Pivotal Learning, Resilience, And Marriage With Howie Zales

 

Meeting the increasing need for top-notch streamed content is what Viridity Entertainment Services specializes in, catering to any format you may require. In this episode, joining Adam Markel is the man behind VES. Howie Zales of Viridity Entertainment Services reveals his pivotal learning point and how Viridity Entertainment offers its service. Talking about resiliency, Howie shares his story with Greg Norman, the Golfer. Howie also shares what creates that resilience in their marriage. Let’s take a bite of this meaty episode and join Howie for more!

 

SHOW NOTES:

03:59 – Howie’s Career

09:14 – Mentorship

12:52 – Viridity Entertainment Services

18:26 – Greg Norman the Golfer

26:45 – Resilience in Marriage

—

Get the newest Change Proof Podcast episode delivered directly to you – subscribe here. And, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please give us a 5-star rating on iTunes! For instructions click here.

How do we leverage continuous uncertainty to thrive in this unprecedented new world? 
The answer is to build the resilience we need to power us through the challenges we face so that we become “Change Proof.” Prepare to tackle the future with confidence by reading Adam’s latest book Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Pivotal Learning, Resilience, And Marriage With Howie Zales

I have a great guest. His name is Howie Zales. He is an Emmy Award-winning camera operator who started his career at the NFL Network in NBC Sports. His passion for broadcasting led him to found Viridity Entertainment Services, a streaming and professionally recorded in-house production service offering TV quality live streams to corporations. Clients include T-Mobile, Capital One, the Food Network, and the hip-hop group, Salt-N-Pepa. I know you’re going to love my conversation with Howie Zales. Sit back and enjoy.

—

Howie, it’s always fun to listen to your own bio. You’ve had a very storied career, very different things, but there’s a common thread throughline that we’ll talk about. My first question is, what’s not in the bio? We’ll keep it simple. What is one singular thing that’s not in your intro or your bio that you would love for people to know about you?

The most important thing to me is my family, my wife, and my kids. I’ve had the greatest career that people could have. I go to parties, and there are doctors, lawyers, and whatever else there. All people want to talk about are TV sports. What is it like to meet Michael Jordan and athletes? To me, I loved what I did, but family is the most important thing.

I’m with you there. We have something in common to begin with. You’ve done a lot of traveling throughout your career at one point. It’s like the old cliché or whatever. If they could put a ZIP code on a plane, that would’ve been my mailing address for some time, which is fun. I love to travel to this day, but getting home is what we’re all after. Let’s talk about the circuitous route to where you are now, but let’s not start with where you are currently. Let’s go back a ways, not randomly, but pick a spot. Is there an inflection point? Right before we hit record, I was showing you a copy of a book I wrote some years ago. This is the second edition of this in paperback now. It’s called Pivot.

Pivoting is a word in use nowadays. It was a word of art. When I wrote that book, I thought it was an interesting way to talk about it. Frankly, pivot has such a business connotation, but when I was thinking about the title of this book about personal and professional reinvention, having been a lawyer for a couple of dozen years before that book, I thought about basketball. That was the first concept for me. I grew up in a house where basketball was a major sport. My dad loved it. He played in college. It hurts to even say it to this day. It still hurts to say I’m a Knicks fan and I’m still somehow.

It’s brutal. It has only gotten more brutal. I get to see Spike Lee. We live half the year on the East Coast and half the year in California. Where I live on the East Coast, I get to see him fairly often and it’s awesome. It’s brutal. I don’t go to the games like he does and scream and yell. He’s quite a celebrity, but his pain is as great.

We all share the same pain.

In basketball, there’s a move called pivot. You can rotate all the way around 360 degrees on one foot and not violate the rules, not be traveling, walking, or anything like that. You could see the whole court. When I started writing this book, or more like when it was almost finished and trying to describe what the concept of a pivot is from the standpoint of seeing the court, being able to see what your options are before you make that next move, whether it’s to pass, shoot, or whatever. I want to get to that pivot point earlier on in your career or even in education, wherever it might be. What does that look like now that I’ve given you plenty of time to think about it?

