Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This episode is airing in mid September of twenty twenty four. Sarah is going to be interviewing Erica Arisbaddan, who is the former CEO of Barstool Sports, so she has a lot to tell us about careers and business and life.
She is the author of a book called No One Cares About Your Career, right, Sarah? Is that how? That's the book?
Yes?
And I love the title. I feel like it's so descriptive and just very honest. It's a very honest book.
Yeah.
And the idea that like nobody cares about your career, I guess it's more not that like nobody has any interest in it whatsoever, but more that you are the one who kind of has to take charge of it because there's not some career fairy godmother out there looking out for you or designing your career path or telling you what is the best next step. You kind of have to figure that out for yourself. But that is part of taking your career seriously, which is something that
we definitely advocate here on this podcast. So, Sarah, did you have a clear vision of what you wanted your work life to look like before you started working?
To some extent, yes, I feel like that vision has shifted over time. And honestly, if I didn't have my blog actually see in writing what I thought my vision would be, I'm not sure I would remember this. But I even noted back like fifteen years ago or more that I wanted to do be a part time pediatric indocronologist. So I must have had some other ideas in mine. I might not have wanted to voice them because that would have felt risky at the time, But I kind of always knew I wanted to do a lot of
different things. I knew I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to see patients, I wanted to do pediatric indochronology, and I do feel like along the way, I have then played with things. We've done career crafting episodes where we talked about various things. But I do think the true it's so true what Eric's title says, which is that like, no one is going to hand you on a silver platter, like this is what your day to
day life and career will look like. And here's a step you could take, and here's a leadership position you could take, and here's.
A pathword upward for you.
Like there may be some mentorship that help you see what possibilities there are, but the only one that's really going to be invested in what that path looks like and it's going to have to actually take those steps to put themselves out there is you. So that's why I was really attracted to the title of this book. And yeah, I'm excited with this conversation.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely when you build your own business, this becomes apparent very quickly. Like you know, it's not like school where tenth grade follows ninth grade and if you do these requirements, you will move on to the next level. I mean, it's unclear what the next level is, and even if you have a picture of it, it doesn't always mean that there's some straightforward thing that will get you there. You can definitely take steps backward, try
things that don't work. You know, it's just all risk taking and you hope some of it pays off eventually. But that's why you got to keep thinking about it, because again, nobody else cares about your career, but you I think there's a lot of stuff in life that nobody's going to care as much as you are, and you just I think that goes both ways. I mean, it's kind of like, oh, well, I better take it seriously then, and it's also like, well it's kind of liberating.
I mean, I don't know why we have this. It's kind of I don't know if it's an American cultural thing where people always have to claim that there's a lot of opposition to whatever, Like nobody told me I could do this, or you know, I people said I couldn't do X, Y or Z. I'm you know, for most of it, probably nobody really cared.
Everyone's still busy paying attention to themselves.
So yeah, yeah, no one cares. So that'll be our takeaway from this nobody cares about your career, so you should. So let's hear what Erica has to say.
Well, I am so excited to welcome to best of both worlds Erica Ayers Badon, who was former CEO of Barstool Sports, a company many of you may have heard of, and the author of Nobody Cares about your career, which is really what we're going to talk about during this interview today.
So welcome Erica.
Thank you for having me so.
Excited to talk.
I was attracted, especially honestly to the title of your book, and we'll get to that in a minute. But just in case people don't know about you or don't know about Barstool Sports, can you give us the like three minute version of your career journey. I know that's asking a lot because you've been you've done a lot of things.
Yeah, no, it's good.
I think everybody should do a lot of things in their career. So my career has predominantly been in the intersection between technology, the internet, content, advertising, and commerce. Like that's really where I've lived my professional life. I worked at a lot of really big companies like Microsoft and AOL and Yahoo. I have worked at a bunch of startups, a lot of you know, which were disasters.
One was part of an IPO and then was a disaster.
