I left my job at a major national news organization (yes, you’ve heard of it) and created Joy Adjacent with one goal in mind: to share my 13+ years’ experience in the workforce as an executive, entrepreneur, recruiter, and employee with the people who need it.
My outlook on life and the approach I take with clients are grounded in one fundamental conviction: you deserve to enjoy your job.
Your work should interest and motivate you. It should be wonderful, enriching, and galvanizing. It should add to your experience as a whole person, not detract from it.
You spend most of your day on the job, so what you do at work should be adjacent to your passions and values as a person, and never run counter to the things that nourish, fulfill, and bring you joy.
If you're not jumping up in the morning excited to start the day, then you need to change your job. It is irresponsible not to.
You deserve to enjoy your job.
So how did we let ourselves be convinced that work is something we should merely tolerate?
Look, not all of us want to work in our passion. Cashing in on passion is not for everyone, and many of us prefer to separate our work from our interests and hobbies.
But these activities should, at the very least, complement each other and create the conditions for a fulfilling life. They should be joy adjacent.
What happens when our work comes into conflict with the activities and values that fulfill us? What should we do when, far from bringing us joy, work drains us, fills us with anxiety as we wake up, leaves us emotionally spent by 5 pm, and starts to encroach on our relationships, our self-image, and our health?
Should we just chalk it up to the cost of doing business? Or shouldn't we think twice about the business we are in?
We have been conditioned to accept that work is supposed to suck.
We look around to see many of our friends and family miserable in their jobs, so we delude ourselves that this is normal, that we are not supposed to like work, that work is something we should tolerate at best and suffer at worst in order to have money to pay for the things we actually do enjoy.
Really? With your one life? Are you ok with that? Are you ok with giving the vast majority of every day of the vast majority of every week of the vast majority of every year to something you merely tolerate?
If this sounds like a softball, hippie-dippie, do-gooder approach to ambition and career growth, you're not reading the current business school literature...
Work *can* be extraordinary.
Study after study after study has concluded that people who like their jobs are more engaged and productive at work. This is so well-documented that it's become a truism: Employees who find purpose in what they do perform far better and stay with their companies far longer.
Simply put, happy employees are BETTER at their jobs, because it feels less like work and more like enJOYment.
Companies now invest billions of dollars into creating happy workplaces, whether by hiring six-figure Chief Happiness Officers, catering free lunches, installing football tables, or promising unlimited vacation polices, all in an effort to increase retention and keep employees happy.
As well-documented as the research is, it still hasn't hit home for individual employees: you deserve to enjoy the work you do. Hating your job is irresponsible.
After all, how can you possibly stand to waste your one and only go-'round on this planet on work that does not bring you joy?
Don't be crazy.
$47 Billion.
That’s how much the American film industry spends on telling you a good story.
““Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution — more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.”
~ Lisa Cron
Want more proof of the value of a good story? The podcasting industry is worth $480 million, Bollywood is $3.7 billion, and book publishing is $26 billion.
Stories are riveting. They grab our attention and give us a reason to care. To hope. To envision.
But why do stories exert such a powerful effect on us?
“You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”
~ Margaret Atwood
Recorded history — a.k.a. writing — is only 5,000 years old. Over millennia before we wrote, we told stories. We verbalized narratives wrapped in drama and finished in rhyme to deliver news, spread information, and pass on the history of our species from one generation to the next. That is how we created communities, how we selected our chiefs and leaders, and how we found common cause against our adversaries — by listening to good stories and passing them on.
As a result of 200,000 years of Homo sapiens conditioning that preceded written language, the human brain is hard-wired to respond to stories — narrative structures with a beginning, a climax, a resolution, and a journey where the protagonist emerges changed.
Today, stories have no less a hypnotic effect on us than they did before we invented written language. Elections are swayed by a politician’s ability to persuade people with a memorable message — the simpler the better. Brands win or lose by their marketing. Oscars are awarded for weeping eyes and swollen hearts.
It is all narrative. Tell a good story, and you have already won.
And do you know who hiring managers are? They are humans, just as hard-wired as you are by millennia of conditioning to warm up to a good story.
Yet over and over (I have read probably 2,000 cover letters over the course of my career in education, workforce development, politics, and news media), I see job seekers treating hiring mangers like computers. Most cover letters are crowded with run-on sentences listing skills they acquired and tasks they accomplished, with no narrative thread to tie it all together. It all sounds meaningless to the person reading the cover letter.
Human beings do not respond to lists.
When is the last time you remembered all seven things you wanted to buy at the grocery store without writing them down? Lists are for computer code and Excel tables. They are easily forgotten and they carry no emotional weight. Have mercy on the hiring manager: remember that she is human, and just like every human in the history of conquest, elections, movies, and great salesmanship, she will be swayed by a good story.
