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

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. 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.
Today, part one, Erica shares her career journey.

The twist. impact.
Today, part one, Erica shares her career journey, the twist and the turns and the accident that changed everything. Then in part two, airing tomorrow, 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.

Good afternoon, Erica.

Welcome to our show.

Welcome to Chief Change Officer.

Thank you so much, Vince. I'm delighted to be here.

Erica is also a podcast host and she covers careers.

So does that make us competitors?

I don't think so.

I see it more like we are part of this big circle, a world where so many people are focused on their future, their life, and their career. I think we are both contributing to something bigger by sharing insights, lessons, and experiences in a human direct way.
Hopefully, this helps someone get inspired or maybe even get unstuck. So Erica, let's start with you.
Tell us a bit about yourself, your story, and your experience before we drill down into your insights. For sure, Vince.
And it's exciting to be in a careers community with you. That's how I describe that, I think.
So I'm Erica Sosner. I'm the creator of a model called The Career Equation and a book and a podcast by the same title.
I've made it my life's work really over the last 20 years to help people connect their insides, what matters to them, what's important to them, the skills and talents that they're born with their outsides, how they spend time, how they make money, how they create value for themselves and for other people, and how they learn to really enjoy their lives. So I guess on a sort of very simple level, I'm a careers thought leader.
I've been a career coach for over 20 years and I've coached thousands of people all over the world, all sorts of industries, all sorts of ages and stages to use the career equation to get super precise about what they want, how to work, and to make a plan to get towards that and really align that. I also own a careers consultancy that does the same work, but within organisations.
So helping the employer and the employee to really align around co-designing a career path that works for the person in front of them and is a win for both sides. And I guess I became interested in this, of course, because of my own career adventures and explorations.
When I left university, I joined the civil service, the FASTREAM, which is the graduate program here in the UK for working with the government. It's actually the most competitive graduate scheme in the UK.
And so when I got a place on it, I thought I really ought to accept it. But spending time just in the sort of recruitment process and the home office environments told my gut that I probably wasn't going to find a home there.
But I had that tension between, hang on a minute, I've got this really prestigious job opportunity and no plan B. And my gut feelings that perhaps the environment and the pace of the place that I was proposing to make my career in wasn't going to be a fit.
And indeed, it wasn't a fit. And so that experience made me very curious about what is it that makes work for people? How do I get underneath what's thriving looks and feels like? And I began a sort of quest and exploration around this that took me into the personal development works, the human potential world, the personal transformation sort of field, including training as a coach over 20 years ago now, and simultaneously training as a biographical storyteller.
And I think that actually my insights and experiences about how to extract the best kind of stories from people and how to really understand the character at the heart of each biographical story has really informed the practice and the work that I do now. I fundamentally work with people's narrative, helping them to understand who they are at heart and then the direction that character, the hero in their story themselves, wants to take and how perhaps some of the pieces of their previous history now make more sense looking through the lens of the career equation.
And I think most of all, whether it comes to people moving from public to private sector, working for themselves to being employed, from moving across industries, perhaps setting up their own business. Whatever transformation they want to make, I've worked with somebody to make that transformation.
And quite often, I've done that transformation myself. I've had a lot of iterations and explorations with form in career.
So I'm very excited to have a conversation with you today about those transitions and transformations and about how your audience can use the career equation and perhaps some of my experience and stories to help them to make the transitions that are most meaningful for them and to find their thriving zone at work. Transitions, there's so many kinds.
We often think of transition as just changing jobs, but it's more than that. It's not just jumping from Google to Microsoft in the same industry.
Sometimes it's moving to a totally different industry or even changing countries, cities, and life itself. Erica, in your journey so far, if I were to ask about how you've navigated and managed your own transitions, could you share a couple of stories, maybe one related to your own career and one to your personal life?

I think it would give us a deeper understanding of your experience and why you are so well equipped to help others through the career equation which you created.

Yes, of course. Sure.

So in my 20s to help others through the career equation which you created?

Yes, of course. Sure.

So in my 20s, I set up a social enterprise that was a kind of precursor for the work that I do now with the career equation.

It was called the Life Project.

