Strategies for Life and Career Fulfillment with Jordan Maness

In this episode, Melissa Venable, NCDA Director of Professional Development, interviews Jordan Maness, a career advising specialist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Jordan shares his journey into career development, inspired by a high school psychology class and experiences in sports journalism. He discusses his diverse career path, which eventually led him to become a certified life coach and a career advisor. Jordan's philosophy, 'like your job, love your life,' emphasizes the importance of aligning one's strengths with their job and incorporating positive psychology for overall happiness. The conversation concludes with advice for career development professionals, emphasizing self-care, resource-sharing, and partnership with clients.

Jordan Maness, M.Ed. is the Career Advising Specialist for the Division of Continuing Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Certified Life Coach with 20 years of experience career coaching and lecturing. His goal is to inspire individuals to live with passion and purpose. Maness has published a workbook entitled, Select An Ideal Life (SAIL): Your 59-minute Guide to Enjoying the Journey of Life, and he is the creator and instructor for the online Coursera course: “Thriving 101-Designing a Fulfilling Life & Career.” You can learn more about Jordan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanmanesslifecoach/.

Transcript

Career Practitioner Conversations Podcast

National Career Development Association

Strategies for Life and Career Fulfillment with Jordan Maness

February 10, 2026

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Melissa Venable , NCDA, director of Professional Development, and today I'm speaking with Jordan Maness. Jordan is a career advising specialist at the University of Colorado Boulder. He's an author and the creator of a Coursera course titled Thriving 1 0 1, designing a Fulfilling Life and Career.

Jordan, thank you for being here today. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Melissa. It's really fun to be here. Uh, I'm looking forward to our conversation. We met at the 2025 NCDA annual conference in Atlanta and, , during a session where I talked about this podcast, so it's kind of nice to bring our conversation full circle.

Absolutely. Yeah. We were down in Atlanta, you're telling all of us about, uh, great opportunities and look at that. I followed up and so did you. And here we are. I know this is the way it's supposed to work. Right. This is how networking works if you want  for sure.  Jordan, to get us started, tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got into the career development field.

Absolutely. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I'm a career advising specialist at CU Boulder, Indi. In the division of continuing education, I'm also a certified life coach and the journey's  been a fun one. I remember. I'm gonna go back to high school, maybe give some details here. 'cause I think the story  is interesting and, and kind of adds up to why I'm so passionate about this work.

But I was in high school, I took a class called Psychology and it was my favorite class in high school, and it was taught by Mr. Jordan. So what a name.  He was fantastic. And in that class we actually took a personality assessment and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and I said, wow, you know, you can answer a questionnaire and then understand yourself so much better.

Everyone should do this. This is incredible. So I kind of filed that away as something that I was interested in, and I was also watching. Show growing pains back in the, uh, eighties and nineties. And the dad in that show, Alan Thick, had a private practice. He was a therapist and he had his own office in his house.

I remember that much and I kind of always thought  maybe that's for me. And um.  I was the kid who's all, all his friends would come to me and, uh, share their details of their life and ask for advice. And I'm gonna call this girl, what should I do? And I was just kind of naturally an advice giver.

And so that was, that was in the back of my mind as maybe there's a career for me in, in that. Type of arena. But my real passion, Melissa, was sports. I played basketball. I watched sports. I knew all the statistics. And so when I got to college, I was like, how can I work in the world of sports in some way?

And so I was the sports director at the radio station. In college. I was the  president of the sports marketing club. I wrote for the student newspaper. I was a sports anchor for the campus TV station. I was a videographer for the football team, just anything related to sports I could try. I tried and when I graduated I was like, the thing I love doing more than anything else is play by play.

So I decided I'd be a sportscaster. And in that field, you move to a small town in the middle of America and hone your craft. So I was the play-by-play voice of the Western Nebraska Community College Cougars. I know you're a huge fan, Melissa, and uh, that's kind of when I realized that you could be interested in your work and actually pretty good at it, but still unfulfilled.

