Embracing Life's Passions: Carving Out Space For What Matters With Pamela Wagner
Tom Dardick and Pamela Wagner discuss the importance of work-life balance, emotional self-awareness, and respect for others' mental and physical spaces in the context of a rapidly changing technological landscape. They also explore the impact of academic background, the culture of overworking, and the emerging trend of automation on personal and professional growth. Lastly, they share their personal experiences and future aspirations, with a focus on the importance of being present, patient, and aware in one's professional and personal life.
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Embracing Life's Passions: Carving Out Space For What Matters With Pamela Wagner
It’s my great pleasure to welcome Pamela Wagner to the show. Pamela has lived quite a lot of life in her. She’s still pretty young, so she’s been able to pack a lot in so far in her journey. She started working at Google and put herself through a Master’s in Psychology through an extension of Harvard. She has traveled the world. She has spent time in over 100 countries.
She has her own digital ad agency, Ajala Digital, and has helped over 3,000 companies with their ad performance on Google and other places. She is somebody who really recognizes the whole human equation, whether it be in the world of work or how we navigate through this world together. We get into a bunch of different topics about how we can best do that and maybe some of the things to keep in mind as we approach our own work and our stress levels. How we move in the world, she starts talking a bit about that too. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Pamela Wagner to the show.
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Personal Development
Your bio is really interesting, Pamela. You’re a marketing expert. You’ve been all around the world. You’re a global citizen. At a fairly young age, you’re very accomplished. Some of the things that I thought might be of interest to the audience, which is about seeing our power, increasing our agency, more of what we can do, figuring out the ways that we hold ourselves back, and that sort of thing, my guess is you might have some wisdom and some golden nuggets to share along those lines, so I’d like to move in that direction. What is it about yourself that you’ve been so driven to do so many things and be as accomplished as you are in a shorter period of time as you have?
Early on, I experienced a lot of trauma, and that shaped me a lot. I also grew up without remembering hearing words like, “I love you,” or a lot of praise. I was often criticized. What ingrained itself in my mind is, “I need to prove myself in order to be worthy to be loved,” which isn’t healthy. I’ve practiced this before in relationships or in the professional world.
It brought me to very amazing places on the one hand, but I also came to the realization a few years ago that it’s not always healthy to have a drive that purely stems from a scarcity point of view. I’ve started to turn that around and look at, “What’s my positive motivation here?” The other aspect is that I have a feeling that life at the end feels very short, so I rather want to live in the best possible way. I live it in a way that at any point in time when I look back, I do not have any regrets.
Professional Values And Quality Of Work
What a great realization to have at an early stage of our life. The natural thing is a week seems like an eternity when we’re a kid. A 5-minute timeout is torturous because 5 minutes seems to be the whole day. As we get life experience piled up behind us, those minutes seem shorter compared to our lived experience. To have that kind of realization early on in your journey is quite a useful thing. Congratulations on that. How does that manifest in terms of your outlook and in terms of how you take on your role as a marketing expert?
Early on, when I started my ad agency, which was several years ago, I wanted to make sure that we deliver really high-quality services. When I left Google, I felt that there were so many fish in the sea already. I was like, “What difference am I here to make?” What I noticed quickly was that there were very few people who did good work, and they were almost like paid ads.
One of my clients was like, “People are horrible at responding to emails. I would work with somebody for a month or two and I would have to wait for a week or two for a response.” That’s why a lot of people prefer apps like Slack and so on, but we don’t use them at all. We stick with email. He was like, “You’re so responsive. We’re not going to need that.” I’m not talking about immediately responding. I’m very conscious of that. That’s one of the aspects where I’m like, “There are different ways to deliver quality in the way that you’d want it.” One of those, for example, is communication and transparency with clients. Walking the talk in that regard is extremely important to me.
I don’t know what the paradigm is, honestly, that makes it seem okay that you can go unanswered. It doesn’t have to be immediate, but even if you can’t respond in a detailed manner, at least acknowledge and say, “I’m working on this thing,” or, “I saw your message,” or, “I’m busy the rest of the day. Is it okay if we circle back tomorrow?” It could be anything like that that makes it so that you’re telling the person that you care, you’re engaged, and you’re available to them, right?
