#262 Erica Sosna: Rebuilding Her Career—and Spine—One Step at a Time – Part Two

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade Challenger School class.

They're studying Charlotte's Web.

What words did this author use to describe this barn?

Descriptive words.

Wonderful. Can you find some adjectives in there?

New is an adjective describing rope.

Webber is an adjective and it modifies boots.

Those students are seven.

Starting early and starting right makes a real difference. Learn more at challengerschool.com.
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Dash cash back term supply. Hi, everyone.
Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.
Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I'm speaking with Erica Sosna, a fellow podcast host and the author of The Career Equation,

who, like me, is passionate about careers. But what makes Erica's story unique is her remarkable journey of resilience, purpose, and transformation.
In 2022, a life-changing accident left her paralyzed. Facing months of recovery through immense pain and uncertainty, Erica fought her way back.
Back to walking, back to work, and back to a renewed mission. After a year away from her consultancy, Erica returned with fresh purpose, balancing her career on a three-day work week, launching a podcast and expanding her reach to create a bigger impact.
Yesterday, part one, Erica shared her career journey, the twist and the turns and the accident that changed everything. Today, in part two, she'll share the hard-earned wisdom she gained from overcoming paralysis.

Starting a new chapter, shaping a path to personal and professional growth. Erica will also dive into the career equation she created and how we can all work towards becoming better versions of ourselves in our careers.
Your experience and the journey are exceptional. the challenges you faced, both physical and mental, are beyond what many of us could even imagine.
I deeply applaud you for that resilience. As I listened, I wondered, now that you're looking back and you call yourself exceptional, which I think is entirely fitting, what would you say is your superpower? If you had to pinpoint exactly what it is that helped you sustain and succeed through all of those things, what would that be? Is it a deep-rooted faith? Something within your career equation? Or an other quality? What do you think that allowed you to endure all the pain and ultimately come back even stronger.

It's a really good question, Vince.

And in many ways at the beginning, when people were saying it was so inspiring,

because I was posting a bit on LinkedIn about my physio and things,

because that was my work at the time.

And I wanted to feel like I was in the world and that people knew what I was up to.

Initially, when people started saying I was really inspiring, I can't believe it.

How do you do it?

I can't believe it how do you do it I can't imagine how I would do it. I was a little bit dismissive I was look you don't know until you're in the situation of course you would do the same if you thought there was any possibility that you could recover your function whatever it is.
I had a spinal injury but plenty of people have all kinds of debilitating health and mental health conditions and all of that of course you would just go for hell for leather for recovery wouldn't you and it took me a while to realize that the answer to that was not yes for everybody so then I started to ask myself exactly this question which is what so what am I doing that perhaps might be useful and helpful for other people to get a grip on or that they could use? And I suppose there are a couple of things. I think one of the things is I do have a strong faith.
I have a faith in the kind of goodness and benevolent intention of the universe, I suppose, like that. And that meant that I wasn't in resistance to what had happened to me.
I was once taught that when something rubbish happens to you, accept it as though you chose it. I found that to be a very helpful thing, whether that's you're being made redundant unexpectedly or you've had a loss or an illness.
So it sounds crackers in a way to say, accept thing as though you chose it but what's the alternative the alternative is not to accept it even though it's happening to you anyway or to be in battle with it when you can't change it embracing the experience as though okay this has happened and i'm just going to accept it as though it was on my list of things to do and then i'm going to act in response to that in a positive way. So the first was accept it as though you chose it.
The second is that in your life plan and your career plan which is the program that we run around the equation I teach this modality of starting with the end in mind so knowing what it is that you want to accomplish what you want to see and feel and experience and then working backwards from that to work out how you're going to get it done. So knowing what it is that you want to accomplish, what you want to see and feel and experience, and then working backwards from that to work out how you're going to get it done.
So that you are left with a kind of, what do I need to do today or right now? That is, if you like, a penny in the piggy bank of the future, whether the future is I want to walk again, or I'd like to have a child, or I'd love to move countries, or whatever that thing is that you want to experience. And so I used, of course, that modality because it's always worked for me.
You start by vividly imagining you having the experience. And notice that I'm talking about experience rather than stuff.
So say you want the experience of traveling the world or managing lots of people or if we get stuck on I want to be promoted, it's difficult to envisage that as an experience so I would then ask if you do want to get promoted what experience would that give you why do you want that is it more interesting work is it more strategic opportunities is it greater prestige but no you start by envisaging the experience so for me it was I want to experience dancing again cycling again yoga again yoga again, running again, picking my child up.

