Reinventing yourself (with Dorie Clark)

When she was laid off from her job as a reporter, Dorie Clark promised herself that she would never let herself be in the same situation again. She set out to reinvent herself, to define what made her special, and what she had to offer the world.

Today, Dorie shares her lessons on reinvention around the world, as an educator at Columbia Business School and Duke University and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

Listen to the latest episode with JP to learn how to reinvent yourself – and catch up with JP’s conversations with the guests mentioned in this week's episode here:

Subscribe now to JP's free monthly newsletter "Positive Leadership and You" on LinkedIn to transform your positive impact today: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Hello and welcome to Positive Leadership, the podcast that helps you grow as an individual, a leader, and eventually as a global citizen. When she was laid off from her job as a reporter, the day before 9/11, Dorie Clark made a promise that she would never allow herself to be in the same situation again. So she set about defining what made her special, what she could offer to the world, and how she would always be able to find work. In short, she reinvented herself, and it's become a mantra for her and many, many people across the world who follow her online.

DORIE CLARK: When we think of reinvention, we often think of it as kind of a one-time thing, you know, "Oh, I changed careers," or "Oh, I changed jobs." But the truth is, if we want to be mindful of our reputation, we actually have to be thinking about it on an ongoing basis. And that doesn't mean we need to be obsessed with it, but it does mean that we have to be thoughtful that everything we're doing is sending out sort of micro-perceptions that people are picking up.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Today, Dorie teaches executive education at Columbia Business School, and she's a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Standout. She's also become one of the most sought-after speakers on management and branding, helping, as she puts it, "individuals and companies get their best ideas heard in a crowded, noisy world." How she does that is a big part of our discussion, along with some amazing advice on how you can become luckier in your career. I think you'll agree when you've listened to this podcast that Dorie has a curiosity about people, about the world, that's totally infectious. She even turned the tables and started interviewing me. So there's a lot of great practical advice in this episode. I'm sure you'll find it useful. Make sure you stay with us until the very end.

So Dorie, you were born in Pinehurst, North Carolina, a town famous for being the home of golf in the U.S. And you left high school at the age of 14 to attend the program for the exceptional gifted at Mary Baldwin College in Stoughton, Virginia. So with such an exceptional starting point, I wonder how your parents viewed success, the way they had expectations for you, Dorie, and the way it shaped your own values and principles in life.

DORIE CLARK: Oh, well, thank you for asking. You know, it's interesting. I never experienced any pressure from my parents about success. I mean, you hear stories sometimes, especially about people with immigrant parents or whatever. You know, “you have to have these three jobs.” “You have to do this.” “You have to succeed.” And my parents, I mean, I guess like the sort of stereotypical middle-class Americans, I mean, it was always just, “We want you to be happy.” That was really it. I was the person that applied pressure to myself. I just had a very strong internal drive. And I think some kids are like that. It wasn't that I necessarily felt like I needed to be better than anyone. It wasn't that I was competitive per se, but it was that I had a lot of things that I wanted to do. And so it was not at all coming from my parents. I feel like it was quite self-directed from an early age.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Is this gifted program you attended, was it actually a great, I would say, stimulation for you Dorie, at the time? Because sometimes I know people who've gone through that are actually going either way, right? They accelerate or sometimes they actually diverge and go to the very different paths. What happened to you?

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, it's true. My first roommate that they assigned me to left after Thanksgiving, after just maybe six weeks on campus, because she decided she didn't like it and she wanted to go back to high school, which I thought was appalling, like who wants to go back to high school? It seemed like a death sentence, but she did. So anyway, God bless, because it meant I had a single for the rest of the year. So I was very happy she decided it was not for her. But no, I mean, for me, it was a really wonderful program. I mean, it was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be able to sort of sample the riches of college. I mean, it's just, it's so interesting. I mean, college is just such a fundamentally interesting thing. I wanted to, you know, I did not really end up doing this full time, but I wanted for a long time to be a college professor, just because the idea is so magical that you go to this place and there's literally like a buffet of things you can choose. “Oh, I'm going to do Renaissance poetry,” like, how incredible? I had this sort of culture starved childhood in this little part of North Carolina, and so to be able to just kind of pick whatever you wanted to do seemed amazing to me. So it was exciting.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: It was a blast, it was a blast, yeah.

DORIE CLARK: It was totally a blast. Yeah.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: And did you apply by yourself or did your parents kind of plan for the long term for you? Because I know you're pretty deep into long-term planning as much as you are in very much short-term education as well. What about the long-term plan? Did you have any at that stage or not at all? You were just curious and avid to learn new things all the time.

