The Data Shaman Podcast - In Conversation with Jelena Radonjic - Award-Winning Career Coach

A conversation with career and leadership coach Jelena Radonjic on career growth and professional development.

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

People are pushed to deal with more uncertainty, more ambiguity. People who are still working are operating more from the place of fear. Will I lose my job? Like everyone else around me. We're talking millions around the world and hundreds of thousands across Europe and the UK. And just in the US is probably around a million. We have a massive pool of highly qualified, even experienced and senior people in the market. And we have organizations, companies restructuring, shifting their focus, reallocating the resources into AI and technology development. What was enough yesterday may not be enough today. There's still quite a big mismatch between the supply and the demand. Everything is twice as hard. It takes at least twice as long as it used to be.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

And this is the Stage and the CEO, the show where we explore leadership and growth and the questions that shape how we show up in the world. Welcome to the Stage and the CEO podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Welcome everyone. This is the Stage and the CEO podcast, and I'm here with Helena. Radon, am I pronounced it correctly? Helena, yes, it's okay. Excellent. So you are a coach, and I wanted to ask you a very simple question. Can you share a bit about your background and what brought you to coaching?

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Sure, of course, Daniela, and thank you for inviting me to this podcast. Well, I've been coaching for the last eight, nine years, and I qualified approximately as a coach around that time. But I was always interested in human development, potential for growth, mindset, spirituality, transformation, psychology, you name it. Literally from the age of 17, I started to read a lot of works by Fromm and Freud, started to explore Eastern philosophy. So there's always been this trajectory of wanting to explore. I think I'm driven by curiosity, but especially curiosity about people. I genuinely love people and I'm curious about people and how we show up in life, what drives us, what makes us happy or unhappy, and also what are some of the practices that we can adopt in our life to make our lives nicer, better, better, happier, easier. Further on, in terms of my background, I worked in recruitment internationally for many years, starting my career in Japan, in Tokyo, where I spent four years. Then I moved to the UK where I've been more than 30 years. When I say recruitment, I was never a typical headhunter, but I worked with a corporate client from Asia, Europe, and the US, supplying pipelines of talent and sometimes mostly through careers events, but also through bespoke campaigns and generally identifying talent. At the time, this was mostly around early career and graduate recruitment, which gave me a lot of pleasure at the time because I like to give opportunities to young people to have a good start in life. Having come from a background where that was not a given, I could say a word or two about that. So I grew up in what was once upon a time Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and at university I did English and Japanese. That's what took me to Japan. However, in those days, opportunities were literally zero for any type of work that would allow me to thrive using my skills, but also my interest in business and sort of commercial aspects of business. But I was fortunate enough to land a job in Tokyo in those days, which was quite unusual, and that took me on the trajectory of working with companies and candidates in recruitment, and then later on transitioning to working with business schools. That was my last full-time role before I started my career coaching consultancy. With business schools, I also helped them identify and source top candidates for MBA and executive MBA. So to wrap it up, it's all been about work, career, education, how all of this comes together to give us to give us a sense of purpose, meaning, and meaningful work. And then I bolted on that transformational practices and coaching.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

What was the motivation that brought you to change from the corporate world to coaching?

SPEAKER_03 4:12

Okay, so it was it was a gradual process. I quite enjoyed the work I did at the time because it was still helping people. I find that that's kind of a topic, a pervasive theme in my life where I really liked to help people, to facilitate insight, to share some of my, if I may say humbly, wisdom that I've gained and developed over many years through personal and professional development. But at a certain point, it just started to feel like it wasn't enough, it wasn't giving me enough fulfillment, and there was no alignment anymore over a period of time. It also coincided, to be completely open, with a period in my personal life where I was going through a lot of transformation. It felt like at one point everything came to a stop and something new was emerging. And at that time, I started to look at how I can bring together my life experience, my desire to help people and transform lives with my background in helping people with their careers. And that's how my my interest and passion for career coaching specifically emerged.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

I often see people that I'm generalizing, of course, but this starts from a HR resourcing recruitment background and that they move into coaching. However, there are also people that might work like in corporate, in banking or in other areas, and then goes into coaching. I guess do you have maybe a positive thing of having the kind of transition and maybe a negative thing?

