Creating Career Satisfaction with Kira Swanson

[00:00:00] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the How to Scale of Business podcast. My name is Hector Sania. Esteban, and I am your host. And we are here today talking with Ki Swanson. And who knows what we're gonna get into today. It should be a, a wonderful conversation. She is the founder of Love mundane.net, and she's a, a career coach.

[00:00:19] Hector: A career satisfaction coach. Someone who I think just has some really great insights on, on work and, and life and, and, and it's just a, a, a beautiful human being. So, Kira, thank you for spending some time with us today.

[00:00:32] Kira: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Hector.

[00:00:34] Hector: So catch us up a little bit on, on your experience. , when we say. A career satisfaction coach, someone might say, well, Kara, that sounds like a very, you know, pie in the sky kind of cloud job.

[00:00:46] Hector: But you also have an MBA from Duke, I mean, you have a, all the certifications and all the real legitimate, you know, things to back it up. So, so I know that it's, it's , very grounded in, in, in some real experience and education. So catch us up on kind of how you got into that and a little bit about what you're doing.

[00:01:05] Kira: Sure. So I got into coaching. I had discovered coaching. While I was at American Express. So back in like the early two thousands, I had found out about the existence of coaching and I was like, oh, that sounds amazing. Like I, that's what I should be doing. It appealed to me because I had studied psychology in college and so that was always a, a strong interest of mine and had I.

[00:01:31] Kira: Been afraid of psychology back at the time because the model was, what you do with a psychology degree at that time was you go and you work with people who have some kind of abnormality. They have something diagnosable. And I didn't wanna be in an environment where I was talking to people like that constantly.

[00:01:52] Kira: I knew it would just bring me down. You know, I just wasn't at a place where I could help people like that. So when I heard about coaching, which is very different, it's, it's some of the, some of the skills are the same, some of the techniques are the same, but, The client in this case as, as opposed to the patient, the client is coming to you from a state of , often excellence and they just wanna get better.

[00:02:15] Kira: Or they're often great in a lot of areas and then they have one or two areas that they feel are not where they want them to be or even things that are dragging. Back and they wanna address those. So it's a totally different context that, you know, that I thought was much more exciting.

[00:02:31] Kira: And You know, I won't go into my huge long background, but being in a corporate environment for me was like a really weird kind of place to be becauselike, I went to basically a hippie school for college and you know, very, very liberal arts kind of college. And at that time didn't see myself being part of a corporation.

[00:02:51] Kira: I had these broad strokes about what corporations were, that they were evil and greedy, but I ended up getting an mba, and so I kind of got into that orbit because I needed to pay for the tuition, you know, and I found that you know, I think American Express was a pretty reput reputable company, but it had a lot of things that it, it just wasn't a fit for me personally.

[00:03:10] Kira: Like I'm not a. Or like a person who joins big, big things. so what happened was I decided that I wanted to pursue my PhD and ended up leaving Amex so that I could pursue my PhD full-time. And the topic I was exploring were organizational systems. So it was really kind of leadership at the organizational.

[00:03:33] Kira: And did that, that was a 10 year journey. Along the way I started coaching. I did that for a little while, and then I kind of got scared about money. I wasn't making a lot of money. I was just kind of doing it, you know, in my free time as more of a hobby and about a year and a half into. Not being in corporate America got kind of scared about the money and, you know, the inflow of things.

[00:03:57] Kira: So I ended up at Discover because I had connections there and the, the timing was probably really good or or bad because that was 2007, so I was there. When they went through 2008, and that was a very traumatic experience. The company did great, but the executives and the leaders were very traumatized, so it was a, an interesting place to be.

[00:04:20] Kira: One of the reasons I wanted to go back to another company was to experience another culture because I didn't want everything that I knew about corporate to be from the lens of just American Express. And I came into that place with a very different mindset. Like I, I had gone to Amex straight from business school, so I had that business school mental.

[00:04:40] Kira: when I walked into Discover it was more from this, you know, I had been paying attention to a lot of metaphysical ideas. , I would sit in the car and do grounding exercises with a, meditation audio that I had made. So I had a very different perspective and it was kind of funny because at first I didn't really pull it off very successfully.

