Worklife with Molly Graham - How to find your way when you feel lost with Ify Walker

0:02I've made a lot of, let's call them, unconventional career decisions in my life. Decisions that people, smart people, told me not to make. But my gut told me to do it. And every time those decisions ended up being right. But about 10 years ago, I made a job decision that ended up being a mistake. It was a big career leap, bigger scope, bigger title, all that stuff that feels like winning on paper.

0:32But pretty quickly, something felt off. I felt exhausted instead of energized. I was showing up, doing the job. I'd sit in meetings nodding along, but inside I felt this tightening. Like I was holding my breath all day. At first I tried to muscle through it. I kept thinking, it'll get better. But the longer I stayed, the worse it got. Every decision felt heavier. Every conversation left me more confused.

1:01And because this was the type of job I'd always thought I wanted. The mismatch wasn't just disappointing. It was disorienting. I got lost. Not burnt out, not overwhelmed. Lost. For me, being lost at work felt like waking up every day inside the wrong story. Like I had stepped into a version of my career that didn't fit. But I didn't know how to step back out. And I stopped trusting myself.

1:33That's the part I hadn't experienced before, the part that really shook me. I wasn't just unsure what to do, I was unsure of who I was. And that is a very particular kind of lost. The thing about getting lost at work is that it feels like you're the only person in the world that this has ever happened to. Like everyone else is confidently striding down a clear path and you're just not. You're wandering in circles.

2:01And of course, the reality is that getting lost is incredibly common, but we don't have language for it, which makes it really hard to talk about. I didn't have a name for what I was feeling. That is until I met Ify Walker. Ify is the founder and CEO of O4, a talent agency and recruiting firm that places executives at mission-driven businesses. She is also a brilliant writer and thinker. She talks openly about her version of being lost at work, what she calls The work twisties. The twisties are this very disorienting sense of losing position. Like, where do I fit? Losing your sense of purpose? What am I supposed to be doing? Where am I headed? She compares it to what a gymnast feels when they lose their sense of place in the air. It's unsettling and destabilizing. And when Ife explained the work twisties to me, something clicked.

3:01It helped me understand my own experience better. I'm Molly Graham, and this is WorkLife, a show where we untangle the messy human side of work. The work twisties can show up in so many different situations. Maybe you're in your own version right now. Maybe your entire industry feels like it's shifting under your feet. Maybe the thing you've been good at for years doesn't feel fun or stable or right anymore. And you're not sure what you should do next because you've stopped trusting yourself.

3:37And that is why I wanted to have Ify on the show, to share her story and to understand what she did to overcome the work twisties. This was actually the very first conversation I recorded for this podcast. And honestly, I learned a lot making this episode. I was nervous, but I knew Ify's story would help people because it helped me. So I wanted to make sure you heard it. To understand the type of person Ify is, you first have to hear the story of how she founded her company, 04.

4:09I stepped away from a job, a big job, and I was just about to get married, and I said, look, I'm looking around at everybody. And I don't think anyone's happy. There's a whole set of things that I don't think actually align with the life that I'm trying to live. And so I just quit. And my parents were like, what are you doing? We don't understand how you just quit and don't have a plan. And so I was just thinking through what I was going to do next.

4:38I got a call from a former colleague and he said, hey, I'm about to step down as CEO of this large nonprofit. I think my board would love you. Are you available to flying in an interview with them? And if they think you're great, the job is yours. And I remember sort of thinking like, no, I don't want this job. And that's not for me.

5:04give me a couple days and I'll think of some people for you." And he said, how much do you charge for that? I didn't know that was a job. And I said, give me 24 hours. And I came back with a contract, signed it, and I was off to the races. And that was 15 years ago. You sound like someone that's really unafraid of the unknown. Like you say, I quit and I didn't know what I was going to do next. And my parents thought I was...

5:32crazy, you say give me 24 hours when someone sort of challenges you to do something that you didn't even know was a job. Is that scary for you or are you just like, I can figure it out? That's an interesting question. I've never, I hadn't really thought about it in that way. I will say that I think for most of my career, there's sort of been like a deep kind of knowing.

6:02Like, that's not for me. I'm not supposed to do that. And also, I think because of how I grew up in an environment where I had to figure out what were the rules of rural America, what were the rules of being Nigerian, what were the rules of being a kid, what were the rules of navigating different spaces that were very, that were just unfamiliar to me. What were the rules of asking?