SPEAKER_03 5:45

I agree completely with what you said that I see a lot of career coaches, especially, who come from backgrounds of being a headhunter and HR director and so forth because they really understand the mechanics of a career transition or even career progression. And then there are also people like more like life coaches who also provide career coaching, but more with the emphasis on facilitation, insight, and so forth. So in my case, I say I blend both, and I always tell my clients I combine coaching, which is about asking powerful questions and facilitating transformation, with specific career guidance. I think these are two different things, they're quite distinct, but I blend them in my approach because I find that really gives results to my clients. In terms of the transition itself, I think the main point is transitioning from being a paid employee, no matter what you work. You could be a, you know, a managing director or a mid-manager, or you know, even in an early career. I spoke to someone recently who is at the age of 26 starting his coaching company. I think he's gonna do great. But the main shift is really in the mindset of being a paid employee versus I'm now offering value to the world for which I need to be rewarded and I need to be seen and recognized for what I bring and therefore provide for myself on a monthly basis. I find that that is the most significant shift really in this transition.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

That's so fascinating because I can I'm going through that transition myself and I can see a lot of parallels on that. So you coach a lot of people that want to maybe change the career or maybe let's say redundancy or something like that, and therefore they need to basically be guided a little bit in that transition. And we read a lot about AI changing the ways of working. And I wonder from your own perspective of what you've seen. Have you seen in the last maybe 12 months something change or does it remain more or less the same?

SPEAKER_03 7:50

I think a lot has been changing, not just in the last 12 months, but I would say in the last four or five years, the post-pandemic world, where a lot of people's mindsets and and sort of foundation from where they're coming from has changed. So people are pushed to, whether they want it or not, to have to deal with more uncertainty, more ambiguity. Speed of change has accelerated so much that literally, you know, what was enough yesterday may not be enough today in terms of, for example, keeping your your skills up to date or being cutting edge. It is really a very different time from, let's say, 10 years ago. Now, in terms of career, how has this manifested? Now I would say, particularly last two years, the effects of delayering and mass redundancies that have been going on are now really being felt. So I regularly check on stats and so forth when I prepare to talk about my webinars, and the number of people out of work or who have lost jobs or even have taken voluntary redundancy has been at an all-time high. We're talking millions around the world and hundreds of thousands across Europe and the UK, and just in the US is probably around a million mark, if not more. All of this has created an unprecedented landscape when it comes to work and career. So, on one hand, we have a massive pool of highly qualified, specialized, even experienced and senior people in the market. And we have organizations, companies restructuring, shifting their focus, reallocating the resources into AI and technology development in general. Now they're still recruiting, but at the moment it seems like there's still quite a big mismatch between the supply and the demand. That makes it a very volatile and difficult market, both for people who are still working but are operating more from the place of fear. Will I lose my job? Like everyone else around me, and those who actually have lost their job. So to just to sum up, it seems to me, and working with my clients, they still get results, even from most difficult situations, but it seems like everything is twice as hard and it takes at least twice as long as it used to be.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

I guess the question that follows: do you have maybe an advice for people out there that either are going through this transition, or as you said, maybe that they just fear that they're gonna lose their job? What would you tell them?

