Daniel

I have a sense of self that I hadn't had for a long time. My personal and my professional are no longer separate entities, but I feel like I'm a combined full human in a lot of ways now.

Natasha

Welcome back to the Career shifters podcast. I'm Natasha Stanley. Sometimes we find ourselves coasting in a career. It's not awful, but it's not great. And as time goes on, mediocrity can turn into resentment. For Daniel Ricken and his work at a film school, something had to give. And he's now found an unexpected way to get paid for something he's always done for free, bringing people together around the things that matter to him most. Daniel and I talked about bringing together your personal and professional selves, finding ways to sidestep a crazy job market, and what he did when the political landscape crashed into his career change world. There's lots to learn from this story, so let's get into it.

Natasha

If I asked your closest loved ones to describe you in a few key words, What do you think that they would say?

Daniel

Charismatic would definitely be up there. The word leader in some capacity would come up. Each person would phrase it differently, but the word leader or elements of leadership would come up.

Natasha

Nice. Charismatic, loving, or supportive, and a leader. Interesting. Especially in the context of where your career change has taken you. Let's keep those three words in mind as we dig into your story. Now, you and I met a couple of years ago. And when you and I first met, you weren't in such a great place when it came to your work. What was it that you were doing and how did you get there?

Daniel

Yeah, so... At that point, I was working in admissions for a film school. I worked in professional theater freelance artist for years and was fairly successful there, but the freelance artist life did not work for me. I also really missed the kind of educational environment that I had grown up in. I went straight from my bachelor's to my master's and then went to professional theater. And realizing that I was missing it and that I didn't feel challenged enough by the work that I was doing. During that time, I got involved with kind of higher education administration and went, oh, maybe that's the path up of doing that side of college university life and took this job in admissions partially because I was living in the middle of America in Ohio and it was very lonely. All of my friends, my partner were all in New York. My family was all in New York at the time. So I moved back to New York. I took this job and admissions at this film school as a, this is something that I can really kind of phone in and put half of my brain power towards so I can write my dissertation. During that process, my partner and I got engaged. So my brain power went from writing the dissertation to planning a wedding. And the pandemic hits in the middle of this. And I thankfully had some job security at the film school. So I went, okay. I have a steady paycheck, which is great. I have my partner and my friends and everything here. And my brain is being used in important ways, whether it was dissertation and then the wedding. And a little bit before the wedding, I looked at my then fiance, now husband, and went, after the wedding, I'm going to go through a period. And I think this is going to be a bad time coming of me going, I've now been in this job for three and a half years. I am not happy in it. It's a job that we all knew I took as a placeholder, but now there doesn't seem to be a way out. And everything that I've been using my brain capacity for to kind of justify this will be over. And, you know, I'm not writing another dissertation. I'm not playing another wedding anytime soon. So... What comes next, and I knew the hard part for me was not knowing what it was. I had done freelance theater and freelance artist life, and I knew why that didn't work. I had done academic life, and I knew why that didn't work. I was now doing higher ed administration life, and I knew that didn't work. So these are the three paths that have been somewhat my life, and all three of them I felt like I dead-ended. I don't know what comes next. And am I now stuck in my early 30s post-pandemic in this world? Plus, I'm getting paid enough money that there's a concern about jumping ship.

Natasha

Sure. That is particularly self-aware of you to be able to see it coming. What happened when it did come, once the wedding was over and you were in that space of job just ticking over, knowing it wasn't quite right?

Daniel

To be honest, it took a while for the bad to come. Because I knew it was going to happen, so I was able to brace myself somewhat for it. Arguably, millions of people go to New York City every year to try to make it in theater. And the fact is, I did. So the odds have kind of always been against me, and I've always done really well. So that gave me this, like, giant amount of confidence of going, oh, I'm going to find a job easy. And I'm going to figure out what the passion is. It'll be easy. It'll come to me. Because it always has. And six months go by and a year goes by and it hadn't. And that was really, really difficult for me. Applying to a million jobs and a million job boards and a million industries, half telling myself the right thing will stick and that's the path. And half going, there's a million jobs and a million industries. I cannot actually apply to all of this. So what do I do?

Natasha

Yeah. Yeah. How were you choosing those million jobs in a million industries to apply for at that stage? Was it just anything and everything? Were you putting particular keywords into the search bar? Like, what was your approach?

