Coherence Podcast

Time to go deep on relationships, the currency of the fluid careerist. How can you be making and strengthening relationships as a regular practice, not just something you do in spurts when you need it? I’ll lay out all my outreach tips in this episode. 

Let’s approach relationship building (not “networking”) as the living, breathing infrastructure that makes a fluid career work. We'll talk about the mindsets that make outreach feel less terrifying (including the one that trips up almost everyone I coach) and get into the tactics: how to know who to connect with, invite them into a conversation, and structure your weekly outreach. 

I’ll share the most common blockers I see that trip people up with their outreach and people-fueled job searches so you can be sure to avoid them. 

Get ready for a mini-outreach bootcamp.

Resources: 

Get a FREE download of The Fluid Career book introduction here⁠: https://www.coherence.studio/fluid

Get the RELATIONSHIPS guide here: https://www.coherence.studio/fluid

A diversified skill set can be a great advantage right now. But you still have to be strategic about which skills to protect, which to augment, and which to say goodbye to. 

In this episode, we dig into the classic cleaning out the closet question: what is sparking joy and what is making you look out of season. 

We'll map your skills across three dimensions—recency, proficiency, and transferability—and I'll introduce three portfolio shapes (the T, the M, and the Comb) to help you figure out which pattern actually fits how you work. 

And yes, we're going to talk about AI. Because everyone and their mother seems to be expecting you to be “AI literate” by now. But what does that mean and how do you make sure you’re keeping with the times while staying true to your ethical compass? No small question.

If you're already navigating what I call a “fluid career”, one marked by increased movement, variety, and interdisciplines, it’s essential to know how to purposefully curate your skill set, because it directly influences how you spend your time and how confident you feel.

Resources: 

• ⁠Get the SKILLS guide here⁠
• Get a FREE download of The Fluid Career book introduction here⁠
  

Whether we like it or not, we have been reared in a society that conditions us to tie our identity and our worth to our job. 

In this episode, we go deep on identity, the most foundational piece of building a fluid career. Before we can talk about how to wield time, money, or skills, we have to talk about how you see yourself. Because that self-concept shapes the opportunities you give yourself permission to go for.

We’ll explore three perspective shifts that can fundamentally change how you see yourself professionally: moving from perpetual employee to career owner, from a single professional identity to many, and from rigid self-presentation to what I'm calling "contextual authenticity." 

We also get practical with a framework called "Jobs to Be Done", a way of understanding what each role or project in your life is actually doing for you so you can embrace your work ecosystem for the multi-purposed system that it is. 

Along the way, you'll hear from multi-hyphenates who've stopped forcing themselves into one rigid box and discovered that they can conceive of themselves in a more flexible and forgiving way. 

Resources:

• Get the IDENTITY guide here
• Get a FREE download of The Fluid Career Book
• ⁠Get the Fluid Career Checks and Balances Guide⁠ to see how fluid your career already is and get tips on how to make it even more resilient.
  

How do you build a career when the old career playbook no longer applies, and a new one hasn't been written yet? 

We're at an ahistorical moment. The big picture job numbers are not yet reflecting the existing and impending market shake up, but the AI disruption is happening already, and most of us are somewhere between anxious and in denial about what it all means for how we work. Looking to find a recommendation for how to conduct your career during shaky times, I argue that the people who are more distributed, more in motion, more multi-hyphenate  might just be the ones best positioned for this moment of seismic change. 

In this first episode of Coherence Podcast's fourth season, I'm sharing more about an exciting project I've been steadily working on: The Fluid Career book. This podcast season is a companion to the book: a way to introduce the core ideas, bring in voices of people living them , and to give you a taste of the general framework before the book is fully available. 

This kickoff episode lays out the big picture of what a fluid career actually is, why it matters right now, and the five domains we'll be exploring together over the next ten episodes: identity, time, skills, relationships, and money. You'll also hear clips from interviews I’ve conducted with an array of multi-disciplinary careerists who are already managing fluid careers. 

If you're looking for guidance on how to be thinking about your career trajectory and how to maintain your livelihood now that AI is closing in on your industry, this could be the very thing you need to hear. 

• 
  ⁠⁠Get the FREE Fluid Career Checks and Balances Guide⁠⁠ to see how fluid your career already is and get tips on how to make it even more resilient.

Working from home, working for yourself, creating independently - so many of us have to actively TRY to collaborate with others. It’s not built into our workflows or home offices. 

Last summer I got tired of hearing myself complain about feeling isolated in my job and decided to strike up a creative collaboration with a group of other coaches and guides in my existing network. Seven months later, the “Resonance Collective” launched our first project into the world on Metalabel (a platform helping artists release co-created work). 

In this episode, I’ll walk you step-by-step through what I did to get this collaboration from up and running to cheers-ing to the successful completion of our group art project: The Shape of Now. 

Once you have the blueprint for how to create your own Shape of Now project or any collaborative project of your design, you will have zero excuses for wishing you had more teamwork and partnership in your work. Zero! 