My career has been a cluster of pivots. I wanted to play professional baseball in high school and I knew I needed a backup plan. I had one spot for an elective and the course description that I was looking at said it was a TV production class. The description said a trip to NBC studios with a tour and to watch a TV show being taped. I was like, “How bad can that be?” I ended up falling in love with television production. I already loved sports, especially baseball. I knew I had to combine these two passions of mine. What better way to do that in a career? I only looked for colleges that had TV sports, but it’s a difficult industry to get into.

I ended up taking a job on Long Island right out of college as a production assistant. I pivoted right out of that production assistant job to become the lead editor at that company because when I did an internship in college, I learned how to use the same equipment at that internship that this production company had. When their editor left, it was a natural progression into that job, but I hated it. I took a job, eventually shooting TV news in the field with a reporter.

To anyone who would listen, I would tell them my ultimate goal was to be a sports camera operator. I wanted to shoot sports. Because of basketball, I would watch the NBA on NBC. Throughout college, I knew that I wanted to work for NBC Sports. That was my goal. One day, ESPN called the newsroom because they were doing a basketball game and a camera operator got sick. They were in desperate need. Because I would tell anyone who would listen what I wanted to do, they said, “We have someone who is dying to do this.” That was my first job in TV sports.

You get a random call, if you believe in random.

There’s no such thing.

You get this call that says, “This is the day. Are you ready to get behind the camera? About what age were you at this point?

I’d say 24. I then continued to do local jobs. That job became another job, and so on and so forth. I met a mentor. I was getting enough work that I gave up the news job and was, became a full-time freelance camera operator. About two years into that, from doing sports, I drive to do a few days in Boston Celtics, Bruins, and Red Sox, depending on the season, then do a few days in New York. One day, I got called by an outside company to do a horse race. The race was airing on NBC Sports from Belmont Park. It was airing on NBC, so they sent their top director at the time, John Gonzalez, who had done many Super Bowls. He did the NBA on NBC and whatever other events.

I did a good job. I hustled and I gave him more than he asked for. This was in 2000. He said, “Howie, you did a great job. We’re starting this new football league in February called the XFL. Would you like to be a part of it?” I said, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.” He said, “Why don’t you come to Notre Dame?” Notre Dame football airs on NBC Sports. “We’ll see how your football skills are. If you do a good job, we’d love to have you on the crew.” I ended up shooting Notre Dame football for over twenty years. I did the XFL that season and then wherever John Gonzalez went, Howie Zales went. I am so grateful for that.

He was a mentor, I’m assuming.

Yeah.

You’ve answered the question. I was going to ask how important are mentors nowadays, maybe more than ever before, because it feels to me, and I’m saying this not just with personal experience but also professionally speaking. Our own organization, Workwell, works with other organizations. Our company works with companies that are looking to make changes within their structure. Often those changes have to do with employee engagement and productivity and things, the usual stuff.

What I see in that space is less and less mentorship. Clearly, the pandemic is the culprit there. I have a research that as part of our research, we have yet to go back to see mentorship on the decline before the pandemic. Is this the continuation of a trend? I don’t think that’s the case, but as I’m speaking to you, I can’t say one way.

I want to get your thoughts on this. I see that the mentorship is for younger people coming into the workforce now. When you came in, you met Gonzalez. That was so important to you. It was pivotal. Do you see that mentorship is something that’s lacking in the environments that you’re around? Any thoughts on that?

Especially in our field, because it’s a difficult job. You can’t practice. You have nowhere to practice your skills. Mentorship or shadowing and having a mentor coach and teach are so important. I started a course and mentored people because it’s so difficult to get that in our industry.

You can't practice your skills, so having a mentor, coach, and teacher is important. Share on X

I don’t know what the trend is here because people are, in many ways, working differently and remotely and in hybrid situations, etc. The opportunity through Zoom to mentor somebody over a virtual platform is possible, but it is a little different than when you’re right there in proximity. A lot of those mentorship moments are not planned. They can be planned and often that is some of the advice that we give and that we can assist in implementing.

