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.
Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author Rachel May Stafford, confided to her friend that the fruits of her successful career were starting to sour. She had become stressed, depleted, and was starting to feel used—contaminating her joy and purpose. Her friend Shannon replied with a wise reminder, the way only our truest friends can:
Today we’re building on 319: Who’s Sitting in the Board Room of Your Brain? With Adrian Klaphaak . . . and 328: Accessing Your True Self Through IFS, full Pivot x Career Pathfinder podcast episodes (Spotify playlist).
If you are looking for a little support and guidance on finding your purpose, or best next step, check out Adrian’s Career Pathfinder Program and apply promo code PIVOT for a special offer on his group training. If you’d like to work with him one-on-one, he just opened up a few new spots—book a free consultation here.
Research shows that negative interactions take a significant toll on all of us, carrying as much as five times the impact of positive ones. And yet, most people don’t realize how much microstress they’re under. As today’s guest helps reveal, we’re not just affected by the big, obvious stressors, but by the little moments throughout each day rippling beneath the surface. Karen Dillon and her co-author Rob Cross call this an “unrecognized epidemic,” one that’s invisible and relentless—in this conversation you’ll learn strategies for reducing even just a few microstresses in your life that can have a profound impact.
Raise your hand if you love Reality TV. Now admit to that in public. Now choose that as your academic discipline—to study and teach sociology through the voyeuristically fabulous (and often fabulously warped) lens of reality TV—and you’ve got today’s wonderful guest, associate professor Danielle Lindemann.
If you, too, let these shows wash over you at the end of a hard day, binge-watching dating shows with increasingly quirky premises or even hate-watching famous families bicker then make-up, you’re not alone.
“We want to peek into the lives of these interesting people,” Danielle writes. “But it’s their similarity to us that keeps us riveted. We’re voyeurs, but part of what tantalizes us about these freak shows is that the freaks are ourselves.”
As “recovering people pleaser” Natalie Lue opens her book, The Joy of Saying No, “Suppressing and repressing my needs, desires, expectations, feelings, and opinions to try to influence and control other people’s feelings and behavior was as natural to me as breathing. I thought it was normal to tell people what they want to hear (read: lie) to make them feel better. I believed I was ticking the boxes of being a Good Person by being kind, generous, hardworking, conscientious, loving, eager to help, attractive, and intelligent, and doing what others needed and wanted.”
If you, too, are ticking “Good Person” boxes while making yourself miserable, this episode is for you. Natalie and I discuss the five types of people pleasers, what we continue to struggle with today despite decades of awareness-building, and how to build the skill of saying no.
“There are no bad parts.” That’s a core idea behind Internal Family Systems, a form of psychotherapy that helps guide hidden parts of ourselves to the fore so they can be acknowledged and integrated. Today, recurring co-host Adrian Klaphaak and I are building on episode 319: Who’s Sitting in the Board Room of Your Brain? by talking about how IFS can clear blocks when navigating change, and modeling the process with JB in the hotseat.
At 24 years old, Eric Zimmer was homeless, addicted to heroin, and facing jail time. In the decades since, he has found a way to recover from addiction and build a life worth living for himself, while coaching others through his programs and award-winning podcast The One You Feed, based on an old parable about two wolves at battle within us (a story I also share in Pivot).
We had the great pleasure of recording in person—while meeting for the first time! This was extra special because of how much Eric generously shares about his pivots through addiction and recovery, the deeper needs beneath destructive coping habits, how challenging addiction can be on friends and family, and what the literature often gets wrong about codependency.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
—Anthony Weldon in The Court and Character in King James (1651)
Are you an accidental fraudster? An unknowing victim? A righteous whistleblower? The possibilities are closer than you think. Today’s guest, forensic accounting professor Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope, is here to remind us that fraud can happen to—and be committed by—any of us.
Among companies with over $10 billion in global annual revenues, 52% experienced fraud during the past 24 months. Since the pandemic hit, global online fraud has increased by 46%. Even worse, “We regularly miss the red flags that are swatting us in the face.”
Listen in to this conversation to learn why business is a victim hallmark, what makes us susceptible to fraudsters or to committing accidental fraud, and how to get better at spotting red flags.
Attending conferences can be overwhelming — even for the most excited extroverts among us—let alone the introverts who challenge their comfort zone in the registration process alone.
Today, my friend Alisa and I do an in-person debrief of our recent week-long adventure at the TED global conference in Vancouver (my second time attending, her fifth). We cover conversation openers, the power of a genuine compliment, trying (and sometimes failing) to approach people we admire as a peer, handling the inevitable FOMO and big feelings that arise, when to call it quits (what I call “falling off the cliff”), and so much more.
As today’s guest—imposter complex expert Tanya Geisler—notes, the global self-development industry is worth $41 billion as of 2021. She says, “That is a lot of money invested in making people feel terrible about themselves…and like they need to be fixed. (Think diet industry but for confidence.)”
In this episode, we’re talking about the six ways imposter complex manifests, the ways that trying to eliminate it can paradoxically exacerbate feelings of unworthiness, and even more importantly: the six illuminating values behind imposter-y habits that can help you step into your fullest expression.
