Career Clarity with Athletes: A 2ndwind Podcast with Ryan Gonsalves

156: John Tarnoff - How to embrace the beginner’s mindset, mid-career navigation tips for career strategy

• Ryan Gonsalves • Episode 156

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What if your career isn’t over, it just needs a reset?

In this episode, we’re joined by John Tarnoff, career coach and author of Boomer Reinvention, who shares how he completely pivoted after being laid off at 50. From Hollywood executive to helping thousands navigate second and third careers, John’s story is real, relatable, and packed with insight for anyone figuring out what’s next.

We talk about how to stay relevant in a changing world of work, why your next chapter doesn’t have to look anything like your last, and how to build a career that actually feels good, not just impressive on paper.


We talk about:

- Why your career isn’t a straight line and that’s okay

- How to shift direction without starting from scratch

- What a “60-year career” could look like in today’s world

- The mindset you need to grow, even when it feels like you’re late

- Why failure might be the thing that finally frees you

- Tools like Ikigai and prototyping to test new paths before you commit


💎 GOLDEN NUGGET:

 “You’re not starting over. You’re starting from experience. That’s the shift. You’re not going back to the bottom of the ladder—you’re building a whole new ladder, using everything you’ve learned. People think reinvention means erasing the past, but it actually means carrying the best of it forward. Your story isn’t restarting. It’s evolving.” 


 Want support on your own pivot? 

Visit www.2ndwind.io to learn more or book a session.
Let’s help you figure out what’s next and build a career that fits where you are now. 

Speaker 1:

It's that healthy career versus, to use the words there. It's what is a healthy career versus a long career, yeah, and it's getting a clear definition purpose on what makes what's a career. Health check in some respects, right, yeah.

Speaker 2:

It's saying great, it's a mindset. It's a mindset question and I think for a lot of people who are getting older and kind of questioning their direction of their career, there is a danger of kind of falling inward, collapsing inward and feeling like, oh, I'm too old to do this right. Or this idea of old dogs, new tricks, right, yeah, and I reject this categorically and I reject this categorically. I think that comes about if we don't spend enough time or focus on our health and on making health a vital part of our work lives.

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Ryan Gonsalves and welcome to a Second Wind Academy podcast, a show all about career transition through the lens of elite athletes. Each week, I invite a guest to the show who shares their unique sporting story. Please join me to delve into the thoughts and actions of athletes through a series of conversations. Don't worry, there's plenty to learn from those of you that aren't particularly sporty. Elite athletes are still people after all. Let's be inspired by the stories of others. John Tarnoff, welcome to the show, great to have you talking with me today. All about career clarity.

Speaker 2:

Ryan, I love being here. Let's get into it.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Now, john, you and I, we're going to have a different conversation to normal. This one is definitely going to be, I'm going to say, informative in a different kind of way. Rather than delving into an athletic career and the transitions you've made, really you're here to help unpick and delve into, well, what is a career and how do we navigate careers in today's world?

Speaker 2:

I'll just say, to kind of cater to your audience and to the theme of your show, is that I think we all have to approach careers from an athletic perspective, in the sense that we all need to be in training all the time in order to deal with this very uncertain, changeable career environment that we find ourselves in, where careers are no longer this steady state thing where it's like, well, either you're in a job forever or you're out. We have to be more nimble, we have to work on career agility, as we would work on physical agility. We have to work on resilience, we have to work on endurance, we have to work on strategy, a lot of things which I think are familiar to serious and professional athletes.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely Couldn't agree more. You know, as you're saying, that the world of career is changing, or the world of work is changing, and whilst typically we talk about athletes being in one career, one, one sort of focused path, and then having to step out of that hopefully, you know, in their early 30s, I think what we're recognizing is well. Actually, that is becoming more and more apparent for those who aren't even athletes. You know that you're not in one job for life. Things are going to continue to change and, like you say, nowadays I talk a lot about career literacy. So when I was younger, it was all about financial literacy. You need to understand how to money, manage your house, do that Whereas the way that the workforce and jobs are changing, we now need a career literacy, and that's not just for athletes, but that's for everybody.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, traditionally we have not been educated in being career literate, We've been leaving it to chance, We've been relying on outdated concepts of career management, and so for many people that I work with who are in career transition typically I work with people in mid-career, but I will work with people people come to me in their early 30s who are essentially getting over what I would think of as a kind of apprenticeship stage of their careers, right when they have learned the basic skills, they have built a certain level of confidence, of competency in what they do, but they may be facing some headwinds. They may be facing some corporate change that is impacting their work. I'm thinking of a guy that I'm working with right now who is in the financial sector, who is in his mid-30s, who had a really good job with a marquee-level company.

