Business Growth Architect Show

Ep #147: Jeff Standrige: Hate Your Job? Here is How to Turn it Into a Powerful Calling

• Beate Chelette • Episode 147

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Jeff Standrige reveals the steps to transform your job into a meaningful calling, so you can find more fulfillment beyond collecting a paycheck. Discover the simple steps to turn your career into a purpose-driven journey, balancing success with true personal impact. 


In this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show, I speak with Jeff Standrige, Managing Director at Innovation Junkie, about how to transform your work into a meaningful calling. Jeff opens up about his “crisis of calling,” that pivotal moment when he realized that professional success didn’t equal personal fulfillment. Instead of abandoning his career, he used it as a foundation to drive impact, a choice that ultimately reshaped how he viewed his work. This is powerful if you feel that your job is a dead end and you are looking for more fulfillment at work. 


In our interview, Jeff and I break down his six essential pillars for building a culture of excellence—elements that foster clarity, accountability, and genuine connection across any organization. Here are the first three, you’ll find all six in the interview. 


1. Strong Leadership – Every culture of excellence begins with committed leadership. Jeff emphasizes the need for leaders to embody the mission and values of the organization, demonstrating by example how to balance results with relationships, fostering a sense of trust and integrity across the team.


2. Absolute Clarity and Focus – Jeff discusses how clarity around an organization’s mission, vision, and goals aligns every individual’s work with the broader company strategy. When team members understand how their day-to-day contributions support a larger purpose, it drives collective motivation and purpose.


3. Engaged and Committed Teammates – An essential element of any successful culture, Jeff emphasizes the importance of fostering a team that is not only skilled but also genuinely committed to the organization’s mission. Clear roles and responsibilities allow teammates to bring their best selves to work, knowing exactly how they contribute to the team’s success.


For anyone questioning their work’s purpose or looking to lead with intention, this conversation digs into how we can reshape our daily actions to build a fulfilling career. Listen in as Jeff and I discuss the real, practical steps to align your work with your values, so you’re not just clocking in but creating something lasting.


To explore Jeff’s principles and explore practical ways to bring a culture of excellence to your organization, connect with him on LinkedIn or visit his website, Innovation Junkie. Share your own journey or insights in the comments—Jeff welcomes hearing from those striving to make a difference in their careers. Don’t miss this chance to turn your vocation into a powerful calling and join the conversation on what it means to thrive.

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Jeff Standridge:

Hey guys. Jeff Standridge here, Managing Director of "Innovation Junkie," and on our podcast episode today of the Business Growth Architect Podcast, we talked about vocation versus calling. If you want to learn more about what your calling is relative to your vocation, that is how you earn your living, and you want to understand how to connect those two you're going to want to listen to this episode. In addition, we learned about the culture of excellence and how individuals and organizations can create a culture of excellence to drive them toward significant, sustained growth within their companies and within their own personal lives. So take a listen. I think you're going to love it. You're even going to want to share it with someone else.

BEATE CHELETTE:

And hello, fabulous person. Beate Chelette here. I am the host of the Business Growth Architect Show and I want to welcome you to today's episode where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom. Truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in a spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. Welcome back Beate Chelette here, the Business Growth Architect, and today we're talking to Jeff Standridge from Innovation Junkie. And what's going to be interesting about today's interview, it's exactly, I mean, it's my dream interview, because it's about strategy and spirituality, or is it spirituality and strategy with us today? Jeff, I'm so excited for you to be here. Thank you for coming on the show.

Jeff Standridge:

It is my pleasure and it is an honor to be with you today. Thank you so much.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Excellent. So when we were talking for the first time you said that you had figured out you had a mission, something that you needed to share. And I'm gonna open with this kind of, like a little bit, sort of on the controversial side of things. Sure is that kind of like normal when you're, like a corporate executive, and then one day you wake up and you say, have a mission to share. Like, what do you do with that? When that happens?

