you shouldn’t but you can text, you can eat your milky bar and do whatever you like at the same time, because it’s been automated. What happens is you’re supposed to be driving to your mother-in-law or something. And you get to a crossroads, and you turn left to your mother-in-law, you turn right to go to the pub and you find yourself in the pub car park. Because basically your brain had a path to the pub, it set that up, it knows how it goes, so you go there. You’ve got to think, where do I want to go? And what happens with money stories and with stories in life generally, is we have these things of “that’s what I want”. So people will end up, yes I want this job. My story to myself like you saying, “I’ve got to get X amount of money in my job, I’m not going to accept”. And what you need to do is think, “where do I want to end up? Do I want a job where I get this starting salary, it doesn’t matter where I end up, it doesn’t matter whether I’m doing something I hate for 40 years. But it’s really important I have this job now?” Or do you want to think, “okay where do I want to end up? Where would I like to be in 15 years time? Ah okay, what sort of things do I like doing? That sort of job is something I’d love to do, that’s the sort of place I’d like to end up. How do I get there? Oh right I’d have to accept an apprenticeship to start with. Okay”. Now that’s where it gets difficult because that’s where you’ve got to re-write your story. You go, Oh the already cut bit where ‘I must have this’ and you’ve thought that since you were 14,15, you get to 22,23, it’s been sitting there for eights years. It’s this well cut path, this is what you’re going to do. You have to be able to say “hang on a minute, that path doesn’t take me where I want to go. It’s nice and easy to go down that path and I can follow it, but I don’t want to go that way. I want to go the other way. Ah hell, okay going to have to learn something new. Got to get the machete out and I’ve got to cut a new path to go where I want to go”. Because the thing is it’s harder, but it’s far more satisfying because for start you get a sense of mastery over yourself. You’re not just acting like an automaton. You’re deciding what you want and of course you end up, maybe you don’t quite get the job that you want in 15 years time, maybe it takes you 18 years. So what? Because you’re having a great time and you feel good about yourself because you think “hey, I could’ve been in this real dead end job that I don’t like and as it is I’m doing something I really enjoy, I’m getting good at it, I’m building a reputation for being fantastic. What’s not to like?”.
James: It can be difficult to re-write those money stories. Especially if they’ve been embedded for years by parents telling you “ah little Timmy’s going to be a doctor, or little Timmy really needs to be an engineer or dentist or whatever it is.
Kim: That’s right. A lot of the stories will come from that. So in terms of money, in the book I’ve used examples of things like girls who get told it’s not lady like to manage money, which of course is nonsense. It’s like guys who are really interested in psychology or nursing, will be “Oh, that’s a girls job”. No, about 80% of nurses are female and about 80% even of the business psychologists like me, about 80% of them are female. So what? It doesn’t mean a guy can’t be good at it if they enjoy it. Same as mechanics except the other way around. There’s no reason why a girl can’t be a mechanic just because “oh girls don’t do engineering”. Well most of them don’t want to, but if you do there’s absolutely no reason. There’s no difference in ability between men and women in most of these areas. There might be a difference between the genders in preferences for things but that’s not the same. If you happen to have a minority preference, but that’s what you really want do, go for it. Because there’s no reason why you can’t do it. That is one of the sad things that parents often, because they want to help the children, they actually hinder them like that. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about this”. But actually at some point you have to because you get classic things like Bernie Ecclestone. Tamara wants a place in London, but instead of saying what do you want? Lets work out what’s a reasonable thing so you can get some value to yourself about making decisions. “Yeah that’s okay love, £49m apartment”, so what he’s created is a Paris Hilton who doesn’t really know whether any of her friends like her or whether they’re just hanging on for money. He’s trying to help her but what he’s doing is crippling her life because she’s never going to be happy, because she’s never going to have any sense of self-worth. And parents try and do that, there’s the thing about your parents mess you up, they don’t mean to but they do. And that’s one of the ways they do it; they’ll give you these sayings that maybe they believe or they think are really useful, like “you must save your money”. To a lot of people that would be handy, but the problem is, maybe you come out of a Uni, you do some work for a while, but you’ve got an idea, your a Bill Gates type. You want to be an entrepreneur and you’ve got some money to set up your own business, but if you let that money story dictate to you, you’re not allowed to spend it because you’ve got to save. You can allow your brain to be shaped by other people and force you into something that actually you don’t really want, or you can take control of it. It’s not easy and that’s why I do a lot of coaching and I wrote a book and things like that. But it’s to try and help people to take control of their own lives and say what’s going to make me happy? Instead of just following what people have told them. How can I get where I want to be?