And about a decade ago, ten years ago, I took the CEO job at Barstool Sports, which was at the time a very small, like fledgling, little renegade brand in Boston, Massachusetts, which started as a newspaper became a very janky app and a website and it was all about opinion and perspective and personality, mostly about sports. And I joined that company in twenty sixteen. It had twelve people, no p and L, no business system, and we grew it and sold it for five hundred and fifty million dollars in
twenty twenty three. So we had a huge, crazy, big run. It was wild and exhilarating, very funny. We grew it to be one of the ten largest brands in the world on TikTok and an ultimate real powerhouse in American media. So that's kind of the Barstool Sports of it all. And now I'm the CEO of a company called Food fifty two, which is a lifestyle home and food brand.
Amazing, what an incredible journey all that experimentation led you to like an amazing success story, and yet you decide done, let me keep going.
Yeah, I know, maybe I'm an idiot. I might be an idiot.
That is amazing.
I'm always inspired by that into somebody who clearly like might not have to continuing to be chugging along, and yet they're impassioned, they're excited, and everything just ends up like falling into place for them to continue pushing.
So super exciting.
That's awesome. Yeah, I do like to work. So here we are all right.
Well, on the note of work, you had a lot to say, like a lot to say your book. There's just so much in there. I'm super excited to talk about it. Just so much useful and interesting stuff and so many stories. So let's start with the title. Where did you come up with? Nobody cares about your career? And I don't know, is that something you've always kind of been passionate about the idea that you have to take charge of it on your own or tell me a little bit about that.
The title?
Yeah, it was funny. So I you know, I wrote the book.
I think the publisher expected like a fairly short book, and it kept like getting longer and longer. And longer and longer, and we edited quite a bit out of it actually, So the book was pretty dense in a good way, I would say, And I didn't know what to call it. And nobody cares about your career wasn't the intended title at all.
It was just one of the chapters.
And it's something that I've said to myself really since almost the beginning of my career, and it's just always been a mantra I've had in my head, which is that you are the one who can make a difference in your life and in your job and in your career, and that it is a complete and utter waste of time to live a life or have a job, or be in a career or be on a track that feels good or looks good or says a certain thing
or is a certain way to somebody else. You really need to do things that make you happy and create fulfillment. And that you are ultimately responsible.
For your career.
You're responsible for the path you take and also what happens on that path. So that's really where the title came from. And you know, it's fun. I think it's a good message for people. I think you kind of see it, it seems negative. It's actually, in my opinion, very positive because it's supposed to be very freeing. This book is designed to be freeing and to empower people to say, Hey, what makes me happy and energized? How can I push myself? What iterations of myself can I
be and become? And hopefully this book is helpful along that path.
Yes, I think the word empowering is exactly what I was thinking, like, Okay, no one else is going to take charge of this, and therefore it's on me and I must be empowered to move forward, empowered to make decisions, and empowered to take responsibility for my actions, which is a major theme in this book that we're going to talk about. And in fact, you spend a lot of
time talking about failure and mistiqus. So before we even get into how you recommend others with failure along the course of their careers, can you tell us about what kinds of failures you've had or have there been struggles that kind of inspired this passion around failure.
Yeah, I like failure. I call it fail always mode. Success I think can make me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable, and I think the reason I think failure is really important, and the book talks a lot about my failures and just failure in general. Is that what failure really is. It means two things, in my opinion. One is, or in the best case, it means two things. One is, you're putting yourself in an environment where you don't know exactly what to do, so you are in a new environment.
You are learning things, You're pushing yourself. You're putting yourself in a place where it's not all perfect and you're not the expert and you have to figure some stuff out. So it indicates that you are in an environment that is not comfortable.
And then the second is it's indicating that.
You're trying, you're experimenting, you're trying to figure things out, and failure if you think about exercise, you think about sports, you think about experiments. I read a social post the other day that the inventor of the dice in vacuum had like something like five thousand prototypes. He built five thousand vacuums that didn't work until he built the five thousand and.
Whatever one that became the dice in vacuum.
That is also failure, right, It's knowing that you're trying to do something, you're trying to become something, You're trying to figure something out, and you don't know exactly how to do it, but you do have the willingness to try. And that's really you know, this book is about, in a nutshell, you need to put away your insecurity, which is I'm not good enough, I don't know enough, I'm not ready. And you need to put away your ego, which is I'm too good for this, I'm above this,
I'm better than this. You have to put both of those things away and kind of show up with yourself to tackle the problem that's in front of you, and that can really great things can come of that.
All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we're gonna talk more a little bit on the subject of failure.
