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.
I almost fainted when today’s guest, Kevin Kelly, said yes to be on the Pivot Podcast. Kind, brilliant and the king of techno-literacy, Kevin is one of the great technologists, futurists, and thinkers of our time.
“The future is a formless void, a blank space waiting to be filled. And then a Torchbearer envisions a new possibility. Some say being a torchbearer is a burden. Some say it’s a blessing. Either way, those who light the path are the ones who change the world.” —Nancy Duarte and Patti Sanchez, Torchbearer’s Calling in Illuminate
“Stop offering up advice with a question mark attached! Even when every fibre of your body is twitching with a desire to fix it, solve it, offer a solution to it.” —Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit
It’s the final countdown! Time to wrap-up the final days of 2015 then dream-and-scheme for what’s to come. I don’t set New Years Resolutions, but I do choose a theme for the year, do fun mind-mapping exercises, set quarterly targets, and hold myself accountable with mastermind groups.
In today’s final Pivot Podcast of the year, I share practical tips to help you set a 2016 strategy by doubling-down on what’s working, and setting up small experiments to test what’s next. AKA, the Pivot Method!
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That’s the gremlin I hear behind the slight nerves I feel about sharing today’s conversation with my good friend Nicole Antoinette.
As we both hit eight years of blogging this year (ten since I started Life After College), we decided to take an honest look at the social media fatigue that sometimes washes over a life lived online.
The most recent was a two hour pow-wow with my friend Elisa on all of our best business tools and tactics. Take a listen: Systems, Hacks and Shortcuts for Solopreneurs with Elisa Doucette (her awesome show notes are here). For a full systems bootcamp to get you set-up for 2016, check out the 5-Day Systems Ninja course.
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.
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.
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.
