Success beyond Corporate America

Paula: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Chatting with the Experts where I speak with incredible women, women from Africa, from the Caribbean, and in the diaspora. These women share with me a mission, which is to educate women, to empower women, and to encourage women globally. Today’s episode is called Corporate to Calling, Building the Bridge from Corporate to Entrepreneurship, and my guest who will join me in a minute says, corporate success doesn’t have to be abandoned to pursue your calling. It can be leveraged. She is a career advancement coach and corporate transition strategist, who helps high performing [00:01:00] professionals move from corporate surviving to entrepreneurial thriving. She has a background in entrepreneurship and corporate leadership, and equips ambitious leaders to design the next best move with clarity, confidence, and purpose. In other words, she turns adversity into strategic advantage and builds careers that are rooted in legacy, in alignment, and intentional success. Welcome Jraya Nicole to Chatting with the Experts.
Jraya: Thank you. Thank you. Hi Paula. How are you?
Paula: Hi. Good. You’re doing such a phenomenal job. ’cause we hear a lot about people in corporate.
Jraya: Mm-hmm.
Paula: But we don’t hear about how they transition from corporate to self-employed. [00:02:00] And that’s what you’re here to talk about.
Jraya: That is what I’m here to talk about. Because I will just start off by saying there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being successful at the work you’ve outgrown.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: So that, that is what we are talking about today. That is the gap that I now have built my career on closing.
Paula: So I noticed offline we talked about success survivors and you say that success survivors, because in other words they’ve been successful in corporate, but this is a brand new road. And so you will mention that they feel misaligned in spite of their corporate achievements. Let’s talk about that. Why should they feel that way?
Jraya: Well, it’s an interesting dynamic and for many, they find themselves feeling guilty because they have, in fact, [00:03:00] achieved so much. And I do work with driven, wonderful, ambitious men and women who, they’ve mastered the corporate game, but they’ve quietly started to wonder if it’s even the right game.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: They climb the ladder, but is it leaning up against the right wall? So, to your point of success survivor, these are individuals, professionals, they’ve accomplished by every external measure. I’m here in the United States, the American Dream, the advanced degrees, the specialties, the higher than medium salary. Yet Paula, they find themselves disconnected from the work or the title that they have achieved, and most importantly, the version of themselves that they’ve spent all of these years building in front of family and friends who believed in them.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: So when I use the term success [00:04:00] survivor, that leads to the path that will be discussing today, which is the unlearning to turn that adversity and that inner turmoil into second act success.
Paula: Mm.
Jraya: Mm-hmm.
Paula: So, is there a signal that you actually see? I mean, what is it that you see in them, or what is it that they see in you that makes them come to you?
Jraya: So, the one thing is the relatability because I have been successful as both an entrepreneur in the rights of the metrics of achieving that six figure salary, which is often a coveted milestone. And I also was able to replicate that success in corporate.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: So I have a vantage point to be able to support professionals to reverse engineer that outlook that have only known corporate and aspire to have more autonomy, [00:05:00] flexibility in their own working life. And they’ve understood that money success can only do so much for you. There’s a yearning. So what I’ve identified and here’s what most career advisors, let me tell you what they miss here. The real barrier, it isn’t confidence. ’cause I work with highly competent people. It’s courage. It’s not even capital. Because they have the resources. It’s infrastructure.
So hear me out here. These are high achieving men and women that are aspiring to exit corporate, but they don’t have a strategy on converting all that they work for, decades of exceptional performance into a viable position, business, or next move in their career. Mistakenly I believe, it’s drawn because what I position is you are not starting over. You [00:06:00] are not starting over. The skills that made them indispensable employees. Sometimes that doesn’t automatically translate into entrepreneurial traction. They were the expert at the job. But there’s a different type of packaging that needs to happen to do that in a entrepreneurial capacity. So, and without that bridge and that understanding, I see too many talented professionals, they stay stuck in that outgrown role.
That’s the first option. Or they leap and they don’t have a plan. They leap. And that usually ends up in those that left corporate, they end up returning back. Because they just didn’t have a strategic exit. So I treat corporate to call in. I use that as a bridge for these individuals and through my framework it’s a [00:07:00] strategic exit, but I like to call it the beautiful exit. That’s actually part of my program. It’s a comprehensive guide on leaving, corporate success and entering entrepreneurial as an authority figure, right? So I help people identify all of those skills that they developed, let’s call it their corporate currency.
Paula: Yes.
