56. Make Your Dreams Come True in 2022

Episode Transcript

Rosa Santos: (00:00)
When is the appropriate time actually to start dreaming about what’s next? It could be August, but it could be January. Right?

Alisa Manjarrez: (00:10)
Yeah. For me, I always think about what’s next around my birthday. That’s like my new year’s. It’s like, “Okay. Where have I been? Where am I going?” And for me, personally, by the time this airs, I’ll be 40 years old. Yeah. But today I have one more month.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (00:28)
Welcome to the 40 club.

Alisa Manjarrez: (00:29)
I know I’m excited. I actually am really excited about it. My friend just turned 40 yesterday. And on her birthday card I put, “40 is the new 25 with no chill,” because she just does not care about anything. And I remember in my thirties, I realized things didn’t matter as much as they did in my twenties. And then, forties, it’s like, “No. Actually, nobody cares.” So, I don’t know. Rosa, you might have to tell us what it’s like in the next decade.

Rosa Santos: (01:04)
I might. I might.

Alisa Manjarrez: (01:06)
Even though everyone thinks you’re younger.

Rosa Santos: (01:09)
Yes, because I’m 25. I’m actually 25.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (01:12)
There you go. There you go. But you know what I’m always thinking about what’s next. That’s just kind of the way that I’m wired. I’m like, “Hey, what’s next? What do I got to be thinking of? What am I doing tomorrow? What am I doing next year?” So, I agree with Rosa. I don’t know that there’s a wrong time to think about what’s next. So, happy new year, everybody. Let’s talk about what’s next.

Rosa Santos: (01:37)
I think I said this when I went to my dentist a while back. I can’t remember why he said this, but that really stuck with me is, “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” So, every tomorrow can be new year. It can be what’s next. So, it’s how your mindset is prone to thinking about possibility beyond where you are at today. So, there you go.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (02:08)
It’s funny because I think about it like today’s one less day that I’m here to get done everything that I got to get done. So, I think of it a little bit different. Instead of tomorrow is the next. I just think, “Hey, this is one less day that I have, so I need to get going if I want my dreams to come true.”

Alisa Manjarrez: (02:28)
Well, let me introduce us. What I love about today is we’re all big dreamers. We all love to look at the possibilities. We all know that every day is a new day to begin. So, my co-hosts today are Dr. Merary Simeon. She is an HR executive and motivational speaker. Welcome, Merary. Today she’s wearing white and silver sparkles and her daughter’s tiara. And next, we have Rosa Santos, HR executive and leadership expert. And today she is wearing beautiful puff white sleeves and a gorgeous silver ball necklace. So, we’re all going to the ball today. And I am Alisa Manjarrez. I’m a vision producer, an executive coach at the Happy Cactus. And I have my black sparkles and my snowflake necklace today.

Alisa Manjarrez: (03:33)
Welcome, everyone, to the What Rules podcast. We’re talking today about breaking the rules for your own career, breaking the rules for yourself, breaking the rules of your mind, breaking the rules from your past, breaking the rules from what other people think that you should be doing. We’re against all that because we’re all grown now. Now, that it’s 2022. But you know what? The road to career, success, and happiness starts with having big dreams.

Alisa Manjarrez: (04:06)
And today’s speaker dreamed of scientific discoveries, working on Broadway, and saving the world. And all of those big dreams have actually come true. Madelyn Mackie is a published biochemistry researcher, has worked at four Tony Award winning theaters, and responded to disasters all over the country as an officer with the American Red Cross. We are so excited to have her here today. So, here to help us activate our own career dreams. Please, join me in welcoming Madelyn Mackie.

Madelyn Mackie: (04:46)
Thank you, Alisa. I appreciate you giving me an opportunity to activate career dreams while wearing a tiara. That does not happen.

Alisa Manjarrez: (04:54)
Yes. I was just going to say tell us what you’re wearing today.

Madelyn Mackie: (04:56)
Yes. We’re wearing a burgundy sheer top with a very double tier sparkly tiara.