DORIE CLARK: Well, I didn't necessarily have a plan all figured out, but what I knew and I felt pretty solid in this was that sticking around in high school -- and I had finished ninth grade, so it would have been three more years of high school -- really just would have been biding my time. You know, it was just waiting around for life to happen with a bunch of people that I didn't really get along with that well. And so I thought if I could just accelerate that by three years, if I could gain back three years of my life to be able to do things or to be able to be with interesting people, that felt like a great investment for me. I wasn't sure what I would do with that time, but I was pretty sure I could figure something out. I mean, I'm curious for you, Jean-Philippe, what was it like sort of growing up and being a teenager for you in France? Did you feel enriched as a teenager or were you also like, you know, you can't wait to get out? What was your experience?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: No, I would tell you, Dorie, I was probably more patient. I loved socializing with other kids in my hometown in Nice, in the south of France. At the time I loved already playing soccer, so I was playing soccer after the school, in the streets.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah!

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: And, no, I was enjoying life, just enjoying life with my family and my friends in my little city school at the time, yes. But I didn't get in any kind of gifted program at this stage, at the time, at all.

DORIE CLARK: Oh, but that sounds very nice. I mean, if you like the things that are on offer in your youth, then that can be quite satisfying. So that's great.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Tell me more about maybe your parents, dad or mom, was there any kind of defining moment or critical, you know, as some of my guests in the podcast call a crucible. You probably know this term crucible, which I like, actually, shaping moment. Any shaping moment with your family, dad or mom, that is still in your mind, Dorie, on who you are, the kind of DNA, the kind of values you drive in your life today?

DORIE CLARK: Well, I think about even just -- we were talking about the experience of my going off to Mary Baldwin College, now University, early. And one thing that I really appreciated and respected was my mom. I mean, she was very into being a mom. I was her only child. I was born when she was a bit older. And so it would have been very hard for her to let me go. You know, she was invested and it meant that things would be a little lonely for her, because, I mean, her and my dad did not have the best relationship. And I think it would have been easy under the guise of protecting me to keep me at home for another three years, you know, really to kind of entertain herself and have company. But she didn't do that. You know, she really stepped back and realized that it was the best choice for me. And I wanted to do it. And she was like, okay. And it was hard for her to do it. I was moving. You know, I was 14 years old. I was moving six hours away. It was a six-hour drive. So it was quite a while. I mean, you could…

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: It’s a big deal at the time, yeah.

DORIE CLARK: You know, you could go maybe for a weekend, but it wasn't easy. Nobody had cell phones. So it's not like she could keep very good track of me. So I think it was very selfless of her to be willing to let me go off and do that. And I appreciate that because I feel like that's kind of -- if one can say what parents should do, I think that sort of archetypally, it's like, well, you need to really think about what's best for the child, and that's what she did.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: It's obvious to me that Dorie's mother has been really empowering since the very, very early years of her development, which is wonderful because that's not always so easy for parents to do. I wanted to go back to Dori's incredible appetite for learning, because here again, her mother played a key role in allowing Dorie to pursue paths where she did not necessarily think was the right one. And she displayed the sort of long term thinking that Dorie would go on to write about in her more recent book, The Long Game. You see, Dori studied philosophy as an undergraduate and then theology at master's level. And her mom would have much preferred her to study law, but she had the ability to step back from the choice Dorie had made and realize that it was the act of learning which was more important than the actual subject and whether or not it conformed to what she wanted for her daughter. With hindsight, some people might consider philosophy and theology to be curious choices. I wondered why Dorie had gone down that road and what sticks with her today.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, I was initially, I mean, as an undergraduate, I was a philosophy major because I was always interested and I am still interested in how people make sense of the world, how they make meaning in the world. And it was just so great to be able to look into and kind of understand different thought traditions or how people thought about things in the past. I mean, philosophy has largely been banished, I think, from at least American public life. I mean, I think the French have more interest in the role of the public intellectual, but I mean, in the U.S. it's just nowhere. Everyone views it as very irrelevant. And I think that that's a shame because ultimately when you engage in it, I think in the right way, philosophy has the ultimate relevance because it's about questions about how everybody lives lives. I mean, it's true that like a lot of things, philosophy at times has gotten insular and if you read things that are produced in academia, you can understand. Everybody looks at it and it's like, well, that's impenetrable. I don't understand it. What does it relate to? But ultimately, I mean, when we think back to the time of Socrates, he was an educator. I mean, there was all of these disciples and people learning from him because it was viewed as a way of learning to engage in a productive way in the world. And it was like that with Aristotle. And so I would love to see philosophy kind of be back more in the public sphere. But anyway, that being said, when I transferred, I ended up transferring colleges from Mary Baldwin to Smith. The way that philosophy was done at Smith, which is actually how it's done in most American universities, was a little drier than I was used to. It was a little bit more in the sort of logic slash almost like a weird variation of neuroscience kind of way, which was less interesting to me. And so I found more answers to the epistemological questions that I wanted through studying religion. So I shifted over to that as I got closer to my senior year and into my graduate studies as well. Now, when you went to school, did you study business? Was it sort of like straight through or how did you get on the path you're on?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: No, I would say it was not an accident, but it can relate because my dad was a doctor. My mom was taking care of us, the three of us at home as well. And because I met a couple of times with people in the business community when I was about to make a choice, I said, well… Actually, what I said is, “I don't want to be a doctor,” because my sister was also becoming a doctor. And I said, “No, I want to do something else.” So it was more like “doing something else,” but I was also kind of interested by those kind of people who seem to enjoy actually what they were doing from an economic standpoint. And I had no idea what I was going to do, honestly, when I joined a business school, but eventually it worked well.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah. So what was the moment for you? Like, how did you finally sort of lock into what you ended up doing? Was there a specific kind of moment where you realized like, oh, this is interesting or this is going to be my path?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: No, I guess when I started to get into the theory of economies and what it means for nations in particular to develop their growth, their future, I mean, relating myself to my home country, but also other countries in the world, I was very interested by other cultures in the world -- what was going on with Russia at the time. Well, a very different Russia than today.

