Finding meaning and happiness in your career boils down to how you align your work with your values and passions. When we work on something that feels purposeful, it gives a sense of fulfillment that goes beyond a paycheck. How can we find a career that resonates with who we are?

In this episode, I chat with Debbie Morris, the founder of Live, Learn, Serve, a career transition coaching service. We talk about how to create a happier, more meaningful work life by focusing on things like employee engagement, career growth, and aligning your values with your work. Debbie breaks down why so many people feel disconnected at work and shares tips on finding purpose, practicing self-reflection, and adopting a positive mindset. Don’t miss this conversation—it’s packed with insight!

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Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really new to me as I’ve experienced it myself, I know a lot of other people have experienced it, which is how do we make work a better place to be, a happier place to be, a place that you really want to be? And I often comment that hating work is kind of built into our culture, if you think about Sunday scaries, Wednesday hump day, thank God it’s Friday, and I’ve often said to people that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can live a life where work is just one of the things we do along with weekends and you enjoy your weekend, you go, you dance, you party, and then you come to work on Monday and you also get to do something you love doing. To talk about how we can maybe help make that world a little bit more of a reality for more people, I would like to bring to you my guest today, Debbie Morris, the founder of Live Learn Serve career transition coaching service.

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Debbie, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Thank you. I’m excited,

 

Well, I’m excited to talk to you about this because you’ve brought up the Gallup surveys that seem to be pretty consistently stuck with only about a third of the people in this country actually being engaged in their work, and then, globally, that number is even worse than the United States. So let’s start there. What leads to this result and this kind of stagnant result that, despite the fact that we’ve understood for so long that results in our organizations would be better if more people enjoy their job, why is it still that only a third of Americans are actually engaged in and what keeps it stagnant?

 

Well, I think first we have to sort of deconstruct the word and the intent of engagement. So, as organizations grow and they bring folks in, they want people to be committed to their work and to find alignment with the organization’s values. So, intrinsically, they want that level of commitment and they know that if you are intrinsically motivated, that you are more likely to stay and be high performing. So, the goal is to have that level of engagement. In order to do that, though, there has to be some level of alignment so there has to be alignment to what I believe in, what that organization believes in, and I think, first and foremost, what we’ve seen lately is that, oftentimes, there is a misalignment. So, people don’t necessarily feel like they are connected and believe in the same things their organization does. So, number one, there’s misalignment. Number two, I think people have said over and over again, we hear this all the time, is that they want opportunities to grow. So, career growth, that is a type of growth, but then as we look across generations, we see growth as meaning different things. So, growth could be vertical movement within an organization, but it could just also mean I want to expand as an individual or I want to expand as a global citizen or I want to contribute to something larger. So,

Managing group finances can be tricky, but it’s all about clear communication and setting shared goals. Whether it’s splitting bills or budgeting for a project, transparency keeps things running smoothly. Have you ever had a financial disagreement that taught you something valuable?

In this special episode, I’m joined by Joshua Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. We talk about struggles of managing group finances, from tracking contributions to avoiding awkward money conversations. To deal with these, Joshua introduces his app, designed to streamline group financial management, making it easier to collaborate, stay organized, and maintain trust within the group. Tune in, and learn more!

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Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today is an important day for Action’s Antidotes because it is my 150th episode, that’s kind of a milestone and, usually, I don’t make these episodes or any of these episodes about myself. Usually, it’s about the guest I’m interviewing, but this particular interview actually pertains to an area of my life personally because I’m the treasurer of an organization called Toastmasters, not the organization International, if you’re familiar, but of a local chapter, I’m a treasurer, and as a treasurer of the group, I oftentimes go to the bank, facilitate transactions with a bank account, because groups like Toastmasters or any other group oftentimes require having a budget, and a lot of people have clubs like that or perhaps you’re out there thinking about what kind of club or organization you want to start. Well, when I go to the bank, I never know what to say to the banker about whether it is a personal or a business account, because it kind of treads that line kind of between the two. It’s not a business, we’re not trying to make a profit or anything like that, we’re just trying to organize all the Toastmasters activities and expenses under this account so that we can fund our operations with our dues and what we owe the international organization and stuff like that. Given that a lot of our pursuits and a lot of us are going to find ourselves in a situation like this, I want to introduce to you today’s guest, Joshua Lee, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools.