You are the protagonist of your career. So what’s your professional story?
Maybe you feel like your meandering, disjointed, perhaps even random career has no through-line that ties it together and packages it neatly for employers. If that’s what you think, you’re absolutely wrong. You’re also in luck, though, because that’s exactly what I do for my clients. I craft the narrative.
My mission is to excavate your combined work and life experience to weave a compelling narrative that positions everything you have done as a logical progression leading you to this precise point, at this exact interview, to perform this job. And I’m really good at it.
Why am I qualified to do this?
Workforce development: I am the cofounder of an online talent matching and workforce development platform connecting job seekers to employers in one of the most challenging employment markets in the world: East Africa. I developed the training and methodology we used to get candidates past the interview and into the job, making me both a battle-hardened entrepreneur and a career readiness specialist. Having started this business, I have also hired, fired, and managed staff, and I know what to look for in a candidate.
Professional interviewing and storytelling: On the strength of a popular political blog I was writing at the time, I was recruited to launch a podcast interview program at a major political think tank in Washington DC, delivering pithy, concise stories about policy and politics to scrutinizing and skeptical audiences.
Political communications: I served in the press office of a U.S. Senator and observed first-hand how stories are generated, leaked, and disseminated at the highest levels of government.
Executive-level media expertise: I bring over a decade of experience from the newsrooms and boardrooms of NBC Universal and National Public Radio. As with most of the past decade of my work, I was in a position to review job applications and hire staff for high-stakes, visible roles.
Career education: I directed the career department and job placement at a women’s university, boasting an 85% job placement rate in a very volatile job market.
Strategic communications leadership: I served as the communications director of the same college, developing communications and marketing strategies to highly differentiated audiences, including international donors and funders, local media and partners, and underserved students. I honed my craft developing highly-targeted messages in a context where no two audiences were alike.
This unique intersection of political acumen, crisp communications talent, and workforce development expertise (and admittedly, a good old fashioned love of literature) is a powerful combination in a career coach.
Take a look at what my prior clients have said.
Let me answer your question with a question. Have you ever found yourself procrastinating on a project that doesn’t even seem that hard, and definitely shouldn’t take that long, but for some reason seems insurmountably impossible to complete?
That’s because you’re doing work that’s not aligned with your purpose — work that is not adjacent to the things that give you joy.
When you enjoy your job, you’re simply better at it! The hours fly by and you leave the office satisfied. Far from feeling drained, you find that the sweet flavor of job satisfaction whets your appetite to produce even more.
If you enjoy your job, you’re going to be better at it!
I tend to come across as a workaholic, but I am not. I’m only a workaholic when I’m working on projects that are beautifully aligned with my purpose — with the things that bring me joy. When you work in your purpose, within your joy adjacencies, you’ll find it’s harder to differentiate between who you are and what you do. And the work you do becomes easier to perform because it is already so reflective of who you are. By merely being, you are doing.
A satisfying work life represents an efficient allocation of your energy, and will leave you feeling happy and fulfilled in other aspects of your life.
That’s why it is so important to get joy adjacent in your work. You spend the majority of every day, which constitutes the majority of every week and every month, over the majority of your productive years…at work. Your work life constitutes your life.
If you aren’t happy at work, you’re not living a happy life.
You spend most of your life working. Why would you not do everything in your power to ensure that the majority of your time is not spent on something miserable that you hate doing, but rather on something you love, so that you can make your mark on the world?
This is worth everything. The stakes really are that high.
Typical conversation:
Them: “So what do you do?”
Me: “I work with private clients on career and job search strategy.”
Them: “Oh, so you’re a life coach?”
Me: “No, I’m a career and job search expert. I consult. I consult on this one thing and one thing alone. I don’t want to know who hurt you as a child and I can’t fix your eating habits. I just know what it takes to get hired, and that’s why people hire me.”
Since starting out in this industry in 2013, I never once referred to myself as a life coach. I find the concept of life coaching uncomfortable and too close to therapy. Since I have zero expertise on your life, I certainly don’t have the secret to coach you into living a better one.
I do know a lot about this one industry, however. As an expert in this field, clients hire me to advise them on a very specific, time-boxed, and goal-defined problem: get them out of the work they’re in, and into something they actually want to do.
The difference is not at all subtle: I do not coach people through open-ended problems such as personal relationships, unhappiness in life, childhood trauma, etc.
I get hired with a surgical aim: to assess your career situation, inventory your strengths and talents, identify what you love and hate at work, build a professional narrative to market you to employers, and equip you with primetime-ready application materials.
Since I get hired to share my subject matter expertise in recruiting, hiring, firing, building teams, and running companies, I am a consultant, not a coach.