And that's when I started to think about why am I unfulfilled? What's missing here? And location is a big  factor for me. I need to live in places that kind of fit my personality.  Work-life balance is also very important to me. I knew I wanted to have a family someday, and in sportscasting you're always traveling, working nights and weekends, and I knew that wasn't gonna be a long-term fit for me.

And then lastly, I was feeling very pulled to do something morally fulfilling. I didn't know what, but I just knew that something more aligned with my, um, kind of life vision and mission was important to me. So anyway  to speed up the story a little bit, i, I, after leaving Scott's bluff, I was a, I tried marketing in Denver, then I worked, uh, running a smoothie business in San Diego.

I tried sketch comedy in San Francisco, working on a sketch comedy show with my four brothers. And through it all, I kind of had the idea of therapists in the back of my mind and I was doing informational interviews. We always tell our clients do informational interviews, and so I was doing a lot of them.

I kind of realized that working on a college campus, that's my happy place. I love the beach and I love college campuses. It's like any where, anywhere I go. I love to just go stroll on the college campus nearby.  And so I thought maybe a therapist. At a college would be a perfect job for me. And so I was doing informational interviews and I remember talking to, uh, a therapist at a college and asking her about her typical day and what she deals with.

And she's like, yeah, you know, I might have a client dealing with suicidal thoughts and then I'll work with, uh, anxiety and depression and anorexia and, and I'm thinking to myself, I'm just way too sensitive for that being my every day. And I asked her, I was like, when you help these individuals maybe kind of equilibrium again, and they start to feel.

Quote, unquote normal, how do who on a college campus helps them then go from normal or average to feeling like they're thriving, that they're really    you know, flourishing? And she said, well, probably the closest is the career center. You know, they're having these conversations. And I said, Hmm, that could work.

And so I eventually went to UCLA for grad school and did an internship at the UCLA Career Center. I was hooked and so I got hired there. When I finished grad school, I worked as a career counselor at the UCLA Career center in various roles for about 15 years.  Got certified as a life coach, eventually moved back to Colorado, and now I work in continuing ed  doing career advising with continuing ed students, but also with community members, quarter life crisis, midlife.

Crisis people about to have an  maybe an encore career at retirement age. And it's just a fascinating field and it's just everything that I  would hope for using my talents, making the impact that I want to have. And, uh, it's been a fun journey. Oh, career paths are infinitely interesting.

Everybody's got one that's super unique to them and all of their contextual kind of variables. And so thank you for sharing that.  There's a lot to, there's a lot to ask you about there, but I, I just wanna comment, I really love the idea of a career center as a place that. Send you off to where you're gonna thrive.

That's a really cool way to think about the work  that we do in career development.  And when you and I were preparing for this conversation, we talked about a little bit your, your philosophy, that you  runs you and your direction. I think you described this as well, and it's like your job, love your life.

Tell us, tell us some more about that. Yeah, and that's, you know, that's something that I've, I've come to over time and it's really  the foundation of the work I do. And so again, I'm a bit of a storyteller, so let me go back in time. My dad, his dream was theater, film, and television. That's what he loved.

And he got a job outta college, working at a television station, and then he got laid off. Then he met my mom and they decided they wanted to have a family. And for him    being around for his family and, and spending lots of time with his kids was important to him.  His dad was a busy businessman who didn't necessarily prioritize family time, and so he made that decision to switch to teaching.

And he had this joke that I only heard four or 500 times as a kid. But what are the three greatest things about teaching? Any idea, Melissa?

You caught me off guard. That's all right. I'll just, it's a joke, so I'm gonna give you the answer anyway. Uh, the three greatest things about teaching according to my dad are June, July, and August. And that was his joke. Got it. So you could see that,  the passion for teaching wasn't necessarily there.

He liked it and he liked his lifestyle. He liked the time off, and he was always there at  Christmas break and spring break and, you know, nights, weekends, and, and our summer vacations were always piling me and my four brothers and, and my mom and dad into our motor home and cruising across the country for a month.