DORIE CLARK: Yes.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: What was going on with the US, of course. What was going on with the Eastern bloc of Europe, which was in a different place in the world as well. It was fascinating to me to understand the role and impact of an economy on providing opportunities for people and civilization to do more. So that was the trigger, really, for me, Dorie. So let me go back to your roots as well, if you don't mind, which I love the dialogue we have, obviously. You know, we've been talking a few times and you've been writing a wonderful book about reinvention, reinventing oneself. And you started your career as a newspaper reporter in Boston, which I think you really enjoyed. But at the end of the day, you got laid off, and it was a major shock. So was it the time where this idea of reinvention happened to you, Dorie? You just woke up after that day saying, oh, my gosh, what I'm going to do? Tell us about the story.

DORIE CLARK: Well, I think for me, probably the most salient reinvention lesson that I learned from getting laid off early in my career was actually that for a lot of us, myself at the top of the list, reinvention is not something you necessarily want. I mean, there's really two classes of people. I mean, there's the folks who are chomping at the bit and they want to reinvent themselves and they want to try something new and shift to a new career or whatever. And that's great. That's exciting. And then there's the rest of us where it's like, “No, I picked my thing. I worked hard to pick my thing. Why do I have to have a new thing?” and it's very upsetting. And I think that for me, I had originally wanted to be an academic, got turned down by the doctoral programs I applied in. And so then I settled on journalism and I was rather proud of myself because I'm like, oh, well, if academia isn't going to work out, this is an excellent second choice. It's interesting. It's intellectually engaging. I get to meet people and write and all these things. And so it felt like a good fit. And so to have that kind of ripped out from under me as well was like, are you kidding? Like, I just I just solved this problem. Why do I have to solve it again? And so I really tried very hard to hold on. I tried looking for other journalism jobs, but unfortunately, it was not a good time economically, and so there were none. I freelanced for a while and I kept kind of getting dragged along a little bit. People said, “Oh, well, in a few months we'll start hiring.” And then the goalposts kept moving. And so eventually a guy approached me that I knew through reporting. I had been a political reporter and he was a political consultant whom I interviewed sometimes. And he reached out. He knew I had lost my job and he said, “Well, I'm working on this campaign. Would you be interested in being a press secretary?” And I immediately said, no, I'm like, no, no, no. I want to stay with journalism. And then, you know, I thought about it for like an hour. I just like sat at my desk and I thought, wait, what are you doing? You know, you've been out of work for six months. Nobody's hiring you, like you've been trying, why don't you do it? And so I called him back and said, no, actually, I guess I would be interested in an interview. And that began the political phase of my career. But it made me realize, oh, you know, a big part of reinvention is getting in touch with reality, like really just kind of getting down to the base level and saying, how are things really and how do I adapt to that? And I think that that is cognitively and emotionally a very interesting and important journey.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah. And I think it's very interesting to talk about the two different types of reinvention, the reinvention that happens to you and you have to react somehow, and the fact that, yes, some of the people have the incredible ability to reinvent themselves, although they don't necessarily need to change. It reminds me of an episode I had with someone I think you know well, Dorie, with Whitney Johnson. And she talked about the way she applies, of course, the S-curve, the well-known S-curve, which was applied from an organization standpoint to the people. And she talked about the three phases that I'm sure you know super well. The launchpad, where we get started and it's slow, it's hard to learn new skills, new stuff. Then you've got kind of a steep curve, which is when you can start hitting the sweet spot with the rapid growth of learning. And then you get into the mastery phase when you know it all so well that it's become so comfortable. And some of the people decided it's OK to be comfortable for the rest of your life and some don't. Right? And they decided to start a new S-curve. So a new start again. So tell us more about your own modeling of reinvention. What does it look like? If it's not like an S, what is it?

