Erica Sosna
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
Do they like having a lot of space? Do they like to be at home? Do they like to be in the buzz of the office? Environment is all of those things, the IT, the coffee, the lot. So to what extent can both the individual and their employer gain insight and understanding about these four components, skills plus passion plus impact, divided by reducing the amount of levels of friction involved
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
between the ideal environment and the environment that they've got. That's basically the equation. The tools and the training that we use that are adopted by people like Amazon and Nomura and a number of other significant global firms is all about how do you have a conversation that focuses on these key components
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And how do you make it easy to look through the lens of the equation when you're trying to uncover what isn't quite working, what isn't quite fitting for an individual coming to work? Because all of us want to do our very best and we want to feel that our talents and skills are used in the very best way. And the equation says, look, there's a sweet spot for that.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
There are some things that you are exceptional at, that you care about a lot, that make a difference. And if you focus your working attention on those things, then both you and your employer will have a win. Both sides need to know what those are and they need to check in regularly because some of those things change as the person changes.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So it's really about equipping the entire organisation to use the equation as its lens for dialogue and to use the very simple tools that sit around it so that everyone can have a conversation where both parties quickly understand what's going on and can therefore co-design development plans and career paths and opportunities to make for that win on both sides.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And of course, the results are longer tenure, lower sickness absence, greater loyalty, higher employer engagement, better productivity, greater internal mobility, greater diversity at senior levels. All of those things arise from a very simple technology and a very easy to learn conversation. But it's the simplicity that makes it powerful.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
It takes just five minutes, as I've taken with you to explain it, and you can immediately start to apply it.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And of course, if you want to see how that works, check out the podcast, because that's a series of career coaching conversations using the equation just over and over again to give people the insights they need about the tweaks that they need to really refine their career, to sit in their sweet spot more and more often.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
It's a really good question, Vince. And in many ways, at the beginning, when people were saying so inspiring, because I was posting a bit on LinkedIn about my physio and things, because that was my work at the time. And I wanted to feel like I was in the world and that people knew what I was up to. Initially, when people started saying I was really inspiring, I can't believe it. How do you do it?
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
I can't imagine how I would do it. I was a little bit dismissive. I was, look, you don't know until you're in the situation. Of course, you would do the same if you thought there was any possibility that you could recover your function, whatever it is. I had a spinal injury, but plenty of people have all kinds of debilitating health and mental health conditions and all of that.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
Of course, you would just go for hell for leather for recovery, wouldn't you? And it took me a while to realise that the answer to that was not recovery. Yes, for everybody. So then I started to ask myself exactly this question, which is, so what am I doing that perhaps might be useful and helpful for other people to get a grip on or that they could use? And I suppose there are a couple of things.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
I think one of the things is... I do have a strong faith. I have a faith in the kind of goodness and benevolent intention of the universe I suppose like that. And that meant that I wasn't in resistance to what had happened to me. I was once taught that when something rubbish happens to you accept it as though you chose it.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
I found that to be a very helpful thing, whether that's you're being made redundant unexpectedly or you've had a loss or an illness or it sounds crackers in a way to say, accept that thing as though you chose it. But what's the alternative? The alternative is not to accept it, even though it's happening to you anyway, or to be in battle with it when you can't change it.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
Embracing the experience as though, okay, this has happened and I'm just going to accept it as though it was on my list of things to do. And then I'm going to act in response to that in a positive way. So the first was accept it as though you chose it. The second is that in your life plan and your career plan, which is the program that we run around the equation...