And he could do that. And so I saw that  as an example  like your job, love your life. But for me  I originally was like, yeah, but I wanna love my job. And as I shared earlier, I, I was seeking the, a job that I love and I was following a series of passions and just really realizing that, you know, finding a job you love.

Is difficult as we know, you know, the statistics, people who are really engaged in their job, it's low. I, I think in this country we're about 30%, uh, worldwide, about 20% according to Gallup, that are really engaged in their job. And, uh, it's, if, if you're, you know, coaching clients and you're saying, you know, let's find a job that you love, you know, that's, there's a lot of pressure  that's what's gonna happen.

And he, and as we all know. Even the best jobs, it's work sometimes, you know, it's not blissful every single day. And so what if we change that philosophy to finding a job that we like and to, to me that means alignment. Liking a job means it's well aligned, first and foremost with your strengths. That's the number one most important thing.

 People who are eng, you know, using their strengths. On a daily basis, and their jobs are six times more engaged than people who aren't. And that's a huge factor. So getting clear on your strengths and finding roles that let you use those strengths on a daily basis, most important. And then of course, your values being a match, that will lead to fulfillment and of course, um, being interested in your work.

But what if we then say  your job. Find alignment, but then love your life. What is positive psychology? There's tons of research the last couple decades on what leads to fulfillment in life, and when people are implementing these habits of happiness in their life, then they start to be more successful in their career.

So whether they're seeing their career in a different way, a new perspective, because they're happier outside of work or if they're on the job search, as they're doing these happiness habits outside of work, the research shows they're much more successful on their job search. They're more resilient. They apply more often.

They don't procrastinate as much. They do better in interviews. So I started to say, you know, as a career and life coach, the most important thing is that we exemplify what we preach. So  that's important, but also that we're not afraid to talk to people more than just about their job search or career goals.

But what are your life design  factors that are coming in here? What are your habits that you are utilizing? And when we do that and we start to help our clients evolve as people and happier overall, then they're more successful with their careers as well. So like your job, love your life. And this sounds really attending a lot of notes with me and I think probably for a lot of our listeners as well.

 And you talk about teaching and, and online teaching, and that kind of moves us into your course. Mm-hmm. Uh, with Coursera, again, that title, thriving 1 0 1.    What made you wanna create this course  and is it related to this philosophy? I feel like it is a hundred percent yes. Yeah. Yes. So I wanted to, you know, I.

There are a lot of courses out there and there's a lot on positive psychology these days, and there's a lot of courses on career development or job search, but I wasn't seeing a lot that combined them. And so with this philosophy of like your job, love your life, I wanted to create a course that talked about both, and particularly started with.

Positive psychology, science of wellbeing information for the first half of the course. And then moved into kind of the design thinking, career development parts.  Because again, as I mentioned  as Sean, a core, the author of The Happiness Advantage says, you know, happiness fuels success, not the other way around.

And so many of us, you know, focus on, we gotta get the perfect job and then I'll be happy and I'm. I'm saying, well, yes, but, or, and let's also think about overall happiness first and what are your happiness habits and what is, what is the basics of that? So that was the first part about why I thought this course was needed.

And I call it the course we all needed, but never got to take. I also think that the Coursera format is really  in line with the way that people seem to dive into their overall happiness projects, meaning. It's self-paced. So some people all of a sudden are up in the middle of the night and they're like, I gotta make a change.

And they want to dive in and they're feeling really motivated. And so I wanted something that was  again, available 24 7 self-paced.  A combination of. Lecture, video, lectures, readings, discussion prompts. So it's interactive, but again, people could go through the whole course if they wanted in, in a few days, if they're really fired up or if they want to take it over a course of a year, they could do that.