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Joshua, welcome to the program.

 

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me today. 

 

Yeah, thank you for hopping on. And so I want to start a little bit about what Tribe Money Pools does about these situations where, okay, you’re not a business but you’re also not a personal account, you’re kind of operating something together in a group.

 

Yeah, absolutely, and I think it would be a little helpful for me to provide a little context as to what Tribe Money is just very quickly. Tribe Money is a digital platform that helps groups share and manage their finances. What we’ve taken are the fragmented processes that occur in group financial management today, such as communication, facilitation, execution, and, most importantly, governance, which is all done with different applications or through different means and different channels. We’ve taken all that and consolidated it all into one platform so the actual financial management, the process of sharing and collecting finances with members of your group, whatever it might be, is much more streamlined, way easier and easier to track, and it’s much more secure than all traditional methods that really exist out there in the market today. So.

Really pertaining to what you were talking about earlier, what we’ve brought to this space to really help groups such as yours is provide these quick, virtual, shared bank accounts that people can put together with the click of a few taps.

Most importantly, set rules and access controls to ensure that people can monitor who can spend,

Have you ever been in a situation where, if something doesn’t work, it feels like going back to square one? This might make you question where and what you should pursue in life. One thing that prevents us from reaching our potential is limiting beliefs. What’s holding you back, and how can you begin shifting your mindset?

In this episode, I’m joined by Taylor Lehn, the founder of Black Raven Coaching. Taylor shares her story, starting as an aspiring coffee shop owner and eventually finding her true calling as a wellness and spiritual coach. We dive into the importance of building community and the value of in-person connections. Along the way, Taylor talks about the power of following your passions, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and creating a life that truly aligns with who you are.

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Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs with Taylor Lehn

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that’s really important to me, in case you haven’t heard it in some of my other episodes, is bringing community together, bringing people together actually in person more and more. We have a lot of online platforms where people are connecting with one another and that’s great and that’s beautiful, but one of my goals going forward is going to be, and has been for years, is how do we reestablish on this community feel, someone to feel like you’re a part of something and that you’re actually interacting with the other people in your community. My guest today, Taylor Lehn, is a life coach and a local wellness event coordinator and the founder of Black Raven Coaching here in Denver, Colorado.

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Taylor, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you so much for having me.

 

Well, thank you for joining and I want to start a little bit by going into your story. Obviously, when you started this whole journey, you had a very different idea about what you were going to be doing. 

 

Oh, definitely. Ever since I was young, I always knew that, as far as my career was concerned, that I just needed to be my own boss. So, entrepreneurship was always where I assumed I would go. However, when I was younger, I had almost no clue what I was passionate about and finding something that I could pursue that would actually fulfill me for my entire life seemed like a very daunting task. So, when I went to college, of course, and I studied entrepreneurship and economics and the only thing I really knew I was passionate about per se was, funnily enough, coffee. I’d always been a coffee snob throughout high school, into college, while going through college, when it came time to find a job, coffee shop barista was the number one. So I dove into that and loved it, absolutely loved it. Knowing that eventually I wanted to own my own business once I got out of college, I really pursued that path of becoming a barista, really thinking that opening and owning my own coffee shop someday was what I was going to do. So I spent about the next six years or so after college really pursuing that. However, as I learned the trade, met some amazing baristas, worked my way up to becoming a coffee shop manager, really learning the ins and outs of what it takes to get a coffee shop started and to keep it running, it is a lot of work. I would say owning a coffee shop is one of the most difficult businesses you could pursue. It usually takes a coffee shop about five years to even break even. Really seeing the inside of it, seeing the people who are at the top of their game and what they had to go through and struggle through just to keep their business and their dream alive, I started realizing that that might not actually be what I wanted to do for my entire life, and that left me feeling very confused and really just not knowing what step to take. I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. 

