Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Aree Bly talks about aligning your skills and strengths for sustainable success
• An in-depth look into recognizing the components that can change your career outlook
• Aree discusses the critical elements of her alignment model for success: friction, fear, flow, and fun
• Aree describes her thoughts on how to measure success
• How taking time to slow down can get you back on track
• Carl J. Cox and Aree discuss book recommendations to evolve your skills and build a better future

In this episode…

Are you struggling to align yourself and bring value to your career? How do you reset to find a different direction in your path?

Aree Bly is an Alignment Coach with her company, Alignment Ally, and has experience recognizing and developing strengths specific to your career goals. She has developed her model to visually discover the values and skills you possess to propel your career forward. Aree does this through the Four F’s: friction, fear, flow, and fun. Aree recognizes what skillsets you’ve already created to achieve your current level of success and enhances your transferable skills to take you to your next destination. 

In this episode of the Measure Success Podcast, Carl J. Cox talks with Aree Bly, Alignment Coach at Alignment Ally, about the ways to build sustainable success. Aree explains her developmental model to visualize where your skills intersect, how to focus on building relationships, and why collaborating on your strengths leads to greater success.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Aree Bly on LinkedIn
• Alignment Ally
• “Where The F Is The Reset Button?” with Aree Bly
• Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• 10,000 Hours: You Become What You Practice by Phyllis Lane
• 40 Strategy
• Contact 40 Strategy
• Carl J. Cox on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is sponsored by 40 Strategy.

40 Strategy provides strategic planning and consulting to help organizations realize and achieve their dreams by creating and measuring KPIs for success.

Unfortunately, most organizations only spend 2% of their time — or about 40 hours per year — on building an effective strategy.

Increasing the success of those 40 hours is what 40 Strategy does because your success is their passion — and that’s why organizations look to them for guidance.

Not only does 40 Strategy help you craft and implement an effective strategy, but they’ll also work to facilitate teams with proven practices and help with your scenario planning.

Harvard research shows that you can triple your success when you use the right Key Performance Indicators. Who doesn’t want that?

If you have questions, you can reach out through their website or email them at catch@40strategy.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Measure Success Podcast where we feature top leaders on how they measure success in their business and life. Now, let’s learn from their experiences.

Carl J. Cox 0:18

Carl J. Cox here, and I’m the host of the Measure Success Podcast, where we talk with top leaders about how they measure success. This episode is brought to you by 40 Strategy and 40 Strategy. We help organizations and individuals figure out where they want to go, then we help figure out how to create a plan to actually get there are basically we help companies and organizations and individuals help find their strategic plans and measure the right KPIs for success. Only 10% of organizations actually get two thirds of their strategic objectives done. And I don’t know about you already, but I think that’s pretty crazy. Do you agree? I do. Yes. It’s It’s nuts. And so at 40 Strategy, your success is our passion to our organization’s costs to help. Not only do we come up with a strategy, but with proven practices to actually get it done. Harvard Business Review says if you actually focus on the right KPIs, you could triple the likelihood of your success. So if you’d like to learn more, reach out to us at catch like catching a ball at 40strategy.com. And now we’re going to our next part is are usually we have a shout out. This is going to be a little bit different shout out. This shows a dedicated my father who passed away last week, Vinny or Vinson Cox, he was a longtime maritime seller. And he recently passed away for as long struggle with alzheimers. And I just want to say thank you to everyone in the audience, and listeners and everyone who’s reached out to our family during this difficult time. So thank you very much for that. And then we’d like to move on to Aree, who is our guest today. Aree has over 25 years, and came to coaching after 25 years of an actuarial career, where in addition to the technical work, to develop mentoring, and coaching programs to support cross functional teams. Now through experience and training, she enables clients to identify and navigate their unique values, strengths and skills in order to joy the freedom of sustainable success. Her speaking career has taken her all the way to a TEDx stage, which is where she speaks about the Four F’s Manifesto, and our workshops on using her unique alignment to create sustainable success. She also from a education perspective, she did her studies starting out in South Dakota at August, August, Tanna College, where she has a bachelor of science, math and accounting. And she also has a Master of Sciences, statistics from the University of Nebraska. So with that, Aree, thank you so much for being on the Measure Success Podcast.

