Episode 91: Creating a Life After Law with Jen Ruiz

Welcome to The Career Clarity Show, where we help you find a lucrative, soulful, and joyful career path for you!

One of my favorite things to do on the Career Clarity Show is bring on people who can help to stretch your sense of what’s possible because so often we can find ourselves in a mental and emotional rut when thinking about making a change. This is especially true if you are in the kind of career that costs a lot to get into, financially or emotionally. It can be terrifying to think about what else might be next out there. 

Today’s conversation is all about how to create a new career path after getting out of a career that feels like an entanglement. We’re joined by Jen Ruiz, a lawyer turned full time travel blogger and author. Jen’s story is perfect for anyone who is looking to navigate interesting and weird career challenges to create a path that feels like it’s something that’s on your own terms.

Want to learn more about our strategic framework for successful career change? Download The Roadmap to Career Fulfillment ebook right here!

SHOW NOTES:

• Jen on a Jet Plane
• Instagram: @Jenonajetplane
• From Blog to Business Book
• Roadmap to a Fulfilling Career eBook

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Transcript:

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:04  

Welcome to the Career Clarity Show. If you want to create a career path you’ll love you’re in the right place. I’m Lisa Lewis Miller, career change coach, published author and your host, and each week, we’ll bring you personal transformation stories, advice and insights from experts about how you can find a more fulfilling, soulful and joyful career.

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:31  

Welcome, welcome back to the Career Clarity Show everybody. I’m your host, Lisa Miller. And I am delighted to get to have you back with us today to share yet another story of somebody who has navigated interesting, funky, weird career challenges and decisions just like you to create a path that feels like it’s something that’s on her own terms, where she’s defined success in a way that feels really really good. And where she’s created something a little bit untraditional. One of my favorite things to do on the show is bring on people who can help to stretch your sense of what’s possible, your sense of what’s realistic, your sense of what is available, because so often we can find ourselves in a mental and emotional rut when thinking about making a change. Because when you get to the point in your career that you’re thinking, is this all there is, is this the best that I can do. It can feel really easy to feel limited and to feel small and to feel hopeless. And this is especially true if you are in the kind of career that cost a lot to get into. This might be a financial cost, it might be a time cost and emotional cost and identity cost to get into. But especially folks who go into high transaction cost Pads, Pads like being a doctor pad, like being a dentist, or pad like today’s guest in being a lawyer, it can be really terrifying to think about what else might be next out there. Especially if you’re worried about paying for loans for school, especially if you’re worried about having created an identity or a professional network that is solely based in that world. So today’s conversation on the podcast is going to be about how to create a life after life after law life after whatever that is that feels life giving that feels satisfying, that feels soulful. And that doesn’t feel like you’re gonna have to start back over at the bottom, making peanuts, working entry level kinds of stuff for the rest of your life. It’s easy for fear to try to take over in the driver’s seat and tell you that you’re never going to be able to make money ever again. You’re never going to be able to achieve the lifestyle goals that you have, especially knowing about the four pillars methodology that we talked about so much. Being out of alignment in your lifestyle pillar can absolutely cause dissatisfaction and wanting to make a switch. I’m so excited for today’s guest to talk a bit about how to navigate getting out of a career that can sometimes feel like an entanglement, especially if it’s not feeling like it is bringing you the kind of fulfillment and happiness that you want. So if you feel like you are stuck, if you feel like you have invested so much in your career that you can’t even possibly imagine being able to make a shift out of it. Even though you know you’re not feeling as lit up as you want to. Today’s episode of the podcast is absolutely going to be for you. So stay tuned. Today’s guest on the podcast is Jen Ruiz. Jen is a lawyer turned full time travel blogger and author. She is a number one Amazon bestseller and two times a readers favorite award winner. She’s also a three time TEDx speaker and the founder of people of Puerto Rico, a nonprofit that helps locals establish online income streams. So as you can tell, today’s guest has definitely figured out life after law. And I can’t wait to unpack and dig into her whole story with her. Jen, welcome to the Career Clarity Show.

Jen Ruiz  4:10  

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Lewis Miller  4:13  

Well, it’s a delight to get to talk to people who have made big, bold, courageous shifts. And it’s particularly fun to talk to people who have done that in an arena that seems untouchable. So many career paths that include getting a masters or a doctoral level of study, feel like you are you’re trapped. Once you go into that because of the amount of time and energy you invested the amount of student loans that you now have to pay for and it feels like the only career that can help you to pay for those loans is doing the things that you don’t actually really want to do. So I am so so happy that you said yes to come on the show today. And I want to start our conversation today around what it was that made you want to go into law in the first place because I think that the decision to go into Any high cost career usually starts from a place of good intentions, hope, a dream, even though sometimes it doesn’t pan out the way that you had imagined and thought. So can you back us up in time to when you were first considering what was possible for you in your career in life? And what it was that made law and law school feel really interesting to you?

