Career Relaunch®
Joseph Liu
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Standing on Your Own with Lola Scarborough
Making a career transition always seems to take longer than you initially expect. It’s hard to know exactly how long you should give yourself to make the progress you want. In this week’s episode of Career Relaunch, legal secretary turned yoga studio founder and instructor Lola Scarborough describes how grit and determination ultimately allowed her to get her yoga studio off the ground. We discuss the downside of having a job that’s too comfortable and what you learn about yourself when you’re forced to make a sudden career pivot. During the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll also share my own personal experience with my own career transitions taking longer than I wanted. Key Career Insights The comforts of a stable, corporate job can often lead you to stop asking yourself tough questions about what you truly want from your career and life. When you make tough changes, you discover both things you like and things you may dislike about yourself. Discovering who you really are comes from a place of discomfort, which is exactly what a career pivot forces upon you. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to take a step back, reevaluate whether you’re being realistic with the timeline you’ve given yourself for a specific career transition or project you’re hoping to complete in the near future. Then build in a little extra buffer. And if you don’t get as far as you want as quickly as you want, just remember not to beat yourself up too much because it’s not unusual for things to take a little longer you than you initially expect. About Lola Scarborough, Yoga studio founder and author Lola Scarborough is an IKYTA and Yoga Alliance E-RYT-500 certified yoga teacher and a co-owner and Managing Director of Yoga Lola Studios. Lola is a certified life coach, a certified Wellness & Health Restoration Natural Foods Consultant, a certified tonic herbalist, a certified Ayurvedic Practitioner, a certified aerobics teacher, a certified Level III Reiki master and a novice astrologer. She teaches Kundalini Yoga along with many other types of yoga. She has a long history as a writer, teacher, and project manager in the business world. She’s authored articles, films, and videos related to yoga, health, and healing. She published her first book on natural breast health Fighting for Our T**s: A Woman’s Battle Cry in July 2018. She’s also completed her Ph.D. in comparative religion and published a book of poetry titled Molten Woman. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Lola know! Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners! Leave Joseph a Voicemail You can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to Grammarly for Supporting Career Relaunch Built by linguists and language lovers, Grammarly’s writing app finds and corrects hundreds of complex writing errors — so you don’t have to. Career Relaunch listeners can download Grammarly for free by going to GetGrammarly.com/relaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): Fear and money kept driving me to go every day into a job where a lot of times I was exhausted. I was stressed out. I took a deep dive into what motivates me, what do I want. Joseph: Good morning, Lola. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It is great to have you on the show. Lola: Thank you, Joseph. I’m delighted to be here. Joseph: We are going to talk about a few different things today, including your former life before you started your yoga studio, your transition, and also how you’ve now become a yoga instructor. I’d like to start by having you, first of all, just tell me what you’ve been focused right now in your career and your life. Lola: I’ve continued to stay focused on building my yoga studio and wellness business. Most recently, I released a book, and I am going to be featured in an upcoming book as well called The World’s Most Amazing Women that’s going to be released in December. One of the things I’m doing now is working to grow out my speaking skills. I love to lecture. I love a captive audience. It’s my very favorite thing. I’ve been working on that and working on raising awareness around different health-related issues through doing blogging and other things like that. Joseph: I know that we’ve got a couple of different topics to talk about today, and I want to come back to your studio. I do want to go back in time and talk about what you were up to before you were a yoga instructor, because I know you haven’t always been a yoga instructor. Before we get to that, how did you get discovered to be featured in that book, The World’s Most Amazing Women? Lola: I started doing some podcast radio interviews with KC Armstrong, and he invited nine women that he felt had stories that were significant, meaningful, and lifechanging for his readers. He invited me to be one of the lead writers in his book. Joseph: Okay, very cool. I’m looking forward to seeing you featured there. Can we go back in time, Lola, and talk about what you were up to before you were involved with yoga? What were you doing in your former life when you were working in the corporate world? Let’s start from the beginning, and then we can move forward from there. Lola: When I was 17 years old, I graduated from the Atlanta College of Medical, Dental, and Business. I spent roughly 20 years of my career as a legal secretary. I loved it. I loved the legal field. I actually thought about entering it but then decided to have children instead. As a part of that, towards the latter end of my career, we made a huge transition. I’m 59, so I’ve seen software come of age from MS DOS to MS Word. Because I picked up on those sorts of things easily, I became a lead trainer, and then became a lead writer for our training materials. I did that for quite a long time, and I loved doing that too. From there, I segued over into becoming a full-time technical writer. I worked with Capgemini, Axon, a software company called SBPA Systems. I did that for, I guess, another 15 years. From there, I went into project management. That was my last role in the business world, where I lead project teams of up to 10 and 15 people. I worked with companies as big as Burger King and Vanguard and some others and doing software implementations for their administrative systems. That’s where I was when my career shifted. Joseph: You’ve already mentioned a couple of career shift. I know we want to cover the major ones, shifting toward being a yoga instructor. I do want to go back a little bit here because you’ve mentioned a couple of major shifts, from being a legal secretary to a technical writer, and then a technical writer to a project manager. Let’s just take the lattermost recent transition from being a technical writer to a project manager. How did you manage to make that sort of a transition? Because at least on the surface, it seems like those would be two very different things. Lola: They really were, and I wasn’t really fully prepared for what happens when you’re a project manager. I met a man, and I married him. I moved from where I was. I moved myself and my children from Stafford, Texas to League City, Texas, which is where I’m at now. I went in, and I interviewed. She really liked my style, because I’d held lead positions. As a technical writer, I managed teams. I was already used to being in leadership positions. Being a project manager, I’d put out my begging bowl before I do that again. Joseph: What did you dislike about being a project manager? Lola: The 22-hour days and implementations not going right, clients very understandably being very distressed because their systems were down. People would quit because it was such a stressful situation, then you’d find yourself with a deficit of personnel. It was a small company, so one person leaving would have a major impact on the ability to get the project to fruition. The pay was awesome, but it was a lot of stress. Joseph: Can you take me to the moment when you made the decision to leave that behind? What was happening for you at that time? Lola: I’m a very security-oriented person. I always told people, they say, ‘Don’t you want to start your own business?’ I’m like, ‘No, not until after I retire.’ I kind of got kicked out. I had opened my yoga studio. I came through when we were in the acute stage of a recession in this area. Joseph: That was in 2008. Is that correct? Lola: Yeah. I had a friend who was coming. I let her use my yoga studio, which by the way, only had one student because the yoga studio was to be a retirement dream. I would only really be working hard six years from now had things gone along as intended. I had opened it up, and she had a magazine. She said, ‘Well, if you’d let me use your studio for my group, I’ll run a free ad for you.’ I said, ‘Awesome.’ Before I even opened the studio and put a web presence out, I talked to my manager, and I talked to the other co-owner of the business. I said, ‘Listen. This is what I’
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