Speaker 2:

A big reorg swept through at the top. The division that he was working with was deemed no longer part of the strategy and as he was really beginning to make progress on this project, really enjoying working with this team, they all got wiped out. So he's now kind of thinking okay, well, how do I take all of the lessons that I've learned and build something for myself that is again more resilient, right and more long-term. In terms of what's his purpose, what does he really want to do, what's the kind of impact he wants to make, and how can he program this in a way to keep it going.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and it's wonderful to hear that, because you've just described a situation where you'd have a long-time pro or Olympic athlete coming out early 30s, just like you've mentioned, and they would describe themselves in exactly the same way. I've just been dedicating this whole part of my life, I've achieved excellence, I'm at the top here, I've been at my game and now I need to find something else that's going to be resilient, that's going to be in line with what my real or my true calling is and how to go and find that out. So, look, I want to definitely step into that a bit more Now. Before we do that, tell me a bit, tell me about you, tell me where you are and tell me what do you do so.

Speaker 2:

I am a career coach. I live in Los Angeles. I work globally online here People in the States, in Europe. I've worked with people in Asia, the Middle East, on career transitions and I come out of a very volatile business. Unlike many career coaches, I do not come out of HR or recruiting. I come out of industry, and the industry that I worked in was a particularly challenging one. It was the entertainment business. I worked as a film studio executive for many years. I took a kind of a sabbatical into technology in the 90s, had a startup raised, the money went up and then 2001 hit and the market wiped out and we wiped out. So it was a great learning experience, to say the least.

Speaker 2:

Got back into the entertainment industry in the 2000s, but in a different role. In the interim. I had taken a psychology degree. I kind of hit 50. I thought what am I going to do? I'm in this mid-career period, I need to change things up.

Speaker 2:

Took the psychology degree to learn more about how I think, how other people think, and I started kind of changing my tune. And this is something which actually happens psychologically to people in midlife, which is that you begin to look for more of a sense of meaning and purpose in the work that you're doing. You kind of have a lot of your life behind you, You've conquered some of those initial goals and obstacles and now you're thinking, okay, well, what's the second wind right? What is that next level of achievement that I can go for? So for me, I began to realize that I was more interested in people than in projects, and the first half of my career had been very project focused in developing and managing these film and TV projects. Now I was more interested in the people behind those projects and what made them tick and how I could support their growth. And that's what led me to this role that I had at DreamWorks Animation for most of the 2000s, at a time when that company was going through massive growth and changes. At a time when that company was going through massive growth and changes and it was a great place to be at that time and through the evolution of the Shrek franchise and the how to Train your Dragon franchise and Kung Fu Panda, which I had a chance to work on very early on, and a bunch of other things, and working on new technology projects and migrating artists from traditional to digital technology, and it was fantastic and working on new technology projects and migrating artists from traditional to digital technology, and it was fantastic.