Alisa Manjarrez: (05:04)
Yes. I love that you call yourself a career activator. I don’t know if you’ve taken the StrengthsFinder or if that’s where that came from, but activator is my number three. I’m pretty sure activator is one of Dr. Merary’s top ones because she actually has a conference called ACTivate. So, we’re all in this realm together. So, where did that come from?

Madelyn Mackie: (05:28)
It took me 48 years to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. So, as you told your audience, I was a published biochemistry researcher. After I wrote my first paper, my mentors and advisors looked at me and said, “Wow. This is great. What are you going to do next?” And I looked at them and said, “Not this. This is not what I’m going to spend the next 40 years of my life doing.” My true love and passion was the stage. And everyone around me kept saying, “You’ll never make a living at theater. You’re going to be waiting tables and sleeping on your parents’ couch for the rest of your life.” And being a stubborn and naive 20-year-old, I went in and did it anyway. Now, one of the things in theater… That’s where I first learned to activate. In theater, you’re laid off every eight weeks. So, every time a show opens, a show closes, and you have to reactivate your career because the rent is activated every single month.

Madelyn Mackie: (06:28)
So, after 15 years in theater, I got a little burnt out, a little jaded, and I wanted to activate a new career. I was a volunteer at the Red Cross, and I just said, “I wonder if they will hire me.” And I went and activated my network and sure enough, they hired me. It took some convincing, but they activated me. They hired me as a program manager. And within 18 months, I was promoted to an officer position in charge of a six county Bay Area region and a $3.5 million budget. And people used to just always ask me, “How did you go from the lab to the stage, to the C-suite?” And I was like, “I have a system. Let me show you my system.” And my system is based on do three things at a time. One, two, three. When you do those three things, let’s do three other things. And so, it just came really natural that we’re going to go and activate other people’s career dreams.

Rosa Santos: (07:18)
I’m just thinking, “Huh? What if I had done that?” You’re making me rethink all the choices that I’ve made.

Madelyn Mackie: (07:28)
You’re right where you’re supposed to be.

Rosa Santos: (07:30)
Yeah, which is a good thing. Hey, it is a good thing just to revisit. Right? Revisit your decision-making patterns, your dreams, and the how you go about actually making those dreams reality. It seems to me, I’m reading between the lines that at those moments, you were really clear as to what you wanted and how to get it. My curiosity is around what happens in between those moments.

Madelyn Mackie: (07:59)
Fear.

Alisa Manjarrez: (08:03)
We can end the podcast.

Madelyn Mackie: (08:04)
I’m sorry, Rosa. I interrupted you. How do you get to those? Go ahead.

Rosa Santos: (08:08)
No, no, no. I think we should leave it now. Leave it. It was great, everybody.

Madelyn Mackie: (08:12)
No, I’d say those. I mean, and that’s the challenge. Right? When you’re lost, and you’re confused, and you’re scared, and you’re worried. And eventually, you get to a point where you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I remember in school, in college, I had just published the paper. I was doing a second internship and fellowship in biochemistry. And I was just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, crying my eyes out, saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I hate this.”

Madelyn Mackie: (08:45)
And I was like, “What if I changed my major right now? What would happen?” And I jumped out of bed, and I’m going to age myself, date myself a little bit here. And I pulled out the course catalog booklet. I did not look it up online and opened up the booklet and looked and saw what would happen if I changed my major and realized I could still graduate in a year and a half. But I would have to activate that day. It would have to change. I could not take one more science course. I would have to flip majors. And that was like, “Well, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it.” So, there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of confusion. But we all reach a point, I think, that you get sick and tired of being sick and tired and say, “What if? What if I do this one thing, what would happen?”

Alisa Manjarrez: (09:32)
A guest that we’ve had on our podcast asked who came on and said, “Why not?” And so, it’s really interesting to think about how these really simple questions can change your life. What if and why not? And then, what happens next?

