Giving Up The Law And Taking A Bold New Career Direction, With Cynthia Pong

Leaving a stable career to explore a new career direction can be daunting. But sometimes, taking the leap is exactly what you need to thrive. J.R. Lowry chats with Cynthia Pong, founder and CEO of Embrace Change, to discuss her bold transition from a public defender to an executive coach and author. They explore the challenges of career shifts, the benefits of taking a sabbatical, how to overcome burnout, and finding purpose in new opportunities. Cynthia also shares insights from her book, Don’t Stay in Your Lane, offering practical advice for professionals ready to take control of their own paths. If you’re feeling stuck or seeking profound change, this conversation is packed with inspiration and actionable steps.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/cynthia-pong.

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Giving Up The Law And Taking A Bold New Career Direction, With Cynthia Pong

Founder And CEO Of Embrace Change

My guest is Cynthia Pong. Cynthia is the Founder and CEO of Embrace Change and an award-winning Executive Coach and Speaker who empowers women of color to advance their careers into positions of power. In our discussion, we’re going to talk about Cynthia’s early career years as a public defender, and her decision to leave the law behind, her current work with Embrace Change, and her book, Don’t Stay in Your Lane. Let’s get going.

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Cynthia, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show.

Thanks so much, JR. I’m very excited to be here.

Cynthia’s Unexpected Path To Law And Public Defense

I’m excited to talk to you and get to know you a bit since we are new to each other. I feel like we need to tell your story chronologically. You went to college at Brown. When did you decide that you wanted to practice law?

That was a funny journey because, growing up, the only thing I thought I would never be was to be a lawyer. It was a fraught process. Chronologically, what happened was when I went to Brown, I really had my eyes open to just all sorts of systems of oppression and how they interacted with each other, systemic injustice, stuff like that. My first goal was I wanted to be a community organizer.

When I went and did an internship doing that, I think it was after my sophomore year, I realized I could not do that. It was way too hard. I couldn’t take day after day just having doors slammed in my face, canvassing, and stuff like that. I was like, “If I can’t make change without the system, then maybe I should think about how to make change from within the system.” I defaulted to maybe I should get a law degree. That’s how it happened.

When did the idea of being a public defender first come into focus?

After I was like, “Let me look at options for me to try to make social change from within the system.” Around that time, I was also taking these classes on the criminal legal system. I can’t remember exactly what the course was called, but it was taught by a professor named Joy James. It was really just about the mass incarceration system and how racism intersects with that and stuff.

I was like, “Maybe I should go into criminal defense and specifically public defense.” Actually, my first stop was I wanted to do that work but for young people, like the juvenile defense, because I was super naive in those days, if it’s not already clear, but I was like, “The youth, the kids, they’re so young, they really should not be caught up in any system like this. Let me do that work to try to jam up that system and keep more kids out of jail and juvenile delinquency court and all that stuff.”

I went into law school thinking I was going to be a juvenile defense lawyer, but then I took a clinic doing that work and I was crying all the time because it was so sad. I was like, “I can’t do this,” similar to my experience in community organizing. I was like, “Let me like default back to an adult,” a criminal defense public defender work. That’s how that happened.

You did some work initially after law school in Jackson, Mississippi. Am I remembering this right?

That was after I graduated law school from NYU and I was I really need a break from the pressure cooker that is New York City and the legal environment, particularly, ironically in public interest in law. It’s a pretty small community of people like everyone knows everyone and everyone’s going after the same opportunities. I was like, “I need a break from this. I’m so stressed out,” and I applied to a lot of clerkships. It just so happened that the only one that I got was this one for my judge, Judge James Graves, in Mississippi in the Supreme Court, so the state high court down there at the time. After I left, he got appointed by Obama to the Sixth Circuit. That’s why I ended up in Jackson for a year and it was cool.

You went back to New York and you ultimately found your way into the public defender’s office in the Bronx?

Yes. I worked for legal aid in the Bronx and it was my dream job.

How did you find it at first? What did you like so much about it?

I don’t know that I would describe it as I liked it so much, as that was my goal. I wanted to do that work. What I will say is that I really liked my colleagues. The people who also worked in that office and it’s a different workplace culture is different everywhere you go. It was a really great set of people. A lot of friends and people that I either keep in touch with are still held in very high regard now, but I liked that part of it a lot. I also liked that it was my mission to do that. That was my goal. I wanted to provide really good representation and defense of people who had been arrested and accused of crimes and couldn’t afford their own lawyer. That’s what I liked about it.