The fact of the matter is that often, it’s those unexpected conversations that happen because you’re in proximity to somebody else. You’re on the job together and you work through something. There’s a question that comes up or there’s an F up and that moment becomes a pivotal point of learning because something has gone sideways. The pivot that you have to make at the moment is the one that becomes a great teacher.

To your point, I mentored this guy Sean, who started as a utility on TV production shows. I gave him as much advice as possible. I said, “During your lunch hour, pick up the camera. Play with the camera and ask all the questions you can possibly imagine because one day, someone is not going to show up and be sick. You’re going to be on that show as a utility. I’m going to be able to call the client, “I have a solution to the problem because Sean is there. He knows how to use the camera. He knows the sport. Perfect fill and we’re covered.”

Lo and behold, that happened. Sean got his hockey debut because one of our camera operators got sick. Now Sean is one of the best camera operators in the country working Sunday night football for NBC sports. It goes to your point about having mentorship when called upon or when need be is huge.

Another thing that you and I have in common is that I’m off and on stages for corporate events. Those events are mostly filmed. Not always, but a lot of times they’re filmed for training purposes, but also they’re live-streamed out to groups of people that didn’t or couldn’t make it, didn’t feel comfortable making it, etc. You do that work as well. Your company provides that livestream service and everything that surrounds that.

Our company Viridity Entertainment or VES provides hybrid, in-person, or virtual live stream and event production. We do it for all different types of events, sporting events, concerts, corporate meetings, conferences, expos, etc.

 

There are a lot of things that can go wrong in a live production like that. Isn’t that right?

A ton can go wrong. What we find is that with a data set up/rehearse, we iron out all the bugs. We tell the client, “We’re going to try to make every mistake possible so we figure out what can possibly go wrong so we have a solution for that fire drill. We may look like we have no idea what we’re doing right now, but we know what we’re doing and we’re doing it on purpose. If this should happen, what is our solution?” The worst rehearsals turn out to be the best shows.

I had one for a bank. I’m not going to mention their name. I don’t know that I have approval to do that, but a big bank. We had our tech check our rehearsal for this. It was a virtual event for a couple of thousand people. It was a small little gathering, very intimate. We didn’t want anything to go wrong the day, of course. We never want to have to pivot in the moment. Primarily for time reasons, there are solutions. I had one happen where I was at a Four Seasons Hotel, a beautiful hotel. I love Four Seasons. They are an amazing group of folks. They had an internet issue there and I couldn’t believe it. I had to go back and forth between a hardwire and Wi-Fi.

I had to toggle back and forth probably seven times during an hour-long presentation because when one of those would cut out, the other one was available. Don’t ask me how that was the case, but that was the case. The clue that I would get as I was in the middle of my presentation was that in an hour, there was a lot that I wanted to cover and I didn’t want to lose time with logistics. Lots of speakers know this. You don’t waste time with filler words and things that don’t add value to an audience. They’re paying you a lot of money to be there and you’re going to value the whole way through.

I would get this little tiny circle that would show me that it was cutting out. I would literally go up and I would switch the connection and then it would be about a ten-second delay. They realized what was going on and I would pick up my sentence exactly where I left it off when that little circle appeared. It was a great demonstration, as what we were told by the organizers of it, of what resilience looks like, at least technically at that moment.

Certainly, in a live event with this bank, that rehearsal day was a total disaster. Everything that could go wrong with the systems seems to go wrong. Inexplicably so. I was an attorney for a lot of years, so I believe in logic, but it’s so funny that tech seems to defy logic at times. Without the day of it all imploding, we wouldn’t have had a flawless day the next day, which is what occurred. Talk to me about resiliency in the work that you do because there isn’t a lot of margin for error in those events.

I am always so sensitive to the AV guys because, for example, I’ll say, “I want to control my mic pack.” It’s going to sound silly, but if I need to cough, clear my throat, or whatever, I don’t want to cover my mouth and the mic. I want to be able to mute myself and then unmute. It’s a simple thing. They don’t like to give up control of that mic pack. I say to them, “I’m going to be responsible. I’ll be a good boy. I know exactly what happens. If, for some reason, I turn it off, then don’t turn it on or whatever, everybody is going to turn around and look at you. There’s so much pressure on the guys that are sitting behind the black skirting.