 

Yeah, that’s a tough spot to be in, to be honest.

In today’s world, shared workspaces have become more than just a place to work—they’re hubs for connection and collaboration. They bring people together, creating opportunities to build relationships, share ideas, and grow alongside others who share similar goals. These spaces remind us how important it is to surround ourselves with supportive communities that inspire us to reach our full potential. How can being part of a shared workspace community help us achieve our goals?

In this episode, I chat with Ann Marlin, the Owner of Broadway Collective, a co-working space in Englewood, Colorado. Ann shares her insights on creating spaces where entrepreneurs and small businesses can truly connect and thrive. We also explore the impact of a well-designed workspace on productivity and how finding balance between work and life can lead to long-term success.

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Community through Shared Workspaces with Ann Marlin

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the things that I find most important in today’s society is connecting people, rebuilding community. You’re probably aware that compared to, say, 50, 100 years ago, we’ve seen a lot of our traditional sources of community decimated and people don’t really kind of run into each other and people will often talk about this idea of a third place, a third place being somewhere other than the home and other than the work where you still go and regularly interact with people and regularly just bump into people, and that the way a lot of people build connections is just by these chance circumstances in which you run into anyone. And in modern society, in my own life in particular, I often notice that someone has to start taking the initiative to plan meetings. Otherwise, people can easily go weeks, months without seeing their friends, without seeing the people they’re connected with. Today, I would like to bring on my guest, Ann Marlin, who is the owner, founder, and operator of a building where we’re actually sitting in right now, called the Broadway Collective.

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Ann, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

 

Well, excited to have you. We’re sitting here so we’re on the premise of the very initiative so this is a first for Action’s Antidotes here at the Broadway Collective. Tell us what the Broadway Collective is all about. 

 

Thank you. So the Broadway Collective really was born for the necessity of our sister company as we needed office space. We outgrew our previous office space and found an amazing mid mod building right here on Broadway in Oxford in Englewood, Colorado, and we fell in love with the building because of the floor-to-ceiling windows and just the overall vibe. It had not been touched since the 80s so I’m talking wood paneling, purple carpet, baby blue walls, but we really could see the potential in the building in that our sister company, we do real estate investments and fix and flip. The minute we stepped into this building, we’re like, “Gosh, this is amazing.” We knew, however, that this building was going to be too big for our sister company, Elevation, so we thought, well, what can we do with this building? And our passion is to support other small and local businesses and so I thought, oh my gosh, let’s make a co-workspace out of it and invite other businesses into our sphere and see if we can pass back business back and forth. 

 

Now, one thing I love about your story is how you were able to come in and play a little bit bigger than a lot of people were thinking because I think a lot of people would look at something like this and be like, “Oh my god, I love this building so much but it’s too big for us. What are we gonna do with all this space? Let’s just keep shopping for somewhere smaller or find a way to get by with what we currently have.” What would you say is it about your experience,

When we hear the word longevity, it’s not just about living longer—it’s about thriving through the years with good health. Adopting healthy habits can make a difference in our day-to-day life. What are the things we can do to promote healthy longevity?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Cory Goldberg, a distinguished plastic and craniofacial surgeon with a vision for longevity medicine and aesthetic surgery. He discusses how to promote healthy longevity, emphasizing diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional health. He highlights the impact of poor diet and processed food on health and life expectancy. Listen now to explore strategies for a healthier, longer life!

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Unlocking the Secrets of Healthy Longevity with Dr. Cory Goldberg

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about longevity. Now, we’ve covered this a little bit in some of our podcast episodes that have covered health, fitness, wellness, but we’ve never really talked about longevity specifically. My guest today, Dr Cory Goldberg, is at the forefront and using some innovative techniques to promote longevity and some innovative ideas for the future of this entire subject as well as healthcare in general.

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Dr. Cory Goldberg, welcome to the program.