Jen Ruiz  5:27  

Sure. So when I was in college, I was very active in student government, and I was a political science major. So initially, I thought that I wanted to go into politics. And I saw that a lot of people who ran for office were lawyers at one point in time. So I thought that that was just a natural path for me moving forward. By the time I left college, I actually had decided that maybe politics wasn’t for me, just because I had gotten to the highest level of student government elections in college, and it can get really intense like the movie with Reese Witherspoon, like election. So much. And so it made me reconsider as to whether or not I wanted to do politics. But I knew that I still was interested in law, and that I still wanted to do something where I had the power to make a difference and to really use my skill sets, which were, you know, writing, speaking, not necessarily surgery, so not necessarily going into medicine. Not necessarily math. So wasn’t trying to be an accountant or an engineer. I knew I liked law. And it was interesting. So I went in there at first wanting to be a politician or national relations diplomat, something of the sort. But then when I was in law school, my passion became criminal law. And I thought I wanted to be a prosecutor, to the point where I actually did a lot of coursework and internships To that end, but for some reason, I just could not get hired in that position to save my life. I actually applied and got to the final interview stage with major offices all over the US, you know, the Bronx, Chicago, West Palm Beach, and at the end was never offered the position. And I was baffled because I had done everything right, right. Like I followed all the paths, and I done all the internships and I clerked for a judge at a felony trial court for a year after and I just couldn’t understand what the problem was. And now in retrospect, I’m realizing that it was not meant for me, and that all of these things helped lead me to the path that I’m at now. And I’m grateful that I didn’t get a job in Baltimore City as a prosecutor, while I would probably still be entrenched in some of the heaviest, you know, murder rape cases, and I would not, I don’t know that I’d want to deal with that in my day to day basis, so that I would be able to do it on a sustained basis. So I’m grateful for it now. But at the time, I didn’t understand. And I just felt like I tried so hard to manufacture this outcome, and I couldn’t. So what I ended up doing was moving to Florida to pursue, but I mean, I, if I was going to be kind of doing any kind of private firm law, which already I was not passionate about, because I knew my goal was to help people, right. So if it was going to be in the criminal world, if it was going to be in the nonprofit world, which I eventually ended up in. That was the goal. So I wasn’t very passionate about working for a private firm. But I moved to Florida thinking that at least if I’m going to be working for a private firm, I’ll be doing so somewhere that I really like I had gone to undergrad in Florida and I missed the weather. And so I worked at a Social Security Disability firm for two years, while I was there before I ended up at legally doing nonprofit law, which was, I would say, the closest to a perfect legal job that I could find all the things that I hated about law, you know, working until midnight, nobody valuing your work life balance, you know, all kinds of no time off. And courage, like Legal Aid was the opposite of that. And they paid for your student loans, like we paid you a stipend, and your student loans were forgiven on top of that. So it was everything taken care of a job where you’re out by 5pm every day with great co workers, and you’re making a difference, and you have great benefits. So it was great. But it wasn’t it. And I think that that was something that was very clear to me because I was content in a nice place. Naples, Florida was beautiful. I had lovely coworkers, we would do a weekly trivia team. But I just knew that that wasn’t it for me, right? I didn’t want to be there forever and ever and just think 20 years later, okay, this is what I did with my life. So I started then at that point, I had already been in this whole transition. And this whole period in which I was trying to get from private firms illegally, which was like the dream legal job. I had been trying to find a creative outlet. And that’s when I had started blogging and freelance writing. So I had already been blogging and freelance writing for years, I’ve rebranded my website twice, I knew that that was something I kept wanting to do in my spare time, even if it wasn’t necessarily bringing me a lot of money or anything like that. It was just something that I kept carving time out for regardless. And now I’m seeing that it was because it was something that I was really passionate about. And then all the aspects of law that I loved were related to storytelling, and those same skill sets that I use now. So in retrospect, I see where all the puzzle pieces Fit. But definitely along the way, it felt like I kept hitting walls. And I couldn’t understand why.