And so that was really the reason that  I created the course. I was able to kind of pull my favorite articles, my favorite TED Talks, and put it in there. And so it's, it's sort of, um, all the things I've been learning about for two decades. The best of. Put into this course, and then when people go through it and they get some momentum, if they wanna then pull a 300 page book    off the shelf or order it from Amazon and dive into 300 pages on a particular aspect of what we talked about, great.

 But I think they needed like a starting point, and that's what  the course is really about.  When we first started talking about having this, this conversation, I said, oh, I think I need to take this class. I think I need to take this course.

Uh, so for learners that are gonna to sign up for this  what are the biggest takeaways, do you think, for them? And then how the, kind of follow up to that, how might our career development professionals who are listening, you know, what do they need to know about this course and how could it help them do what they do?

 So lemme tackle that in a few different, um, ways. First of all, I think,  as I mentioned before, I'm a big believer in the biggest impact we can have on people. Number one is our example is through our example, and so just exemplifying  passion, engagement, purpose in our own lives is really important.

And as  people who are in the helping profession, often it. It happens is that we're giving so much that we forget to take care of ourselves. And so, uh, Lisa Nichols said  the, your, your job is to fill your cup so much that you're overflowing and giving from your saucer.  And I love that quote, and I always think about that.

I'm like, yes, I want to give from my saucer. And so instead of giving from my cup and then. Realizing that's empty.      I have nothing left to give. If you're giving from your saucer  you're making sure that you're always filling your own cup first. Um, and so this course to answer the question for our career practitioners will help you again, if you're feeling at all, like your cup is not  full, or you're not giving from the saucer, the overflow.

Maybe take this course just for yourself so that you can then have more to give to your clients. Secondly and more practically, um  speaking the course is going to give the  basics of positive Psychology Flourishing, um, is a book by Martin Seligman. I take a lot of information from that book and Wellbeing, which is a book by two, uh, Gallup researchers.

And those are kind of the primary  positive psychology  points that you will learn. And just to summarize, 'cause we've got the time really quickly, I call it, instead of sleepwalking through life, it's living in hd. And what that means is what you have in life and what you do in life. So what I mean by that, uh, there are five big bucket areas of wellbeing.

We are career practitioners and good news is career wellbeing is one of those five.  It's also the most important one 'cause it affects the other four. But we also have financial wellbeing. Community wellbeing, health, wellbeing, and social wellbeing. And so these are five big bucket areas. Again, this is from the book Wellbeing and it's in Thriving 1 0 1.

In the course, I'll talk about this. And so the idea is we want to fill up our career wellbeing, of course. There's four other areas to focus on as well that lead to overall thriving. And if anyone's listening to this and they're thinking to themselves, wow, those five areas, I'm definitely not filled up in all five.

Don't worry. Only 7% of the world's population is filled up in all five. Um, so you're not alone, but. If there's gauges of those five and you're like, wow, I don't do anything in my community, or I've really let my social  network kind of fall apart. I don't have great relationships.  Maybe you see that and you're like, okay, I want to invest there for my overall wellbeing so that when I look back at my life, what do I have in my life?

How am I doing in those five areas? And then the question is, what are you doing on a daily basis with your mind and time? So that's the D and hd. So mind. We're always in the past, future or present. So Melissa, hopefully you're present right now. You're with me. Um, but it turns out most people, according to the research outta Harvard, are only present about 47% of the time.

And so half your life, you're not mentally and physically in the same place. What's the problem with that is that they've seen through the research that there's a big correlation between not being present. Less happiness. And so we need to learn how to be present more often. So we talk about that in the course.

We talk about when you're thinking about the past. 'cause your mind is either in the past, future or present. So if it's in the past, are we working on gratitude  feeling gratefulness rather than ruminating about things we don't like? And then when you're thinking about the future, most of us worry a lot.

I know that's, I, I'm a bald man. I think I worried my hair away because I worried so much when I was younger. But, um. Can we change that to optimism, which is about 25%. The research shows about 25% inherited. You know, it's genetic, but 75%, it's a learned skill. And so can we work on maybe having a best case scenario journal, which I write in every morning.