 

Hi, Stephen. It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to our conversation

 

Where we began here. So you have some innovative ideas about longevity. I know, traditionally, people just talk about stuff like getting regular exercise, eating well, and even we’ve recently talked about some other kind of psychological things people can do, like controlling their thoughts, minimizing stress, and being around the right people and spending good time and good company. Is that part of your program or do you go right to some of these more innovative, less currently mainstream techniques?

 

Well, honestly, what you just hit on are two of the most important pillars of healthy longevity and good diet and exercise are keystone. I mean, you can’t have healthy longevity without that. There’s no quick fix that gets you around those basics. And I would add to that, good healthy sleep and a good emotional state and interpersonal relations so you commented on your episode on thought control and those kinds of things, being present and controlling your thoughts and your emotions and relations with other people really key for healthy longevity. So, no matter what else we add to that now, those four pillars are by far the most important things that anybody can do to make sure that they’re as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

 

And so if you think about the average person, either the average person you encounter or the average person kind of in society today, what do you think is the number one worst thing people are doing for the health on a regular basis?

 

I have to say it’s diet. People follow the diet that their parents taught them, the idea of four main food groups. They follow eating habits that are based mostly on addiction to the foods that we were exposed to on a regular basis in our society. People are eating poison, they don’t even know it, and I think that’s the biggest contributor to poor health. And the reason that in the United States, the past few years, the average life expectancy has actually gone down by a couple years for the first time in over a century and a half and that’s with corrections around the pandemic and COVID.

Even with that, the life expectancy is going down and I would say diet is the number one contributing factors to that.Share on X

 

And so what is the biggest mistake people are making in their diet? You talk about the foods that you become addicted to, the foods that you’re trained to eat. What can someone do right now to get out of that?

 

Well, as with any addiction,

Sometimes, we all stop and think about where our life is going and feel like we’re meant to accomplish more. Life might be good, but there’s something inside that is urging us to grow and do something bigger, and we are willing to work for it. It’s a feeling many of us have had, and it often leads to big changes. When you feel like this, how do you turn that feeling into real steps forward?

In this episode, I sit down with Christian Ray Flores, a performance coach and entrepreneur. He discusses the common experience  that we seek more in life despite achieving some level of success. He explains the concept of hedonic adaptation and the natural cycles of life, including the need for personal growth and fulfillment at different stages. Redefine success — tune in today!

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Embracing Growth and Change with Christian Ray Flores

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve had some episodes that have covered some broad topics and we’ve also had some episodes that have covered some specifics, specific aspects about starting a business, specific pursuits, specific components of our lives. Today, I want to take us a little bit back to the more broad topic because we’ve all found ourselves in that situation and I think the broad category of experiences around the situation can be I’m looking at my life and maybe it’s okay, maybe it’s not, but I know I’m capable of something more and I have the desire for something more, I have the willingness to work for it, which is the situation that a lot of people find themselves in and I found myself in quite a bit throughout my life. To touch on this topic, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Christian Ray Flores, who is an entrepreneur, evangelist, media producer, and a performance coach.

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Christian, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you for having me.

 

Thank you so much for joining. So, as a performance coach, you work with a lot of people in the situation that I just kind of described there where someone’s saying, “Okay, I’m taking a look at my life and I’m deciding that I’m ready for something more, I want something more, I’m capable of something more.”

 

Yes, a lot. Me, actually, most of the people I work with are in that space. 

 

Yeah, I can imagine that. What’s a good way to kind of wrap your head around it, starts with a feeling, I’m assuming, for most people but –

 

It totally does, yeah. 

