Transcript of The Universe Is Hiring: Finding Purpose and Taking Action with Anniston Riekstins

I started asking questions, what do I really want to do and what am I good at? I started unraveling a lot of things. I know a lot of people in their mid-30s, that's where those questions really start coming. But for me, it hit me early. It started me on this journey of self-discovery. My path was being created out of necessity for myself, and I became the student. I was a student of myself, and it was through this process that led me to understanding a desire to coach and to give back, because I think that's the natural path. You learn and you apply, and then you want to turn around and you want to teach it. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next in Cash & Checks? Well, it starts right about now.

Hey, guys. What's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what gets you right and what makes it today actionable. That's what we're about. Today is about action. It's about purpose. It's about goals. But goals don't matter unless you're making them happen. We all get in our head a little too much, myself included. That's why I'm excited for today's guest, who's actually one of the stars on our podcast network. She is Anderson Rick Steen. Anderson, what's up?

I am so happy to be here. I've been really excited about this conversation.

We all want to get hired at certain points. If the universe is hiring, I want to get hired. You got a book, The Universe is Hiring. We'll talk about that. I did love title. I had to get that out. I was like, yes, because I hear a lot of titles of books where I go, I've heard it a thousand times. I have not heard that one, and it really sunk with me. Bravo. Well, thank you.

I honestly cannot take credit for it at all. It was one of those moments where I was in a meditation and it just landed. I saw the book cover, I saw the title, I had the outline. It was like a present that landed in my brain. I can't take credit. I don't know where it came from, but thank you.

Bravo. Anaston is one of the co-host of the In Powered Life podcast on the Radcast Network, and also an SVP at a large company. She's a leadership coach. She's a do it all. How do you keep it all together, Anderson?

I think I've had to get really discerning, and I'm sure you can relate to this, Ryan, because you've got a lot going on, too. But we all have a plate. And when you actually take the time to get really clear about what's on your plate and what do you actually want to be there and what is necessary, that you realize that a lot of the things that you're saying you don't have time for or that you're saying isn't possible is just a story and that you can reallocate the space around. And that's what I feel like I've gone through this process over the last 15 years of really arranging my plate with just the things that really light me up, like spending time with my kids and Rudy and my job, but also the things that really fulfill me, like writing and podcasting and coaching. And you create the time. It's amazing what you can do with time when you start to get really discerning and say no to things that you know are not for you or that are not really necessary.

I have this firm belief that we make the time for what we want to make it for. I'm not belittling anyone or judging anyone when I say this because I do think you nailed it with the story thing. We create these narratives and we convince ourselves. We're like, Oh, I just don't have time for that. I can't get to that. But we make time for what we want to make time for. Everything else gets bucketed over here. You subconsciously start to make that a valid reason why you don't do it, but it doesn't necessarily make it Questioning your relationship with time is an important exercise that every single person should do because it becomes a scapegoat.

For instance, if there's something that was really, really important to you, you would carve out the time. It might come as a cost of something else. When I was writing this book, I wrote it between the hours of 4: 00 AM and 6: 00 AM in the morning because that was the only time I knew I was going to have a quiet house. That's when I'm in my most creative in that flow. The cost was, I was in bed every night at 8: 30. The cost was late night Netflix. It was going out for late nights and late dinners. I just couldn't have both. But this was more important to me, so it was a choice.

You have to compartmentalize these things and compartmentalize the steps that it takes to get it done. This is what I love about the book and about what I'm sensing from you. I'm an action guy. We could talk about shit all you want, but let's start doing things. I love personal development and coaching. I do. I believe in it, especially high-level ones like yourself and Rudy that are just high quality. You can get so much out of it and you don't know what you don't know. My only trepidation with the industry is just learn, learn, learn, learn, learn I've got all this stuff. Okay, when are you going to do it? When are you going to put it to play? That's a lot of your mantra here, isn't it?

A hundred %. And I was one of those people for a really long time, to be frank. I'm a natural born seeker. I love to learn. I love to read. I've read thousands of books. I took a speed reading course just so I could read more. I'm that kid. I was the nerd who loves school. But a point came where I was learning so much. I was consuming so much information, but nothing was really changing in my life. I would read a really great personal development book, and then I'd be like, Oh, my God, I feel so great. And then ask me two weeks later, and I wouldn't be able to tell you anything about that book. And it's because I was missing a really important element, which is actually taking something from the book, applying it, experiencing it, and not just once, but repetitive, and then being able to create a change and a shift in my way of being and showing up and how I think. But I think what happens is just that a lot of people will consume because that's comfortable. It doesn't require you to really do anything outside of your comfort zone or anything different than what you normally do, and then they miss out on the gold.

