In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about the absence of career satisfaction that so many of us feel and the effects of that on our confidence, mental health and overall well-being. My guest this week, Anthony Kuo, is a career satisfaction coach who shares strategies we can all use to thrive at work. Anthony shares his personal journey of feeling pressured to do things he was good at, even though he didn’t enjoy them. He also teaches us how to spot not just the red flags, but also the green flags to help us better understand what we need to be our best selves at work.
About My Guest
You are more than your job, and your career is more than a shiny resume. Much more! Anthony Kuo is a Career Satisfaction Coach - and he wants to help you intentionally craft a career you're excited to wake up for. Anthony graduated from the NYU Stern School of Business in 2010 and subsequently took an 8 year tour through the Fortune 500 world, rising up the corporate ladder before realizing he was filling his bank account but leaving his soul empty. Anthony integrates his practical experience with his training as a Transformational NLP Practitioner to gently and playfully guide his clients through one of life's most omnipresent questions: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
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Connect with Anthony:
Transferable Skills Checklist: https://www.untamedcareer.com/transferable-skills
Website: https://www.untamedcareer.com/
Free Care Card Training: https://www.untamedcareer.com/care-card-signup
"Is your career building or breaking your mental health?" Quiz: https://www.untamedcareer.com/quiz
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Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:
Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.
Learn more about the Leading Humans discussion group
Join the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals.
Schedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges.
Websites: https://kimmeninger.com
Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome, Anthony, I am already enjoying our conversation that one we started before I hit record and I can't wait to continue it, I'd love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.
Anthony Kuo
Yeah, my name is Anthony Kuo. I'm a career satisfaction coach. And so what that means I like to say is that I help people become what they want to be when they grow up. And we do that through three steps First, by defining what career satisfaction even means to you in the first place, because that is actually a really, really personal thing. And it doesn't serve us to go by like your parents definition or society's definition or what your second-grade teacher said, was career satisfaction. So once we figure that out, the second step is where can you find that so we determine where that is possible where you can achieve that. And then third, once you do that, we work to make that a reality. And sometimes that means, you know, the whole rabbit hole of resumes and interviewing and all that typical stuff. But then sometimes also, it's as simple as having an uncomfortable conversation at your current job and advocating for what you need. And, and then being pleasantly surprised that it's actually available.
Kim Meninger
I love that because you're right, I think a lot of times, we jumped to the conclusion that something isn't possible before we've actually explored it or asked for it. And I remember years ago, my old boss always used to say I can't solve a problem I don't know, exists. You know, and I think that it's it's a fair statement. If you haven't asked your manager, you haven't you have sort of advocated for yourself, you don't know what's possible. Yeah, and I want to go back to what you talked about in terms of career satisfaction, too, because I think that's so important. What you mentioned about not what your parents think, or your second-grade teacher, I think many of us are carrying around a narrative that was fed by these influencers in our lives, and we don't even realize it, and then we're acting out those beliefs, and wondering why we don't feel as satisfied as we think we should, right. There's this sense of, is this all there is? Is this really what my career is going to look like? And so I wonder if you can say more about just this, this whole experience that so many of us are having?
Anthony Kuo
Thank you. Yeah, it really is. In my experience of pretty universal experience, though, what you just said, Is this all there is, I've spoken to so many people who climb and climb and reach the pinnacle of their careers and become an executive somewhere or start the business that they thought they wanted to. And then they get there and it's like, what the hell is this it? I thought there would be more I thought I'd be happier here. And I think that this is a like I certainly I certainly had that experience. In my own corporate career. I was a rising star. I was rapidly promoted, I had all the markers of quote, unquote, success. I was the poster child of the American dream. You know, my parents were immigrants to this country. I did the whole thing, right? I got good grades. I went to a good school, I got a good prestigious job. I had a six-figure salary, the house, the car, everything. And I reached a point where I was just like, I don't understand what's happening because everything on the outside is telling me that I should be happy. But on the inside, I just felt empty. And all I could do was just collapse on the couch when I got home. And what I started to realize was that I was following. Yes, my parents template for what success meant. But also I was doing so in a way that I think everyone does because this is what we're conditioned to do. I was following what I was good at was following my skills as opposed to what I was actually interested in. You know, this, that's something that we you're totally right. We are so conditioned to do from when we're very young. That's what we get praised for when we're in school. When you do well on a test, oh, what a smart kid. Right. And this is a very personal journey for me. Because I I was raised by two very accomplished musicians. My parents met in music school, they went to Juilliard, and I was taught the piano from a very young age, and I ended up performing at Carnegie Hall when I was when I was 15, and again, when I was 17. And, again, that's one of those things. That sounds really impressive, right? And to be fair, you know, there was a certain amount of hard work and talent that went into it. But it was not my thing. It was 100%, my mom's thing. And I went along with it only as far as it was useful to me in that it helped me get scholarships from college. But I really, my heart wasn't in it. And it was really, again, really baffling for me to be so good at something but not enjoy it. And so this, this idea, this experience leads to the backbone of what I teach, which is that there's a really big difference between what we're good at, and what we enjoy. So much of our the job market narrative is about what can I do for you? Right? Or what can you do for me? What are your skills? What's your experience? And the question, I think, that gets lost, but is extremely important is, but what do I need to thrive?