6:31billionaires for money. I didn't know prior to that the only thing I sold were like Girl Scout cookies and those practically sell themselves. And so I was just sort of in these situations where I had to observe and sort of make meaning of, okay, these are the terms of engagement. These are the real rules. That understanding of how to navigate new, unfamiliar spaces is what makes Ify so successful. Ify's company, 04, took off like a rocket.

7:01She brought on new clients and was expanding her team. And then something happened that shook her sense of self. The triggering event for you going into the work twisties was losing your dad. It sounds like he was a grounding force. Will you talk about what that meant for you both in losing him and why you think that triggered it and then also in finding yourself when he wasn't physically around anymore?

7:31I still remember, like I wanted to play football. My mom was like, absolutely not. You girls don't play football. And my dad was like, let her play. She wants to go around with the boys, let her play. And he went to the school and I was the first girl to ever play football. And he made sure it happened on my behalf. There was never sort of the pressure actually from him to be anything other than what I was. And so I think to not have that...

8:02just called a lot of things into question. And then, and because I saw him as sort of the one who had created the space, the foundation in other moments in my life, if I'd felt confused or I didn't know what to do, that was always a compass. And it seemed like when he was gone, I was like, so what's the direction then? Your work twisties were triggered by grief.

8:34But I think you think of the work twisties as different than just grief specifically. Can you explain how they're different? Well, first, I think grief is not a moment in time. Grief is there. I think grief has a chair in my life. It will always have a seat. But I don't have the twisties anymore. And I think that the distinction is, I don't know how the people process grief, but I know that for myself, I couldn't do fundamental things. I can't run a meeting even though I'm a CEO. I can't pitch investors. I can't run a sales meeting. I've raised $40 million. I can't run a sales meeting. I can't have a conversation with someone on the plane who's just asking me, what do you do? Blank. These things that I have been trained to do

9:35For most of my life, I couldn't do anymore. Let's back up and just actually define the work twisties. This is something you've written online about. And it's a metaphor that has helped me make a lot of sense of my own experiences. So I know it will help some people who might feel lost in their career or at work. So set the stage for me. Tell me where the concept of the work twisties started for you.

10:05I remember Simone Biles saying to the world that she was done, that she was no longer going to participate in the Tokyo Olympics because she had the twisties. And I remember the onslaught of naysayers, people calling her weak, that she was unpatriotic. And I also remember her...

10:31publicly just seeming not to care. She said, this is dangerous. I'm gonna support my team, but I'm done. And I remember thinking about the courage that she took in that moment and how she didn't ask anyone for permission to essentially save herself. And I was really just taken by that idea that in that moment where she had lost sense of place and position, in the air, she had lost the connection between her mind and her body, recognizing the danger that she was putting herself in by continuing, that she essentially got off the escalator, right? She's like, I'm not, I'm not riding up anymore. I don't know how I'm going to, or if I'm even going to come back. She didn't make us any promises, but she had a knowing and she, she actually took action with it. So that's sort of the moment where I thought,

11:27This is really interesting. This is really powerful. So then that led you to realize at some point that you had the work twisties yourself. So talk about what the twisties now mean to you and when you realized you had the work twisties. For me, that coincided with the loss of my dad and recognizing that a baton had been passed, that I wasn't equipped for, I wasn't ready for.

11:54But it also cycled a long time my company was growing and different things were required of me. And I found myself in a place where I couldn't do basic things. So similar to a gymnast that, you know, Simone, she could do a cartwheel with her eyes closed on a four-inch beam, but she couldn't do it because that connection was broken. I couldn't do sales meetings. I would go into meetings and just sort of mid...

12:24Conversation just completely be like what I don't I don't know what happens next I would be trying to give feedback to a colleague and could find myself Like I don't do I know how to give it? I don't what is this supposed to be? I couldn't respond to basic emails from clients from Vendors I had to forward those to someone else because I didn't know how to respond and these are basic fundamental things that I'd been training for for a very long time and there was some kind of disconnect between what my mind sort of knew to be true and sort of how I was actually behaving and showing up and I remember how disorienting that was and also how much shame I had because I didn't know what was happening and didn't think anyone else had experienced this and so

13:21I didn't know how to even ask for help. I just sort of tried to muscle my way through it. I don't think we have language for it. That's why I was so taken by it. I wanted to give executives, leaders, and organizations language for periods of our careers where we may feel like we have lost sense of place, position, purpose, and for me, protection. It sounds like...

13:51almost losing trust in yourself. And you've talked about sort of having this strong sense of inner knowing. So for you, was it partially about losing that inner knowing? It was 100% about that because these are things I'm supposed to be able to do. I still remember a meeting where someone asked me what the vision was for the company. And I think I just looked at it. I was like, I don't know. What do you think? It's my company.

