gabby took dayquil, went down a youtube rabbit hole, and came back with a thesis: the woo-woo is real, but you can train it. this whole one is her "sciencing the woo-woo" — the reticular activating system, aka your brain's spam filter, and why manifestation actually works. it's not sending vibes into the universe and waiting for a check to show up (rip, failed student of The Secret) — it's that when you can picture what you want, your brain starts filtering the right opportunities and collaborators in, and the dopamine you release keeps you motivated to go do the thing. you can't survive on vibes alone. marisa brings the human proof with a green dress, an arsenal kit, and a stranger named karen at publix — a completely non-transactional exchange that lands the whole point about not forcing connection. we get into mirror neurons and who you let into your orbit, gabby confessing she's a "professional pessimist" whose assume-the-worst armor meant good shit never actually happened, the anna connection that refused to happen when forced and then landed serendipitously two weeks later (what's the rush?), and marisa's orbit theory of people finding each other at exactly the right time. plus the fine line between icky intuition and plain old fear (a whole future episode), why we mislabel our own emotions, and an ai card pull that closed it a little too perfectly: "i am not behind on building alignment." the universe meets you at your level of delulu — so science it, then do the work.

catch us speaking at IMEX — head to chinwag.live for all the info. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at http://chinwag.live.

gabby comes back from nine days in LA — four BTS concerts, two toddlers, and a phone she left in the seatback pocket on day one, which delta eventually mailed back from dallas fort worth but not before five accidental days of a digital detox. and here's the thing: she didn't flip a car over. she was calm, present, actually there for the shows — the kind of thing she swears would've gotten her institutionalized back at her old corporate job. meanwhile marisa's on the other side watching emails and whatsapps pile up, resisting the urge to say "we gotta respond to this," and both of them clock that they took their foot off the gas on chinwag for ten straight days and the world didn't end. it just pushed things. from there we get into the niching conversation liz latham from club beachy reopened — her reframe that niching isn't narrowing your focus, it's finding one thing people know you for so they can recommend you, and the rest happens as a result. gabby wrestles with it hard: "i take the creep out of your scope" gets her remembered, but she doesn't want to be the scope creep girl, she wants to be the human dynamics person — anyone who works with people who has issues with people, full stop, stop asking her for a narrower audience. marisa pushes back that for multidimensional people who actually connect, the box depends on who's in the room. then the real turn: your positioning isn't a job description, it's the way you actually exist. marisa's is presence — and gabby's whole point is that marisa doesn't just teach it, she lives it, which is exactly why gabby stayed calm without her phone. plus: why remote teams got shoved into virtual during you-know-what and nobody ever thought to ask "what's the best way to communicate with you," gabby's expo expo and nashville talks, and a card pull — "my focus is sacred and worth protecting" — that landed a little too on the nose given how the episode started. soft skills, hard truths.

new episodes weekly, more info on our IMEX appearance at http://chinwag.live.

marisa's fresh off connect marketplace and her brain is already six weeks out on imex — because chinwag is going live and in person, officially, in partnership with spl productions (hellospl.com). no ego, no one-or-the-other: they show off their av using our content, we show off our content using their tools. but the episode really opens up when gabby brings something that's been nagging her — a line from a book she loves on imposter syndrome, that the people most qualified to do a thing talk about how qualified they are the least, and the people who aren't are the loudest about it. doth protest too much. every time she says "this is my superpower" she has to shake the ick off, and she can't figure out why some people can say "i'm good at this" and it lands, and others say it and you feel the exact opposite. marisa's reframe is the whole episode: the ick isn't about them, it's a mirror. if someone over-explaining how great they are gives you the ick, look at what you're judging in yourself — everyone is their mirror. you don't have to say it, you embody it: the "podcast host" shirt that made people ask what's your podcast, the "best present is to be present" sticker that starts the conversation without claiming a thing, leah shouting them out without ever being told, katie tagging gabby for conflict resolution off one phone call. say it only when it's genuine and you can back it up — and ask who you're really trying to convince, you or yourself. plus: what's the rush, why a building notch counts as much as a completed one, and why the sales cycles are longer than you want but that doesn't mean they're not working. red card of the day: i trust my process and pace with new tools. big thanks to spl productions for the partnership and the show-floor audio setup — go find them at hellospl.com. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

