Confidence Classic: The 4 Phases of Change That Shape Your Next Level with Jason Feifer

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0:32Don't wait for a problem to remind you you're uncovered. Policies start as low as$29 a month. Get protected in minutes at nextinsurance.com. That's N-E-X-T insurance.com. We are in a state of constant evolution. We should live in permanent beta, which is to say to think of ourselves as a product in beta that never is finalized, is always being refined and revised. And if we think of it that way, when the change comes to us, even if it comes to this thing that we feel like we've reached our wouldn't go back moment, we've redefined ourselves, we got there and now change is coming again. We have to just see that as another part of the natural cycle of things and an opportunity to build even more.

1:17I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet my guest this week. He's been on the show once before, but we're glad to have Jason Pfeiffer back.

1:54He's the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, a startup advisor, host of the podcast Build for Tomorrow and Problem Solvers, and has taught his techniques for adapting to change at companies including Pfizer, Microsoft, Chipotle, DraftKings, and Wix. He has worked as an editor at Fast Company, Men's Health, Boston Magazine, and has written about business and technology for The Washington Post, Slave, Popular Mechanics, and others. Jason, thank you so much for being back with us today. I am honored to be back. Great to see you. Great to see you too. So we were just offline talking about the fact that both of us are going through moves right now to get out from small, small time living two bedroom type apartments and get into bigger spacious opportunities.

2:39And I know that you just wrote a book about change and adapting to change. And it's just so funny that right now you and I are like all in embracing change in this moment. I know. Well, I am excited for your move. I'm excited for my move. I'm excited for everybody's move. So this book, Build for Tomorrow, it's funny, we were talking about where we live and we're going to move because I wrote this book during this major disruption in my life. So when the pandemic began, literally the day that schools closed down in New York City, which is where I live, my wife and I, we have two little boys. We live in the right now at 1000 square foot two bedroom apartment.

3:17And we were like, we don't know how long we're going to be locked in here, but it's going to get crazy with these two little kids. So my parents live in Boulder, Colorado, and they have a house and outdoor space. And we thought that's just going to be a much better environment for our kids. So we went out there for what we thought would be, you know, who knows, but turned out to be 18 months, which is crazy. I know. And the reason was because schools, because camps opened up out, the summer camp opened up out there. It hadn't opened up in New York. And then we got them into a school that was going to be open the whole year, whereas it was kind of iffy in New York.

3:50So anyway, we stayed for 18 months. And I got to tell you, I went through this process when I was out there, which I then recognized in so many other people, which was, I spent quite a while, once we knew we were going to be there for a while, I spent quite a while defining myself against this new area. I was like, I'm a New Yorker and all this Boulder stuff. Everybody here just wants to talk about hiking and these are not my people. You know, this is what we do. The very first thing that we do when change comes to us is we panic and we try to hold on to what we had before because we experience the change as a loss.

4:30And I was feeling a loss for my identity as a New Yorker because here I was in Boulder. And what I came to realize after 18 months there was, oh, actually, it's kind of wonderful to step away from work and go on a hike in the middle of the day. I'd never done that before. I never even thought of that. And that doesn't mean that I lose my identity or the things that I kind of orient myself around, but rather that I can add things and I can discover new things. And I came out of that experience with great new friends and some new lifestyle habits, frankly, and a sense that I had reached what I now like to call wouldn't go back, the final phase of change, where I say, I have something so new and valuable, I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it.

5:11I mean, we came back to New York, but something in me had changed. I wanted something different. I wanted a somewhat different pace of life. And that drove us, for example, to my wife and I to find a house in Brooklyn that's further out. It's not in the center of the action like we're in now. We can't just walk around the corner and have amazing restaurants anymore, but we have this space and it's going to afford a different kind of pace and lifestyle. And I got that out of this change that I didn't know I needed, but I did. Wow. That is shocking. I completely understand when you're talking, I'm thinking in my mind, the analogy for me is when I got fired and when it first happened, you know, just sheer panic, What is going to happen?