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
I teach this modality of starting with the end in mind, so knowing what it is that you want to accomplish, what you want to see and feel and experience, and then working backwards from that to work out how you're going to get it done so that you are left with a kind of what do I need to do today or right now that is, if you like, a penny in the piggy bank of the future, whether the future is I want to walk again or I'd like to have a child or I'd love to move countries or whatever that thing is that you want to experience.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And so I used, of course, that modality because it's always worked for me. You start by vividly imagining you having the experience. And notice that I'm talking about experience rather than stuff. So say you want the experience of traveling the world or managing lots of people. Or if we get stuck on, I want to be promoted. It's quite difficult to envisage that as an experience.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So I would then ask, if you do want to get promoted, what experience would that give you? Why do you want that? Is it more interesting work? Is it more strategic opportunities? Is it greater prestige? But you start by envisaging the experience. So for me, it was, I want to experience dancing again, cycling again, yoga again, running again, picking my child up.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And I really vividly imagined how joyful and pleasurable those moments would be. And then I worked backwards from there to say what would need to happen the week before, the months before, the year before. And what are the things that I need to start doing? And that then gave me the kind of pillars of what actions I needed to take on my emotional recovery, my physical recovery.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And to keep taking action, have a rhythm for taking action every day, a little bit every day to move towards that goal. I think the sad thing is I'm very open-minded and I love new things. A friend once told me I have an insatiable thirst for novelty, which I thought was a brilliant way of putting it. I've always just really been very interested in new stuff that's new to me.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
It may be ancient, but like new stuff to me or cutting edge or like just things and places and experiences I haven't had before. And until my injury, I'd spent very little time. I was very lucky to have spent very little time within the sort of medical model of Western medicine at all, really. I hadn't really needed any help from modern medicine.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And so I was very interested in what might exist in terms of alternative paths to healing. And I read a huge amount about that. I watched loads of videos. I read loads of blogs. I talked to lots of people. And some of the things that I introduced were things like acupuncture, something called mctimony, which is a very gentle, supportive form of chiropractic. No click clacking.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
It's really a kind of spine mechanic work. It's very delicate and effective. Something called frequency-specific microcurrent, which is 100-year-old technology for jump-starting the body by using electricity. Because for me, like a spinal injury is all about electric connections and stuff. So I tried some different things. So I think those are probably like the three things. I'm very determined.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So once I accepted it as though I chose it, I knew that it was something that I had to do. And so I was going to follow that to the nth degree. Then I made a plan that started with the end in mind, visualizing vividly and viscerally what I wanted to experience. And then thinking, if I'd already done that, what would be the story I would tell about how I did that? And from that, I devised my plan.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And then the third was the sort of willingness to be open and try things that were unconventional, perhaps less known about, perhaps outside of the medical model, and to just keep going. We have this model as well in the equation about the hero's journey. And it basically says that anything worth doing is going to be difficult and it's going to suck at some point.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
But the time to stop is either before you decide to do it or when you've exhausted all possibilities. That in fact, when you're in the middle, in the thick of it, when it's feeling really difficult and unpleasant and you're thinking, well, why did I ever take this on? It will never go the way I planned. That is not the time to give up. That is the time that is the darkness before the dawn.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And so again, knowing that map of transformation existed inside of me and that I knew it to be true, having experienced seen it in my own life and other people's just helped me to have that tenacity to keep going when it really sucked. So I hope those are practical and useful for anyone in transformation and transition.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
But I guess those are the fundamental qualities that make the biggest difference to me, I think.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you for asking it. So let me start with this. The purpose of the career equation is for both the employer and the individual to have a frame of reference and a way of talking about careers that both parties understand.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And without that, organizations can say that they have career conversations, or I could say I'd like to have a career conversation with you, my boss, my HR, whatever. But there's no consistency. There's no consistent language or shared understanding. So just like it would be ludicrous for a company to have 10 different accounting systems and nobody really be talking the same language financially.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So it also really makes sense to have one model for all the conversations that happen around careers in an organization. Right. And yes, we absolutely focus on building capacity for the employer, the person who's going to take that insight and do something with it.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
But we also want to retrofit the ability for the individual to be prepared for that conversation, to have a good conversation that they are ready for. So the equation is fundamentally about how do I understand the best ways to nourish and nurture the person in front of me so that they love working here and feel excited to stay and continue their future career here.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And so that I really get the best value out of them and the organization gives them the best opportunities to thrive. And for both parties, the equation solves this very quickly and simply. And it does it by asking four things that are useful for everybody to understand about the person in front of them. Number one, what are you naturally good at?
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
This is an unremarkable insight that we all, when we play to our strengths, we are happier, fulfilled, more successful. We have more enjoyment at work. So the first is, do I understand what this person is naturally good at that they want to be applying to the workplace? The second is about passion. What do they enjoy? What gives them pleasure and energy?