Lisa Lewis Miller  10:06  

Well, let’s take you and your story back to that moment when you were working at legal aid in sort of that the most perfect opportunity that could exist for this, this sort of like Plan B trajectory that you found yourself on. How did you know that that wasn’t it? What told you,

Jen Ruiz  10:27  

I was more excited to do the things on the side than I was to actually go to my job, like I was more excited to do the freelance writing to do the blogging to do everything else. And I knew I didn’t want to excel. So I’ve always been president of this club, you know, like volunteering for everything. I wanted to do the bare minimum. So if there was a volunteer event, I tried to find a way to get out of it. Like I didn’t want to stay longer. I didn’t want to join any of the young lawyers, organizations, like I hated the meetings that I would have to go to with the judges like barristers, meaning that they meet once a month, and I would dread them because I would just, it would be the same catered food lineup, and then we’d all sit in this fancy room, and then we’d all talk and make blog jokes. And it was just so miserable for me to not enjoy it at all, I wanted to be anywhere else, I would always try to make an excuse to leave early. And that’s how I knew like I didn’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else doing other things. And I didn’t want to grow up to be these people, right? Like, I am so happy that there’s so much power and influence on money in one room. But I want nothing to do with it. Because it’s just like, so. So many legal jokes that were not funny, Lisa, like, sitting there, like, why is this happening? And they’re all good people, but it just wasn’t something I was passionate about. And it just wasn’t something that I really wanted to devote extra time to. So that’s how I knew that it wasn’t it for me.

Lisa Lewis Miller  11:55  

How did it feel to come to that realization after having been thinking about being a public advocate in some form, for years and years, and putting in all the time and effort at school and creating this identity around law?

Jen Ruiz  12:12  

Yeah, it was weird because I do get a kick out of prestige and money and influence, right? Like, those are the things that generally I really liked to be around. And I always really wanted to be in that space. And I love to be in the room of like the decision makers and to discuss like the behind the scenes of the case, and to be the one that gets to see all of the evidence, whereas the jury only sees some of it, you know, I love that access. And I love that feeling of like making and molding law and society, I really I still find it fascinating. But it just wasn’t clicking for me on a day to day basis. And it was a slow realization. So at first I was like, well, it’s just because I’m here or it’s just because I’m in this type of firm. And if I go to a different firm, it’ll be different. Or it’s just because I’m in this city, right? Because Naples is a significantly older population. If I was in Miami, it would be different, it’d be much more exciting to be part of the young lawyers. So I kept thinking to myself all these justifications. But no matter where I went, because I went to different states in different cities in different places, I still didn’t enjoy it. To that end, what I liked most in law school was the competitive aspect of trial team. I love competing abroad the same way that in undergrad I did Model UN like I love those team building activities, and I love going and doing those activities together. But the day to day of law, the paperwork, the windowless offices, the people whose problems you solve, and then come back a week later with the same problem. The attorneys that asked you if you’re the paralegal because you’re young, and you’re female, you know, like all of that I just could do without. It just became very, very clear to me, especially because what I was most passionate about were all the things that I felt I had to sneak in on the side, like all of the different writing at one point, I was working for Pik firm, which is just like an insurance kind of people reprocessing firm, I was pending my Florida Bar clearance when I first moved down to Florida. And I would actually make it a challenge to like get all of that what I felt like was menial, like just busy work out as soon as I could like within an hour and then spend the rest of the day pretending to work. But actually writing articles for elite daily, which was the first big like publication that would publish me and they paid me nothing. But I would spend like my day because they would send out hot topics. And I would spend that day trying to get out as many articles for hot topics as I could to be published with them and seen by them and build my portfolios. That was what I was more passionate about. That was what I was trying to sneak in and find ways to do, not my actual job and so it just became very clear to me that my passion was elsewhere.

Lisa Lewis Miller  14:49  

That can be a really challenging thing to wrestle with. I think that in the Career Clarity Show book, we talked about that the stages of the grief process. We don’t really refer to it as it’s like anymore since you don’t go through it in one prescribed order but that it sounds like you you wrestled with a lot of pieces of the grief process the sort of bargaining of like well if i’m just doing this in miami that’ll feel better the the desire to find these other things to fill your time and to give you these creative outlets and i’m curious when you first i mean it sounds like you did your very first creative writing before you were even practicing law while you were waiting for your bar clearance to come through did that freak you out at that point that you are enjoying writing and doing these creative things for elite daily so much and that you are about to step into a nine to five that did not really utilize that skill set