Kim Meninger
Oh, that is such a powerful question. And I wonder, you know, you, you talk about your own experience, which I so appreciate. And I wonder if there was a moment, was there a, an aha moment? Was it more of a gradual realization? How did you get to a point where you were able to see this with the kind of clarity that you describe it now? Because I think that it's so interesting, it's when we talk about it at this sort of intellectual level, right? It makes so much sense that there's a difference between your skills and interests. But I don't think that we've internalized that clearly. And so how did you get there?
Anthony Kuo
Years of therapy, one. It was a gradual realization for me. And it was one of those things where I had as much awareness as I possibly could have at any given moment, and I made the best moves that I could at the time. So what that looked like, for me was a series of smaller jumps in my career, where I, I would go through this, like, roller coaster cycle where I had a one-ish year of honeymoon, in a new job, I would, hey, this fixes everything. And then slowly, the, the momentum would go down, and I'd start feeling like I was dragging my feet into work. And I would those Sunday, scaries would fire up like, I don't want to go in what is the point of all of this. And then I'd figured out what was wrong to the best of my ability. And at first, it was very, like, professional performance-related, like, Oh, I'm not being given enough opportunities here, or I'm getting bored, or I want more social interaction, and I would make a change. Sometimes that change would be an internal transfer within the company I was working at. And sometimes I, you know, I would, I would execute a transition to another company or an adjacent field. And there came a point where I realized that I exhausted all of my options. Within the realm of traditional employment, right, just real, like I felt like what I was doing was rearranging deck furniture on that Titanic was going down no matter how pretty I made it. And that's when I started to question things at a deeper level. And so there was a gradual build-up to this. But there was actually a moment where I realized, oh, this whole corporate career picture-perfect performance, white picket fence thing, is not cutting it for me. And it actually had nothing at all to do with work. I got into a car accident. I was on my way home from work. And I was picking up a few beers to, to brainstorm a new fledgling business idea that I was having. That turns that turned into what I'm doing now. And I was meeting with my buddy who was a graphic designer, we're gonna start noodling on some, some basic branding concepts. And as I was pulling out into the parking lot, I wasn't really paying attention. I had a little fender bender, just as just a little tap. But the whole thing got blown. So out of proportion, or like the police got involved in like lawyers got involved, and it was just like, completely out of proportion to what it actually was. And the whole thing was so infuriating, not only because of the like, you know, having the book thrown at me for no good reason. But because of what it represented to me. I was reverse commuting from New York City to New Jersey at the time, and it was eating up three hours of my day, every day. And the car became a symbol for everything that was wrong in my life. And then the car expanded to Well, why do I need the car, because I'm commuting to this job that I have tried desperately to fix over the last seven years, and it just isn't working. And that was that little fender bender, like it was such a pain to deal with. But I'm so grateful that it happened because that was the wake-up call for me that like, things need to be changed at a fundamental level.
Kim Meninger
I love the symbolism there like that. That could be a movie. And it is so interesting that it often takes some kind of catalyzing event, right? To bring it into focus in a clear way. And, and I think what, as I'm listening to you talk to what jumps out at me is that many of us have, for whatever reason, this belief that it's either or, right, and I think it's maybe the starving artist, kind of mentality that we were raised with of either you have a really good successful career that leverages your strengths, or you compromise your compensation be to follow your interests, right? Like, I talk to people all the time, we're like, oh, well, I'd love to work for a nonprofit, but I can't afford to, or it's like, they're, they're acknowledging that they are sacrificing something that's meaningful or purposeful because they can't find something that's at the intersection of both their interests and their strengths. Right? So, so how do we grapple with that sort of conscious or unconscious belief to get to a place where we're not trapped by our strengths?