Yeah. Honestly, I could probably go on for hours about this. Thankfully, I’ve been able to surround myself with people, especially my team, who are somehow aligned with how I think in that regard. Otherwise, I couldn’t work with them. It’s one of the easiest ways that you can add value to other people’s lives. One thing I figured out is most clients don’t expect you to know everything. They expect you to be there to help you. If you don’t know something, say you’ll figure it out, give them a rough timeline, and then follow up. There is nothing easier than that.
What do you think it is that causes people who are out there providing services to be unresponsive or think it’s okay to put their agenda above the agenda of the people who have hired them?
On the one hand, it’s not being able to organize one’s email properly. A lot of people never manage that. For me, I’ve found a system over the years of how to manage my emails in a very efficient way. I always make sure I get back to them. I tell my people, “If it happens that I miss an email and you do not get a response within 48 hours from me, then please do push it up again in my inbox.” That happens maybe once every six months or so. I’ve accepted I’m a human being, I might overlook things as well sometimes.
The other aspect is insecurity and not knowing how to deal with certain information. Especially these days compared to many years ago, it’s much easier to ignore someone rather than saying, “Let’s hop on a call. Do you have time for a five-minute chat?” I’ve seen over and over again that every single time personal interaction beats written communication. There’s so much misunderstanding that can happen in written communication. I get it when people are afraid, but also, there are solutions for that. You have a certain responsibility if you want to be paid for a certain outcome or want to be paid a certain sum.
This is one of the things that I saw in your bio. You didn’t really use the term work-life balance, but what you were saying was not being in the grind and not feeling like your responsibilities professional or otherwise are eating up too much of your life so that you don’t have room for the other passions that we might have. Talk a little bit about that, how it works for you, and how you got to that.
The two most important decisions that people usually make in their lives are their partner and their work because these are the two aspects we spend most of our time with, but few people really make conscious choices around these aspects. What I want people to understand is if you choose a work where you overwork yourself, you are constantly stressed, you don’t like your colleagues, you might not even like your boss, and so on, you are going to be in a constant stress mode. That stress mode is going to be detrimental to your health. It causes chronic pain, allergies, and so on. I could go on. The list is long.
I go back to saying, “How do you want to live life? Is this how you want to live life? Do you want to live life stressed and with health issues or do you want to live life happily and healthily and doing the things you love?” The beautiful thing is that now more than ever, we have a choice of how we want to live. There are so many different ways how to make money that it’s ridiculous.
I’ve gotten exposed to that part of my work at Google already and then afterward because I’ve seen so many different businesses. I always tell people there are very few industries, and I shall not name them here, that I haven’t worked with and I don’t want to work with. Other than that, I’ve worked with every single industry that’s out there. Any way you want to live life is possible.
Is that driven mainly by the technological revolution that shrinks the world so that we can do what we’re doing? We have the force multiplier capacities of AI automation and things of that nature and different partnerships that are available, this fractionalization of the workforce, let’s say. Are these the kinds of things that you’re talking about when you point in that direction?
Yeah, pretty much. You can get on Alibaba and start contacting suppliers in China. You can create a website here with somebody from Mexico. You can get the best talent wherever, and that’s extremely advantageous. You can communicate with people all around the world at light speed, and that makes opportunities possible that are unlimited.
You can communicate with people all around the world at light speed, and that makes unlimited opportunities possible.
Some of this, and I know for myself building various businesses, can be somewhat daunting. You pointed towards perhaps an answer to the question I’m going to ask you already when you mentioned the email system. It seems to me that if you’re going to take less of your time up, you need to replace that with efficiency, systems, and organization or leverage with either tools or people to replace that so that we can maintain a value equation. Can you shed some light on some of the tips and possibly some of the pitfalls as somebody would set sail into these waters that you’re describing?
Yeah. I’m pretty non-negotiable with unsubscribing or subscribing to stuff. I’m very careful when I provide my email and which email I provide. I do have different emails for different purposes. I have about 7 or 8 different ones. Monitoring these is fairly easy. I have a MacBook, so I use the Apple Mail system for that.
If I get anything I don’t like, I unsubscribe it. My inbox, my rules. If anybody doesn’t like that, that’s their problem. I don’t always manage that, but ideally, I want to get to a point where I check emails three times a day because I’ve noticed that that is very productive for me. Sometimes, we have emails that take 5 minutes to respond, and sometimes, we have emails that take 1 hour to respond. That makes that sometimes a little bit difficult, for me at least.