In your book, which we’ll get to later, you describe a pivotal moment where you’re having a discussion with a client after his arraignment and you realize that what you just said to him conveyed a sense of resignation about the system. Can you describe that for us?

I can. I do write very detailed about it in my book, Don’t Stay in Your Lane, but it’s not my proudest moment. Sometimes, I look back and like, “You really put it all out there, Cynthia.”

We all have these moments that we look back on. They may not have been our shining moment, but they were still pivotal in their own way.

They were. I’m glad you raised that because that is my hope. I like to be very transparent with people so that they can also be like, “I can make mistakes too.” “Failure” is often the best lesson and everyone’s going to fall on their face at some point or another. Really, the question is how are you going to get up and move forward from there?

At this particular moment, I was about four years into the job. I was already like old hat at what we were doing. I had a new client who had come in, and when I arranged for him, he was charged with some felony charges. We came back, and he was released. I argued for him not to have bail set and the judge released him without bail and so that was great. We came back to court the first time and then the prosecutors dismissed the felony charges. The case remained as a misdemeanor. The most serious charges were gone, but he was still charged with crimes and we still had to deal with the case.

I was explaining that to my client and his family outside in the hallway. I basically just said what I just said. I was like, “If you want to fight the case as a misdemeanor, you’re going to have to come back and forth to court for the next three years if you want to go to trial.” I said it super matter of fact, “That’s just how it is,” energy about it. They were like, “What?” Three years is a long time to be dealing with anything, particularly if these are false charges anyway.

I’d heard this story so many times and I was so jaded and burnt out at the time, JR, that I was just like, “That’s just how it is. Yes, three years, this is normal.” I really treated it like this is normal and just get with the program. I felt my body myself float out of my body because I was so not proud of what I had just said. Who had I become? I didn’t come into this job to turn into this. I realized my burnout was really causing me to do the job in a way I wasn’t proud of. That was the pivotal moment.

I think credit to you for doing the time in public defense that you did. It’s an often thankless task. It certainly doesn’t pay well. There’s always more. I think I have a relative who was a social worker for a while and eventually, she hit the point where she’s like, “I just can’t do this anymore.” It’s like more and more, all hours of the day dealing with crisis situations and it takes over your life. I think what you went through, there’s some specificity there to the world of doing social work in a sense, but a lot of people, I think, hit this point where it’s like work just is so consuming for them. It’s like a slow build, that burnout. They just hit a point where they’re like, “This isn’t working anymore.”

I know it can feel very like death by a thousand papercuts, but you described it exactly right, and the more and more, the never-ending. There are things like caseload caps or stuff that can happen but there is still this feeling that there really is no end in sight. When you’re exposed to that, especially in social work context, too, but I think in other direct service places, there’s a level of vicarious or secondary trauma that you’re dealing with too when you’re supporting people who are in massive amounts of pain. That’s hard, also. As you said, it becomes all-consuming, even if you have strong boundaries, there are limits to that.

Exploring Various Solutions To Combat Burnout

What was it like? When you had that realization, what did you start to think about doing about it?

At first, I just was like, “Cynthia, you just have to figure it out.” I tried having a lot of boundaries. I tried taking up hobbies after work to have something else to focus on, and this is not in the order I tried to do things, but I started going to therapy because I was so stressed out and that really did help. I also started to really be more intentional about my time off.

I was booking vacations and making sure not too much time passed between vacation so I could get that separation. I was basically trying all of the things and then spaghetti after spaghetti, I was throwing them, and then eventually, it still wasn’t changing. I was still stressed out all the time. I remember this time, there was a family member who was in the hospital and it was over holiday, one of the holidays in the winter.

I remember being at the hospital with everybody in the waiting room with my giant binder, prepping a trial. This was really normal to me. Anyway, I tried all that stuff. It took me really a journey of three years, JR, to really be like, “This is not going to work.” It’s a fundamental disconnect between what this work is, what it requires for me to practice it sustainably, and my personality. I just can’t do it.

Also, I had a really great friend mentor who was like, “Cynthia, someone else could do this job without the psychic toll that it’s having on you. Why are you doing this?” I tried all the things and then I realized it’s a more fundamental issue. Luckily, at Legal Aid, we were unionized, or the lawyers are unionized, so we had really great benefits, including I could take a sabbatical. Granted, it was unpaid, but I could still step away from the work, knowing that if I wanted to go back, there was a job for me. I didn’t have to reapply or any of that. I was like, “Let me try the sabbatical thing.”