 

Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an excellent question, by the way. Thank you for setting me up for success here. You know what I think? I think what happens is that the world changes around us and we change and those are the main reasons why we find ourselves in these places where we go, “You know what worked for me two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, it’s just not working for me anymore. It’s just not satisfying me and something that I would be grateful for five years ago, it’s just not enough, and what do I do with that now? What kind of moves do I need to make? What kind of skills do I need to acquire? What risks do I need to take?” And that is sort of in the back of our mind. It’s a little voice telling you, “Is this all there is?” and, yes, and I think the – I’ll tell you a story of – I’ve had so many of those, so many. I can count at the very least five big ones where I’ve made, as a result of that thought, thinking about it, talking to some people, making a switch that is dramatically into another lane professionally, for example, so I’ve had five different careers, and I think I can name maybe five more that are more minor but also significant. But I’ll tell you a story of one of the earliest ones. One of the earliest ones earliest ones was I think it describes the situation when you have acquired your first level of success, you professionally have mastery, maybe you’re a senior executive, VP,

In order to grow our business, whether small or large, there are many initiatives to consider. It could be advertising. But one thing that can help you gain leverage, get exposure, and develop new clients is gift cards. How do we do it?

In this episode, I talk with Larry Rubin, Founder of Swipe It. He shares his journey, including how he overcame significant debt and the importance of supporting small local businesses. We talked about how small business owners can utilize gift cards to generate revenue and build a customer base. Larry emphasizes the versatility of gift cards, which can be used as promotions, employee rewards, and for online sales. Grow your business with gift cards. Tune in now!

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How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about gift cards and a little bit about the restaurant industry, specifically the manner in which restaurant industry uses these gift cards and what it says about what we might need to do in general to help level the playing field between smaller and larger businesses or give smaller businesses, give the person that’s just starting up their own business, whether it be a restaurant or any other kind of business, a chance to survive, a chance to really make it in this particular current state of affairs in the United States, or in any other country, for that matter, given that a lot of you out there listening are trying to build something, build something that you’re passionate about and really putting your all into it, but, sometimes, when you see these bigger corporations out there, it does feel like that the cards could be stacked against you. My guest today, Larry Rubin, is the gift card guru, the founder of SwipeIt, and he’s here to tell us a little bit about his initiative to help some of these smaller, locally owned restaurants take advantage of this tool that is much more readily and easily available to a lot of the bigger restaurant chains.

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Larry, welcome the program.

 

Thank you for having me and excited to talk to you about hopefully leveling the playing field for these smaller guys.

 

Yeah, so 100 percent because I remember when we first connected, it didn’t feel to me necessarily obvious that gift cards was one of the ways that the bigger, larger chains kind of stomp on their smaller competitors, but you’ve observed something very different when it comes to leveraging this tool. First thing I’m kind of curious about is what makes gift cards such a powerful tool for any restaurant to use in kind of generating sales and customer base?

 

That’s part of our battle is going in and really educating the small business owner who, right now, they think of a gift card as a product that someone walks into my business, they purchase it, and they walk out. And that’s great for people who maybe are living or working within 15 or 20 minutes of your business. Gift cards can be utilized in many, many ways. It’s a huge revenue stream for restaurants and other merchants. It’s a great gift to give someone. I don’t know what clothes they wear, I don’t know what their activities are but I certainly know that this guy loves his chicken parm from this restaurant so I’m going to buy this gift card to his favorite restaurant. I know that you can always use it. And what we’re doing is helping the restaurants look at kind of outside the box. Great, we know that someone can walk in and purchase a gift card but do you have a website? Are you offering them online? Are you capturing last-minute gift giving by offering e-cards? All different ways to bring in revenue. And then we look at it in a different light as well and say, hey, it’s great for people to come in and pay you for gift cards but can we use these gift cards to bring in customers, run promotions,

A lot of us want to have a successful and meaningful business. After many years in our business, we all want to ensure that the business we have worked hard to establish will carry on well if we retire. Succession planning is the key to ensuring a seamless transition and long-term success. But how?

In this episode, I sit down with Lowell Mora, President of Impact CFO, who specializes in family- and privately-owned businesses. Lowell talks about the importance of planning for business transitions, especially as founders or business owners approach retirement, including finding suitable successors and maintaining business continuity. Tune in to learn more!