5:54The unknown, the uncertainty is so scary. How do I fast forward through this window of time and get to something stable? And like you said, and then inevitably reaching a place through your four-step process where you are finally in a moment saying, oh, I don't want to go back again. I'm so glad this all happened. I embrace this new thing. But those middle steps in that beginning are definitely challenging. Can you break down those four steps for everybody? Yeah. So I gave you the bookends of it. So this is something I realized during the pandemic. I was going into it. For years, I've been studying how entrepreneurs are adaptable because I found that adaptation is really the key driver for success.

6:35But my question was, how are they doing it? Because it doesn't seem to be something people are born with. It seems to be something that they are learning. And then the pandemic happened and I got to watch, we all got to watch, everybody go through the same change at the same time. but some people seem to move through it faster and some people move through it slower and some people tried to hold on to what came before. And I realized that everybody goes through change in four phases. They are panic, adaptation, new normal, and wouldn't go back. And it's really, it's illuminating to watch people go through this at different paces because what you get to realize is that everything that you experience is totally normal.

7:19Even if you are deeply successful, even if you have a lot of advantages that other people don't, you will still panic at the very beginning of change. You will. And then you will be forced to figure out how to adapt. What are the things that are available to you? And then you will develop a new normal. You'll start to have a foundation that you can build upon and you'll discover some new familiarities. And eventually you will reinvent the thing that you're doing or the way that you think about yourself. And you will get to that point, that wouldn't go back moment, which is available for us all.

7:49And I think that the greatest challenge is not moving through these phases because we will all move through them, but rather how fast can we move through them? How efficiently can we move through them? How thoughtfully can we move through them? Because that's how we get to new opportunity and growth. Well, sometimes before anyone else does. How do you get through the panic phase faster? Because for me, I hate that phase. That is like, oh, it's my worst nightmare. I can't stand it. Right. Me too. It's awful. Feeling that panic is terrible. And there are a number of things that we can do. First of all, I think we need to recognize what we're actually doing in our heads, which I alluded to a little bit earlier, but just dive a little deeper into it.

8:33What we are doing is we are equating change with loss. So when change comes to us, the very first thing that we do is that we identify the thing that we're going to lose as a result. I'm no longer going to have access to this. I'm no longer going to be able to do this comfortable thing. I used to do things in a certain way, and maybe now I'm going to have to change it, and that feels like loss. And then because what we want most of all is to be able to know what's coming next. We all want to know the future for ourselves. We start to extrapolate based on the information that we have. And if what we're seeing is loss, we're going to extrapolate the loss.

9:14So we're going to say, well, because I'm losing this, I'm going to lose that. And then because I lost that, I'll lose this other thing. And then very quickly, we start to feel like we have absolutely nothing under our feet anymore. And so one of the things we need to do is just simply reframe the experience as one in which we are trying to find gain. Gain is harder to see because you don't see it immediately. That story that I told you about moving to Boulder, one of the great gains that came out of that was that I started to be more mindful of what I needed outside of work and thinking more about my physical health and taking time for myself.

9:51I didn't know that I needed that. That was gain that came later. For a long time, I was just focused on loss. So how do we do it? Well, I found that three simple questions can help start to get us there. And those questions are, number one, what is the new thing that we're doing, right? Just like, let's just lay it out. Number two, what new habit or skill are we learning as a result? And then number three, how can that be put to good use? because once you limit the way in which you're evaluating something based on how can this be put to good use, you're forcing yourself to at least have some kind of answer there.

10:27And it may not be the right answer. You may not know exactly, but what you're going to start to do is explore and experiment with your hypotheses. Well, how can this be put to good use? I don't know. I guess if I live in this different city than I did before, one of the things that I'm learning is how to live somewhere else. I didn't know that I wanted to live somewhere else. How can that be put to good use? Well, I guess if I realize that I can make it work somewhere else, that tells me that I don't maybe need to hold on to everything that I'm comfortable and familiar with. And I can start to open myself up to the possibility that I'm more adaptable than I thought I was.

11:05And maybe new opportunities that I had discounted are ones that I should consider now, right? You see how you can start to push yourself to reframe things as change, as gain. And that really starts to push down that panic. Heather, I don't know how you're going to produce this afterwards, but what just happened in case we cut it out is that my seven-year-old just came into the room and demanded that I get up and get him something out of the fridge that he can very clearly get himself. And then he decided to put my Oculus 2 on, even though it wasn't on. And then he said he couldn't see and it was a whole thing.

