Shobukai Shift

The Great Adaptation: Reimagining Life in a World of Change

• Mary Schaub • Season 1 • Episode 1

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The world is undergoing rapid transformation, affecting all aspects of life.
Shifting attitudes towards work reflect a desire for meaningful engagement.
Ikigai represents the intersection of passion, skills, and societal needs.
Coping with change requires understanding the complexities of human emotions.

Living intentionally means questioning societal norms and expectations.
Personal growth often involves navigating the messy middle of adaptation.
Success is not solely defined by traditional career paths or material wealth.
It's essential to recognize and challenge cultural narratives that dictate our lives. Finding your purpose is a journey that requires self-reflection and courage.

Keywords

✅ Change   ✅ Work    ✅ Purpose   ✅ Ikigai  ✅ Adaptation  ✅ Growth

✅ Living Intentionally  ✅ Societal Transformation  ✅ Personal Development

✅ Change Management

Links

✅Kubler Ross Change Curve

✅Cool classical music clip (André Rieu - O Fortuna; Carmina Burana - Carl Orff)

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub. Mixing Engineer: Dylan Yauch

Contact: Shobukai_Shift@mschaubadvisory.com

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

** Shobukai Shift is a MSA Production **

Mary Schaub (00:10)
So let's start with some brutal honesty. We're all feeling it. Things are changing in a really profound way. The world feels tumultuous.

Things that have felt familiar and consistent are giving away to things we don't entirely understand. Maybe we're even feeling a little scared. I recently read a quote from Klaus Schwab. He's the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. If you're not familiar with the World Economic Forum, it's an international think tank established to improve the state of the world. So nothing too serious going on there. They have the brightest thinkers, academics,

business people, scientists, and they all come together and Davos Switzerland every year to discuss the biggest problems facing our world. So Klaus Schwab comments on the current state of change in the world. And he said, I quote, the fourth industrial revolution is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to each other. It's reshaping government, education, healthcare, and commerce, almost every aspect of life.

This revolution will be more comprehensive and all encompassing than anything we've ever seen." End quote. So wow, right? Very sobering, but also kind of validating to hear because it confirms what we're all feeling right now. It's not in our minds, right? There is wide scale change happening and it's affecting everything we know. And when the world changes, we have to adapt.

But here's the thing, when we change, the world also has to adapt. I think a fascinating example of where this is happening right now is around shifting attitudes about work. It used to be that people hit their 40s and 50s and they had a midlife crisis. They'd leave their career, become a painter or a writer. There's a guy I know who was a doctor, but he hated the stress and long hours, so he quit and opened up a little bike shop.

He loved cycling and decided to make his hobby his job. He also thought helping people fall in love with a healthy hobby like cycling would satisfy his desire to help people improve their health and wellbeing. What's fascinating is that Gen Z is coming right out of the gate deciding they don't want to sign up for a miserable job.

They don't need to hustle.

They don't need 20, 30 years to know that time is precious and fleeting and wasting it is the biggest disservice we can do to ourselves. The doctor turned bike shop owner is a great case study, but not all of us know what we want to do, or maybe we don't know how to make money doing it. I know a lot of people who feel they want to do something that helps others and makes the world a better place. The Japanese have a concept called Ikigai.

Ikigai guy is defined as a motivating force, something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living. The four elements of the icky guy diagram, which is four interconnected circles, is to find the overlap between these four things. Okay, you ready? One, what you love. Two, what you're good at. Three, what the world needs.

and practically for what you can get paid for. Okay, so nice concept. We all wanna do things we like and are good at and get paid for it, but how does this relate to making the world a better place?

Carl Jung created the concept of synchronicity, which suggests that events may seem unrelated, but are meaningfully connected, hinting at an underlying order or a puzzle to life. I like to believe this is true. I think each one of us is on our journey to adapt and grow, but together we form an interconnected mosaic of humanity. But for that big picture to work, for all of us to work,

Each one of us needs to focus on ourselves.

As you can tell, I love talking about this stuff. And this podcast is a bit of me practicing what I preach too. I earned my degree in psychology because I wanted to help people, but student loans loomed. And so I ended up spending 30 years building a very successful career as a management consultant and later as a transformation executive. One of my leaders once commented that I would be great at using these skills to solve societal problems. And I thought about that for a while.

Because I do want to leave the world a better place.

So I started by just setting up my own company and I provide advisory services for both businesses and individuals. And I love the work. And I also love podcasts. And after starting one with a friend called Business Psychos, I decided to start one that is more focused on change itself. So I'm finding my Ikigai Guy too. And what I find very helpful

is talking to other fellow travelers about their journeys, getting inspiration, support, and even practical advice from people who are figuring out their own stuff. People like this are so inspiring to me. And keeping people around you who are committed to personal growth is great for expanding opportunities too. I've had in the last 15 years, a lot of great opportunities come from this network. Shoko by Shift,

is an extension of this. It's creating a network of support for you to be a resource in a community, to support whatever you're doing to live your best and authentic life. This upcoming season, you'll get to meet and hear from people who are change experts and from people who are venturing out of the mainstream to live their lives more intentionally and with more purpose. I think it's courageous as hell to do this.

I want you to feel as inspired as I am by their stories. I want to bring you their life lessons. My hope is that this podcast is a resource to you in all the ways that you need it to be so that you can find yourself in a position to become who you really are. In addition to interviews, the podcast will also cover topics that you care about. For example, how to cope with feeling overwhelmed. there's a lot of people feeling that way right now.

especially those responsible for leading and supporting others. People like parents and people supporting family with health issues and even managers. In all these cases, you're having to be strong for yourself and also others. How do you do that?