marisa's off at ASAE, so this one's a pre-record — and it turns into a full nerd-out on the tiny book that took marisa three years to actually finish: phil jones's exactly what to say. gabby, naturally, has already read ten books on influence this year and inhaled the audio version while cleaning her deck. the wild part? marisa reads the opening line out loud — people work harder to avoid a loss than to chase a gain — and gabby loses it, because she'd posted about loss aversion on linkedin literally one hour before. get out of my head. from there they get into the actual magic words: "imagine this" as once-upon-a-time-for-adults (the thing marisa accidentally used on gabby a few episodes back, which gabby then stole for her whole nashville workshop intro), "before you make up your mind" and why gabby's nerves keep turning her follow-up into a lost sale, the icky "i'm guessing you haven't gotten around to it" one they both side-eye, and marisa's warmer spin on "are you open minded" — giving people the autonomy to say no and actually meaning it. plus: loss aversion as the secret engine behind scope creep, why most of this only works out loud and not in a DM, and marisa tagging phil jones and getting a repost because the man built a marketing strategy right into his book. no card needed today — the book was the card — but gabby pulls one anyway: my intention sharpens my impact. shout outs to michelle, crystal (switching to spotify just to comment), rich, and phil. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

marisa's card deck:

phil's book:

kyle's episode - set the hook early

grandpa kyle's words are officially living rent-free in gabby's head. after ten days apart — marisa back from two family reunions and her planning commission academy (zoning, not events, though "planning is planning," honestly) — gabby comes in wound up about the niching gospel she keeps getting force-fed while prepping for the ichi job search council. niche down. pick one thing. speak to one audience. and she's over it. because kyle already told her the move: sell people the thing they know they want, do it stupidly well, and let that open the door to the thing they don't know they need. so why does everyone insist she cram herself into one lane — jack of all trades, master of none? no, that's not true. marisa counters the "so who do you even help?" trap with her imagine-this move — picture the startup founder whose remote team keeps their cameras off and loses everything in slack — and gabby literally stops mid-thought: "I was fully invested listening to you." that's the whole point. you're not niching, you're telling a story people can see themselves in. they get into valentina blowing up off salary-transparency posts, the cousin who's decided marisa is "the ai girl," why reunions should honestly have lanyards and mocktails and curated intros (marisa was in green while everyone else wore red white and blue — not in the group chat), and gabby finally deciding to post the BTS piece, arsenal-jersey energy and all, because she's not a person who fits in a stupid little box. nobody's hiring your niche. they're hiring your brain — and your personality. we're not selling the pens. card pull lands it: your energy is enough when it's focused... but not restricted. personal brand vs. personal product is next week's whole thing. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

Here you go — tuned so the "no shame" thread carries through, since that's the title now:

gabby comes in hot with a networking call that broke her brain — shout out to hayden, met through an ATD meeting she "had no business going to, but whatever, getting in rooms." hayden went out on his own right out of school, freelanced for six-plus years, then went back to corporate on purpose — and because corporate never got ingrained as his identity in the first place, the job is just the job. "if i leave this job, i'm not losing a piece of myself. i'm losing a paycheck." the line that reframes the whole episode: there's no shame in going back to corporate after you've worked for yourself, as long as it's healthy for you and you don't let the numbers become your whole life. marisa and gabby sit in that, because every solopreneur they know treats going back as a failure — and here's a guy who did it backwards and loves it. then it gets honest. marisa's been getting tagged in job posts by people she knows, sending her resume through the "in," and getting ghosted anyway (data farming, not hiring). gabby runs the should-i-do-corporate loop once or twice a quarter. and the caveat neither of them can fully solve: when the work has become your authentic self, how do you detach enough to fit a mold without losing the thing that makes you you? the dream answer is a retainer or fractional role built around what you already do — but "who makes roles for people nowadays?" plus: a mid-year purge opener (fifteen soccer jerseys marisa hasn't worn since 2020, a memory box unopened in a decade, a cvent swag journal getting repurposed for road-trip entries with her nephew), a kyle callback on money buying the baseline not the happiness, and a card pull that lands the plane — "every time i return to the present, i reclaim my power." because sometimes the pull back to corporate is just living too much in the future. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