[00:05:00] Kira: The melding those two worlds. and especially when the tensions all happened with 2008 I started to, kind of question why the heck I came back to a corporate environment. So I did some things that I loved and then there were things about just large organizations that I didn't like so much.

[00:05:17] Kira: So I had to finish my PhD and I had to do research to, to do that. I was exploring how leaders make sense of things, like how they. How they make sense of the environment and what's going on and what they should need to respond to the to that and how they give that to their employees. And what I did was I ended up leaving Discover to finish my PhD to wrap up the research and get that finished.

[00:05:42] Kira: So I did that. And then as soon as that was done, I didn't really have a strong plan, but I was like, I knew I was not gonna go back to corporate. . And that began like a, a long interesting journey where I knew I had backed out of the entrepreneurial aspect out of fear that know, just as the, as quick as I got money concerns, I just jumped back into the corporate pool where I knew how to earn money in that environment very well, and it was very comfortable.

[00:06:11] Kira: , you know, I haven't let myself quit as, as a, as a coach, and my success has been much more recent. So it's been, a really interesting ride. And it's been when I niched, you know everybody talks about nicheing and that's what's really important. And one thing I've discovered I had honed in on career satisfaction as my niche, and then discovered that wasn't niche enough.

[00:06:34] Kira: So more recently, I'm getting into the idea of impact and the idea that we are, we are satisfied and feeling fulfilled with our work. When we're making an impact on either the, our workplace or the processes or the customers that, that we serve in, in our role, when we're making an impact on, on those, on our coworkers, on our community, that's when we feel a sense of satisfaction.

[00:07:01] Kira: So that's, I kind of came to my focus of, I had a lot of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in my career, so that was important to me. And then I got a little bit more focused on what that means.

[00:07:12] Hector: Yeah, take me, I'd love to know what happened was there a wall? Was there a, a, an occurrence an opportunity, something that kind of highlighted that, you kind of even needed to niche down even further.

[00:07:27] Kira: Yeah. I had thought that That picking career satisfaction, like, like there are a ton of career coaches out there. So, you know, I started creating like a, my profile to talk about how how it's career satisfaction that I'm into, not just that I'm not, not just a career coach and I'm not even necessarily about switching jobs.

[00:07:45] Kira: And I, you know, I wanna coach entrepreneurs as well. And I do co coach entrepreneurs because they have the same issues in terms of satisfaction with what they're doing in their work. . But I was finding that everybody was talking about meaning, which is my favorite thing. And it's a very, very popular topic, but it felt oversaturated and it felt hard to get noticed in that area.

[00:08:07] Kira: So I, I could just sort of had this sense that people were seeing me as, just another career coach. And really the biggest problem, like I've taken a few different branding classes, and the biggest disconnect that I started to notice is when I find really great prompts for social media and for the letters that I send to my list and for my blogs, the best prompts, the ones that take you along a customer.

[00:08:35] Kira: get so specific that if I was just blogging about stuff that people are interested in about their career or their career satisfaction it doesn't lead them down a clear customer journey. So if I wanna get my messaging that targeted, I have to start getting ultra specific about what I'm talking about.

[00:08:53] Kira: So that's how I noticed that I still wasn't niche down enough is that, I couldn't respond well , these great prompts that I had accumulated, I couldn't, couldn't come up with great content for it. So that's when I knew I needed to niche down even more.

[00:09:09] Hector: I think this, this prompt thing , it's fascinating. I think it is a great thought exercise, Can, can you take us into what sort of questions maybe you didn't have dialed in or, or, you know, what sort of things weren't, you weren't a, like, as clear on or needed to get more clear as you were nicheing?

[00:09:23] Kira: Yeah. So you know, these questions are, they're based off of different customer journeys. One of the main ones is just the, the classic concept of how does it go problem. I'm, I'm aware I have a problem. Then I become aware that there's a solution for that kind of problem. Then I become aware of or the customer becomes aware of my solution.

[00:09:43] Kira: Then the customer starts to know, like, and trust me. And then the customer buys from me and be, you know, if they become a loyal fan, then they buy even more, right? And they refer people. So to take them down that journey , like if you're trying to focus on problem aware you wanna focus on a lot of the obstacles that somebody might be experiencing right now.