And I really vividly imagined how joyful and pleasurable those moments would be. And then I worked backwards from there to say what would need to happen the week before, the months before, the year before.
And what are the things that I need to start doing? and that then gave me the kind of pillars of what I need what actions I needed to take on my emotional recovery my physical recovery and to keep taking action have a rhythm for taking action every day a little bit every day to move towards that I think the third thing is I'm very open-minded and I love new things a friend once told told me I have an insatiable thirst for novelty, which I thought was a brilliant way of putting it. I've always just really been very interested in new stuff that's new to me.
It may be ancient, but like new stuff to me or cutting edge or like just things and places and experiences I haven't had before. And until my injury, I'd spent very little time.
I was very lucky to spend very little time within the sort of medical model of Western medicine at all, really. I hadn't really needed any help from modern medicine.
And so I was very interested in what might exist in terms of alternative paths to healing. And I read a huge amount about that.
I watched loads of videos. I read loads of blogs.

I talked to lots of people. And some of the things that I introduced were things like acupuncture, something called mctimony, which is a very gentle, supportive form of chiropractic.
No click clacking. It's really a kind of spine mechanic work.
It's very delicate and effective. Something called frequency-specific microcurrent, which is 100-year-old technology for jump-starting the body by using electricity.
Because for me, like a spinal injury is all about electric connections and stuff. So I tried some different things.
So I think those are probably like the three things. I'm very determined.
So once I accepted it as though I chose it, I knew that it was something that I had to do. And so I was going to follow that to the nth degree.
Then I made a plan that started with the end in mind, visualising vividly and viscerally what I wanted to experience. And then thinking, if I'd already done that, what would be the story I would tell about how I did that? And from that, I devised my plan.
And then the third was the sort of willingness to be open and try things that were unconventional, perhaps less known about, perhaps outside of the medical model, and to just keep going. We have this model as well in the equation about the hero's journey.
And it basically says that anything worth doing is going to be difficult and it's going to suck at some point. But the time to stop is either before you decide to do it or when you've exhausted all possibilities.
That in fact, when you're in the middle, in the thick of it, when it's feeling really difficult and unpleasant and you're thinking, well, why did I ever take this on? It will never go the way I planned. That is not the time to give up.
That is the time that is the darkness before the dawn. And so again, knowing that map of transformation existed inside of me and that I knew it to be true, having seen it in my own life and other people's, just helped me to have that tenacity to keep going when it really sucked.
So I hope those are practical and useful for anyone in transformation and transition. But I guess those are the fundamental qualities that make the biggest difference to me, I think.
That's the lived experience that really matters. My podcast is about real, raw, lived experiences, not polished success stories.
Now, I'd like to dive into your book, The Career Equation. I've skimmed through it myself.
I notice you focus on helping employers better support the career growth of their employees. Many career books are aimed at individuals taking charge of their own career paths, but you've chosen to speak directly to employers.
Since we have a few minutes left, I think it would be great to wrap up with this. How do you help employers enhance the career experience with the teams? What steps can they take to create an environment where employees feel not just more productive, but truly motivated and committed.
This is a relevant question to many people out there, feeling stuck in the workforce, looking for a way to feel more engaged and valued. Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade Challenger School class.
They're studying Charlotte's Web. What words did this author use to describe this barn? Descriptive words.
Wonderful. Can you find some adjectives in there? New is an adjective describing rope.
Webber is an adjective and it modifies boots. Those students are seven.
Starting early and starting right makes a real difference. Learn more at challengerschool.com.
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NMLS 696891. Yeah, it's a great question.
Thank you for asking it. So, let me start with this.