Madelyn Mackie: (09:50)
Yes. Then we have to activate. One, two, three. And I love it. People say what’s the first step. Right? A lot of people worry about, well, if I’m starting a business, I’m going to have to get a website. I’m going to have to get clients. I’m going to have to pay my bills. Let’s back up. What’s the very first thing you have to do for that business? Is it do you have to build a website, or you have to get a business license? Do you got to get a tax ID number? What is the one thing you have to do right now? Maybe it’s just, I need to go get my application for grad school. It doesn’t mean I’m going to apply, but I’m going to go get the application. That’s the what’s next. And then, breaking it down into those smaller steps, makes it a lot easier to digest the whole elephant. That old joke and saying of, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” How do you activate your careers, your business, your book, your life? One step at a time.

Rosa Santos: (10:47)
And I tell you, I think what I like about the what if versus the why not is because before you get to the why not, you need to ask that what if question. So, you can really think through options. Right? It’s a very simple way of starting a question, but it opens up a whole fan of possibilities that you can think through. Right? To your point, the small bite, the small chunk. Chunk it, and then you can then, “Okay. Why not this one? Why not this one? Why not this one?” So, it’s a very straightforward way to train your mind to think differently. And sometimes, to your point, it’s fear, but also that helps you calm yourself, that anxiety down a little a bit as well, right, and take control of the path that you want to take forward.

Madelyn Mackie: (11:44)
Absolutely. I think it’s a spark, like you’re lighting a match. It’s turning on the light from the darkness saying, “What’s out there?”

Dr. Merary Simeon: (11:52)
In your experience, do you think that would’ve helped you in the past take a step forward sooner instead of waiting to be sick and tired of sick and tired? Because I agree with you, a lot of the times I’m sick and tired, sick and tired, so I’m going to do something different. I think that’s normal for a lot of people. But what are your thoughts on how do we activate sooner, so that we are not at a point where you’re sick and tired and you’ve gone through all that stress and suffering and tears and all those things that we have to go through?

Madelyn Mackie: (12:32)
I think it’s just really important for us to spend time figuring out what we want. To really spend that time in reflection rather than we’re always doing. We always have a to-do list. We’re always moving, moving, moving, but sometimes it’s important to stop and do that reflection.

Madelyn Mackie: (12:50)
I think if in college, if I had stopped a lot sooner to reflect rather than, “Okay. What’s the next class I have to sign up for? What’s the next semester? What’s the next internship?” Instead of just saying, “Let’s stop. Let’s stop.” And that’s literally what happened to me actually is my father passed away in college and that forced everything to stop. And I told my mom, I said, “I can’t go back. I’m not ready to do a chemistry load again.” And she says, “I understand. Let’s take a break. Let’s get some therapy. Let’s breathe. And then, figure out what’s next.” And what’s next, she said, “Why don’t you just take some courses that you would enjoy?” And I took a bunch of theater courses and that opened up the what if, but I don’t think that would’ve happened if I didn’t stop.

Madelyn Mackie: (13:40)
So, I encourage everyone every quarter, the first of the month, sit down and say, “What do I want this month to look like? What do I want this year to look like?” And really keep that in front of your mind. It’s January that the listeners are hearing about this, and people talk about new year’s resolutions, and I know some people are for and against it, or doing a vision board. This is a big time for vision boards. And what happens is we do that. We get so excited, and then we put the vision board up on the wall. And then, by February, the vision board has fallen off the wall, and we don’t see it anymore. But what if every single month we looked at that vision? If we said, “Am I taking the steps I need to get towards that vision?” And we looked at it every single month. I think that would help with waiting until we’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Alisa Manjarrez: (14:33)
And that applies to life too. I mean, it doesn’t have to be this huge vision to change the world. It can literally be the vision that you have for your home, for your family, for your finances, for how you develop personally and professionally. Taking a look at your level of satisfaction in each level. I like to do this thing called a balance wheel with my clients. It’s like a pizza. Right? And you break the pizza up into all these different categories, home, life, career, fun, love, all that kind of stuff. And then, you choose a rating, and then you say, “How satisfied am I in these areas?” And then, that’s where you see if you need to tweak something, or you look to see where you want to make changes, or it’s where you can celebrate. Wow, I love my house. I finally decorated it. It finally feels like home. I’m going to give myself a 10 and celebrate that. And maybe I’ll have a party.