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So people do best when they are applying their skills to something that they care about. And that care could be that they feel strongly about something. It could be that they love that subject area, love geeking out on it. Or it could be a way of being, like, for example, solving complex problems or connecting people that just gives them that burst of joy when they're engaged in doing it.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So do you understand what gives the person in front of you that burst of joy? What is that sweet spot where they just feel wonderful that they're able to spend their time and energy doing this thing? The third thing is how do they measure success? We call that impact. So it's easy to assume that everyone defines success by more money, more power, more status.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
But I can tell you from thousands of conversations over and over that this is not how most people define a successful life and a successful legacy. They might use those things to keep score. They might use those as a measure, but that isn't actually how they define success itself. So do you understand what a successful week, month, year, life looks like to this person?
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
Because it's going to really help you to make sure that you tailor your feedback, your development opportunities and the activities that they're doing to that definition of success. And then the last thing is where do they do their best work? So we say in the equation that environment makes the difference. Environment is the factor that can make or break.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And that at the home office, at the government, my first job, that's what it was for me. The work was really interesting. I loved the impact it was having. I got to use my skills in research and dialogue and all of those things. But the environment was really stifling. It was really slow. It was very political. You had to be terribly diplomatic, which I was just awful at.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
And a lot of the time your work was just wasted because it was glacially progressing. And then the government would change and it was all a waste of time. And I just couldn't stand any of those things. It was really suffocating for me. And even the environment, you couldn't open the windows. That also made me feel literally really suffocated.
Chief Change Officer
#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two
So do you understand the environment in which that person does their best work? And to what extent can you set up your environment to reduce suffocation? the frictions that impede them and to enhance the environment that helps them be successful. And environment is everything from Are they a specialist? Are they a generalist? Do they like working indoors, outdoors? Do they like working at speed?
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Yeah, of course. Happy to. So I'd been running this consultancy for about four years. And I had a little boy. I still have a little boy. He was two then. And at the end of... The year in 2022, I was out driving in the snow and my car couldn't get any further.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
It stalled on a hill and I went to get out the car to get to a place of safety and walk home and a motorist hit me and dragged me under his car. I was paralyzed from the waist down. I had emergency surgery to try to save my mobility. And I was subsequently in hospital for just shy of five months, having broken 15 bones, but most seriously, my spine, and therefore damaged my spinal cord.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And so over the last 20 months, I needed to learn to walk again, to literally get back on my feet again. And I consider myself very fortunate. I know that sounds weird, but I feel very fortunate because I was able to do that. For many people with spinal cord injuries, the injury is complete. That means that it doesn't matter how hard you work to rehabilitate, the connection is gone.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Whereas for me, the connections were severely damaged, but there was an opportunity to grow and restore them. But that meant almost a year away from my business, away from my team. A year in which it was very difficult to even be strong enough to sit up, let alone carry my child or chase him anywhere. All of those things were just impossible.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And really a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, a lot of uncertainty happened. And I only came back to work in, I think, October 2020. And it's been really interesting to see where work's place is for me. Of course, I couldn't really do the work I did if I didn't love it. It wouldn't be fair to be advising other people on their careers and their career management if I didn't love what I do.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
So in many ways, coming back to work was a real solace. It was somewhere I was confident, somewhere that I was comfortable, somewhere that I was known and respected, somewhere where things were controllable.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Having had a physical injury and the recovery from that being so uncontrollable and my body in many ways becoming very uncontrollable in ways that I hadn't expected, that were very uncomfortable, very embarrassing, very difficult. But it's also caused quite a lot of reflection about, am I, life is short and time is precious. Time is short and life is precious.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Am I making the maximum impact that I could do with my work, which is all about helping people to celebrate their spirits, their capability, their potential and to live lives that feel worthwhile to them and have a positive impact.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And so what it prompted me, that's actually how the podcast came about, because I realized that the consultancy had primarily been working with other businesses and that it had been a while since I had been able to speak freely and openly with the public about their careers, about the direction they wanted to take.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And that the podcast was a great opportunity to be able to have that conversation with a lot more people on a different kind of platform. And also over the years, ever since I was a kid, I had loved Oprah Winfrey. I loved the idea of broadcasting and kind of education in the transformation realm. And podcasting seems a really natural way to be able to do that.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