You’re smiling and laughing, but you know what I’m talking about. Everybody is going to point a finger. It could be that the idiot on stage can’t use the freaking clicker, doesn’t know how to find the forward button versus the backward button, or turn the freaking thing off. There are a million ways that somebody who is on that stage can mess it up, but they’re all going to look at the guys in the booth as though it’s on them.

Here’s the perfect example. Greg Norman, the golfer in the new golf league, LIV Golf. We did the livestream announcement for that from New York City from a hotel space. They wouldn’t let us into the room to set up the day before until 5:00 PM. They wouldn’t let us come for a site survey to check the internet speed. We get there and get into the room. The internet is lacking, to say the least. We finally get set up in a place that we’re not happy with, but it’s doable.

We asked to rehearse with Greg Norman because he is the prime speaker and he has PowerPoint slides and he will not rehearse. “No way,” we’re told. No one will stand in for him. The next morning, we got there, and he would not rehearse. I go up to him. I give him the clicker for the slides and will not rehearse. All of a sudden, at the beginning, he keeps pressing a button and advancing the slides. His person comes over and says, “We’re lost.” I’m like, “We begged you to rehearse.” It was a disaster. It was so embarrassing.

I won’t take our conversation in this direction. We have a good-sized audience, but it’s not like millions and millions of people are going to hear this anyway. I have a very definite opinion about LIV Golf. I’m a golfer. I love it. I have a very distinct opinion about Greg Norman. I guess it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy is what I would say.

It was embarrassing for us as the production company. To your point, where everyone looks at us, but we have no control over it.

I apologize. That sucks. I will ask you, what’s the most difficult situation you ever found yourself in that you also found a miracle? You found your way out of that. Looking at it at the moment, it seemed like it was nothing short of miraculous.

We did a live event in Orlando. We shipped our equipment down there and when we opened up the cases, it looked like someone tried to steal them, or they were turned inside out, all this equipment. One of the only things that got us on the air was I traveled with a whole backup system in my carry-on because I always have a backup to the backup. We made air, but it’s because we planned for a backup that we were able to make air.

I asked you earlier about resiliency and I’m guessing that what you described is somehow connected to your organization’s resiliency.

Also, surround myself with people who are a lot smarter than I am. If I’m the smartest person in the room, we have a definite problem. I hire a core group of people who are all freelance or who work when needed. If he’s not available and then my backup person is not available for a job, I’ll turn it down because I’m not going to put our company name on the line without the best people being available to work on it. It’s not worth it.

It’s so true. There’s wisdom in that. To turn down a business, to turn down money for a business small, medium, or large, it’s not a thing typically done if you don’t have to. As you said, when the team is so important, if you can’t work with your A-team, and you maybe have a second line, a third line of A-team players, people that you’d be comfortable putting in the seat. If you can’t work with those people, you do put your brand and reputation. You put so much on the line when you have to go a different route.

You put your brand, reputation, and so much on the line when you have to go a different route. Share on X

We did an event in New York City for Rayban sunglasses and they said they had an IT person there on site, but their version of an IT person and what a real IT person is were two different things. Their internet systems were controlled by their parent company which was located in Italy. We were on the phone from New York City, with Italy trying to fix their internet because they couldn’t do it here from New York in the building. It almost didn’t make air, but because of our smart people, we were able to come up with a workaround.

Let me ask you. I have my own opinion, but I want to get yours. What’s the most important quality in one of those team players to you?

Someone that’s not willing to give up until the solution is found. They remain calm, cool, collected, and professional. I don’t need someone screaming, yelling, and flipping out. I need you to remain calm, cool, collected, and professional.

That’s a good collection of things. I was thinking you truly have to be the eye of the storm. I appreciate that in every scenario in my life, whether it’s in personal matters or purely professional stuff. No matter how extreme the weather, the wind blowing, the chaos you might feel, the uncertainty, or whatever it might be, there’s this calm. Only good comes from that.