DORIE CLARK: Yes. Yes. I mean, the S-curve is certainly a very useful metaphor. I mean, I really think of reinvention as being sort of three phases, essentially. The first one, to the point about kind of making friends with reality, is understanding at a deep level where you are now. You know, taking an inventory of your skills, understanding how people think about you. You know, what is your brand in the marketplace? What do people know you for? When you come to mind, what do they think? Because we need to know that if we are going to triangulate our journey. And so the second phase, of course, is really getting clear on the destination. And that involves both creating a picture of where we want to go, that's not always easy to kind of figure out, but sort of understanding, all right, at least in a provisional sense, here is where I'd like to be. And then basically working backwards and saying, all right, so what is the gap between that place and here? I may need to get extra training. I may need to network and find my way to meet people that I don't currently know. I may need to work on my reputation, because maybe my reputation is such that people wouldn't naturally assume that I could do that new thing. And I need to somehow convey to them that, yes, I can. And so really coming up with this action plan to get you from here to there. And then finally, I think a part that gets left off oftentimes is what I call sort of living out your brand or living out your reinvention. And so we need to just periodically take an inventory and say, all right, are the signals that I'm sending the right ones? Would a rational person observing me get the message that I want them to get?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I want to convey, yeah.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah. And just making sure there's an alignment there.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: That makes a lot of sense to me. And there's a lot there about being really clear on and laser focused on your long-term goals. Something that a lot of people find really helpful for this is vision boards or action boards. Having a really clear picture, literally up on the wall, of the kind of life you want to live or the things you are aiming for can improve your chances of getting there by over 40% because it primes your brain to grasp opportunities that may otherwise pass you by. For a step-by-step guide on how to create your own board, I recommend you to listen to my episode with Dr. Tara Swart and make sure you put the board somewhere you'll see a lot, like the back of the bathroom door, because you need to make thinking about those goals a habit and build it into your daily routine.

I think all of us want to have control over our lives, at least some of us do want that more than others sometimes, and where we end up where we want or close to where we want. And it doesn't mean that it's all planned out. And of course, there's always room for chance and for luck. And many of the leaders I speak to on the podcast have overcome enormous hurdles to get to where they are today, and yet all of them describe themselves, interestingly enough, as lucky. You know, I was having the Nigerian banker Tony Elumelu, who is a wonderful philanthropist now after a very successful career in banking in Africa, and he's helping 100,000 entrepreneurs in Africa. And I know that in your case, you dedicated almost a chapter of your latest book to luck and say that lucky entrepreneurs have a different personality type than other professionals. So can you tell us more about that entrepreneurial type of personality of the lucky entrepreneurs? Who are those people?

DORIE CLARK: Yes. Yes. Well, so this is a really interesting concept, and it's one that I first really started thinking about about a decade ago, because a friend of mine, Anthony Tjan, wrote with some colleagues a book called Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck. And in this book, they did a very thorough and wide-ranging survey of entrepreneurs and high-ranking executives. And what they discovered is that there are these sort of four leadership types, and it's the ones described in the title, Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck. And for the first three, you can kind of imagine, like, if you're a successful leader there's the smarts-driven ones, the sort of brainiac, let's call them the Bill Gates type, where it's like, "Oh they're so smart, they're ahead of everybody." You have the heart-driven ones that are so passionate about what they're doing that they kind of bring everyone along with them. You have guts-driven leaders where especially in these critical moments maybe the funding falls short or the launch fails or whatever, they rally everyone behind them, and people say, "Oh, wow, you know, this is a person I'm not going to abandon, we're going to do this together." And all of those are very classic leadership types where you can understand, all right, somebody can be successful by leading with this. But the fourth category I thought was especially interesting, and it was what they called luck-driven leaders. And basically, what this entailed -- of course, the nature of luck is you can't control it -- but it turns out that some people actually really are luckier than other people. And the reason is because of upstream behaviors that they engage in that have the downstream result of luck. And basically, two of the most critical are curiosity and humility. Because if you're a genuinely curious leader, you're drawing people out, you're hearing the ideas, and if you're humble, you're actually willing to learn from those ideas and learn from those experiences, and that can often be the difference between being in a room with somebody and ignoring them or being in a room with somebody and having a conversation that unlocks the perfect answer and ends up solving the problem and changing the course of your business.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I think it's so powerful, and I think it connects us back to the wonderful Growth Mindset, obviously, a book from Carol Dweck, and what all of us can learn from that in terms of the appetite to learn, how to learn, actually, all of our lives, which I love. So it actually means, I guess, Dorie, that each one of us can be more proactive rather than leaving things to chance, is what you're saying, right? And we can really nurture that appetite to learn, that humility as well, to basically become more lucky in our lives.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah. It sounds so counterintuitive to say that we can choose to be luckier, but it turns out you actually can.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah. So let's now shift gears and talk about the way to support your reinvention by telling your own life story, the way we can tell our life stories and building a narrative. I was speaking recently to Jacqueline Novogratz, I don't know if you know her, she's a wonderful CEO and founder of Acumen, a wonderful organization, on a podcast. And she gets all the fellows who come through the Acumen Academy to do an exercise that she calls the River of Life. So you start with a piece of paper, then you draw a bending river, and you mark the key moments of your life on the river, the highs and the lows at the bends of the river. So you visualize your life, in a way, and it helps you to see your life as a story that flows, which then you can share actually with others, people you love, the peer group you're working with. So I wonder if you think that creating a narrative, a life story, or putting it on paper is something that actually helps, can help each one of us to be more in control of our destiny, Dorie?