Speaker 2:

And when the company changed direction at the end of the 2000s, much more into kind of production factory franchise mode, I thought I need to go out and do something on my own. It was time for me to kind of go out and be an entrepreneur or be a consultant or really have my own work. And that's how the career coaching started, because people started coming to me. Many of them had been at DreamWorks going. How do I make these transitions work Right? The world is more volatile. I was looking at people my age who were having difficulty, particularly after the 2008, 2009 recession, financially going well, you know, I've lost a lot of money in my house and my retirement's gone, and how do I keep working in this ageist environment that we live in? And it continues to be challenging for many, many people in mid-career. So that's what started the program. I've been doing it now for about 15 years. I work with people in every sector imaginable and it's been a great years. I work with people in every sector imaginable and it's been a great ride.

Speaker 1:

That sounds like a great ride, just where you've been, the sort of industries that you're working across, and I can really align with the purpose that you found by entering into career coaching. There's, I think, many similarities, certainly with myself in there as well. I'm interested in something you said you became more interested in the people behind the projects rather than the projects themselves. To what extent do you think there was always that interest in the people versus the project?

Speaker 2:

I think that's a good question and I think the answer is yes, and I've thought about this because my first job coming out here was as a talent agent, so I was representing writers and directors and getting behind their projects and selling them and their projects to studios and networks and, again, it really was the relationships with these people and the creative talent that they were advancing that really captured my imagination. So, yeah, I think I think there was always that in the background, there was that, that interest in people and that enjoyment of working with people. So, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

It's consistent.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it's those things that are in the of hiding in open, hiding in front of us often, yeah, in plain sight. There we go, hiding in plain sight, and it's always in that skill, which I suppose you've certainly developed and honed to, I guess, as you work with your clients, to sort of tease that out and get that understanding. You were just talking at the start about one particular client you're working with who is now trying to, I guess, find that purpose and things like that. You said it's becoming more and more like that at this mid-career. Actually, I've got another question. I see so many questions coming up what is mid-career? When is mid-career?

Speaker 2:

Really great question and I think that that has changed a lot. And before we got on the call, we were talking about this and I was mentioning that there was a series that the Wall Street Journal did a few years ago called the 60-Year Career, and the idea behind that was that we're used to thinking of careers as a 40-year proposition. You get out of school and you work for 40 years and then you retire, and that is an industrial era model where people are basically working at the same job. You're kind of identified and then locked into the credential that you earn and then you're stamped with that for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1:

That's the job for life, that's it.

Speaker 2:

You are. I mean, I'm sure we've all gotten this advice. It's like, well, stick to what you know. Well, that's a very limiting way of looking at things and I think a lot of people are younger generations are pushing back against that. It's like don't define me by that, right? So the model was you get a good education, it entitles you to work in your career for those 40 years, and then you get to retire because you're too old to work the machines, right or whatever, and you're going to die soon, right?

Speaker 1:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

You retire, maybe got a year Right, so we don't have to pay too much money to kind of keep you alive for those few years, well, that's out the window. People are living longer. If you're 60 today, you have a better than 25 to 30% chance of living to 90. If you're younger, the chances of you living to 90 are much greater. So this is the equation Do you want to spend a third of your life in retirement? Right, Well, how are you going to afford a third of your life in retirement? Well, how are you going to afford it? Number one. Number two what are you going to do with yourself? Number two there's a new model. I think that Wall Street Journal is teasing this idea with the 60-year career, because it's no longer this linear idea of you get out of school, you work and then you retire. I believe and I think this is obvious to anyone education is lifelong.

Speaker 1:

Right. In what way? As in what you think.

Speaker 2:

Well, in the sense that you always need to be learning, because things are changing so much that you need to keep up, and I think, from a self-awareness and self-knowledge point of view, you want to explore what you're capable of, and that's kind of fun at the end of the day. Learning new things is fun at any age and I can certainly tell you, as someone who is an older person, I'm still mad keen to learn new things because I don't want to get bored with life with what I already know. I'm always changing things up and I think that that's a mindset that I want everyone to be encouraged to adopt. Right? So education is lifelong. So your credential means less right, the early credential you want to keep building on that, your ability to do something, is your real credential today. That's why you see people without college degrees starting multi-zillion dollar companies, because they can do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so I'm going to sit on that a little bit. Your ability to do that's the credential.