[00:10:05] Kira: And if I stick with just that concept of career satisfaction and I'm focused on the obstacles, talking about meaning is like very abstract. You know, like it's hard to, it's hard to get real focused on the the pain points or like, say things that somebody can be like, oh, she's describing me. But if I focus on impact, and if I say, maybe you're feeling undervalued or you got disappointing feedback.

[00:10:34] Kira: Or you're not getting a promotion? You know, I can, I can point to much more specific things and I know that a sense of meaning is wrapped up in there, but I can be so much more specific about what kind of problem somebody who isn't making feels that they're not making impact. , you know, is experiencing versus somebody who lacks a sense of purpose.

[00:10:53] Kira: Like that's just, it's too vague for me to, you know, respond to. So I used to struggle a lot. I used to hate it when my content planning and my batching for social media would come up because I'm like, it's, it's a struggle. And as I, as soon as I got niche down more, I, I lo it's fun, you know, I see a prompt and I immediately know what I wanna say.

[00:11:15] Hector: Hmm. Yeah. How, how interesting that the answer became a lot clearer when we, we just asking different questions right? Or asking different questions about different things. That's . That's fantastic. So I'm curious though, because you mentioned that there are a lot of parallels between, you know, you, you career satisfaction, but career satisfaction is not exclusive to someone who works a W2 or someone who is self-employed or someone who has a business or, or I mean, careers A, we all.

[00:11:46] Hector: Most people have work in their life. And so that I think is universal. And so when we get back from break, I wanna a, I'm curious about what can we do? I'm curious about some of these things that we could add into our, you know, daily routines or habits or some of some things that might be .

[00:12:00] Hector: Implementable. But we're gonna get into that right after this break.

[00:12:05] Hector: hey y'all, thanks for tuning in today. Today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media, and we are a small group of genius makers who our mission, our message is to get your mission, your message out there. And so if you have a passion or a purpose, something that you wanna get out to the world, but don't necessarily have the time or the tech skills to do it, we can help.

[00:12:22] Hector: Go to amplify media.com. That's A P L A F Y media.com, and you can check the show notes for details and let's see if we can change the world.

[00:12:33] Hector: All right, Kira, we talked about before break, you know, this is alive. It might seem pie in the sky stuff, but let's talk tactics or let you know. Let's get into the nuts and bolts. And I think that both are important, right? You can't have one without the other.

[00:12:47] Hector: So what are some, some, let's take it at one of two ways. What are either some must dos or some must not dos in your opinion, that are perhaps kind of low hanging fruit that, that people maybe are not realizing are, are opportunities there to improve their, satisfaction?

[00:13:06] Kira: Yeah.. So one of the things I discovered going from a, an environment where I was kind of married to my job. I was that kind of employee, so I was a, a classic workaholic.

[00:13:15] Kira: And the really super weird thing was that as soon as I started working for myself, I found it very hard to work a lot of hours, and I was totally puzzled because I thought, , you know, I thought, okay, I'm working all these hours for other people doing things that they want, you know, I'm only super motivated by a percentage of it, but I work really hard on everything.

[00:13:39] Kira: I'm gonna be like that when I'm doing stuff I love. So I'm here, here, I'm doing what I love. , but I'm, I can't make my, I can't get myself to work very hard at all. Like I'm, you know, like four hours at first was a lot for me, and it took me a long time to figure out what the heck was going on. And in, in my case, I realized that in the early days of coaching, I just wasn't making a lot of contribution to other people.

[00:14:05] Kira: So you have to study like, like your day and what's going on with your, your energy and your motivation and where things are flagging and where it rises. You know, figure out like what it is that that really motivates you. And I know no better way to do that than to, to just track stuff. So I like to track.

[00:14:28] Kira: I attempt to do it hourly, but I'm lucky if I have four entries a day. But that's, that's enough information. I track my mood. my energy and just physically how my body feels. Cuz I've also found that now I'm working like I wanna work a lot. So I work probably between seven to 10 hours a day. And but what I find is that I'm, I'm 55 now, I have fibromyalgia.

[00:14:54] Kira: I cannot physically sit in front of the computer. For more than, you know, five or six hours at a time. So I've implemented after studying this and struggling with it and, you know, ha having all kinds of drama with it, you know, I finally accepted, all right, this is just where I'm at, so I'm gonna design everything around it.