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, I love the River of Life activity, I mean, I think that's a really great one that is often really thought-provoking for the people who do it. And I do think that narrative is important. Certainly, a key part of it is for ourselves, because it can help us make sense of our past -- of course it's important for everybody, but it's especially important for anyone who's been through adverse circumstances, you know, there's kind of this very clear thing. You can either say, "Oh, how terrible, all these bad things happened to me," or you can create a narrative that says, "All these bad things happened to me, and therefore I learned X, Y, Z, and therefore I have the power to help others with A, B, C." And that's just a lot more empowering and motivating of a narrative to be able to turn the negative into something that can really help others. So I think that's crucial. But also when it comes to reinvention specifically, your narrative, your story, is so critical in terms of getting buy-in from other people. And what I mean by that is that one of the more interesting things that I discovered in the course of studying reinvention is that oftentimes, for most of us just intuitively, when we are imagining our reinvention, we make the implicit assumption that the people who are going to be our biggest cheerleaders are the people closest to us, our close friends, our family. And often that is not the case, often it's the opposite. Because they're the ones who are worried like, "Excuse me, how are we going to pay the bills here?" So they can be kind of critical. And so if you are able to create a narrative, it sounds a little weird, but to a certain extent, a reinvention is a PR job, right? And the people that you first need to convince and get their buy-in are the people closest to you. You need a story to show that you actually are serious about this reinvention, that it's not just a whim. You need a story to show that you actually can really do this, that in the new role, in the new identity, that you can perform and you'll be happier and you'll succeed. And when you have those things, you can help paint the vision for other people that can't yet see themselves. And that becomes a really crucial building block for your ultimate reinvention.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I love the way you talk about that kind of life story development and the way that each one of us can do it and can write it down, can paint it, can maybe actually connect images, pictures, and words, probably using some generative AI these days as well, to portray a presentation of your life. But I’d also love to really understand the way it connects with personal branding. You actually mentioned PR, which seems a bit shocking, to say, "Oh, come on, it's about my life story. It's not PR." But I'd like you to discuss a bit what it means. You know, I recently read a book that you may have heard about called Be by Jessica Zweig. And she said that personal branding is not an act of vanity, but an act of service, which I loved, actually. So why is it important to build a personal brand, Dorie, and how can we shape it and then practice it maybe as an act of service?

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, I think that is a really interesting frame. It's true that so many people in this sort of kind of caricature form think that personal branding is about egotism or trying to… You know, I'm reading a biography right now of George Michael. And you know, that's kind of the perfect example, right? I mean, he was unfortunately this apparently quite unhappy, closeted gay guy who really did create “the perfect personal brand” of, you know, “the sex symbol” that everybody wanted. And the more popular that got, the more miserable he was on the inside because he realized how different he was from the image he was projecting. And I think that a lot of people think of personal brand like that, like, "Oh, you're just, you're trying to be something that you're not." And of course, I mean, that's a losing game and nobody's happy with that scenario. Ultimately, with personal brand, the way that I like to think about it is it's kind of more an inside-out phenomenon in the sense that it's about, number one, getting really clear on who you are and what you can contribute, that's always a useful thing. And then number two, just making sure other people get that. Because if they don't, if there's a disjunct between who you actually are and how the world is perceiving you, then you're never going to be tapped for the right opportunities. You're never going to get the promotions you deserve or the opportunities you deserve, because other people just aren't getting it. And so we want to do our very best to try to bring those two things into alignment so that you can fulfill your potential and do the cool things and help the people that you ought to be helping.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes. I love it, and I think there's a lot more we can do, actually, for many people to, I would say, become more self-confident by developing that personal branding in a way that is not egoistic, as you said, but is actually about developing yourself. I know that you are building a lot of content yourself. You've got a strong and clear voice, Dorie, on a number of topics. I've been reading some of the content and articles you published. Can you tell us about one particular entry you did on HBR, which was about the trip you did in India for a little while in your life, which I think inspired you? Would you mind sharing a bit that story and why it inspired you so much to write that article?

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, absolutely. This is the one about going to India for a month and taking the month off?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah. Yeah.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, absolutely. So you're going back into the good archives, Jean-Philippe. I wrote that over 10 years ago.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I know. It's a while.