We'll be right back.
All right, we are back, and I want to get a little bit into specifics. So, first of all, if you can think of an example from your career where there has been perhaps a fail and how you handled it or maybe even learned from how you handled it. Maybe you failed at handling your fail and then that taught you something as well. And then like maybe a scenario where someone works in a corporation and they realized they messed up, Like, how do you handle it?
Yeah?
I mean I fail all the time, So how long do you have I've had all sorts of different failures in my career. I handled things the wrong way. I managed people in a way that I had wished I had managed them differently. I was confronted with situations where I did one thing, but in hindsight I was like, Oh, I knew in my gut I shouldn't have done that. I should do it a different way. I've had really
every imaginable failure there is. You know, I had a big part of my time spent at Barstool trying to make a TV show that our board really felt like we needed a TV show. And I spent a year of my life forty percent of that year trying to get Barstool Sports on ESPN. And it didn't feel good the whole time. It was painful, it was cumbersome, it was fraught with pitfalls. It kept going back to the same place that was like, this doesn't seem like a
good fit, this doesn't seem like a good fit. And still I kept pushing, pushing, pushing to make it happen because it's what I thought I was supposed to do, and it ended up being a total disaster. The show ran for one night, it was canceled, it became this whole big brew haha with ESPN and barstool. But it's a good example of if you keep going on a path that you're pretty sure you're not supposed to be on, and you are not listening to the signs that are like get off this highway.
Get off this highway, like take the exit. Take the exit. It's going to end up probably bad.
And you knew that it was not going to end up well, So that would be one big example of a failure. I tend to believe that people are optimists, so that even and I'm an optimist, so that even when you do fail, I'm kind of getting to your second question, you'll probably rationalize that it was good that
that happened because something else good came of it. So that's also a reason not to be afraid of failure, is that you're going to say that this was for the best anyway, so you might as well just do it. I think when people in a corporate setting are at work mess up on something and I write a lot about this, like what happens.
After you screw up? What do you do after you screw up? Because everybody screws up? First of all.
My perspective on that is that when you mess up, the best thing you can do is to reassess. You need to be able to step out of the situation you're in, and you need to be able to say what went wrong here critically thinking, really critically, being critical about yourself of.
What did I do wrong? What went wrong? What should have been done? Differently?
I think a lot of times when things go wrong, especially at work, people tend to blame everybody else, and it's just about deflecting so you don't look bad. The people who look great after a mistake, and I write a lot of about this are the people who own it, who say this didn't go great, and here's why this didn't go great. This broke down, This broke down. Don't be personal, don't lay blame other places, just address it and then quickly get to what can you do to
fix it? This doesn't account like all the feelings, like when stuff goes wrong at work, like the feelings kind of last a little bit longer than maybe the solution or the then the time you want to get to the solution. So I also really I think it's important to feel failure and be like ooh, like that was a tough lesson that didn't feel good, but still to get back up on the horse and get moving and move forward.
I love that You've also had a great story in your book. It was like a It just was just perfect for me because I was like, yeah, that's you had a party and there were talks being given at the party.
Oh, my most epic failure, and I could just.
Picture it so easily.
But then to like own it and be like, Okay, I'm never ever doing it again. I take full responsibility for it. Here's why we can't do this. And then you never ever had that happened at any event you ever were part of ever again, I'm assuming completely.
Yeah, I think failure happens all the time. I had a business meeting this morning, I had a conference call this morning, and we had a huge screw up on the supply chain, and instead of addressing it and saying, hey, there's something really broken. We screwed up on the supply chain, the person in charge of it was just burying everyone in data like, here's no, no, really, like at the micro level, here's what happened. Here's all the widgets, all the data points. And I'm like, how is this helping
anyone move forward? Like, let's step back, let's admit something.
Went really wrong. What went wrong?
And what are the three things we're going to do to solve it right now in the middle of the crisis, And what are three things we're going to do to make sure this never happens again. And I think it's just really good to have that skill because the reality is work is hard, and a lot of bad stuff can happen at work, and things don't go the right way, or products don't land the way they're supposed to, or
goals aren't met. And being able to be like, okay, wait, I'm going to reframe this thing so we can do something positive about it, I think is a really important skill.
I love it.