SPEAKER_03 10:17

I wish I had the magic bullet answer. There are several things actually, which I would advise to everyone, even if the situation was wasn't as dire and difficult as it is now in today's world. The first one is really to keep anchored in self-awareness, to be aware of who you are and what is it that you truly want. Now, that in itself is work that requires a lifetime in that, in my opinion, and it is really being in touch with yourself, using information and insights from a variety of sources, both external and internal, meaning not just your logical rational thinking, but also your intuition and your emotional intelligence. Once you are in a position where you are anchoring within yourself and knowing yourself better, then it's easier to navigate turbulent times. Now, in terms of what to do and what not to do, the usual thing I would say that a lot of coaches advise is that you need to keep yourself sharp in terms of upgrading your skills, upskilling, that's for sure, in today's market. And a lot of people are doing that. What I find is very important, whether you are transitioning or not, is to keep two things going. One is your network and to keep banding your network with new people. Not necessarily in a transactional way, thinking, oh, you know, will I need this person? It's about really being genuinely curious, wanting to meet new people, learn about new people, whether that's online, offline, or in any other way. And developing meaningful conversations that are based on sharing, on sharing your value, your insight, and genuinely being interested in others. So it's a two-way stream. Now that way, you are future-proofing your career in the sense that the more people you know and the more people know you, which is also important, the easier you will be to get support, information, or whatever you may need in the future. Whilst, I need to add, very important, whilst you are enjoying making these connections and having these conversations, it's important that it's genuine and authentic rather than transactional. Now, linking to the second point, who knows you, this is about maintaining visibility and the strong personal brand so that people learn to associate you with certain things, ideas, concepts, or values that you want to be known for. So these two things in parallel I've seen with many of my clients really really give results. Whether you are okay where you are, I do see people who are happy where they are and they don't feel threatened. All the way to the other spectrum where you may be in the dumps because you know your confidence is shaken and you lost a job and perhaps you're not making any headway in finding the new one. That's what I would say. In addition to, of course, working on your self-awareness and mindset.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

That's very interesting. I will ask you a question that maybe is a little bit, let's say, out of the box. Before when you were introducing yourself, you used the word the word spirituality in the context of coaching. We talk about self-awareness, we talk about being not so much fulfilled, but being present, being aware of what you can do, what you cannot do, what you want, what you don't want. The concept of spirituality somehow comes in. And I wonder how do you incorporate these complex, maybe ethereal, kind of topic into coaching.

SPEAKER_03 13:40

I would say that depending on the client, their unique situation, also their readiness and openness to receive that kind of guidance or guidance that leans into perhaps exploring different ways of knowing and different ways of being curious about yourself and the world. So depending on that, how open they are, how interested they are, I would reach into my toolkit for some of those perhaps exercises or tools or approaches. What I notice is that maybe it is because I put that out to the world, maybe I know attract more of those clients, but I notice overall that in the echelons of corporate world, there are more and more people who are into mindfulness, into meditation, into visualization or whatever kind of practice that is, I would say, at the intersection of well-being and spirituality. There are people who don't have spiritual inclinations in the sense that they don't believe in anything external, which is fine. But there are people who do believe and who are ready to explore perhaps slightly different ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that can help on their way.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

I see, it's actually nice. I like that you use the word toolkit. So to like it depends on the situation, you might have a certain exercise approach, perspective to add to the conversation and see how people react.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

Exactly. I would say that from my personal, even though I work with clients who don't have those interests or inclinations, but from my perspective, I find both in my personal and professional life, that if we don't believe in absolutely anything, but only our power and our willpower and free will, life can be a bit more difficult. The burden of the world is entirely upon our shoulders. So if it's gonna be, it's up to me if it's gonna be, whatever the saying is. I absolutely support free will and willpower. And I believe actually that we create our lives completely, the good and the bad. 100%. However, I find it helpful. I'm even speaking here from a very practical point of view, I find it helpful to open up our minds to the possibility that there may be other forces at play that we can tap into and use for for our own well-being and success, which is working more with energy, for example, and you know, the spirit, let's say, rather than perhaps the rational mind.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

I think that we are made by flesh and it's called a spirit, but effectively we have a very rational, very logical, what we see is what we get, kind of perspective, but also like we are made of something more because we all have emotion, all have sort of like irrational, let's put it the way, feeling. So sometimes I think about why not just leverage them. We have them, why not explore them? That's a bit my two cents on these uh topics. Helena, thank you very much for your time. It's been wonderful. Where can people find you?

SPEAKER_03 16:34

Thank you. It's been a very enjoyable conversation. So people can find me on LinkedIn. My company name is What Work Career Coaching. I chose it because it talks about what work, meaning what work is ideal for me or what is my light's work. That's the message. And linked LinkedIn and my website. So whatwork.com.u on LinkedIn as Jelena Radovich.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Thank you very much, Elena. Really appreciate it. Thank you.