Jraya: Let’s call it that. All of those skills, that expertise, the background, we don’t start over. We design that runway so they can step into that entrepreneurship with the same precision and authority that they brought to the boardroom, that they brought to the conference rooms. So it’s not a reinvention, it’s a translation, if you will. So, that’s the gist of it.
Paula: Yeah. So they’re translating it is like change of currency from the corporate currency to the entrepreneurial currency in other words.
Jraya: Absolutely.
Paula: You help them to see that. It [00:08:00] is currency, but it’s just one is like how you have USD and you have the Euros. One that you’re just taking one currency into the next. So, hmm. And it’s so needed.
Jraya: So needed.
Paula: So needed. It’s so needed.
Jraya: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you’ve mentioned success survivor, and I think this is important to note, when the difference between burnout and misalignment, because they require different solutions. They cannot be treated the same because burnout, by definition is a depletion problem. You’re tired. You’re exhausted from doing too much, but misalignment, that’s an identity problem. You’re drained because you’re doing work that no longer fits where you’re going. So the burnout for my success survivors. You know, the [00:09:00] burnout piece, rest and a vacation could fix that. Perhaps even a new role in a different company or a lateral move.
But the other, which is the misalignment that requires redirection. So treating misalignment like burnout, that is one of the most common and I wanna say costly mistakes that these professionals make when they’re at that crossroads, they take a vacation, get promoted. You know, they add on new responsibility and they, you know, bonus here. But Paula, what they find out is the emptiness returns, it comes back. So we have to have the fix to match the diagnosis.
Paula: Got it, got it, got it. So, and that’s an interesting, you know, burnout is not misalignment. Burnout can be fixed, as you said, with good nutrition, [00:10:00] vacation, rest.
Jraya: Yes.
Paula: Misalignment is an identity problem.
Jraya: Yes.
Paula: So my question is that, do you find that being that you are like the strategic exit, well you’re the corporate exit strategist.
Jraya: Mm-hmm.
Paula: Do you find that quite a lot of your clients experienced burnout and that made them feel that they needed to, you know, change and move into the entrepreneurial capacity? Or do you think that they discover whether I’m misaligned and therefore I need to quit corporate and move, become an entrepreneur, whether solo or within an another? I mean, doing it with somebody, a partnership of some sort.
Jraya: That’s a great question. And it’s a mix of, a little bit of both, but I will say the [00:11:00] majority that are seriously considering entrepreneurship to the point where they seek my services, usually it’s misalignment because they’ve had several cycles of burnout and they’ve identified that the fixes for burnout, which we just listed, which are wellness routines and rest and vacation. It’s not working. It’s not working. So, you know, that’s the thing. We then, once we identify, okay, this is something that a new role, a new job. That’s where the calling element act, that’s when you start to answer the call on your career. Because once we understand, okay, the calling is on you, then we go into building out that runway.
Paula: Got you. Thanks for cutting that up. Yeah, big difference. And I mean, as you said, misalignment because [00:12:00] they’ve had so many burnouts and they’re like, right, I need to know what my purpose is. I need to know what my calling is. Can you help me?
Jraya: Mm-hmm. And I’ll give you an example. You know, one company, I, I worked for a regional company and I assumed the answer would be, oh, I have a new role in a US Fortune 50 company.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: And I, you know, in my own personal life, I still felt the same cycle of burnouts and unfulfillment that I did at the regional level.
Paula: Hmm.
Jraya: So the prestige of working for such a high, you know, company with big notoriety here in the United States. I still was unfulfilled, right? So it’s a thing. So, and let me just say this, just to kind of build a little bit more on the definition of the bridge to entrepreneurship because this is [00:13:00] important when it comes to the profile, is that the person that is exceptional in corporate, the, you know, the strategic thinking, usually high standard visionary leadership. Eventually, you create friction within corporate environments that are built on the backs of compliance and consistency. Not transformation. So when I’m asked, you know, look, Jraya, you have corporate to calling. Corporate to calling, leans into being a transformative professional. That’s the calling and usually that starts to either outgrow a corporate setting.
This isn’t a problem with the said person, Paula. It’s a mismatch between a growth-oriented leader and a structure that stopped growing with them. That is [00:14:00] why I say success survivor, because there is a guilt that comes to a lot of men and women that have achieved high success and have had a high amount of support or you know, whether it be from their own private circle or whatever leadership teams they built within, or just whatever their perception of success had been in their mind up until then. The thing about that is that guilt of putting themselves first becomes, it’s an unfamiliar envi… They just been on autopilot for years and years, sometimes decades for some of the professionals I work with. And that guilt to turn the tide towards entrepreneurship.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: That takes some unlearning, some new beginnings. Right?
