Once again, I’ve got a podcast guest whose Venn diagram of interests looks strikingly similar to my own. Multi-passionate Elin Filbey and I not only share a work history (museums, higher education and career coaching) but other factors as well, including being moms of small children, coming from the upper Midwest, teaching fitness classes, and our love of performing. In the wide-ranging conversation this podcast is known for, we cover this and so much more. Elin’s experience is proof that taking side quests makes a Renaissance Person’s life more fulfilling!

Promised Show Notes Materials (take a drink):

• Sign up for updates on my podcast and what’s happening in the Renaissance People Community.
• Sign up to work with me and Find Your Golden Thread
• Patrick Meaney’s LinkedIn post about shaping your career like a bramble
• Sara’s career coaching newsletter, Take it With You, focused on Packing Your Skillset Suitcase
• Sara’s newsletter with the word cloud of skills needed for remote jobs Appreciating Your Value
• Sara’s newsletter about translating your skills to potential employers Time to Translate
• Queued for Thought episode introducing Conversations on Loneliness, Healing and Connecting
• Social Contract Theory was the idea I was referencing, but looking at it, I wasn’t quite remembering the full definition. Oh well!
• Ep. 8 Bringing Worlds Together Full Circle with Jess Rowell, Renaissance Woman
• Tamara Poles’s guest episode where she discusses side quests on podcast Research Adjacent
• When NASA Gave Spiders Drugs to See how it Affected their Webs, 1995
• Ep. 10 The Forever Revolution with Jenni Gritters, Multi-Passionate
• My preferred metaphor: Reimagining STEM Workforce Development as a Braided River
• A beautiful rant about “soft skills”: Stop Calling Them Soft: Why Today’s Essential Skills Are Anything But
• Ep. 9 A Mind for Memory with Brian Skellenger, Survivalist
• United Karaoke
• Elin’s podcast Curate Your Career Podcast, co-hosted with Alli Schell, Spotify | Apple Podcast | YouTube | Instagram
• Elin’s Facebook Group Deaccessioned: A Network for Former and Aspiring Ex-Museum Pros
• Elin’s website Deaccessioned Career Coaching

Follow Elin on Social Media:

LinkedIn | Instagram |

A few things Elin and I discuss:

• Museums as a stimulating place for multi-passionates
• Drawbacks of museum life
• Elin’s path to career coaching
• How to explain your career jumps
• Toxic relationship industries (i.e. museums, journalism, education, non-profits, pretty much my entire career…)
• Translating your skills or job title
• Finding a career that fits your current values
• Being a helper and a villager
• Keys to answering, “what do you do?”
• How we live for the applause (and give Lind Belcher from Bob’s Burgers vibes)

Quotes from the episode:

(Elin) And I used to think that it was a defect or a, a liability because I was so interested in so many things. But now as I'm getting older and I'm learning more about myself, I see it as an asset, right? Because I am able to pull from all these different places and all these different ideas to inform the core of my work and what I do.

(Elin) I found out later that I got placed with the finance and real estate students who were notoriously difficult because my former director told the person hiring me at the business school that I was a “velvet steam roller”. I was really good at gently pushing back on people, and working with difficult people in a way that still got things done but wasn't super inflammatory, which was a skill I learned through my career. Because when I started, I was like, burn it down!

(Elin) It's an industry (museum work) that takes and takes and takes and takes and doesn't always give a lot back. I often describe it as a toxic relationship

(Sara) Oh, yes!

(Elin) Where it's bad and bad and bad and bad, and then you get to hold a manuscript from the 1500s and you're like, this is the best thing ever! And then you're like, rebounded and you're in love again. And then you just get shit on somewhere else.

(Sara) I like sharing resources. As a Renaissance Person, are you one of those people where, you know, you join a Zoom meeting and you're adding links to things in the chat, emailing people afterwards?

(Elin) It's my love language.

(Elin) I heard something the other day that was, you know, everybody wants a village, but not everybody's willing to be a villager.

(Sara) I love that!

(Elin) Right? And I was like, oh! I caught myself too because I was like, where's my village? And then I needed to reflect, to be like, well, where am I being a villager? And I can't expect that to come back around to me if I haven't given it out.

(Elin) Love a good side quest. It really just brings a lot of joy to my life. And it's also probably part of my neuro spiciness of like, I was born to dilly dally.

(Elin) And a lot of times when people are wanting to leave the field or they're wanting to change, they just start running really, really fast in a direction. And sometimes you're on a treadmill and you're not going anywhere. But you feel like you're, you're really working hard. And you're running, running, running, but you're not getting anywhere.

(Elin) I'm like Tinkerbell, I need applause to live. So I love just being on stage and getting up in front of people.

Follow me, Renaissance Woman Sara Kobilka, on LinkedIn, where I put most of my social media energy, and Facebook.

If you’re extra curious, check out Renaissance Woman Consulting to learn more about some of the many types of work I do.

And should you care to support the production of this podcast, I’d love it if you’d buy me an oat milk cappuccino, my caffeinated beverage of choice.

This podcast is hosted and edited by Sara Kobilka.