Daniel

So I've known that kind of, if I was going corporate, anything with communications would work because I know I can do that well. And I know that a lot of my job experience I can translate over. So Communications was the key word that went in. I would do kind of arts administration jobs, even though that never really felt right. I was also applying for other admissions jobs at other schools because there was a part of me that went, am I just not happy in this job or at this particular school? And I think in my soul, I knew I was not happy in the industry. But it's easier to tell yourself, I'm just not happy in this job than is I need to make a career change. And in the first few months, I genuinely don't remember how, I ended up on the career shifters mailing list somehow. And y'all were doing like a three and a half hour workshop. And I was like, you know what? I can do it that day. I'm free. It's three hours on a random Saturday. Why not? And I did it. I went, oh, this all really resonates with me in a really important way. And I'm like, oh, they kind of get what I'm going through. And I had done the kind of, everyone does in America, I think at most colleges, some sort of career center at your college. And that's the basic, you know, how to get resumes and interviews and internships and all of that basic generic stuff. And it's very, very helpful if you know you're going to be an industry, A, that is corporate and B, that has a lot of jobs and that has a clear vision recipe of you do this you get that grade you do that then you get your job and me you know my artist creative mind went well great and get me a job in finance but i don't want a job in finance i want a job in theater you're not helpful so the kind of generic community career help never really resonated with me because i'm like you're not going to get me i don't fit within that mold so with career shifters that was the first time that i went oh You might get me. And this might be a different story than I've always had. Of course, it still took me a year after that to actually sign up and do the full course. That's

Natasha

a real compliment. I'm really happy to hear that. And so in that intervening year, you're applying for jobs. You are... kind of coming out of that immediate post-wedding glow and you've got this increasing feeling that something's got to give yeah if we were to kind of follow the film analogy since you're at a film school if we were to dive into a scene from that year that really encapsulated how you were feeling about your work what would we see what would be going on

Daniel

That's the like, cliche movie montage of you have the like, day to day, you have some generic white boy song playing, you know, the guy on the subway going to work doing the same motion every day, wearing variations of the same outfit every day, getting progressively less excited with, you know, good morning, as you walk past the receptionist every day. And then you – I mean, going home was just rough. It was just – it was hard because I kind of felt I was better than this. I deserve a life that is more fulfilling than this, and why can't I have that? And so many people around me had the good things. So for me, I don't want to make this sound more depressing than it was, but it was – It was hard. I was feeling very aimless and it was certainly affecting the personal life. I was irritable and I was, you know, my husband, God bless him, was happy in his job. So coming home to that every night was wonderful. I'm happy for him that he was happy, but also it was like, why can't I have that? And that was difficult. So the movie scene would be that kind of movie montage interspersed with just kind of random arguments or spouts of irritability or just sitting frustrated behind a computer screen at my home desk, wondering why this wasn't happening.

Natasha

And aside from applying for jobs, what other kind of strategies were you employing to try and figure out what might come next?

Daniel

So I was talking to people, and I will give myself that credit that I was kind of doing informational interviews into other areas. The problem was most of my own kind of colleagues' peers were either academic peers or artist peers. And knowing that I didn't want either of those, the people that I would turn to were people of kind of my parents' generation who could certainly tell me about their career and their trajectory, but I'm not going to be the vice president of JPMorgan Chase anytime soon. I mean, ever, to be clear. So it was helpful for me to kind of gain some insight into what's out there, but it wasn't... helpful in terms of kind of, okay, how do I practically utilize this? And I think maybe I could have done more with any of those individual things if I wanted to, but none of it resonated. And I kind of, I kept falling back on, I am getting paid enough right now for a job that I don't have to try hard and it does not resonate. So if I'm going to get paid a little more and have to try much harder, but it's also not going to resonate, Is that worth it? I want to move to something that resonates with me much more than the current thing.

Natasha

Yeah. So you're applying for jobs. You're having conversations. You're learning a bit more about what's out there, but nothing's really landing in the way that you want it to. At what point did it start to feel like maybe the rubber could hit the road? Where did you start to find a bit of traction?

Daniel

To be honest, probably not until long time. I mean, I'm sure everyone says this, but I had a really good group and it was a lot of work and I was not expecting it to be as much work as it was, but it was good. And it was a good, it felt like it was productive, good work for me to be doing. And each week things resonated more and more. So this goes back to kind of the first question you asked about things that my friends would use to describe me. I like hosting a lot of parties. Building community is really important to me as kind of a core value. A bunch of things that I've done every year, I've hosted like this big murder mystery party every year, and we do a holiday party, and the biggest of which is I host an interfaith Seder. So when I was in grad school living in Ohio, the first year that I was there, my grandmother passed. She hosted the Passover Seder every year for my family, and she passed right before Passover that year. And I'm in Ohio, and I'm like, there's no Jews here. So I had four friends over, and thus the modern interfaith Seder began in my world.