It’s funny because I think you mentioned in the book that somebody commented to you that you were on. I think that the fact that you had this date circled in the calendar when you were going to start your sabbatical lifted you up enough that you actually brought a new sense of energy to your work, which is the irony of the whole thing.

It was so interesting. I’m so glad you brought that point up because, yeah, there was a renewed pep in my step after I got that sabbatical approved ten months in advance, whereas normally, people just apply for it 90 days in advance. I put in for it ten months in advance because I was like, “Nothing is going to get me denied from this thing. I need that date.” Now, in the coaching practice that we have in Embrace Change, I tell clients about this when they’re really burnt out.

I’m like, “You just need to set a date for yourself, some timeline, some deadline,” because otherwise, it becomes the thing you mentioned earlier. No end in sight. That amorphous, I don’t know. I just urge people to pick a date. Even if you end up changing the date, pick a date and then be serious about it because you’ll get a psychological benefit, a lift from it.

At that point, what was going through your mind about what you were going to do with your sabbatical time?

I don’t know. I did have certain fun things planned because I was like, “These are all the things that I mortgaged off because I was always too busy with work.” Someone else who had taken a sabbatical gave me this really great advice, which if anyone else is going to do it, I recommend that you financially plan ahead. I wanted to do things like take a Spanish class or take some woodworking classes. I paid for those in advance so that in the month or two after my sabbatical, I was getting to enjoy the benefits of this fun stuff I wanted to do, but I wasn’t paying for it while I was not making any money.

That’s just a side tip. Those were the plans I had. I just needed to recuperate. I realized I needed to step away. I needed time to think and I couldn’t do that thinking while I was still immersed in the work. I was like, “I need to reset. Let me do it through these creative activities.” I also walked a lot. We talked about New York earlier, but I just walked aimlessly in New York, with some water snacks and my journal, where I would just walk without any destination and do whatever I wanted in that time just to reconnect with life beyond the job.

It’s a privilege to be able to go out in the middle of the day for a walk and not worry about things like, “I have to be here by this certain time, or I have to get this done when I go back.”

Majorly. I felt that, too. It was almost a little disarming at first when I was out during daytime hours. I was so not accustomed to it. I started seeing, “Other people are out here too.” Remote work also was really getting to be a thing at the time. There were people working in cafes or things like that. I started to really get into that life, but you’re absolutely right. It’s such a privilege to, number one, be able to set your hours or work a job in the hours that you want. Number two, to then be able to leave a job like that and be able to be free of it for any period of time.

I always wonder when I do venture out, have a day working from home and run out to run an errand or get something to eat or something that. You see all these people who are out in the middle of the day. I always wonder what do these people do for work. There are some people in the same situation. They’re just out running an errand. They’re having to be home that day. In my part of London, I can’t explain the number of people who are out in the course of the day. You start to wonder like, “Do you have a job? Do you have some trust fund that’s funding you?” Whatever the case would be, I have no idea, but it is a question that I always go out and ask.

You’re absolutely right, though, because some portion of it could be explained by that or people who work say a night shift or something that. The rest of it, I don’t know. At the same time, I think the level of productivity demands that our modern workplace requires is also bonkers and out of control. There’s a whole world out there.

Adjusting To A Life Free From Constant Work Stress

How long did it take to make the adjustment to not being buried in work every day?

To then feeling somewhat normalized to not being in that environment?

Yeah.

I think it took maybe 2 to 3 months because I suspected that because I’m a very type A-like structured person. I knew that just pulling the rug out from under myself to have completely no structure in my day would probably be not conducive to trying to recover from the burnout and then figure out what I wanted to do next. I figured I would just be in a freak-out mode all the time if I just went straight from 100 to 0 as it were.

I did put into place those those classes. I was taking those courses. I had some structure around it, but then, after a couple of weeks, the feeling of being on “vacation” starts to wear off, and then you’re adjusting to that. It took me really until 2 to 3 months in to be like, “I got to get to brass tacks. What am I doing after this? What’s my plan? This is great. I feel better.” Everyone’s timeline is different, but at that point, 2 to 3 months, I was like, “I feel a lot better. All my psychosomatic stress symptoms had gone away more or less. I started being like, I had that itch of like, “What am I going to do next?”

You did some things along the way to recenter yourself. I know you talked about carrying your journal around with you. What other types of things did you do to help you renormalize?

