Career Pivots & Purposeful Work: Mastering Career Transitions In The Modern World With Ava Lala
Looking to navigate a career pivot or transition with confidence? Host Christine Yeager chats with career development coach Ava Lala, who shares her expertise on embracing change and building resilience in your professional journey. Discover actionable strategies for managing setbacks, leveraging new technologies like AI in your job search, and developing an intentional mindset to achieve your goals. Ava also discusses the growing importance of impact and sustainability in career choices, offering insights for professionals seeking purpose-driven work. Tune in for valuable advice on self-actualization, negotiation, and transforming challenges into opportunities for growth.
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Career Pivots & Purposeful Work: Mastering Career Transitions In The Modern World With Ava Lala
Defining Your Career Path
Welcome to the show. I'm here with Ava. Thank you so much for being here. I'm super excited to have this conversation. Ava is a career development coach. She brings twenty-plus years of corporate experience across different roles and industries. Your role is to help support people through change, which is the reason you're here. Thank you so much for being here. Focusing on career pivots and career transitions, and also to help define success in their work, and how to promote themselves and build relationships to navigate those career opportunities. When you're not working, you like to read books, listen to podcasts.
Yes, I listen to yours.
Experimenting with new recipes, which is super fun, and hiking. We live down the street from each other in Golden, Colorado, and you live here with your husband, young daughter, and your cuddling and demanding cat, Rocco, which I love. Are there many cats that aren't demanding? I don't know.
That's true.
Thank you again for being here. Now, we always start our episodes with a little bit about who you are. I've already given your bio, but I'd love to hear in your own words a little bit about Ava.
First of all, thanks, Christine, for having me on the show. I'm delighted to be here. As you mentioned, I'm a career coach. I really focus on people who are thinking about either the next step in their current organization or who are thinking about that change and what that looks like outside, and moving into their next role. Maybe I can just take you through a little bit of my career snapshot to help you understand, like how I actually ended up doing this work.
I started my career in a traditional financial services company and, from a young age, was leading global marketing for one of the company's five business divisions. It was a pretty prestigious job at a pretty young age and tapped into the high potential of the employee and all the great stuff. I think in retrospect that kept me on autopilot for a little longer than it should have. A decade goes by, I pick my head up, and I'm like, “I'm making rich people richer. There's like got to be something more.”
I was craving something that felt more “meaningful,” but I had no idea what that was. I think many people get to certain points in their careers where they feel stuck. That was me. All I knew is, again, I wanted to do meaningful work. Long story short, that took me about a two-year process where I made all the mistakes, had to figure out this career pivot.
For me, the most important thing that I realized about myself came in a business school class. We were learning about Unilever, a case study around them, focusing on the bottom of the pyramid people in India in the slums. For me, it was this light bulb moment that business can be a force for social good. That's what I knew I wanted to do. Fast forward, I've worked in international development, working at a philanthropy consulting company, and then in ed tech, all had been mission-driven.
It was at my last company that I discovered coaching. I'd always wanted to have my own business, but I didn't know what I would do. When I discovered coaching, it was this way to fuse my lifelong nerdy love of personal development and self-help with being able to help people. That's what I decided to do. I really have always been fascinated by helping people navigate their careers, especially women. That's what I decided to do.
Living With Intention: Cultivating A Positive Mindset
I love it. With that background, I think this question should be easy. I'd like to ask all my guests, “How do you live with intention?”
I think it now takes a lot of deliberate practice. As I've gotten into and learned so much more around the way our brain operates is like it is not necessarily designed for change. To be intentional, one of the first things I've recognized is how to pay attention to the thoughts that I'm having, because we're all walking around with, like, if you think about it, buggy software, we have 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are negatively oriented.
Scientists actually call this a negativity bias, where we're just designed to be paying attention to the potential negatives or the worries and things like that. If you imagine we're walking around all day long with this negative chatter happening in the background. I realized, one, I need to start paying much more attention to what I'm thinking about on a daily basis. Two, I can be much more deliberate in trying to shape the thoughts, but that takes intentionality.