Aree Bly 2:50

Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Carl J. Cox 2:53

Well, we have one of those unique LinkedIn relationships. That’s how we actually connected and I was looking past like, how did we get connected because usually I’m getting referrals from people we actually connected directly from LinkedIn, which was cool. And, and part of the thing, good reason you reach out because I do strengthsfinder. And and so you’re like, Wow, well, how do you how do you use that? And I do I love your Strengths Finder. And you, you clearly understand that we talked about understanding people’s strengths and understanding. Everybody is truly unique. I hate that terminology sometimes, because it’s overset. Right? You know, everyone’s a stone, you know, whatever. You know, we want to say everyone’s unique, but it’s true. We each have our individual parts. And I think just in the top five alone, and strengthsfinder they say that about to find somebody who has the same exact top five in order is about one in 2 million. Wow. Yeah. And so it just you know, it’s it’s not common right for you to run into somebody and nevermind, your top 30 for being in mortar so. So all right, tell us tell the audience more about alignment coach for the analytical brain, your business. Tell us more about what you do.

Aree Bly 4:01

Yeah, so Alignment Ally is the name of the business. But basically, I call myself an alignment coach, for the analytical mind and the alignment coach. It’s really about success coaching, it’s about helping people find and move towards that more sustainable success, but the alignment is the key. And it’s really about understanding where you should be operating at this point in your life. Because I think we read we don’t always recognize how much we are evolving and picking up different skills throughout our career throughout all the experiences that we’re having even you know, outside of our career in our personal lives. So it’s, it’s aligning with those skills and those values and those strengths and knowing how to learn optimally and knowing how to contribute to the teams that were on so that we can be more sustainable. In that path to success. We we create energy and engage As we go rather than draining it, so, so yeah, so my business is kind of twofold. It’s it’s the coaching part, a lot of the one on one coaching mostly with analytically minded individuals like actuaries engineers, finance people, because that’s the way that my brain also works, I can speak that same language, I understand the world in the same context. I’m thinking about models. And then it’s also speaking. So, you know, I was able to get on a TEDx stage and enjoyed that challenge, and being able to share that idea. But I also do, speaking to in our conferences and corporations to help give you more tools for people to navigate more intentionally to that sustainable success.

Carl J. Cox 5:46

So I’m curious, when you, let’s just say your average client, so to speak, that you’re coaching, what is an outcome? You know, they come in for a reason, right? But what what is a typical outcome that they know like, why we know this really work, this really helped me get to a better place.

Aree Bly 6:06

So what I typically see, and I hate the word typical, because everybody is a little different, and what they’re looking for is different. But if they feel like they are now spending their time and in the areas that they really want to be spending. So you know, especially when I work with people, it’s usually middle to later careers, because it’s in the actuarial profession. And I know some other ones, it’s fairly clear cut what you’re doing for the first 510 years of your career, you’re building a lot of skills you’re getting through your exams and other certifications. But at some point, your options really start to open up. And that’s when we can really step back and understand what all is in our toolbox and what we really enjoy doing more and where we get our energy so that we can create the opportunities that will help us to be more successful. So what I see my clients enjoying is looking forward to going to work a little bit more looking forward to the contribution that they’re making. Because it is something that fits so well with where they want to be and learning what they want to be learning. They’re not kind of feeling that friction, I guess, of being stuck in a role that they weren’t quite, they’re ready to move on to something else often. Yeah.

Carl J. Cox 7:28

It’s interesting, because, you know, we, especially us, right, and I can put myself in the same category being a bean counter by trade, right? Except I’m left handed, so I gotta look just one better the other side. But But with that, you know, we, we get caught in these ruts, right? If we get stuck in these habits, and we’re like, well, I’m, for lack of better term, I’m just an actuary, right? Or I’m just this, I’m just that I can’t do anything more. Right? How do you get these individuals who are really smart, really successful what they do, but they feel stuck? They don’t feel like they’re worthy for whatever reason, right there. What type of what are the what are some of the key things that you’re you’re doing with them? To see no, no, you actually do have more value, you can create more things. And then as a result, they end up having more joy, right, as well. So what are those, like kind of what what’s like one of those key couple things that you have to overcome with your clients? So they like oh, wow, I, for lack of a better term, I am more competent or able than I thought I was.

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