I did take a couple of classes, like the Spanish class I was taking. Those were really great, too, because I got to meet people what were just from a completely other context. Prior to that, my world was really pretty much court-centered. People I interacted with talked to either worked at Legal Aid, clients, clients’ families, people in the court, judges, prosecutors, that sort of thing. Getting to just meet everyday people who were like, “I also want to improve my Spanish skills,” was really great and that was grounding.

In addition to the journaling, I also think that I asked myself some specific questions, many of which I lay out and don’t stay in your lane and stuff, but just questions about what do I think didn’t work about my past work situation. What do I think I do want instead? Would that work? I was doing a lot of mental kicking of the tires of different ideas. I had a lot of pipe dreams of like, “I want to open this food truck.” All those kinds of ideas. That was helpful. Definitely a pillar in keeping myself grounded was my therapy, so I still going to therapy all the time. Other than that, I’m lucky that my family was pretty supportive for the most part. Those things helped.

What was it when you realized, “I’m not going back?”

That’s a great question because I don’t know that I really admitted it to myself, but I knew intuitively. I knew intuitively at first and then I admitted it to myself maybe six months in or something like that because, at that point, I had started to figure out, “I want to try creating my own business.” I made those first moves to start my LLC and stuff. It was tricky.

The whole reason I went on a sabbatical in a way other than that the option was there and I wanted to leverage it was because I think in my heart of hearts, I knew I wasn’t going to go back, but I really couldn’t admit it to my colleagues, especially to clients and stuff. I needed that little bit of possibility to be okay with the shift. I needed to orchestrate a slow fade because otherwise, it was too much for me, emotionally and everything.

It’s a safety net, in a way, having the option to go back.

It would have been silly. There were no downsides to doing it that way. There were really only upsides. The whole reckoning of like, “I’m not going to go back,” it’s hard for me to answer that question because I feel there are so many levels to it. It spanned a long period of time.

How did you ultimately come to the decision about what you were going to do next?

I had a lot of the support of my therapist who also was a business coach. She also had an MBA and was an entrepreneurial coach at the time. In hindsight, JR, that was such a boon. She was helping me figure out. She was like, “All you need to get set up is this and this.” I was like, “Okay.” I just went out and did it. I got the ball rolling, but it was spaghetti at the wall. I’m not going to lie. I had no idea what I was doing. It was really just like, “I think I’d be good at working for myself. Let’s give it a shot.” That way, ostensibly I can solve for a lot of the reasons why I burnt out of the first career. It was like immediately, I can set my schedule or I can do things like that. Now, years later, it’s a different story.

Building A Business From The Ground Up

When you got into it, how did you make your start? Tell us about the business more specifically and how you got it started out.

The 1.0 of my business was that I wanted to do nonprofit consulting and strategic consulting work with left-leaning nonprofits or community organizations in the area. There were some ways that I tested this out along the way to JR. The timeline might have been overlapping, but I was doing some unpaid community work.

I was volunteering at a very mission-driven bookshop near my house. I was doing some volunteer work in the Bronx for this business incubator but for small businesses run by entrepreneurs of color, stuff like that. I had a couple of irons in that fire. I’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits and community grassroots organizations over the years.” At that point, in different capacities, I’d seen the insides of twenty of these types of orgs.

You’re about to hear a lot of hubris. “I have seen how the problems are always the same. It’s the same as what I experienced and they could do it so much better. How can nonprofits support their staff? That’s their biggest asset. How can they support their staff better, run their programs better for the community?” I was like, “I’m going to do consulting during that.” I had a couple of offerings program management, then strategic planning, those typical things that you see a lot of nonprofit consultants offer. That was 1.0 of my business.

How did it evolve?

I failed forward with that. I gave it my darndest shot for 4 to 6 months. I had my brochure, I had my offerings. I was really trying to go out, meet people, and be like, “I could work with you for this, or what about these offerings, trainings or workshops?” I was trying to do my best at sales and pitching and stuff. Now, remember, I don’t have any business background. I don’t have any entrepreneurial training. I never did this thing.

I was just trying to make it up as I went and doing my best to pound the pavement and drum up business. I went back to Legal Aid and pitched myself there. That was a hilarious experience. I was just trying to get projects. At this point, I remember realizing and writing about in the book, I didn’t realize how much work it took to get work. That was a new thing to me. I’ve never had to generate my own business prior to that point. In the end, I got one pro bono, one fully unpaid project with a school in the Bronx.