For me, it looks like even taking most mornings, at least five minutes to just jot down a few thoughts that I deliberately want to have. I even have like a binder, and there's a page in there that lists my best thoughts. I look at it at least once a week to try to, again, focus my brain on what I want to think. Otherwise, it's like a little puppy untrained, wandering around doing whatever it wants. I have to deliberately train it. I think, how can I be intentional in what I want to choose to think, and that takes effort?
Business can be a force for social good.
A lot of effort. I've been talking to my son a lot about negative self-talk and how to get out of it. It's really hard to coach someone out of something that you've been doing your whole life.
Yes. I talk to my clients all the time. This is where we start.
That's great. I'm going to take that advice and work with my son to start writing down positive thoughts that we want to have throughout the day. That's great exercise. Also, I have to comment that we talk about being nerds on this show a lot because we go deep into sustainability topics that are pretty nerdy. I have like favorite research report about recycling. We're in good nerd company.
Leveraging AI: A Strategic Tool For Career Advancement
One thing that's great about your work is that you are generally helping people opt into change, or maybe they haven't opted in, but at least they're trying to figure out how to navigate change, whether or not they've opted into it. We talk about opting into change a lot here on this show. You shared with me earlier that you've been trying to push yourself out of your comfort zone and for your clients by leveraging new technology like AI. Can you share a little bit about how you've been using AI and how you've been influencing others to use it as well?
I will say I'm usually actually a pretty big laggard when it comes to some of the latest trends and bads and things like that. I recognized pretty early on that I think AI was going to be pretty influential. Made some deliberate choices for me to stay on top of things, so that looked like enrolling in courses. I'm constantly reading books. I get an email newsletter around the changes that are happening because I think that I do tend to subscribe to the thinking that it's not necessarily AI that's going to take most of our jobs.
Some jobs will go away with AI doing them, but it's going to be the people that are using AI that are going to be much more competitive than people that are not. I think what's interesting is that I've also been staying close to a lot of the jobs data and things like that. It's fascinating to see how many jobs, like even today, that we have that didn't exist 15, 20, 25 years ago. The same thing is going to happen as we look forward.
Some of the jobs that we have today are no longer going to be as relevant, and there are going to be new jobs created. I think that's incumbent on all of us to be watching this technology and figuring out how can we do that. For me, like I literally have a person that I'm looking at that is a reminder, how can AI help me do this? I'm trying to push myself to think about that.
Sometimes I think this is hard because it's almost like the same way you think about delegating, that sometimes that upfront investment, you need to slow yourself down, and it takes longer to pause and to like relearn something in a new way or delegate. In the end, you're going to speed up. With clients, I think this is first, I'm starting to play and figure out ways that I can incorporate this into my career search.
There are ways you can do this at every stage of your job search. I just put an article out around from the early exploration all the way to negotiating. There are different ways you can think about AI being a helper and thought partner in that. Some of this is just with a client pulling it up and using it in real time. One example that I'll go into is I was helping a client with interview prep.
It's not necessarily AI that will take most of our jobs. While some jobs may be automated by AI, it will actually be the people using AI who are far more competitive than those who are not.
As she was telling me her weakness, it was not the greatest example. I was like, “I think this is going to raise some red flags, what else could we think about?” We were stuck. I pulled up AI and I said, forget the exact prompt, but it was something like, “What's another weakness, a common weakness that we could talk about?”
One of them was public speaking. It was like that was a perfect example, because it wasn't something that was going to be core to the job, but it was true. She did not like to do public speaking. That's exactly why she was aiming for this, like behind the scenes role that she was going for. That's just a quick example of how you can even use it as just a thought partner to generate other ideas.
That's great. Thank you. I love that you slow down now and like take the time, and then that will help you speed up in the end. That's a great way to think about it. Can you talk a little bit about your process of helping people through career transition, and really focusing on how you help people through the ups and downs and the resilience aspect? I bring this up because sustainability in general as a topic has a lot of ups and downs. Do you have these moments where you feel like you've really made a big accomplishment, and then something just comes at you, and can a lot of people experience fatigue to pushing the mission? I think there's a lot we can learn from how you bring people through this process and deal with resilience.