Jeff Standridge:

Yeah, so, I think the the first part about that was probably the crisis of mission that occurred when I started asking myself, is this, is this what I'm supposed to be doing with my life? I had been with that organization at that time about 10 or 12 year, almost 12 years, and I had about 500 people on, you know, five different continents, and in the organization that I was responsible for leading and that, and I remember just asking myself, and is this my life calling? Is this my life mission, to sell data to marketers trying to better target their consumers and and surely, there's more. Surely I was created for more than this. And don't get me wrong, it was a great job. I worked with great people. I made a great living, but I started asking the question, What am I here to do? What am I here to affect? What am I here to impact? And so I had that, what I called the crisis of calling that, I started asking the question that started first, and that probably was a, probably a couple of year journey of just asking the question, listening to feedback, examining where I where I would go home fulfilled, what had, what I had, what had I been doing that day at the office? Or when the days when I went home completely unfulfilled and frustrated, what kind of things had I been doing when I left, you know? And and so it was kind of a an evolutionary experience versus a revolutionary experience.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, I think I hear this a lot, and I wanted to ask you that question up front, because I think a lot of people, especially right now, are struggling with with this question to say, who am I? What am I without this job, and if this is not here, then, then how does this show up? So you say this is a multi, multi year journey, really. This is not an overnight thing. What part did your spirituality play into that? Because, if I may just say this, so if you on the internet, marketing, data extraction and resell side, there probably is not much spirituality in that type of business, but you say you had you wanted to bring meaning and mission and purpose to something. So how did you awaken that? Or was it that it was, it felt like it was two different things and you wanted to combine them. You know what I'm trying to get with this question.

Jeff Standridge:

Yeah, that's a good question. My worldview is heavily shaped by my faith and my religious background, and so I certainly relied on that in the community of faith that I meet with on a regular basis, and the feedback I received from that, the teaching and facilitation that I had done for 15 years or so at that time in that environment, and what I found, and I start, I went all the way back to when I was a university professor, back in my late 20s and early 30s, and started looking at feedback that I received there. The feedback was, you've really given me things to think about. You've really impacted my life. You've, you know. Folks that were in my Sunday school class at my church that said, you know, you're a revealer, you say things that provoke me to think differently about my life, my home, my work, my own faith journey. And so when I used all of that feedback with observation, the the inventory of my own gifts that I felt like I had, where I received affirmation for those gifts, I came to the belief that, you know, where I was getting the most fulfillment was when I was spending time with people in a mentoring, coaching relationship, even though the work involved data management, data marketing and data analytics. That's how I received my compensation. Where I was getting meaning from work was the conversations I was having throughout the work day, on work life, balance issues, parenting issues, how to solve problems, just problem solving issues, how to overcome obstacles, career planning, discussions, coaching conversations, when I was speaking at the local chamber on leadership, or I was teaching in my faith community, that's where I really was receiving fulfillment. And so I came to the belief that my own calling was to create new insights that lead people to better ways of living and working, and that's how I've characterized my own particular calling, and the company I worked for gave me a great platform to fulfill that calling. It was not my vocation. My vocation was about data, marketing and analytics, but the 500 people that I interacted with on a day to day basis in my vocation created a great platform for me to fulfill my calling as well.

BEATE CHELETTE:

I like how clear you are about that in in how these things connect, connect with each with each other. Because I do believe that you know what you're alluding to is that the spiritual awakening, it may not have to be a spiritual awakening. You may already be spiritually awake. It's about then the transition. And how can I take what I know is true and then create something that now lives in my purpose and my legacy. Let's go there a little bit now you you're recognizing that part of what you already believe in can be implemented in what probably most people would consider like data management, data resell, not exactly a very spiritual business, as I just said. But you said, Wait Not so fast, the spirituality of this comes in the interaction with people. So now, where do you go from this part about leaving that job and then saying, I'm using this, you know, data driven, technology driven thing, and my love for people and being the revealer and building some sort of strategic business component out of it, because I think a lot of people struggle

Jeff Standridge:

with that. So it was eight years. I spent eight more years at that company. But here's the deal, I spent eight more years at that company experiencing a level of fulfillment that I had not experienced in the prior 10 or 12 years that I was there. And so, like I said, that company gave me a great platform to fulfill my calling. So I think it's important that we talk about vocation versus calling for a couple of moments, because, you know, there are some people in the world who are in tune with their personal calling very early in life, and they build their career or their vocation around that calling. My father in law was a Methodist pastor. My wife was a pediatric nurse practitioner. My son in law is a physician. My other my two daughters are both nurses as well. One's a pediatric oncology nurse, one is a neonatal intensive care nurse, and so they get they get up and earn their living every day by fulfilling their calling. Their vocation and their calling are somewhat the same thing. I on the other hand, that was not the case. My vocation really had nothing to do with my calling, unless I could figure out a connection between the two, and so I figured out the connection between the two. I figured out that my vocation created a great platform, put me in front of hundreds of people on a day to day basis, and gave me the opportunity to talk to them about things other than just work, to help them with their work to help them grow their careers. And so I've come to the belief that everyone has a calling. For some people, it's their vocation. For others, it can so their vocation can support their calling, but they have to do the work to figure out the connection between the