You could take a book, one singular book, and you could apply one singular idea from a book, and it will change your life forever. But if you don't apply anything, it's wasted space. It's just an idea. But ideas don't create change.

Ideas don't create change, and hope is not a strategy. That's right. Two of my favorite sayings. When you write a book, you get these impressions over time. You're pulling from themes and things that have helped you that ultimately did it. What career, journeys, some of those things that maybe built that path or that mind map for you?

I started asking questions, I would say in my early 20s. Big questions because I felt really lost. And I was looking around. I'd found myself working at this amazing advertising agency right out of college. It was the dream job. It was what I had worked so long for. I remember one day I was sitting there and I was looking around. I saw this guy sitting across from me who had been with the agency for 20 years, sitting in the same cubicle he'd been in for 20 years. I just had this sinking feeling of like, so this is it. This is what I work so hard for, and now this is it. It's going to be like every day is the same. I started asking questions, what do I really want to do and what am I good at? I started unraveling a lot of things. I know a lot of people in their mid-30s, that's where those questions really start coming. But for me, it hit me early. It started me on this journey of self-discovery. My path was being created out of necessity for myself, and I became the student. I was a student of myself, and it was through this process that led me to understanding a desire to coach and to give back, because I think that's the natural path.

You learn and you apply, and then you want to turn around and you want to teach it, because I think it's just ingrained in all of us, which is why so many people want to be coaches, because it's just that natural thing within But what I couldn't grapple with is I've always been very career-minded, and I've been successful in business. And yet on the flip side, at home, behind closed doors, I was miss spirituality, married to a coach. We were hosting coaching sessions in our home for years, having strangers come in. Nobody at my work knew about this. It was like I was living a double life is what I felt like. I had all the things that really filled me up. I was writing in the mornings, and I was meditating, and I I was having this whole experience, and then I would button it up and go into the office and sit in the boardroom and be a badass executive. And that was my life. And that worked until such a time as the desire to grow that real, authentic part of me started really kicking in. And I wanted to launch into coaching, and I wanted to be a speaker, and I wanted to share all of these things I was learning.

But that fear of what will they say? Oh, my God, they're going to fire me. They're going to think I'm a crack. They're going to think I've gone off the deep end. And all of those fears kept me very, very small. And so you hit that point where you're like, what am I going to do? And I finally had to make the decision in the leap that I was going to have to start showing up and to face that fear.

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Thankfully, someone came in, well, someone, that person being my husband, showed me how to do this because at the time I was working as a director at a very large company, and they headhunted Rudy because they someone to come in and lead their sales teams. He was taking a break from his companies, and he was like, Fine, okay, I'll go do it. I sat him down and I said, Rudy, this is not one of those companies that you can just come in and just say everything that you're thinking and bring all of these spiritual ideas into. I mean, it's very corporate. I was like, so you might have to just be thoughtful of what you're saying. And he was like, I have no intention of doing that. He's like, I'm going to show up and be me. And if they don't like it, okay, fine. What do I have to lose? Then I'll go somewhere else or I'll do something different. I was petrified for him and for me because what would that look like for me? I was his wife. To my surprise, when he came in in all of his glory and all of his rudiness, he approached these sales teams as he would as a high performance coach and as a spiritual teacher.

It worked. People loved him. The revenue went through the roof. The company was having gains like it had never seen. I just sat there with a mouthful of teeth. All these years I've been here, I could have been doing all of this. And instead, I've been allowing that fear to me. I know I'll never get where I want to go unless I can start being who I want to be. And that means everywhere, not just at home. It means at the office, at the grocery store, as a mom. And that was the big turning point for me. When I received the idea for this book, to your point, I received it. I was like, one of those things. I was like, huh? I wrote it all down. I was like, that's such an interesting concept. I'll think about that later. I don't think I have the time to write a book at this point. But it wasn't until I started training on these topics a lot and I would get people come up to me and they would say, Is there something else? You've really tweaked something within me. I'm thinking about a lot of what you're saying, and I want to continue with this work.

Do you have a book? Do you have something I can take and work with? And I was like, No, but I could write a book and I already have the whole outline because I got it in a download one day. Long story short, yes, this was the path, and it was certainly a path. And I was a student of the path, and I still am a student of this path.