Have you ever considered teaching for a university? Even if you don’t take the path of Ph.D. student pursuing a tenure-track position, you can land adjunct roles after reaching a certain point in your professional career.
Today’s guest Alex Budak—who happens to be someone I went to high school and college with (and someone who gave me hope that I could succeed in the earliest days of self-employment!)—is taking us behind-the-scenes of pivoting into a professorship.
“When there’s a fork in the road, take it.” That’s one of my favorite Yogi Berra classics of paradoxical wisdom. Pivoting is defined by its own set of paradoxes and tricky decision points, so today I invited a special guest to the pod to share two of her frameworks that I fell instantly in love with, and that I know you will too!
We’re also celebrating the one-year bookiversary and recent Audiobook release of Sarah’s wonderful book, Expansive Impact: An Invitation to Lead in Everyday Moments.
“Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.”
That’s just one of many gems from Kevin Kelly’s new book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier, bits of wisdom that he thinks of like handrails to grab when he needs a quick reminder about what is most important.
In this conversation, we revisit our 2016 discussion about the power of human-AI partnerships, give you permission not to become a billionaire, help you lean into serendipity and embrace paradox, and encourage you to buy your time (through delegation) so that you can focus on doing the work that only you can do. As Kevin says, “Don’t be the best, be the only.”
How ambitious are you? More importantly, how ambitious do you want to be in different areas of life and work? Today’s guest, Kathy Oneto, takes the long view on goals, especially for those of us who are naturally inclined to overwork until we burn out. Instead, we can be more intentional by toggling the dials of right ambition, right effort, and right time up and down as we move through different seasons.
In this conversation, Kathy and I discuss managing ambition anxiety, how to know if you’re bumping up against what Gay Hendricks calls an “Upper Limit Problem” versus your “truest fit reduced ambition,” mapping energy vs. urgency, and how to know when ambitions or life seasons have truly shifted versus handling a short-term setback.
Who is sitting in the boardroom of your brain? Who is sitting around the table, challenging your decisions, making noise, and offering critiques?
Today Adrian and I are walking through one of our favorite coaching exercises by offering up (and coaching each other through) identifying and describing three of our current loudest board members and who we want to hire moving forward. This work connects to a therapy tool called Internal Family Systems which Adrian will share more about in our next episode together.
“It’s OK to be a late bloomer as long as you don’t miss the flower show.” —Jane Fonda
That’s a quote that today’s guest, Jenna Valovic, pulled to remind herself that not all of us are what she calls straight arrows when it comes to career paths, landing on a singular purpose early without wavering and experiencing success and achievement from a young age.
Late bloomers, on the other hand, can learn to embrace the winding road—at least once they stop shaming and blaming themselves for not having it all figured out yet.
After all, as Jenna says, “Few things make you appreciate achievement more than waiting years to experience it. Consequently, many late bloomers find success to be even more savory when it comes.”
Are you feeling trapped by the infinite scroll of distractions? According to today’s returning guest, Paul Angone, we have all become cultural escape artists, what he dubs the “Refresh Generation.” Paul writes, “We are constantly getting a hit from our phone for the latest update. The iPhone is our cigarette, and too many of us are chain-smoking our phones."
It’s time to get off the dizzying carousel of phone addiction, and relearn how to listen to ourselves and our day for aha moments instead. Paul believes that “the most successful and fulfilled people on this Earth are simply better at paying attention to what's important.”
Today’s solo riff is on a three-word phrase that has helped quell countless waves of anxiety in the decade since I first heard it, wisdom passed from my friend Monica McCarthy (aka MonBon’s) mom, then to the pages of Pivot. Pardon the occasional panting (lol) and background noise—err New York City soundscape—as I recorded this one on a big hill at the park, running up and down while throwing a giant log for Ryder to chase. He chases sticks, I chase ideas!
What would you do if you had more confidence? Today’s guest, Kelli Thompson, polled over 500 people with this question, and received answers that were equal parts inspiring and heartbreaking.
In this conversation, Kelli shares the story of walking down the aisle at her first wedding, when her intuition was whispering that the relationship wasn’t right, but she didn’t yet have the confidence to listen.
We discuss strategies for listening to that still, small voice within; how to stop “box-checking” for external validation; the flip side of the imposter monster: pedestal syndrome; and working through the “poop soup” of liminal space between major changes. As Kelli says, “You can’t criticize yourself into more confidence.”
Joy and frustration can be equally motivating. Sometimes joy pulls our focus like a magnet to where it needs to be. On the other hand, sometimes being grumpy and frustrated is a sign we need to pivot in another direction. They both help us understand what roles or activities, or ideas we need to say no to to make sure we have enough space for what we want to say yes to.
Today, I’m joined by recurring guest host Adrian Klaphaak, who is just returning from a two-month parental leave after welcoming his second child into the world. We’re talking about preparing for, and returning from, time off; the challenges of parenting while running a business; and working toward sustainable joy and focus amidst it all.