James: That’s a great point. Because as we talked about at the beginning this is the best time to make those decisions, as you’re coming out of University and applying for your first graduate job or your first proper job. Do the thinking at the front end and it will save you a lot of hard hours spent doing a job you don’t want further down the line. Unfortunately Kim time is running away with us. But before we finish, lets move to our weekly staple of questions. So first off, what one book would you recommend to our listeners that they could read?
Kim: You warned me about this and there are loads. One of the obvious ones is What Colour’s Your Parachute, there’s a brilliant book on decision making called Gut Feelings by Gird Gigerenzer, there’s various stuff by Seligman. But the one that I would go for is one by a guy called Matthieu Ricard which is just called Happiness. Basically it’s written by a guy who’s a Buddhist Monk, but also he’s got a PhD. He’d studied with the Nobel Prize winner in cellular genetics. I mean he’s a brilliant bloke but it’s the best book I’ve ever read. It was the inspiration for me writing my first book. It’s the best book I’ve read on just being happy, on understanding what it’s about and how to achieve it. He doesn’t pretend ‘oh this is easy’, but he does explain this is all the science behind it. This isn’t just made up rhetoric, this is absolutely based on science. He’s obviously got the scientific credentials to prove it and he’s saying this is how you can have your life if you want. You have to work at it, but this is what you can have. I think that that is fantastic. It’s just called Happiness by Matthieu Ricard.
James: Excellent and everything that Kim just mentioned there will be linked to in the show notes. That’s not one I’ve come across but I will add that to my summer holiday reading list. So Kim what one website would you recommend to our listeners?
Kim: There’s a lot of good career-based ones, but the one that I would recommend in terms of what we were talking about earlier on which is okay, what are the talents that you’ve got? It’s a free one, they like you to sign-in, because they want to use the anonymised data for research, but you don’t get any contact from them or anything, they’re not going to follow up or try and sell you things. It’s one called V I A. It stands for Values In Action. As I say it’s a free one, but the great thing about it is it’s strengths profiling. Rather than saying you’re good at maths or you’re good at this, it’s a series of questions and what it gives you is a little profile and they’re strengths of personality. It’s not that they’re good or bad, but it’s “okay, what am I likely to enjoy doing?”. So they’ve got things like Hope; so it’s you’re the person who tends to encourage people not to give up. Getting on with people; you’re the person who just manages to break the ice at things. It’s things like leadership; you’re the one that people look to when it’s all floundering a bit, or there’s confusion or people are frightened, they tend naturally to go to you. It’s things like being a good listener, we mentioned earlier. It’s all the sort of things that don’t really come up a lot of the time, they certainly don’t come up in tests at school or Uni and they often don’t come up in job interviews and whatever. Because they’re a bit more subtle than that, but that’s a really good guide if you don’t have a good feeling for it yourself, if you do that it gives you a little bit of an idea, not a final answer, but it gives you an idea what you might find floats your boat in a job. And if you can start to look at that and think “Oh okay, there’s this little pattern of three or four of these things that I really like, skills and talents that are innate in me, my unique personality, that I really enjoy using. If I can find a job that uses those, that’s going to be good.
James: One of the books I recommended in episode 14 was StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath I think and that sounds similar.
Kim: Most of them are based, I think I mentioned with books, Seligman’s stuff, a lot of them are based on his work in strengths in the positive psychology field. Yes StrengthsFinder. There are several around, it’s basically just that the V I A one is free. Which is always handy.
James: Which is definitely always handy. Kim what one tip can listeners implement today to help them on their job search?