DORIE CLARK: Yes. That was a really interesting experience for me because I think a lot of us, especially in North America, but more broadly as well, are kind of caught up in this always-on, never-take-a-vacation kind of ethos. And there's almost like an existential concern nagging at us that, oh no, if I take off more than a couple of days in a row, oh, people will forget about us, or oh no, all this work will fall through the cracks, or oh no, my career is going to implode because I'll miss responding to that message or whatever it is. And it's quite damaging. I mean, obviously, because at a really basic physiological level, we're always in the sympathetic mode and not in the parasympathetic mode. So we've got these very high stress levels. But also in a more mental sense, we are basically just running on a hamster wheel and we're executing, we're doing things, but it's not really clear because we don't take the time for strategic thinking whether we're doing the right things. And so a lot of that actually helped, 10 years later, animate my book that I wrote, my most recent book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Because what I realized by going away to India for a month, and this being more than a decade ago, I was not totally clear with the places that I was going, if the internet connection would be any good. I was going to some kind of remote places. So I thought, I have to count on the fact that I might not be accessible. And so how do I literally just adhere to that? And it turns out that at the end of it, I really was refreshed. I really did have better ideas as a result of doing this. But I've become really interested in this question of how do you create enough space for strategy and why do we get trapped in the busyness? I even did a TEDx talk, which now it's gotten over 2 million views, which is amazing, called "The Real Reason We're So Busy and What to Do About It." And I think so much of it is just about this need for busyness as a form of status and a form of mental reassurance.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes. We'll come back to that in a few minutes, Dorie, if you don’t mind, the busyness, because I think it's still a syndrome of many of the issues we have in society and the workplace as well. You're talking and you're right about developing ourselves in a way that might appear on the surface to benefit people as individuals, but kind of self-development that's common to people who are entrepreneurs, for example. But of course, not all of us are entrepreneurs. So what does that work in the context of being an employee, as an example, and we have many listeners who are employees of small to very large organizations, what are the things that companies can learn from what you're saying in the way they manage their teams, their people at scale? What would be your recommendation?

DORIE CLARK: Yeah. Well, it's always an interesting question about entrepreneurial thinking and branding within a company. I mean, historically, and this was something that at least in the early days of personal branding, people were very concerned about, was the idea that if as an employee you were seen in any way kind of raising your profile, that was automatically viewed as a flag of like, "Oh, well, he's going to leave. He's job shopping." And the employers wouldn't like it and they would basically get jealous and crack down. And I think among less enlightened employers, that may still be the case in some areas, but I think that there's been a growing understanding that it actually can be a very symbiotic thing that if you have an employee that is out there, yes, growing their own brand and you could say promoting themselves, but doing it in the service of the company, maybe they're speaking at industry conferences, maybe they're writing for business publications, something like that, that light ends up shining on the company as well, that you are a company that fosters talent. You are a place that high profile people want to work at, and that ends up attracting even more business and even more high talent employees.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So you see that as a driving force for monetization to keep and retain and attract talents as well, to help them developing their personal branding one at a time?

DORIE CLARK: Well, I think this is something where, depending on the role, it may not be terribly relevant for a company to support the personal brand of each and every employee. But certainly, at an enterprise level, there are key positions where it is in the company's interest to really help and really provide support because there's only so many times that Microsoft or Walmart or whatever it is can be written about. But if you have this phalanx of higher level employees that are independently, oh, well, they wrote this article, they got quoted in this publication, they’re guest lecturing at this prominent university, all of a sudden you might've had one media hit and now you have a hundred because you have people representing the institution doing it. I think that's crucial. What I will say is that wherever one is in an organization, if you, the employee, want to enhance your personal brand, I always think that that is worth it for you to be working on. Because we have to acknowledge in the bargain that we strike with companies -- you know, in America, we don't have long-term contracts, it's hire and fire at will, and that is the strength of our economy and it is also, it certainly can be a weakness. I know this from experience that at 3:59 on Monday when I was working at the newspaper, I had a job and at 4:01 on Monday, I did not. So it's a really good idea to not get too comfortable and assume that the thing you're doing is going to last forever. We have to be very Buddhist about it, right? We have to assume impermanence and if we assume impermanence, we can be pleasantly surprised when we end up spending a happy 20 years at a company. But it's always good to be thinking, all right, have I kept up my networking? Have I kept up the ways of making sure that people haven't forgotten about me, just in case?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah. I love it. I think it makes so much sense in 2024, Dorie, to have this balancing act between every individual employee's development, fulfillment, growth, including their own branding and their own voice, actually, in alignment with the company's mission, in alignment with what they do. You know, another great example is Paul Polman, who was the former CEO of Unilever and he's doing a wonderful work with IMAGINE, it entails a social and environmental transition. And he reminded me about the exercise that Unilever still does today, which is a purpose workshop for every new employee coming in to get to know what is their personal purpose in life. And it connects that back to the company's mission, to the company's vision as well. So I think both are very complementary in the way we elevate every individual, every person a potential with the company's mission and accomplishment. I’d love to come back to the “busyness,” because I love this word, and because we've been all obsessing, I'm reading myself on time management, how precious is my time. And we all know that it's something that actually needs, in a way, a reset in the way we think about time management. So can you actually maybe educate the listeners, all of us, on Dorie’s busyness or I would say lack of busyness maybe, mastering the most precious resource you have beyond your health, which is your time, Dorie, how do you do that?

DORIE CLARK: Well, I struggle just like everyone does, for sure, Jean-Philippe. But I certainly have put a lot of thought into it because for a long time I was working all the time, seven days a week, and you get in habits. And honestly, during certain periods of time, that's a great skill to have. When I was working on a presidential campaign, we worked seven days a week. You had to, because the news cycle is seven days a week. But what enabled that, and I think this is the crucial thing, is that there was an election day, and after that election day, you were not working seven days a week. It was like you have a sprint, you get to the finish line and you either win or you don't, but you know that you're going to have a break.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: A target date.