Building Resilience: Navigating Emotional Ups And Downs
That's one of the things that I talked about is that you have to do so much of the job search process is an exercise in confidence, and you have to have that resiliency to ride the inevitable emotional ups and downs that come from that. One of the things that I focus on is mindset in my work. It's a core fundamental pillar. Again, that's where we start.
One of the first things I do is teach my clients around how their brain works. One of the things that's important for all of us to recognize is what we call the motivational triad. Our brains are designed for three things. We want to maximize pleasure. Again, in our caveman days, that meant procreating, that was going to keep us alive. Nowadays, it means like binging Netflix and having that pint of Ben and Jerry's. The second thing in that triangle is to minimize pain.
Again, you think about caveman days, you didn't want to eat the berry that was going to make you sick and potentially kill you. Now it means, “I might want to avoid that uncomfortable conversation with my boss.” The third part is efficiency. The brain wants to be as efficient as possible. Again, in caveman days, you didn't have a lot of calories, so you had to be conserving your energy. Now it means that your brain wants to, again, be on autopilot and have this comfort zone.
In your comfort zone, you know what's going on, and your brain is on autopilot. One of the first things to recognize with a career change is when you're going to do something new and different, your brain is automatically going to go into red alert, like, “What? This is new, this is different. I think we're at harm and risk.” It's going to naturally serve you up thoughts around doubts, insecurity, fear, all that stuff. At the same time, if we go back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that final need is self-actualization.
I think there's a lot to people wanting to strive, wanting that change in their career, wanting to do big things. You can see this interesting push and pull dynamic that on one hand, you do want this change, but on the other hand, the minute you think about it, your brain goes a little nuts. All those things come up. All that to say, this is totally normal. Your brain is designed to do this. Nothing's gone wrong, but then you do need to think about how do you override these natural tendencies so that you can go after that.
Again, that goes back to understanding that your thoughts are what are going to dictate your feelings, and your feelings are what allow you to take certain actions or inactions. It starts with understanding what you're telling yourself. Again, going back to that intentionality of what do I want to tell myself? I am capable of this big job, or it's okay that I might “fail.” That's a lot of the work that we do upfront is thinking about that mindset. Again, what do you want to do, and the intentionality of what you want to think?
I did make progress on my project, even if the world still has a lot of challenges.
I was just going to offer a couple of examples of how I did this, because I think one thing is sometimes people are in a job that they don't like while they're still searching. You have to think about how you manage the frustrations in your day job. One of the things I did was I envisioned putting on a cape every day when I went into the office. Now that could be because I was in a stage where my daughter made me watch Frozen 37 times.
I had a cape that was top of mind, but like, that's how I envisioned it. That helped me like lower the frustration temperature in my day job. Simultaneously, three times a day, I literally was like, “I am accepting my new job offer.” I try to get into that feeling and excitement, and motivation to like, then do the actions related to the job search to make that a reality. Again, showing you just like how you can have to deliberately, maybe tell yourself what you want to choose to believe.
I love that. Through all that, what have you learned from experiencing change? What advice do you have for someone either opting in intentionally or experiencing change, or trying to influence change?
Candidly, I struggle. I listen to your show, Christine, and I think you are someone who really does embrace a lot of change. I'm a little, it is much harder for me. I am not as spontaneous. I like predictability. Change is still a big challenge. I think the benefit that has come from these gray hairs that I now have to cover up is that change is constant. It's always going to happen.
The more that I can be accepting and less resistant, that's really helpful. The other thing again that I've come to realize is that anytime I'm going through a setback or something that is a source of frustration, I'm trying to reshift it to say, “How can this be happening for me, not to me?” Again, several years ago, when I was in the last corporate job I had, it was just not a fit. I struggled. It was a blow to my confidence to not be a high performer.
It was really hard in the moment, but now I'm so glad that I had that period of time where I struggled because I now have more empathy. I can realize for other people that, “It's not you and it's not the other company. It's just this mismatch.” Having experienced that myself, I'd like to think I've
become wiser for that. I think giving yourself some grace that there will be change that sometimes is put upon you. The more you can try to look for the things that you might learn and take away from it, I think, might help you as you're going through that. Sometimes I think it takes months, if not years, to look back and realize maybe that was a good thing.