Natasha

For anybody who doesn't know what a Seder is, can you break it down for our listeners?

Daniel

The Seder, it's... So Passover, that's, you know, the Exodus, Moses, Israelites, burning bush... Out of Egypt of slavery, across the Red Sea, and honoring that entire holiday. So you have a service that, for me, I have kept at a tight 70 to 90 minutes. Some people, this will be like a three or four hour situation, because you eat, at some points, a few ceremonial foods during it, and then afterwards, there's this big dinner. So I... Hosted an interfaith one knowing that I need to make this accessible to people that are not of my tradition. So I hosted it the three years that I was in Ohio. And then I came back and the first year back was April 2020. So everyone was searching for community then. And I went, okay, I can expand this to a personal community. And I did it on Zoom. So the Seder specifically is important because there's an exercise that we do in the launchpad, the paperclip game. It's essentially a big brainstorming session where it was me and two other folks from my group. And I was talking about this later. And somebody else went, you could market this. And this is something that you could do. And during that time of me being upset about my career, I also sought some spiritual guidance and talked to my rabbi. And my rabbi at the time went, you could be a really good communal leader in a Jewish space. Have you thought about rabbinic school? And I went, there is no world in which I'm going back to grad school for five years. So I completely cast it off. And that was that. But then, I don't know, six months or so later, this comes up in Launchpad about being a Jewish communal leader in some ways. And I was really thinking about it, of how this could resonate. And it felt right, kind of in the soul when it came up. So I went back to the rabbi and she went, okay, talk to some directors. And I went, directors? I'm like, I know they exist, but what is this? And she was, so the directors of a synagogue, you have the rabbi who does all the clergy stuff, the preaching, the pastoral care, the life cycle events, all of that. And then you have the director who kind of does everything else. Membership, programming, fundraising, operations facilities, all of that. And I went, oh, I was the director or the stage manager when it was theater. I was the teacher. I was the administrator. This is that, but at a larger scale. And it's a not-for-profit. Nearly every synagogue is a not-for-profit. So it felt good in work for the soul. It's still doing kind of work for a good cause. So I did Launchpad July and August of 2023. finished August of 23 and reached out to the rabbi, and this conversation was happening kind of the first week or so of September 2023, reached out to all these directors as they're going into High Holy Days 2023. Of course, High Holy Days 2023 ended with October 7th, 2023. So the mentality that synagogue folks and Jewish folks were in at that point was, meant that when I was having these conversations, there was a lot that was about the attacks and the ensuing war and everything going on. It wasn't the kind of happy conversations that we all kind of thought and hoped it would be, but they were still really meaningful and they really resonated with me.

Natasha

What kind of conversations were they? Like, what were you asking? What did you talk about?

Daniel

They all kind of started with me genuinely just asking them, you know, what's the day in the life of their... What are the things that resonate the most with them? What was their trajectory to get there? Because some of them came up through the Jewish spaces into an executive director position. Some of them were directors of other not-for-profits that jumped in. And there was a weirdly large amount of folks who transitioned from freelance theater into Jewish executive directors. You're kidding. So they were describing things the same way that I did of it's stage managing just for a not-for-profit. Yep. So this idea started getting a lot of traction in my mind. So I reached out to more folks and more folks. And the more people I talked to, the more this felt right. There are the kind of career change metrics that we've learned in Launchpad of the, you know, resonance, competence, sustainability. And I think Competence was always the easy one for me. I know what I'm good at, I know what I could be good at, and I know what I'm not. Resonance, this had the resonance, and I think as far as the sustainability, I don't have a lot of shame. I had no problem really asking the specifics of, okay, financially, what is the trajectory here? Can I be making the amount of money that I want to be making to live the life that I live, especially living in... Yeah. Yeah. conversations should I be a part of that I'm not inherently a part of. And some of them, you know, put me on a bunch of message boards or a bunch of job specific boards. And there's jewishjobs.com, which is... Of

Natasha

course there is.