Speaker 2:

Right. So, from a professional point of view, you're always going to be learning. So what's the most important thing that you want to grab when you go into your career? And I would say it's self-awareness, self-knowledge. Who are you, what motivates you, what stimulates you, what sparks your imagination, what sparks your curiosity. Cultivate that, right. That's what needs to get you into the workplace, and the workforce is that sense of wonder about stuff. So go for that.

Speaker 2:

And then in your career, through these various stages that you're going to be in, where you're learning in this direction, you're changing, you're adapting, you're taking a break, you're learning more about yourself, you're getting involved, maybe in raising a family, maybe you're caregiving, maybe you're going back to school again right, there are all these opportunities. It's not this linear idea where you got to work for the same company, the same job, right, for 40 years. It's always going to be different. The change, I think, also, is that you want to be generative, right, you want to. It's not about just showing up nine to five anymore and saying, okay, what am I supposed to do today? And then just doing what they tell you to do. Those jobs, by the way, are going to get replaced by AI.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

So you need to figure out where can I make a strategic difference right? How can I be more creative, more strategic, more insightful and push the barriers, push the limits right, Work in these teams to come up with new ideas. If you do that, if you're generative in that way, then you can sustain your career for years and learn new things and go in new directions. And then the final stage of the career, as I would propose it, is giving back. The more you know, the more you learn, the more you have to share to help people who are coming up behind you do better right, Pay it forward. So that, I think, is the way we have to look at career today.

Speaker 1:

And I think that's an interesting. It is a shift, right, it's a shift on the way we look at the traditional career, in that, like you say, we get our way through school, we do further education, college, vet, whatever it is, but we build that skill so that by 22, we're set for life off. We go, but that life isn't going to end at 60, 65. We now need to look at that life ending at 100 plus, which means from a traditional career perspective, as we say, be adaptable, be versatile, be ready to make those shifts at 30, 40. I mean, I'm picking decades but to be honest, it's whenever a strategic shift is actually going to come in. You need to be best prepared to take that next step. And what you're describing, sort of some of the fundamental pieces, are that learn through doing so. That academic your accreditation is now doing, it's getting out. It's learning, exploring, doing things by and you say, generative. So finding out, where do you create value, how do you create value? It becomes the part that helps you navigate this new career landscape.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and I think that that goes on until the end, right, hopefully, you want to be doing this as long as possible, and I think that along with that, I also think and back to the fact that we're working in an athletic context here there is a certain level of physicality that I think is very important for us in career, right, and I think that our bodies let's do it this way our minds work better when our bodies are working better. So there's a lot of conversation today about health span and lifespan and right, I would, I would rather I'm not so much concerned about my lifespan as I am concerned about my health span, right I would rather live a life that is more healthy and can be concerned about my ability to show up every day as a healthy, functional, vital person, rather than just the idea of living long right.

Speaker 2:

And I think that that mindset is important for a career, because otherwise I think people tend to kind of run out of steam early.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's that healthy career versus, to use the words there, it's what is a healthy career versus a long career. Yeah, and it's getting a clear definition purpose on what makes what's a career. Health check in some respects Right. Yeah, it's saying great.

Speaker 2:

It's a mindset. It's a mindset question and I think for a lot of people who are getting older and kind of questioning their direction of their career, there is a danger of kind of falling inward, collapsing inward and feeling like, oh, I'm too old to do this right. Or this idea of old dogs, new tricks, right yeah, and I reject this categorically. I think that comes about if we don't spend enough time or focus on our health and on making health a vital part of our work lives. So this goes to burnout. This goes to the idea that when we're young, we can work 80 hours a week. We press through, we have a kind of a burnout macho culture, particularly in tech. This is insane, right. Burnout is real. People are burning out.

