Chief Change Officer
#68 Career Equation Author Erica Sosna: Rebounding from Physical Paralysis to New Heights – Part One
Thu, 14 Nov 2024
Part One. In 2022, an accident left Erica Sosna, Author of The Career Equation, paralysed, facing months of recovery, and re-learning to walk. Yet, she is grateful, even through pain and uncertainty, to have rediscovered her own resilience and purpose. Over two years, she has fought her way back to walking, rebuilt her business, and found a new mission in helping others. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Two Jobs, Two Failures: A Gut Check Moment “After two roles that didn’t work out as planned, I hit a crossroads. I took a step back and asked: am I in the right place? I needed to rethink my priorities, work style, and the kind of organization that would truly support me.” The School of Hard Knocks: Rejections and Redirections “Returning to the corporate world after running my own social enterprise was unexpectedly tough. My CV was different, unconventional, and people didn’t trust me to hold down a job. It took resilience to find an organization that valued my unique experience.” Shifting Gears: When Your Work Becomes Your Solace “Returning to my consultancy after a year’s absence was grounding. My work has always been my passion, but after such a physically uncontrollable experience, the familiar structure felt like a comfort. It also became a chance to rethink: How could I reach more people, make a bigger impact? And so, the podcast was born.” A Balancing Act: Rediscovering Purpose in a Three-Day Week "Managing a business on a three-day week, while also recovering from a spinal cord injury and parenting, meant redefining success. I’ve refocused on what truly matters, aligning my time with my gifts and refining how I reach people. It’s been a balance of impact and sustainability.” Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Erica Sosna Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI, JP 2 Millions+ Downloads 50+ Countries --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What inspired Erica Sosna's journey of resilience?
But what makes Erica's story unique is her remarkable journey of resilience, purpose, and transformation. In 2022, A life-changing accident left her paralyzed. Facing months of recovery, through immense pain and uncertainty, Erica fought her way back. Back to walking, back to work, and back to a renewed mission. After a year away from her consultancy,
Eric Le returned with fresh purpose, balancing her career on a three-day work week, launching a podcast and expanding her reach to create a bigger impact. Today, part one, Eric Le shares her career journey. the twist and the turns and the accident that changed everything.
Then in part two, airing tomorrow, she will share the hard-earned wisdom she gained from overcoming paralysis, starting a new chapter, shaping a path to personal and professional growth. Erica will also dive into the career equation she created and how we can all work towards becoming better versions of ourselves in our careers. Good afternoon, Erica. Welcome to our show.
Chapter 2: How did Erica navigate her career after paralysis?
Welcome to Chief Change Officer. Thank you so much, Vince. I'm delighted to be here. Erica is also a podcast host, and she covers careers. So does that make us competitors? I don't think so. I see it more like we are part of this big circle, a world where so many people are focused on their future, their life, and their career.
I think we're both contributing to something bigger by sharing insights, lessons, and experiences in a human, direct way. Hopefully, this helps someone get inspired or maybe even get unstuck. So Erica, let's start with you. Tell us a bit about yourself, your story, and your experience before we drill down into your insights.
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
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.
Chapter 3: What is the Career Equation model?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chapter 4: How can we redefine success in our careers?
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?
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Erica face when returning to work?
Transitions, there's so many kinds. We often think of transition as just changing jobs, but it's more than that. It's not just jumping from Google to Microsoft in the same industry. Sometimes it's moving to a totally different industry or even changing countries, cities, and life itself. Erica, in your journey so far,
If I were to ask about how you've navigated and managed your own transitions, could you share a couple of stories, maybe one related to your own career and one to your personal life? I think it would give us a deeper understanding of your experience and why you are so well-equipped you help others through the career equation, which you created?
Yes, of course. Sure. So in my twenties, 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
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?
Chapter 6: How can personal development shape our careers?
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
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.
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.
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 organizations. 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.
Chapter 7: What lessons did Erica learn from her career transitions?
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.
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.
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.
I'd gone through like 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.
Chapter 8: What is the importance of aligning personal values with work?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 specialized, 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.
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 CDs 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?
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.
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