[00:15:13] Kira: So what I designed, I basically do the siesta. So I work about five or six hours. and then I take two to four hours off and then, you know, I finish what I wanna finish. So that could be another hour, it could be another three, even four hours. It doesn't matter. Like it's, it's what I feel like doing, what I have energy to do.

[00:15:33] Kira: And if I take that siesta when I come back, I'm totally energized. It's like a whole new ballgame. But that's me. You know, I'm not saying go out and do a siesta. What I'm saying is study yourself. Like figure out your pattern. , figure out what you're motivated to do and what you're not motivated to do and try to like, try to hack it.

[00:15:53] Kira: I used to hate being on social media and it was for silly reasons, like, which I think a lot of us share, which is comparisonitis. And also just reading like negative stuff, bummed me out. For me, I found that LinkedIn was my favorite space to hang out in. I didn't have a lot of those kinds of trigger.

[00:16:12] Kira: and when I stay on LinkedIn, my energy is very high and I can be in there for, you know, an hour and a half and feel great. I cannot do that in Facebook. And I'm not even really on Instagram, so I don't know about that. But, you know, Facebook is a bummer to me,

[00:16:30] Hector: Yeah. INS Instagram is the king of compare com. What did you call it?

[00:16:33] Hector: comparisonitis.

[00:16:35] Hector: I'd say. Said, that's it. That's what I have Yeah. So, so great. When you talk about you know, understanding your routine, because at first when you said, you know, the Siesta thing, I was about to walk out to my three and four year old who might be making it on the recording with their, their yelling here and say, okay guys, new plan. Dad's take, dad's taking a nap after work. You guys are and, and they would, they would be all for it. But your your point about designing it around your life, right? What you can do is so important

[00:17:05] Kira: Yeah. Studying it like a scientist, you know, like, like you're, like every day is an experiment to me.

[00:17:11] Kira: Which is great because I used to get bummed out and very judgmental of myself if I wasn't feeling very productive. But like a little while ago, I , I did an hour long impromptu conversation with my brother and we just, you know, it was just a rant session. But I know emotionally it's therapeutic and we both need it.

[00:17:29] Kira: And I'm like, I don't care that it's the middle of the day because that's how I've arranged my life now. So if there's something that pops up, you know, and I made a very deliberate choice, I'm gonna go ahead and do it. . And that just means, you know, I'll work another hour if I feel like it, that I didn't plan to tonight.

[00:17:46] Kira: But if I keep myself really well energized, then I will work, you know a lot and be really happy about it and get my personal life fit in very easily. But if I you. Try to be over specific about, you know, oh this is, I'm gonna do it this, you know, do this then, and be very tense about it. Then my energy SAPs and I feel uptight and stressed.

[00:18:11] Kira: So you know, like I'm all about working eight hours or six hours where you feel really energized and excited the whole time versus work working, you know, eight hours or nine hours. , you know, there were only four where you were really producing effectively.

[00:18:29] Hector: Yeah. I think the, definitely the first step would be to assess and, and analyze it. Are there any favorites or any, any kind of, once you realize, you know, I've written down, I'm in a funk, or I've been, you know, a little unproductive, you know, for a couple of hours or what, you know, a couple of se you know, sessions where you're realizing it.

[00:18:51] Hector: What are, what are some things that you do to kind of you know, alter course in the midst of.

[00:18:57] Kira: So the very first and probably most important thing which is super simple, but really hard is self-love. So we, you know now, like when you're an entrepreneur, you're your own boss and we beat ourselves up as our own boss. Far worse. We say way nastier things to our. Than any boss ever said to us.

[00:19:18] Kira: We would be in court if you know, if somebody heard us talking to ourself as an employee the way that we talk to ourselves. So soften that up. know, like, knock it off. Do not criticize yourself. Give yourself a break. You know, being, being mean to yourself and harshing yourself and very judgmental and rigid.

[00:19:38] Kira: It just creates stress. Like there's no, there's no value. It does not make you work harder. It's a, it doesn't, in, you know, it does not motivate you. So just being nice to yourself and being, you know, like, okay, I was doing the best that I could, you know, I didn't have the energy or there were too many disruptions, you know, like I was doing what I could do in the moment.

