Creating Success From a Career Challenge

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Bonnie Saint John. Despite having her right leg amputated at age five. She became the first African American ever to win medals in the Winter Olympics competition, taking home a silver and two bronze medals at the 1984 Winter Paralympics in Innsbruck, Austria.

Bonnie graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, and served in the white House as director of the National Economic Council during the Clinton administration. She has been featured extensively in both national and international media, including The Today Show, CNN, The New York Times, and many, many others. Bonnie, I'm so honored. I know how busy you are that you took the time to help us better understand how to take obstacles, which clearly you've done so well, and turn them into something beneficial.

Bonnie St. John: Right. Well, it's a fascinating topic to me that I'm very passionate about. Excited to be here.

Anita Brick: I think it's one that you and I share that passion for. So the first question actually is from an executive MBA student. And she said, when caught in the state of inertia, stagnation seems to be my primary state. I'm not able to really work out of it right now. What would you suggest that I do to get myself going again?

That's a tough first question to start with. We're Chicago based. Take the hard one first. You know, it's interesting. You look at my resume, which you just read out, and I've done all these things and you would think, oh, well, here's somebody who's never had inertia or stagnation. I have gone through periods of that and burnout too.

Bonnie St. John: I wrote a lot in Live Your Joy about going through a period of real burnout and exhaustion and getting through it. And I guess what I would say from a really authentic place is when you're in that place, it's not that easy to get out, right? And it takes time. But I would recommend getting sleep, exercise, meditating, and doing a lot of things for your health.

The other time that I was really in stagnation and I was dealing with healing from emotional issues, from the abuse in my childhood, I had to work some of those things through before I could get to the other side, and it was very frustrating because I would set goals and then I wasn't interested in them, and then I would set different goals and I wasn't that interested in them.

It was a very difficult time for somebody who's really goal oriented. So you have to be patient with yourself, but I think you can keep pushing. Try to find something that you're passionate about, but if it doesn't work, be forgiving. So I kept tackling the problem, but I was forgiving of myself. If it doesn't always work, don't just give up and go, oh well, I'm inertia.

Anita Brick: I would totally agree because sometimes we can get into this. Okay, I'm all on or all off, and sometimes it is those tiny little actions that are important to us. I'm a big believer in and I know you and I talked about this a long time ago when we, when we first connected, had this motto, if at first you don't succeed, do something with less momentum. You can reverse the momentum if you do something that is accessible. And I also think you need to have people around you who don't criticize you for not moving, but help.

Bonnie St. John: Nudge you along. That's the thing too, is that beating yourself up can often become more debilitating than anything else that's going on. So. So when I say be forgiving, don't beat yourself up about what's going on, because that's definitely not productive.

Anita Brick: So nice segway into a question from a weekend student. And he said, this past summer I did an internship. I had an argument with my boss and I didn't apologize. Honestly, I didn't see the need to. Clearly, this was my mistake because I didn't receive an offer. How can I use this blunder for greater success in the future?

Bonnie St. John: That's a great question, and it's nice that they can be candid about what happened. If I could actually talk to the person, I would love to ask what they see as the blunder? Do they see the blunder as simply not apologizing so they could get a job even though they didn't meet it? You know.

Anita Brick: It's interesting.

Bonnie St. John: Is there a deeper reflection when they say the blunder? So really processing what happened? I guess I would say the larger issue is you're going to have many years in the workplace doing your career and being able to understand the environment, have political savvy about what's going on and about who is in charge and what they need to feel comfortable with you, to give you authority, to have confidence in you, to rely on you.

Not just sucking up to somebody, but how can you make them feel like you're really on their team? If you want to be on their team, you know you can call it reading the tea leaves or social skills or emotional intelligence. You know, we can call it a lot of different things. You're going to need to master some of those skills.