Theme music is by Brian Skellenger

Podcast distribution support provided by K.O. Myers of Particulate Media

(sung) Connecting the Dots with the Renaissance People

I have Elin Philby, a multi-passionate who has both lived in some of the same places I have and worked in some of the same industries that I worked in. In this episode, we talk about museums, one of our shared industries as a stimulating place for multi-passionate, but we also get into the drawbacks of museum life.

We talk about Elin's path to career coaching, how to explain your career jumps, toxic relationship industries such as, uh, museums, journalism, education, nonprofits. Basically my entire career path until becoming a entrepreneur. We talk about translating your skills or your job title, finding a career that fits your current values and what season of life you're in. We discuss being a helper and a villager, and I'm not talking about the Village People and the key to answering the dreaded question, what do you do? We also talk about how we both live for the applause, and how we give Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers vibes.

If you're enjoying learning more about the work that I do, helping Renaissance People confidently live expansive lives, I encourage you. Sign up for the updates from the first link in the show notes or by visiting my website, ren woman consulting.com. That's Ren with one N. Now back to this week's episode.

Here we go.

So Elin, my question for you, which I know as someone who's listened to multiple episodes of the podcast, you're ready for this one. And I'm looking forward because I am gonna be doing like this massive analysis of everybody's response and trying to figure out what does it mean. But for now, I just need data for me to do a massive assessment of, so which term aligns best with your personal identity? Renaissance Person, multi-passionate, generalist, versatilist. Jack, Jill, Jay-of-all-trades, boundary spanner, or do you pick none of the above? I'm going off on my own tangent.

[00:03:39] Sara Kobilka: It goes far and wide.

[00:03:41] Sara Kobilka: That's wonderful. Had you ever used the term multi-passionate to describe yourself before or had you ever come across a term to describe yourself versus describing your career?

Because I'm now kind of finding that, you know, I have to separate out the two because there are some people who have had that wide ranging career. I've heard portfolio career. I've heard a lot of terms to describe the career aspect of it. But then there's also just the like personal interest in a lot of different topics, side of things from that, just general interest in a lot of topics. Have you used a term like multi-passionate multipotential, anything like that before?

They've both kind of existed in their own realms, right? In like a very professional way and then in a personal way. And I also used to think that it was a defect or a, a liability because I was so interested in so many things. But now as I'm getting older and I'm learning more about myself, I see it as an asset, right? Because I am able to pull from all these different places and all these different ideas to inform the core of my work and what I do.

So I am also a former museum person and I think I first interacted with you on LinkedIn. I'm sure that it was, you know, one of our overlapping Venn connections who commented on one of your posts or something like that. And it got onto my feed. And I have left the museum world, worked at a couple of different museums and even I was executive director of the Iowa Arboretum, which really, an arboretum is a museum.

[00:06:07] Sara Kobilka: It's just a museum of living

[00:06:09] Sara Kobilka: And you talk about wearing three hundred hats. We were a small team.

[00:06:16] Sara Kobilka: We only had a few people working. So yes, I was the executive director and representing the organization at big meetings and writing all the grants. But I also changed the toilet paper roll and I also did social media and I had to have all those interests and be able to kind of jump on board whatever task that people wanted me to do.

And so I saw some of the work that you were doing in the museum space and supporting museum professionals, and I think I reached out and said, Hey, you know, I, I bring this perspective of having worked in, maybe when people say museums or say they talk about museum studies degrees, which do exist for people who didn't realize it. There's museum studies degrees. But I think there's more of an emphasis on art museums perhaps, and some of those more traditional ideas of museums that perhaps came to the United States from Europe.

Whereas the model of the Science Museum, which was the second type of museum that I moved to and where I truly found my calling, that came outta the United States. And the United States is more known for science museums, which perhaps have a little bit of a different mindset of embracing the idea of being hands-on. Earlier than perhaps art museums were. It isn't meant to be a place where you just go around and look at signs, which is the stereotypical thought of this is what museums are for. You go around and you look at things and you read signs about them and you'd maybe talk about them. But that, is not what a science museum is about, and it's meant to be the antithesis of this.

And it is really exciting because we partnered with the art museum on campus and they came in and talked about like the chemistry of how, people can look at past iterations of a work of art

[00:08:01] Sara Kobilka: How they can actually peel back literal layers and metaphorical layers of how did the artist paint this painting? Or things like that. Or they had a piece that was stolen from the museum, Tucson, and then it had been recovered right around the time that I was working there. And so we got to talk about that as like a forensic science sort of...

[00:08:23] Sara Kobilka: But that's, I know, it was so cool!

[00:08:25] Sara Kobilka: I'm huge on bringing the arts together with the sciences and STEAM and, and all those multidisciplinary things that I think we Renaissance People are so good at.

[00:08:35] Sara Kobilka: And that's my lovely tangent because we celebrate going off on tangents.

But to bring that back to how I got connected to you is I saw some of the conversations you were having around supporting people who work in museums because that isn't always the easiest space to work in, and most people don't go to college to get degree to work in a museum. So can you tell me a little bit more, my question is kind of about where is your expertise and, what types of things are you doing where people are seeing you as an expert? And I think you really are taking advantage of your multi-passionate background in those areas of expertise that I'm familiar with at least

And what I do is people. And people do go to college and get advanced degrees in museum studies and in these fields that direct them right into museum work or hopefully into museum work. But what's happening in the field is that these jobs are requiring advanced degrees.