Paula: Yes, I can see that. Yes, because it’s like they’ve given… sometimes the corporate life has [00:15:00] become their identity.
Jraya: Yes.
Paula: And they feel loyal to whatever corporation or organization they’ve been in. And it seems, from what I’m hearing from you, like they turn their back on that. Something that has helped build them to where their career, growth and you know, the whole identities is associated with that, and suddenly they’re just, you know, putting it behind their back and moving on. Is that what I’m hearing from you?
Jraya: That’s exactly what you’re hearing. Absolutely. And for them to see it not as personal failing.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: But I helped them see it as this is your first act of entrepreneurial thinking.
Paula: Yeah.
Jraya: Outside of the box that you got it. Spot on.
Paula: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And for some that, you said quite a few of them that you’ve named or you pointed out that quite a lot of these individuals have a growth mindset. So in other words, you are helping them to see that it’s [00:16:00] because they’re growing, because of their growth mindset that they have outgrown where they were.
Jraya: Right.
Paula: For so many years or decades or however long it’s been. Now it’s time to do something different. But that’s scary.
Jraya: Very scary. Very scary. So much so that some people, they won’t do it.
Paula: Yeah.
Jraya: They won’t do it. They won’t chase the reward that entrepreneurship can produce in their life and in their family’s life because the risk of the comfort that they are currently in is too great. But let me tell you why dissatisfaction is often the first signal of evolution. The first signal because first of all, let me just say, for those of you watching, tapping in with us, I am not anti-corporate. I had great times in my corporate tenure. [00:17:00] I utilized my entrepreneurial background and was able to… I often say I didn’t climb the corporate ladder. I took the elevator. You’ll hear me say that.
Paula: I love it.
Jraya: I had great success in corporate, had it did great things for my family. It afforded me to see parts of the world and relocate to cities that I would have not, you know, been exposed to. So corporate is not an enemy, but I’m also of the understanding that we shouldn’t paint it as a friend. And let, give me a second here, because we’ve been conditioned, I say we collectively, those of us that have climbed the ranks through corporate structures and since we’ve been conditioned to villainize being discontent. I talk about this a lot in my book Choice Destinations, which is a lot of the psychology, when you’re standing at the crossroads, thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. A lot of people [00:18:00] start to view that them aspiring to wanna do something on their own as an entrepreneur. They see it as ingratitude.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: They start to see it as corporate treason because they, you know, I use these terms, but I mean it corporate like they’re turning their back on a system or organization and it becomes a negative event versus, I often call it, it’s again, the first language of calling. And it’s to be honored and acknowledged. So the reframing is a huge part of the beginning of making this decision. So I work with individuals that decide a timeline for those that are transitioning to entrepreneurship. Maybe this season the runway is not strong enough for [00:19:00] them, and once they’ve done their audit . But two, three years down the line, this is what they wanna do. But the thing is having a strategic plan, I have some professionals that say, you know what, Jraya, I’m going to be going in three months. Let’s put this plan together. So it’s a very personal choice. And the reason why I’m a corporate exit strategist is because we work through all of these things, unpack before, so you can make a confident choice walking towards the unknown.
It is truly a faith walk. I’m sure Paula, I know you know. It is truly a faith walk walking into entrepreneurship, but here’s the question I ask all of the people I work with, what will happen if you stay?
Paula: Mm.
Jraya: What will happen if [00:20:00] you stay?
Paula: If you stay? Okay. And that’s a pertinent question because it makes the individual sit down and evaluate.
Jraya: Yes.
Paula: On both sides. You know, this is what I know and this is what I don’t know. And you’ve mentioned something, you encourage the strategic exit versus the reckless leap. There’s a big difference, and I mean, you’ve gotta think this through because when you become your own entrepreneur, you don’t have IT department, you have to do your own payroll. You know, talk about, you are your own marketing and sales department. Those are big responsibilities that are suddenly yours.
Jraya: Yes, very big. Now we do lead with strengths because there are some myths at this crossroad. It’s not a true [00:21:00] starting over, not for the professionals that I work with. They’re highly tenured. Even five and 10 years of corporate experience is gold to take into an entrepreneurial capacity. But you said something important here. You are aware of many hats.
Paula: Multiple.
Jraya: So I bring the… I call it your career sweet spot, right? Because following your passion can be great and it can be dangerous. Okay? So if it’s not matched and complimented with these two other elements. So the one thing is, yes, what lights you up? What are you passionate about? Absolutely. When you’re thinking about leaving corporate, think about what lights you up, what are you passionate about? You know, what is on your mind and [00:22:00] pulling you?