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Align Your Life and Thrive with Diamond Drip

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about succession planning. We’ve talked quite a bit about the process of starting up a business on this particular podcast, about what challenge you face on the come up, but then, what happens when you’re getting ready to retire and you want to make sure that the business is going to be in good hands and you want to make sure that your own wealth is going to be in good hands. To discuss this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest today, Lowell Mora, fractional CFO, who specializes in working with a lot of these family-owned businesses around such issues.

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Lowell, welcome to the program.

 

Thanks for having me. Appreciate you having me here today. 

 

Tell me a little bit about Impact CFO. Tell me a little about your story, what you do with your clients. 

 

At Impact CFO, I help primarily as a fractional CFO, which fractional means exactly as it sounds, I spend a portion of my time helping a business that may not be able to afford – it typically can’t afford a full time CFO. So my practice focuses primarily in on the family-owned business in the small to midmarket that is looking towards a transition, either to another family member or to an external exit to maximize the wealth of the family and the value of the business. 

 

Now, when you say businesses that can’t quite afford, say, a full-time CFO, what’s a general size? What number of employees is that typical –

 

So the typical, most of us finance guys talk in dollars, but in employees, it’s typically employee levels of 25 to 100, 150. Again, it depends on the complexity of the business as well. So, in dollars, we typically talk somewhere around $5 million in sales, up to $50 million. Now, I’ve worked with smaller and I’ve worked with bigger but that’s the sweet spot. 

 

And so you’ve encountered a lot of these family-owned businesses that have gotten to this level. You said like $5, $25 million annually. I assume it means, right? So, what do you notice in some of these family-owned businesses that get to that level? Do you notice any kind of common thread in the type of people that you work with and the type of founders who are in the situation about who they are, what they’ve done to get to where they’re at? 

 

Yeah. Typically, in my practice, a lot of people out there is values based.

So I look to work with people that share the same values as me, which are pretty basic, which is a high level of integrity, strong, hard work ethic.Share on X

A lot of what I do is in the manufacturing, industrials, industrial products, industrial equipment. I also work with services, business services, and IT providers and things like that but, typically, it’s a business of an entrepreneur and they’re overwhelmingly, today in our world, they’re overwhelmingly male, and they’ve gotten to a point where they have a successful business and can support them but they don’t necessarily have a natural heir or successor. In a lot of cases, they don’t know what to do with that. And what typically happens, and it’s common,

Are you working full-time but dreaming of starting something new, like a business or passion project? Balancing a job with a new venture can be tough, and finding the right alignment to make it all work can feel overwhelming. How do you balance your time and energy to turn your ideas into a success?

In this episode, we’re joined by Diamond Drip—a coach, speaker, and Human Design enthusiast who’s passionate about helping women break free from the “who do I think I am?” mindset. Diamond Drip empowers women to move past self-doubt and confidently step into their potential, making their big dreams a reality.

Together, we dive into the struggles of balancing a new project alongside a full-time job. Diamond Drip shares why this balance can be so exhausting and offers practical strategies for managing dual roles. From time management to energy-boosting tips, this episode is packed with advice you can start using today. Tune in now to align your life, find your balance, and thrive in everything you do!

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Align Your Life and Thrive with Diamond Drip

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us are in a situation where we're trying to create something new in our lives, whether it be starting a business, starting any kind of endeavor, just do something different, and sometimes we end up struggling a little bit and one of the struggles that we oftentimes end up with is that our lives are not really in alignment. That's some of the challenges that we have where situations that I see a lot of people and, say, you have a full time job and you're also trying to start a business that can be really exhausting, it can be really hard to find time, in the same way I oftentimes find people starting businesses while not having a full-time job, not having a steady source of income, and having to struggle in a whole different way. And in some of those pursuits is where my guest today, Diamond Drip, a coach, speaker, and human design enthusiast who helps her clients overcome some of these challenges and find a life that's in alignment for them because not every person is the same and one of the things we're trying to move past is what I often refer to as the one-size-fits-all solution for life, the one-size-fits-all prescription for life.