They're paying 40, $50,000 a year in major cities. Sometimes they don't offer health insurance or retirement or advancement or anything like that. And so I really use my skills from my time in the museum world. And I, I really loved career development there and I worked a lot with our interns and I was always like the resume girl. Like, I love resumes. It's like a puzzle for me and I just, I love doing them.

And when, and this is again like tangent, but this it's important to my origin story. I got pregnant with my son while I was at my last institution and I just had this moment where I was like, my life is about to change very fundamentally and my priorities are changing, right?

So like, when I worked at my last institution, 50, 60 hour weeks were not a big deal. Nights and weekends were not a big deal 'cause it was just me and my husband. But I knew once my little guy came along that. I wanted to spend time with him. I didn't wanna spend time with somebody else's family on the weekend. I wanted to spend time with my family.

So, that caused me to pause and be like, OK, what am I gonna do here? I live in Madison, Wisconsin. And although it's an amazing town, the arts and culture scene is smaller than it is in a more major city. So, wasn't really anywhere for me to move up at my organization.

I did not wanna be an executive director. I don't do well with politics or bureaucracy. That's just like not my jam. Um, couldn't move really to anywhere else in town. Couldn't move towns, right? 'cause my husband has a contract here at the hospital. So, OK, what am I gonna do?

And I saw this through line in my career of career development and working with students to know how to talk about their skills, how to expand on their skills, resume, cover letter, all the nitty gritty. But then the story component too. So I actually pivoted and I became a career coach at the Wisconsin School of Business working with finance and real estate students. And like whew! Curve ball Batman! Because like what a night and day difference between my like sweet little horticulture students and these really like grindy, career focused finance students. It was just a big difference.

And I found out later that I got placed with the finance and real estate students who were notoriously difficult because my former director told the person hiring me at the business school that I was a velvet steam roller. That I was really good at, gently pushing back on people, and working with difficult people in a way that still got things done but wasn't super inflammatory, which was a skill I learned through my career because when I started I was like, burn it down. I don't wanna do that. Just, a bit young and reckless.

And as I grew through my career, I learned a lot more about how to handle those things. So anyways, working with finance and real estate students at the business school, loved it, learned so much. Had the most amazing team. It was really feeding into that multi-passionate of, it was like a new museum, right?

I was getting to learn about a totally new content area, finance and real estate. Like wow. Very interesting. Totally different than anything I'd ever done before. And I loved that.

And then I got pregnant with my daughter, and I remember one day, it was like 3:30 or something. And I wanted to leave a little early so I could pick my son up from daycare and just spend a little extra time with him.

And they're like, no, you have to stay. I was like, but I don't have any more meetings today. I'm done with my work. And that was kind of the moment for me where I was like, OK, I'm out.

And so again, started thinking like, what am I gonna do? So I had this, and this is the multi-passionate dot connector part of my brain of I love museums and I love the people that work in them. And I've learned so much working at the business school about the ins and the outs of the career world. And I was helping these 21, 22-year-olds land, six-figure jobs.

And I, I thought like, OK, my museum people are just as smart as you are. They're just as hardworking. They have a lot of skills to offer. Why are they not having these types of opportunities if they're looking to leave the field? And so that's where my business and where I'm now known as a known entity comes in, is I help people understand their museum skillset and learn how to translate it for new roles and new career pathways.

And so many of us, like I wanted to work in a museums since I was a little girl. That was a thing I always loved. And so many people struggle with this outta the box thinking or this dot connecting thinking of all I've done is worked in museums. Who else is even gonna hire me? Like, what other skills do I even have?

And so that is my greatest joy in my career. And what I love doing, what I'm known for, is helping people to connect those dots. And to understand that through line of their career and how they can use those skill sets as a superpower instead of a liability. Right? A lot of people go in saying like, oh, I just worked in museums. That's all I can do. And so I work with them to really dig in and understand what those skills are and how can you talk about it in a way that's gonna land you somewhere else.

[00:15:14] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:26] Elin Filbey: My gosh.

[00:15:29] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:15:31] Elin Filbey: Ugh. Love it here.

But I took the executive director job right after my meteorologist

[00:15:40] Sara Kobilka: which I had to do a lot of explaining. One thing I always talked to my clients about is, some people look at networking as a four-letter word. They're like, that's gross. That's disgusting. It feels awful. But almost every position that I have landed is because I cultivated a network and I like to use cultivate and gardening

[00:16:00] Sara Kobilka: metaphors and all that sort of

[00:16:03] Sara Kobilka: I wouldn't have gotten the position if I didn't have people on the

[00:16:06] Sara Kobilka: advocating for me because the job title that I came in with at the very top of my resume looked nothing like executive director of an arboretum. So that first and foremost. But, also was the former journalist and I was able to explain how my background in journalism was helpful.

[00:16:24] Sara Kobilka: And then

I, through all of my jobs I have taken, I call it my skillset suitcase.

[00:16:29] Sara Kobilka: of all these skills in all of these stops on my multi-stop journey of a career. And I bring all of them with me. But you have to have that go of explaining to people you have it. Because when you work in an industry like broadcast journalism, working in museums, people on the outside, a public, very, very small idea of what you do, where your strengths lie. And it's up to you to advocate for yourself.