The other aspect is if I look at my emails, I try to be really conscious of my time and not look at it during a call. I’ve noticed what even happens to me sometimes during a call is I would glance over to my emails and start reading them, which isn’t ideal because I cannot multitask. Most people cannot. I don’t give them proper attention. I try hard to focus on the call, the meeting at hand, or the task at hand. Sometimes, I even close my emails and then open them up again when I do have time to respond to them and get back to them.
That addresses the input of requests for your time. In your role, people reach out to you most via that. It’s not that they’re texting or calling you.
I’ve honestly pretty much reduced the use of my phone number partially because half of the year, I’m not reachable when I’m abroad, which is very inconvenient. Secondly, I do use WhatsApp, but I’m also very strict with WhatsApp use for personal purposes. Even if a client messages me there, I typically tell them to keep it by email because I’ve seen that that’s much healthier for me. I’m really strict with my boundaries. Enforcing those helps me not just focus but do better work and better output for our clients.
I imagine that when you say you’re strict with boundaries, that also pertains to setting expectations for people. Sometimes, we can paint ourselves into the corner of saying, “I’ll get that right out to you.” We’re wanting to serve and help when we then don’t realize, “I had two other things I had to do before that. Now, I’m late. All I had to do was say, “It’s going to be next week.” Is that some of the equation too?
Yeah. I typically do not say anything that I can’t deliver. I’m very conscious of my words because I know what that means to people. I know that walking your talk is the easiest way to build up trust in someone. That’s why some of our clients have been with us for years. They know they can rely on what I say. If in rare instances there is anything that I cannot deliver or even laid on the deadline that I communicated, I let them know. It also goes back to practicing what I preach. What do I like, and how do I like to work with people? I like to reflect that in any outside engagement that I have.
You put yourself through a Master’s of Psychology. Was this after you were working at Google or while you were there?
Yeah. It was afterward. It was always my dream to get a degree at Harvard, but I couldn’t afford it when I was a 16 or 17-year-old getting into university. I didn’t even know back then how it was getting scholarships. This was years ago. It was way different back then. I finally had this time where I couldn’t just apply, but I also had the financial resources to afford it without necessarily having to get a scholarship and do it on my own terms without having to necessarily move to Boston. As much as I like Boston, I don’t like it in the winter. It’s too cold for me.
I went to school in Boston so I lived that experience myself. It was cold. Going to classes in the winter was rough.
I can’t do that. That’s too much for me.
What I was going to ask out of that was you’d already been established in your career path, and then you add a Master’s of Psychology at Harvard at the top of that. How did that infuse, enhance, and expand your view of the marketplace, people, and your role in that space?
I’ve done a lot of work in the personal development space over the past several years. I’ve tried out all kinds of different modalities. I read a lot about consumer behavior, behavior change, behavioral psychology, and all of that. I wanted to add that academic credibility. Sometimes, when you talk about experience, people tend to discredit that a bit and say, “It’s just one experience.” I wanted to be able to say, “It’s not one experience. What I’m doing is based on XYZ amount of studies.”
I’ll give you one example. There is an energy healing work that’s called Reiki. A lot of people would call it woo-woo, but there has been a study done in 2019 with over 1,100 reiki sessions. Each single one of them brought a positive improvement in terms of less anxiety and less depression and healing all kinds of things like chronic pain.
I want to be able to communicate that and show people that there are different opportunities out there to think about things and work with them and they’re all available. People sometimes tend to have this tunnel view where they only see what they know. That can limit them as well in their lives. We do the same with our clients where we help them see beyond what they know so that they can then grow their business beyond, for example, sometimes Google ads, Meta ads, and so on.
People sometimes tend to have this tunnel view where they only see what they know, and that can limit them in their lives.
When I hear you answer that way with the academic background of a Harvard Master’s in Psychology, you suggest that a person who might otherwise poo-poo the idea is more likely to say, “This is probably based on something that is accepted standard academic practice.” You get a little bit more buy-in from that. Did I understand that right?
Yeah. You could say so. I had a very fascinating observation when I spoke at a conference. I spoke on the subject of why better performance equals less work and how you can achieve better performance by working less. I spoke on the science and data behind that. I offered people 6 to 7 data points and studies that showed that, why we should do that, why we should work less, and how that leads to better performance. I then led them through a short meditation at the end and a breath practice.