I learned many things from it, but also in many other ways, wasn’t great for me to grow my business or whatever. They got a good result, but I couldn’t turn it into more paid work. I couldn’t do that. About 4 to 6 months in, I realized, “This isn’t working. Something’s not right here.” I was throwing the next spaghetti at the wall. The 2.0 in my business, I was like, my business coach therapist was like, “Why don’t you try doing some training for lawyers? You’re a lawyer. You can teach them.”

I was like, “I want nothing to do with lawyers. You’re not hearing me. I just want to be somewhere else.” Eventually, after four months of not making any money, you will do some things. I was like, “All right.” She supported me to do this and I taught this mindfulness course that was an ethics CLE, like a continuing legal education course on how to practice mindfulness as a lawyer to improve your practice. I recorded this training for one of the large providers of these kinds of training and thousands of people watched it. Overnight, 2,000 people watch the training and I was like, “That’s interesting.” I didn’t get paid for this, but there is demand.

Where did you put it up? Did you put it up on YouTube?

No. It was through this company called Lawline. They’re one of these providers of CLE credits, and different firms would contracts with them. The course took off overnight. I was like, “There’s something here.” I built the 2.0 in my business around doing mindfulness training. In-person, series, in a law firm, independently, I was just trying all the iterations of that. That, too, ended up failing, but that’s a different story.

What was 3.0?

The 3.0 was the career coaching. At this point, I’d been doing the mindfulness training with a little more success, but still, I was like, “Something’s not right here.” I’ve been doing that for, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 8 months or something like that. I was making some money and getting some traction, but I also realized I wasn’t turning people into repeat clients. I realized it wasn’t building a sustainable business. I missed working with people one-on-one. I’m a big introvert and I really just like a one-on-one conversation.

Doing all these big training and not really seeing the impact of it was starting to get to me. I became a public defender to work with people one-on-one, but I just didn’t want 130 clients at a time. I wanted to work with people who were not just in the worst phase of their lives at that moment. This was one piece of insight that I was lucky to have come to me. I realized that in whatever job I had been in, people would always come to me to solve problems.

If they had some dilemma or they didn’t know what to do about this or how to maximize some opportunity, a lot of times, they would come to me for advice. I loved giving advice. Now, that’s not what coaching is per se, but that’s what was in my mind at the time. I want one-on-one work. I want to work with people on positive change, and I’m good at solving problems.

I put myself out there on Facebook at the time, my personal Facebook account, and I was just like, “I’m thinking of taking on a few individual coaching clients. The first session is free. Sign up here.” Literally, that was all I did. I had a very basic sign-up page. Four people signed up. Two people became paying clients. One person is still a client to this day, many years later. I was like, “There’s something here.” Once I started doing that work, I was like, “I love this. This is it.” It felt like the pieces aligned.

Who do you tend to typically work with? What types of people and what are the situations that they’re usually coming to you for help with?

I’ll answer that question chronologically because it’s also changed over time. At the beginning, I just put it out to anyone, and for the most part, it was women who signed up with me. Also, within that, it was women of color. I realized over, it was quick. It was maybe 2 to 4 months. I realized mostly it’s mid-career women of color who are coming to me for the coaching. I enjoy working with them the most. We have the most impact. I get them, they get me. The ROI is 3X of somebody else.

I niched down early and hard in my business, which turned out to be really helpful. I was like, “Cmbrace Change, we do career coaching for mid-career women of color.” That was before coaching blew up and became a thing. I got a lot of pushback in the early days being like, “How can you focus only on women of color? How are you going to make a business like that?” I have a lot of thoughts to that, but we don’t have to get all into it. The point being was that was a radical thing to put yourself out for at the time, but I did.

In the end, it was great because I was ahead of the curve. When the big wave came, I was well-established in that area and had a specialty. That’s how it started. In the beginning, it was a lot of career change because I also had gone through this career pivot myself, people were like, “You did it for yourself? Help me also go through this. I’m also burnt out. I don’t know what to do.” It became more nuanced. There was more also negotiation. It was like, “I like my job, but I’m underpaid,” or like, “I want to pivot this or that in my career or industry,” like wage gap stuff.

After that was more leadership and entrepreneurship. Those are all areas that nowadays are still all pillars in the organization. I have an agency model now where we have a whole team of BIPOC coaches who coach people in these different areas. We are pretty mid-career, but we also have a lot of executive coaching clients as well as newer up-and-coming clients. However, mid-career is still really good. That’s where a lot of our clientele and community members are. I’ve always been industry agnostic because it’s really important to me that I was like, “We can learn from each other outside of our silos.”