People in corporate change management functions talk about the Kubler-Ross change curve when talking about helping employees cope with change.

Are you familiar with this? It's a framework for how to help people deal with change so that they can eventually accept and hopefully embrace it. Kubler-Ross was a psychologist who wrote about the stages of grief in her book, Questions and Answers on Death and Dying. This is back in the 70s. This theory was then adapted in the 80s to address employees' resistance to change in a business setting. From a psychological point of view,

The stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And in the business context, they add in things like experimentation and decision-making. But you get the gist. One thing about this framework and how people in corporate America sometimes get it wrong is that it's not as straightforward as it seems. In my mind, the framework misses two really critical things. Firstly, it doesn't account for the complexity of corporate environments.

Things like cultural norms and structural realities like how people are compensated and how that might motivate or impact behavior. Despite what Citizens United might think, companies aren't human beings. A company looking to get their employees to accept a new return to office policy isn't the same as a widow dealing with the loss of their spouse. Another thing which is often lost in the adaptation from psychological theory to change framework

is that the stages aren't always experienced in sequence or linearly. This is really important. What I'm saying is that you can find lots of fancy change frameworks out there, and lots of people say they do change, but the process never happens as cleanly as it's written on a PowerPoint. And believe me, I sure have tried. I love PowerPoint. But anyway, when we talk about supporting ourselves and others with change,

We need to get into the messy middle. We need to get out of corporate spin, consulting terminologies, and all that guru self-help stuff, and talk about the hard realities of dealing with adaptation and growth.

Have you ever met anyone who's doing exactly what they always dreamed of doing as a kid? They're out there. And these are interesting stories too. I was at Lincoln Center last month for a symphony performance with the New York Philharmonic. Have you ever watched famous classical musicians play? Go check it out. It's much more fascinating than you might imagine. There's a lot of great videos on YouTube, I'm watching their faces and their bodies and there's like all this

art just like pouring out of them and their instrument. Sometimes they're very animated and other times they wear zero expression at all. But all of them are very unique in that they knew what they wanted to do from a very young age. I mean, unless they were imprisoned and forced to learn, which is probably a great story for one of the many True Crime podcasts, but

To work at that level, you've been playing that instrument since you're like five. It blows my mind that there's this guy on stage who at five years old decided to dedicate his life to playing the oboe. You see this in other fields too, sport, sciences. I didn't even know that being a marine biologist was a thing. Like that's something you can do for a living. No one told me that.

I suspect a good number of us have just been surviving or just trying to find some tangible path having a decent life. Maybe unless you're a prodigy, being able to choose and chart out your path as a kid requires a bit of privilege. mean, let's be honest. Someone bought that little boy an oboe and a lot of lessons for a lot of years. For me, I just needed to support myself financially. So going to college was a big enough hurdle for me.

And when I graduated, it was time to start working and paying off the student loans and to stay in school and get a PhD was just not going to happen. And so I chose jobs that I could do well and fast forward 30 years and the career sort of happened on its own. I suspect more people are like me and that they're approaching their lives just following what just seems to be the option or the norm.

particularly in the West, think there's this framework that we're all given on how to exist in the world. I mean, obviously you have to have a job from a practical perspective. We all need to buy food and shelter and clothing. And as social beings, we do need a social support network of some kind. But over the years, this has changed.

Today, many more people are deciding that

Having children just isn't right for them. In 2023, almost half of all adults under 50 had no kids. That's huge. And it's up 10 % from just 2018. Go back 50 years and it was closer to 25%. The point is you are in control of how you want to live your life. you need to cover the cost of living, but

You don't need a big fancy career to make tons of money. You don't need to buy a big home. If you're in a city, you probably don't need a car. But and I think this is really important. You do need to figure out what kind of life you want to live. The shift is to approach your life more intentionally. Don't just go through the motions. Don't buy into what others tell you your life should be.

Be mindful of cultural elements that might suggest you live your life a certain way because it benefits a group economically. So back in the day, the De Beers company, do you know who this is? De Beers is a diamond company. They used to run commercials, very emotional, know, marriage proposals, of course, and it had the slogan, diamond is forever. It's pretty smart marketing.

We all want to believe that our relationships are forever. But they wanted to increase their sales. So they changed it to a marketing campaign that suggested men spend one month's salary on a ring. And that wasn't enough either. So then they changed it again. And the guidance was spending two months' salary on an engagement ring. And this just became culturally accepted.

Many Americans don't even have two months salary in savings in case of an emergency, in case there's like a health issue or they're laid off. So can you imagine just putting two months salary away for a ring?

The takeaway for this first episode is that the world is going through rapid transformation and that this is precisely the right time for you to focus on yours. To start, just begin getting comfortable with the idea that you're the author of your story. Very simply, your life's purpose is to figure out your life's purpose.

recognize that this is scary process and that there are lots of systemic influences in our society to keep you asleep, going through the motions and abiding by a cultural narrative based on conformity and consumption.

I'm going to end today with some questions for you to take away and ponder. If I had a magic wand and you could be put into the life of your dreams,

What would it look like? Would you have a career or a job? If you didn't have to work, would you still want to contribute in some way? What would it be? Okay, what if the only thing you had to worry about is learning as much as you could about yourself and the world? Would that mission be enough for you? If not, is it because it seems too easy or too

your answers in the comments and I'll read some of them on our next show along with my answers. Until next time, remember you are the change you've been waiting for.