Madelyn Mackie: (15:35)
I love that you build in the celebration. That celebration is so important.

Rosa Santos: (15:40)
Yeah. And I think we forget this is going to be our third year in COVID, I think. Right? And I feel how all that we learned from the first months in lockdown and COVID and what I thought was going to be, “Oh, the world is going to be so different.” I don’t know if you guys feel the same, but I feel that we’ve gone back to some of the prior to COVID kind of ways of being, for lack of a better way of addressing that. And we have forgotten the small things that make you happy or to take those moments that in fact, while we were in COVID, we all seemed to be so grateful for and helped us in many ways connect and relate to others differently. And to your point, Alisa, celebrate things that before you hadn’t even noticed that were part of your realm or worth celebrating.

Rosa Santos: (16:45)
So, as we face the new year, how should we think about not just the fact of dreaming but really showing up maybe differently and not just for others but for yourself? Because what I am thinking is coming out of a major crisis, there’s always innovation and opportunity and creativity because, as to your point, there’s a jolt there that you cannot escape. But when you are in this kind of the sick and tired of sick and tired it’s a bit more challenging. So, as we’re still in this kind of, I don’t know, blur of being in COVID, but it’s a bit of a hybrid mode of prior to COVID but it’s still in COVID, how do you jolt yourself to create that space of that mental bandwidth to then being able to go into the what if?

Dr. Merary Simeon: (17:40)
For me, I go back to the things that I enjoy, but honestly one of the things that I learned a while ago is that energy comes from four main sources in humans. Right? It’s the body, the emotions, the mind, and the spirit. And even when there’s nothing negative going on, I try to do my best to protect that and how my energy comes forward. How am I spending my energy is really you the way that I look at it. A lot of people always talk about, “Hey. Time, time, time.” And I’m like, “Time is there. It’s how I spend my energy during that time.” So, for me, and I know we talk about this all the time, is I exercise. I have to, even my family calls me out like, “Go run. Go do something.” Right?

Alisa Manjarrez: (18:29)
They can tell when you need it.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (18:33)
Yeah. They can tell when I need it. From a mental perspective, I do not speak negative and when I do, my family corrects me, and I try to avoid being around negative people now. Some of them are family members, some of them you can’t escape them because they work with them. But I try to make sure that I do them from an emotional perspective.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (18:51)
Honestly, as tired as I am sometimes on the weekends. Last weekend, I was all weekend in a soccer tournament just to see my daughter and her emotions and how happy she is. I try to go dig into that. And then, spiritually, everybody knows on the program that I have strong faith. But I try to feed those because right now I’m really blessed. Right now, things are going well. But I want to make sure that I keep that energy going, so that I continue to think, “Okay, what’s next? Let me not wait until something bad happens.” That’s not to say nothing won’t, but at the end of the day, that’s how I do it. And that’s how I stay motivated and kind of protect the energy that I have, so that I can carry out positive energy for others.

Alisa Manjarrez: (19:38)
I’ve been feeling kind of not bad but not amazing lately. I’ve been asking myself. One of my good friend ends as a coach. And we always ask, “What do you want?” Like Madelyn’s saying, “Know what you want.” And I’ve been saying I don’t know what I want. I don’t know. And I was like, “Well, what should I do about this?” How do I get out of my… It’s not a funk. It’s just not all of me. I just don’t feel like I’m all there. And I started thinking, “Well, should I get therapy?” And I really thought about it. Am I in a place where I just need therapy? And then, I was asking myself a bunch of questions. And I was like, “I’m not depressed.”