Speaker 2:

I think the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early. I think a lot of that. I may get in trouble for this, but I think a lot of that comes from burnout in the sense of I can't keep going, I can't work at this pace for another 10 or 20 years. I better accumulate as much money as I can early so that I can just relax and rest. Well, you know, that doesn't work, guys, you know, and I think if you talk to a lot of fire advocates once they get there and they make that bundle of money in their 30s and then they say, oh, I've retired. Five years later they're going. I need to get back in Need something.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, they need to be going. You know that's again interesting thinking about from that athletic perspective. You've got this Olympic route, professional route, where it is typically full throttle to get on the podium right that you know we're talking about. This burnout is unsustainable, I mean not just physically but mentally is going to be unsustainable for what is a 60 year, 70 year career. That's just not going to be done, which almost leads its way to this sort of peaks and troughs where you may push and then you may take your foot off the pedal or at least shift direction. Foot off the pedal or at least shift direction. Go into a learning phase rather than a necessarily extreme delivery or revenue generation phase.

Speaker 2:

I think that going for the podium is great, and I think that when you're out of the gate and you're trying to figure out who you are, what you're capable of and you're willing to push the boundaries, that's fantastic and go ahead, set records, hit the podium, but and I'm sure that you see this a lot in your practice directly that's not who you are, right, as a athlete, as a human being. You're more than that record. You're more than those achievements. That is part of the human progress, the evolution that you're going through across your life. So you want to be able to say, okay, I did this, here's what I've learned from this.

Speaker 2:

My life is going to go into other areas of achievement. Maybe I can take some of the qualities and the personality and the behaviors that I use to achieve that particular goal and apply this to other areas right particular goal and apply this to other areas. Right, Maybe I can broaden this out to work with other people, to be a leader and help them benefit from the kinds of techniques, behaviors, disciplines that I learned or that I used to achieve this, and we can do other things. So, then, I think this goes into the ability to begin to define what the career can be after the athletic career.

Speaker 1:

How you know people listen, people are watching and they're thinking yes, that makes sense. How do I do that? What are some of the basic things that they can pretty much do in at home to help them navigate this career or that particular change you're talking about?

Speaker 2:

There's an exercise that I start with with everybody, and it's probably you and your viewers are probably many of them already familiar with this exercise. This is called the Ikigai I-K-I-G-A-I. This is this supposedly Japanese philosophy of life's purpose, and you see this Venn diagram on the internet these four circles. I'm told this is not an accurate depiction of what Ikigai is really about, but this is how we've been interpreting it in the West. Four questions what do you love to do? What do you do? Well, what does your world need and what can you get paid for? I do a little switch.

Speaker 2:

The Ikigai says what does the world need? I think that's too aspirational, I think that's too big. It has to apply to your world, right? So if it's your business, you know your focus. What does the immediate environment around you? What can you do to make a difference? So this is about kind of creating the beginnings of a so-called product market fit for you. And if you spend some time answering those four questions and looking at your answers, keep it going, you're going to start to have a better sense of where you can apply your value out in the world. So that's number one.

Speaker 2:

Number two I would say is and this again applies across everyone and every situation. You can't do this alone, right, you have to get feedback. You have to do this cooperatively. You don't know how you're being perceived in the world. That's very important to the process. So get a core group of people together, people that you've known, people you've been in school with, colleagues, maybe fellow competitors. Build a community around these relationships and work with them. You help them, they help you. Together, figure this out. So you're part of a community, part of a movement to answer these questions. Each of you is going to be answering it differently, but you are all going to be working together to help keep everyone on track honest, right, authentic and that's what's going to get this process going.

Speaker 1:

Love that, that's great.