Jen Ruiz  15:49  

well it started first with my blog which at the time that i rebranded twice so at the time it was 20 sheep and i had started it to talk to people who were kind of struggling in their 20s having just gotten out of school it wasn’t a very sustainable blog i’m no longer in my 20s but i thought that it would be good to just have an outlet at the time blogging was not seen as a career so i did not expect it to be one i thought it was just going to be something i did on the side if i got free stuff out of it great if i got paid you know 50 bucks here and there even better i at no point expected it to grow into my full time job and that’s where again i feel like maybe rejection is redirection so i’m very happy that all of the avenues they closed for me to not become so all consuming that i didn’t have the ability to explore what i actually really enjoy doing and i can’t imagine doing anything else right now i can’t imagine if my life had been just like stuck in that place and if i had never known i’ve been able to travel to all these places and meet the people that i know from around the world and have the experiences that i have so i love what i do now but it would have just never been a career that i thought was possible legitimately you know and actually making money off of it at the time when blogging was just getting started now you can definitely make six figures or more as a blogger easily in passive income so it’s a really lucrative field that people are understanding more and more but at the time it was just i needed an outlet and something fun to do on the side

Lisa Lewis Miller  17:15  

i love that and you know the story that you’re sharing is like so so many people that we have on the show have that when you have the reckoning moment and the realization that what you’re doing in sort of your your full time employment is not helping you feel the way that you want to feel giving yourself the space and the permission to explore other things purely for the joy purely for the curiosity the enjoyment the stretchiness of them it never really seems to start with the intention of becoming a full time shebang and then inevitably the more time and energy you put towards it if it’s feeling good and exciting in life giving opportunities present themselves we just had somebody on the Career Clarity Show named miles biggs and his story is so similar so if you’re listening to this and you want to hear more examples of giving yourself space to play with a curiosity and an interest and see how that can then manifest in a totally new direction for your career check out the show notes will link to miles is episodes that you can take a peek at that but it’s that experimentation process and the playfulness of that is so cool and it also feels like part of what made it successful was that there wasn’t pressure on it at least at first to be your be all end all.

Jen Ruiz  18:36  

Exactly and i actually felt a little bit insulted every time because i had a lot of them that went viral and so every time they would somebody be like it’s elite daily paying you for this like what is what because what else would a lawyer do with their time if not bill you know $400 an hour for whatever it is that they’re working on and i’m just like no that was completely free and i understand why people looked at it that way but for me having that like and now as a blogger i wouldn’t say you know get paid for exposure because people have to pay rent but having that ability to be on a major platform as somebody who had never written you know professionally before other than legal paperwork was huge for me and to have that audience and that reach is what led to the new opportunities because it was from elite daily and then my post that went viral there with millions of views that i got an offer to then start as a travel writer specifically for pace magazine

Lisa Lewis Miller  19:28  

so tell me a little bit more about what that was like was it the kind of offer where you got it and you knew immediately you can quit your full time job you’re going to be good to go financially was there a lot of wondering and worrying and freak out that came with this idea of oh my gosh how do i how do i cut ties and completely walk away from the legal side of my life

Jen Ruiz  19:48  

so first i want to clarify that as a freelancer or blogger there’s never any point where you’re just like i got it made financially unsound everything’s gonna be okay and this past year prove that Because even the different income streams that I build up, were completely wiped out. So I feel like part of being an entrepreneur is being okay with riding the waves and understanding that you won’t have that level of security in the same way. But that’s okay. So that was not at all a secure, like full time job offer that was a we will pay you $150 per article that you write on travel, and I was sitting there like, great, I have not traveled absolutely anywhere. I’m a lawyer that is at like somewhere until like, a pm at night, and then I go home. And I do not think so actually, my first article for them was like, on how to have a staycation in your own city, like I really had nothing to write for them. And so that next year, I actually took a birthday trip to Barcelona with the goal of like writing more about Spain. And those eight days were a fight and my birthday falls, January 3, so it’s the holidays anyway, so courts are close, like it really shouldn’t be that hard to get time off. My goodness. I mean, I could barely just connect the people on my phone, were still calling me it was still like be grudging when I came back that I took that time off. And those were the little things that really chipped away of me when I was working for someone else, and why I could never go back to working for someone else again, because I cannot have somebody tell me like, No, you cannot take this time or No, you cannot do this, I love being able to set my schedule as I see fit. I think it’s ridiculous that I would have to be like a warm body in an office just to be a warm body in an office after the work is like done. And if there’s no work that needs to be done, like that blows my mind. And so I just could not do it. And so I started traveling that year, and then already so I went to my birthday trip in January already by April, I had the job with legal aid. And then I switched and then now having Legal Aid, I had more time off bank holidays, things like that. And that’s when I started traveling more and writing more for paste magazine. But we’re talking 150 bucks, one article every two, three months, like definitely not nowhere near ready to be quitting my job just at least now getting paid as a writer, which is awesome.