alongside it really being a struggle to get the business back on an even keel. The team were amazing at keeping things going, but you need to always be growing if you're in the consultancy area. That was really been a really hard year on the business development front.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
The podcast gave me an opportunity to do business development, but in a really much more joyful way and with an opportunity to touch more people and to have more fun in a way that I had always wanted to do in my career, which was this kind of educative broadcasting. I say in my sort of career philosophy that a career is a series of choices.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
where we explore how do I align my gifts with how I spend time and make money. And that sort of tightrope of, first of all, knowing what your gifts are and knowing what gives you joy, because that can evolve and change as your life evolves and changes as your priorities evolve and change.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And then how do I spend my time consciously around that in a way that generates value and success for myself and other people? That's a kind of constant adjustment. It's a constant tightrope walk of teasing out how do I stay on course with that? And I think for me, it became clear that my work is still my work. The subject matter still really works for me. I still love it.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
But perhaps the way in which I was transmitting it needed to shift or I wanted to add something to that. And that also returning to a three-day week, so I run a business on a three-day week, was definitely all that I wanted to do, given that the job of rehabilitating my spinal cord injury is really a kind of a lifetime's work. And the job of being a good parent is also a lifetime's work.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And just in terms of what was realistic in slicing the pie of my life, that was going to be the time that I had available. Yeah, it's been an opportunity really to fine tune what really matters to me and also to really get a sense of how exceptional, I'm going to use that word even though I feel a bit shy about it, How exceptional I can be when I'm up against it.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Because in the last two years, I have gone from completely paralysed to walking again. I have rebuilt a business and launched a podcast. I have been a great parent in spite of all of those challenges and obstacles. So it really has caught me a lot of good things about myself. It's really shown me a lot of good things about myself.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And it's been interesting to see how inspiring and empowering that has been for other people to witness as well. It wasn't really something I expected, but... The outpouring of kind of generosity and support and encouragement and positive feedback has also been, you know, really an exceptional experience, really.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
It really taught me a lot about who I am and the impact that I have in the world in a way that's been very moving.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
For sure, Vincent. It's exciting to be in a careers community with you. That's how I'd describe that, I think. So I'm Erica Sosner. I'm the creator of a model called The Career Equation and a book and a podcast by the same title. I've
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
I've made it my life's work really over the last 20 years to help people connect their insides, what matters to them, what's important to them, the skills and talents that they're born with their outsides, how they spend time, how they make money, how they create value for themselves and for other people and how they learn to really enjoy their lives.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
So I guess on a sort of very simple level, I'm a careers thought leader. I've been a career coach for over 20 years and have coached thousands of people all over the world, all sorts of industries, all sorts of ages and stages to use the career equation to get super precise about what they want, how to work and to make a plan to get towards that and really align that.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
I also own a careers consultancy that does the same work, but within organisations. So helping the employer and the employee to really align around co-designing a career path that works for the person in front of them and is a win for both sides. And I guess I became interested in this, of course, because of my own career adventures and explorations.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
When I left university, I joined the civil service, the Farstream, which is the graduate program here in the UK for working with the government. It's actually the most competitive graduate scheme in the UK. And so when I got a place on it, I thought I really ought to accept it.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
But spending time just in this sort of recruitment process and the home office environment told my gut that I probably wasn't going to find a home there.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
But I had that tension between, hang on a minute, I've got this really prestigious job opportunity and no plan B. And my gut feelings that perhaps the environment and the pace of the place that I was proposing to make my career in wasn't going to be a fit. And indeed, it wasn't a fit. And so that experience made me very curious about what is it that makes work for people?