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Diamond Drip, welcome to the program.

 

Hey, Stephen. It's so great to be here with you and our listeners today.

 

Yeah, thank you for coming on and sharing some of these ideas with listeners because I think when it comes to starting up anything, and it doesn't have to be a business, it could even be just trying to do better at your current job, when it comes to trying up anything, people often talk about the practical stuff, like you need to do more of this, you need to learn this skill, you need to learn this industry. People might talk less frequently about some of the stuff that you specialize in, which is how to bring your life, your habits, and everything else into alignment with who you are, which starts with an understanding of who you are. So, tell us a little bit about what you do with your clients. 

 

Absolutely. I love that you brought in that piece too about people wanting to build up their skills, people wanting to learn these other things, and one of the things that I work with my clients on is making sure that the things that they're adding to that list of to-dos, those skills to add, those classes to take are actually things that light them up, not just because someone said they should do it. And so I have a really simple framework when it comes to how I support my clients. It's called the trust framework. And so the very first thing that we do is we tune in to their authentic self. So, every single one of us has a unique, energetic blueprint, you and I were talking about this a little bit the last time we met, and it is in that blueprint that we can recognize our in...

Starting a nursing career is both exciting and challenging, especially in the fast-paced world of healthcare. New nurses often struggle as they transition from school to real-world practice, navigating complex systems and high demands. How can we improve nursing education to better support them?

In this episode, I speak with Morgan Taylor, Chief Nursing Officer at Archer Review. Morgan shares insights into the challenges new nurses face, the structural issues within nursing education, opportunities for innovation in healthcare, and ways to better align incentives in the field. Don’t miss out, listen now!

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Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about the many different ways in which we can go about carving your own path because I think sometimes people think about any pursuit and they think about the most common manifestation of it and they think the most common manifestation of carving their own path as being something along the lines of either starting your own business or doing something really, really wild, like going and living off the grid somewhere in, I don’t know, Uganda, for the lack of a better place to think of, but there are plenty of different ways in which you can kind of discover where your path is going and discover how you can get to a place where you once again feel excited about the things that you once felt excited about. 

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Today, my guest is Morgan Taylor and she is the chief nursing officer at Archer Review and chief nursing officer, I feel like a different C-blank-O title emerges every other week, so, yeah, Morgan, tell us a little bit about that. 

 

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on today. I’m excited to talk. Yeah, chief nursing officer, to me, sounds totally normal, because I grew up as a nurse at big hospitals that always had a chief nursing officer. But, of course, if you don’t work somewhere that has nurses, that’s going to sound a little funky to you, right? 

 

Yeah. 

 

And really how I got to where I am is kind of funky. It was not a straightforward path at all, not something I had planned out or set my sights on a decade ago. I started out as a bedside nurse at Duke University in the Raleigh-Durham area here in North Carolina. I started working in a – we called it the children’s resource unit. I went to all different pediatric areas of the hospital, spent a lot of time in the ICU, in the emergency department, and I loved it. I learned so much. It was a wonderful experience. And then COVID happened and things got a little dicey there. It was a big challenge, one that I’m proud to have played a part in, but what was most impactful for me and kind of what started me on this path where I ended up today now was I started seeing that the new nurses coming in to join us in this profession were very underprepared, and not to any fault of their own. They just didn’t have the experience that they needed to get prior to coming and working in a level one trauma center taking care of very, very ill patients. So that got my wheels turning. I started to think maybe there’s something I can do in kind of the education bubble, that’s something people talk about. I started kind of looking for ways to dip my toes in the water, so to speak, see what’s out there, and that was when I connected with the CEO, Karthik Koduru, of Archer Review. He was working on trying to put together a platform to really enable nursing education that was accessible and affordable and specifically targeted nurses getting ready to take their board exams. We call those exams the NCLEX and it’s that last test you have to take before you’re fully licensed, you’re out there on your own actually caring for patients. And we had really poor pass rates. They were anywhere from about 80 to 87 percent,