All the people remembered in the end was, on the one hand, they cried, which was good. It was an outcome I hoped for that something would be released. They also did meditation and breathwork. That goes to show that we can work with all kinds of science data points, but we’re such emotional human beings that what really makes us remember and experience whatever data there is is the story of the emotions we connect with it.
You’re singing my tune. Part of the Eye of Power protocol is it’s a model that helps us see that inner part of ourselves that remains hidden from our conscious minds. The protocol is a set of lenses we look through. The problem is that change and improvement are not just an intellectual exercise. It’s not that we don’t know some things. It’s that our emotionality is complicated around it.
We don’t have a full picture of what’s real and true within ourselves. We’re very complicated. What we think about ourselves is only the part of the iceberg that sticks up out of the water, and the rest of it remains out of view. Within that part that’s out of view, there are lots of conflicting impulses. You know this from your work, I’m sure. Our tasks become to line those things up.
It seems to me that what you’re pointing to when you talk about less time and more space is it’s allowing us to have that flexibility to come into congruence. The slavery of the to-do list is what I encounter in the world. The to-do list is longer than the hours that you have in the day, and that’s true every day for everybody in the organization. It’s because of that that everybody has this background anxiety level that says, “I don’t have enough time for what I’m doing.” That’s not psychologically the most empowering thing. That’s what you’re pointing to. Am I right about that?
Yeah. That’s something I observe almost every single time I sit down to try to meditate where I can observe how my mind starts coming up with, “You need to do this. You should do this.” When I then inquire more about that and be like, “Where does it come from?” It goes really deep into my parents, especially my mom’s side that I had to have the feeling that she was doing something. She wasn’t being productive or good enough when she wasn’t working.
Especially as human beings, what we need to understand is that our brain is like our muscles. It only grows during times of downtime. We often think we’re having downtime but we’re not. As an example, and this was a few months ago, I had a session with one of my counselors. She was like, “Are you close to burnout right now?” I was like, “No.” She was like, “Are you working too much right now?” I was like, “No.” She was like, “Is your mind working a lot right now?” I was like, “That sounds about right.” We sometimes think we’re not doing anything, but our minds are constantly going on and on about things. That can cause stress levels as well that we often forget about.
I love that point. It’s that constant chatter. The theme that I’m getting from how you’re sharing these things, the word that comes to mind is space. When we have that constant durable wheel going, and whether it’s physical or mental, it doesn’t matter, it’s not leaving space for the deeper parts of ourselves to emerge.
I was having a really cool conversation with a friend of mine. He’s the kind of friend that we both like to go philosophical and deep, so we get into these great conversations. We were talking about, “If most people were sitting at this table with us, they wouldn’t be engaged because they wouldn’t want to do the work of going down that far.”
He is a leader of a fairly large team. He sometimes has that frustration where people don’t want to work things through the mental. I said, “You’re a smart guy, so it’s easy for you to hold a bunch of things in your conscious mind and continue the path down that. Their conscious mind doesn’t work that way, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not in there.”
It’s not necessarily that IQ piece because our brains retain everything that we are exposed to. Whether we can retrieve it and put it into articulation is the variable that creates this spectrum of what we’d say a smart person versus a non-smart person might be. It’s that space that we’re pointing to that allows that inarticulated wisdom.
Unless there’s actual brain damage or things that are physically wrong, it’s in there, and it comes through that side that maybe might not be verbal. It’s that space we need to allow that wisdom to bubble forth to respect that. That’s maybe perhaps some of what you’re observing. Am I out in left field or are we aligned on that?
On Boundaries
Absolutely. When we talk about space, it’s not just physical space. It’s space on your own. One thing that I noticed in 2023 that, for me, it feels like my space is being invaded is when other people have their phones on loud when they’re watching stuff on loud, or when they’re having calls on loud in public transport. There is a lack of respect for somebody else’s space. I’ve noticed how these things impact me and how I feel.
I know certain airlines have already started saying, “If you are watching something, then please use a headset.” In certain areas of public transport, they’ve already started communicating that. It’s really important for people to keep in consideration that space isn’t always physical. It’s mental. We need to understand what mental space means for us and what we need.
Space isn't always just physical; it's also mental. We need to understand what mental space means for us and what we need.
