Benedikt Oehmen
speaker
156 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Benedikt Oehmen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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which was of course a big change for me i i took it as an opportunity to say okay good this part of my career is done let's transition to somewhere else in the company and i went from a publishing to a production environment and localization so the translation of our games and started there as a manager helping the team over there the german and italian team in particular
to transition through what we were going through because now they also lost about half to a third of their co-workers and now they needed to do more with less resources so there was a lot of change management to be done somewhere where I thought great I can make a positive difference here for the people to actually remove roadblocks make their lives easier so they can get
the staff that do best, they can get that done with as little interruption as possible. And that actually worked quite well. But then in 2020, the second shoe dropped and they announced, hey, we are going to close the Versailles office completely. It was super tough and everybody that remained in the hopes of being able to keep on with Blizzard, then those hopes shattered.
Now everybody was faced with, okay, what am I going to do now? And in that environment, I sat down with my team and said, okay, it is what it is. We all have to go through these five stages of grief again that we just passed through the year before with many of our friends leaving. but we'll come out of it on the other side.
And once you're in a good space to think about it, I want to have a discussion with each and every one of you, what you want to do moving forward after Blizzard and what we can do right now to get you started on that journey towards a prosperous future where you feel fulfilled and happy and have a good job even after Blizzard. And that, in a nutshell, were my 17 years at Blizzard.
Yeah, so that was definitely towards the end of my time at Blizzard when I was exploring more and more coaching techniques and more and more workshops with my team to really empower them to take charge of their own destiny and do so with hopefully a more positive outlook on their own abilities and their own future. And It's really starting to make a difference for them, but also for me.
In that moment, I realized, wow, like coaching, I really resonate with that. Not telling people what to do, but listening to them where they are right now, where they want or need to be in the future. And then together...
explore that possibility space of what they can start doing right now with a long-term view but very small and iterative steps right now to get to where they need to be and that's when I discovered for me and said hey After the time at Blizzard, I'll have some time and I have some resources. I'll get certified in coaching.
I want to know more about that and I want to be able to do it professionally. And during the following year, I did then exactly that. And that's what convinced me doing that course with other coaches. Wow, yes, this is really what I want to do moving forward because I'm not bound to a corporate overlord who says, tells me what to do and where my priorities are.
And all my efforts basically go towards making rich people even richer in a sense. And now I have the freedom to work with people that share the same values, that are geeks like me, which to me just means they embrace what they love without reservation and they're not afraid of showing it.
So people who do that, they don't need to be gamers, they don't need to be nerds or anything, but they're just unapologetically passionate about what they're doing.
And those are the people I love working with because that is my background and that's the life that I lived at Blizzard and I will forever be thankful for having had that time and the opportunities that Blizzard afforded me to grow into that person that I am today who is...
a lot more safe in his own abilities and okay, not having a normal nine to five job, but being my own boss and having my own company and living a little bit outside my comfort zone and pushing against it steadily. So yeah, I'll forever be grateful for that. And it led me to where I am today and it's a really exciting space. So yeah.
So to me, it comes down to your point of view and how you choose to engage with that event in your life. That event being your parting ways with your former employer, either by your own choice or you're being forced to because you have been laid off or the company is no more. And we can choose to look at that and say, oh my God, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me.
What am I going to do now? This is the most scary thing that ever happened to me in my life. I'm being thrown out of my comfort zone. I had this nice little place where I was good at what I was doing and it was comfortable and I made money and that allowed me to survive and live my life. And that's when people, if you look at it like that, then yes, it's very scary.
But you can also choose to look at this energy in your body that you feel, this being scared as, oh, there's energy in my body. I'm kingly all over. I'm excited for what lies ahead. So instead of looking at what you lost, it's, oh, wow. So I'm not bound to this company anymore. What other opportunities are there for me? What is it actually that I'm passionate about? What is it that fulfills me?
and is there maybe a better fit for me out there than what i have been doing previously and if you look at it from that perspective then change is exciting because now you enter this world of opportunity and the five stages of grief you get through them a lot more quickly and rapidly than when you look at it from the other side of being scarce and having that anxiety.
And if you have that for the first time, yes, it's completely normal to be scared because you lose your safety net. And that will always be scary, especially if you have to provide for your family and for your children. The more you get exposed to it, right, the more you are... getting used to nothing in this world is 100% safe. Nothing is being granted or forever.
Then you get into the practice of building that resilience and asking yourself, Hey, what if tomorrow my workplace changes or my position at work or my responsibilities or I don't have a job anymore? What can I do right now to prepare myself for that eventuality and the change that is very likely to come in the future at some point?
And if you look at it like that, then you can prepare yourself each day a little bit with stuff that makes sense for you in the future. And that may start with looking at what am I actually passionate about? What is it that I want to do with my life? And how does it overlap with stuff I can get paid for?
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