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
How do I get underneath what striving looks and feels like? And I began a sort of quest and exploration around this that took me into the personal development works, the human potential world, the personal transformation sort of field, including training as a coach over 20 years ago now, and simultaneously training as a biographical storyteller.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And I think that actually my insights and experiences about how to extract the best kind of stories from people and how to really understand the character at the heart of each biographical story has really informed the practice and the work that I do now. I fundamentally work with people's narrative, helping them to understand who they are at heart,
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And then the direction that character, the hero in their story themselves, wants to take and how perhaps some of the pieces of their previous history now make more sense looking through the lens of the career equation.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And I think most of all, whether it comes to people moving from public to private sector, working for themselves, to being employed, from moving across industries, perhaps setting up their own business, whatever transformation they want to make, I've worked with somebody to make that transformation. And quite often, I've done that transformation myself.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
I've had a lot of iterations and explorations with form in career. So I'm very excited to have a conversation with you today about those transitions and transformations and about how your audience can use the career equation and perhaps some of my experience and stories to help them to make the transitions that are most meaningful for them and to find their thriving zone at work.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Yes, of course. Sure. So in my 20s, I set up a social enterprise that was a kind of precursor for the work that I do now with the career equation. It was called the Life Project. And the Life Project was all about how do I take a
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
the insights and the self-knowledge that comes from personal development work and help people under the age of 25 to have that curriculum so that they know how to make the most of the world of work. How to take, for example, your knowledge that you like maths or history at school and go, where might I find a use for that or a home for those skills in the changing world of work
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And I really enjoyed that work. I didn't make much money from it. It was the first business that I'd run. It was in the social realms. Money was always tight with clients. But it was a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself in a
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
research and development phase to find what worked and to find programs and tools that were really going to change people's lives and transform the education space because most of us fell into careers rather than chose them. There's no set curriculum about how to discover your skills and how to spend your lifetime usefully which is mad really because we spend up to 80,000 hours at work.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
So I love that work very much. And I got the opportunity to work with many universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Sussex. I went to Berkeley in California and did some work there. I worked in India and Australia, all kinds of places, bringing what became the career equation, bringing that toolkit to a really wide variety of individuals under 25 and those who work with them.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
But then the government changed here in the UK and that had a lot of upheaval around the budgets that my clients worked with. And suddenly it was a very difficult situation for many social impact and not-for-profit organisations. So I decided that I needed to move back into the world of kind of corporate leadership management and training and to see where my skill set might find a home.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And at that time, people were quite prejudiced. If you had been self-employed or run your own thing, they really didn't think that you could hold down a job. And so I got a lot of rejections just on that basis. I had an interesting CV. I'd done some significant things. But people just didn't trust me to hold down a job. And that was very discouraging.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
So I really had to work hard to parlay who I was and what I'd done to even get a chance to talk at interview about how I might be a valuable addition. But eventually I did get a number of job offers. I took a role in a consultancy. It was very exciting to be there. It was a small consultancy, very dynamic. But leadership work was quite a sort of minority share of what they did.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And very quickly it became clear that there was a bit of a conflict between what they thought the job was going to be and the actual opportunities to do that job once I was in-house. And long story short, after six months, they decided not to renew my probation, which was devastating.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
I'd gone through life being an A student and having all these ambitious, prestigious jobs and making things happen. And then I got this very loud, resounding, like that was very discouraging. And I hadn't done what I wanted to do, which was recommence my career within the leadership realm. So I went into the pool again. I went into the market again.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And I was in a number of discussions, but one organisation was particularly pushy and they wanted to create a role for me that sounded very exciting. I went to the interview and my gut sense was, this place is chaotic. I'm not sure. But I ignored that gut sense and I took the job. And it was... Quite an experience. And because of my previous role, I really didn't want to let myself or them down.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
So I worked like a dog. I was doing 60, 70 hour weeks every week. The CEO had put me on a project that was in addition to my job, that was actually another full-time job. And I was really working like three full-time jobs.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
Until we got to a point where I just couldn't, I couldn't continue for a variety of reasons, both sort of health, but also just practically speaking, it was impossible to keep up is what they were asking me. So here I was with two failures under my belt. That was how I read it. Two, two failures. And that really caused me that summer to stop and think.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And I was actually in the process of writing my first book that summer, Your Life, What Became Your Lifetime. And it really caused me to go, can I just apply my own model and thinking, what's going on here? To really make sure that this third time I make the right choice.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And some things that I really noticed were I needed to be in an organisation that just did leadership and management, that wasn't a bolt-on or an add-on or a hundred other things that they did, that understood what I had to bring. That was the first thing. The second thing was I definitely wasn't up for the daily commute. I'd actually been working virtually since 2002, and this was now 2012, 2013.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And I realized that, yeah, I needed work that was flexible and respected my autonomy and energy levels and trusted me. And I think the third thing was that I wanted to be part of something small. I learned from previous incarnations that I was really happiest in a small firm, in a small team.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And so when I went out there the third time, I joined a consultancy called Blessing White, which was an employee engagement and leadership consultancy, worked virtually, really specialised, had deep expertise and had a wonderful time, a very successful track record of some great global rollouts with people like HSBC and Bristol Myers Squibb and some really significant global projects.