grandpa kyle finally makes it onto the pod — and immediately turns it into a masterclass. kyle morris built and sold a business before thirty, then went dormant for three years figuring out who he was without it, and came back with thirty years of pattern recognition on how to build things people don't know they want yet. the trick? you don't sell them the thing they don't understand. you sell them what they already know they want, do it well, and set the hook from the beginning.

we get into the case study as loss leader (free, but there's a contract on the other side), the actual pricing math kyle keeps in his back pocket — your burn number, a realistic goal, find the median, divide it down by 52 weeks and 40 hours, and never move the rate down, only up — and why networking isn't standing in a bar telling people how cool you are. it's investing in people and letting the law of reciprocity do the rest. gabby runs her carousel pitch on the human layer that fractures under org change, kyle marries it up with a tech play, and suddenly there's a one-two punch. plus: the $1,700 chicago bar tab that bought fifty people's attention, why being "differently authentic" to different people isn't fake, and marisa getting kyle catastrophically lost under a chicago train track.

red card of the day: clarity is my superpower, not speed.

soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

marisa went to a PMI Nashville roundtable on a random tuesday night — not an events thing, not her industry — and came out of it texting gabby photos of slides at 3am. the topic was motivation. the takeaway was that four people sitting in the same front row were motivated by four completely different things, and nobody would have known that if the instructor hadn't asked.

so we spent this one pulling that thread. why other industries are hungry to learn the people stuff while events assumes it already has it handled. leading without formal authority, which is every project manager and every event person alive. how "what motivates you" gets you the socially approved answer — family, faith, friends, all the f words — and "tell me something that motivates you" gets you an actual human being. gabby's volunteer years at the healthcare foundation, where every idea hit a wall until she stopped pitching what made her look good to her boss and started asking what mattered to them.

then it turned into a marketing conversation, because of course it did. the woman who stopped posting "here's what i can do for your company," started posting about pay transparency, and is now at 10k followers with work coming to her instead of the other way around. why nobody shares or saves a sales post. why "i'm an expert" stopped landing the second AI made everyone sound like one, and showing beats claiming now in a way it didn't five years ago.

plus: marisa's honest account of talking into an AI note taker until the thing in her head made sense, gabby's rule that it can brainstorm but never copy-paste, and a card pull that landed a little too on the nose. we close on why every evening networking event is a loud club with karaoke and no quiet corner to actually talk to anyone — you cannot debrief a long day while flo rida is performing on stage — and what chinwag wants to build instead. the messy middle. comment on this one, we want to hear it.

soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

Heather of O'Shea Event Consulting doesn't build registration websites — she reverse-engineers them. Start with what leadership needs to see, then backbuild the reg to capture it. Fresh off Cvent CONNECT Nashville (5,000 attendees, a mid-keynote rebrand, Lower Broadway shut down twice), Heather brings the hard truths: nobody fills out surveys anymore, so read the behavior instead — clicks, agenda customization, RFID scans. Your past data isn't a bad date to hide in a drawer; pull it before your F&B negotiation, not after. Plus why she's fluent across nine platforms but married to none: "you can make any platform do what you want — if you know what that is."

live from cvent connect, we grab nate dillon, VP of business development at SPL, for the most honest conversation about production companies you'll hear all year. his take: the tech is the tech — almost every production company is the same. the difference is whether you see the twinkle in their eye when they talk about your event. we get into the long game of trade show BD (spoiler: the ROI is an unknown return over an unknown amount of time, and it hinges on someone remembering to follow up three years from now), why nobody should ever be forced to share an airbnb, the exhaustion of being present from morning until midnight, and what decompression actually looks like — an 85-pound lap dog (hi Teddy!), a dance party, and a boat in northern minnesota. plus bourbon. obviously bourbon.