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: The second part is you match that and I mentioned it earlier, your corporate currency, that’s your skills, the background, your education, all of the things that snowballed in your life that made you who you are at this moment, but what you just and is the most important, Paula, about wearing all the hats. Will the market pay you for it?
Paula: Mm.
Jraya: Because will the market pay? Because the runway that we build are profitable pathways. That’s the part about the strategy. That’s the part about the strategy is building a profitable
Paula: path.
Profitable. That’s the keyword there.
Jraya: Absolutely. Absolutely. So we translate the corporate currency, the [00:23:00] passion. You put that with a profitable pathway where the data backs it. The data backs it. I am a doctoral candidate, so I live in the numbers. The data backs that, and it’s been validated and I show people how to do that while they’re still employed. That’s important.
Paula: That’s important because that was the next question I was gonna have to talk about the fear also of burning bridges. The fear also of, well you, we kind of touched on it… feeling disloyal.
Jraya: Mm-hmm.
Paula: But you know, even when you go into solo entrepreneurship or any other form, if it’s a partnership, you need those connections and you may need those connections. And so that could be a scary thing in that am I burning my bridges or will I be able to continue building my bridges, or will I be able to build bridges?
Jraya: Well, we don’t wanna burn bridges because corporate currency definitely extends to our [00:24:00] network. So the strategic exit, I refer to it as a beautiful exit, and one of the basis of that is the relational runway.
Paula: Relational.
Jraya: So. here’s some of the elements of the runway. Here is the financial runway that buys you time, the reputational runway, that’s gonna open some doors for you. You because sometimes your reputation of being in the room before you get in the room. This is when people will promote you and speak about you, and you’re not even there. You have advocates. So we talk about that. But what you just touched on again, is the relational runway, your network, because those are your first network of referrals. Those are your cheerleaders, your advocates, your sponsors, your early clients, that’s how you gain and sustain momentum.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Jraya: So that’s [00:25:00] the difference from, from a strategic and beautiful exit versus a reckless leap. So we are not burning bridges, we building them strong.
Paula: Building bridges.
Right. So what I’m hearing from you is that you help them see the relational runway and the financial runway that lead… in otherwise you create the profitable pathway from these two runways or a better way, the runway, which are… Of course that’s the relational one is big when you start it.
Jraya: Huge.
Paula: But you need those connections. You need them to sponsor to be the, as you said, not just the sponsors, but to be the mentors sometimes.
Jraya: Mentors, advocates. Advocates.
Paula: Advocate.
Jraya: Yes.
Paula: And know cheerleaders. You need that.
Jraya: Absolutely. Yes. So we talk about all those dimensions because that’s how you close the gap.
Paula: Yeah.
Jraya: And that’s why, you know, in the comprehensive, in my [00:26:00] frameworks, you leave well and you enter strong. That’s the basis of it.
Paula: Yes.
Jraya: We discuss all of that and it’s a calculated move rather than an emotional reaction. We don’t wanna make decisions from desperation. No, we don’t wanna do that.
Paula: Well, you know, Jraya, we could talk forever. Looking at the guests who have joined us, I know they have even more questions than…
Jraya: okay .
Paula: Than I do. But this is so interesting. But if someone’s looking online, if they didn’t join us in as an audience member, how can they get in touch with you?
Jraya: Wonderful. So I’m Jraya Nicole on all platforms, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and I am on Spotify, Corporate to Calling is the podcast. You can listen in, leave commentary. I’m excited to support however I can. I’m always in the comments, so, [00:27:00] but that is how you can find me, Jraya Nicole.
Paula: Lovely, lovely. Thank you, Jraya Nicole. And for those of you listening online, all viewing this, if you’d like to be a guest like Jraya Nicole, please reach out to me on my website, just Chatting with the Experts. I’m also on LinkedIn. Please visit my business page, just Chatting with the Experts, Facebook Chatting with the Experts. And we are also on Instagram as at chat_experts_podcast. Oh my gosh. We also, how could I fail to mention this? For those of you who are listening and viewing this, we have so many other videos that you can listen or you can listen on view on our YouTube channel, which is Chatting with the Experts. Please, please, please do not hesitate to learn, to be educated, to [00:28:00] be empowered and encouraged by these phenomenal women, women experts who are sharing their knowledge and strategies with you. And with that, Jraya, we are gonna open up the floor for those who joined us so they can ask you the questions that I forgot to ask. And you get an opportunity to network with them as well.
Jraya: Wonderful.
Paula: Thank you so much again for saying yes to being a guest and Chatting with the Experts, and we’ll open up the floor now.