Kim: What I would do is imagine you’re about 10, 12, 15 years, whatever time-scale suits you, down the road and you’ve made a real success of it and you’re well known. You’re interviewed on TV, so pick your favourite interviewer – Graham Norton, Parkinson, Oprah, Jon Stewart whoever it is. If you’ve got somebody you can trust with it get them to play the interviewer. But the important thing is to think about, what stories are you going to tell? What do you want to be looking back on in 10 or 15 years time? What was the pivotal moment for you, that got you to being top notch of whatever you do? That made you famous, that made your first million. Whatever it is you want to have achieved. What was it that got you there? Because if you can do that, you can start to think about “okay, what are the things that are really key to me? What do I, in my heart, feel, that would be it? For example, I’ve done that and I do it every so often and one of the big ones for me, when I started going into psychology of finance, it was I suddenly realised I don’t have kids, got lots of cats but we don’t have kids. I thought “hey, wouldn’t it be great, if I was on, because I’m old so I think of Parkinson, and I was talking to him and he was saying what are you proudest of? And I thought, well actually it’s changing the way initially kids in the UK, but then kids throughout the world, were taught about decision making, life, handling money. So that I have made the world happier. And I thought, “wow! That’s what I want to do”. Now I might not make it; maybe I will, maybe I’m really going to do that. but the point is, that’s got meaning for me, it’s something I’m reasonably good at, I enjoy doing even if I was lousy at it. So it ticks all the buttons to make me happy and if I can achieve it, it’ll be fantastic. Even if I don’t I’m going to have a great time trying. It’s what I do professionally now so it earns me a living. I would say to anybody, have a think about it. Because if you can get yourself something that is going to float your boat, then if it does prove tough, and it probably will at times, you’ve got to re-program your brain, you’ve got cut new paths. That goal, that vision of what you’re going to be and that you’re going to be so proud of, is going to drive you on, it’s going to allow you to do it. Whereas if you don’t really care and the only reason you’re doing it is because one day you’re going to earn loads of money. You’re going to be miserable as sin, but you’re going to have loads of money. Or because dad told you to do it or whatever. Or you didn’t know what else to do or all your mates….If it gets tough in those situations you’re not going to bother, because why would you? But if you can have a dream, if you can find something that you really want to do, that you can become, then it doesn’t really matter what obstacles people put in your way, you’ll manage.
James: Brilliant. Kim that’s a brilliant point for us to finish on. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you and the work that you do and your books?
Kim: Probably easiest way is if you just Google Taming the Pound, because there’s a website with contact details.
James: Excellent. I’ll make sure that we’re linked to that on the show notes. So you can check it out on the show notes, at graduatejobpodast.com. Kim many thanks for appearing on the graduate job podcast.
Kim: That’s fine, I enjoyed it.
James: Thanks again to Kim, we covered a range of really interesting topics there. As always 3 things stood out for me. The first is on the stories we tell ourselves with regard to money, jobs or both. I liked his analogy of your brain being like a jungle with paths cut through it, with existing thoughts and ideas being paths that have already been cut. With new routes needing to be cut for new ideas and thought patterns. Turning this to your job search, what are the easy and lazy paths that you are going down just because? Because the family wanted you to study that subject, or get that job, or because it’s assumed that you must get a grad job because you went to university. Or be it looking and applying for jobs on online job boards. Or if you’re still using the same CV even if it’s not working. We do things on auto pilot without thinking about them, we go sown those mental pathways not because they might be the most effective ones for us, but because they are already there. Take time and have a think about the new paths you need to cut on your job search. And the reasons why.
Which leads to my second point. I loved Kim’s comment about going where your interest is, not where the money is. Money is a by-product. If you are passionate and good at what you do, money will ultimately come. As Steve Rook said back in episode 3 though, being passionate isn’t enough, you might be passionate about playing football, but if you’re not good enough, that passion isn’t going to make a difference. Use the Values In Action tool Kim mentioned which is linked to in the show notes at www.GraduateJobPodcast.com/money It’s a great little tool and will get you thinking about where your strengths lay.
And finally, be careful of Comparanomics. Just because all your friends or people from your course might be headed to a particular industry or type of job, or wage, doesn’t mean you have to. Chase your own dream, not someone else’s and be careful of blindly following those pre-existing money or job stories. Central to all of this is awareness though, so take that time to do some careful thinking about what is right for you. OK, that’s me done. All that remains is to say check out the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/money
If you’ve enjoyed the show let me know on Twitter, my handle is @gradjobpodcast, or email at hello@graduatejobpodcast.com and please do leave a review on ITunes or Stitcher Radio, as I say every week it’s the best way other than sharing us with your friends to show appreciation for the podcast and it helps massively in the ranking on iTunes. So a big thankyou to NKotecha for her recent 5* review saying ‘What an incredible useful podcast, all the guests are so interesting, this is a podcast I’m sure to find useful throughout my career. Thankyou’. Thankyou NKotecha, it’s much appreciated! Join me next week when I speak to Katie Purser head of graduate recruitment at Frontline where we discuss getting into social work. I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly I hope you use it and apply it. See you next week.