It's kind of like, what am I gonna do today? And what's the best case? What could happen, right? What could go well?  So we developed that optimism. So that's, that's what what we do with our mind. Then what do we do with our time? That's where we come from. Uh, Martin Seligman's flourish book Firma. And that's all about  positive getting pos, spending some time doing some things that give us positive emotions, spending some time in engagement, spending some time investing in our relationships, spending some time doing something meaningful, something bigger than ourselves, and then spending some time accomplishing things, even if it's just getting your laundry done, setting goals and accomplishing them.

 I know this is a little bit long-winded, but that's half the course. And then the other half is going to get into design thinking  and career design. And so really pulling from the Stanford information about what is design thinking, what are the design mindsets? How do we apply this to our own careers so that we end up  finding careers that are well aligned for us, and then having success getting into those careers.

I talk a lot about storytelling and, and interviewing as well, and then we wrap up the course, kind of summarizing all that I talked about, and so that's what people can get out of it. They can. Hop around, they can go through the whole thing.  And hopefully they find it, uh, really helpful, not only to themselves, but then the information that they can share with clients so that they can be an even better  career coach.

Oh, wow. What a gift. A, a resource full of resources is really  what it sounds like to me. Just a  a lot of pieces. You can decide what works for you, what you need at that moment, and, and move forward with that. I think so. Some improvements? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think  sometimes we don't know what we don't know, so we just know that we're stuck or we're just feel like there's more for us, or that we could be a little bit more engaged in life, but we don't know where to put our attention.

And so maybe going through a course like Thriving 1 0 1 would help people get a little bit more focused on what they want to do and to improve their level of, of fulfillment in life.  It, I mentioned in the intro that you're an author, and so you've got, you've got this course that you've created a lot of writing involved in that.

I  I'm, I, I know.  Uh, but you've also got not just a book, but a workbook. Yes. Which is intriguing and it is called Select An Ideal Life, your 59 Minute Guide to Enjoying The Journey of Life. So  how does that project wrap into your philosophy and into the course and everything else? Yeah, absolutely.

So select an Ideal Life. It's an acronym for sale.  So in short, I call it  my sale workbook. Not really a sailor. My, again, my dad, we, I grew up in Denver, Colorado, not a kind of a landlocked state and city. So my dad had a hobie cat, a 14 foot hobie cat for any sailors out there. And  we would go out to the reservoir, uh, near our house and.

We would just go out sailing and there was no destination. You were just going to kind of halfway across the reservoir, turning around and coming back and the whole enjoyment was just being out there. And so when people say it's kind of trite, but you know, life is a journey and it's all about the journey  and uh, that was the closest thing I could understand, uh, for me to really understand what that meant.

When we, when you're out there sailing, it's really not, for some people, they're going somewhere. But for us it was just like, enjoy the journey, enjoy the time out there. And so, um, that's kind of where the sailing metaphor started.  And I don't know how you got through college. But for me  like using mnemonic devices and. Analogies and acronyms to remember things was really helpful for me. And so I put that into a workbook when I was reading all about career development and  wellbeing. I was like, how do I remember all the nuggets from these, again, 300 page books or all these great TED talks?

And as I was researching all of these things, I started  and applying them with my clients, I started to realize there were some real. Key themes. And if I could put it into an analogy, a sale analogy, it might help me remember and it will also help other people. And then I also wanted it, instead of to be a book, I wanted it to be a workbook because I think that interactive piece is so critical  for true learning and applying what you're learning.

And so there's a lot of prompts in my workbook about, um, how you're applying the information you just learned. They're really short chapters. They have little drawings, my own drawings. I'm not an artist. You will laugh when you see these.  But the whole point is that you're interacting with it and you're going through it.

I call it your 59 minute guide to enjoying the Journey of Life. Because you could sit down in one hour and read through the whole thing. I don't recommend that. 'cause I do want you to go through it piece by piece and, and really engage and discuss and reflect. But you could go through it in an hour. And the whole point is once you're done with the work.

