Career Shift from Corporate Banking to Professional Photography with Michael Ryno

Transitioning into a new career can be immensely challenging particularly when the majority of your time has been devoted to pursuits that might not align with your true passion. However, deep within, you may sense a persistent longing for a life that resonates with your authentic self. How can we have the courage to make a decision on a significant career shift? Welcome to today's episode! We are delighted to have Michael Ryno as our guest. In this episode, Michael will take us on a captivating journey as he shares his remarkable transition from the world of corporate banking to pursuing his true passion in photography. With an impressive 25-year career in finance under his belt, Michael's story is one of courage, perseverance, and the pursuit of personal fulfillment. Tune in to this episode to gain a deeper understanding of the personal and professional transformation that occurs when one follows their passion. Stay tuned and get ready to be inspired! --- Listen to the podcast here: Career Shift from Corporate Banking to Professional Photography with Michael Ryno Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. It’s been a while since I’ve shared a story about a significant career transition and some of these significant career transitions are a little bit harder to come by because it’s so much easier to transition to something with like, quote-unquote, “transferable skills” or even to just move on to, say, a competitor or a slightly different job, get a promotion than to take a whole different path. But sometimes, that whole different path is what you really want out of life. It’s your true passion and it affords the life that you really want. And if you don’t want a certain lifestyle and you want a career that’s going to give you the lifestyle, you’re going to have the adventures you want, the travels you want, the types of things you want to be doing, then that’s a great thing to come by. My guest today, Michael Ryno of Michael Ryno Photography pursued recently his passion of being a photographer as opposed to his prior career. --- Michael, welcome to the program. Yeah. Hey, thank you so much, Stephen, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. No problem. I’m glad to have you because I’ve done a lot of stories about people leaving whatever job they had to pursue what they really wanted. It’s been a little while since I’ve shared one of those that, I’m kind of covering some other topics. So, yeah, Michael, tell me your story about where you were for, I don’t want to say most of your life but for a significant amount of time? Sure, sure. I think most of my life, that’s probably a pretty accurate statement. So, out of college, I went right into banking. I majored in finance so I was in the banking and finance world from 1983 all the way until August of 2021. While an enjoyable career, it sort of got to the point where I was, to be honest, maybe a little bit burned out and so forth with that corporate grind and what had occurred there was over the course of the last, I guess, five, six years while I was doing that corporate banking, I had picked up a camera, I think I learned how to use it properly and really became passionate about photography. So, like I mentioned, in August of 2021, it felt like the right time to let go of that corporate environment, that corporate job, banking, move on and pursue this new career In photography. So would it be accurate to say that at least for well over a decade, potentially, that that job in finance did serve you well? Throughout that time, I had, like I said, great relationships, great people that I worked with. Having said that, there were a few different banks that I had been involved with the last, say, 14 years of that career was in the large corporate food and agribusiness lending, large food processing companies and I still look back and enjoy having had that experience and learned quite a bit from it. It was time to start learning a few other things and add on it. Like I said, photography being something completely different. Yeah. So what made you first start feeling like, was it when you picked up a camera and you were like, okay, this is something I really want to be doing, or was there an inclination like, okay, I’ve been doing this for a while but maybe I want to try something different before that? That’s a great question. When it comes to photography, it’s something that, as a child, I enjoyed but had inexpensive film cameras or whatever back in the day. Graduated from that to adult life using point and shoot cameras but nothing really fancy and it was in 2016, I guess, about seven years ago that I’ll say purchased a real camera. The reason I got that actually was because I do a lot of outdoor activities, hiking, fly fishing, skiing, and so forth on that and so, while I was out in those environments, the idea was, well, let me get a real camera and learn how to use that and come back and see if I can take better images in that while I’m out in nature than what I was getting with other cameras that I had before that. Even though the iPhones have come a long way, there’s still some things that I could do with that. That was sort of the drive, was just my enjoyment of nature is what got me into it. So you were enjoying nature and then it sounds a little bit like you rekindled interest that you had from your childhood. And so, if any of my listeners out there are kind of in a situation, maybe they have a job that isn’t really inspiring them and they’re in that stuck, “Okay, maybe I don’t wanna do this anymore but I don’t know what,” do you think it’s a good idea to start thinking about, “Okay, what did I really love doing as a kid?”? Is that a good place to like kind of start searching for what that next thing is going to be? I never really thought about it but I think that’s a great question. Because maybe as a child and maybe as we get through, we go into these other jobs that we have, large corporate jobs or whatever it might be, maybe you sort of lose track of what some of your younger childhood interests were, and whether any of the things that you might have been interested back then might actually have opportunities to move forward later in life, in my case, making it into a hobby, becoming a serious hobby, and then becoming a profession. And then given that you got this inspiration around 2016, given that particular timing, I need to ask you, what were your thoughts at the time of that, I don’t want to say fad, that might be a harsh word, of when everyone that went skiing was wearing those GoPro cameras for a couple of years and then you saw them kind of fade away a bit? I will say that I was guilty of that. And, again, I had that before I had the, I’ll say, professional camera. Saw some of the things that were coming out on those original GoPros. The GoPro, I think, I had the model 1, sure enough, strapped that to the top of my ski helmet and got back and realized that all I could see was the tips of my skis. I wasn’t even focusing or aiming --- Oh, no. Kind of a long way of saying, yes, I was guilty of that, kind of that action camera as maybe part of that start of taking an interest outdoor photography thing. I have not upgraded to any of the other models of the GoPro but great question. I’m guilty of having done that myself. Yeah, I think anyone that did a lot of skiing in the mid-2010s remembers when they just all of a sudden all started appearing. I mean, nowadays, and this is possibly partially related to my new business in initiative but it seems like people are more hoping to enjoy the experience and be present in where they are. So, has being outside and active and in nature always been an important thing to you in your life? Yes. Actually, it has been, again, going back to high school and maybe even a little bit before that, when I mentioned earlier, the fly fishing and that. That was something that I had done quite a bit. Actually used to live in California and did some of that in the Sierra mountains. Migrated that over to deep sea fishing when I was in college down in Southern California and some of the years after college and that deep sea fishing. Also just spent a lot of time outdoors. Down in Southern California at the beach, I used to be a lifeguard at Huntington State Beach so that was my summer job while going to school and playing water polo and swimming in college. Outdoors is some place that I often feel like I belong.Share on X Now, I need to ask you about this period of time because you were in, I’d say, corporate America for almost two decades. Were you trying to like keep up some of these outdoor experiences? And, if so, how did you manage that with whatever restrictions you had on having to be nine-to-five or whatever it was at the time? Thirty something years in that indoors as a desk job, had obviously quite a bit of restrictions and so forth and that in terms of getting out into nature. For all of those years, yes, I still did, at least since moving here to Colorado about 30 years ago, was always involved with fly fishing and, for a while there, it was golf also in that and, again, just a number of those different things to get me outdoors. Skiing, as we mentioned. Obviously felt a little bit scrapped in the days and sometimes on weekends just with the number of hours that had to be allocated to that corporate job, which was important to do that also for all those years. And so, around 2016, you’re skiing, you’re wanting to get your GoPro videos but then you’re wanting to get stuck with fancier cameras, how did that turn into, “I wanna make this my new job”? It sounds like, at first, you would just get like more and more into the hobby and then it kind of flowed in that direction. ...