Lisa Lewis Miller  21:59  

Well, then let’s fill in the gaps in the story there. So you have this one paying gig as a writer. What happened between then and being able to walk away from working in the legal world.

Jen Ruiz  22:12  

So still not much like I didn’t have a million things set up before I just took a leap. So because and I remember when I did, I had a consultation with a friend and appsumo was like let’s talk about your monetization methods. And I was like other people would have been much more cautious and would have set aside a ton of money not me. I’m just like whatever. I can always waitress I waitress for many years in college, I was like worst case scenario, I can make 100 bucks a day if I decide to start waiting tables. So I felt confident knowing that I had ways of making money, right? I was still young, capable, able bodied, like I felt Okay, very, like I have skills that can be used for different jobs. But between that gig and the time that I quit, I had my 12 trips in 12 months challenge before my 30th birthday. So I set out to take one trip every single month before my 30th birthday to celebrate just the end of my 20s. I did as many trips as I could I took sick days, like I had one sick day where I was out in a balloon in the middle of Albuquerque and my boss definitely suspected. But I didn’t feel bad about it. Because I’m in a hot air balloon in the middle of Albuquerque during like an international festival where there’s 500 other balloons around me and this is magical. And do I regret being here as opposed to in my windowless office fielding calls from men who are calling me the paralegal? No, no, I do not. So that was amazing for me. And I just took everything I possibly could and made the most out of it to the point that at the end of that year, I have used all of my days, and it was either continue. And now I kind of suffer a year to gain a phase back or quit. And so in December, I had kind of already decided that I was going to quit. Something that had helped me is that in February of that year of adventure, I had already started working online teaching English in the mornings before work. So I would teach English every morning, couple hours, two and a half, three hours. And so I also knew that I could just teach English online like maybe I couldn’t live in the US and do that. But I could definitely live in Asia for at least a year teaching English online and have enough money to support me with nothing else. So that was good. And then but by the end of that year, I decided that before I quit, I should probably you know test some concepts. So I decided to write my first book on affordable flights. It did really well became a bestseller won an award. And that was all I needed one book proof of concept that I’m done. I quit. So one book as an income stream on Amazon, my teaching job that I need to sustain full time outside of the US. And yeah, just the confidence that knowing that I could always apply for more jobs, do more freelance gigs, things like that, and that if I was going to take a leap, it was going to be at that point in time when I was 30. Single, you know, no children, no pets. No No obligations to stay anywhere. But it was a good time to try something different.

Lisa Lewis Miller  25:07  

That is one courageous story. I think that’s, that’s awesome to be thinking about it in that way. And I can imagine there are probably some people listening who are thinking well, oh, Jen, what about your loans from law school? What about your friends and family? Did you actually leave the US? So the villain some of the blanks in the story here?

Jen Ruiz  25:26  

Yeah, yeah, so let’s discuss loans from law school are on a pay as you earn program. So I figured, if I’m earning the money that I’m earning as a teacher, then I’m going to pay based off of that, which is going to be like 50 bucks a month, because it was all federal loans that I have, I didn’t have any private loans. So all federal loans are eligible for the income based repayment plans. So I just figured, if I’m earning very little, I’ll be paying very little, it’s not going to be like $1,000 a month, I have to pay for loans. So that was easy. And then also thinking that federal loans can only be if you’re on the income based repayment plans that can only be held against you for 20 years. So worst case scenario, I’m paying the bare minimum of my federal loans for 20 years, and then letting the rest of that go. Also understanding that with a full scholarship to loss to college, and a $50,000 scholarship to law school, I still have more than $250,000 in loans. So I just thought that was ridiculous. I was personally affronted by my loan amount. And I was not going to spend my life working to make five grand a month and then paying all of that to loans and then just eating hot dogs and sitting in my like shack apartment every day like no, I refuse to go out like that. So I had already had the backup that worst case scenario, Income Based Repayment for 20 years until they’re forgiven. But I had known leaving the nonprofit that I wanted to continue the nonprofit repayment plans was just 10 years in the public sector. So 10 years working for a 501 c three recognized organization. And I happen to have a background in law. So I just started my own 501 c three organization. And so working on the public interest repayment plan through that,

Lisa Lewis Miller  27:01  

What was the nonprofit you started?

Jen Ruiz  27:03  

People of Puerto Rico, my nonprofit here in Puerto Rico, to help entrepreneurs develop online income streams?