Daniel

It was all for, you know, people like this. So I went in and saw what happened. And I put both New York and Philadelphia in as potential areas for And I was getting at least first round interviews for nearly every job I was applying for to the point where I went, oh, this definitely has traction and which of course builds the confidence after two years of bits and nothing. And I addressed this directly in the cover letter of, I know I'm not the traditional candidate here. We can name this and that's not a scary thing to name. That meant that I wasn't the right fit for everything I applied for, and I knew that. And getting those interviews, it became very clear at some of these interviews, yeah, I'm not the right fit here. But that's okay. It's still interview experience. So the job that I'm currently in, synagogues notoriously move slowly because every decision is a board decision. The board meets once a month. So I applied for my job early November of 2023. I was asked for my first round interview the first week of December, a month later, which is a significant period of time. I had my interview at the end of December and another three weeks passed before they asked me about a second round interview. Oh, wow. I came in and I did the second round interview and another three weeks passed and we hit February. I went, I guess they went with the other person. I don't love that, but okay. And then they called back and they wanted me to do a final round interview. And it was another two weeks after that. I got the job. So it clearly worked.

Natasha

How were you feeling? Because it's a long process that you're describing, right? You... Came out of Launchpad, you started having all of these conversations, then you started applying for jobs as you became more confident about this being the right direction for you. What was the internal experience like of going through that process? What kind of spaces did you find yourself in on the inside?

Daniel

Something felt like it had turned a corner. That entire four-month-ish period of time, I am somebody who... very much needs kind of the structure. And obviously, as a human, I understood that career shift is not linear. I understood that it wasn't going to be do step A, do step B, do step C, get results that you want. I understood this intellectually, but that's not how I function internally. So, so much of launchpad and career shifters and The entire career change process was forcing me to challenge this anyway. However, I will say once I started, this felt linear to me. This felt like it had some structure. Every step of it went, okay, informational interviews and talking to people and building connections and building a network. I have the support. I'm there. I can progress to applying for jobs. I am getting these interviews and I'm learning how to better tailor jobs. the documents for this industry and better tailor interview questions for this industry. Now I'm getting multiple round interviews.

Natasha

Yeah. I kind of want to go back in time a little because I really hear in the way that you tell the story how linear it felt. And it does sound like a straight line. And I'm kind of curious about the bit before that began. So... You'd started the launch pad. You hadn't yet got to the point where you started seriously thinking about this career path in this industry. What happened for you in between those bits? So what other ideas were you considering? How was it feeling for you before you settled on this as a direction to explore? Fill in that part for me a little bit.

Daniel

During Launchpad, one of them, and in the month right after Launchpad, two others of my husband's two best friends and his brother got married. All out of state. So it was all of this do, do, do, go, go, go, a million things running. And of course, in the middle of that, October 7th happens, which now I have to speak about. somewhat professionally because it's part of my job in a lot of ways, but it also deeply affected me personally. So once Launchpad ended, I gave myself the kind of two-week grace of do-nothing, career-focused. And after that, honestly, we were in High Holy Days, so so much of my life was Jewish spaces anyway. So I finished Launchpad with a number of kind of ideas and threads to potentially follow. but also the knowledge that realistically I could not follow all of them simultaneously. So much of my life was crazy busy and, you know, good fires with weddings and things and bad fires with October 7th and things of, you know, my headspace was putting out fires left and right that I kind of let myself go from September to November, I am going to follow this thread and see what happens. I allowed myself, because I took this chance with Launchpad, and because it went well and I was feeling much better and in a much more kind of confident place at the end of Launchpad, I kind of went, okay, if I need to do this again, I'll do this again. So the other thing that happened, I guess, and this is part of this too, was with October 7th. And I found myself in this weird nexus of being surrounded by people incredibly especially in terms of America incredibly liberal people and I'm Jewish and the far left of America has very much not fallen on the Jewish side of this conversation and while we can certainly have a worthy conversation about the differences between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at the end of the day most people on every side of this conversation have been conflating the two. That was difficult for me on a lot of levels as things on my social media, things from friends of mine blew up in conversations. And it put me in a few positions at a lot of points in that month of October, on top of everything else that I was saying, to facilitate a bunch of conversations amongst people with differing views. and go, we need to kind of see humanity here. We need to have community here. We need to remember that the world is on fire here, and putting it out is more important than who puts it out, frankly. So I found myself building community in Jewish spaces, and I was good at it. And I went, oh, I can build community, and there is a bit of a healing happening here. So I can build Jewish community. I can facilitate that, which really amplified the, this is the thread that I should be following.