The word that stood out there to me is respect. Respect is something that is probably the most valuable and sometimes the most rare thing we see. I focus a lot of times when we’re talking on this show on the world of the workplace. What you pointed to was the world in general being out there. It doesn’t matter where you are. What does it mean to be respectful, and why does that matter?
In the Eye of Power world, when we talk about respect, it’s simply recognizing the value of people that they have a space in the world like you do, they have a walk that’s unique to them, and they have insights that you don’t have. Respect is simply being aware and acknowledging that there’s something there that’s worthy and deserves at least our consideration if not our time.
The only thing I would add to that is the understanding that we all share a common space and it would be nice to have a beautiful common space. It’s our responsibility to keep it that way. When I walk on the street, I probably don’t want to find a street that’s full of trash when I walk into an office. I don’t want to find the dirty dishes there. It’s the same as at home. At home, I clean my stuff. I try to treat every place as much as possible as if it was my home. It’s the simple things. If I spill something, I wipe it. If I drop something, I pick it up, and so on. Those things go a really long way.
You were pointing towards noise pollution. Somebody, let’s say, is driving in a car and they’ve got their stereo jammed. You can hear for a mile around the thump of the base. From their perspective, they like their music loud and they’re in their private space, which is tough. From another point of view, it’s, “I’m recording a podcast and you’re driving past my house. You’re encroaching on my space and you’re not aware of it,” or whatever. There’s a balance between that shared space that you pointed to and the personal freedom to live the life that we would like to live. How do you navigate those sorts of opposing forces?
Personal space goes so far in terms of what I can do and where it does not influence the other person. You can have the music as loud as you like, but if it starts impacting other people and other people hear it, then there is a boundary to that. You should be respectful of that. The same thing would count for themselves. I always try to help people understand, “If somebody did this to you when you were recording a podcast and somebody drove by with loud music, you wouldn’t like it either.”
A lot of people, or if not most people, lack that understanding like, “If somebody else did that to me, would I like that?” That’s something I’m really grateful for that my parents instilled in me. They always tend to tell us that back. It was not a comfortable question. I didn’t like it, but it helped me understand being a responsible human being or citizen.
That’s ancient wisdom right there. That’s the golden rule. That’s pretty good advice on that front of it. I’m getting a theme of respect for space, both outward and inward. In your bio, you are pointing to the 30-hour work week. That’s, by definition, giving yourself space. Each day has room in it for whatever priorities may come in.
How would you coach or counsel people who are trying to make their way? You’ve got other people’s expectations. Let’s face facts. Most people, when you’re hired, are not expecting 30 hours. A lot of places that I’m working with expect double that. Some people give triple. If you want to get to the top of the ladder, that’s the paradigm. They think it’s going to take that. Some people are willing to pay that price and others aren’t. How would you guide and coach people as they consider those external realities?
I would help them understand where the current behavior comes from. If they work a lot, why do they work a lot? That can often go very deep. Sometimes, there are decades of history there. It is really understanding what the root is here and also why you’re being stressed. I always try to tell people, “You’re not stressed because of your coworkers. You’re not stressed because of your children, your spouse, or anybody else. You are stressed because there’s something triggering you that you have allowed to happen over and over again.” That’s why we also need to understand the responsibility that we put ourselves in certain situations. Nobody else makes the decisions for our lives unless we allow that.
Next, I also need to understand how I want to live life. If you’re like, “Am I okay with working 68 hours a week?” Go for it, but I would argue that most people who say that are lying to themselves. They don’t know any better. They don’t have the belief or even haven’t seen examples that there’s a better way out there. I then would examine what I am afraid of if I work less. A lot of times, there’s fear. That can be attached to the ego. It’s like, “Am I on the path where I’m expecting to get a promotion because that’s the thing to do? Do I feel like I’m expected to work a lot? Do I feel like I’m expected to not say anything?”
Depending on what the case is, I also encourage people to say something or have that conversation with their bosses because, to be honest, most managers and bosses are not aware of how much every single one of their employees works. They give you work and hope that you’re going to get it done. Oftentimes, I would also argue, I hope that you say something that you can’t. Typically, when you voice your boundaries, especially if you deliver value, I’ve never seen anybody have an issue with that. Companies are starting to understand that their employees can only do good work if they feel good and healthy themselves.