Well, We're going to pivot a little bit and talk about one of everybody's favorite topics when it comes to work, which is bosses.
Ooh, I love bosses.
Okay, so difficult bosses or bosses maybe where your styles are incredibly different or I think your words you're misaligned. How do you advise handling it? And I guess when would you at some point decide like time to move on?
Yes, okay, I have a lot of opinion on this. I have a whole matrix of bosses, the friend boss, the absent boss, the micromanaging boss. In general, I hate having a boss, so I want to just disclose that, like, I'm from the camp of people that never wanted a boss. But I don't think that having a bad boss necessarily has to be bad for you. I think a lot of really good things in my career is a good example of this. A lot of really good things can
come out of having a really bad boss. And the reason I say that is a lot of times, to the title of nobody cares about your career, people put too much emphasis for their career in their boss's hands.
It's almost like you give.
Your career to your boss to decide are you on the path, are you off the path?
Are you doing a good job, are you not doing a good job.
And I don't really actually think that's your career has nothing to do with your boss, like your career should be for you. But I think it's important to understand what type of boss you have so that you can best navigate and be successful with that boss. So in my mind, I had a lot of absent bosses, And absent bosses are people they don't really care about what you're doing on a day to day basis you're doing a good enough job, They've got other fires to fight.
They're just going to like, let you be, leave you alone. Sometimes people don't like that because they're like, I'm not getting the attention I want or I'm not getting the direction I need. My point of view on.
That is screw it.
Like take the opportunity to take as much work as you humanly can, as many projects as you can get yourself involved in, and use the absentness of your boss to create more opportunity for you. So that for me is like one way you would handle an absent boss. People have bosses who are idiots, and I've had a
bunch of bosses who are idiots. And the other piece of having an idiot is you can spend all your time either complaining about your idiot boss, which is kind of dangerous because it eventually is going to get back to them. And two that doesn't really help you or that person or two. You can use their deficiencies as
ways that you can show strength. So you know, I had a boss who I would describe as an idiot, and I at first was annoyed and like kind of bitter about it, and then I was like, you know what, I'm going to get invited to every meeting this guy's getting invited to because I know so much more, And what an opportunity for me. I could have written this off as a really bad thing, it actually was a
great thing. It put me in a position to do a whole bunch of things and be seen by a whole bunch of people who never would have otherwise cared or known what I did.
I do think it gets to inside.
This is super long winded, but I do think that micromanaging bosses and toxic bosses you should not stay with. And I think it's fine for your boss to be absent. I think it's kind of dangerous when your boss is your friend. I think it's okay even if your boss is an idiot. But if your boss is really toxic, which means to say they don't have good intentions, they're negative. They're creating an environment where you cannot succeed or your boss is just on you on every you can't move
because your boss is so suffocating. I think both of those scenarios are scenarios that you should stay in long enough to learn it and know it, but don't stay so long as you become affected by it.
That makes sense, and I'm sure there are plenty of listeners who see themselves in most full of these scenarios, definitely, no matter where they are in their career journey.
Early, middle, early, yep.
So now I want to talk a little bit about a very best of both worlds centered topic, which is that you talk about how there's some challenges that a little.
Bit unique to women in the workplace. Yes, so can you share a little bit about that.
I'm so glad you're talking about this. And everyone ignores that chapter in the book. So I have a chapter in the book that's called for the Girls, and really what it is about, and it's not just for girls. I think it's for anybody, and especially men should read this. But what the chapter is really about is the things that women in particular, and I'm a woman, so I speak to that go through at work. And the first thing is that I've been working now almost thirty years.
And you know, most every woman who's been working five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, they've gone through some similar things. One is a glass ceiling right where you're in an environment where women are not particularly welcome, or that seat at the table is not particularly appreciated or assured.
I think the second piece of that is just sexual harassment, which at the beginning of my career, sexual harassment was blatant, like for women who were in business ten years before me, it.
Was like promoted.