14:22I started it. I began to sort of outsource this knowing, well, I don't know. And maybe you know, Molly, you know, maybe, maybe, does anyone, you know, let's just survey the crowd and let's see what people have to say because I didn't, I didn't know. And that used to be my calling card. I'm the oldest of six. In our culture, we have a title for the oldest daughter. You know, she's the Ada and everybody sort of defers to that I am used to.

14:52understanding, knowing what to do. In an emergency, I am the person you follow without a doubt, right? I will own that. But to be someone who suddenly doesn't know what to do next, who can't tell you whether you should go left or you should go right, was deeply crushing, right? That's actually my identity.

15:13and I didn't trust myself to make decisions anymore, didn't trust myself to respond to emails, didn't trust myself to talk about the vision, didn't trust myself to manage a team. And that's a really dangerous place to be in because I also started taking in and internalizing a lot of stories about myself and also asking for and taking in a lot of advice, which I think even further muddled my own ability to Find my voice and figure out what I actually knew to be true. Yeah, so in that Moment which sounds a little bit like a dark hole. That's exactly what it was Molly. Yeah, literally dark hole. Literally. That's what it felt like. Yeah, I'm familiar with that feeling Did you let yourself?

16:05Take a step. I mean, you were navigating the grief of losing your father while trying to run a company that you founded. Did you let yourself step back or did you just try to power through it? I tried to power through it, but that's my biggest regret is if I were to go back and talk to myself, I would have said to myself, it's okay to go away. It's okay to like go away and see what happens in moments of quiet and silence, it's okay to get off the escalator just because it's going up, does not mean you have to continue to ride. That moment when you don't know who you are anymore, when it's hard to do things that used to be easy, when you don't trust yourself to decide things or answer things or just take the next step, the triggers can look different for each person, but I'd argue the feelings once you're lost are universal.

16:59And that's why I'm so taken with this concept that Evie has developed. Because by naming it and understanding it, you can begin to find your way back to yourself. We'll get to how Evie worked through her twisties in just a minute. Okay, Evie, so you're running 04. You're growing this company, but you completely lose your footing. You realize you need to reset. Can you talk a little bit about what your mindset was?

17:35How did you approach that challenge of resetting it literally required? reteaching myself fundamental things and so what I mean by that is You know if I think about Simone one of the things that she did was she had to go back to The the last thing that she knew like beyond like a shadow of a doubt that she could do She started doing cartwheels, right? She's been doing cartwheels since she's been to to prove to herself that she could do a cartwheel and it's improving with these really basic fundamental skills and then beginning to practice things with greater complexity and accepting that the time that it would take would be the time that it would take, right? And so similarly, that's what I had to do. Yeah. So you said she found her place by jumping into big...

18:32pizza balls and doing cartwheels. And that was safety and reorientation. What was your version of doing cartwheels? How did you start to learn your position and place and time again? Well, one, I stopped asking for advice. So I fired metaphorically other voices. And it's like, I'm not listening to you. You're fired. I'm not looking for your advice. That was number one.

19:01The second thing I would literally have to do was sometimes making a list of fact versus story. So if I was telling myself I can't do this meeting, I don't know what happens next. Okay, what are the facts? Okay, the facts are that you have this meeting with Molly Graham. The facts are that, this meeting is at 10 a.m. Central. The facts are that all the questions are about things that you know.

19:29Story is that it's going to be terrible. It's going to be a bomb. You're not going to be able to speak. The words are going to come out. Those are all stories. And being able to separate those two things was like a practice for me. And that at a very tactical level, I would just start with the smallest thing. I can send an email to my team that says, here are the three things that we're focusing on. That's it. That's it. Three bullet points. It doesn't have to be anything else.

19:57And I started to find things that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could do. You talked about advice being disorienting for you and adding, I think, to the pit of despair at the bottom. Tell me why advice was so disorienting for you. Because it was so easy to just take it, right? It was like a magic pill.

20:26It's like, that sounds good. You should do that. You don't get any closer to knowing because you've taken somebody else's advice. And in a lot of ways, I was sort of abdicating responsibility. I was passing that on to somebody else, and it also made it easier to blame them if something didn't go well. Because at least I didn't have to choose. I don't have to be wrong. And that constant sense of somebody else's in control.

20:56I think that's what was so disorienting. I had lost my ability to dictate and determine my life. And that was just confusing to me. If you met someone that was going through the work twisties right now that was listening, thinking, oh, that's me, what would you tell them? I mean, I'd tell them when I wish someone had told me, which is you won't be here forever.