The empowered life is on our network. Rudy and Anaston show was amazing. The moment we got on today, and Rudy and I have a lot more contact than you and I, and we started talking, I came up in the agency business. There's a familiarity with Anaston that's this badass advertising person that I would go to another agency and be like, God, she's a badass. I respect the hell out of her. And it was like that mutual respect thing because you know how it is agencies to agencies when you're an agency agency meetings. I was like, that was totally the vibe I got when you got on. You reminded me of New York Ad agency, badass. That's the highest compliment I can give you. I didn't know you were on the marketing and ad side. That was fascinating. There's a lot of books that get rid and a lot of stuff, and it's certainly typically by subject matter experts. There's something super credible and interesting when someone has lived and breathed and developed these concepts through their own personal development. I think that makes this highly credible because you're almost your biggest case study, perhaps, overcoming some of these things and then putting them into practice.

I love that. I want to talk about what it is that people can expect from the book.

What people can expect from the universe is hiring is an opportunity to get really clear, number one. I say that because I think that a lot of times we don't really create the space or people won't create the time and the space to take a beat and to assess who am I and what are my passions and what really actually lights me up and what were those dreams that I've just been sitting on because I believe they're a figment of my imagination at this point. It's never going to happen, but for some reason, they won't leave you alone. I actually have an exercise in... I have an exercise in every single one of the chapters because back to what we were talking about earlier, Ryan, in terms of experience, every chapter, there's something for you to anchor this information and for you to do. Because my goal is that you could literally read one chapter and it could be life-changing for you if you just do the exercise and actually go through the process of that experience. One of the exercises is, it's called an authentic self-resume because I've seen thousands of resumes in my time.

We will pour over our resume and write all the things that we've done in our career. But if you ask someone to sit down and now I want you to write a resume about you, about who you are authentically and what your passions are, what your unique strengths are, what is your unique selling proposition. You bring to the table a gift that you have that maybe nobody else does. People have a hard time with this. They have a really hard time with it because they don't know. They've been so busy being somebody else that they're not even aware they're being somebody else anymore. And so they're so disconnected from who they really are that, of course, they're going to feel unfulfilled and unhappy and lost. My goal in the beginning of the book is really to help bring people back into who they are at their core. And then from there, give them a roadmap and a step of how can you start today being who you came here to be and fulfilling the role that I believe that we all have uniquely one that's been created for us, that we are meant to fulfill, and that we're uniquely being qualified for every single day through our experiences.

When I hear you say people finding their purpose, some people are confident, so maybe it's not self-doubt always, but is that what it is 9 out of 10 times? Is it just self-doubt, or is it an inability to take action that isn't guaranteed to succeed? Those are two very different things. They sound similar, but they're different. Some people, they're just naturally unsure of themselves, and then some people just don't like the unknown.

It's a different fear. To answer your question, it's definitely both. You hit two of the core obstacles that people have. One of the things in terms of self-doubt, if you knew for a fact, if someone said to you, You have a gift that nobody else has, nobody else will ever have for the rest of eternity. You have this gift, and it's a superpower. When you start to utilize it and you start to work on it and perfect it and become a master of it, when you share this gift, it is going to light you up in a way that nothing outside of you can. No amount of money, no amount of things, no amount of relationships, but this. Number one, would you not walk a little straighter? Like, I got this gift. If you believed that, how would you show up to your life? Would you show up being all meek and mild, or would you show up and be like, Hey, I got something?

What the podcast, everything else you guys are doing with the Empower University. Where's all that? Where can we find it?

First of all, I just want to thank you, Ryan, and your amazing company. We had been at our podcast a couple of years before we met you and the team, and you guys have assisted us in terms of supporting our growth with this podcast has been extraordinary. And what you do is really such a gift to the world. And so anyone who's listening to this who wants to launch a podcast or has a podcast, I really hope that you guys reach out because it's incredible, your So thank you for that. Thank you. I would say you can find me on Instagram, Anaston Blair, Rick Steen. You can find us an Empowered Life podcast, and we'll be keeping everyone updated with all the great announcements. The book is available on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, pretty much anywhere. You can find your books online, and then it will be anywhere that books are sold.

The Universe is Hiring, Discover the Role You Were Born to Fill, Anaston Ricksteins. Anaston, it's been a pleasure. Loved having you on.

Thank you so much, Ryan. This has been awesome, and I'm just so honored to be here, so thank you. Thank you.

Rianisright. Com. That's where you'll find all the highlight clips, the links to all of Anaston's stuff. Look, go get the book. You know you want it. You need it. You got to take it. No hammer. You got all the softness, but it's the truth. She's bringing it to you. We love it. We love having them on the network, and we're number one for a reason. We got guests like Anaston. Thank you so much for making us number one. We'll see you next time on Right About Now.

This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a RADCAST Network production. Visit rianisright. Com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.