Discovering Your Inner Purpose

Dr. Benjamin Ritter is a leadership, career and empowerment coach. He is a national speaker, podcaster, author, mentor and he’s passionate about guiding others in finding and creating a sustaining career they love. With many years of experience coaching and a background in organizational leadership and adult learning theory, he understands how to navigate any career path you decide you want to travel. Since launching his coaching practice, he’s guided hundreds of professionals towards creating the career they love and impacted thousands through his events and media content.

From empowering young professionals to take accountability and feel empowered over their own job level with satisfaction to guiding senior leadership on how to stand out from the competition, develop executive and discover meaningful work. Ben is an expert in his field and guides people towards truly living for yourself at work and in life. I get to call you Ben because we’re friends as opposed to Dr. Benjamin. Welcome to the show.

Please call me Ben. You can call me Neb sometimes. For some reason, people want to turn my name around.

You and I are relatively new to living in Austin and that’s part of the joy is getting to meet people. We both are also from Chicago. It’s been fun to look at the similarities and our passion for helping people in different ways. Would you mind taking us back to your own story of origin? You can talk about childhood or school and where you got this premise of, “I’m going to live for myself.” I don’t think that’s normally a concept that we think about. I’m sure there’s a great story of origin there.

I never thought I’d be a coach. I still don’t think I’ll be a coach, even though I’m a coach. At every single major turning point and milestone in my life, especially the ones where I felt lost, stuck, underutilized and questioning things, having those existential moments that we all tend to have, coaching popped up. The first time it ever happened, I was training to become a professional athlete in college and I didn’t make it. There were many things that happened to that.

I had my major canceled in college. I had hip surgery when I thought I was going to go abroad and play. I went abroad to play and got told that if I stay there, then I might have a chance, but I only had a semester left in school. There were many different rough points in that separate story. I lacked confidence there. When you set yourself up to achieve something outside of yourself, all you do is focus on achieving it. You hold yourself accountable to that and you define who you are by that, and then you don’t achieve it. Along the way too, you struggle to achieve it. You experienced some tough internal dialogues.

When I finally realized that I wasn’t going to make it, when I realized that I had to make the decision to make this my main priority or take away this priority for my life, I had to figure out how to redefine who I was. Luckily, we had the internet then. It wasn’t still that prominent, but I went online and searched something along the lines of, how to be confident, how to find yourself, what is the meaning of life? All of these keywords that you think you might type if you’re questioning life and searching for them on the internet, which is an interesting strategy, which I don’t think is as interesting nowadays.

What came up was this field of personal professional development. What came up were articles upon articles and books upon books on how to become more attractive, how to become more confident, how to become successful in business. It was never, “This is the meaning of life.” You’re probably more likely to find books like that nowadays than you were back in 2005. In my search engine results, that didn’t pop up. I spent the next 4 or 5 years studying that industry, studying all the material I could find, and not just studying it though, but going out and applying it.

As I mentioned, confidence was a big issue of mine. All of the material that you find on confidence as it relates to men is mainly focused on attraction, dating and being social. I would go out by myself to bars. I would walk up to strangers on the street. I would do things to make myself extremely uncomfortable to ensure that I never felt those things were uncomfortable. I probably lend a lot of those experiences to my stage presence, my ability to walk into a room, to my networking capabilities nowadays. That was the first little pinpoint in my life where coaching became influential and became something important to me.

If you fast forward a little bit, coaching came back when I got out of grad school. I couldn’t get a full-time job for about two and a half years because of the recession. I wanted to work in the federal government and public health policy at that time. I was doing some work for the Illinois Department of Public Health. I thought I was going to keep doing work for the Illinois Department of Public Health after grad school but the world had a different story. It had something else planned for me. I got a job offer from the Illinois Department of Public Health, from the CDC, and from two other health departments, but they were all canceled after I signed them.