Some people are intuitively better at them than others. I am not necessarily somebody who is intuitively great at those things, but if you're not intuitively good at it, you're going to want to find some mentors and coaches to help you with soft skills and reading the tea leaves and understanding how you need to network. Put it in that larger context of that's a real sign that you are going to have to work harder in this area of political savvy in order to have the career that you deserve.

Anita Brick: I would certainly agree with that. And I think it's a good point, because you never get very far if you don't have that interpersonal savvy. And sometimes it takes making mistakes along the way. There was actually another weekend student who said, I have an opportunity to present to senior leadership in my company, and I'm scared I will fail, as I did in the last job. When I presented, I actually froze in the middle of the presentation and I don't want that to happen again. What would you suggest?

Bonnie St. John: Practice. Practice, practice? Absolutely. One of the things that will happen is by overly focusing on freezing the last time that's going to make it worse, we tend to program ourselves with what we're saying over and over in our head. And if you're saying don't freeze, don't freeze, don't freeze, your brain is going to hear freeze. So it's really important to focus on what you do want to do and not what you don't want to do.

It's really important to practice the presentation. When I was working in the white House, I was only about 30 years old and I had to give a big presentation to a very senior group, a number of cabinet members and their senior staff. I was frightened out of my mind and my boss forced me to practice in front of him, and I'm so glad he did that because I needed to do that.

And I probably wouldn't have practiced enough because I was so nervous. I was spending all my time changing the presentation and doing things instead of practicing. So practicing is key. Focusing on what you do want to do. I want to be articulate. I want to be clear. I want to be eloquent. I want to be confident. I want to know my material, all those things, you know, mentally focus on what you want and maybe find somebody who can give you some feedback and coach you a little bit too.

So you're not just practicing alone, but you're actually practicing in front of somebody. I think if you do those things, you know you will do well. You may not be the greatest presenter in the world. You'll have a solid performance.

Anita Brick: I agree, I am really important in getting the feedback, but it sounds like what's happening is there's a little doubt creeping in to that weekend student, which dovetails with a question from another executive MBA student who said, doubt is one of my biggest challenges. I know this stems from wanting to break into a new field, which I will never do if I keep the doubt really close to me. Thank you in advance for your help. How do you begin to dissipate or pivot out of doubt?

Bonnie St. John: Well, the opposite of doubt is confidence. And again, you and you here. This is a theme you're hearing. Anita two is well let's focus on what we do want to talk about. So let's talk about confidence. I always say confidence is a muscle. So it's something that you can strengthen. The more you use it the stronger it gets.

Earlier you said if you first you don't succeed, do something smaller. If you can find small ways to exercise your confidence, you know you can get bigger and bigger. We interviewed for How Great Women Lead. My daughter and I wrote the book together and we interviewed the president of Liberia, and she is so courageous. You know, she's a Nobel Prize winner.

She's the first woman to be democratically elected president on the continent of Africa. She's been jailed. She's been nearly killed. She had to flee the country several times. She keeps going back to school courageous. And we asked her, you know, how do you do that? And she was essentially saying, you know, you take your first risk, take your first challenge, and you move forward and it makes you stronger.

And eventually you reach a place where fear is not a factor. So she's saying, no one starts with all the confidence they need. You build it by stepping forward and trying some things, and maybe you can volunteer or take an unpaid internship where you can prove your skills in this new field, they said. The issue is breaking into a new field. Show that you can do things in that field, you know, and build up your confidence piece by piece so you can get stronger over time.

Anita Brick: So important, because you see this, there are people who say, okay, I'm going to work out two hours on Saturday, two hours on Sunday, and by halfway through the workout on Saturdays, they're done as opposed to the person who maybe takes a brisk walk 20 minutes a day just to get that momentum going. How do you know where to start this one?

Bonnie St. John: We brought this up a couple of times and it went small. Have you seen Tiny Habits work by that professor at Stanford? Because he talks about that and he does these charts where he explains the science between why tiny habits are important. I was like, oh, I was looking at this chart and I finally got it. What he's saying is, most of the time when we're trying to do something hard, we have to stay motivated.