✨The Shape of Now Project on Metalabel ✨

Thanks to my collaborators: 

• Amelia Hruby - Off the Grid podcast + founder of The Interweb membership community 

• Xenia Viray - Myths of Creation -- Imagination Healer + Frequency Artist who runs business incubators, retreats, workshops 

• Lexi Merritt - The Pretty Decent Internet Café - writer and runs the membership community The Study

• Callie Rojewski - Online and IRL - brand and business consultancy for founders, leaders and creatives shaping the future with technology

More resources from Melissa: 

• Coherence Studio Website:

• Explore 1:1 coaching

• FREE GUIDE: Career Crossroads: From Confusion to Confident Action in 30 minutes

• FREE TRAINING: Work that Works: Design your next career move with confidence 

The Fire Horse Lunar New Year has arrived, signaling passion, independence, innovation, and rapid action over strategy. Easy right? 

For so many of us, the gap between knowing what we want and actually moving toward can be hard to traverse. What I’ve found in my coaching sessions is that the resistance toward advancing our audacious goals comes from low belief in… ourselves. 

In this solo episode, I use the symbol of the Fire Horse as a jumping-off point for something I’ve been sitting with for a while: the inner capacity that makes action possible in the first place. Self-esteem.

If you’re someone who knows what you want but keeps finding reasons not to go after it, this episode is for you. 

🔥 Join the Fire Horse Power Hour workshop - Tuesday, Feb 17th

More resources from Melissa: 

• Coherence Studio Website: https://www.coherence.studio/
• Explore 1:1 coaching: https://www.coherence.studio/coaching
• FREE GUIDE: Career Crossroads: From Confusion to Confident Action in 30 minutes
• FREE TRAINING: Work that Works: Design your next career move with confidence

At the top of 2026, I am inundated with prospective clients signing up to do 1:1 coaching. What are they all looking to find? To solve? I’ll tell you what I heard. 

For anyone feeling both a tug to strive and a pull to stay under the covers, this episode will remind you of the main ingredients that go into having enough clarity, enough confidence, and enough hope to move forward in your life with grace.

Give me the Coherence Podcast cheat sheet. What are the things you need to know from this past season? 

In this cherry-on-top, Season 3 finale, I’ll walk you through the five essential takeaways from six months of weekly episodes. I didn’t need no ChatGPT to help me distill all of the good conversations into five key takeaways. I lived the conversations! 

For both newcomers and those who have been with me along the way, this episode will give you a primer on the biggest themes that came up in my conversations with self-employed creatives creating their own custom jobs. I’ll share why I am especially proud of this season, and give you a hint about what’s coming next. 

I’ll be taking a couple months off to regroup and gear up for Season 4. If you miss Coherence Studio in the meantime:

1. Dip back into the archive to listen to past episodes

2. Subscribe to my newsletter

3. Reach out for an intro call to explore 1:1 coaching or take my signature program - Coherence 

   
   

You can also find Melissa at: 

• Coherence Studio Website: https://www.coherence.studio/

What does it mean to create "exquisite work" when machines can mimic human output in seconds?

In this special episode of Coherence Podcast, my friend and collaborator, creative career coach Kat Koh and I pull back the curtain on the urgent questions that we coaches are grappling with as artificial intelligence reshapes the creative landscape. 

Kat describes herself as a "career therapist" (though she's quick to clarify she's not actually a therapist) who celebrates existential crises because they signal growth and aliveness. Drawing from her decade of coaching and deep background in art history, she introduces the concept of “exquisite work”—her thesis for how creatives can not just survive but thrive in the AI era by returning to what makes us fundamentally human.

We wrestle openly with the real dilemmas their clients face: Should a podcaster become a therapist for job security? Can idealism coexist with pragmatism when AI threatens traditional creative roles? We explore the tension between wanting to encourage our client’s artistic souls while understanding that financial worry kills creativity faster than anything else. I hope you can feel the unscripted, emergent nature of this conversation and our belief that self-trust becomes more crucial than ever during times of rapid change and uncertainty. 

You can find Kat at: 

• Website: Kat Koh Coaching

• Substack: https://katkoh.substack.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katkoh/

• IG: @katkoh

You can find Melissa at: 

• Coherence Studio Website: https://www.coherence.studio/

• FREE GUIDE: Career Crossroads: From Confusion to Confident Action in 30 minutes

  FREE TRAINING: Work that Works: Design your next career move with confidence

How do you create a custom career that feels good in practice (and not just recreate the subpar working conditions you intentionally left behind?)

Olivia Vagelos runs a creative agency called Design for Feelings Studio where she does everything from coaching couples designing their weddings to consulting on the experience of "people pooping in space on commercial space travel." With a background in product design and years at IDEO.org, Olivia has crafted a unique practice centered around one deceptively simple question: "How do you want people to feel?"

In this conversation, we explore how Olivia left IDEO during peak COVID days only to accidentally recreate all the same structures she'd purposefully wanted to leave with her corporate job. And how she course corrected to build a business that actually lets her take time to stare at trees and research magic tricks.

She shares practical wisdom about playtesting early and often, designing time itself as an experience, and how she's building her latest creative sandbox, The Good Chaos Club. 

Listen to find out why Olivia thinks that the best creatives often fall prey to burnout (it has to do with being radically uninspired!)

 You can find Olivia at: 

• Website: Design For Feelings Studio