Now it's more insidious, where you know, you can't be as blatant as you know to hit on someone in the office. But there are ways where you can be put in an environment which I call the gray, which is there's some opacity. There's double meaning for most everything where you're in a situation where it may be a work thing, but someone may have ulterior motives or different intentions for you. And this is something that's very unique to women at work, and that women have to understand
how they navigate. And then there's all sorts of other stuff, being pregnant at work, what happens after you have a baby at work, what happens if you're dating someone at work in all those scenarios. So I have a lot of opinion about it. I don't really think about my gender a whole lot in my job, and I love that. And I don't think your gender should help you or hurt you at work. I do think understanding the things that your gender brings you is really important for women.
It's very often a sense of empathy, it's a sense of vulnerability, it's an ability to communicate, and I think it's important to harness those skills to be most successful as it relates to being a woman at work. There are things that are disadvantages to women at work, which is one is we tend to do all the work at work and do all the work at home. And how do you do the best of both worlds? Like that's tough? How do you navigate your second shift versus
your first shift? But I do think it's important that women recognize same as when you encounter our problem, like where am I? What are the advantages to me in this situation? What are the disadvantages? And where do I want to get to and how can I navigate to get there?
Definitely tricky territory, and I was very excited to say that you included that chapter in your book. We're going to take another quick break and I'll be right back with one more sort of related question. All right, we are back, and you mentioned it briefly, but obviously sometimes men add to their family as well, but maternity leave is still primarily taken more by women, although increasingly by
both genders. I also feel like a lot of people find this podcast just as they're about to maybe enter maternity le for the first time, and it just seems so scary. Do you have tips for that very special situation of someone who's left the workforce for maybe a few months and is coming back, like how to steal themselves out? Yeah, tell me about your thoughts there.
I talk a lot about this in the chapter.
And look, coming back to work after you've been on maternity leave is a really apprehensive time. It's apprehensive for who's going to take care of your baby. It's apprehensive in terms of what's expected of you now at work. You've just come off this time where you've you know, I know when I had my kids.
You're kind of.
Isolated in a little bubble and it's a really magical time, and then you're kind of back out into the world and you feel a little fragile. So it's also you know, it's an apprehensive time for who you are as a woman and how you're feeling, and you can often, I think, feel really fragile and uncertain, and it's important to honor that, but also it's important not to let that hold you back.
I get a lot of questions in my DMS about re entering the workforce after taking a maternity leave or taking a break, and the first thing is, hold your
head high and do what you have to do. So if you need to go to the pumping room and you're carrying around all the equipment and it's like the most like embarrassing, like, eh, I've all this stuff, I got to refrigerate it, like it's cumbersome, But hold yourself high and hold your head high that the fact of caring for a child and producing milk for a baby does not make you any less viable in the office, and you go into that next meeting as though nothing
had happened the fifteen minutes prior. So that would be my first piece of advice. My second piece of advice is, I think a lot of times when women re enter the workforce after having a kid or they come back from eternity leave. You tend to want to overcompensate because for some weird, screwed up reason, which is probably that
we're made to feel this way. You feel guilty that you've been gone for three months, four months, whatever, and then you start yourself on this track of you know, you get up, you care for your baby, you care for your fan, you commute, you get to work, or you go on zoom and do work. Then you shut it down, you shove food in your mouth, you say hi to your partner, you care for your baby, and then you get right back online again. I think that's
of the mistakes I've made in my life. I think that's one of the greatest mistakes I made, which is like my kids are in the tub, I'm on my phone. Like answering work emails, like set boundaries early for yourself and even and especially when it's scary for yourself, because the reality work will take up every orifice of your time if you let it. And this feeling that you're
accessible at night every night. Now, yes, some nights you have to work late and you have a big project and blah blah blah, but the fact that you're expected to be available at night I have a huge issue with, So my advice would be to set really clear boundaries on that.
And then the third is when you're at work, make the most of work.
So if you're there for six and a half hours, crush the six and a half hours. If you're there for nine hours, crush the nine hours. But at that ninth hour or seventh hour, whatever hour, shut it down,
get out of there and go live your life. And I think sometimes when you have kids, you feel depleted because you're supposed to be everything to everyone at all times, always, and it's a lie, like it's it's not going to work and the only person and the person who is going to suffer and give up the most because.
Of that is you.
So just really making the boundary stick, not for anybody else's reasons, but to preserve yourself, I think is really important.