[00:19:59] Kira: When I have good mental hygiene, I'll be able to do better. So I can look forward to that, but I'm not gonna beat myself up for what I just did, and I'm not gonna beat myself up in the moment for. You know, like I'll, I've noticed myself working on some task and simultaneously saying to myself, this is the wrong task.

[00:20:15] Kira: I should be working on that other thing. You know, why am I doing this? And I'm like, because I wanna get it done. Like, well, no, you know, go do that thing. It's more important. And, you know, like, do you think I am doing anything? Well, you know, it's crazy. So just stop it, stop, stop being mean to yourself. It's, it's not productive.

[00:20:32] Kira: And then the other thing is to have a tool set. , or not a tool set, but like a, like things that you can do to bring up your energy you know, ready to go. So that could be other tasks that you enjoy more, or it could be what I call expansion exercises, which are intended to raise your energy. So it could be anything from meditating or, you know, like, I like to read my vision.

[00:20:58] Kira: or do a gratitude list or do something physical is really great. And I try to be preventative with all that stuff. So I, I do a modified pom pomodoro method where usually maybe every hour or so I'll get up and for five minutes I do some housework. And it's, it's a strategy to just help my body and my energy level and my mental, you know, capability, make it through the day.

[00:21:22] Kira: Cuz if I don't take that. and my eyes, you know, like, my eyes are looking 18 inches all day long. That's killer for, for your eyes. So I get up, I do housework, then I've got, you know, a cleaner house and a better body and energy. So, so change, you know, do something different. If you're, like, when you notice an issue, you gotta, you gotta do something different to get into a different energy space.

[00:21:49] Hector: Hmm. Such great advice here, Kira, such great advice. Where can people, I know you've got some resources online, can people go and, and, and learn more about some of these teachings?

[00:21:59] Kira: Yeah. So the best way to do it is my, my website is love monday.net. And if you go on there um, I have a blog. And it, you know, a lot, lot of great stuff to like my blogs are the same kind of things that I'm talking about right now. So a bunch of blogs on these types of articles or these types of concepts.

[00:22:20] Kira: And I'm growing my presence on LinkedIn and I'm at kira linkedin.com. So I have my own little url. Kira linkedin.com is my,

[00:22:32] Hector: I love that. I'm gonna,

[00:22:33] Kira: and it's k I r A.

[00:22:36] Hector: k i r A. Very cool. We'll go get connected with Kira on LinkedIn. That's where we got connected actually. And my last question for you, Kira, is, in your opinion, what is the secret to growing or scaling a business?

[00:22:47] Kira: You know, you so you had asked me that question ear, you know, before we got on, and my immediate response was consistency. And then I'm like, oh no, that's not growing and scaling. That's, you know, maintaining, but I'm still gonna go with consistency. And I think actually consistency is super cool because if you can have consistency right now with whatever you're doing, like if you don't have consist.

[00:23:09] Kira: You know, figure out the things that are most valuable that you wanna have consistency on. Consistency on. Create that consistency. Then as you're in, you know, intentionally growing and scaling, pick new things, like expand that consistency. So it could be your social media strategy.

[00:23:25] Kira: It could be. you get on new platforms, or it could be you increase your frequency or you increase the way you're playing the game. So you could go from you know, just photos in social media to lives you know, that, that kind of thing. So I would say take a baseline of consistency and just grow that same stuff and keep that consistent, you know, so like, grow what, you know, scale up through.

[00:23:53] Kira: increasing, not, not your, not increasing your consistency, but increasing the stuff that you're consistent with,

[00:24:00] Hector: Yeah, there's a compounding effect to that for

[00:24:02] Kira: right?

[00:24:03] Hector: Yeah. That you definitely get. Kira, this has been a great conversation. I wanna thank you for your time and, and your wisdom here. If you guys got any value at it today, I, we'd love a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcast. If you. If you know someone who is in the midst of scaling their business or growing their business or thinking about Start one, please send 'em this episode, and then I would encourage you to take one thing that Kira mentioned and implement it.

[00:24:27] Hector: Go out and execute it. Let us know how it goes. We would love to know about your successes, but thanks so much for sticking with us and as being part of the How to Scale Business Family. We'll see you on the next one later y'all.