Ep. 92 - Preparing for Change and taking Small Steps to Deliver Impact and Cultivate Inclusion - with Joe English

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Being agile, adaptive and even fluid may have been a means of survival for the past year, but it is fast becoming a habit as uncertainty is the new certainty. Yet the thought of pivoting or forging a different path can still leave us stuck, inhibited by fear and frozen by indecision.

So how do we prepare for change in a positive way that helps us push past this inertia and turn fear into an empowering form of excitement as we take the next steps towards our career goals?

For Joe English, change has been and continues to be an ongoing component of his journey. He grew up feeling somewhat different in an insular, largely ethnocentric, conformist environment. But those same experiences built character, grit and empathy.

He set his sights to find other places to experience more of the world which led him from his small New York State town to Yale, McKinsey and Company, then to a fellowship at Generation, the global education-to-employment NGO. He’s written about education policy for outlets such as Politico, The Advocate, and Education Week and in 2020 he made the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

In this episode we learn how Joe navigated the challenges of being perceived as different, embraced his sexual identity, and set career goals that saw him leaving his home town in order to create the change he wanted to see in the world.

Navigating the Challenges of Being Perceived as Different

Joe was the first person in his town to attend Yale University, but this is not all that seemed to set him apart from many others in his small rural town. The son of a Pakastani immigrant, and an Ohio-bred father, Joe says that he was visibly different to those around him:

“That's something that’s visible to people in this small town where I grew up. A lot of them were totally well-meaning, but just didn't necessarily interact with too many people who came from that sort of background that I did. And that was an obvious source of difference.”

But internally Joe also struggled with his sexual identity, as a gay man, something that he did not openly share with others until he went to college. These early experiences built a fortitude in him and even though he didn’t realize it yet, would lay the foundations needed to take those uncomfortable pathways to success, such as taking a different career path to those around him.

Realizing the Power of Education and Building Foundational Skills to Propel Forward

The college experience opened his eyes to new perspectives and opportunities, while simultaneously showing him the benefits that education - and representation within it - can have. As someone who cared about public service and also understood the value of good public education, he had a desire to leverage that into doing good as he knew the limitations to access for those growing up in communities like he did. But the question was when he felt prepared to make that difference.

While his personal experience meant he was uniquely placed to understand some of the gaps that weren’t being addressed, he knew he needed to develop critical hard and soft skills to be able to be an effective operator and thought partner. It’s those valuable building gained at McKinsey & Co that enabled him to parallel path the pursuit of his mission-driven goal in the non profit and education sectors.

Parallel Pathing To Bring About Change

That mission to use literature to cultivate empathy and inclusion wasn’t actually planned. Joe realized that a source of difficulty he had with his identity as a child stemmed from not having any positive representation of LGBTQ people growing up. Yet having a book or some unit in school about them as a young person would have meant the world.

Having open conversations with his high school teachers after graduating from college triggered a passion to figure out the resources that would be helpful and offer them for free. It was this desire to bring that positive representation in schools particularly those that are rural, lack natural diversity and funds for investment.

Joe set about establishing Hope in a Box while still at McKinsey & Co, a dual track that pushed the limits of the skills and work ethic he was learning at the firm. The mash-up of the discipline required for his day job, mixed with the purpose driven non profit work helped him push through the fear of starting, that can hold some people back.

But while Joe’s goal was one of broad impact, his approach was to start small, test, and iterate in order to create traction. This mindset allowed him to grow this side hustle steadily into the non-profit he runs today while also being able to see the bigger picture and correct his course as needed.

Hope in a Box is now in 300 schools across the country and has become powerful for building self-esteem and self-confidence and also for building empathy among other students to understand the unique challenges and experiences of people who are in LGBTQ communities or other minority ones.

And with growing diversity at hand, having those social and emotional skills are more important than ever in our economy.

Pushing Past the Fear and Taking Small Steps towards Broad Impact

Joe learned the importance of being comfortable with risk-taking early on in his life and throughout his career. Yet it didn’t mean that there wasn’t fear in all those moments.

In fact the scariest moments for people Joe says, can be when they verbalize the concept they want to bring to life with others because “that's, when people are going to tell you this is great. Or they're going to tell you, this is useless then why are you thinking of this? Like, why would you ever even assume that this is going to be useful or that you're credible to do something like this?” It’s that fear of rejection is what can hold people back.

In order to push past the fear however, Joe says to take small steps towards your goal, and talk it through with people without laying expectations on yourself to solve the problem all in one go.

“You just start by taking small steps, right? Talk to a couple of friends or interview a few people about your concept or your idea, carve out some time on a weekend. That's dedicated, protected time where you can just write and like do some ideation.”

From here, Joe believes that iteration is key, as you take note of your plans, and chart out what is working and what isn’t. Writing plans down means you can check in at a later date and see which of your goals have changed, and why.

By “zooming out” to see the bigger picture, calibrating the risk/reward tradeoff, he was able to overcome mental obstacles like reaching out to people via email. With this new perspective he could see that even though it was a big deal to him, receiving an email is an everyday occurrence for the recipient.

The road to career success is paved with lots of small moments like this, with failures and success along the way, but it is important to see them for the small steps that they are, and not be so afraid of the failures that you miss out of the rewards of the risk.

Change is a fundamental part of any career journey, and Joe shows that with small steps and aligning it to who we are, the skills, experiences, passions and beliefs we have, we can create traction towards a bigger work and life goal. We can build that career mashup that lets us have the impact we want to have in the world.

Joe’s Career Advice:

Think about your goals, then write them down so you can see where you’re headed. If you don’t, you won’t see how they’ve changed over time.

Key Takeaways:

Change is a fundamental part of any career journey and in order to make an impact, or make a change, we must first prepare.
Broad impact can be made through small steps.
Those moments of external validation or rejection even if you yourself are very convinced of the value that you're presenting is always scary.
Most of us have a fear of change that can inhibit our progress on our career journeys.
- Don’t feel like change has to happen all at once; problems can be solved in small parts
“Zooming out” from something we are worried about can show us that we may be catastrophizing what will be one small moment on a much longer journey.
When we prepare for change we should calibrate the risk/reward tradeoff and understand both the positives and the negatives.
A lot of us have goals - we think about them, talk about them. But if you don't write them down, it's hard for you to really come back and see how those goals are tangibly changing over time.
- By writing them down, like it gives you a more concrete sense of where you are headed and they can be revisited and tweaked over time as you learn more about you and your situation.