Small habits require very little motivation, and so you can do them, and then you can build another small habit and another small habit and another small habit. And eventually you have a big habit. His work really goes to the point of sometimes by starting a small, repeatable habit, you can end up creating something much bigger than if you try to grow big and you just can't do it.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right when you think about any big changes that have occurred, things look like they were an overnight sensation. But they were. I was chatting with someone and he was telling me about a company that he started. People look at it and they're like, oh yeah, he IPO and did all this. And he was like, Anita, it took ten years.

People look at the end point, but they forget that there were just all these small things that we had to do over and over again. So I think that's a very, very good point. If we could switch gears just for a little bit. And Allen said, hi, Bonnie, I've had a solid career for over 15 years working with three companies during that time.

The last four years have not been so good. I've worked at three different companies. One was a bad choice on my part, and the other two had a contraction and let go of more than 10% of staff. I feel like I haven't accomplished much in the last four years, and I'm not sure how to position this because I don't want to look like a failure.

Bonnie St. John: Well, I think one thing to think about there is that that's not going to be an uncommon story that a lot of companies have contracted and let people go. Don't take it as personally as you might. Don't internalize feeling bad about it. Try to focus on again what was good about it. What even though you were in places for a short time, what were you able to accomplish in that short time?

Or what skills were you able to grow? Or when something goes wrong, there's something good that can come out of it. Steve Jobs, in his famous graduation speech, talks about how he dropped out of college, but he stayed there like he stayed in his friend's dorm or something, and he just started going to classes even though he wasn't registered.

And he said as a result of that, he took a calligraphy class, which he never would have taken as part of his major and was, you know, just so fascinated by it. And when he started working on creating personal computers, he was interested in fonts and style. So he created a beautiful interface, which was natural for most geeks to do.

So I guess I'm just saying this person may have jumped around and had several different jobs, but what is the gestalt of that? Do they have an interesting perspective because they've seen disparate things over a short period of time. What is the advantage they got? What are the skills they got? Let me make another comment here too. And there's a number of issues about setbacks and confidence.

A lot of the research said women struggle more with confidence than men. There's this story which many of you have probably heard, that if there's a job opening and it has ten requirements, a woman who has 8 or 9 may say, well, I'm not qualified, I guess I shouldn't apply. Men will apply when they have three and say, I can do it three out of ten, you know?

Wow. Studies show we tend to be less confident. If you ask people coming out of a test, what was your score? Men will tend to overestimate what they got. Women will tend to underestimate. I want to filter the information too. I don't know what the gender of some of the questionnaires is, but when somebody is saying, you know, I had these three difficult assignments from my last three jobs, how do I position them in the future?

Women are more likely to focus on trying to explain what went wrong for their next employers. Men don't do that. They tell you what they did great. There was one example. They were one of the consulting companies was saying, if you're getting to your annual review and you had seven projects and six of them were great, and one of them blew up and, you know, went down the toilet, women will stand there in their annual review and talk about how they could have done the one differently.

Men will talk about the other six. Now, the caveat for that is if you're interviewing with a woman, you should consider a balance. You cover a little bit about what went wrong because she'll think it's more genuine. But if you're interviewing with men, maybe you should just focus on what is positive because that's what they would do, right?

Anita Brick: Good point.

Bonnie St. John: So sometimes I think I worry too much. How do I explain the mistakes or what went wrong is a lack of confidence and it tends to be more women. I'm sure there's men who do it too, but I just learned.

Anita Brick: Got it. There were two questions and they were kind of the opposite sides of the same coin. So to speak. But the first one, and there were a couple of here, too, were about feeling that they were overqualified and too old. One person said, I am being told that I am overqualified and believe that this is code for being too old. I can't change when I was born. What would you advise me to do to use this vast experience in a positive way?