Anthony Kuo
Yeah, I, I love this question, because it really gets to the heart of career satisfaction for me. And I said earlier, that career satisfaction is something you have to define for yourself because it is extremely personal. I'll share my definition of career satisfaction. And I think it's one that like, does, like aspects of it do apply to everyone. I define career satisfaction as when you get to use your personality at work, where you're in an environment that values and appreciates who you are innately. So you don't have to twist yourself into a pretzel in order to succeed, or in order to be recognized or valued. And I think what ends up happening a lot. And I imagine this, this dovetails a lot with impostor syndrome is we try to belong through our, through our skills, we try to belong through our achievements. And if I can just achieve high enough, then I'll have a place here. And if you know, that works fine, sort of. Right? It's, it's a helpful strategy for you know, the, like, beginning parts of life and beginning parts of career especially in certain, certain circumstances. But it's it comes out a trade-off. Right? Where what happens if you don't? What happens if you struggle? What happens if there's a learning curve? Then Oh, my goodness, I'm a fraud. I don't belong here. Right. All those all those inner voices that I'm sure we're all very familiar with. And so that leads to a very heavy focus on what am I good at? You know, I teach a, a concept that I call Have a carry card. And it's like when you when you go to the store and buy a plant, there's a little card that says like, this is how much water to give this plan, this is how much light to give it. You don't want to give too much light because you'll burn the leaves and you don't want to give too little light, because then it'll turn away and starve and all that learned all of this the hard way, by the way, by killing my mom's plants when I was 13. And so what if we could have that for ourselves as humans for our careers? And I discovered that one of the really key components to our care card is not just interest is not just skills, but style. What is our style of meeting our interests? What is our style of applying our skills, what are their style of, of meeting our needs? And when we haven't met it, it's really effortless, you just show up and you're you and it feels great. And when your style isn't met through your work, or through your workplace, then you end up feeling like a square peg in a round hole. And it doesn't matter how much you try and how good you get and how accomplished you become, there's still something that just doesn't fit. We work with all of that.
Kim Meninger
That is such a great way to capture that. And going back to what you were saying earlier to about trying to belong through your skills and achievements. Because just the pressure just keeps ratcheting up, right? And especially if you work in a highly competitive environment, or you are constantly comparing yourself to other people, you've never reached the point of okay, I've done it. And so there's that constant source of self-doubt imposter syndrome, however, we want to think about it. And really, it is a function of I'm not able to be who I am. And I think about this a lot too, because I had a high-tech career before I started doing the work that I do today. And I was a pretty intelligent person I did well in school, I did well, you know, I was a non-technical person in a technical environment, which always created a lot of self-doubt for me. But even when I was at my peak, even when I felt like I know what I'm doing, there was always something missing. And I never could put my finger on it. And I think it was because it wasn't me. I felt like I was like, you know, sort of playing a role. It was It wasn't how I would choose to show up and the things I would choose to do if I, if I had that another option. And so, you know, I look at myself today in comparison to then I guess you could call some of it maturity. But, but a lot of things like I feel liberated, in a sense, because I get to do the things that I love to do every day. And I get to, you know, focus even though I work harder today, I feel more challenged today than ever before. Doing it in a way that allows me to, like you said thrive. Right. And I think there are, unfortunately so many people out there who just don't see that as a possibility.
Anthony Kuo
Yeah, I mean, it is really ingrained in our culture, to not see it as a possibility to always be on this endless treadmill of there's the next thing to accomplish in order for you to feel worthy. And then once you get there, there's the next thing Oh, you didn't see it before because you weren't worthy. But then there's the next thing and I think it comes from, you know, like, I was a academically gifted child. And I was in all the other like, quote, unquote, gifted programs, which is a double-edged sword. You know, I had, I had great learning opportunities as a kid, I love learning, I still do. And it also meant that all of the adults around me, like all of the feedback I was getting from the adults around me was for my smarts and for my achievements. Rather than for who I was, I mean, I did get some of that to like, you know, you're a good kid. But it meant that I like I internalize that. And, and what I said earlier, like what happens when I was confronted with something that was challenging? What happened when I was learning, you know, like failure is an integral part of learning how else do you learn then through your mistakes? And I started to notice for myself, like, I have the vocabulary now as an adult with, with you know, a lot of perspective but I remember the feeling have like, the path narrowing for how much leeway I had to experiment to try things. And, and after a while, like, by the time I was in middle school, I felt like I didn't really have a choice, but to be the perfect A-plus students. And, you know, it would cause all sorts of anxiety, if I would get like a 95 on a test, which is a really good score, you know, it's still an A, it, you know, it definitely demonstrates that they learned something and retained something. And it still felt like it wasn't good enough. And I think a lot of us carry that forward into adulthood, where you get the promotion, but then, you know, our, our corporate overlords structure things so that you get the promotion. But then here's even more objectives, here's more, quote, unquote, opportunities for improvement. Right. And this just induces this feeling of, I'm not good enough. And I don't have what it takes to do what I'm doing. Forget about, I don't have what it takes to do anything else, I don't have enough to just do what I'm doing. I'm barely hanging on as it is. And that I think, leads people to feeling really, really trapped. And a big part of what my work entails, when I sit with people is just to restore their hope and faith in themselves. And a lot of that comes through simply reminding them of what they're capable of. Because a lot of the messaging that they've internalized is, you're no good. And, you know, if you've gone anywhere in your career, you've done something valuable. If you've gotten anywhere in your career, you've done something that is worthy of recognition. And the unfortunate thing that happens is when it doesn't get recognized, we forget about it, or it goes and sits in the blind spot. And so a really big part of the recovery. And the advancement into career satisfaction is to not only identify it but to embrace it so that it can be yours.