Embracing Change And Opportunity
That’s a welcome trend in the world where we’re starting to understand it’s the whole human. It’s not transactional like, “You have this skill. I pay you this money to provide this particular deliverable,” which has been the currency in the world throughout all of history. We’re having this emergent, perhaps higher place, that says, “What matters more than what?” We can go up whether it’s the Maslow hierarchy of needs or whatever other model you want to point to.
Especially in the world that’s emerging with automation where if it’s a straight-out task that can be automated, it’s going to be automated. What does the world of work mean? When it’s not necessarily those mundane tasks anymore, what does it mean to be employable, work as a team, and add value to the world? This is a challenge that we’re all looking at, wondering about, and wrestling with. What’s your view on that macro level?
I honestly think it’s going in a good direction because our brain anyway doesn’t do well with just mundane tasks. It needs challenges in order to grow and develop. If the most mundane tasks can be taken over by automation, why not? We find so much more joy in doing things where we have to think a little bit or where we have to figure something out. Overcoming challenges doesn’t make us happier, but it also makes us stronger. Even if these times are not easy, they’re extremely important to our overall long-term happiness.
You’ve lived that yourself. I saw in your bio that you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Tell me about that experience.
It was one of these experiences that showed you that you can do whatever you want as long as you prepare for it in your mind. Three weeks before climbing, I got sick, so I couldn’t really prepare physically as much as I wanted. I’m a generally sporty person, so I tend to do sports regularly, but still, I’ve never climbed a mountain that high and that long. It’s seven days of extended walking, so to speak, depending on which route you take, but I took the seven-day one.
In the early morning of day six, pretty much shortly after midnight, what you do is start the ascent to the top. That takes somewhere between 5 to 7 hours depending on how fast you are. The thing is you can only walk very slowly because the air is so thin. You have to practice patience. You have to practice proper breathing. You then get up there and understand that any fear you had wasn’t relevant, and secondly, you can do it as long as you put your mind to it.
One of the key things that I did that I visualized was not having any problems with altitude sickness. That’s one thing that a lot of people complained about before, so I knew that that was something possible. I countered it by visualizing the opposite. Whenever people tend to talk about fearful things, I focus on the opposite, and that helps me immensely. That also helped me with Kilimanjaro.
I loved how you related that story because there were parallels between your mindset and how you experienced that adventure and all the other things we’ve been talking about in our professional lives and our work. There were numerous things about that. There was the mindset of being patient and making sure you were aware of the surroundings. That’s an important thing.
When we’re in that hustle and bustle, patience tends not to be the thing that emerges. The casualties when we’re in that do modality are things like patience, respect, awareness, and being present at the moment. We’re on autopilot running a program. That’s not quite the center of the bullseye as it relates to the point of being human, right?
Not at all. The one aspect that I keep doing, which takes me out of that ordinary aspect and getting used to stuff, is traveling. I frequently put myself in different situations and different locations. That helps me not to be caught up for too long in doing something over and over again. It helps me to question certain things that I’ve been doing.
That’s very valuable because sometimes, people get stuck in a job for like 3, 5, 10, or 20 years and they think that’s normal. They think that that is life, but there’s so much more beyond that. The only thing that’s keeping us from that is fear, and that fear is about something that’s never going to happen. In 99% of the cases, if you look back at your life, you’ll notice, “Whatever fear I had hasn’t come true.”
Life Passions: Fear, in 99% of cases, is about something that will never come to pass. Looking back on your life, you'll likely realize that most of your fears haven't materialized.
That’s so true. We talk a lot about that in the Eye of Power. I call it the pain quadrant. Consternation is a type of fear that you’re pointing to there that holds us in a place where we create scenarios and we’re worrying about them. Therefore, it slows us or stops us from taking that step forward. It’s a major way that we lose our personal power or our agency in the world.
Travel And Cultural Experience
You said you were in 100 countries. You like to travel and you’re comfortable putting yourself in different surroundings. My wife and I are moving into that space. We’re now empty nesters. I was in a band for a long time. I left the band so that we can do that kind of thing and be where we want to be. My business is going more virtual so it doesn’t matter where I am.
We’re moving into that space. We didn’t do it as early as you did in life, but I’m hoping to expand my horizons by being immersed in these different places and cultures. As somebody who’s entering into that world, if you could think of a kernel, an observation, or guidance that you could share about your experience that at the beginning of your journey you wish you knew?