It was almost like clockwork into the next day or within three days, they were pulled back due to funding. That was a two and half-year period of time where I was getting a job and then not getting a job. I made it work. I bartended and then interestingly enough, I was out by myself one day being social, because this is a habit that I kept. Someone approached me and said, I know what you’re doing. You need to meet my boss. The next day, I ended up getting hired to run a nationwide bootcamp program for men in relationship to interpersonal dynamics. For the next year, I was leading men on bootcamps in how to be more social, how to be more attractive, and how to have more confidence. At the same time, I ended up getting federal funding for six months of free life coaching for public health professionals. This is hilarious because there was no funding for a job. It was a grant that I applied for through networking, through going off on my own and meeting people.

Coaching again came up. I never thought about it as a full-time job. It was always a way for me to make some side money. It was a way to develop because after working for this guy, I ended up seeing an opportunity starting my own business. I started my own coaching practice but again, as a side hustle, there was demand to make some money. Fast forward another 6 or 7 years, I’m working in healthcare which I got that job because of the networking and meeting someone across the bar. I get selected to become an executive in my system. Because of that, I get the opportunity to receive sixteen months of leadership training from our Director of People who was a coach, who then becomes my coach. All of a sudden, I realized, “This could be a job. I could do this for a living.” I’m sitting here going into work on a daily basis feeling stuck, underutilized and feeling like, “This isn’t the place that I belong.”

Every job I’ve had up to that point was a reaction to the environment that something I needed to do because I needed to put money in the bank. I needed to create a career journey for myself. I finally felt empowered at that point in time to ask myself, “What is it that I want to do? What are my strengths?” I now have control. I have the ability to live for myself at this very instant. I don’t have to be held in handcuffs to the economy or to what people think I’m able to do or not able to do. I went and asked my coach, “How do I do what you do? How do I do this?” We came up with a little bit of a plan. I went back to my boss. I asked her to be involved in the talent development space. She said, “You can do this. Talk to the department. Get involved in projects.” I had a lot of energy for the first time in probably six years at this job. I felt like I was going to do something that I wanted to do, and then we got acquired. Everything I was going to do stopped.

I’m proactive and action-oriented, so plan B is I’m going to find a job in this field. All of them were about half my salary because I had no resume experience in this other than my side coaching business coaching men. That doesn’t make a resume seem lofty. I don’t have a lot of expertise in talent development and coaching individuals from my side business, at least not on my resume. I’ve been running this coaching practice for 5 or 6 years. I have experience doing this. I know I’m good at it because I got hired to do this in the past and I have a lot of media attention for it. I was writing for AskMen and Men’s Health at that time. I was getting interviewed on a live stream Facebook show with 100,000 or 200,000 people. I can prove it. I was in the Apollo Theater in Chicago as a panelist for The Great Love Debate.

There was stuff that was like, “You’re good at this,” but it wasn’t the industry I wanted to do it in. I’m like, “I’ll take all this knowledge and I’ll start my own business again. I know how to do this, but I’m going to do it in an industry that I’m passionate about, that I care about.” This is always a theme in my business development stages. How do I get seen as someone credible with no experience here? How do I sell myself to individuals? I’m like, “I know how to get media attention, but I’m still 30 and I want to work with executives. How does that work? I want to work with managers. I want to go into organizations. How are they going to believe me? I’m going to get my doctorate. I’m going to get the golden key to open up the door to at least get people to listen to me.” That led to me getting published in this field because I got to do some research in it and I got to speak on it. It did skyrocket my business. It probably sped up the timeline for more than a few years in terms of becoming successful. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past few years.

That’s not an easy feat getting your PhD, but that gives you the credibility. A lot of people write a book to try and get that credibility, but the PhD is at a whole other level of commitment and time. What I hear as a consistent theme is a lot of resilience going on. This awakening that you were stuck in something that you didn’t love and there are many people out there that feel that same way and because you’ve been in their shoes, you know what it feels like. The irony of you can change jobs, but you still have similar challenges if you’re not doing what you love. Would that be a fair assessment?

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