As I round the corner into this ninth year of podcasting, after over 700 episodes today, I’m announcing a pause for both shows.
Listen in to hear what factors helped me reach this decision across time, money, energy, depressing industry articles, the pace of both shows’ growth, and mix of additional business factors that make this an important moment to pause and regroup. You might also appreciate the even deeper dive with my longtime friend (and first coach) Adrian Klaphaak in Pivot episode 360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts.
“Expectations are the enemy to the creative process. Sometimes you have to let go of the known to see the unknown.”
Today I’m speaking with James McCrae, an author, poet, and meme artist based in Austin, Texas. He is the founder of 🌻 Sunflower Club, a global school and community dedicated to conscious creativity.
Good decision-making is not about omniscience or clairvoyance—it's more about resilience, according to today’s guest, decision engineer Michelle Florendo. “Decision-making is harder than ever before, and it's not your fault,” Michelle says. “People feel like they ‘should just know’ how to decide.”
Today we’re talking about a framework more helpful than pro-con lists, tuning into your head, heart and gut; why the quality of your decision is not equal to the outcome—did good or bad things happen; keeping a decision journal to evaluate the quality of your decisions regardless of the outcome; and how to drop the guilt of “bad” past outcomes.
What happens when you make a big decision but still have lingering doubt, fear, and even despair? How do you know when a “download” from the universe is worth following, and what does test-driving a decision look like? What happens on the other side or when a pivot is taking far longer than planned?
We’re unpacking all these topics in today’s twelfth and final (for now) conversation for the Pivot x Career Pathfinder series with Adrian Klaphaak.
“You can’t give what you don’t have.” That’s just one of the powerful lessons that Nataly Kogan learned the hard way seven years ago, after suffering a debilitating phase of burnout. As a former refugee from the former Soviet Union, she began her American journey in the projects and on welfare, then going on to build an impressive career as a finance and tech executive and serial entrepreneur over the next 25 years. Until she crashed at thirty-eight years old and needed to find a new way of moving forward.
As part of her healing process, Nataly began to paint when she was 40 by signing up for a painting retreat in Tuscony (that turned out to be for semi-professional watercolorists), and now her paintings are on the cover of her books—front and center as part of her bold self-expression.
How often do you come down with a Case of the Mondays? It can be a strange feeling to avoid your to-do list on a big project when you run your own business or side hustle: if you are the one calling the shots on schedule and strategy, shouldn’t it be energizing much more often than not?
However, for one reason or another, we often let fear and shoulds take-over (myself included) and suddenly find ourselves at a fork-in-the-road with projects we care deeply about.
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
―Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Yes, we—there is no way this would be possible without you here reading, and for that I am grateful beyond words.
The Pivot Method will be published in hardcover by Portfolio/Penguin in early 2016, one of the top business and career imprints, and I could not be more thrilled! Their vision for the book blew me away, and I feel very lucky to be in such great hands over this next leg of the JB journey.
Cyber crimes are increasing at a staggeringly multi-exponential rate. Ignorance about our devices and online security is no longer acceptable; cyber crimes affect over 1.5 million victims per day. That’s 18 victims per second, 556 million victims per year, and over 600,000 compromised Facebook accounts per day. [Source] The recent Sony hack was so sophisticated the FBI says it would have gotten past 90 percent of firms. This is not something we can afford to ignore, especially for those of us who run online businesses.
Today I am thrilled to introduce you to my good friend, web strategist and performance expert Willie Jackson.
What does it take to find your Zone of Genius and stay there?
For those of you considering hiring a virtual assistant in 2014, I cannot recommend it highly enough — this is easily one of the best things I did for my life and business last year. And yet, control freak that I am, I did not go down without a fight!
For YEARS I had read all the books (4-hour Work Week chief among them), and knew the importance of delegating and not being a bottleneck. But each time I tried to move forward with hiring someone, I got overwhelmed, discouraged and gave up. Who to hire? US or overseas? What should I delegate? How do I do it efficiently? Can I trust them?
Thankfully I gave it another go by hiring someone in October, and I’ve been hooked ever since. After just four days of working together, she became indispensable to my daily workflow.