And in a super competitive job market, you have to make sure that a computerized culling system doesn't cut you out before you get to the point where you get to personally advocate or before a human eyeball sees your resume.

[00:17:11] Sara Kobilka: So

[00:17:12] Sara Kobilka: You have to have both things. You can't just have the most amazing resume and preparations to interview and cover letter ever. And you can't just network with people and use AI to write your resume and cover letter. You have to work on all of those fronts. But I think for me, I was able to start off my career working with broadcast journalists because I had been on TV.

[00:17:35] Sara Kobilka: I'd been a meteorologist, I'd been a reporter. I knew what the sports people did, so I could tell them as that outside perspective of, do y ou realize how amazing you are?

And that's why when I started my newsletter is, I once took a bunch of articles because a lot of people wanted to find remote jobs. A lot of them were people were moms. I was in a group for women in TV who are already out of the biz, or wanna wanna get out of it.

And a lot of them are moms or want to start families, and they have a partner maybe who has a job and they can't move. Or maybe they finally made it to that home market and don't want to leave their safety net. Whatever it might be, they want remote jobs.

So I found all of these different descriptions of the quote, soft skills that remote jobs want. And then I fed all of that into a word cloud generator and filtered out all the superfluous terms: is, and…all those. And was left with the adjectives and it was like communicate, that was the one that stood out the most.

And I'm like, this reads like the job description of working in broadcast journalism, and it also read like the job description of working, in outreach at the university or working in a science museum. So I'm like, you've got these skills and if you're a learner, a lifelong learner, which I think so many people who go into the museum field, go into it because it's a field

[00:18:58] Sara Kobilka: You're constantly learning

[00:18:59] Sara Kobilka: And so if you can learn whatever specific skill to the job that you're gonna have, they can train you. But they can't train you to be curious. They can't train you to work under tight deadlines or with limited resources which we're really good at in museums and higher education, all

[00:19:19] Sara Kobilka: these places don't get paid.

[00:19:20] Sara Kobilka: And I think it is working with a coach who has some experience in their own life of working in that field that that can open your eyes to the idea of, wait, I have those skills!

It's an industry that takes and takes and takes and takes and doesn't always give a lot back. I often describe it as a toxic relationship

[00:19:59] Elin Filbey: Where it's bad and bad and bad and bad, and then you get to like, hold a manuscript from the 15 hundreds and you're like, this is the best thing ever! And then you're like, rebounded and you're in love again. And then you just get shit on somewhere else, you know? So it's, and I'm sorry, I don't know if I can swear on this podcast.

[00:20:19] Elin Filbey: OK, cool. Have a potty mouth, so,

[00:20:28] Elin Filbey: yes, yes, yes, we are. Yes we are.

[00:20:31] Elin Filbey: Correct.

[00:20:36] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:20:39] Elin Filbey: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And like when I moved and started talking to people in business, for example, all of a sudden this term, ROI came into play, or all these different things. Or we use the term engagement all the time in museums or aha moments or things like that, that to the outsider, they're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And so you have to learn your jargon.

I take some of my science communication trainer training and use that with anybody who comes from a specific industry that has their own language. Because we do, we get into these places and we talk about things, and we don't even realize that what we're talking about means nothing to other people. Right over their heads!

And I was like, whoa! OK. Let's back up here.

[00:22:16] Elin Filbey: Yes!

[00:22:18] Elin Filbey: No!

[00:22:20] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:22:23] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:22:28] Elin Filbey: Sick.

[00:22:31] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:36] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:22] Elin Filbey: He was busy.

[00:23:24] Elin Filbey: Yep. Yep.

[00:23:28] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:30] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:23:32] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

And it's, is that a system that has any potential to change, is the question that I have and seeing what happens with the pandemic? And the attack on museums and just the difficult time that they're having right now. I don't have a ton of hope for that field. And that makes me so sad ' cause there's such value from those institutions.

But, I'm in the mix in this conversation because if people don't have an option, they come to me. But there are conversations that are happening about salary transparency in terms of applications and talking about lack of benefits and all of these other things. They're happening. Right? They're grassroots. Like I said, they're happening on a smaller scale, but I, I do believe that there's gonna have to be a reckoning in the field. But also at the same time, there's not, because every time a museum person leaves their job for something better, there will be hundreds of overqualified applicants applying for that job.

And so at a certain point, I don't feel like the field is, isn't gonna feel the need for change. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other passion driven industries like broadcast journalism, museums, sports. There are so many people waiting in their wings for their opportunity that even if it doesn't pay well or doesn't have great benefits, people will still line up in droves for that chance.

So I hope a change is coming, but because of the way the system operates, it'll be a long time coming or it'll be slow.

[00:25:42] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:26:01] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:05] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:26:20] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:22] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:23] Elin Filbey: Hell yeah!

[00:26:28] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:26:56] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:27:42] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:27:45] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:27:47] Elin Filbey: Absolutely.

[00:28:00] Elin Filbey: mm-hmm.

[00:28:15] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:28:19] Elin Filbey: Uhhuh.

[00:28:20] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:28:22] Elin Filbey: No.

[00:28:33] Elin Filbey: No.

[00:28:35] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:28:45] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:28:49] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:49] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:28:58] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:59] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:04] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:18] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:20] Elin Filbey: Yes, yes,

[00:29:22] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:29:23] Elin Filbey: You know, toddlers, they survive off of air and a goldfish and they're like, we're good.