Kim Meninger
Well, there's so much to what you just said, I'm trying to figure out which byte to take. Because I want to go back just for a moment to what you were describing about the 95 on the test because I just wrote an article about this. And one of my points was that this the way that school is structured, creates perfectionism, very early on, because we're all graded on that standard of perfection. And if you are a good student, and everybody's praising you for being a good student, that incentive is there to just be perfect. And always get the, you know, the a plus. And then we get into the workplace, there's no such thing as an eight plus anymore, right? You can't get 100 on your tests, there's you don't get you don't even get generally speaking, the feedback to know where you are in the process is very disorienting for those high achievers who have become accustomed to that right. And so if you have no internal sense of what is important to you, or how you evaluate yourself, and your worth and your value, as you're describing, all you have to go on is the external feedback and validation of the people around you, right, and then that becomes a trap. Because like you said, Now I'm making my world smaller and smaller and smaller because I can't take the risks required to expand. And so much of life is trial and error, right? We learn about ourselves through experimenting through failure, getting it wrong, making mistakes, figuring things out. And if we're not, we don't give ourselves permission to do that. We end up in this little small bubble that doesn't serve us or anyone around us.
Anthony Kuo
You just said something so important about like developing your own internal barometer for your value and for your worth. And that is so important. And that's why it's like the first step in, in my work, right, like, define what career satisfaction means to you. And it sounds simple when I say it, but it is a really long and deep process for a lot of people because we've gone so long without even giving any thought. And we've become so accustomed to just hang on to the external indicators that somebody else gave to us a long time ago. You're making me think of, in an incident in my eighth-grade science class. Where like I was, I was definitely like a like, perfectionist student, but there was one girl in my class who was even more so. And like, and I don't blame her for it, because her mom was really scary about it. Like, if she got a 99 on a test, she would like start crying and beg for the extra points just so she wouldn't catch crap from her mom. And the, the experiment of the week was the egg drop. You remember, like, you know, you would you would package up and egg in whatever you could think of. And then our teacher would go to the top of the roof and toss it down. And if your egg stayed intact, you passed. And if your egg broke, you failed. I think the, the grading scheme of that is problematic in hindsight, but you know, this poor girl, she worked really hard on her, on her on her project, and the laws of physics one out on that one. And when, when, when we opened her package, the egg had broken. And she just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. And, you know, eventually, the teacher felt bad and gave her like a C for it instead of, you know, a zero. And I just think now about how tragic that is, because, in fact, she really did learn something like we all did, we all learn about what protects an egg when you throw it up roof. And that's really useful, especially if you want to become like an engineer. And we also learn what doesn't work. Also really important if you want to be an engineer, or just, just in general. And it's really unfortunate that the lesson that they that almost all of us learned was, Wow, I got a zero. Or wow, I got an A, and we didn't really understand. You know, we learned a little science that day. But I think we learned more about like the system.
Kim Meninger
Yeah. Oh, that,'s that's a really powerful story. Because my, my sense as you're describing that, especially if most people got the zero is that the A was more of a few, right than a sense of, oh, like I learned something. And I got this right, right? I was like, Oh, thank God, I escaped the horrors of and, and you're right, I think there's, there's so many moments like that, where our highest priority is to protect ourselves from some perceived negative consequence, as opposed to saying, you know, what, can I learn from this? How will this enlighten or enrich me in some way?