Lisa Lewis Miller  27:11  

Excellent. Sounds like you were really strategic and thoughtful about how do I game the system? Like what’s available? How do I work around this to make it work on my terms?

Jen Ruiz  27:20  

Yeah, I mean, I was already on a public service loan forgiveness plan, I already had two years towards that. And I just knew that I wasn’t I seen a lot of my colleagues do it, they went to go work for top 100 firms and to make their 10k a month, and then they just paid most of that towards loans with the goal of paying it off. And just to me, money was never my motivating factor. So I never wanted to pay off the loans to then amass a ton of money and then just have like, my pool of money to turn around. And like Uncle Scrooge, like that was never my fantasy, I care more about exchanging that money for as many experiences as possible, versus just sitting there and being like, well look at all my money. Like, for me, money is a means to an end. And I feel again, very confident because I am still young, I’m able bodied. And I know I have the skills to do jobs, that would make me money. in many different ways. I’ve always worked, I’ve worked since I was 15. You know, I’ve worked in nursing homes and restaurants. And I’ve worked all throughout school, I had three jobs in law school. So I know I can find work, and I know I can always find work, that’s going to make me money, but it’s not gonna make me happy, not so much. And so teaching was something like that, that maybe it wasn’t my passion, but it was something that was paying me 20 bucks an hour. And I could set my own schedule and do from anywhere in the world. So good enough that I could use that as a way to get by until I built my other income streams.

Lisa Lewis Miller  28:37  

Well, let’s talk about that part of the story then. So you take the leap, the end of December, you’re out of days, you go for it, you got some writing, you’ve got teaching, you are founding a nonprofit. What was the first year like for you?

Jen Ruiz  28:54  

The first year, I really focused on books, I wanted to get those that income stream up and to build my expertise to become an author to have something that people could better relate to instead of blogger, because not everybody knows what that is. So I wanted a more formal title, it losing my title, like I’m still a lawyer, and I still use it sometimes when I feel like I’m being pushed around. And I’m just like, actually, it’s Esquire. But I miss that. Like that was something. One of the things I missed the most, it’s being able to like sign my title everywhere and be having that difference when people hear that you’re a lawyer. Like when they’re like, Well, what do you do? And then they never expect me to say lawyer because I look young and whatever. And so when I do, they’re like, Oh, I miss that immediate reaction. Whereas now it’s like, oh, I’m a blogger, and I go like a whole different reaction. And I do miss that like sense of authority and knowledge and immediate kind of prestige that came with telling people I was a lawyer. So out of all the things that I missed the most. That was it and that’s part of why I’ve worked so hard to become recognized and other ways to apply for these awards. to you know try to reach bestseller status to give the tedx talks because these are things that are more easily recognizable by people and then i’m more than quote unquote just a travel blogger

Lisa Lewis Miller  30:10  

well and that strategy is one that is a fabulous thing for anybody who’s considering a career change to be thinking about how you could do something like this in your own path we talked about this a lot in the Career Clarity Show approach when we talk about phase two and a bit of phase three when it comes to making a change which is that you need to have some proof provable expertise proof that you are who you say you are proof that you walk your talk and having things like a book having things like a book with the bestseller having things like a tedx talk having these external markers can help for somebody to see that you’re not just saying that you’re a writer you’re not just saying that you do these things but that there’s something else tangible to point to that shows that you are you’re legit and you’re credible and that you can do what you say you want to do and that you say you can do in order to open up new and different opportunities for you i love that you were always thinking so strategically about how do i build reputation how do i build this sense of being trusted in this space

Jen Ruiz  31:12  

yeah and it was something that i saw other people doing and so i remember looking at big blogger sites and going to their about page and being like oh my goodness this person has written for like natgeo and this person has won all these awards and so it was just things that i started gathering and seeing what made this person so revered in the space and how could i mimic those actions so i never look at other people doing things like competition i look at it like almost inspiration that i could do it as well right because if they’ve paved the way now a blogger has already gotten this award this means it’ll be easier for me to get that award moving forward so i love seeing what others in the space are doing to motivate me to apply for awards and to reach out for press trips and to you know go to conferences and apply to be speaker so those are all the different things that i started to pursue but none of that really comes overnight and it does take time and building your brand and i think i respect a lot of my friends that do it while still working a full time job but i think i really needed to have the ability to devote my full creative energies to it versus going to work and then having my leftover energy at the end of the day going to something like if i wanted it to build it into a full time job