The one thing that always comes to my mind would be that the world is a much safer place than you think. Do not let any news or whatever statements derail you from going to a country that you really want to go to. I’ve had the most fabulous experiences in places where people say they’re war-torn or there is a lot of hunger, or whatever. Do things like this exist? Absolutely, but there’s also a whole lot of sides of abundance and positive things that exist. I simply try to focus on the positive stuff and what kind of experience I want to have.
Worst case, if you don’t feel comfortable somewhere, you can always leave. I’ve been to countries where I said, “I don’t necessarily want to come back here,” and that’s okay. There’s always going to be certain cultures and countries that you’re going to gravitate more towards. If not, you learn something and have a story to tell.
Is there a place that you didn’t think you would love that you ended up loving or vice versa?
There were quite a lot of places where I was hesitant in the beginning to go to, but then when I went, I had really great experiences. Some of those were Nigeria, Ghana, Pakistan, and Jamaica. I’m talking about seeing the non-touristy sides of these places. Vietnam, I was positively surprised by that. I really liked it even to the extent that people told me it was nice, but it was even nicer. Those are some of the places that left a good impression. I’ve also gone to South Africa. A lot of people talk about South Africa that it’s super dangerous. I could probably talk for an hour about how that story came to be, but it’s a much safer place than people think.
Future Goals And Aspirations
What are some of the horizons ahead for you? What are you looking forward to in the next phase of your life?
At some point, it’s probably going to come a little bit of settling down, like mentoring and that period of my life. I’ll always keep traveling to some extent. I am looking to see how far we can grow the impact with the ad agency as well as with this new business I’m slowly building in the personal development space. I’m hoping that I can show a lot of people that whatever they need is within themselves. They don’t need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on external stuff or external devices. We have everything we need within ourselves. Once we discover that and once we learn how to work with that, everybody can have a much better life than they expected or can think of.
We have everything we need within ourselves. Once we discover that and learn how to work with it, we can have a much better life than we expected.
I love that. That’s a great message. Is there anything you’d like to add as a way of wrapping up? If somebody wants to know more about you or would want to partake of how you offer value in the world, can you give some guidance as to what you might tell people about that?
Sure. If you are a 6 to 8-plus-figure business and you are tired of having to manage ads or ads that don’t work, then we can help with that. We’ve helped over 3,000 businesses grow with ads, so there is pretty much nothing we haven’t seen with full transparency and proper communication. For that, you can go to AjalaDigital.com. If you are more interested in the personal development side, then the website is called HustleLessLiveMore.com. We’ve tons of articles for you up there to read and tons more stuff coming. That will help you to reduce that stress and see new ways how to live a happier and healthier life.
Thank you. It’s been lovely to get to know you a little bit. I love the journey you’re on. I find a lot of inspiration in what you’ve said. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us on the show.
Thank you too. It was a pleasure.
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Thank you for being my guest. I very much enjoyed our time together and your generous sharing of your experience so far. I’m motivated to get out there and experience more of the world based on your story and what you’re able to share with us. I am looking forward to being able to circle back and share some of those experiences with you and others.
To drink all there is of this world up is some of the things that I got from our discussion as well as leaving space for ourselves and other people. Get off that crazy wheel of constant doing and learn to have the maturity and wisdom to be in the world. To experience what life has to offer and realize that at a young age is fantastic. It’s never too late. I’m happy to start in my later years. Wherever you are in the world, you can always move forward from there. Thank you for tuning in to Pamela and I discuss the world of space, the world of respect, the world of being, and the world of getting off the craziness and allowing yourself to live in love. Talk to you soon.
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About Pamela Wagner
Pamela Wagner is an accomplished and award-winning entrepreneur, honored on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and has 15+ years of experience in the personal development industry. Recently, she completed a Master’s in Psychology at Harvard Extension School and has been running her ad agency for 8+ years after leaving Google. Having successfully built a 6-figure agency without ever working more than 30h/week, she is the antidote to the modern ‘hustle hard’ anthem. Recently, she has started teaching others how to drastically reduce their stress levels and live a calmer life, where one of her first clients was Salesforce. Pamela is a true global citizen and has been to 100 countries. Next to her business endeavors, she is also a lecturer at several universities in Europe, the Middle East, and the US. Her insights have been featured in media outlets such as ABC News, Forbes, Yahoo, Mashable, MSN, the Washington Times, Google Startup Grind, and many more.