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, exactly. And the problem with so much of modern life and modern business is there's no finish line. You could be working seven days a week for the rest of your life, and intellectually, we know that's unsustainable, but it's very hard to sort of snap ourselves out of it. But one of the concepts that I actually talk about in The Long Game is this concept of thinking in waves. And just like we have circadian rhythms that govern our bodies on a day-to-day level, you know, okay, now's the time we sleep, now's the time we are more active, we need to think about that in our professional lives as well. It's natural that, okay, there's a big project launch, something like that, great. You're working all the time, you're all in. But we have to be mindful that it's not going to work if we don't also give ourselves the dip and allow us to feel okay taking a little bit more time for rest or for recalibration afterwards. The system's going to break and we need to think about that and build that into our plans.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So how do you build both that long-term plan view that you take, Dorie, in your book clearly, and kind of the day-by-day, weekly and monthly habits of managing your time? Can you reconcile the two dimensions of long-term and every day, every week, when you wake up in the morning, how do you deal with that?

DORIE CLARK: Yeah, I mean, this is certainly the perennial question. I think that what trips a lot of people up, and I've of course studied this a lot, I've had a lot of conversations, is that many times people think that they need to have a much more precise, kind of granular plan than they do. They assume they have to map things out and have charts and timelines and things like that. I'm actually a fan of much more impressionistic activities because it allows you to go with the flow a little bit more, but I'll give you a precise example. So starting as early as the end of 2015, I had just a crazy travel year that year. I had launched this book called Stand Out, and I gave 74 talks that year. I was traveling around, it was about 1.5 talks per week. Most of them were not in my city, so I was traveling everywhere. And at the end of the year, you know, it's Christmastime and I'm like sick and I'm miserable and I just realized like, "Oh, this is too much. I can't keep this up." And so I decided then that I wanted to try to shift my business and my activities into doing more things that were passive income, by which I mean things that, unlike speaking, don't require my physical presence. So I started to make some concerted choices. So I developed the following year an online course called Recognized Expert, which I've been running this course in community ever since. I've done online learning for many places, including a ton with LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes, yes.

DORIE CLARK: So I wanted to sort of gesture in that direction. So I would say that's a big sort of long-term like, okay, the intention is more passive income. But then we think about the kind of granular goals. So for the first half of 2016, my goal was, okay, I haven't ever created my own online course. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to spend the first half of the year launching my own course. And that became the kind of big picture thing for that chunk of time. Now, of course, that wasn't the only thing I did. I still had to have meetings. I still had to respond to emails, but I had a big picture intention. And similarly, I've kept that up. I think there's only so many goals you can pursue at a time, but I literally just last night concluded the launch for – you know, every year I do a sort of big launch around the Recognized Expert course and we just concluded that -- so that was a big focus of the last several months. But now I can move on to other elements of it. So I think it's, okay, I have an intention, and then I have one or two things, no more than that, that I try to accomplish in a six-month period. And then there's the day-to-day mishigas we all have to do.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I love it. I love the way Dorie talks about active and passive outcomes, and passive income as well. Businesses and leaders need that light and shade, the slow and the fast, because there are some activities that need agile responses and others, like strategic planning, which needs more time, and we have to be alive to those differences. The slower things might seem more time-consuming, but they're actually time-releasing. And so we can maybe balance our time accordingly so that we are not on as a machine all the time like crazy.

DORIE CLARK: I'm curious, Jean-Philippe, what do your days typically look like? How do you structure things?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Well, I've been somewhat probably too much, I would say, maniac about numbers and data, because I've been quite educated in that culture, Microsoft, for many, many years of my life. And I've been trying to chart my time for so many years because I was doing a number of crazy things, and I was trying to fit all of that together. I've reset a little bit my system as well. Now, number one, I'm privileged to pick the activities and the people I love the most to work with and spend time with, all my time. And I've got just a few buckets of the big things I want to get done around the big themes, which are pretty much aligned with a mission on youth, on entrepreneurship, tech, education, and all of that feeds, in a way, my days and weeks. And then I will take on a couple of big projects every year that I love to accomplish as well, to keep growing, keep learning. Anyway, that's kind of high level.

DORIE CLARK: I like it.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So we’re almost coming to an end, but before we conclude, Dorie, I'd love you to share a number of your daily practices and habits to keep that wonderful smile you’ve had since the first minute of this podcast. And I can tell my listeners, it's not fake, because we had another call together before and you're really smiling all the time. And that's part of the positive leadership to me, actually, the way you generate your own positivity. Can you share with me, with us, what you do? I know you are sharing the same also, focus on our sleep, I think you’d be members of that.

DORIE CLARK: That's right. That's right. We're team [OVERLAP 00:48:43].