[00:29:29] Elin Filbey: Yeah. Love 'em. But yeah, that, I'm a parent first is, I've had to do a lot of thinking about that too. And I think that's part of this multi-passionate part is I am really passionate about my kids. I do love my kids so much . And I also love building my business. And I also love helping other people.

And it's interesting 'cause my husband works in healthcare. So one of our dinner table conversations is how many people did you help today?

[00:29:56] Elin Filbey: Yeah, it's been really special. And, I can talk to them about, you know, I'm way less interesting than my husband. I'll be like, I helped, uh, Sara work on her resume today 'cause she's applying for this really cool job at this gym company and da da da. My kids are like, dad, who got cut open today in surgery? And I'm like, well, OK.

[00:30:16] Elin Filbey: I get it. But I mean I've even seen it trickle down though too, to my kids. And, our son is, there's a little boy in his class that is nonverbal and uses a assisted communication device. And Aodhán is his self-designated helper. He sits at the meal tables with him and helps him and is like with him.

And when I found that out, I was just like, oh, this is why it's important for them to see that mom and dad value helping people, because then that also becomes a value that is present in their lives and something that they see as important too. And that they can care about Spider-Man and also about caring about other people and helping to make the world a better place.

[00:31:41] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:31:52] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:54] Elin Filbey: Look for the helpers.

[00:31:57] Elin Filbey: Love him.

[00:31:59] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

And everyone thinks that that's unique to their own community. It's not. It happens every time. Whether it's a small town story, whether it's a big city story. People do come together and help other people.

I think there's more good people than there are people with really malicious intentions. The good people vastly outnumber the people with malicious intentions. And maybe that's a Pollyanna view and rose-colored glasses, but I'm sticking with it.

[00:32:51] Sara Kobilka: I think there's more good

[00:32:52] Sara Kobilka: then there is bad. Which gives me hope, which we need hope right now.

[00:33:02] Sara Kobilka: Yeah. Same for us.

[00:33:12] Sara Kobilka: Yep!

[00:33:20] Sara Kobilka: I love that!

[00:33:54] Sara Kobilka: I literally applied that over the last two weeks because I'm in the Northeast and we had all these big snowstorms and we had all these snow days. We have friends who have kids who are the same age as my children are almost the same age. And both parents work full-time. And with the COVID pandemic, you as an adult don't get a snow day anymore.

You're just told to work remotely and hold all of your remote meetings

[00:34:18] Sara Kobilka: And maybe you're working hybrid anyways.

[00:34:19] Sara Kobilka: And so I knew that they had a lot of things that they couldn't adjust. So when we had these two-hour delays and I knew it was the bad day of the week for them 'cause we'd been bitching and moaning, complaining

[00:34:29] Sara Kobilka: with each other in solidarity already,

[00:34:31] Sara Kobilka: I just preemptively, when we got the 4:00 AM text and I woke up at five, I just shot both of them a message and said, hey,

[00:34:39] Sara Kobilka: two-hour- delay. Do you wanna just bring your kids over?

[00:34:42] Sara Kobilka: I'll let them play, give 'em a snack and make sure they make it on the bus. And rather than waiting for somebody to reach out and say, oh, could you help me out?

[00:34:51] Sara Kobilka: I'm just gonna do it for them.

[00:34:53] Sara Kobilka: And then the next time if I need to reach out, I don't have that guilt. 'cause I sometimes have that guilt of reaching out.

[00:35:00] Sara Kobilka: We're trying to build our own

[00:35:02] Sara Kobilka: safety nets, but then we have a guilt of reaching out

[00:35:04] Sara Kobilka: to ask, will you help me today? ' Cause I don't feel like I've one for one helped you enough.

[00:35:09] Sara Kobilka: And so I'm building good karma.

[00:35:11] Sara Kobilka: I'm making my own safety net by

[00:35:13] Sara Kobilka: saying, this is a time when I have flexibility to, without any request, offer support. And then when I ask of it from someone else, I don't feel as bad.

[00:35:23] Sara Kobilka: We've kind of almost got this mutual compact. It's going back to...

[00:35:26] Sara Kobilka: Oh what's the compact of, why communities come together that we learned about in history class oh so long ago? I'm gonna have to look it up.

[00:35:33] Sara Kobilka: And I'll put it in the show notes, which is

[00:35:35] Sara Kobilka: Take a drink everyone!. I'm gonna grab my water bottle.

[00:35:37] Sara Kobilka: Because that's a thing in the podcast. We Renaissance People love to share resources

[00:35:41] Sara Kobilka: with one another. And so I put all these wonderful resources in the show notes. So I encourage everyone to look at it.

And, if you are driving and listening to podcasts, that's where I listen to most of my podcasts as while I'm driving. And then I'm like, show notes. Oh shoot, I have to remember!

[00:35:56] Sara Kobilka: If you sign up for my listserv that I send out ahead of time, one day ahead of time, you get the show notes

[00:36:03] Sara Kobilka: Emailed directly to you so you don't have to look them up, in the podcasting platform.

[00:36:08] Sara Kobilka: I don't know, show notes are fun.