That’s how I got the name of my company, which is a weird name, Viridity. I went to a mastermind and one of the opening things that they talked about was when things go well in business or life and you react quickly, and positively, it’s called being in the blue zone. Conversely, if things go bad and quickly, you become angry or you can’t handle it, that’s called being in the red. However, if you’re even-keeled, no matter what the situation is, it’s called being in the green zone. I came home and I told my wife, “We need to find some word that means green that’s not money-related because that would be obnoxious.” My wife came up with the name Viridity and it flowed with entertainment services.

I like it. Thanks for explaining that. That makes total sense. It’s verdant. In Italian, it is Verde. Maybe that’s what happened with the people from Rayban. I forget the name of their parent company. We were up for a gig for them some years ago, and I can’t remember their parent company’s name. Luxottica. That’s right. That’s who. They’re massive. They might be the biggest eyeglass manufacturer in the world. I say nice things about Luxottica. On the personal side, how long are you married?

We celebrated our 10th anniversary.

When it comes to resiliency in terms of that relationship, and feel free not to answer if this is too personal, what creates that resilience in this marriage, this second go around that’s ten years in the process?

Plus, we work together.

You work together too. I work with my wife as well.

We like each other. We’ve known each other since high school. We grew up in the same town, just different high schools, but we have all the same friends from childhood. Our parents went on a trip to Israel when we were seniors in high school. They didn’t know each other and we didn’t know each other. Our parents became best friends and all of a sudden, I was going out to dinner with my parents, and Jenny and her parents would be there for accidental bump-ins. They tried setting us up for years and neither one of us listened. When we finally came clean to them about twelve years ago, they were like, “Finally, we’re family.”

That almost feels like a romcom-type scenario.

We enjoy each other’s company.

Resiliency there has to do with likability and compatibility. I just want to get the essence of what your take is on that.

We’re different in a lot of ways and we counterbalance each other, which makes for a good relationship. She’s good at certain things and I’m good at certain things and we go to each other for the things that we’re not good at. For example, I have a little dyslexia and I’m not a good writer. I will not send an important email out without her proofreading it. It won’t happen. I’m the more salesperson and when it comes time for the business side of the business like that, selling and knowing the technical side of the business, that’s my area. She takes care of the business side, the invoicing, the billing, and the math of the business. She’s the brains behind that part of the operation. We run our house together 50%. We share the responsibilities of being married and taking care of the house and family.

My wife Randi and I used to do relationship workshops and things like that, which we love to do. We’ve done them all over the world. We haven’t done it in a bunch of years. There’s so much nuance to it and obviously, everything is different based on the parties. It’s not like this one rule or one set of things for everybody.

I heard somebody say something about whatever you’re 50% is, you’re doing 100% of your 50%. You’re putting 100% effort into the piece that you’re responsible for. In the best relationships, it seems to me that people complement each other, as you said. We all have weaknesses. We have strengths and weaknesses. There are things we like and hate to do. It’s nice and it’s convenient when something that you don’t want to do and aren’t great at doing somebody else actually wants to do and is great at doing it. That doesn’t always align so perfectly across the board. It’s remarkable how often that is the case.

I traveled 4 or 5 days a week for twenty years. It was my wife Jenny who convinced me. She said, “You make more as an entrepreneur than Howie Zales makes as a camera operator.” We sat down, and she was like, “Look at the two columns. You’re working too hard as a camera operator to make this amount of money versus what the business makes.” That’s when I said, “I need to stop right away.”

A lot of people potentially might be pausing a moment right now to think in terms of how they’re operating their lives because it’s so interesting that we could be doing something and not seeing it. It’s like the goldfish that’s in the bowl in the water. It doesn’t know it’s swimming. It’s wonderful. How long ago is that she pointed that out to you?

About 5 or 6 years ago. I was always tired. In order to stay home the longest, I’d leave on a 6:00 AM flight and then travel home, taking a 6:00 AM flight home. You’re delirious when you do that, working long days in between that. The business is making far more money than I was as a camera operator. I loved what I was doing. I was having fun, but not at the expense of my health and being away and fitting everything in life.