Bonnie St. John: It's an interesting issue because I think the younger generation coming up often looks at people older than them, like people. You're version two and I'm version 4.3. You're only often younger people thinking, well, your experience isn't relevant anymore. The world has changed. I think maybe that view undervalues wisdom and experience, but there is some truth in it too.

The world is changing very fast, and if you don't understand social media and new networks and a lot of things that people are concerned that you may not be able to adapt to, I would say one way to combat some of that prejudice would be to make it very clear that you are adapting and that you are adaptable and that you're taking on new skill sets that normally wouldn't be associated with somebody your age.

And it's almost like you probably have to bend over backwards to prove it, but you can do that. And so if you need to take a course or again, work in a community group or take an internship where you get to demonstrate facility with something that people really wouldn't expect from somebody in your age group. I think that that could help combat some of that prejudice, particularly if you are able to have cutting edge skills in your field, you're not going to worry about your age if they need what you got.

Anita Brick: I see that it can go the other way too, which was the second question, which is from an evening student, and she said, my obstacle isn't a failure, but really a limited amount of work experience. Two years to be exact. I want to find a job with less travel so that I can focus on school, but it doesn't seem to satisfy HR in screening interviews. I welcome your suggestions.

Bonnie St. John: Can I don't know the person, but I have to say, even just from hearing that question, the bias that comes up for me is when I'm interviewing somebody and they're telling me all about what they need and they seem less focused on what I need. I'm very frustrated by that.

Anita Brick: And maybe that's the problem. Well, I need less travel. Well, what are you going to do for me as the employer? What are you going to do?

Bonnie St. John: To provide if I'm in the interview, hearing all about, you know, what they need? And does this job require a lot of travel? Well, does it have this 30% or does it have 35%? I'm going to be concerned that they're not really committed. I want to see you come into the interview and be very committed to what I need you to do in the job. It's fine to get what you want, but to spend too much time up front asking about it, is going to sabotage chances.

Anita Brick: Yeah, I agree, so here are a couple of questions about making mistakes at work. One was from an evening student who said I made a mistake at work and was fired. I was only in the role for six months and it still haunts me. I know that I would do things differently and yet can't seem to articulate this credibly, and certainly I'm not doing it. Consequently. Help. And thank you.

Bonnie St. John: You know again that one sounds to me like maybe they're trying too hard to articulate their mistake and maybe they don't need to be articulating it as much as they do. I would recommend finding a mentor, somebody who has some wisdom, maybe even a little gray hair, and practice with them about how to do this. Often in our own mind, we're so hung up on what happened and still replaying the video of the car crash.

We can't explain it succinctly and without emotion, and you want to be able to explain why you left your other job honestly, succinctly and clearly. It may take a bunch of run through with somebody whose objective is to get you to that place. Another thing you could do is go back to the place where you made the mistake and talk it through with somebody there to just to say, you know, what could I have done?

Here's what I think I should have done. What do you think I should have done that could help them just process some of what happened and get rid of it? Sometimes it's the trauma kind of replaying inside that you can't really paper over very well. So just cleansing it out makes it easier to go forward.

Anita Brick: I don't know about you, but sometimes I make myself feel worse by losing some of the accuracy or the facts about what actually happened and infusing too much of the emotion. So maybe one way to do it is to, if you can, and it's appropriate to go back and see what you could do differently. But even talking to one of us about.

So sometimes it's good to not divorce yourself from the emotion, but to separate it out a little bit so that you understand what the real facts are, and it's often easier to let it go. There's another related question. This is a weekend student, and he said, I did some research about you and wow, you are amazing. That's it.

My talent seems almost insignificant given what you've gone through, but here I go. Anyway, I took a job almost a year ago and then an old nemesis was hired and he's now my manager. Last week he put me on a performance plan, and I don't think he wants me to ever get off that plan. What would you recommend that I do to turn around a situation where there is old baggage in the relationship?