[00:36:10] Sara Kobilka: I like sharing resources. As a Renaissance Person, are you one of those people where, you know, you join a Zoom meeting and you're adding links to things in the chat, emailing people afterwards...

[00:36:30] Sara Kobilka: And that's part of the loneliness epidemic is just like reaching out.

[00:36:34] Sara Kobilka: And saying, hey, I'm thinking of you.

[00:36:37] Sara Kobilka: And for people who it feels weird to reach out to someone else and say, hey, I'm thinking of you,

[00:36:42] Sara Kobilka: I get past that weirdness by saying, I just heard this thing, or

[00:36:46] Sara Kobilka: I just read this thing

[00:36:47] Sara Kobilka: and I'm thinking of you.

[00:36:48] Sara Kobilka: So the show notes, we take a drink of whatever liquid you want. Mine is water today. I'm hydrating.

[00:36:54] Sara Kobilka: There's allergy stuff going on

[00:36:57] Sara Kobilka: Yeah.

[00:37:06] Sara Kobilka: Not to say that it wasn't smart to take lots of medicines because there are so many things going on right now with children

[00:37:13] Sara Kobilka: We've gone through like four rounds of illness.

[00:37:15] Sara Kobilka: We've had pneumonia. We've had infections of multiple body parts.

[00:37:20] Sara Kobilka: My husband had strep last week. Don't even know where that came from!

[00:37:24] Sara Kobilka: Don't know if a kid had strep and we didn't even know it.

[00:37:27] Sara Kobilka: It's all over the place.

[00:37:29] Sara Kobilka: Well OK, so I think you're a good person to answer this question. Museum people have a lot of experiences. A lot of them are Renaissance People, and maybe even they jumped around before they got to their museum job. How do you help people and you yourself, explain your complexity without overwhelming people? Because if I tried to give you my resume, I was just editing it. I'm working on an RFP, which is they want somebody to submit a proposal in order for them to get paid to do a project. So, we're working on it and they told me I have to do a one-page resume.

[00:38:02] Sara Kobilka: I'm just like, how am I getting eight pages down to one page? OK…

[00:38:08] Sara Kobilka: This is go time, buddy!

[00:38:09] Sara Kobilka: But how do you explain to people the task of whether it's simplifying your resume, getting a cover letter, or just we said networking's important. The 30-second elevator pitch of Sara Kobilka, Renaissance Woman? It doesn't exist as a 30-second thing.

[00:38:25] Sara Kobilka: But how do you try to do that? What advice do you give?

So A) know your audience. I have a client who worked in museums for a long time. He's applying for a agricultural education job. I'm like, OK, you have collections experience, you have visitor services experience, you have, grant writing experience, and you have agricultural education experience.

So, lead with what is important to the person that you're talking to, right? They don't need to know that you processed a 10,000 object collection database. They do care that you did a database collection of farm equipment and that you designed education programs and that you did this exhibit about this farmer, right?

So it's, know your audience and speak to what they're looking for. And I don't mean to say that in a disingenuine way of, oh, just be who they want you to be. But if they are looking for an agricultural educator, you just need to talk about how you're an agricultural educator and not about... all of the other stuff is, is an asset and it comes up behind you, is look at all these other things I bring to the table. But especially when we're thinking about having to be concise. The 30-second pitch, the one-page resume... they don't need to know the other stuff. And I think that's hard for A Renaissance People, and B, our Venn diagram of museum people, because context is so important to us. And we wanna share all of this context and all of this knowledge and, and, and tell the backstory why this is important.

[00:40:06] Elin Filbey: Yes, exactly. And so, so it, it's, know your audience. Speak to how you are going to solve their problem, and how you are the most logical solution, rather than telling them every single thing about yourself, right?

And then the second is your secret sauce. So what about you in your background makes you the most obvious candidate or makes you a really cool hire? So, some examples, and I do best with examples, right, because it highlights what I'm talking about. \

So, for example, I have a client, her background in museum education and engagement and program delivery. She's applying for a role within a military organization where she'd be running programs to combat food insecurity. Her dad and her grandfather were in the military. She was in ROTC. And she was like, yeah, but that was 20 years ago. I don't know why I need to put that on now.

And I'm like, but it shows that you get it, right? It shows that especially because it was 20 years ago that this has been a part of your life for a long time and that you get it. Especially like with something like the military, right? Again, with the like very niche subset of people who feel like they only have a certain set of skills, military is like that, right? So if you have military, let's talk about military.

So it's understanding that this, I call it the secret sauce, but you can think about it of the thread, like, what are the dots here that I'm gonna connect for you, that makes me really unique or really cool as a candidate.

But, then also the core tenet of communications 101: know thy audience. Have your unifying thing, but know what matters to them. And that goes back to Jess Rowell a science educator who I had on the show. And she talked about finding the why of the other person. And that's how she gets her students interested in what she's talking about. That's how she gets a potential collaborator to listen to her as she explains her ideas is find out their why and speak to their why and give them a reason to be curious and want to learn more about you because you are an onion with layers that they can peel and peel. It's like, what? That thing! And now another new thing. I didn't even know that! And you can, you can keep surprising them and then you're kind of an interesting person to talk to

[00:42:42] Sara Kobilka: 'cause you never know how they're gonna surprise you. But you gotta, you gotta hook 'em first.