21:27And this is normal, like life and work is not this hockey stick. It's not just up and over to the right, even though that's what we've been sold. So I would say, yeah, you're suffering. Like I'd want someone to acknowledge you are suffering. There is a cure. Everything is unfolding as it should be, and you will find your way back to yourself again. You also said to me that one thing that helped you was...

21:59sort of this idea of being 10% braver every day. Will you just talk a little bit about the idea of bravery and how that helped you? If you are in a place where you don't trust yourself, everything feels scary. Everything feels like a possible big catastrophic mistake is waiting on the other side. You don't trust yourself. So every sort of act where you are taking the chance to prove to yourself that you can do something is an act of bravery. So for some people maybe that is I'm going to walk into this meeting or some people's like I am going to go to a conference for the first time in two years because I've thought I don't know how to talk to these people so I can't do it but asking myself how I could be 10% braver.

22:54has been really powerful and for me part of the process you know that I haven't talked as much about is understanding that up until that point purpose, place, position, protection were all things that had not that I didn't have to work for them but they had to sort of come to me. They just were. But at this stage in my career I might have to go chase those things. I might have to go create those things. I might have to go find my people. I might have to go create my safety. I might have to go chase my purpose and recreate it and redefine it and define it for myself. And to get there for me has required that I ask myself again and again, what would it look like if I was 10% more brave? I don't have many work regrets.

23:49But the ones I do have come from moments when I listen to the wrong part of myself. It's so interesting listening to Evie's version of Getting Lost because it sounds like her self-confidence was grounded in her father's complete belief in and support of her. And when he died, she didn't know who to listen to. For me, making the wrong decision made me realize that there are parts of myself that could guide me in the wrong direction. Parts of myself that were grounded in what other people thought of me or externalities like that.

24:19While I was working through my work twisties, I learned a helpful metaphor from a career coach. She told me to picture my inner voices like people in a car. Some are in the front seat, driving or navigating. Some are in the back seat, along for the ride. And some are shoved in the trunk, muffled and forgotten. She had me take people out of the trunk and ask them how they got there. And she had me talk to the people in the front seat and ask them what it would take for them to let someone else drive.

24:51Like Ify, I had to fire certain people and not listen to them anymore. And then I had to learn who in my car I should trust, how to make decisions by listening to a new set of voices. A few years later, I actually turned down a fancy cool job offer that certain voices were screaming at me to take. That time around, I really forced myself to grapple with the hard questions. What does this job actually get you?

25:21Is this the right decision? Or is this just something you're excited to post about on LinkedIn? Every decision I made after getting the work twisties felt like an act of bravery and like I was relearning to walk or to car wheel to use the gymnast metaphor. But ultimately, it led me to a much stronger grounding in who I am, what I care about, and what work I should be doing in the world, not what someone else thought I should do.

25:51And that's what I wanted to talk to Ify about next. More in just a minute. When I sat down with Ify Walker to talk about the work twisties and how to regain your inner knowing when you've lost it, I also wanted to talk about her executive search firm, 04. I wanted to know what she'd say to people who are looking right now in this incredibly challenging job landscape, because it's easy to lose yourself in the hiring process, trying to sound impressive, trying to be what you think people want. And I think her approach asks you to flip that. It rewards clarity about who you are, both for companies and for candidates. Listening to you talk about the work twisties, it's all about finding your footing again. And for you, and I think in general, that was about choosing courage over fear. And that's a thread that runs through your work.

27:07at 04 or 2. You've, in my opinion, built a company that asks leaders to be brave, to look honestly at themselves and at their culture. So I'm curious what bravery looks like to you and your work and how it sort of creates your approach to working with companies. For us, it's shown up in a couple of ways, but I think the biggest is or has been the decision to say we are not going to play a game of pretend. We are not going to pretend that executive search or hiring is a meritocracy, which would mean that we look at the entire scan of the world for any any role and that only the best people will roll rise to the top. But it's just not how it actually plays out. And that we're not going to pretend that these things that are invisible just because they're invisible don't

28:09exist. And so what I mean by that is early on when we started 04, you know, we'd have a lot of conversations with boards and they would say things like, look, we just want to hire the best person. But when I actually would give them the statistics, I would say, I just want you to know that over the last several years, I can count on one hand, the number of people that have been hired that were not already known to my client, known to their network, or known to us.