Purpose-Driven Careers: Exploring Impact And Sustainability
For sure. Hindsight is funny. You definitely can go back and see what you've learned with the right mindset, of course. I love the idea of how can this happen for me, not to me. That's something that like I personally have these random health challenges. I am constantly thinking, “What can I be doing differently to change them or what have you?” There's just sometimes there's nothing I can do.
Your thoughts dictate your feelings, and your feelings allow you to take certain actions or inactions.
Instead of thinking of it as “This is something that's happening to me,” trying to think about shifting my mindset to like being grateful for the things that I can do. It's great advice that can be applied to various areas. You have, I don't know if this is recent or has always been focused more on the impact or sustainability space, as far as career transitions are concerned. Can you talk a little bit about why that is and what you've seen that's maybe unique in this sustainability or impact space?
I think that goes back to that light bulb moment that I had early on in my career, where it was like, I love business. If we look at it, business is a huge lever and driver in many things. This recognition that we need various actors if we want to create the type of social change we want to do, but that business can be a really big force. I loved that concept. I think that there's a shift in the way consumers are thinking about their purchases, as employees are thinking about wanting to be at organizations that align with their values.
Wherever possible, I want to shine a light on these types of businesses that either have their mission embedded or that are just holding themselves to higher standards. Christine, I know you and I share a big love of B Corps. I am a total fan girl. I have been obsessed with them. Part of this is I just want to use my voice, my capabilities, to try to encourage that wherever possible.
I really love working with professionals who are in a similar mindset, or people who really want to create change and want to do so through their careers. I want to really be able to help them as they think about that. I think there are ways to think about it. Like, can you have an impact career? Are you in the CSR or ESG space? Does your role do something that has an impact? You be an accountant, but you're then aligning to an organization that either is a B Corp and holds themselves to higher standards, or there is a mission baked into that.
Where we can try to bring the community together, because I know with some of these teams and some of these roles, they're small in organizations, and it can feel very lonely to be one of just a handful of people trying to rally a whole organization around some of these principles. Where we can trying to build community and learn from one another is also an important part.
Do you think it's easier, harder, or the same to make a career transition through the sustainability or impact space?
I think right now in the current market we're seeing, it may be a tiny bit more challenging. As we've seen some of the pullback in things like DNI, and I think the macro environment around some of the climate pullbacks and things like that, just might mean that there is less visibility of things that are happening. My hope is that the arc, as we'd say with Obama, I think it was his quote, “The arc is long and tends to bend towards justice.” I do think there are things around pendulum swinging. My hope is that over time, we will see again, a lot of people embracing these types of roles and careers.
I feel like I'm seeing there be a shift in language, perhaps, and not always in a full-blown shift away from things, meaning they might change how they talk about it. They're not using ESG or CSR directly, but that doesn't mean that the work is necessarily going away.
I think the biggest thing is, and this applies to even job servers, the more you can position either yourself or the work in terms of what does this drive value for the business? I think that's why we're seeing many companies not stepping away is because they realize this is important to the bottom line. Over time, it's actually going to either increase profit, cut costs. Be smarter, attract more consumers, whatever that is. The more you can tie into, like, what is the value at the end of the day? I tell that even to job seekers. Being able to communicate the value you bring. Why was this a benefit? I think those are the things that will then allow those efforts to stay put.
Change is the only constant. We must learn to embrace it, not fight against it.
Embracing Change: Unlocking Growth And Opportunity
Great. We're here for our last question. We like to end with, why embrace change?
I think because it's somewhat fruitless to fight it. Change is a constant. I think that's the only thing that is a constant is change. We have to learn to embrace it and not fight against it. I think the other thing that I've been thinking a lot about, especially when it feels like there are a lot of things outside our control. The economy, the job market, and the changes coming out of the administration. There are more things that we cannot control than we can.