Speaker 2:

The following I would say and this is kind of out of another thread that I've been following is the idea of prototyping, the idea that you can experiment with various options, career options, whether this is conceptual prototyping, where you kind of write out what you think the first year of a particular job in a particular business would be. You think the first year of a particular job in a particular business would be. You can also go out and seek out people who are doing this work that you think you might want to pursue and interview them, interview multiple people. What's it like? What is your workday like? What's the good news, what's the bad news? Right, get a sense of what that could be for you and then, if you want to do internships or shadowing, spend a day with one of these people and say can I just kind of sit with you or follow you around for a week and see if this makes sense? All of those opportunities are there to help you get a sense of whether this is for you or not.

Speaker 1:

That's really good. I like those. Actually, I had an experience just building on that, last week where a company called Work Window. We had these virtual reality, the meta VR goggles, and they brought workplaces to us. So it was a fully immersive opportunity for us to explore working on a construction site, working in a podiatry clinic, working in um in like in a car dealership, so you had all all through these virtual reality goggles so you're sort of moving around. So that, again, just on that prototyping that you know, bringing in new technologies as well, that I think is really fascinating. Three great, great tips there.

Speaker 1:

One of the bits that I think athletes I guess I've got two separate questions one of the bits I know athletes struggle with is I'm a professional, I'm the 0.1 percent in a given thing, right? I'm now going to step away from that and come into something fully new. I'm used to learning mastery, awesome, awesome. And now I'm going to start somewhere at the bottom or near bottom again, which is quite difficult to sort of. Well, I guess that's going to be quite a difficult thing to go through. You know it is a difficult thing. Having gone there myself, it's a difficult thing to have to go through. But in this new world, this new career structure. We're going to be moving following our ikigai, following where we're good and where we've got these things. But it might mean we come off that top and have to start and work our way up. Is that something, or to what extent do you come across that, helping individuals to navigate that particular painful point?

Speaker 2:

First of all, I would say and this may sound kind of outrageous, but that is a gift to have been in the 0.1% and now to be forced really to start over and to be in the 99.9%. It is the gift of humility, it is the gift of connection to humanity in its entirety and it is entirely normal and I encounter this with people in a different stage of life who have achieved high levels of seniority in corporate business and who now are facing a sense of okay, I've kind of climbed to the top, but I am being pushed aside to be replaced by younger people on the way up, people who were much like I was five or 10 years ago. So the timeframe is different than it is with athletics, because in athletics we're talking about people who are much younger. It's a there's a compression of time. This happens over a much shorter period than it does in corporate, but the idea is the same.

Speaker 2:

You get attached, you identify yourself with that achievement. Again, you're more than that and the gift of this to me is the opportunity for you to uncouple with the ego identification with your achievement and to realize that you are not that achievement and people are not looking at you or you really don't want them to be looking at you just in terms of that achievement, because that's not real right. That's in their heads. Your being in the point one is not really about you, it's about them. It's about their sense of I'm down here. That person's up there. You're just another human being. You actually want to connect with that person in a different way, not from the point of view of being the God. So that's why it's the gift. It gives you a chance to kind of get back into what's really important in life and it gives you a chance to kind of relax and get away from only being limited to that small idea that you're the best in this.

Speaker 1:

What a trap you know like you describe it as a gift and and at first I'm there and I'm thinking, oh no, I can't say that. That's like saying I don't know, it's good luck when it rains on your wedding day I get that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know, it's know it's like no, it's just what we're saying. You've got to deal with it. But you're right, there is a gift there. There is a wonderful, and we talk about learning, but it's a wonderful learning opportunity and you brought in two key skills there one of humility and just being humble enough to go again, and it gives you, therefore, therefore, an inner sense, or sense in your sense, of belief in your ability, but then also this emotional connection to then to be able to connect with individuals. We're going to be outside of your typical circle, but that humility and emotional connection is another chap who, alex, who do a lot of work with, and he talks about humility and eq, as these two traits that are within athletes to you get, get knocked down, you get back up and it's like, yeah, you're humble, like right, I've got to go again, I've got to keep learning. And it's finding that competency I don't know if that's the right word, but that competence inside you again to go again and reapply yourself in this new field or this different world.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's embracing the beginner's mind and I would say that what keeps you, you know, young, whatever that means, but it keeps you kind of vital and energized is the willingness to surrender the achievement, to surrender the attachment. I mean this is getting very Zen here, but I think it works. You know your ability to ability to let go of that achievement, let go of the value of that achievement and to embrace what's next is really important as a cornerstone of real success. And it's interesting, it brings up a quote that someone gave me a long time ago. It's a quote from the playwright Eugene O'Neill and it really just shocked me when this guy told it to me. But I'll say it.