Alisa Manjarrez: (20:23)
I don’t know. I need that jolt. And so, I just hired a high-performance coach and it’s basically life coaching. It’s basic. I’m friends with and I hang out with a lot of these deep coaches. And I’m all about let’s work on your big vision. But I needed someone to help remind me of the things that you’re talking about, Dr. Merary. Like, “Okay. Well, let’s talk about your health. Where are you at with it? And okay, let’s set a really tiny goal like just making sure you move for 30 minutes a day.” And honestly, I’ve been at the place where I need someone to just remind me of the basics, to kind of get back to myself.

Madelyn Mackie: (21:10)
I think you just hit on it, Alisa. Finding someone else to help jolt you, so a therapist, a coach. That’s their job. They’ll keep asking those questions, those tough questions that make you go, “I’ve never thought about out that.” Or another option is take on a crazy BHAG challenge. Right? A big, hair, audacious goal. So, a jolt that totally impacted my whole life that I never thought would ever happen. I decided to be a triathlete. And I made this decision when the furthest I had ever run was to the corner to catch the bus. And I didn’t swim, and I didn’t have a bike, but I said I’m going to go be a triathlete. And not only am I going to be a triathlete, but I’m going to do a half Ironman race.

Alisa Manjarrez: (22:02)
I love hearing you say half Ironman race while you’re wearing a tiara, by the way.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (22:06)
I love it.

Madelyn Mackie: (22:11)
And it started with walking. That was a joke. Making that decision that I’m going to pursue this goal. It’s a two-year goal because of the shape I was in. I wasn’t going to get off the couch and just jump into the Pacific Ocean and swim 1.2 miles. Instead, it started with walking. Walking 10,000 steps, and I set another goal of I’m going to do it for a hundred days. And then, all of a sudden that changed my whole life because when I set that goal, the walking became a priority. Right? It became, “I’ve got to get this done.” Just like Dr. Merary says of doing her workout. She’s going to do her workout and that’s a priority. So, I set up the calendar and I did this the old school, the gold star chart, and gave myself a gold star for every day.

Madelyn Mackie: (22:56)
And you suddenly have a streak, and I didn’t want to break the streak. And the next thing you know, I had 100 days, then 200 days, and I did a 5K and then a 10K and then a half marathon. I learned to swim. I got a bike. I learned to bike. I spent a lot of money on biking and all the equipment that goes with it. And it totally changed my life. Now, with the half Ironman, I ended up doing it as a relay team, which was a lot of fun. And it’s still on the list of, “We have to go and accomplish this goal.” But just setting that goal impacted my discipline, my focus, my health, my business, my relationships, and it impacted everything. So sometimes to jolt ourselves, we have to think about something of what if I do something that I’ve never, ever thought I could ever do. Let’s see what would happen.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (23:51)
It’s so interesting you say that because I volunteer for an organization on their board. It’s called Back on My Feet. And what we do is we fight homelessness, and the way that they do it, it’s through physical exercise. Right? So, it’s actually walking. So, they walk with us. They need to start walking with us for 30 days. Once they do that for 30 days, then the organization… I mean, you can see it. You can see the change in them because they’re winning. They just walk. Like you said, they used to just walk to the corner. And now, they’re actually walking a mile, and we get members that are in no shape at all. And now, they’re finally getting their own apartment. We support them get a job. We train them on interviewing and a whole bunch of things.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (24:42)
I mean, I’m sure there’s many organizations, but what I know from this, the highest, what I call retention rate, as far as success, 90% of them still have jobs. And we stay in contact with them. And it all started for something so basic, walking. That was the only commitment that they had, walking. And we’ve had members graduate. And it’s just amazing. It’s just gets me so excited every time I see one of our members just reach a milestone because it’s sometimes those basic things in life, like our health, that we need to protect so that we can enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Alisa Manjarrez: (25:17)
That’s so cool.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (25:19)
Back on My Feet. It’s national. If you don’t know it, look it up, support it.