Anthony Kuo
Yeah. And that's the thing with career satisfaction, because I, I like to say that career satisfaction is not a one-and-done. It's not like you land in a job. And then you can wipe your hands clean of the whole journey and cool, that's it, that's it forever. Because it's not going to be perfect. It never is. When we land in a new career, something is going to be better. But then, because we because landing in that new career, and that that better career gives us the space to enjoy more, then we start to have the availability, availability to notice. Oh, that another part of my career that I haven't had the bandwidth to notice before. That's not quite right anymore. I don't love that. And if we have the like, rigid, you know, did I pass or did I fail kind of mentality? It's going to feel like a failure. It's going to feel like oh, no, I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. But we can take it and learn from it. We can we can work with it. And so sometimes when I work with people, it's a one in like either short term engagement, see each other for a few months and then, you know, I wish them well in their new chapter. And then some people I work with long term, because it's, it's a, it's a whole adventure to notice. What would you like now? What would you like now that you've landed here? What would you like to experiment with? Oh, cool, we had a hypothesis that that would be better. And that turned out not to be the case. Cool, what do we miss? So we can do better next time.
Kim Meninger
And love the language of hypothesis too, because that takes some of the personal emotion out of it, right? And sort of acknowledges that. Yeah, we're, we're doing a bit of an experiment here. And we're testing like, I like to think of a lot of the career management process is collecting data. And there's nothing inherently good or bad about it. Just, just I'm learning about myself and learning about what's out there. So that's a really great way to think about it. So I mean, it sounds like if we think about it in terms of your process, step one is the redefinition or the clear definition of career satisfaction. Would you agree with that?
Anthony Kuo
Yep. 100%.
Kim Meninger
So would you advise people listening to take that as an action for themselves? Is there anything else that you would suggest? Like, obviously, we're going to, in a moment, get to how people can find you if they want you as their partner in the process? But if they're gonna try this on their own, is there anything else that you would say? They should be thinking about? Kind of, if they've never thought about this before? And they're just thinking, ooh, this speaks to me? What do I do next?
Anthony Kuo
Yeah, I think the first thing that I advise people to do is to actually, this is gonna sound counterintuitive, but it's to listen to your dissatisfaction. Because that is really important information that you're getting from yourself. Where your, your, your body, your system is trying to tell you something, something's not working. And we can often define what would work through what doesn't work. Right, so so that, you know, from a, from a broad philosophical sense of define career satisfaction as it means to you like that. That's nice. That's, that's, that's interesting. But the real practical nature of that is worded the green flags and the red flags that you need to see. Like, what specifically makes you feel like you're thriving, what specifically makes you feel like, you're just gonna, you know, rage quit the next day. And so that's like, that's, that's that transition into the practical, using your day-to-day experience as information to feed into your next day-to-day experience is where the rubber meets the road on this whole satisfaction journey.
Kim Meninger
I think you're absolutely right, it takes it down to a much more practical level than that very abstract question of what does career satisfaction mean?
Anthony Kuo
Yeah, yeah, I get a lot of referrals from therapists actually. And it's a really great partnership. Because in therapy, you work through the emotional things. And you do go through like, some of that exploration of like, what does my career even mean to me as a person? And where therapists tend to turn to me is for that practical like, this is what it specifically looks like for you in your job.
Kim Meninger
So for anyone out there who's listening and wants to learn more about that, and you Where can they find you?
Anthony Kuo
You can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all the things my handle is Untamed Career. And my website is untamedcareer.com. And I also, we were talking about this earlier, I was thinking about what would be a nice resource for listeners of this podcast, like what is the intersect between career satisfaction and impostor syndrome? And we discovered as we were chatting before recording that there's a lot you know, one of the things that we chatted about today was like feeling stuck, right? Feeling stuck in what you're doing and a really common thing that I hear when people walk into my into my office is, I feel like I can't do anything more than what I'm currently doing. And I'm afraid that if I move to something else, I have to start all over at the bottom. And like I've worked so hard to get to where I am, I don't want to get coffee anymore. And the if you've, like I said earlier, if you've gotten anywhere in Korea, you've done a lot of stuff, you've gotten a lot of valuable experience, you have a lot of knowledge, even if it's really specific. There is a really strong base of transferable skills and transferable knowledge that you're building. So I've put together a guide to help you. Consider the transferable skills you might be missing when you ask yourself that question. So if you, if you have that feeling of I can't do what I'm doing. I can't do anything other than what I'm doing. We'll leave, we'll leave a link to where you can get this guide in the show notes. Wonderful.
Kim Meninger
Thank you so much, Anthony. I loved this conversation. I'm sure others will as well. So appreciate your insights and just very grateful for your willingness to be part of this with me.
Anthony Kuo
Well, thank you I really appreciate your curiosity and, and your, your message it's so needed and I also really love your, your ethos of like allowing the imperfect to be as a recovering perfectionist, and people pleaser myself. We really need that. So thank you. Thank you.