28:37That would suggest that we have a monopoly on the best people, which we know that's not true. So what it does mean is that we hire the best of who we know. So knowing that, how do we want to design, right? And so it's sort of like calling certain things into question. And another key example would just be this idea that if I just tell you I need a CFO who's run a company of excise and you know an assas company that looks like this That's all there is to it when we would say well no I mean there's this piece called culture and It's an almost invisible in some places and there are unspoken rules of success and We actually are not going to be able and you are not going to be able to find the right person if you don't understand what's in your cultural waters if you don't understand what allergens or contaminants

29:34you might have, and you don't have to be ashamed of those things, but you need to know that they're there so that the people who are, who can thrive in those waters, are sort of joining your team and your organization, but also the people who might not can also opt out and save both sides, you know, heartache. Is there a moment or a search that really captures what this looks like in practice, the kind of honesty and bravery that you're talking about?

30:02Yeah, I'm thinking about a CEO search many many moons ago where Yeah, I had the opportunity I'm in the boardroom and board members were discussing two finalists and One of the board members said I'll never forget busy said about this African-American candidate He said I know that he looks good on paper and that he has all the experience That we've said that we wanted but I can't help but thinking it's all bullshit. Those were exact words. And I remember this sort of very sort of stateswoman like board member who just said, hey guys, I mean she was maybe one of two women on the board. And she says, let's just call it what it is. He doesn't remind you of your sons or your nephews.

31:01the analysts that you probably have helped groom at your financial organizations. And he makes you uncomfortable. And they all laughed. They all laughed like they were all in on the joke. And she said, you shouldn't hire him because you'll set him up for failure. And I supported that. They absolutely should not have hired him because they didn't believe in him. And so that's sort of the example that stands out for me. That example is crazy. But also not as Crazy as you might think sadly sadly and there's so there's so many examples Molly and I use that one because it's like You could sort of see it but it's there are examples of people doing it because someone's pregnant or Somebody you know things that are clearly illegal But but the thing is that's actually why I'm so fascinated by this and fascinating about how we hire and the decisions that we make because I think we do ourselves a disservice

32:00to pretend that certain things are not there, right? To pretend that we don't have an orientation. To pretend that we don't have an affinity for people who make us comfortable, right? Who we've seen before. We've seen an archetype of that individual before. And I think our charge as a firm has always been to like say, let's just put the challenging things on the table. Let's talk about who makes it here. Why don't we just talk about that up front?

32:28so that everybody understands what the rules of engagement are. It sounds a little heartbreaking sometimes. Why? Say more. Why? Well, I think there's a way we wish the world worked. Yeah. And part of your bravery and your firm's bravery in the process that you run is being blunt about reality. Yeah.

33:02it sounds like also a fundamental belief that being blunt about reality leads to a higher chance of success for everyone. Absolutely. Candidate and company. Absolutely. Let's just close the gap between expectations and reality. That's what we exist to do. Let's eliminate that daylight. That's where all the problems live. If I'm a candidate, because it's a hard market out there right now, if I'm a candidate, what should I take away from What you've learned you know building and running oh for and doing all these searches Be yourself so the people who are looking for you can find you being really clear about Exactly who you are and and leading into that versus trying to be

33:52everything, which is what I'm seeing a lot of right now is like, I could do that. I could do that. I could do that. I could do that. Like, are you, you know, that book, cause we both have kids, are you my mother? Or that like baby duck is like walking around asking like, are you my mother? Are you my mother? I see a lot of, are you my mother's right now? And that is what I find to be heartbreaking because people who I think are actually going through their own version of the work twisties where for so much of their career, people were tapping them on the shoulder.

34:21people were igniting them and saying, Molly, you're phenomenal. You should come and run this. You should go do this. And they've done it. And now they're at this moment where, through circumstance or choice, they're saying, wait, I have to go seek it. I have to go choose and decide for myself. And that is disorienting, especially when your calling card has been like, I get knighted. It's really scary to decide you're going to knight yourself. Be yourself.

34:52so the people who are looking for you can find you. I swear, this is the best, hardest advice in the world. It sounds so cliche, be yourself. But to truly know yourself, know who you are, know what you were put on the earth to do, that is the point. That is the compass that no one can take away from you. And somehow, I think you can only find that compass if you get lost first. Work Life is a production of Ted and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Amy Gaines-Mcquade. Ban Ban Shang is our story editor. Ted's executive producer is Daniela Balarezzo. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne Hilash, Valentina Bohanini, Laini Lott, Tonsika Sungmanivong, Ashley Murphy, Daphne Chen, and Greta Kohn.

35:57If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my sub-stack, Lessons. I'm Molly Graham. Thanks for listening.