Natasha

Yeah. So paint me a picture of how this job felt when you first stepped into it. You left the film school admissions department where you had been arguably coasting unhappily for quite a long time. and started something completely different that you'd worked really hard to get into, what did it feel like to land in that new space?

Daniel

It felt really good. It felt really good. There was so much of this kind of weight lifted on so many levels. And there was also this sense of welcome. Everyone here was so excited to meet me and so excited to kind of get to know me and so excited to... be here with me and so, so supportive. This was a place that I felt very much kind of accepted me. For me, I didn't have to explain or justify that. I could bring my full self here and almost immediately I was doing work that I felt was important and I felt was good. And the learning curve, because I hadn't, you know, yes, I can argue that skills transferred over and they do, but there are some very specific things hard skills that I did not have that I needed to get quickly. And there was a lot of that, but also a lot of support in helping me do that. I will say now, you know, I've been in my job for a year and a half. I am realizing the limitations to my happiness here. It feels that I am doing important work. I'm doing work that I'm really happy doing it, but there's a cost to it. And It's a cost that while I'm willing to pay for now, I'm not going to want to pay that permanently. And I'm beginning to think about how I can do this work outside of a traditional synagogue space or at a different synagogue space. Cost specifically is every Jewish holiday I'm now working. Somebody walks in with a million opinions about what the new logo or the new website says, and now I'm not in the service. I have to be handling that. Or the sink won't turn off in the women's bathroom. Daniel, can you use some basic plumbing skills? Sure. So I can't, I don't have spiritual fulfillment here in a way that is important to me as a human that I've never needed to get from a job before. But now because my job is making that spiritual experience happen for so many other people, where do I fall into that?

Natasha

Now the part of all of this we haven't touched on yet is that it wasn't just a career change you made. It was a geographical change.

Daniel

It was.

Natasha

And you and your husband had been talking about maybe making the move. But as with a career change, the theory is often quite different from the reality. So how did the two of you navigate that?

Daniel

We are still navigating that, to be clear. But I am very lucky in that my brother lives in Philadelphia. And my brother actually lives fairly near the synagogue where I work. So when I started my job, my husband and I had three months left of our lease in New York. So for those three months, I commuted and I lived on my brother's couch during the week. And I drove home to be with my husband for the weekend and drove back on Mondays to be here. And I will tell you, sleeping on an air mattress for three months is not great for your back. But besides that, we made it work. Then three months in, when our lease was up, we found somewhere here to move. However, now I'm in my career change, in my geographic change, living in the city where I work, but my husband is not. So my husband still works in New York City and commutes in for his job three days a week. But that's really hard. It's a six-hour commute on him, three hours each way. He is up at four in the morning, out the house by 5.30 in the morning, three days a week, and home between 8.30 and nine at night. So there's very limited time that we have together now to... have dinner or have quality time together. And that is difficult. And he's not looking for a career change. He's just looking for a geographic job change, but that makes things hard. And like I said, newlyweds. So we have goals and things that we would like to accomplish in kind of five and 10 year plans that can't really happen on this schedule where he's commuting in three days a week and he's The reality of my job, and this is something that I genuinely love about my job, is that every day is different. I feel like I'm doing the work every day in kind of the same, you know, the work is making the synagogue a better community and making it better, of course. But every day is a different way of doing that or different types of projects that I'm working on. And I love that type of diversity in my headspace. I feel like I'm flexing creative muscles and administrative muscles. But there are also some days where I get here at nine in the morning and I'm out at 11 o'clock at night because it's a board meeting. And that is hard if that falls on a day that he's working from home. So now we're down to one less day a week together. So it's difficult.

Natasha

It doesn't happen in a vacuum, career change, does it? No, it does not. Was there anything that surprised you about the career change process now that you've got the benefit of hindsight on your shoulder?