 

That’s a clear pivot right there. I remember when I was commuting into Manhattan from where we were living at the time, we lived in Freehold, New Jersey.

That’s a long drive.

It depends. It could be an hour and a half on a good day, on a good commute, and three hours on a Friday afternoon. That’s both ways. When we decided to open a satellite law office in the town that we were living in New Jersey, for me to do Mondays and Fridays so that I could have these longer weekends with the family and stuff like that, that seemed to be revelatory at the time. My wife was integral in that as well as many other common-sense decisions that I was incapable of coming to just for being in it.

We’re often so in it and that’s why. Vacation time is important to take time to. Time to meditate. I hadn’t been a meditator until recently, which is remarkable. In fact, I gave a TED Talk some years ago where I declared that I’m a crappy meditator only because I didn’t try very hard and didn’t stick to it long enough to explore whether there was something in that for me.

I think for people who might be at an inflection point right now, maybe add a pivot point, please. Take the old Pivot book off the shelf. It’ll help. It’s helped me, oddly enough, which I won’t get into now. Meditation is another one of those things or any stillness practice where you can get quiet. Whether it’s even walking in the woods or surfing for me now where we live, walking out in the rain, or going out to look at the stars at night. Quiet time and meditation in particular for me now, it’s important to be able to come to some of those.

It’s obvious in hindsight that the change was a good one or it was needed. At the moment, people are deathly afraid. I don’t know how to say it. I was a lifeguard at Jones Beach. I don’t know if you know that I worked at Jones Beach. It’s a busy beach because all the buses went there. It’s where the boardwalk is and all that stuff. People in the water realize they’re over their heads even for a second, because the tide has pulled them out like a rip current. They might be in a little mild suck. As soon as they realize they can’t stand and that they’re going away from the shore, it’s panic that you see.

It’s like you see it. Change is very much like that. The idea of, “I’m so far into my career. I’d be twenty years as a camera operator. How on earth will I give this up? What will happen if I do? To be able to make those pivots requires clarity and a stillness that gives you confidence. Would you agree with that?

No doubt. To your point, I hired a business coach to help me develop systems and processes for the business. When I hired people for our core team, it wouldn’t be a three-month training process. “This is how we do things, this is how we do this, this is how we do that.” It helped me get myself organized on what I need to do on a daily basis. Instead of becoming so reactionary, I try to be more prepared so when a fire develops, I have time to put it out.

More resiliency. This is maybe the last thing I’ll say and then we’ll wrap things up, but we have to develop our resilience before we need it. I think people don’t get that. It’s a proactive system. You have to be resilient when the shit hits the fan, but the time to develop resilience is before the shit hits the fan. That’s the time when you build it.

We have to develop our resilience before we need it. Share on X

To that point, we’re going to hire someone for the HJZ productions, our first business, so I can scale Viridity Entertainment and build it and make it more resilient because too much of my time was being taken away from it working in the other business. It’s having that.

This is a not-so-random question here, but any thoughts on the market, where we are right now, based on what you’re hearing and seeing from your corporate clients?

I think things are in a good place. People are willing to spend money. We had a phone call with our financial advisor and things seem to be in a good place. Hopefully, it will continue on that path.

It’s always nice to hear that people are still spending. Companies are still spending because when they’re willing to invest, that’s a sign that things are better than they might even seem. It’s always important for us to have that. When there are a bit of a few green lights ahead, it helps us to understand that we also have to continue to invest. Businesses of all sizes need those signs. Nobody, big or small, has a crystal ball. That’s the fact.

Our business requires a lot of equipment, so we’re constantly investing and reinvesting in new and updated equipment to make sure that we can handle what our clients need. There are companies like ours across the country that are constantly doing that and that’s just one little field.

 

Howie, I enjoyed the conversation and getting together with a fellow New Yorker. I’m not in New York anymore. My mother and brother still live there. I won’t ever get that out of my blood. If somehow there was an exorcism or something possible to pull the New York Knicks fan out of me, that would be okay.

Actually, they’re having a good season, but it’s early.