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes. Tell us more what you do in terms of your health, your body, your mind, and your sleep and all of that, Dorie.

DORIE CLARK: Aha, well, thank you. I mean, I'm not somebody that is incredibly rigorous about a daily schedule. I mean, I know there's some people who they've got their miracle morning checklist and "Did I do my gratitude at 5 a.m.?" And I respect that, but I'm not quite wired that way. But I would say there are some cornerstones. And these are things that I didn't necessarily always do, but I've had to learn over time. I mean, one, just at a really basic level, is looking at my schedule and being mindful as I'm scheduling things to leave a break so I can actually have lunch. I used to not do that. I used to, like, forget sometimes, and then I would just be miserable in trying to, like, when the person looked away on the Zoom call, I'd, like, turn around and, like, try to stuff a banana in my mouth. I mean, it was just embarrassing. But now I actually have limited and I've capped this for myself and I've told my assistant, I've capped the number of meetings that I'll do in a day. I won't do more than five meetings unless something is, like, an absolute emergency, because I realize that my efficacy just fades after a while. And so if I can't be genuinely sharp for it, I should push it to another day. So because of that, I'm able to make sure that I have time baked in so that I actually can eat and keep the physiological systems at a reasonable level.

You know, another thing that I've become quite a big fan of, which I think is so interesting, is saunas. It turns out that there's such incredibly robust research, notably out of Finland, which is where they're most obsessed with them, but unlike most things in the health world where it's like, "Well, we don't really know," I mean, it's just such basic stuff, "We don't really know what's a healthy diet," like, they don't know anything. But one thing they actually do know through rigorous studies is that regular use of saunas, and it is pretty regular, it's like four times a week plus, there's a dramatic impact on your cardiac health, which is amazing because it actually can be a fun and social thing rather than like a hard-working kind of thing. So that's been one of my hobbies that I've been doing a lot of lately.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: You do multiple saunas per week now?

DORIE CLARK: I do, I do actually, yeah, and I'll bring my book in. It's two for one, Jean-Philippe, I'm reading my George Michael biography in the sauna, it's amazing.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: The more I listen to you, Dorie, the more you seem to become European, actually. You are having lunch like French people, you're having some breaks like we love having in France as well, you know, we take five weeks of vacation, which I know Americans look at us as crazy people, and now you take saunas like the Finnish as well, and others, so welcome to Europe.

DORIE CLARK: Ha, ha! Well, thank you, yes, I will raise a glass of Bordeaux to that.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Now my very last question, Dorie, you're someone who is continuously, obviously, evolving and reinventing yourself in your work, in your life. And as we met prior to the podcast, I mean, you told me about a super exciting new project you've been working on since 2016, so I'd like us and you to finish, what is the next transformational change for Dorie that you're looking to embrace right now, which is going to surprise the world, and we should put that hold on our calendar when it comes out, please, share with us.

DORIE CLARK: Well, thank you, Jean-Philippe, I appreciate it, and this is a journey. I don't believe in just sharing things after the fact, when they're all cleaned up, I like to share them in real time. And so in my book, The Long Game, I actually write about this journey, but starting in 2016, as you said, I decided that I would create a goal for myself of learning to be a musical theater writer, which was not something I had ever done before, I had no experience, literally zero, but I started doing it. And I'm a big believer in the saying that we overestimate what we can do in a day, and we underestimate what we can do in a year, and I thought, well, that's even more true if we think we underestimate what we can do in 10 years. And so I really believed that I could get from zero experience to extreme proficiency in the course of a decade if I applied myself assiduously. So we are now at year 8 out of 10, I have been working on this, I have now written multiple musicals, and one of them has continued to advance. As we're recording this, in about 10 days I'm going to be going to Ohio, where the show, it's called Absolute Zero, has its first university production, and we actually just recently found out that there's gonna be a production, a workshop production this summer at Vassar College in New York at their Powerhouse Theater, which is a pretty well-respected developmental place. It is where Hamilton, in fact, had a developmental run, which is very cool, so we're working on it, we're working toward Broadway.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Whoa, Broadway! I'll make a note on my calendar to see that show. The sky's the limit for Dorie. Who knows what she'll turn her hand to next. A woman of many talents with such solid and practical advice for developing your personal brand, being clear on who you are, and what you can contribute, and making sure you communicate it to others. And I love what she says about busyness. You know, we can all take the opportunity to be more impressionistic with our time. Who would have thought, too, that you could actually engineer your luck, you've just got to start by being curious and humble. Thank you so much, Dorie, it was, again, a delightful experience being with you.

DORIE CLARK: Jean-Philippe, merci beaucoup, and it was such a pleasure.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I'm Jean-Philippe Courtois, you've been listening to Positive Leadership podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, then please do leave us a comment or rating. And if you'd like more tips on how to develop your positive leadership practice, then head over to my LinkedIn page and sign up for my free monthly newsletter, Positive Leadership and You. Thanks so much for listening, and goodbye.

Positive Leadership

Reinventing yourself (with Dorie Clark)

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