BEATE CHELETTE:

two. I like the clarity. I really like the clarity on this. What I'm hearing is that it doesn't sound like you were in despair over this not aligning for you. So how could you stay so calm in all of this when you clearly seeing that there's a massive shift? Well, yeah,

Jeff Standridge:

I was not in distress or despair. I just knew that I was not experiencing the kind of fulfillment from my career that I felt like. As much time as we spend at our jobs, at our vocations, at our careers, there should be degree, be a degree of reward that comes from it, other than just the financial aspects and and. And sometimes I think the financial aspects can mask fulfillment, right? We say, Oh, it's a great job. I've got I make a great living, and I get to see crazy places around the world, but it was also exhausting as well. And once I figured out the connection, as I said, and I shifted my mindset, I was not just perfectly contented, I was very fulfilled with that job and that company. It was a great place to work. And about eight years later, I found what I felt was the opportunity for my vocation to no longer just support my calling, but for my vocation to become my calling, or my calling to become my vocation. And that's when I started the work that I do now, eight years ago. Do

BEATE CHELETTE:

you think that people that have this sense of slight dissatisfaction with the lack of alignment. Sometimes don't have the tools to figure out how to get themselves out of it, because I think that people really like to go and blow up their lives.

Jeff Standridge:

Yeah, sometimes it's called a midlife crisis, and it's called by other names as well. For sure, why

BEATE CHELETTE:

can people not figure this out? Why cannot everybody be so calm and collected about this and give it the time that it requires for this transformation change to really happen? Why do people take it to the point of dissatisfaction where they blow if there's an answer, well, yeah,

Jeff Standridge:

I don't know that there's an answer other than if, if we listen to everyone else but ourselves, now, I think there's value in listening to what other people have to say about us in terms of what they see as our gifts, where we have impacted them, if we only pay attention to the social media and we begin to compare ourselves against these fabulous lives that we see playing out on social media every day, and we don't realize that that that's not reality, then I think we can sometimes be led astray into what meaningful actually means. Have

BEATE CHELETTE:

you always felt this, this connection, or was there a connection, and then there was a deepening on the connection? So the reason that I ask is, I think there's been really a mass activation that's taken place over the last couple of years, of people being called to step up that come from very unlikely places. But in order for you to step up, you need to get a download of some sort. There has to be some sort of awakening, a connection, a rediscovery of some sort. How do you think that happens? Or how did that happen for you? Because I think I want to talk about this, because I know people struggling with this, and the question, Who am I without this job? And what else is out there? For me is a question of people are biting their teeth out they can't solve it. So can we? How do we direct them to the inside job.

Jeff Standridge:

Well, for me, it started with with prayer and and delving into the holy scriptures that I consider holy in my life, which is the Holy Bible and the Christian scriptures. I was born in, raised in a in a community of faith, and I've continued as an adult in in a community of faith, in a couple of different communities of faith over the years. Taught, I taught adult Sunday school class, as we call it, for about 25 years, and and what I would do in that in that Sunday school class was not as much teaching is. I would explore and come to the table with questions, and I would tell folks in that class, and I'm going to come here with questions and how I've kind of reconciled those questions, and I'm going to let you just listen in, because I don't have all of the answers. I have more questions than I have answers. And so it was truly a two decade, two and a half decade exploration. I think of the Scriptures and and what it means to live out my faith in the here and now versus just waiting until the hereafter, so to speak. And you know, I believe that. I believe that one, when one comes to faith, that's the beginning, not the end.

BEATE CHELETTE:

You know, I had a very interesting conversation last week, and I want to get a little bit off script here, where I had said that when you surrender, sometimes surrender feels like defeat, because it requires you to let go, let God or whatever you know term, term our listeners prefer to listen to use, but surrender and trust is the most, most difficult thing, because we are taught by the our environment, by the government, by corporate America, by internet marketers, by social media, that we have to follow a particular pattern. And then if we have the watts of cash, the Ferrari, the nice house with the ocean view, that's then somehow we made it, and then somehow we have everything that we ever wanted you. And I know that that's BS, that that really isn't true. Yeah. Just means that you have the house in the Ferrari, and then you're still exactly who you were. That's right. So because after the surrender, there's another part, that's the calling in part. And the calling in part from your perspective, I mean, it took you, then eight years to call it in, or did you? Did you give yourself the time to call it in? I