Lisa Lewis Miller  32:24  

awesome and i think that’s a really helpful perspective too is that a lot of people want to make a change but they they sometimes don’t get really honest with themselves about what kind of energy and action and time it’s going to take to make the change and if you say that you want to make a change but you’re only putting an hour a week towards making it happen it totally may still happen right if you’re using an incredibly effective efficient hour but if you can open up more space if you can stop doing some things now to do what matters most right now to open up doors and possibilities it makes the process so much faster excuse me so much faster so much easier and oftentimes a lot more fun because there’s less of this friction and this conflict of feeling like you’re being pulled in so many directions you know when you can make the decision and say nope i’m not doing this anymore for this period of time in order to double down on what matters most for me right now there’s a certain amount of of ease because the decision has been made and i know in my own story of entrepreneurship back in the day i used to be really active as a singer i used to be a part of a all women’s competitive barbershop acapella choir and it had been so life giving it was so joyful to have that community of women it was so lovely to get to be singing and dancing and having fun and learning music and stretching myself in those ways and when it came time to create my corporate exit plan i knew for as much joy and fun as this is bringing me in my life it’s not the most important thing right now and i can always get back into this later which i totally did i think it was back in 2018 2017 2018 that i came back to acapella after having run the business for several years but i just knew that that was a trade off that once i made it would open up the time and the space and the mental clarity to do what mattered most to move closer to my dreams

Jen Ruiz  34:33  

i totally see you being a part of the pitch perfect cast

Lisa Lewis Miller  34:36  

you know i that that is absolutely life goal i think pitch perfect five when you’re casting please call me so jen let’s forward to you to present day what does life and work look like for you in the here and now

Jen Ruiz  34:53  

so present is a little bit different than what i thought it would look like because the last year the pandemic has completely wiped out all of my travel related income streams so when i started i was feeling really good about this year because i had built up a couple of things that i didn’t have when i quit so i had a blog and it had been present for a while which was good because in google’s eyes the age of your website is part of what helps it rank but i didn’t know a lot about writing you know for google search engines i didn’t know about how to search for what people were looking for all of that right seo and i went to one of my 20 trips in 12 months because i ended up being 20 trips instead of 12 i went crazy it was like an amazing race at the end and one of those trips was to a travel conference so my first travel conference and it was there that i did two things i took a writing class with a very respected writer that was amazing and then i also at another conference went to an seo workshop live all day and so both of these things helped me one home my storytelling skills for freelancing that’s what helped me win awards later on and get published in other places washington post matador network all of these were from pitching my article like having an article idea and sending it to the editor and hoping that they assigned it to me and then doing a good job writing it and hopefully you get more assignments moving forward and then but i didn’t really like freelancing i have a lot of friends that do it and do really well my friend lola mendez is a wonderful freelance writer she makes five figures in a month but she is pitching like 500 articles on and she’s following up with everybody and she has major spreadsheets like i mean it’s insane how much pitching she does to get the assignments that she gets so for me it wasn’t steady enough freelancing was always a good extra like if you’re gonna pay me $500 to write this article great awesome but i’m not counting on that $500 every single month now because it’s just not likely and so it’s a good bonus when it comes around and it’s a good extra income stream but it’s not my most reliant reliable income stream one of the ones that was very reliable that got completely wiped out was blog ad revenue so once i could get my website views up i could have ads on a site that could just charge people for virtue they could pay me for virtue of being there i’m like uh however if i get 1000 views i’ll get like 20 to 40 bucks per per 1000 views so if i was getting 3000 views a day i could be making anywhere from 60 to 120 bucks a day and that was passive just for having a website it’s already up and i love that so much and so my goal was just to scale back write more articles do more of that right and because it was such a great i’m with a great publisher program it’s really it is somewhat reliable but then in march nobody’s traveling anymore so absolutely nobody’s searching for things to do in rome or you know best cafe in thailand like nobody cares about any of that anymore they’re all searching for how do i cut my own hair and how can i work out at home so those blogs did amazing and their traffic spiked and they’ve been making six figures easy on those bloggers food bloggers have cleaned up this past year okay because everybody’s trying to cook food bloggers have just been off the charts somebody made like $1,000 in a day just from their food blog and my media vine publisher thing like a passive income just from how many people were on that site travel bloggers have not had that year it has been a very different year for us and while everybody else is skyrocketing and our earnings have plummeted so i was making a few 1000 a month in ad revenue and it went down to like $4