[00:42:46] Sara Kobilka: You gotta get them willing to listen to you and you gotta find that point of commonality

[00:42:53] Sara Kobilka: Otherwise, they're just like, you're this person. You don't understand the military at all. Why would I want to talk to you? Why would I wanna hire you or work with you?

Just because I'm from a military family and I'm passionate about that, doesn't also mean that I can't be passionate about this other aspect of my life because I am multifaceted. I am multi-passionate. There is that through line of serving others, but you could put a different hat on it so that it is more easily understood by the person you're talking to.

[00:43:41] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:43:45] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:47] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:58] Elin Filbey: That's a really good question.

[00:44:02] Elin Filbey: Yeah. Helping others. And it really, I think, comes down to education. I love teaching. And I've had all these weird side quests in my life, but they all kind of come back to this teaching education thread, right? I was a babysitter all throughout forever. And then an undergrad I studied human development and I taught in Chicago public schools and then museums. And in my life in Madison, I was a fitness instructor because I love teaching people about their bodies and how to move. And I think it's this, this passion for teaching and helping people understand is the through line here. Because what I'm teaching now is how to understand yourself better so you can achieve a goal. This quote that I love is, education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. And I, I think that's the golden thread, is just teaching people how to get fired up about themselves and feeling good about themselves so that they can set out to achieve or be what they want

[00:45:21] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:45:24] Improv Game

[00:45:30] Elin Filbey: OK.

[00:45:46] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:09] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:46:11] Elin Filbey: So much. And I think too, it's like when you're interested in so many things, it is a lot easier to, you've got a bigger data set to overlap with too, right?

[00:46:20] Elin Filbey: Um, I think for me, you know, you're a Renaissance Person when you think a conversation is gonna go one way, but then it actually as a really beautiful deep dive in somewhere you never thought you were gonna go. I never thought we were gonna talk about the loneliness epidemic and being a helper. But that was a really important part of our conversation.

[00:46:42] Elin Filbey: OK.

[00:46:43] Elin Filbey: Let's do it.

[00:47:07] Elin Filbey: yes.

[00:47:08] Elin Filbey: Oh my God!

[00:47:13] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:16] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:18] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:22] Elin Filbey: Yes,

[00:47:29] Elin Filbey: yes,

[00:47:30] Elin Filbey: Yes!

[00:47:31] Elin Filbey: Yes,

[00:47:37] Elin Filbey: Yes. Right. Yeah. Nothing is ever really a straight line with us. It's always a winding journey. I think you're a Renaissance Person if the side quest turns into the main quest,

[00:47:49] Elin Filbey: yeah.

[00:47:52] Elin Filbey: yeah.

[00:48:01] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:16] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:48:24] Elin Filbey: My God.

[00:48:30] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:48:32] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:48:34] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:37] Elin Filbey: Yes. Love a good side quest. It is really just brings a lot of joy to my life. And it's also probably part of my neuro-spiciness of like. I was born to dilly dally really and truly. And so, yeah, I love a good side quest.

[00:48:56] Rapidish Fire Questions

We just went through one metaphor, but what's the metaphor that you find yourself using a lot in either the work that you're doing in coaching or in your life in general?

And so something I I really lean on a lot is knowing we don't have to have a map, right? We don't have to have the turn-by-turn directions, the Mapquest to date myself. We don't need to have the turn-by-turn directions, but we do wanna know what direction generally we are heading in. That does allow room for the side quests and the bumbles and tumbles and dilly dallying. But it also gives us a purpose and a direction so that we're not being, in air quotes, productive for the sake of being productive.

It's taking action in service of a greater goal or a greater mission towards being who you wanna be, rather than just taking action to take action.

[00:50:27] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:50:34] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:50:45] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:48] Elin Filbey: Right.

[00:50:57] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:51:02] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:15] Elin Filbey: Tangent

[00:51:17] Elin Filbey: A side quest.

[00:51:22] Elin Filbey: Side Quest! Yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:25] Elin Filbey: OK.

[00:51:26] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:51:27] Elin Filbey: Perfect. I love that.

But with the side quest, one of the things I hate is the metaphor of the STEM careers pipeline because it implies there's one place you come in and one place you leave. And we talk about the leaky pipeline and a lot of people in industry and funders like to talk about the pipeline. But one of my favorite replacement metaphors is the braided river. As a metaphor for how we move through careers, and I'll put in the show notes a link to a wonderful article about talking about a braided river. Many paths to get there.

[00:52:02] Sara Kobilka: There's a direction that the river's going, but it's not a pipe where you enter here and you exit here, like Mario trying to get to the next level. We're,

[00:52:11] Sara Kobilka: a lot of like Super Mario Brother's theme

[00:52:14] Sara Kobilka: Um, in this show. Didn't expect that, but that's OK. I'm OK with that. I had a old cell phone, the flip phones, where you could make your own ringtones and I actually made the Super Mario brother like figured out how to do that with my ringtone

[00:52:32] Sara Kobilka: for one of my friends. We've lost a lot these days

[00:52:35] Sara Kobilka: with our cell phones, I think. OK.

And I used to talk about that a lot in interviews in parts of my career when I was interviewing for educator roles that were not in my content area. I'm the hockey player. I'm a kick ass educator. I know how to make good programs. I know how to make content exciting and engaging. I know how to identify audiences.