And the Life Project was all about how do I take the insights

and the self-knowledge that comes from personal development work

I'm going to go back. The Life Project.
And The Life Project was all about how do I take the insights and the self-knowledge that comes from personal development work and help people under the age of 25 to have that curriculum so that they know how to make the most of the world of work. How to take, for example, your knowledge that you like maths or history at school and go, where might I find a use for that or a home for those skills in the changing world of work? And I really enjoyed that work.
I didn't make much money from it. It was the first business that I'd run.
It was in the social realms. Money is always tight with clients.
But it was a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself in a research and development phase to find what worked and to find programs and tools that were really going to change people's lives and transform the education space because most of us fell into careers rather than chose them. There's no set curriculum about how to discover your skills and how to spend your lifetime usefully, which is mad really, because we spend up to 80,000 hours at work.
So I loved that work very much. And I got the opportunity to work with many universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Sussex.
I went to Berkeley in California and did some work there. I worked in India and Australia, all kinds of places, bringing what became the career equation, bringing that toolkit to a really wide variety of individuals under 25 and those who work with them.
But then the government changed here in the UK and that had a lot of upheaval around the budgets that my clients worked with and suddenly it was a very difficult situation for many social impact and not-for-profit organizations. So I decided that I needed to move back into the world of kind of corporate leadership management and training and to see where my skill set might find a home and And at that time, people were quite prejudiced if you had been self-employed or run your own thing.
They really didn't think that you could hold down a job. And so I got a lot of rejections just on that basis.
I had an interesting CV. I'd done some significant things, but people just didn't trust me to hold down a job.
And that was very discouraging. So I really had to work hard to parlay who I was and what I'd done to even get a chance to talk at interview about how I might be a valuable addition.
But eventually, I did get a number of job offers. I took a role in a consultancy.
It was very exciting to be there. It was a small consultancy, very dynamic, but leadership work was quite a minority share of what they did.
And very quickly, it became clear that there was a bit of a conflict between what they thought the job was going to be and the actual opportunities to do that job once I was in-house. And long story short, after six months, they decided not to renew my probation, which was devastating.
I'd gone through life being an A student and having all these ambitious, prestigious jobs and making things happen. And then I got this very loud, resounding, like, that was very discouraging.
And I hadn't done what I wanted to do, which was recommence my career within the leadership realm. So I went into the pool again.
I went into the market again. And I was in a number of discussions, but one organisation was particularly pushy and they wanted to create a role for me that sounded very exciting.
I went to the interview and my gut sense was, this place is chaotic. I'm not sure.
But I ignored that gut sense and I took the job. And it was quite an experience.
And because of my previous role, I really didn't want to let myself or them down. So I work like a doc.
I was doing 60, 70 hour weeks every week. The CEO had put me on a project that was in addition to my job that was actually another full time job.
And I was really working like three full time jobs until we got to a point where I just couldn't I couldn't continue for a variety of reasons, both sort of health, but also just practically speaking, it was impossible to keep up, is what they were asking me. So here I was with two failures under my belt.
That was how I read it. Two failures.
And that really caused me that summer to stop and think. And I was actually in the process of writing my first book that summer, What Became Your Lifeman? And it really caused me to go, can I just apply my own model and thinking to what's going on here to really make sure that this third time I make the right choice.
And some things that I really noticed were I needed to be in an organization that just did leadership and management, that wasn't a bolt on or an add on or a hundred other things that they did, that understood what I had to bring. That was the first thing.
The second thing was I definitely wasn't up for the daily commute. I'd actually been working virtually since 2002 and this was now 2012-2013 and I realized that yeah I needed work that was flexible and respected my autonomy and energy levels and trusted me.
And I think the third thing was that I wanted to be part of something small. I learned from previous incarnations that I was really happiest in a small firm, in a small team.
And so when I went out there the third time, I joined a consultancy called Blessing White, which was an employee engagement and leadership consultancy, worked virtually, really specialized, had deep expertise and had a wonderful time, a very successful track record of some great global rollouts for people like HSBC and Bristol-Myers Squibb and some really significant global projects. I got the scalps on my belt, if you like.
But that was the big learning that taking that time out, it's not just about sending out a million cvs or hitting apply on linkedin jobs it's really about taking that time out to think about what is my unique design what environments help or hinder me what keeps me well where's my zone of genius and making sure that you discern all of that before you jump into a role. And I

think that was really foundational to the work that I do now and my understanding and empathy and relatability for other people who are making fairly big transitions. I totally relate to your story.
Before I launched this podcast, I also faced setbacks and failures that took a lot of reflection to walk through.

Like you said, it was devastating when it happened.

