EP 317: Leveraging LinkedIn With The Pocket PhD Founder Emily Crookston

In This Episode:

* How The Pocket PhD founder Emily Crookston started leveraging LinkedIn after the pandemic threw a wrench in her public speaking plans* Why she went from posting spontaneously to planning out her content and using a weekly structure to guide her* What prompted her to start a video interview series on LinkedIn* And why Emily doesn’t care about trying to work the LinkedIn algorithm

So you’ve got a big plan for this year (or even this week or this month!).

What happens when somebody throws a wrench in the works?

Do you fight to get back on track?

Do you flee to something else entirely?

Do you freeze and hope that it’ll all blow over soon?

Each of these 3 responses is perfectly normal & understandable. After all, fight, flight or freeze is a baked-in biological response we all have.

But most of the time, we need a different way to respond when our plans get interrupted.

Fight, flight, or freeze might be our biological response when faced with a threat but they’re rarely the best response.

I propose that the more strategic—more human—response is to adapt. It’s not so much a reaction to the threat as it is a curiosity about what we can do with the new information or circumstances.

I’ve been coming back to a line from Sebene Selassie’s book, You Belong, over the last few weeks. She writes, “Curiosity is a crucial component in reducing our reactivity.”

Curiosity asks us to consider how we can approach new information or circumstances creatively—instead of trying to figure out how to fight it, how to run the other way, or how to wait it out.

Obviously, we all got thrown for a loop last year when Covid hit. That wrench in the works played out different for every one and every business—but we all had to adapt in some way.

If you fought, fled, or froze, you’re not alone!

I think we all responded that way initially. I certainly did—big fighting energy over here!

What was amazing to watch though is little by little, the business owners I’m in community with started to ease up on that immediate reaction and started to find a more adaptive, proactive response.

I saw amazing things happen for people when they adapted—even if those things didn’t always lead to financial relief or more time to themselves.

One of those people is my guest today, the founder of The Pocket PhD, Emily Crookston.

Emily is a ghostwriter and editor who works with experts and thought leaders to help them bring their ideas to the masses.

As you’ll hear, Emily’s plan for 2020 was to grow her business through in-person speaking engagements. Her first gig was on March 8—and then… lock down.

But Emily adapted—taking the same strategy she was applying to speaking gigs and applied it to LinkedIn. She’s seen tremendous success on the platform over the last year and I wanted to talk with her about how she adapted her plan, decided on LinkedIn, and then figured out how to make the most of the platform by working her plan.

We talk about how she made the jump from posting spontaneously to planning her content & scheduling it. We talk about the video interview series she started.