Book, you can identify the key areas in your life that you need to dive deeper into working with a coach or reading that 300 page book, or going to that retreat, or investing that $5,000 into that seminar because you know more clearly that that's the part of your life that needs the most work. And as a career advisor, I, I found sometimes people would come to us really with like, I wanna make a career change, or I need to get this new job.

And then. As you talk with them more deeply about their lives, it's really not going to be the first thing that they need to work on because if they do just make that career change. First of all, it's very difficult, especially in these times to find a new job and land that new job. But wherever you go, there you are.

It's the same person with the same habits. And so  sometimes, you know. Making sure that the career pivot is the, is the first place to start is important because what if there's some other things you could do, or there's some things you could do that would change your perspective about your current position, or you could do some things in your current position to like it more, align more of your skills, and then all of a sudden you realize, okay, maybe I don't need to make that change, or I don't need to make it quite yet.

There's some other things I can do first. And so all of that goes into the work. Book, uh, Melissa, and it's called Select An Ideal Life Sale, your 59 Minute Guide to Enjoying The Journey of Life. Oh  I think you, you've hit on something here. We need to make this, all this information that's out there that we might read or absorb in some way.

We need to make it relevant. For us. And the way to, one way to do that is  to interact with it. So this workbook sounds like it's  that's what it's gonna do. And so  and my context is different than yours, which is different than the students or clients that we're working with. And so having this tool available, I think is really important.

So thank you for, for sharing your sale philosophy    with us through this, this format. So as we're gonna kind of wrap up here a little bit, Jordan, what advice do you have for career development professionals who are, , new to the field? Yeah, and I think this, I think my advice for new professionals is probably similar to my advice for seasoned professionals, which is  remember a  couple things and this has really helped me.

Um, and I've, I've touched upon a little bit of this, but you know, I think.  We try to, we're in this profession because we wanna make a difference and we, you know, for many of us, uh, we feel called to this profession. We feel great fulfillment when we are able to inspire others, when we're able to help them get to their goals and reach their destinations.

 But we often do it again at our own expense. And so the first piece of advice is to really think about exemplifying what your. Sharing with others saying  I, I  I have found that sometimes you're talking with, uh, people in our field and they just, they that, that glimmer in their eye seems to have faded.

And it's just from  giving, giving. And so I really think we can best serve others if we, again, take care of ourselves first and do our best to fill our own cups that we're giving from the saucer. So that's one thing. Um. We're resource experts in this field is another aspect, like we don't have to know everything, but we, you know, staying on top of the trends and learning about key resources and being a part of NNC DA and sharing resources and learning from the different conferences and, and local chapter meetings and all kinds of different things that are happening is so important so that    we're, we're a team. We're all in this for the  the same ultimate reason to find, help people find great fulfillment, passion, purpose, and then the world is a better place. So  I would also say one other thing is that working with clients  oftentimes, you know, mark, Vicki is like, how can I be useful to you?

That philosophy and, and that feels really good. Um, but the reality is also we have to say that this is a partnership when we're working with, with our clients and. They have to meet us halfway. And so if you find yourself doing so much handholding, this is especially for our younger co-care practitioners  if you're doing a lot of handholding, you're ultimately  fishing for them and you're not teaching them to fish, to use that old analogy.

But I think it's so powerful and so. Give them, uh, your clients the expectations that you have for them. Like I'm, go, we're gonna work on this in partnership together, and there will be  a give take relationship. There will be assignments, and there'll be things that you do. And if you live up to your end of the bargain, I'm certainly gonna be here for you and I'm gonna be useful to you and we're gonna get to your goals together.

Oh, great advice. Jordan Maness thank you so much for being here and sharing your approach to career development work, your philosophy, uh, the content that you're providing, uh, all of us to, to learn a little bit more about ourselves and about the work that we do. So thanks again. Thank you, Melissa. It was a lot of fun.