11:36And then finally he left. Thank goodness for editors, which is true. Thank goodness for editors. But also, I realized this interesting thing during the earlier days of the pandemic when my kids were home all the time, as you know, yeah, as you know very well, I saw a major eye roll there, which was that they would come and they would like burst in on me doing things that were live. There was no editing. Sometimes I was giving a keynote talk that people were paying me to do, right? And they would come burst in and they start climbing all over me. I was doing like live webinars for entrepreneur and the kids would come bursting in.

12:07And at first, my instinct was to just get them away as fast as possible or ignore them or something. But then I came to realize that for the audience, the kids interrupting was a highlight because it was relatable and because they have gone through that themselves. And because it showed this humanness of experience that's far different from my professional presentation. And they really liked it. And I came to realize that sometimes the things that we think are dragging us down can actually be great assets. And so now if we were doing this live, if you and I were doing this live, I would have played that differently.

12:49Like when my kid came in, I engaged him, but I was basically like, how can you leave this room? Right. But if we were doing it live, what I would have done is I would have just grabbed him, plopped him in my lap and kept going. And he would have said something funny and I would have made a joke about it and everyone would have loved it. And afterwards, people would have told me that that was the thing that they remember. So sometimes we can't always be so afraid that something is going to go wrong because sometimes the thing that goes wrong can be turned into the thing that is most memorable in the good way.

13:15Meet a different guest each week.

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16:49I ask you to try to find your passion. Oh my gosh, I love that. And thank you for sharing it. This is so good. And in my mind, this is what popped into my mind. Right before the pandemic hit, I was interviewing Sarah Blakely live in Boston for a hyper growth conference for drift sales and marketing event. And when I was walking out in front of her to introduce her and my feet get really, really sweaty when I'm nervous. And of course, I always have four inch heels on. And so I'm walking out my Christian Louboutins in front of thousands of people with Sarah Blakely right behind me. and my foot comes out of my shoe and I almost face plant on the stage in front of everyone.

17:31I was able to catch myself. And so I jumped up and said, major shout out to the hometown girl who didn't face plant. And everyone went wild, Jason. Like it was, they thought it was so funny, right? I just used to joke about it. And then Sarah started laughing and then we high fived. And like the next thing you knew, everybody was with us and after the event. people were like, wow, that was so funny that you made a joke about falling. I'm like, who knew that was going to be the thing that got people fired up? I know, because that's the human thing, right? Because the people in the audience are not in a position to be getting on stage and interviewing Sarah Blakely, but they definitely have fallen in their shoes, right?

18:13And so when they see you do it, they feel that instant connection. This is what we should want. We should want to break down boundaries. And we should also be open to that sometimes the greatest things that are going to happen to us are the ones that we didn't plan for. As you were telling that story, which I love, I was thinking about, I was in Maine last week and there's this in Oxford, Maine, which is this tiny little town. There's a, there's like a country store, like a farm stand or whatever called Smedberg's. And Smedberg's has a giant sign in front of it advertising that they sell lobster, L-O-B-E-S-T-E-R.

18:53Now, what is going on with that? So I went inside and I asked, because I was like, that's not how you spell lobster. And surely somebody has told them that, right? And so the story is that years and years ago, the owner was making a sign to advertise their lobster, and she had done it L-O-B-S-T-E-R. And one of her employees was like, oh, no, no, you're missing an E. It's L-O-B-E-S-T-E-R. And so the owner, who was like, oh, well, I guess she knows, made a sign that said Lobster and then put it out front. And people thought it was hilarious. And they, you know, they very quickly realized that it was a misspelling, but it distinguished them.

19:29Suddenly, Smedberg's became the Lobster Place and people started to remember it as the Lobster Place, which, you know, in a region where everybody's selling lobster, I mean, a lobster is a lobster, a lobster is it's hard to differentiate. And so they've kept that thing up for years now. And they even sell shirts that say home of the lobster. And they really leaned into it. And people love it. People love Smedbergs. And you know, you could have been embarrassed by that. And you could have taken the sign down immediately. But by owning it and having fun with it, and just being able to break down that barrier a little bit between you and the people that you serve, you can really just create so much.