Oh my gosh, Erica, if I had we don't do sound effects on this podcast, but like if we did, I would have the standing ovation one be going a hut right now because I can't tell you what you just said in the last two minutes is probably going to change some people's life, Like I mean, you giving that kind of permission from someone who is where you are right now in leadership and everything.
It's just so incredibly valuable.
So thank you.
That was amazing.
Oh that's so nice. I have a quick story on that. I know we're probably out of time.
But no, tell the quick story.
I had a woman who worked for me. This was actually really interesting. I had two women who worked for me recently, and one was a available at all times, all hours of the night, like I'm like, working, working, working, working, working, and the other woman was a working mom with two kids I think under four. And what was interesting to me is I stepped back and looked at them and I said to myself, Wow, credit to the mom where
she shut down every night at five o'clock. And she conditioned because she's shut down at five o'clock, you knew you weren't going to get an answered until the following morning. And I think we're all successfully and secure in a way where you're afraid to do the action of shutting at five. But all it did was train everybody else not to bug her until eight thirty the following morning.
Versus the woman who was always available, she was disappointing people because they were like, you're always available, why aren't you available to me now? And the reality is, when I stepped back and looked at these women, the working mom, I think worked probably forty fifty percent of the time as the other woman, but got as much done and did it with greater discipline. So I think there's this fallacy like the more you work, the more you work.
Like I don't believe that at all. I think you need to make the most of the time you have and you have to be a maniac about that time. But beyond that, you've got to go live your life, and I think you can be fabulously successful with that.
That is amazing.
Well, one last thing before we go, oh well, other than you telling everybody, of course, all about where they can find everything, we'll get to that. But we share a love of the week every week on this podcast. I hope your team share that with you, but if not, you.
Can They didn't.
They didn't, Okay, So it can be off the cuff, and I will have to go first because I will give you time to give yours and okay, I just thought of mine.
That didn't take too long. Okay, But it can be a product.
It can be like a season, a beverage, a shoot, like I don't care, a book whatever.
Okay, So mine is I had.
I don't get a lot of patient gifts because I don't know, like it's just not necessarily in the culture what I do. Plus, I take care of patients for so many years and it's not like they're aging out
for that long. But somebody was going to college and the mom gave me a lu Lavo candle and it was just I mean, obviously that's a lux gift and I would not expect a patient to give me that, but like, it was just so nice and I have it on my desk and now every time I smell it, I just feel this gratitude for like the privilege about knowing I don't know, it was awesome.
So that is my love of the week.
Oh I love that. That's a great love of the week. My love of the week. When is this coming out?
I think it's in like two in mid September.
Let's say mid September, okay, or end.
Of September something like that. Sorry I should know that, but.
Okay, my love of the week.
Well you I'll tell you this one and then you can tell me if it's too dated. Okay, So my love of the week is I've been watching in.
The US Open.
I love to watch tennis. It is the most inspiring sport. I think it's one of those sports where the female athletes are even better than the men athletes.
Like it's so fun to watch.
And there's this announcer, this Australian woman named I think her name is Renee Stubbs, and I had never heard of her before. I'd never seen her before, I didn't know anything about her, but I loved her attitude. She was on the broadcast and I think she's a former tennis player herself and a former coach. And everyone was talking like all nice and the platitudes about like oh, Coco golf had lost to Emma Navarro and.
Everyone's like, Coco so great, Coco so great.
And she was like, yeah, like, I don't think she had the confidence and her swing wasn't high enough, and and I loved that she had the balls, I guess for a lack of a better word, to speak her mind and with such clarity and specificity.
So she's my love of the week.
I love it.
That's not going to be dated, that's everlasting. That's evergreen right there.
So that's perfect.
Plus I just love the image of you like watching sports and listening to the commentary and like with what all you know and what you've built, like your analysis of it.
Oh, it's so fun.
So I DMed her and I was like, will you come do I do these like daily work videos? And I'm like, will you come do the daily work videos with me? And she said yes.
So I was like, that's so fun. That is so amazing, double love of the week.
Super super cool. Well, this has been so much fun. I'm serious, I'm going to like play that part on a loop. That ending part, it was just so perfect. Good good, And tell our listeners where they can find your book. Remind us all of the title one more time, and just where they can find more about you.