Bonnie St. John: You know, it's interesting. I've coached a number of people in a workplace setting through similar situations. There's a lot of variations in how this can occur. I would try multiple approaches at once, only knowing the surface. Do your absolute best to make the relationship work, so do your absolute best work. I know somebody who was in this situation where they just knocked it out of the park, so much so that the person simply couldn't talk to them, and they were eventually moved on from that boss and were able to do things, but they just did an inhuman perfection of work.

That's one way to do it. Another thing I would say is to embrace changing the relationship with that person. There's something you can Google actually called ABCd reframe. I think it's ABCd reframe from cognitive theory. It just helps you to walk through how you change your beliefs about the situation. We have beliefs about that person and their behaviors and their motivations.

Sometimes those trap us into outcomes that we don't like. And so one of the ways to change the tug of war that's going on between the two people is for you to shift your beliefs about why that person is doing what they're doing or what they're trying to do to you. If you can change your beliefs, you can change your own behavior, and sometimes not always, that will shift the relationship.

But it can be as little as this is your nemesis and you feel like they're really not being helpful to you to go in and say, I think they're really trying to be helpful. Let me listen to the advice and do what they say. Let me try to have forgiveness. Let me try to pour goodwill into the relationship and see what happens so you can do your best possible performance.

You can change the emotional firing in the relationship. And the third thing I would say is start looking for other opportunities too. So that could be inside your company or outside your company and look for what your other options are and do it in a, you know, a tactful and quiet way. So if you're working on those fronts, something's bound to work for you.

Anita Brick: Agree. And if you have other options, it takes the pressure off from the current situation, too. There was an MBA student who had sort of a variation of these last two questions. He said. My company recently merged and my position was eliminated during interviews. Hiring managers want to know why they were not offered another position in the company. They don't respond very well because I wonder this myself. Any advice? Appreciate it. Thanks, Bonnie.

Bonnie St. John: This was another one where I was thinking about it, and I think it's a good idea, if you can, to go back to the old company and try to have some confidential conversations there. H.R. Or somebody that you trust and try to find out more about what happened, you may find out that they really did try to put you in several roles, and it didn't work.

And then you'll have a good explanation about how they really valued me. They really tried. And here's what happened. Or you may be sure, to some extent, that you weren't a team player or your skills weren't right or something like that. And that's something you can also use and learn from too. So either way you'll learn something. But what I hear in that question is lack of closure.

It's your internal confusion that's making you not present yourself very well. So finding closure internally can then help you to move on and just be able to answer the question in a confident way. And when you answer questions like that in an interview in a confident way, it doesn't necessarily mean you're telling them the whole story. You can tell them the truth and tell them in a succinct and professional way, without giving them the whole saga. People don't necessarily want to hear the whole saga. In the interview, getting the saga sorted out for yourself and then focusing on how I present myself would be two steps.

Anita Brick: I agree, very good points. Do you have time for two more questions?

Bonnie St. John: Sure.

Anita Brick: Okay, great. And executive MBA students and I'm facing a big personal challenge at home. And I don't want this to derail my career in the process. Any advice on how others have managed this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Bonnie.

Bonnie St. John: Again. That's a really big question. That's hard to answer with all I know, but I can think of different examples. I know a woman who was in a management role and her mother was dying. She talked to her leader and had some conversations about it, and they figured out how to work around it. So it was really good communication, really good support and making it work.

If you're not in a supportive environment, that can be harder. I know one woman who turned down a promotion because there was something going on at home, but she was very clear when she did it, she said, I have always wanted this promotion. I can't do it right now. But in its time frame, can we work to make sure that I have a similar opportunity again, as opposed to just turning it down?

I think a lot of times the answer is good communication and honesty, and that usually is premised on good performance. If you've had really good performance up to this point, and people want to keep you on and be flexible and if you don't have that at a company, maybe you should be thinking long term about how to shift to a company where they value your performance so much that they're able to work with your needs for flexibility.