Jen Ruiz  38:35  

in a month so it was awful just completely wiped out my books same thing so my first three books were travel books and they were earning more than 1000 a month and then nobody’s searching for travel stuff anymore so then that income gets wiped out completely i published my fourth book in april about 25 ways to work from home that did really well i started going on tik tok because it was a new social media channel i had the time actually in the last text talk that i was in a journalist told me that if i wanted to get into video i would be better off on tik tok than youtube in terms of getting exposure and that she felt like that was where it was going to be next so i got on tik tok and then next thing i know tik tok blows up and i had like 100,000 plus followers sean t finds me on tik tok and like invites me to be on his podcast and tells all his people to follow me and so somehow along the way tik tok actually saved my site traffic that had plummeted like now i’m getting 10,000 views a week just from tick tock because i put in a link and i have like a link to different things that i’m sharing and now that is my top link on my website my business like i just put my books there and that’s how my books have done well i haven’t pushed for reviews or anything and i see that people are constantly going because it’s linked on my desktop i linked a forbes article there that i was featured in forbes this year you know like so it’s been crazy so i just i pivoted a little bit from it A lot of it from travel to entrepreneurship. And so I was sharing on tik tok my digital entrepreneurship tips how you write for somebody how you pitch an article, how you can teach English online, how you can start a blog and monetize it, how you can get sponsored campaigns, all those things. And I’m still trying to do that now. I had a coding boot camp that found me, and they actually hired me to do their tic tocs. So that became a good additional income stream. But it’s one that I’m grateful as on a contract basis, because I found that while I’m creating for them, it means I’m not creating for me, and then it’s taking me back to that initial place that I was at with wall where I, I want to build my brand, I don’t want to build the brand of others. And I think that that’s been very difficult for me, because they’ve been wonderful and have given me a lot of opportunity and asked me to come on full time with them. And I was just like, no, because if I’m building your brand, it means I’m not building mine. And it was it’s getting easier and easier to turn down these offers and I never thought I’d be getting offer a senior marketing position for a startup what as a non marketer, right? I don’t have a marketing degree, like I don’t have it. But these people are asking you because I know. And I take the time to really understand concepts, which I think is just the lawyer in me, right? Like I don’t just do things willy nilly. And so I really do enjoy tik tok as a platform, I think it has shown a lot of great conversion for them and grow for them. So Tick Tock was really a blessing in disguise. This past year, my entrepreneurship around getting featured now and all these different things entrepreneur, and Forbes and getting into a lot of virtual speaking engagements, which is also a concern because all of my in person conferences were canceled. But I actually was able to do more speaking engagements this year, because I didn’t have to add the travel to it. So I could just show up from my computer.

Lisa Lewis Miller  41:45  

So it sounds like the bottom line for you has been that when entrepreneur ship has thrown you for a loop, because the market has changed. life has changed, whatever. You are just so motivated. And so energized to learn something new, try something new, play with something experiment, see what works, really create content, pretty speedily so that you can ship quickly, you can test quickly, you’ll get feedback back if things are working or not quickly. And that willingness to be adaptable and flexible and fluid and pivot as you need to is such a huge, huge piece, successfully navigating and learning how to thrive and entrepreneurship. So Jen, I’ve loved everything about your story and sharing the really unique ways that you’ve been thinking about opportunities and creating them for yourself and navigating, making decisions. And so for people who are listening to this who want to learn more about you and your background and what you’ve been up to and what you’re going to be doing what are the best places for them to keep in touch.

Jen Ruiz  42:49  

You can find me on my website Jenonajetplane.com on TicTok Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, all the socials. I still manage them at Jen on a jet plane and on Amazon. My books are under agenda, please, if you’re interested in any of the ones that I’ve mentioned.

Lisa Lewis Miller  43:04  

Wonderful. Well, Jen, thank you for being so candid about sharing everything that you’ve been up to and doing as you have been navigating your own way to Career Clarity Show. 

Jen Ruiz  43:12  

Thank you, Lisa.

Lisa Lewis Miller  43:20  

And that’s the wrap. Let us know what you thought about today’s episode. leave us a review on Apple podcasts because not only can your stars and words help us find great guests and topics to feature on future episodes. Your input also helps other people find the resources they need to discover the work that lights them up. And make sure to check out my book Career Clarity Show finally find the work that fits your values and lifestyle for the link to order it go to GetCareerClarity.com/book. And don’t forget to get your other tools resources and helpful goodies at GetCareerClarity.com/podcast. Thanks again for joining us for the Career Clarity Show today. And remember, if you don’t love your work, we should talk because life is too short to be doing work that doesn’t light you up. Talk to you next time.