Okay, great. The book is called Nobody Cares About your Career. You can find it wherever books are sold. And I did the audio book, so if you are a busy woman and you don't have a time to read a book, which I would totally understand, you can just listen to it.
So I think it's a good listen. I'm I'm biased, obviously.
You can find me at Erica, which is Erka or at Erica Underscore. I'm at Erica on Instagram and then on TikTok at Erica Underscore.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
Amazing, what amazing handles you have. That is great.
I worked hard for the handles.
You deserve them. Thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
Well we are back. Sarah did a great interview there with Erica Arizbadan, who is the former CEO of Barstool Sports, the author of the book Nobody Cares About Your Career. Lots of great advice there. So this question is from a listener who is considering hiring a career coach. She says, have either of you ever used one? Do you have thoughts on them? And what kind of role they could play in career growth. The context is that she is
currently in a midpoint in her career. She's been in law for about fifteen years out of the baby years, her kids are in school, she is free of student loans, and she is still under forty. Wow, she's accomplished a lot. It's an exciting prospect to have things feel open, but she's wondering what she should do if she needs to find her passion or find ways to maximize her current role.
She seems to get a lot of ads for career coaches through professional organizations and podcast feeds LinkedIn wherever she is on social media. So she's curious if we have any insights or experience with coaches, what they might be able to offer in the quest for career happiness. Her instinct is skepticism, but it's good to be curious. Sarah, what do you think?
Yeah? I have a mix as well.
I think part of it is, are you out of place where you feel like really exploring what you want with another person in scheduled sessions with specific exercise would be helpful for you? And would you be unable to do that work in a maybe less expensive context. If so, this might be something to explore. I would be aware of any coach who has any part of their platform in teaching others to coach. I just that really scares
me because it gets very pyramidy. Or a coach who wants to tell you how to kick butt in your field but has left that field to coach specifically. Maybe that's okay if they're clearly in a later phase of life, like Listen, they put in thirty awesome years and they accomplished great things and now they've moved on to coaching. But if it's like, no, they did that for five years and now they're coaching, I think there's some concern
sometimes to be found. Again, this is not universal. I mean I can think of some specific people who do things more in the coaching realm who maybe have specific protocols or things they've developed to share that can be super super valuable. But yeah, I just think you have
to be a little bit careful. Definitely talk to others who have worked with said coaches if you can, Like a great coach should be able to even offer not just testimonials on their website, but maybe like, oh you can chat with this other person in your field and see if it was helpful for them, and then just
always reevaluate. Hopefully you don't have to pay a ton of upfront costs, so if you invest and you go to a couple sessions and it's not helpful, then you can decide that maybe to go another avenue, either finding another coach or doing something different.
Yeah, we get a lot of pitches from coaches, and I think we are very very wary of most of them, and there's a lot of like up selling and these sort of things like you have to buy this package and then you have to buy this other package, and it's more about the coach as a guru as opposed to what they are going to do to help you.
And if you are bothering to pay for this, it really should be all about what they're going to do to help you, so as opposed to I don't know, you all stand around and worship this particular coach in their guru status. So yeah, I'm pretty skeptical as well. It can work, just you know, I would definitely only go through like personal recommendations of someone who's seen really good practical results, concrete results as a real result of
working with the person I do. I want to suggest one other option though, for this person, which is that I know somebody who was thinking, like do I need a career coach whatever, And what she realized is that she knew what she needed to do and like the exercises she should think about, and like the what she should investigate, and like different things she could do to help in her career. She just needed someone to push
her to do it. But if that's the case, then maybe what you need is an accountability partner or a goal group or sort of mastermind group of folks. Maybe you can find other people who are also ambitious, who are in similar or stages of life with you, who might meet up regularly to discuss your ideas and next steps. And so you know, not only would that be like lower cost, I mean just in the sense that you're like getting together with people, it could also be a
lot of fun. Like it could actually build your professional network in a very good way. Like these people would be kind of your cheering squad and you're the cheering squad for them. You'd be very close together. So I'd throw that out there as an idea as well.
I love it, and hopefully something like that if it's a collection of your peers, wouldn't be a crazy financial investment either, so bonus, Yeah, exactly.
All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. Sarah has been interviewing Erica Arizbadan, who's the former CEO of Barstool Sports. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening.
You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram and you can.
Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together