It's been a while since our last episode of Lane Change, but many of you might've noticed how many Lane Changers used their COVID time to build an audience, a personal brand, and ultimately a new direction.

So I've launched a new show and it's called Creator Habits. It's about the habits that help you discover new ideas and build and grow an audience. Please check it out and subscribe! 

Most episodes are under 20 minutes, and Season 1 features podcasters & writers.

It's available wherever you find your podcasts. 

• Web: http://creatorhabits.club/podcast

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That's a wrap! Thanks for listening to season 2! We are taking a summer hiatus but excited to come back in a few months with something new. Stay tuned to this feed to check it out!

Making a lane change from corporate work to the startup ecosystem is just the tip of the iceburg for today’s guest. After founding a startup, and working for countless others across diverse industries, Adam Oskwarek found himself trying to figure out what was next during COVID. Having spent 4 years researching climate change as a personal hobby, Adam took this time to translate his research into writing. In the process, he became an accidental “creator” of Zopeful, a course that makes climate knowledge bite-sized and accessible to all.  

In this episode Adam shares tips on continuous learning, creating habits that support going through transition & uncertainty, and the work of simplifying complex topics like climate change. Adam shares what it looks like to launch a climate email course from creation to promotion.

About Adam

Adam is a dad of two, lives in London, and loves learning, exploring, fixing broken stuff and uncertainty.

On the work front he’s invested 10 years working in startups and scale-ups across a range of sectors including edtech, fintech, SaaS and e-commerce. He’s worn many hats but mostly in Ops, Growth, Marketing and Product. Prior to that he worked in large corporations until he could stand no more.

He believes that intentional culture and people are main competitive advantages for 21st century companies.

Most recently he’s been digging into all things climate related, following 4 years of trying to reduce his own footprint and connect the dots on how we, as a society, dig our way out of the challenge we’ve created.

Always hopeful, he aims to bring energy, calmness under pressure, care, thoughtfulness and light-heartedness to everything he does. Still a work-in-progress.

Making a lane change from management consulting to tech may not seem like a huge stretch. But today’s guest took her next big offer to become a senior product manager and traded it in to become a creator. Based on her own lane change into product management, Linda Zhang started writing a newsletter to help early-stage product managers learn product lessons and navigate getting a foot in the door as a PM. Soon enough, her newsletter grew into a paid toolkit. 

In this episode Linda shares valuable tips on managing a career transition, from positioning to job applications, as well as tactical insights from her journey as a creator. She discusses growing out her newsletter, as well as validating, pricing, and growing her product toolkit offering.

Linda Zhang is the creator behind the Product Toolkit and the Product Lessons newsletter, both of which help individuals learn about and become product managers. Linda started her career as a consultant at Bain & Company before transitioning into a role at Snap and eventually becoming the Group Product Manager at Faire. She turned down a senior Product Management offer at Instagram to strike out on her own as a content creator.

Product Lessons & Product Toolkit provide examples, actionable tips and templates to fast-track a product management career.

Jas spent 5 years as a private banker in Sydney. After a series of burnouts, Jas turned to modeling and later acting, spending hundreds of hours preparing casting call videos & traveling to shoots around the world.

When COVID hit, Jas was living in Germany and his life ground to a halt. He asked himself, “What can I do to take more control over my life?” As he began posting some of the videos he created about managing mental health, followers started asking him about his seemingly professional video set up. It just so happened that all those casting call videos had shown him how to create a professional look regardless of the setting and equipment! Thus began Joy with Jas, a course and community helping creators and small business owners create home studios, be more confident on camera, and build relationships over video.

This podcast is not only a lane-changing story but also includes some of Jas’s actionable tips on working in front of the camera.

Follow Jas:

Website: https://joywithjas.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/joywithjas 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joywithjasvideo/ 

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joywithjasvideo

Sara No Socks

Sara spent almost 20 years in healthcare - switching jobs from administrator to nurse to corporate innovation and amassing degrees all along the way. But while working on the innovation team, she realized she’d rather be doing the job of the designer on the team. So she quit her job without a plan, only to find that building up a new skillset and trying to get clients at the start of COVID was not going to plan.

Sara knew that she couldn’t be the only person in this position but she couldn’t find anyone else being open and vulnerable about it. So many creators claimed to be self-sustaining. So she decided to share her journey online, first on Instagram, then on Twitter and YouTube and in her podcast Talks With SaraNoSocks, where she has honest conversations with other creatives about their emotional, mental and financial struggles. Her journey chronicling her own struggles, led her to start an entire community helping emerging creatives.

A self-described “chronic re-starter”, Sara, like many of our guests on the podcast, sees her career as additive, not a straight line. 

Follow Sara

Website 

Twitter

Podcast

Community

Every creator and brand relies on building out an audience in order to grow their business. But what about a community? Creating a community goes one step deeper, helping audience members create bonds with each other. Communities also create deeper loyalty, can drive insights for the kinds of products or content to produce, and becoming a big point of differentiation.

Danielle Maveal is a former goldsmith who became one of the first community managers at Etsy, before creating engaged communities for organizations like Airbnb and Lyft.

In this episode, she shares tips and tricks for starting, growing and measuring a community.

Follow her at:

https://www.daniellexo.com/

Mindset Fitness expert Lissy Alden shares tips and frameworks on managing and improving your mindset while going through a career transition.

As CEO and Founder of MYNDY, a mental fitness company, Lissy Alden helps professionals build confidence, optimism, resilience, and energy into their lives so they can thrive both personally and professionally.

In this episode you'll learn that Mental Fitness is the practice of strengthening your mind to deal with the ups and downs of your life. We discuss:

We’re kicking off our expert series with storytelling coach Anna Darian who shares tips on telling your story while going through a career transition.

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Before becoming a podcaster, Laura Joyce Davis spent over a decade as a memoirist, writer, and stay-at-home mom. She was already familiar with the life and discipline of a creative, but when she turned to making a daily podcast during the pandemic, creating content became the family's main business and source of revenue.