The Power Of Niche Specialization In Business

I believe that so strongly. There are so many things I could learn from you. There are so many things that we could talk about, even though we have completely different career paths. We’ve always worked with people across the industry. Those are some of the similar problems is people know something’s “wrong” in their career. They don’t feel fulfilled. They know they’re underpaid. They’re not able to land the opportunities or the roles that they want. They chose one career path because their family wanted it for them, but they really wanted to do something else. Those kinds of things are very common before people seek out coaching services.

Cynthia Pong: Many professionals usually seek coaching services when they do not feel fulfilled, underpaid, or cannot land the opportunities or roles they want.

There are common situations that people typically reach out to a coach for. Usually, it’s when they need to make a job change or career change or when they’re feeling a sense of frustration over being stuck, underappreciated, burned out. There’s usually a precipitating problem.

There is. I understand that. I also would encourage people to think it can also be a proactive thing. If you’ve got an opportunity, you’re leading a team at the next level now, or you anticipate that’s going to happen in the next year or two, yeah, get a coach before you think you’re going to need one. You will be ready so you don’t have to get ready type of thing. It’s never too early because what the coaching process is going to help you do is get to those insights faster. It’s going to help you work smarter, not harder. The only thing that we can’t do, almost everything in a career I like to say, JR, is course correctable, almost everything.

There are a few but very relatively few one-way doors. However, the only thing we can’t do as people yet is turn back time. If there’s something that you needed to have been planting seeds for 3 years ago and you come to me now, there’s only so much we can do. We can start planting the seeds now, but then you’re not going to see that fruit until 3 years from now. That’s why I encourage people to be proactive, get your ducks in order before you think you need it and it will pay you dividends.

You’ve got this agency model in place. How do you pick the people that you bring into your umbrella?

As far as the coaches or our training?

Yeah.

A lot of times, they actually come from our client community. I’m really into this idea of building ecosystems. I think a lot of times people think like, “We got to have really strict boundaries,” like the silos thing I was talking about earlier, everything’s got to be very in their own box, but I actually think much more in permeable areas and things that.

In 2024, we launched our coaching certification program with the particular focus on training up and coaching and teaching people of color who want to coach other people of color. How do you do that? There is a level of skillset and it’s different to provide psychological safety for someone in that situation. Not everyone can do it. Also, there was no other program, and I looked at doing that in that particular niche. I was like, “This is a need. People are starting to ask me for it in different ways.”

I really actually didn’t want to do it cause I knew it would be so much work. It’s such a huge project, but I undertook to do it. We launched it in 2024. It was hugely successful. The first cohort loved each other. They learned so much. It was so transformative. Some of those folks are now on our coaching team. Prior to that, I started out with colleagues. Other people I saw in the space. I was like, “ I like what you’re doing. I like your approach. Let’s collaborate and work together.” It’s been a mix over time, but it’s evolving.

As businesses do. Along the way you wrote this book Don’t Stay in Your Lane, do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

I wrote the book not because I wanted to write a book. I feel somehow called to say this but because I thought at the time I was like, “All these folks need support to be coached through their career change. I can’t work with everybody who wants to work with me.” I literally just can’t. There are not enough hours in the day. Not everybody has the resources and funds and the ability to hire us, to hire a coach, to hire me, to go through this process. I was like, “How can I get this information out of my brain and put it into something? They can take it and coach themselves with it through their career change.”

Similarly to the coaching certification program, I looked for this book. I looked for this book so that I could refer my clients out to it or send other people to it. I didn’t find one that I felt actually talked about career change in a way that could be applied by women of color, people of color, women in general, non-binary folks, a lot of folks from marginalized backgrounds, LGBTQ+ folks. There wasn’t that lens and I felt that was really problematic.

I wrote the book with that in mind as well. Things that actually apply to us, things that we can actually do to advance our careers through these pivot points. I thought it would just free me up because then everyone could just do it and do it for themselves. I was not exactly how it worked out, but that’s why I wrote the book. To describe it a little more granular, I wrote it spliced in my own narrative and story of my career change, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I really don’t hold back there because I think it’s important for people to know.

Interspersed is like, “Now over to you. I just went through this pivot. How do you apply it to yourself? How can you do this exercise and this reflection for you? How would you advise this other an avatar of a person so that you can then apply it back to you?” Super interactive. In the middle, there’s a choose your own career plan path book that actually starts with how burnt out you are because that’s a threshold question. There are eight special sections interspersed between them that are about common mindset challenges that we might face, such as imposter syndrome, martyr complex, and other things.