But once I worked through those feelings, it became an opportunity to look inward, to be honest with yourself, and eventually grow out of it. Those setbacks ended up leading to new insights, to new heights, knowing what I can and I cannot do, what I can accept, and what doesn't fit me at all.
It helps me become laser-focused on what really works for me and what's worth pursuing. That clarity can be powerful, almost like a reckoning, and turn tough moments into real growth opportunities.
So I love hearing about how career transitions shaped you. And you also mentioned that you've been through personal events, live events that bored an other layer of challenge and insight.
Would you mind sharing more about those experiences? Yeah, of course. Happy to.
So I'd been running this consultancy for about four years and I had a little boy. I still have a little boy.
He was two then. And at the end of the year in 2022, I was out driving in the snow and my car couldn't get any further.
It stalled on a hill. And I went to get out the car to get to a place of safety and walk home.
And a motorist hit me and dragged me under his car. I was paralysed from the waist down.
I had emergency surgery to try to save my mobility. And I was subsequently in hospital for just shy of five months, having broken 15 bones, but most seriously, my spine spine and therefore damaged my spinal cord and so over the last 20 months I needed to learn to walk again to literally get back on my feet and I consider myself very fortunate I know that sounds weird but I feel very fortunate because I was able to do that.
For many people's spinal cord injuries, the injury is complete. That means that it doesn't matter how hard you work to rehabilitate, the connection is gone.
Whereas for me, the connections were severely damaged, but there was an opportunity to grow and restore them. But that meant almost a year away from my business, away from my team, a year in which it was very difficult to even be strong enough to sit up, let alone carry my child or chase him anywhere.
All of those things were just impossible. And really a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, a lot of uncertainty.
And I only came back to work in, I think, October 2020. And it's been really interesting to see where work's place is for me.
Of course, I couldn't really do the work I did if I didn't love it. It wouldn't be fair to be advising other people on their careers and their career management if I didn't love what I do.
So in many ways, coming back to work was a real solace. It was somewhere I was confident, somewhere that I was comfortable, somewhere that I was known and respected, somewhere where things were controllable.
Having had a physical injury and the recovery from that being so uncontrollable and my body in many ways becoming very uncontrollable in ways that I hadn't expected that were very uncomfortable or very embarrassing or very difficult. But it's also caused quite a lot of reflection about, am I, life is short and time is precious.
Time is short and life is precious. am I making the maximum impact that I could do with my work which is all about helping people to celebrate their spirits their capability their potential and to live lives that that feel worthwhile to them and have a positive impact and so what it prompted me that's actually how the podcast came, because I realized that the consultancy had primarily been working with other businesses and that it had been a while since I had been able to speak freely and openly with the public about their careers, about the direction they wanted to take.
And that the podcast was a great opportunity to be able to have that conversation with a lot more people on a different kind of platform. And also over the years, ever since I was a kid, I had loved, I'd loved Oprah Winfrey.
I'd loved the idea of broadcasting and kind of education in the transformation realm. And podcasting seems a really natural way to be able to do that.
Alongside it really being a struggle to get the business back on an even keel, the team were amazing at keeping things going, but you need to always be growing if you're in the consultancy area. That was really, it's been a really hard year on the business development front.
The podcast gave me an opportunity to do business development, but in a really much more joyful way and with an opportunity to touch more people and to have more fun in a way that I had always wanted to do in my career, which was this kind of educative broadcasting. I say in my sort of career philosophy that a career is a series of choices where we explore how do I align my gifts with how I spend time and make money and that sort of tightrope of first of all knowing what your gifts are and knowing what gives you joy because that can evolve and change as your life evolves and changes as your priorities evolve and change and then how do I spend my time consciously around that in a way that generates value and success for myself and other people? That's a kind of constant adjustment.
It's a constant tightrope walk of teasing out how do I stay on course with that? And I think for me, it became clear that my work is still my work. The subject matter still really works for me.
I still love it. But perhaps the way in which I was transmitting it needed to shift or I wanted to add something to that.
And that also returning to a three-day week, so I run a business on a three-day week, was definitely all that I wanted to do given that the job of rehabilitating my spinal cord injury is really a kind of lifetime's work. And the job of being a good parent is also a a lifetime's work and just in terms of what was realistic and slicing the pie of my life that was going to be the time that I had available yeah it's it's been an opportunity really to fine-tune what really matters to me and also to really get a sense of how exceptional I'm going going to use that word even though I feel a bit shy about it, how exceptional I can be when I'm up against it.
Because in the last two years, I have gone from completely paralyzed to walking again. I have rebuilt a business and launched a podcast.
I have been a great parent in spite of all of those challenges and obstacles. So it really has caught me a lot of good things about myself.
It's really shown me a lot of good things about myself. And it's been interesting to see how inspiring and empowering that has been for other people to witness as well.

It wasn't really something I expected, but the outpouring of kind of generosity and support and encouragement and positive feedback has also been, you know, really exceptional experience. Really taught me a lot about who I am and the impact that I have in the world in a way that's been very moving.
Just now, Erica shared her career journey, the twists, the turns, and the accident that changed everything. Tomorrow, in part two, she will 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 tell us how we can all work towards becoming better

versions of ourselves in our career. Come back and join us tomorrow.
Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, 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.