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
I got the scalps on my belt, if you like. But that was a big learning that taking that time out, it's not just about sending out a million CVs or hitting apply on LinkedIn jobs. It's really about taking that time out to think about what is my unique design? What environments help or hinder me? What keeps me well? Where's my zone of genius?
Chief Change Officer
#156 Career Math 101: Erica Sosna’s Formula for Bouncing Back – Part One
And making sure that you discern all of that before you jump into a role. And I think that was really foundational. to the work that I do now and my understanding and empathy and relatability for other people who are making fairly big transitions.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
Yeah, of course. Happy to. So I'd been running this consultancy for about four years and I had a little boy. I still have a little boy. He was two then. And at the end of the year in 2022, I was out driving in the snow and my car couldn't get any further. It stalled on a hill. And I went to get out the car to get to a place of safety and walk home.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And a motorist hit me and dragged me under his car. I was paralyzed from the waist down. I had emergency surgery to try to save my mobility. And I was subsequently in hospital for just shy of five months, having broken 15 bones, but most seriously, my spine, and therefore damaged my spinal cord. And so over the last 20 months, I needed to learn to walk again, to literally get back on my feet.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I consider myself very fortunate. I know that sounds weird, but I feel very fortunate because I was able to do that. For many people with spinal cord injuries, the injury is complete. That means that it doesn't matter how hard you work to rehabilitate, the connection is gone. Whereas for me, the connections were severely damaged, but there was an opportunity to grow and restore them.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
But that meant almost a year away from my business, away from my team, a year in which it was very difficult to even be strong enough to sit up, let alone carry my child or chase him anywhere. All of those things were just impossible and really a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, a lot of uncertainty. And I only came back to work in, I think, October 2020.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And it's been really interesting to see where work's place is for me. Of course, I couldn't really do the work I did if I didn't love it. It wouldn't be fair to be advising other people on their careers and their career management if I didn't love what I do. So in many ways, coming back to work was a real solace.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
It was somewhere I was confident, somewhere that I was comfortable, somewhere that I was known and respected, somewhere where things were controllable. Having had a physical injury and the recovery from that being so uncontrollable and my body in many ways becoming very uncontrollable in ways that I hadn't expected, that were very uncomfortable, very embarrassing, very difficult.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
But it's also caused quite a lot of reflection about, am I, life is short and time is precious. Time is short and life is precious. Am I making the maximum impact that I could do with my work, which is all about helping people to celebrate their spirits, their capability, their potential and to live lives that feel worthwhile to them and have a positive impact.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And so what it prompted me, that's actually how the podcast came about, because I realized that the consultancy had primarily been working with other businesses and that it had been a while since I had been able to speak freely and openly with the public about their careers, about the direction they wanted to take.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And that the podcast was a great opportunity to be able to have that conversation with a lot more people on a different kind of platform. And also over the years, ever since I was a kid, I had loved Oprah Winfrey. I loved the idea of broadcasting and kind of education in the transformation realm. And podcasting seems a really natural way to be able to do that.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
alongside it really being a struggle to get the business back on an even keel. The team were amazing at keeping things going, but you need to always be growing if you're in the consultancy area. That was really been a really hard year on the business development front.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
The podcast gave me an opportunity to do business development, but in a really much more joyful way and with an opportunity to touch more people and to have more fun in a way that I had always wanted to do in my career, which was this kind of educative broadcasting. I say in my sort of career philosophy that a career is a series of choices.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
where we explore how do I align my gifts with how I spend time and make money and that sort of tight rope of first of all knowing what your gifts are and knowing what gives you joy because that can evolve and change as your life evolves and changes as your priorities evolve and change
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And then how do I spend my time consciously around that in a way that generates value and success for myself and other people? That's a kind of constant adjustment. It's a constant tightrope walk of teasing out how do I stay on course with that? And I think for me, it became clear that my work is still my work. The subject matter still really works for me. I still love it.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
But perhaps the way in which I was transmitting it needed to shift or I wanted to add something to that. And that also returning to a three-day week, so I run a business on a three-day week, was definitely all that I wanted to do, given that the job of rehabilitating my spinal cord injury is really a kind of a lifetime's work. And the job of being a good parent is also a lifetime's work.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And just in terms of what was realistic in slicing the pie of my life, that was going to be the time that I had available. Yeah, it's been an opportunity really to fine tune what really matters to me and also to really get a sense of how exceptional, I'm going to use that word even though I feel a bit shy about it, How exceptional I can be when I'm up against it.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