Speaker 2:

I use it often because it's so powerful. And the quote is those who stop at success and do not push on to the greater failure are the true spiritual middle-classers. How petty their dreams must have been. And that just rocked my world when I first heard it, because it's really radical. Right, this idea of pushing beyond success into failure, and a lot of Silicon Valley culture is about embracing failure and pushing through failure to find success. And I think there's a lot of validity to that, and I think, particularly for people who are high achievers very early in life. Again, this is an opportunity.

Speaker 1:

That's right. I must admit I was chatting with failure. To what extent is failure truly accepted outside of sport? I think the way we're getting to that is more yeah, we talk about it's good, go out, fail and start again. Go out and fail and start again when it comes to business and things like that. But there's an ego, there is a human part of us that says, oh, it's good to fail within my terms, so as long as it's like, it's okay, hey, it was only a small business, it was all right. But for so many, for so many people, that business failure, that being retrenched, that redundancy or, as they're saying, is it the game of life? Or I think it was rich dad, poor dads, when you get downsized, that failure is actually really hard and many people don't get past that, they don't overcome that.

Speaker 2:

That's really hard. Well, this gets into all sorts of psychology around shame and self-acceptance and the willingness to essentially own the pain of the failure and really look at your expectations for yourself and the judgment that you have burdened yourself with. And in many cases, people who are achieving a lot are running from their own fear of failure and it can catch up with you. And when that happens again, this is the gift, this is the opportunity to go. Okay, I failed. I am still a great person because I achieved what I achieved. I am not my success, I am not my failure. I am deeper than that and it's time for me to discover more about who I really am.

Speaker 1:

John, one last I'll say question. Maybe actually I'm not giving you questions, I'm giving you problems to solve live. This is this is about-.

Speaker 2:

Do I get a score?

Speaker 1:

That's it. Yeah, that's, that's right, my son. He's going through his exams at the moment, so yeah, I'll, I'll get it mark. One of the challenges I think many athletes face is when we retire. People still see us as the athlete. So whilst we shift our mindset, others don't. It's like hey, ryan, you're still scoring goals. No, I I'm not. I'm, in fact, I never really scored goals, but you know. Okay, but that's fine.

Speaker 1:

But one of the challenges and this is more to do with age and in that, what is the right age to be doing something? So when I'm 20, when I'm 20 years old, it is absolutely okay for me to walk into the office and, hey, I'll get the coffees, I'll go get the cups of tea and sandwiches, I'll be the the apprentice and do that. When I'm 30, hey, I've got. I now managed four people, five people. That's okay, because I'm a young manager, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. When'm 40, I'm running departments or businesses and this kind of thing. When I come out, you know, as an athlete, I'm 31, 32 years old, I'm walking.

Speaker 1:

Now, does ageism exist? I'm like, hey, I'm humble, I'm ready to start at the bottom. So, if I'm ready to start at the bottom, but they're like nah, you can't start at the bottom because you're going to be with 20 year olds or whatever it is. Do you see signs of one that that is that reverse ageism? I'm not sure You're too old, well, no, I guess it's. But you know, do we see that still occurring? And are there any tools, or again, mindset, you know what, what could we do, or you know, to sort of navigate that sense or that position?