Daniel

I think the two biggest surprises for me both had to do with the people. Number one, the number of people that were willing to help. And I genuinely, earnestly were happy to get an email from me saying, can we chat? So that was the first big surprise of how open-hearted everyone was. And the other thing, honestly, were the number of people who were in this same boat. I am surrounded in my life before this, or even now still, but I think I've always been surrounded by people who have stuck the line. My mother was a teacher and was a phenomenal teacher and taught in the same building for 40 years. And she knew that she wanted to be a teacher in second grade before that. My father... balanced whether he wanted to be a lawyer or a teacher. And he did have a career change. He was a lawyer for 20 years and then switched to teaching. And my grandparents were all teachers. My family is a family of educators. The artist friends of mine, there's a somewhat of a recipe there, even though there's a resilience because most people don't advance steps easily in that recipe. The finance people, the more corporate folks, most of the people in my life have known what they've wanted to do. And stuck that path. And yes, there are obstacles in everyone's path, of course, but there wasn't, it felt to me at least, a lot of people in my personal life who are still asking themselves as an adult, what do I want to be when I grow up? And negotiating and struggling with not having that answer. So doing career shifters and giving myself the community with that, of learning there were other people like me out there that had this community, that was a giant surprise for me in a really wonderful way.

Natasha

What parts of all of this do you think people don't talk about enough?

Daniel

We don't talk about the money enough. And especially, I think this was deeply hard for me. I live in a country that is very politically divided at present. And not only are we politically divided, but we are politically divided somewhat geographically. So the places that are cheaper to live or more affordable to live are not places where me and my husband could live in a Jewish home safely. Not necessarily. And my safety has to outrank the rest of this. So there's a dark side of this conversation that i don't feel like people were talking about as much so i think it's that

Natasha

yeah it's a very real one and it's one that entire households let alone individuals are having to navigate quietly on the inside and health care and insurance and all of the rest of it these are big issues and big topics

Daniel

yeah

Natasha

but they're also scary to talk about for a

Daniel

But that's how we're raised. We're raised in this kind of culture of you can't talk about those things. You can talk about your passions, sure. You can talk about your wistful dreams of, oh, I've always wanted to be a professional baseball player, but now I'm too old for that. You can always say those types of things, but you don't talk about money. How many companies have HR policies that say you can't talk about salaries with other people?

Natasha

How do you think that you have changed? as a result of this process?

Daniel

I feel much lighter. I think that is an important thing. I feel like I was walking around with this kind of heaviness and this kind of plodding along, doing the thing that now feels much lighter and that's lifted. I have a sense of self that I hadn't had for a long time. I think I, and I can probably argue this myself, much longer of life than I would like to admit, but trotted the path that was expected of me or trotted a path that was expected of me. And now it feels like my personal and my professional are no longer separate entities, but I feel like I'm a combined full human in a lot of ways now in a way that I hadn't been. And even though my current job is extremely unlikely my permanent, you know, I don't think I'm going to be here for 40 years like my mother was in one building. But I do think this feels like it is an industry or a world that resonates long term. And there's, frankly, like a world, there's so many parts of it left to explore and discover and unturned that I'm still living in this world that and may discover a different path within it is the right one for me at some point. And that's great. And that feels really good.

Natasha

It sounds really good. Well, then I guess the final place to go will be the question that makes everybody groan. I

Daniel

literally just...

Natasha

If there was something that You think that other career changes could really benefit from hearing. Many of our listeners are thinking about making a shift. They're feeling all kinds of stuck. They don't know how to do this thing. If there was something that you think they benefit from hearing from the other side, what would you want them to know?

Daniel

Find community. To find people who understand who you are and what you're going through. And those might not necessarily be the same people. And I think that's important too. I had a lot of people in my life who really supported me. My husband, of course, the top one of those, but other people who saw the struggle of me not being happy and genuinely threw so much love into me and made sure I knew that I felt as a human, not alone. And as a human being, capable of whatever the next path is, but have no idea what to do with career shift. And the Launchpad crew and other people that I've met over the course of this, at least in the beginning, don't know me at all. They don't love me. They don't root against me, but they're not my personal tribe of support system, but they understand it. And yes, there are a few people in the Venn diagram of those two communities. But overwhelmingly, it was just finding people to make sure I had that.

Natasha

Daniel, thank you so much for this conversation today. It's been such a joy. There's so many elements of your story that I didn't know about and that I've got to hear today. If people want to find you, follow what you're up to, get in touch, where can they do so?

Daniel

Instagram is probably the best way of doing that. DanielRicken16.

Natasha

Phenomenal. That was Daniel Ricken, whose experiences you can read more about in the success stories section of the CareerShifters website. Next week, I'm joined by career coach Louisa Taylor to explore the key themes from Daniel's story, including the potential pitfalls of trying to find your dream job. So I think setting the bar high is great, but don't try and set the bar so that you can't move. I'm really looking forward to this one. I'll see you then.