Key Takeaways And Actionable Advice For Career Pivots

You went through obviously your own career change journey. What were the things you most wanted to impart to people to do and not do?

The thing I most wanted to impart to people to do is take action. Try a thing. If you read from the beginning, and I love that you brought me through my journey chronologically, JR, because you heard it from the beginning. I had a theory, I tested that theory by taking some action, and then I trial and errored my way forward. That first thing, I thought I wanted to be a community organizer. I tried it out, it wasn’t for me. What’s the next theory that I have? Maybe be a juvenile defense lawyer.

I tried that out in a small way. Not for me. That is literally how I have found my way forward in my career every step of the way because a lot of times, we think we should just know something or that there’s some arrival point this arrival fallacy. That’s not true. We are all in progress. We are all learning. We’re all works in progress. Just taking each next step will lead you to the next step. Even if you feel you don’t know, you feel super scared. You’re very unclear. Don’t worry, just take the next step. The path is made by walking.

It’s very true. I think there’s a lot to be said for the empirical testing, like going out and trying something. This is the working identity book that Herminia Ibarra wrote really talks about the fact that you can’t just think your way in the right direction. You need to have a little bit of experience mixed in there and engineer ways to try things. There is definitely something to be said for that. I’ve done a little bit of that in my own way, too.

You were talking about some of the things you were doodling in your journal, that you were considering doing the food truck and other things. At one point, I was thinking about going into business as a high-end AV home theater installer. The way I tested that idea was I went to the biggest trade show that the industry had, which a friend of mine got me into, and I realized, “I’m not going to like this on a day-to-day basis.” That was probably the best $500 airline ticket I spent. It was a good learning.

You could never have thought your way to that because you had to just be immersed in it. You knew so quickly. As the clarity came so quickly, but you had to be there and you had to take that risk and go and invest that $500 or whatever it was. Yeah, 100% that. I also have this part of this diagram in my book too. It’s called the Meta Pathway. It’s a four-step cyclical process that you just have to go through in your career all the time. You plan, you take action, you reflect, and then you iterate and you do it all over again. It’s got to be the back and forth. You can’t always be in the planning mode. You will not move forward.

What have readers said to you about what they’ve taken away from your book?

There’ve been many touching things. I’m grateful to say some people have called it having a career coach in your back pocket. People have shared how they felt really seen and heard in the book. It’s been just transformative for them to know that someone else went through this, and not only did they survive, but they’re here now, and it’s been transformative to see how things have grown with Embrace Change on the back end. They’ve just shared really heartfelt things about how they saw and how I very transparently put things out there.

I don’t mince words. I’m going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are pros and cons to this. There’s privilege involved in this process. You’re going to come up against various systemic barriers. I’m just acknowledging our reality, really, but because it’s written in such a real talk way, people really like that. I’ll also just share this in case it’s useful for people. There’s no right way. That applies to this book too. I had one person write to me and said, “I read this whole book in one night.” You’ve seen my book, JR. It’s sizable.

It’s 275 pages.

I tell people it’s more an encyclopedia or a program, a course, than it is your typical career book. It’s not like that at all. It’s really a bigger resource than that. On the flip side of the one person who binge-read it in one night, I have somebody who, I love this method, too, she just flipped to a random part of the book and just started reading. She’s like, “Every time I flip to that, it is exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.” I’m like, “I don’t know what’s happening.” She’ll read a little bit and then she’ll stop. She’ll go about her career. A couple of months later, she feels stuck. She flips to a random part and she’s it’s always what she needs. I was so heartened to hear that. I don’t even know how that could be possible, but that’s what she said.

Building Community And Support For Women Of Color

What’s ahead for you in the business? What are your goals for the next few years?

Isn’t that the million-billion-dollar question? I will readily admit I don’t know what’s coming because having gone through the past couple of years, what a roller coaster. If you’re up for sharing too, I would love to know about your experience, but with the pandemic, everything that happened after that, and the economic fallout, 2024 also was really tough on many businesses. I just feel like I saw so many business owners left and right closing up shop. They’re looking for work. They’re taking on a full-time job now.