Jeff Standridge:

don't know that. It took me eight years to call it in. I think I started calling it in immediately. I just called it in in the environment. I realized that where, where I worked every day was did not define me, nor did it define my calling. I think I started calling it in immediately, and then over a period of eight years that led me out to do to my own to my own business. So to speak, I love

BEATE CHELETTE:

that. I love that that's exactly where I wanted to get to. You didn't wait for this to happen, that to happen, that online course to finish, for you to meet the right person. You said, my ministry starts here and starts today with what I with, what I have, and I think that that's a great takeaway for our listener today to say, If you take nothing away from this interview, but this one, there is no there, that's just here, you know,

Jeff Standridge:

here now, yeah. I also think that, you know our that God gave us a brain and he gave us intellect, you know that sometimes, and he gave us the ability to do work, to think and to do work. I saw a meme a few years ago that said, Don't lean on a shovel and then pray to God for a hole, or something along those lines. But that's that's it, right? So we have to use the tools we've been given to actually find the connection between our calling and how we spend our time every day, we're so compartmentalized. People don't talk about politics, people don't talk about religion, people don't talk about beliefs and core values. I'm talking about personal core values in the workplace, because we have to separate that we can't really be who we are, and I think we the more that we could move back toward an integrated lifestyle, the better everyone would be

BEATE CHELETTE:

excellent. And that's our segue for the culture of excellence, which we'll talk about next. So thanks for playing with me, Jeff, and really outlining on how somebody who may feel stuck in where they are to then move over to taking on, making the change in the here and now and then really mapping out and calling in what kind of comes next. You called in Innovation Junkie, and you called in cultures of excellence. So tell me how that comes about, because the way I heard it is that you are now in this business. You're realizing here now is happening here now, and you are moving forward by focusing on the people, the impact that you can make. How did the culture of excellence? How did that happen? And what is it? So

Jeff Standridge:

with Innovation Junkie, we started working with a number of companies around the world and helping them build what we call our strategic growth plans, and implementing our strategic growth system, helping them chart the course as an organization, mission, vision, values as an organization, and then where, who are we, where are we going, and how are we going to get there, and how are we going to make sure we get there when we said we Want to get there. And by working with those organizations and seeing the tremendous impact of that work, we started observing where which organizations tend to excel in implementing our strategic growth systems and which organizations don't. In other words, some organizations were doing much better, even though they all had the same infrastructure around their plan. They all were implementing our strategic growth system, but some were outperforming others, some were underperforming. So we began to observe and began to see that it had a lot to do with the culture of the organization. Now I ask people what culture is, and people usually come back with, well, it's the core values that we have on the wall. Okay? Well, yeah, that's sort of, yeah, that's one manifestation of culture, right? But it's also the the unwritten rules, the unwritten norms, the unwritten behaviors. It's the way I feel on a Sunday night when I'm preparing to go to work on Monday morning. It's the way I feel on a Friday afternoon when it's almost time to go home. Those also point to what the culture is. So we began to observe these, these elements that tended to be consistently present in those organizations that were outperformed. And so we built that into a framework that we call our culture of excellence. And that's those six elements that I'd be happy to talk through a few, if you like?

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, I definitely do, because I like this notion to say, and I think it's so important to point out in in our interview that what I'm hearing from you is that the excellence, your personal excellence, is the ministry. It is not the waiting for. Or somebody to do the right thing, give you the promotion, see your full potential, but the culture of excellence, the way I, I perceive it from from you, is, well, I am the culture of

Jeff Standridge:

excellence, yeah, well, it's a it's a good it's interesting. You bring that up so early in my academic career, what led me out of healthcare? So I'm formally trained as a respiratory therapist and a paramedic, and served as a as a professor at a at a medical school in a in a cardio respiratory program, and I began to study the differences between top performers and average performers academically. So what is it that differentiates that top 1% from the middle 50% and oh, by the way, the middle 50% are not unsuccessful. In fact, it's the vast majority of people in the working world. But there's something that differentiates those uber successful or those top performers. And when I boil it down, it really comes down to the knowledge, skills and abilities and habits that enable someone to balance results with relationships. If we focus on results at the expense of relationships, we will be wildly successful very quickly, until we alienate everyone around us who's responsible for helping us maintain those results, and then we lose them both. But by the same token, if we focus on relationships at the expense of consistent results, people will love us until they lose respect for us, because we can't do what we say we're going to do when we say we're going to do it. And so if we define that balance of results and relationships as creating personal excellence, that's exactly right, and I've had the opportunity to study excellence then, not just at the individual level, but at the small team level and at the large organizational level as well. And all of those observations and research led to those six elements that we call that culture of excellence. Well, let's

BEATE CHELETTE:

hear them. Let's go over them.