Anita Brick: I've seen it just like you have, that when we have strong communication and it's backed up with strong performance, people want to make things work. And I think today, probably more than ever, there are different ways to work and sometimes it means a day at home or working from home or other options. And I think with technology it allows for different things. And I also know you need the emotional bandwidth to handle that too. So I totally agree with you. If you can have that conversation and the support is there, that is really the best way to go. It really is. You've given us a lot of really wonderful advice and I love your perspective. It's not about always making a case.

It's really about that engagement and self honesty, which leads to trust on the other side. One of the things we like to do at the end of an episode is to kind of summarize in a way. So if you're thinking of 2 or 3 things that someone can do if they're in the midst of the obstacle, not really sure where to go. What are some things that you see work over and over again for people? What would your top three be?

Bonnie St. John: Yes, I would say make sure that you stay in your own power. So not even just confidence, but in your own power. You get to define what success means for you. You need to be aware of how success is defined in your job, in your company, and be very aware of that. But you also want to. When you have a setback, you can redefine it as an opportunity.

If you're defining yourself and not letting yourself be defined by others. I mean, that's such a classic thing for me to say. I'm the one legged black skier from San Diego who had no money, so I let other people define me. I certainly wouldn't have become a ski racer. So the ability to imagine your own future and what you want to be creative and enlist help to get there is key for overcoming setbacks.

Because if you let yourself be defined by the setback or defined by other people's opinions, then you don't have the power to move forward. Getting stuck in the past instead of envisioning the future is something that really doesn't serve you either. And that's what you've heard me saying over and over through all the answers is, well, how can we focus on what we do want?

Well, how can we focus on what we want to happen? How can we sometimes disentangle ourselves from the emotion that's all hung up about what's going on in the past. And I acknowledge that that's real work. You know, do the work to let it go and move on. Getting stuck from criticism and personal insults and things like that.

Sometimes we let that stuff stick to us or we get so focused on that. Focus on what you want, not on those things. People who achieve a lot have often been criticized by people who have often, you know, you look at Hillary Clinton, she's suffered so much criticism. Steve Jobs suffered so much criticism. Being a little thick skinned is critical for success.

Anita Brick: Two very good insights, really important. And you have such credibility when it comes to answering these things for the very reason you mentioned. I mean, you are a master of taking really big challenges and crafting a life that is so, so inspiring. So thank you for inspiring us today too.

Bonnie St. John: Let me give one more tip. It's interesting when you say, that is how I've done my life. And I wrote about this in the book Live Your Joy as well. When I looked at how I did what I did, one of the metaphors I came up with, and you will appreciate this in business school, is that I've always had a portfolio of goals, just like you would have a portfolio of investments.

You don't put everything in one thing. You have some high risk investment, some lower risk investments, and then you're going to get a blended return. When I look at my goals and my vision for what I'm doing with my life, I've always had some high risk things like going to the Olympics, like, okay, I'll try for that, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go and get good grades and go to college.

You have your medium risk things, and then you have a couple of blue sky opportunities, and over time, you put your effort and time and investment into those opportunities. And if something's really not paying back, you let it go. And if you know you get a little bit of success, you put a little bit more into it. I've always had a lot of different things going on, and I could tell you I've failed at so many things, but that you don't notice because I've succeeded at a few.

Anita Brick: Clearly you have.

Bonnie St. John: Clearly you.

Anita Brick: Have. Again, thank you for making the time. This is really invaluable and I really appreciate that you were able to find a little time for us today.

Bonnie St. John: Oh well, thank you, Anita. Of course, the things that people are struggling with and the questions they're asking are really valuable. I'm sure so many of the students are going to go out and do great things. We need all their potential.

Anita Brick: Absolutely. And Bonnie has referenced a couple of her books and other things. And if you want to learn more, her site is really fantastic. It is BonnieSaint john.com and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.