Staying focused on like, what is it that I can control and what can I do, goes back to, again, what you choose to think, the actions you want to take. How you choose to feel each and every day, that's the biggest thing is focusing on when change is happening, what is it that I can particularly do, and how do I want to navigate through this? Again, focusing on what you can control.
That's great. Sometimes that also applies to business from a strategy standpoint. There's only so much a company can control related to sustainability. If you're a true believer and you're like really ready and going ho, you can feel like you need to boil the ocean and hopefully not physically. Yet if you can hone back in on what your company can control, and to your point, tie it back to the value that it brings to that company or risk mitigation that it provides to that company, then it can have a much bigger effect both in your selling story and in your total impact of the business. Getting back to that core can be really valuable.
I do think there's something about incremental progress. That's consistent incremental chipping away over time. When you look back, that can be pretty big. Maybe that's a way to focus on the small mini wins along the way to the big thing. That can also help people feel a little more motivated to keep going when the big thing feels so elusive.
Transforming Challenges: Turning Setbacks Into Stepping Stones
This is great. Thank you so much. I loved that you shared so much about doing the homework. We talk a lot about how sustainability comes with a lot of homework. What you talked about is how you used this time to step back, do a little research, understand, and then you could more easily apply that information to your journey. Taking the time to do that was so valuable in figuring out the next steps.
As I mentioned, I loved that, to reiterate that, you said to slow down now so that you can speed up later. This is something that happens in the sustainability space a lot. Sustainability professionals are already understand the climate change challenge or the recycling challenge, or they already get and they've already done a lot of the homework, and they're talking to people who haven't done any of that homework. Taking the time to slow down, read around, and then figure out how to delegate the right aspects to those stakeholders can be super powerful and accelerate later.
That's such a powerful message that I think resonates beyond career transitions. I also really appreciate the little tactic that you brought up a couple of times, just in the physical reminders. The Post-it note on your screen. The writing down what you want to think instead of the negative thoughts you're having. Having these physical reminders in front of your face and how powerful that can be in resetting your mindset and your intentions.
That's such a, “I can use that tomorrow.” I appreciate you bringing that into this conversation. Also, you mentioned how self-actualization is at the top of Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs. This came up, actually, my brother wrote a book called 10 to 25: The Mindset of Motivating Young People. He talks about how, like teenagers or adolescents, which are fact, not only teenagers, but nonetheless, adolescents have this need or want to be seen and want to have status. I think that's true beyond adolescents.
To your point, there is always this self-actualization status aspect of motivation, that if you can provide a level of autonomy to the people that you're trying to motivate and then give them this very realistic goal with high support, then they can also get to that level of self-actualization or status. That can be like a really motivating tool for yourself or for other people that you're trying to influence. Thank you for bringing that up as well. You also reminded us that confidence is really at the core of being able to present your message and bringing it with confidence.
That can be hard when you're constantly faced with potential criticisms about what's going on in the world of climate change and diversity, equity, inclusion, and everything going on in that macrospace you were talking about. It was a really good reminder that, like bringing that confidence and having that belief in what you're trying to do, knowing that it's tied to your values and your intentions, can really help someone influence change. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me, Christine.
Is there anything else? Any last words?
No, this has been great. If anybody is interested in getting any of these additional resources or stuff to help them through their job search, they can certainly come visit my website. It's AvaLalaCoaching.com, and there are a bunch of free resources. One of the things that I really want all people, but especially women, to do is also negotiate. That's something that I care a lot about. Good things happen, and women make more money.
I'm on my soapbox about helping to reduce the gender pay disparity that still exists. One small way that we can all do that is to negotiate and ask for what we're worth. That's something that's near and dear to my heart. Again, people can come to my website if they want to get any more resources. Thank you so much for having me.
We will have your website in the show notes as well. Thank you so much.
Thank you. It's been a delightful experience.
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About Ava Lala
Ava Lala is a career development coach. She brings 20+ years of corporate experience across different roles and industries to support individuals as they make career pivots, define success in their work, and build relationships to navigate their career opportunities. When she’s not working, you can find her consuming books and podcasts, experimenting with new recipes, and hiking. She lives in Golden, CO with her husband, young daughter, and cuddle-demanding cat, Rocco.