I know the foundations and the meat and the principles of things. And I love learning. So I have no problem then learning your content so that I can translate it into my framework. Right? So I think that's something too for people to keep in mind is there's part of being multi-passionate and like having all these different interests is that you've learned the frameworks and you've learned how things work so that you can apply other lenses on top of them. And I think that's a really special skill that doesn't get talked about enough.

[00:54:13] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[00:54:15] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:54:27] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:40] Elin Filbey: Yep.

[00:54:49] Elin Filbey: Rabbit hole that I've gone down recently. That's a really good question. So we are exiting survival mode with our children. They are two and three and a half, so we're having glimmers of thriving. And I've been actually going down a lot of design rabbit holes because now I'm trying to get our house looking and not even just looking nicer, but just feeling nicer and not feeling like a, a tornado went through it.

And so I've been doing a lot of design rabbit holes. Like last night for probably about 45 minutes, I was researching how to mix curtain textures because I don't, oh, I don't know if you've bought curtains lately. They're so expensive. It's so stupid.

[00:55:35] Elin Filbey: And I would really like to learn how to sew, but that's like one of my ADHD doom hobbies that I just, I haven't bought a sewing machine yet because I just don't know where I'd put it anyways. But yeah, so like 45 minutes last night about how to mix curtain fabrics and like, what looks good and what achieves what look. So yeah, that's probably not the answer you were expecting, but yeah, I, I did a really deep dive into curtains last night.

[00:56:02] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:56:03] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:56:10] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:14] Elin Filbey: Yeah. I am a karaoke champion. I was in a competitive karaoke league when I lived in DC. 'Cause when I moved to DC I wanted to meet new people beyond people that were in my grad program. And I am not a sports girly. I'm married a sports fan, which is why, I know you can't see me, but I'm wearing Michigan gear today.

But, my parents put me in pretty much every sport growing up and I sucked at all of them. And I was like, after a certain point I was like, can I please just do theater and dance? Like I don't wanna do sports anymore. And they're like, you gotta do.

[00:56:46] Elin Filbey: I know.

[00:56:48] Elin Filbey: I know, I know. It was like, my parents were like, you have to do it to get into college. But so yeah, so when I moved to DC I was like, well, I'm not gonna join a kickball league because I have no interest in playing kickball.

[00:57:04] Elin Filbey: Exactly. I don't have the hand-eye coordination for anything involving a ball. And so, yeah, so I found a karaoke league and I did it the entire time I lived in DC and I made really amazing friends and it was a really cool creative outlet for me that fed in with my museum time because we would make costumes and we would have these group numbers that had these elaborate setups and themes and storylines, and

[00:57:32] Elin Filbey: Put it in the show notes. I did District Karaoke. But I know Chicago has it. Baltimore has it. New York has it, and I think LA has it now. I've had on my back burner for like, since I've moved to Madison to start it here. And maybe, you know, once I firmly exit survival mode, I will. Um, but yeah, and our team made it to like citywide finals a couple times. And it was just a really, it was so silly. It was just silly and it was fun. And that's something I think, a lot of people don't know about me is that I, yeah. I'm like, Tinkerbell, I need, I need applause to live. So I love, yeah, just being on stage and getting up in front of people, so,

[00:58:18] Elin Filbey: Ooh,

[00:58:20] Elin Filbey: Beba.

[00:58:21] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:58:28] Elin Filbey: Yeah,

[00:58:32] Elin Filbey: I was wondering who that was. Yeah.

[00:58:39] Elin Filbey: Amazing.

[00:58:45] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:11] Elin Filbey: Oh my God,

[00:59:14] Elin Filbey: That's so fun.

[00:59:21] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:38] Elin Filbey: Oh my God.

[00:59:40] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[00:59:54] Elin Filbey: Oh my God.

[00:59:57] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:59] Elin Filbey: This is the next one. Are you a Bob's Burgers fan?

[01:00:04] Elin Filbey: OK. My husband is always like, you are Linda Belcher. Like, she loves like dinner theater and mystery dinner parties and things like that. And I'm like, oh, that's giving Linda Belcher vibes.

[01:00:16] Elin Filbey: She's a queen. I love her so much.

[01:00:20] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[01:00:23] Elin Filbey: I know the worst.

[01:00:27] Elin Filbey: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:34] Elin Filbey: Yeah, so, I'm really active on LinkedIn. You can find me there, Elin Filbey. I also have my own website, deaccessioned coaching.com. And my podcast that I co-host with Alli Schell called Curate Your Career. Those are all really good places. If you were to find me on Instagram, you'd probably really be confused because as a multi-passionate, my past history as a fitness and wellness and body, positivity coach lived deep in my Instagram archive.

So that's probably not the best place unless you wanna see like, you know, who I was in a past life. But yeah, LinkedIn, my website and Curate your Career podcast.

[01:01:13] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[01:01:15] Elin Filbey: Yes.

[01:01:22] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[01:01:25] Elin Filbey: Yes!

[01:01:29] Elin Filbey: You gotta do it.

[01:01:30] Elin Filbey: Yeah.

[01:01:33] Elin Filbey: Thank you.

(sung) Connecting the Dots with the Renaissance People