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.

Bravery requires being off balance. You will only find the courage to “cross the cringe chasm” by remembering that the risk of losing your identity is greater than the risk of losing approval.

As today’s guest Henna Pryor writes in her wonderful debut book, Good Awkward:

“The idea of releasing this book into the world without knowing how you’ll receive it makes me cringe. But it makes me cringe even more to imagine walking through life as a person who doesn’t write and release the book that matters so much to her because she’s worried how it will land. Either one is a risk.”

Holding space for thousands of others, primarily those who have experienced unspeakable trauma, is not for the faint of heart, nor should it be swept under the rug as simply par for the course of doing social work.

Today’s guest, Dimple Dhabalia has written a forthcoming book that’s part memoir, part manifesto—Tell Me My Story—Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self—a must-read for humanitarian professionals. While working in the field in Zambia interviewing asylum-seekers from the Rwandan Genocide, she experienced autoimmune disease and recurring nightmares that she spent the last decade figuring out how to heal and solve for fellow service-oriented professionals.

Are you running a Franken-Brand? A quick, inexpensive logo here. And then someone a few months later tries to write the brand strategy. And then another junior hire adds in graphics and you don’t even know where they came from. Suddenly, you have this brand that is cobbled together, and no one on the team is feeling compelled.

In part two of today’s Free Time crossover episode, returning guest Adam Chaloeicheep and I are diving into the four personas of clients who are ready to do brand work.

What do a flying money emoji, a stray takeaway coffee cup, and a heart have in common? Those were the starting clues I brought to Adam Chaloeicheep and his cofounder Marisol at Together Agency before starting work on the Free Time brand—as now expressed in my latest podcast, website, and book.

This is a two-part crossover from the Free Time podcast; this episode originally aired in November 2021. We’re discussing the strategic thinking that goes into brand strategy long before the visual assets are produced, the biggest misconceptions clients have about the investment and process, and why brand is so important for a business.