Rosa Santos: (25:23)
I love what you guys are saying because it’s how do you get to know yourself and have this self-awareness of where you are at. So, you can make choices to change that course. Right? And if you’re at a point where, as you, Merary, said, “I’m good. Things are good, but I need to make sure that they continue to be good. Right? And sustain what I have because I’ve worked to really hard for that.” And if you get to a point where you don’t feel that way, then you can have that spark in some way because we know there is empirical evidence that doing this kind of thing really changes you, yourself as a human being, but also the impact that you can have on others and how engaged and whatnot. So, that idea, Madelyn of, “Give yourself a goal completely outrageous. Even if you didn’t think that it was possible for yourself,” that is going to do wonders to how your brain develops and what that means in terms of your energy, to your point, Merary. I love that.

Alisa Manjarrez: (26:35)
Well, what you were saying, Rosa, it’s true. We are always training our brains. Right? We have all these neuro pathways that we might feel are set in stone, but they’re actually not. And so, when you can do something like a big, hairy, audacious goal and say, “I’m used to not walking at all to I’m going to be in a triathlon and do Ironman,” that trains your brain to show you that you actually can do big things. You can do hard things. You can do big things. You can do things that seem impossible. And so, all of that comes back to the decisions that you make and the way you think about your career and the possibilities that are there even if you’re just not sure if you can get that. Maybe it’s a really tiny that you’re going after. If you haven’t looked at other areas of your life where you can improve in small increments, it’s going to be really hard to see that you might be able to improve in your career as well.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (27:33)
I love that, Alisa, because sometimes we’re just so focused on our career that we forget that we are more than a title, that we’re more than a career. And, Madelyn, I don’t know how to swim. I’m going to start.

Madelyn Mackie: (27:47)
There you go. She said it here, folks. She’s going to learn how to start. I went to one of those kiddie children’s pool training places and hired. You can get one on one private lessons. And it was a four-foot pool. And I was like, “Let’s do this.” And it was funny because they were like, “Okay, today you’re going to be a tadpole.” It was like okay. But, Alisa, you’re so right that sometimes we think about that promotion in our career, and it’s overwhelming. Right? It’s absolutely overwhelming, but let’s do something a little closer to home. Maybe it’s clean our house. Maybe it’s paint the bedroom. Maybe it’s learn a new skill or a new craft. And that gives us confidence. And that confidence then carries over into the rest of your life. That you think, “Well, you know what? I did renovate my house. And I also learned how to do something I didn’t know how to do. Maybe I can go and get this promotion.”

Madelyn Mackie: (28:49)
So, it’s all interconnected. Everything in your life from your health, your environment, your relationships, your career. If one of those things are off, all of them can go off. And if one of those things you’re excelling at, then it carries over that old saying of, “A rising tide raises all ships.” So, if your career is struggling, it’s okay. Stop. Breathe. Don’t focus on the career. Let’s focus on something we can control. And then, once we get control of something, then that’s going to carry over in the rest of our lives.

Alisa Manjarrez: (29:25)
Want to know how breaking the rules can help you level up your career game? Search What Rules podcast on any social media platform and join our members only group on LinkedIn, where we discuss rule breaking strategies for multicultural women. What Rules is a production of Color Forward. The show is produced by me, Alisa Manjarrez, with editing and fabulous sound design by Mathr de Leon. Visit colorforward.com for more stories, events, and, of course, all the episodes of What Rules.

Alisa Manjarrez: (30:06)
Merary, I thought of you because I was riding my bike. Because now I’m trying to have these 30 minutes of activity. And it was really hard and I was like, “I can do this. I can do this.” And I thought of you.

Dr. Merary Simeon: (30:19)
Listen, all jokes aside, if you need a cheerleader, you could call me. I will cheer you for those 30 minutes.

Rosa Santos: (30:27)
Yeah. Me and my wings will be there too.

Madelyn Mackie: (30:31)
I’ll wear my tiara.