The purpose of the career equation is for both the employer and the individual to have a frame of reference and a way of talking about careers that both parties understand. And without that, organizations can say that they have career conversations, or I could say I'd like to have a career conversation with you, my boss, my HR, whatever.
But there's no consistency, there's no consistent language or shared understanding. So just like it would be ludicrous for a company to have 10 different accounting systems and nobody really be talking the same language financially.
So it also really makes sense to have one model for all the conversations that happen around careers in an organisation. And yes, we absolutely focus on building capacity for the employer, the person who's going to take that insight and do something with it.
But we also want to retrofit the ability for the individual to be prepared for that conversation, to have a good conversation that they are ready for. So the equation is fundamentally about how do I understand the best ways to nourish and nurture the person in front of me so that they love working here and feel excited to stay and continue their future career here.
And so that I really get the best value out of them and the organization gives them the best opportunities to thrive. And for both parties, the equation solves this very quickly and simply.
And it does it by asking four things that are useful for everybody to understand about the person in front of them. Number one, what are you naturally good at? This is an unremarkable insight that we all, when we play to our strengths, we are happier, fulfilled, more successful.
We have more enjoyment at work. So the first is, do I understand what this person is naturally good at, that they want to be applying to the workplace? The second is about passion.
Like what do they enjoy? What gives them pleasure and energy? So people do best when they are applying their skills to something that they care about. And that care could be that they feel strongly about something.
It could be that they love that subject area of geeking out on it. Or it could be a way of being like, for example, solving complex problems or connecting people that just gives them that burst of joy when they're engaged in doing it.
So do you understand what gives the person in front of you that burst of joy? What is that sweet spot where they just feel wonderful that they're able to spend their time and energy doing this thing? The third thing is how do they measure success? We call that impact. So it's easy to assume that everyone defines success by more money, more power, more status.
But I can tell you from thousands of conversations over and over that this is not how most people define a successful life and a successful legacy. They might use those things to keep score.
They might use those as a measure, but that isn't actually how they define success itself. So do you understand what a successful week, month, year life looks like to this person? Because it's going to really help you to make sure that you tailor your feedback, your development opportunities and the activities that they're doing to that definition of success.
And then the last thing is where do they do their best work? So we say in the equation that environment makes the difference. Environment is the factor that can make or break.
And that at the home office, at the government, my first job, that's what it was for me. The work was really interesting.
I loved the impact it was having. I got to use my skills in research and dialogue and all of those things.
But the environment was really stifling. It was really slow.
It was very political. You had to be terribly diplomatic, which I was just awful at.
And a lot of the time, your work was just wasted because it was glacially progressing. And then the government would change and it was all a waste of time.
And I just couldn't stand any of those things. It was really suffocating for me.
And even the environment, you couldn't open the windows. That also made me feel literally really suffocated.
So do you understand the environment in which that person does their best work? And to what extent can you set up your environment to reduce the frictions that impede them and to enhance the environment that helps them be successful? An environment is everything from, are they a specialist? Are they a generalist? Do they like working indoors, outdoors? Do they like working at speed? Do they like having a lot of space? Do they like to be at home? Do they like to be in the buzz of the office? Environment is all of those things, the IT, the coffee, the lot. So to what extent can both the individual and their employer gain insight and understanding about these four components, skills plus passion plus impact, divided by reducing the amount of levels of friction between the ideal environment and the environment that they've got? That's basically the equation.
The tools and the training that we use that are adopted by people like Amazon and Nomura and a number of other significant global firms is all about how do you have a conversation that focuses on these key components and how do you make it easy to look through the lens of the equation when you're trying to uncover what isn't quite working, what isn't quite fitting for an individual coming to work.

Because all of us want to do our very best. And we want to feel that our talents and skills are used in the very best way.
And the equation says, look, there's a sweet spot for that. There are some things that you are exceptional at, that you care about a lot, that make a difference.
And if you focus your working attention on those things, then both you and your employer will have a win. Both sides need to know what those are and they need to check in regularly because some of those things change as the person changes.
So it's really about equipping the entire organization to use the equation as its lens for dialogue and to use the very simple tools that sit around it so that everyone can have a conversation where both parties quickly understand what's going on and can therefore co-design development plans and career paths and opportunities to make for that win on both sides. And of course the results are longer tenure, lower sickness absence, greater loyalty, higher employer engagement, better productivity, greater internal mobility, greater diversity at senior levels.
All of those things arise from a very simple technology and a very easy to learn conversation. But it's the simplicity that makes it powerful.
It takes just five minutes, as I've taken with you, to explain it, explain it and you can immediately start to apply it and of course if you want to see how that works check out the podcast because that's a series of career coaching conversations using the equation just over and over again to give people the insights they need about the tweaks that they need to really refine their career to sit in their sweet spot more and more often. Thank you so much for joining us today.
If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.
Until next time, take care. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Mario's Bistro.
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Dosh Cash Beck Terms apply. Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade challenger school class.
They're studying Charlotte's Web. What words did this author use to describe this barn.
Descriptive words.

Wonderful.

Can you find some adjectives in there?

New is an adjective describing rope.

Rubber is an adjective and it modifies boots.

Those students are seven.

Starting early and starting right makes a real difference.