Because in the last two years, I have gone from completely paralysed to walking again. I have rebuilt a business and launched a podcast. I have been a great parent in spite of all of those challenges and obstacles. So it really has taught me a lot of good things about myself. It's really shown me a lot of good things about myself.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And it's been interesting to see how inspiring and empowering that has been for other people to witness as well. It wasn't really something I expected, but... The outpouring of kind of generosity and support and encouragement and positive feedback has also been, you know, really an exceptional experience, really.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
It really taught me a lot about who I am and the impact that I have in the world in a way that's been very moving.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
For sure, Vincent. It's exciting to be in a careers community with you. That's how I'd describe that, I think. So I'm Erica Sosner. I'm the creator of a model called The Career Equation and a book and a podcast by the same title. I've
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
I've made it my life's work really over the last 20 years to help people connect their insides, what matters to them, what's important to them, the skills and talents that they're born with their outsides, how they spend time, how they make money, how they create value for themselves and for other people and how they learn to really enjoy their lives.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
So I guess on a sort of very simple level, I'm a careers thought leader. I've been a career coach for over 20 years and have coached thousands of people all over the world, all sorts of industries, all sorts of ages and stages to use the career equation to get super precise about what they want, how to work and to make a plan to get towards that and really align that.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
I also own a careers consultancy that does the same work, but within organisations. So helping the employer and the employee to really align around co-designing a career path that works for the person in front of them and is a win for both sides. And I guess I became interested in this, of course, because of my own career adventures and explorations.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
When I left university, I joined the civil service, the FASTREAM, which is the graduate program here in the UK for working with the government. It's actually the most competitive graduate scheme in the UK. And so when I got a place on it, I thought I really ought to accept it.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
But spending time just in this sort of recruitment process and the home office environments told my guts that I probably wasn't going to find a home there.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
But I had that tension between, hang on a minute, I've got this really prestigious job opportunity and no plan B. And my gut feelings that perhaps the environment and the pace of the place that I was proposing to make my career in wasn't going to be a fit. And indeed, it wasn't a fit. And so that experience made me very curious about what is it that makes work for people?
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
How do I get underneath what's thriving looks and feels like? And I began a sort of quest and exploration around this that took me into the personal development works, the human potential world, the personal transformation sort of field, including training as a coach over 20 years ago now, and simultaneously training as a biographical storyteller.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I think that actually my insights and experiences about how to extract the best kind of stories from people and how to really understand the character at the heart of each biographical story has really informed the practice and the work that I do now. I fundamentally work with people's narrative, helping them to understand who they are at heart,
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
and then the direction that character, the hero in their story themselves, wants to take and how perhaps some of the pieces of their previous history now make more sense looking through the lens of the career equation.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I think most of all, whether it comes to people moving from public to private sector, working for themselves, to being employed, from moving across industries, perhaps setting up their own business, whatever transformation they want to make, I've worked with somebody to make that transformation. And quite often, I've done that transformation myself.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
I've had a lot of iterations and explorations with form in career. So I'm very excited to have a conversation with you today about those transitions and transformations and about how your audience can use the career equation and perhaps some of my experience and stories to help them to make the transitions that are most meaningful for them and to find their thriving zone at work.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
you help others through the career equation which you created yes of course sure so in my 20s i set up a social enterprise that was a kind of precursor for the work that i do now with the career equation it was called the life project and the life project was all about how do i take
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
the insights and the self-knowledge that comes from personal development work and help people under the age of 25 to have that curriculum so that they know how to make the most of the world of work how to take for example your knowledge that you like maths or history at school and go where might I find a use for that or a home for those skills in the changing world of work