20:06That's so funny. And I love that they developed a product line with t-shirts out of it. I mean, it's like a great unique value proposition. They've separated themselves from everybody else out there doing the same thing and made themselves memorable. So that is an excellent story. I love it. Okay. So we've talked about the four phases. What's the most important phase in your opinion? Well, it's a good question. You can't have one without the other. You're going to go through them all. I think that the most important phase is also the most challenging one. And that is the obvious way to answer that is wouldn't go back is the most important because it's the goal of the whole thing.

20:42What you want to do is get to this moment where you say, I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it. That's the goal. But I'll tell you, it's also the most challenging because once we get to wouldn't go back, we're going to want to hold onto that for dear life, right? We're going to have this new thing. It was hard to get to, you know, think about it for yourself, right? I mean, you reinvented your career and now you've got what you have now and it's amazing, but it's not going to be like this for the next 70 years, right? Some other kind of change is going to come to it.

21:15And when that happens, all of us, we're going to say, oh no, but I went through this whole process and it was so hard to get here and I don't want to give it up now, right? And what we have to remember is that we are in a state of constant evolution. We should live in what Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, likes to call permanent beta, which is to say to think of ourselves as a product in beta that never is finalized, is always being refined and revised. And if we think of it that way, well, then when the change comes to us, even if it comes to this thing that we feel like we've reached our wouldn't go back moment, we've redefined ourselves, we overcome obstacles, there was a lot of struggle and challenge and we got there and now change is coming again, we have to just see that as another part of the natural cycle of things and an opportunity to build even more.

22:06I think, again, we cannot go to this place where we think that the only things that we will ever have are the things we already have. We need to instead be able to set ourselves up to think that when change comes, it's an opportunity to upgrade. Now, one of the ways that we can do that is a really important mental exercise I think we shall go through. Everybody should go through this. I should be curious if you have and what your answer is, is to very clearly separate what we do and why we do it. And the reason for this is because I think that we too often identify with the product of our work, with the output of our work.

22:45We think of ourselves as, what do you do? Well, what I do is I produce this thing. And that's fine. But if you identify too closely with that, if that's your identity, then as soon as that changes and it will change, you are going to feel completely unmoored, right? I mean, Heather, if you thought of yourself only as a podcaster and then tomorrow the podcast industry falls apart, right? Well, you're going to feel completely unmoored. You're going to feel like, well, now I'm nothing. But if you can identify something about yourself that is so core, the value that you provide to people is so intrinsic to you, that it can survive any change, it is the thing that does not change even in times of change, well, then you have an orientation point whenever there's a moment of disruption.

23:35So for example, for me, I have the sentence that I tell myself, I tell stories in my own voice, right? It's very different from say, I am a magazine editor, because I'm a magazine editor is contingent upon me having a job in magazines. Easy to not happen. But I tell stories in my own voice. Well, stories is anything. Stories is newspapers and magazines and podcasts and speaking on stage and books and whatever. And in my own voice, I'm setting the terms for how I'm going to operate. This is the work that I will do. Now, anything can change. Anything can come at me. After this conversation, I could check my email and entrepreneur could say, Jason, it's been a good run.

24:16We're sick and tired to your face and goodbye, right? And I hope that doesn't happen. I'm not interested in that happening. But if it does happen, it doesn't impact my ability to tell stories in my own voice. I have an orientation point. We all need that. Have you thought through something like that for yourself? No, I haven't, but it's really, really helpful. And I think, like you said, it's gonna help everybody listening right now because what I just walked through in my mind was when I got fired, I felt like I'd lost everything because I lost my chief revenue officer title, right? I wasn't thinking of what's intrinsic to me that I can bring with me wherever I go.

24:50I wasn't thinking that way. I was thinking this has been taken from me and I had a non-compete. I had to leave and abandon what I was an expert in. That's when the panic set in. Step one, panic came in hard, right? But then I also thought to myself, to your point with the pandemic, I went through a much smaller version of that, but I had really stepped into my speaking business and taken off a year before the pandemic came. So I was really identifying with myself as a speaker. That's who now I have become in my mind. But same thing, using that same methodology, it doesn't need to be a title of speaker or title of chief revenue officer or title of editor.