That’s spoken like a true New York Knicks man. You’re right. They are having a good season so far. Thank you so much for your time and I’ll do a recap for folks. They know to expect it. If you know somebody who is in a pivot or transition period, that’s one of the throughlines that came through in this episode, feel free to please share this episode with a colleague, a friend, a family member, or somebody that might benefit from reading some of these words. That’s always helpful to us as well. We appreciate it. Howie, thanks so much.

Thank you. My pleasure.

—

That conversation with Howie Zales was fun. I so enjoyed that. I hope that you did as well. We covered some ground. Howie certainly has learned a lot in his business about resiliency and about pivoting. His life has been one series of pivots after another. I know that only too well since that’s been the case for me and maybe that’s been the case for you. We all are serial pivoters at a certain point in time. Not all of us have made that many career pivots, although I hear that more than the norm than it is the exception these days.

Certainly, when I was growing up, people tended to stay at their jobs for 20 and 30 years. At the same job and in the same industry and that kind of thing. That has become less and less prevalent. We have so many options available to us. We truly can do anything that we decide we’re going to commit to, commit our time and our energy, our love, and our resources to within reason.

I would love to be a professional basketball player, but that’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. When it comes to my own professional pivots, they are guided by where I can feel that I’m able to add the greatest value. Going back and speaking to my younger self, as it were, what I would say is not so much follow your heart. That’s good advice. I’ve given that advice.

I would say look at where you can create the greatest value and follow the path forward or toward that place where you’d be optimizing value and adding more and more value as your career goes on. If you’re at a place where you don’t feel as though you are able to add more value and maybe you’re not even fulfilled or satisfied by the value that you’re currently contributing in the arena that you are presently engaged in, there’s no shame in that. There’s no harm in that. You have to take stock. You have to be self-aware enough to recognize that perhaps that’s not a long-term solution to what you want out of life.

We all want very much the same things. We want to feel fulfilled. We want to feel good about what we’ve done. We want to be rewarded and acknowledged. That includes money, but it’s not exclusively about money. These are important questions. They were inspired by my conversation today with Howie Zales. I hope that the things that Howie shared and our conversation inspired you in some way. If it did, that’s fantastic. If there are others in your life that would be inspired in some way by this conversation, feel free to share this episode. That’s always super helpful to us and we appreciate it, as we frequently ask for that. We appreciate your help in doing that.

If you love the episode, whatever platform that you consume this media on, feel free to rate it. Provide a five-star rating if that makes sense to you if that feels good, and if that’s in alignment and true. Otherwise, whatever rating also makes sense, that’s perfect because feedback is very helpful to us, and we very much appreciate that you would take the time to provide any feedback, whether that’s the best feedback or it’s something less than that. Thank you again and I mean that sincerely from my heart.

Also, we would love for you to take a moment, if now is a good moment, you can go to RankMyResilience.com. You can get your own resilience score in three minutes or less and find out how resilient you are feeling in this moment, how resilient you are, in fact, in these four very important areas, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resiliency.

There are resources that are entirely complimentary as a result of your taking the time to do that. That is our offering and hopefully, a place where we’re adding value to many people all over the globe. We hear that pretty frequently. We have some reason to believe that people are benefiting greatly from this conversation and from their taking stock of how resilient they are and where it is that they can improve that resiliency for their personal happiness, productivity professionally, and in other areas of their lives and simply in being at their best. Thank you so much for being a part of our community. We so appreciate you and thank you for tuning into this episode.

 

Important Links

• Viridity Entertainment Services
• Pivot
• RankMyResilience.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/howardzales/
• https://www.Instagram.com/viridityentertainment/
• https://Twitter.com/hjzprodinc
• https://www.Facebook.com/veslivestreams

 

About Howie Zales

Howie is an Emmy Awarded camera operator who started his career at the NFL Network and NBC Sports. His passion for broadcasting led him to found Viridity Entertainment Services, a streaming and professionally recorded in-house production service offering TV-quality live streams to corporations. Their clients include T Mobile, Capital One, The Food Network, and hip hop group Salt-N-Pepa.