On my daily tech podcast, I enjoy exploring how technology is transforming businesses, reshaping industries, and even changing lives.

Today's guest is my good friend Sarah Elkins who I met in Denver at her No Longer Virtual conference.

One of the reasons I invited Sarah back onto the podcast today is to share how she is leveraging technology to transform both her life and business.

Using tech to tear down the barriers between online and offline

After supporting and receiving support from online connections throughout the world, Sarah found herself wanting to connect with people beyond the keyboard. What if you could leverage your incredible online professional network to improve your real life, face-to-face business, and community?

The result was her online connections flying from all over the world to meet in a room in Atlanta, Denver, and next year, Chicago. As someone that also believes in connecting with listeners, guests in real life too, I will also be connecting with her beyond the keyboard in Chicago in 2020.

Using tech to launch a podcast

Your stories don't define you, but how you tell them will. If relationships are the key to happiness, communication is the doorway, and communication is most engaging when we use stories as our foundation.

In Sarah's podcast series, you'll hear personal stories of professionals who have identified pivot points that shaped their careers. These stories will resonate with you, you'll nod your head in understanding, and then we'll dig into the lessons from each of those situations. When she is working with clients, she reminds them to listen for understanding, not to respond.

During her podcast, she asks that you listen to consider your related stories and to listen and consider which stories in your life might have similarly impacted you.

Using tech to publish a book

Sarah then set out to crowdfund her new book "Your Stories Don't Define You, How You Tell Them Will" using a platform called Publishizer.

In the book, Sarah will help readers understand the stories we tell and why. The intention of this book is to improve self-reflection and improve relationships as a result.

In today's podcast, I learn more about how Sarah once again turned to technology and the online community to bring her book to life using Publishizer. We also disucss how the crowdfunding platform matches authors with publishers.

Authors write proposals, readers pre-order copies, and publishers express interest to contact authors. Publishizer queries publishers based on pre-orders milestones at the end of the campaign. The author receives a range of offers and selects the best one.

About Sarah

Sarah is a keynote speaker, Gallup Certified Strengths Coach, and has been hosting a successful podcast for nearly two years. Her keynote and coaching clients are diverse, including science and higher education non-profits, medical professionals, startup teams, and local, state, and Federal agencies. She is described as "down to Earth" and as having a "practical approach to stories as a communication tool."

Sarah shares how she has leveraged technology to launch her own conference, podcast, and book. But, all with the same goal in mind, using technology to bring us all closer together.