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I really enjoyed that work. I didn't make much money from it. It was the first business that I'd run. It was in the social realms. Money was always tight with clients. But it was a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself in a
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
research and development phase to find what worked and to find programs and tools that were really going to change people's lives and transform the education space because most of us fell into careers rather than chose them. There's no set curriculum about how to discover your skills and how to spend your lifetime usefully which is mad really because we spend up to 80,000 hours at work.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
So I loved that work very much and I got the opportunity to work with many universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Sussex. I went to Berkeley in California and did some work there. I worked in India and Australia, all kinds of places, bringing what became the career equation, bringing that toolkit to a really wide variety of individuals under 25 and those who work with them.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
But then the government changed here in the UK and that had a lot of upheaval around the budgets that my clients worked with. And suddenly it was a very difficult situation for many social impact and not-for-profit organisations. So I decided that I needed to move back into the world of kind of corporate leadership management and training and to see where my skill set might find a home.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And at that time, people were quite prejudiced. If you had been self-employed or run your own thing, they really didn't think that you could hold down a job. And so I got a lot of rejections just on that basis. I had an interesting CV, I'd done some significant things, but people just didn't trust me to hold down a job. And that was very discouraging.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
So I really had to work hard to parlay who I was and what I'd done to even get a chance to talk at interview about how I might be a valuable addition. But eventually I did get a number of job offers. I took a role in a consultancy. It was very exciting to be there. It was a small consultancy, very dynamic. But leadership work was quite a sort of minority share of what they did.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And very quickly it became clear that there was a bit of a conflict between what they thought the job was going to be and the actual opportunities to do that job once I was in-house. And long story short, after six months, they decided not to renew my probation, which was devastating.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
I'd gone through life being an A student and having all these ambitious, prestigious jobs and making things happen. And then I got this very loud resounding like that was very discouraging. And I hadn't done what I wanted to do, which was recommence my career within the leadership realm. So I went into the pool again. I went into the market again.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I was in a number of discussions, but one organisation was particularly pushy and they wanted to create a role for me that sounded very exciting. I went to the interview and my gut sense was, this place is chaotic. I'm not sure. But I ignored that gut sense and I took the job. And it was... quite an experience. And because of my previous role, I really didn't want to let myself or them down.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
So I worked like a dog. I was doing 60, 70 hour weeks every week. The CEO had put me on a project that was in addition to my job that was actually another full time job. And I was really working like three full time jobs.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
Until we got to a point where I just couldn't, I couldn't continue for a variety of reasons, both sort of health, but also just practically speaking, it was impossible to keep up is what they were asking me. So here I was with two failures under my belt. That was how I read it. Two, two failures. And that really caused me that summer to stop and think.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I was actually in the process of writing my first book that summer, Your Life, What Became Your Lifetime. And it really caused me to go, can I just apply my own model and thinking what's going on here to really make sure that this third time I make the right choice. And some things that I really noticed were I needed to be in an organization that just did leadership and management.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
That wasn't a bolt-on or an add-on or a hundred other things that they did that understood what I had to bring. That was the first thing. The second thing was I definitely wasn't up for the daily commute. I'd actually been working virtually since 2002, and this was now 2012, 2013. And I realized that, yeah, I needed work that was flexible and respected my autonomy and energy levels and trusted me.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And I think the third thing was that I wanted to be part of something small. I learned from previous incarnations that I was really happiest in a small firm, in a small team.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And so when I went out there the third time, I joined a consultancy called Blessing White, which was an employee engagement and leadership consultancy, worked virtually, really specialised, had deep expertise and had a wonderful time, a very successful track record of some great global rollouts with people like HSBC and Bristol Myers Squibb and some really significant global projects.
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
I got the scalps on my belt, if you like. But that was the big learning that taking that time out, it's not just about sending out a million CVs or hitting apply on LinkedIn jobs. It's really about taking that time out to think about what is my unique design? What environments help or hinder me? What keeps me well? Where's my zone of genius?
Chief Change Officer
#261 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part One
And making sure that you discern all of that before you jump into a role. And I think that was really foundational for to the work that I do now and my understanding and empathy and relatability for other people who are making fairly big transitions.