Jenny Blake
363: 🌈 Taking a Quiet Sabbatical and ...

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.

Jenny Blake
362: Setting Creative Intentions Instead of ...

“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.

Jenny Blake
361: On Decision Engineering and Evaluating ...

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.

Jenny Blake
360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision ...

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.

Jenny Blake
359: “You can’t give what you don’t have” — ...

“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.

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71: Finding Faith, Courage and Confidence as a Secret Agent—Michele Rigby Assad's Pivot from CIA to Author

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71: Finding Faith, Courage and Confidence as a Secret Agent—Michele Rigby Assad's Pivot from CIA to Author

"Was it hard to be a CIA officer with all of the challenges and change that entailed? Yes. Scary? Of course. But if I was going to fulfill my life mission, I had to conquer my instinctual tendency to freeze in place. Fear would get me nowhere. Faith, however, would take me to places I could never have imagined."

—Michele Rigby Assad, Breaking Cover: My secret life in the CIA and what it taught me about what's worth fighting for

Grab a cup of coffee or tea and settle in, because this weeks guest is a fascinating one, a one-of-a-kind woman I'm lucky to call a friend. Michele Assad was a self-described "sweet, faith-based southern girl" in high school, the last you'd expect to become an international undercover agent for the CIA, interrogating terrorists while stationed at war zones across the Middle East. But that's exactly what she did for ten years with her husband in a real-life Mr. and Mrs. Smith situation.

In this conversation we dive into what it was like to work as a woman in interrogation rooms even when everyone told her she'd only succeed behind the scenes doing paperwork; the role of faith in Michele's career, how she honed her skills around intuition and reading body language, and what it's like for her to "come out" and try to build a public-facing platform after so many years of being required to keep her entire life secret. 

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67: What Does Your Soul Know? Flow and Transparency with Penney Peirce

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67: What Does Your Soul Know? Flow and Transparency with Penney Peirce

“To know yourself as a soul . . . you must dissolve everything in the way. The clutter composed of fear, fixed beliefs, and unconsciously ingrained habits."

—Penney Peirce, Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity

What does it mean to make enlightenment normal? How do you remove the filters that dim your soul's wisdom? How can you feel into what wants to happen and find greater flow in life and work? What does it mean to be so authentic and transparent that we live as truth with nothing to hide? Penney and I dive into these questions and many more on this week's show as we discuss her new book, Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity, which I was incredibly honored to write the foreword for. 

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63: Artist as CEO — with Jenny Blake, Michel Karsouny & Kerri Lowe

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63: Artist as CEO — with Jenny Blake, Michel Karsouny & Kerri Lowe

This is a special episode on Artist as CEO, featuring my guy, Michel Karsouny. My longtime blog friend Kerri Lowe, who helps produce a narrative podcast called ArtistCEO, came over to our studio apartment to facilitate a free-flowing conversation about all things art and business. Michel and I met over a year ago walking in opposite directions down a New York City sidewalk — how's that for the magic of serendipity?! Find out how we navigate the highs and lows of creative living, moving beyond burnout, and balancing the business side of art-making with opening up space for the unknown. 

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32: How Meditation Re-Wired My Brain + 5 Tips for Making the Habit Stick

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32: How Meditation Re-Wired My Brain + 5 Tips for Making the Habit Stick

Meditation has re-wired my brain. I don’t walk on clouds every day, but I do feel like a new person three years in to maintaining a daily practice (and 120 days in to a consecutive streak). I know, I know. One shouldn’t promote meditation as a miracle cure. But if you have an active mind, one that veers toward anxiety and stress like me, take a listen to this week’s Pivot Podcast.

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27: Intuition and Frequency with Penney Peirce

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Intuition is an innate gift, one available to all of us, and a skill—a muscle that you can build with practice and attention. I am thrilled to bring you today’s podcast, an interview with intuition expert Penney Peirce, whose books have had an enormous impact on my life. Reading The Intuitive Way kicked off two years of coincidence tracking, intuition studying, and surrendering to serendipity—and completely transformed the way I go about my day-to-day life. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, and stay tuned: we’ll be doing a follow-up on dream interpretation in a future episode!

ABOUT PENNEY PEIRCE

Penney Peirce is a gifted intuitive empath and visionary, and one of the pioneers in the intuition development movement. She is a popular author, lecturer, counselor, and trainer specializing in intuition development, “skillful perception,” transformation, and dreamwork. She is the author of The Intuitive Way, Frequency, Leap of Perception, Dream Dictionary for Dummies, Dreams for Dummies, and The Present Moment: A Daybook of Clarity and Intuition.

Penney has worked throughout the US, Japan, South Africa, and Europe since 1977 as a coach to business executives, coaches, psychologists, scientists, other trainers, and those on a spiritual path. Peirce’s work is open-minded, practical, and sophisticated, synthesizing diverse cultural and spiritual world views with many years’ experience in business as a corporate art director with such companies as Atlantic Richfield and American Hospital Supply Corporation. She is extraordinarily attuned to the intricacies of the mind and the dimensions of human awareness, blending a deep understanding of natural laws with a designer’s skill in structural patterning.

Penney emphasizes the practical aspects of intuitive development and transformation, helping people apply “direct knowing” to increase natural efficiency and their enjoyment/participation level in life. Her work assists people and organizations in uncovering life purpose and action plan, understanding and easing transitions, alleviating burnout, and finding accurate answers to pressing questions. She believes that life functions according to innate natural principles, and when we live in alignment with these truths, things work smoothly and effectively.

TOPICS WE COVER

  • Intuition as a tool for accessing information through “direct knowing”

  • How to develop your intuition and learn to trust it

  • The difference between gut instinct and intuition

  • Question and answer come at the same moment

  • Intuitive writing and journaling; many creative projects get done with intuitive help

  • Moving from the Information Age into the Intuition Age; how to embrace transformation

  • Navigating change in relationships

  • The creation cycle: going from inspiration and vision in your right brain, to transferring it to the left brain for planning, to the physical work and manifestation

  • Placing attention rather than intention

  • How to avoid being an energy sponge, and shift back into your home frequency when you get off-balance

  • The importance of dream journals—even if you don’t remember your dreams

PODCAST: INTUITION AND FREQUENCY WITH PENNEY PEIRCE

Press play on the embedded player below or listen on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Overcast:

RELATED RESOURCES

Check out other episodes of the Pivot Podcast here. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen, and if you enjoy the show I would be very grateful for a rating and/or review! Sign-up for my weekly(ish) #PivotList newsletter to receive curated round-ups of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and new tools I’m geeking out on.

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16: Stacy Sims on Somatics: Why How You Sit Might Cause Stress

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Did you know that just the way you sit might be causing anxiety? Or that by straightening your spine and scanning the horizon you can calm your central nervous system, just as deer in the savannah do?

Stacy Sims, founder of True Body Project, is an expert on somatics, or how our physical and psychological bodies relate to one another. I had the great fortune of stumbling across her workshop in Bali when we were both there in 2013, and we have kept in touch since.

In this week’s podcast she shares her story of recovering from alcoholism through body awareness and movement practices. Stacy describes why if your body is holding stress—even just sitting in a certain positions that visually mimic those of tension, fear or depression—your emotions and thoughts will create a story to match.