Jeff Standridge:

Sure the first one is strong leadership. Every culture of excellence in an organization begins with a core group of leaders who are committed to the common mission of the organization. They're committed to the vision of the organization. They're committed to cultivating a culture that where everyone moves forward collectively. They're willing to not just articulate a set of core values, but to live by them, to set the example for other people in terms of how they balance the results and relationships. So first and foremost, it starts with strong leadership. Secondly, it involves what I refer to as absolute clarity and focus. In other words, everyone in the organization knows where they're going as an organization, how the organization is going to get there, what their strategy is to actually arrive at that destination. But they also understand at the individual level how their day to day work contributes to that strategy and contributes to the collective achievement of that strategy as well. Third is engaged and committed teammates. So we have people with common interests, who are committed to a common purpose, who have who are, who are, who are individually competent, but they also have clearly defined and accepted roles so that they can be engaged on a day to day basis in the pursuit of that mission, both individually and collectively. What helps us to maintain engaged and committed teammates. Brings us to the fourth element, which is empowering communication. Strong leaders have a communication style that is empowering. The word Empower literally means to make someone stronger and more confident in dealing with the circumstances they're facing. So strong leaders in order to have engaged and committed teammates also engage in communications that empower people, that make them stronger and more confident in dealing with the circumstances they're facing. So those are the four. Four of the of the six elements, the fifth one is 100% accountability. 100% accountability is pretty much synonymous with integrity. If you think about the word integrity, when I was a medical professional, we used to talk about the integrity of the skin or the integrity of the bone. If the bone or the skin had lost its integrity, it was broken, it was no longer whole, right? When our words match our deeds, and our deeds match our words, we have integrity, and by definition, we are whole. Think about the word to integrate, means to bring together in a whole to disintegrate, means to blow apart or to break apart. So when we have 100% accountability, that means our deeds match our words. We do what we say, we say what we do, which is really the synonymous definition of integrity, both individually and collectively as an organization. And then finally, organizational agility. This is the ability for individuals in the company, but the company as a whole. Well, to be resilient, to be adaptable, to recognize that, in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until he punches them in the mouth, right? And so every now and then, our plans get punched in the mouth, and we have to step back, wipe off the blood, so to speak. Sorry to be graphic, but realize that we have to figure out how to be adaptable and how to be resilient and how to bounce back and continue executing against the mission.

BEATE CHELETTE:

I think that is totally true. I love the part that you put in the agility, and I you put in the agility at the end, because that's what happens. And then you do all of that, and then a pandemic comes, and everything you just planned was it's just over, and then you plan for it, and then suddenly, you know, there's a global recession looming. And so you and people are so attached to failure or feeling like failures when the plan is changing. So I think that the notion of saying no, no, no, look at it as agility, is a much, much, much, much better notion. So Jeff, for somebody who now wants to figure out how you can bring a culture of excellence to them, where would they go? So

Jeff Standridge:

they they're welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there, and it's Jeff Standridge on LinkedIn. Or jeffs@innovationjunkie.com. Jeffs "s" for my last name, Standridge,@innovationjunkie.com, or jeffstandridge.com I'd love to interact with any of your listeners who are, who are interested in learning more about the culture of excellence, or individuals who may be interested in this concept of calling versus vocation. I'd love to talk about that as well with them, yeah,

BEATE CHELETTE:

which I which I think is a really powerful, powerful conversation to be having right now. Well, so thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure

Jeff Standridge:

to have you. It's been my pleasure, and as I said, an honor. And I appreciate you for having me. Thank

BEATE CHELETTE:

you so much, and thank you for listening to or watching this episode of the business growth architect show. If there was something in here, if you know somebody who needs to step into purpose or understand the difference between vocation and calling, or how to combine spirituality with a strategy. Please share this episode with them and until we see each other again. Goodbye. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, give us a five star, review, a comment and share this episode with one more person so that you can help us help more people. Thank you again, until next time. Goodbye.

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Beate Chelette

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Jeff D Standridge

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