All kinds of pivots had to happen because things have been so tough. I don’t want to sugarcoat that. I had to pull out all the stops to make it through 2024 and I still make it through, but that’s how much I believe in the bigger work that we’re doing and the larger mission that we’re pushing forward. That being said, I think in the future, to put it very generally, it’s community. The last few years, ever since the beginning of the Leadership Accelerator program, I have seen the power of groups and cohorts and our clients and our community coming together not just a one-to-one, which I love, don’t get me wrong, but really collectively.

They can build laterally and peer coaching, peer mentoring, and peer connections can happen, but there are very few spaces that are dedicated to and that center women of color in a way that’s how we do it with our values. I’ve had multiple variations of this now, all with different focuses, always with beautiful results.

Our ECCC Coaching Certification Program, that cohort bonded beautifully. We’ve had eight cohorts of the accelerator graduate and it’s almost 80 people. They landed a White House fellowship, Stanford, Harvard fellowship, all this great stuff on the back end because of the power of them being in this journey together. We have an EC collective that’s been my most accessible offering. I tied it to streaming service pricing, like Netflix pricing.

For $25 a month or less, you can be in this group and access 100 other women of color, resources, social hours, and a lot of convenings because we need our support more than ever with everything coming at us all the time. The chaos and the volatility, the tumult, it’s a lot. To make it through your day-to-day and also try to move the needle in your career advancement, you need people who understand what it’s to be you, who can be your brain trust, and who can be your personal advisory board. Community, that was a lot but I’ll stop there.

I’ll add a bit to that. I think, first of all, you could go to ChatGPT and say, “Give me ten tips for dealing with burnout.” It will tap the collective wisdom of many thousands of people in doing that. What ChatGPT can’t do is create a community. You couple that with, I think, Gen Z, in particular, is a very word-of-mouth-oriented population demographic. They want to get advice from other people that they perceive to be like them, maybe even more than experts. I think there’s a lot of power in the cohort model. I think the community piece gives you a little bit of technology proofing because the technology can’t replicate that part.

Whenever it comes to tech, I’m like, “Not yet,” but I do think it’s true. All joke aside, I think it’s true. There’s a synergy that happens. You can’t bottle that up and take it out somewhere. You can’t replicate that. That happens between people in a very organic situation. Your example, going to that high end, that’s something that you couldn’t find out from ChatGPT or using any of these tools. I like it for multiple reasons, of course, but mainly because I was a skeptic. However, watching it so many times and watching the incredible bonds and the growth and the support that was there, I can’t provide that as one person. That’s only something that can happen at scale.

Most Valuable Career Advice And Closing Words

Any last career advice you want to leave our audience with?

I would say as hard as it can be, trust where you’re at in your journey. I’m going to double down on the thing I said earlier. Take the next step. You can think it’s going to be a mistake. Maybe it is a mistake. Maybe it’s not. Honestly, it’s the thing that you need to do. Take that risk. Bet on yourself because again, the only thing you can’t do is turn back time. Do the brave thing. Move forward through the uncertainty. If you read my book, you’re going to see how incredibly foggy my situation was. Through just repeatedly putting one step in front of the other, sometimes with my eyes closed or a grin on my face, still just do it. Each path will illuminate the next.

It’s very true. Good place to stop. Thank you for doing this.

Thank you, JR. This was so great. Thanks for everything you’re creating for your community.

You as well.

—

I want to thank Cynthia for joining me to discuss your career journey from being a public defender to shifting into coaching and leadership development with a few stops along the way. You can also check out her book, which again is called Don’t Stay in Your Lane. This episode was brought to you by Pathwise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, visit Pathwise and join our community now. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Cynthia Pong on LinkedIn
• Cynthia Pong on Instagram
• Cynthia Pong on TikTok
• Embrace Change
• Don’t Stay in Your Lane
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Twitter
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Cynthia Pong

Cynthia Pong is the founder and CEO of Embrace Change and an award-winning executive coach and speaker who empowers women of color leaders to advance their careers into positions of power. A Forbes Contributor and LinkedIn Top Voice for Job Search and Career, she has been featured in HBR, The Atlantic, and on NBC, CBS, NPR, and more.

Cynthia and her team provide specialized coaching and training programs for high-performing women of color up to the C-suite. Equipped with Cynthia’s strategic guidance, her clients break down barriers, lead with authenticity, and earn what they’re worth.

Cynthia’s Anthem Award-winning Leadership Accelerator program has propelled women of color to prestigious fellowships, promotions, and top graduate program admissions. Her book, Don’t Stay in Your Lane: The Career Change Guide for Women of Color, has solidified her foremost voice on career advancement, negotiation, and thought leadership.