Speaker 2:

I guess two things come up. The first thing is that, no matter where we are in life or career, I think it's important to adopt a service mindset right. And you're talking about being young, and when you're young and you don't have the domain knowledge, you don't have the experience. You have your willingness to serve and to learn and that's what they are expecting of you. For a period of about 10 years, from 2010 to 2020, I was co-writing a graduate program here in Los Angeles in entertainment management, so young people wanted to get out of college, earn a degree, get into management roles in entertainment film, tv games, music and I would say to them they're saying so in my internship. How should I approach my internship? And I'd say be of service right, figure out ways where you can be of service, knowing what you know, willing to learn, willing to adopt or adapt to opportunities and take on tasks and volunteer, et cetera. But I think that willingness to serve continues, no matter where we are.

Speaker 2:

I believe that leadership is actually service right. A strong leader is the person who is of service to their team and is, particularly today, in a very flat hierarchy world. The leader is the person who's making sure that everyone in the team is doing well, right. So there are different ways of being of service, but I think the way into it, that question of what's the most appropriate thing to do at any age is what is it that the stage of your life where you can be of service? What's the most appropriate way for you to be of service? And start there right, and people will help you with that. People will say, oh well, you've done this, this and this. It's silly for you to be getting coffee, but would you be willing to help me do this spreadsheet right? So you know there's no hard and fast answer. All I come up with is this idea of just look for opportunities right to help out, to be of service.

Speaker 1:

You know, I think that's a wonderful. I think that's a wonderful answer because those watching so many it's like where do I begin? How can I help? And where do I begin is what they say. What they may not ask the question is how can I help? So when they want to get an experience, as we said, prototype or do something, how can I best help? Flips it around because it's not. Yeah, go get the coffees. Not that that's a bad thing, but I guess in the terms of service, but it may well be well, can you come and talk to these individuals? Can you use your athletic experience, your pressure there to come and support?

Speaker 2:

I would also say that, yes, you can ask the question how can I help? But I think it also is incumbent upon us to figure out how we can help To say I see a need here that's not being addressed. Would it be okay if I step in and help out on that? And I know many successful people who in their early years adopted that policy or attitude in working in their organizations. They found the area that was not being covered well and they volunteered essentially to go in and help develop it and they just kept doing that, looking for opportunities to fix things right, to fill the gap, and they are majorly successful today because of that mindset approach. So a certain amount of proactivity there is important. It's not just about going you know, what do you got right? You know I want to help.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it is, you said it. Yeah, it's the proactive nature. And it comes back to the Venn diagram we were figuratively drawing earlier around saying, right, this is what I'm good at, this is what I can do, and where does my world, where does this world need me? And let's get that overlap. And it's bringing that in to sort of, yeah, help make it work. John loved this conversation. It has taken, as I said at the start, I said that as long as we're happy, then this is good. So I've enjoyed picking your brain. Thank you for being so open and generous with your knowledge and experience.

Speaker 2:

It's my pleasure, it's great to be on your show and I'm glad it was fun for you. I hope it's been of value to your audience as well.

Speaker 1:

Oh, absolutely Without a doubt Now. So, john, there's gonna be those listening, watching, who are going to want to find you, follow your journey. What's the best place to locate you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the best place is to find me on LinkedIn. I'm, I think, the only John Tarnoff on LinkedIn, so just search for me there. You'll find my profile. You can connect with me through that profile, contact me, et cetera. That's the great, great, greatest place to do it.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. John. Thanks a lot for taking the time out today. Pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Second Wind podcast. We hope you enjoyed hearing insights from today's athlete on transitioning out of competitive careers. If you're looking for career clarity for your next step, make sure you check out secondwindio for more information or to book a consultation with me. I'd like to thank Claire from Betty Brook Design, nancy from Savvy Podcast Solutions and Cerise from Copying Content by Lola for their help in putting this podcast together. That's all from me. Take it easy until next time.

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