As I round the corner into this ninth year of podcasting and after over 700 episodes, today I’m announcing a pause for both shows.

Listen in to hear what factors helped me reach this decision across time, money, energy, depressing industry articles, the pace of both shows’ growth, and mix of additional business factors that make this an important moment to pause and regroup. You might also appreciate the even deeper dive with my longtime friend (and first coach) Adrian Klaphaak in Pivot episode 360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts.

While I will be sad not to bring fresh episodes to your earbuds every week, I truly want to say thank you so much for being here. This only represents a small fraction of listeners, but I was genuinely touched receiving the Spotify Wrapped for Podcasters stats at the end of 2023, after I knew I would be pausing once all the episodes “in the can” went live.

There’s one thing I know for sure: I will miss you during this break 🥹

Pause and regroup on any of your creative projects so you can create space to hear what’s next.

📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/363

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“Expectations are the enemy to the creative process. Sometimes you have to let go of the known to see the unknown.”

Today I’m speaking with James McCrae, an author, poet, and meme artist based in Austin, Texas. He is the founder of 🌻 Sunflower Club, a global school and community dedicated to conscious creativity.

As a creative strategist, he has worked with top brands and startups. James is the author of Sh#t Your Ego Says and How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis, and today we’re talking about his new book, The Art of You: The Essential Guidebook for Reclaiming Your Creativity.

Excerpted from The Art of You:

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📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/362

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Good decision-making is not about omniscience or clairvoyance—it's more about resilience, according to today’s guest, decision engineer Michelle Florendo. “Decision-making is harder than ever before, and it's not your fault,” Michelle says. “People feel like they ‘should just know’ how to decide.”

More About Michelle: Michelle Florendo is a decision engineer and executive coach who is passionate about teaching people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity, from the small, consistent microdecisions over time that governs how you show up as a leader to the big macrodecisions you make about what direction to take next in business or life. Over the past decade, she has shown hundreds of driven professionals how to use the principles of decision science to grow their impact and fulfillment. She served on the inaugural coaching team for Seth Godin's altMBA, was a founding member of the Forbes Coaches Council, and helps train new coaches as a Faculty Coach at Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute. Michelle helped redesign the decision-making module in Stanford's famous Designing Your Life course and has taught courses on decision making for Stanford Continuing Studies, and hosts the podcast Ask a Decision Engineer.

Tune into multiple sources of data: head+heart+body. Pro-con lists tend to mostly activate rational thinking. As an alternative, try an attractive-concerning table. Draw a 2x2 with a column for each option. What is attractive about each option? What is concerning? Look for themes that bubble up.

📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/361

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What happens when you make a big decision but still have lingering doubt, fear, and even despair? How do you know when a “download” from the universe is worth following, and what does test-driving a decision look like? What happens on the other side or when a pivot is taking far longer than planned?

We’re unpacking all these topics in today’s twelfth and final (for now) conversation for the Pivot x Career Pathfinder series with Adrian Klaphaak.

More About Adrian: Adrian Klaphaak is a coach, purpose guide, entrepreneur, and founder of A Path That Fits Career and Life Coaching. His coaching approach is holistic—a constant balance between getting results and a quest for meaning and fulfillment. He describes himself as “a deep seeker with a constant itch to make things happen.”

Examine your own relationship to rest and taking extended breaks. Ask yourself: What do I really need? How am I really doing? Where am I in the cycle of death, birth, creation, and rest?

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📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/360

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“You can’t give what you don’t have.” That’s just one of the powerful lessons that Nataly Kogan learned the hard way seven years ago, after suffering a debilitating phase of burnout. As a former refugee from the former Soviet Union, she began her American journey in the projects and on welfare, then going on to build an impressive career as a finance and tech executive and serial entrepreneur over the next 25 years. Until she crashed at thirty-eight years old and needed to find a new way of moving forward.

Today we’re talking about how she got through that tough burnout period, the ways she practices putting her full self into the world, why it’s never too late to start something new, and how to drop the self-care guilt when filling your own energy reserves.

More About Nataly: Nataly Kogan, a leading expert on emotional fitness and leadership, is a dynamic entrepreneur, best-selling author, and sought-after international keynote speaker. Despite starting from challenging circumstances, Nataly achieved remarkable success in her career, reaching top positions at McKinsey, Microsoft, a venture capital fund, and founding/executing five startups and tech companies.

Her influential books, including HAPPIER NOW, GRATITUDE DAILY, THE AWESOME HUMAN PROJECT, THE AWESOME HUMAN JOURNAL, reflect her mission to help others thrive. Nataly hosts The Awesome Human Podcast, recognized as a transformative "best-self hour."

“Don’t let the leftovers of yesterday spoil the freshness of today.” Fill-in this sentence: I am an awesome human because: ______________.

📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/359

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Bravery requires being off balance. You will only find the courage to “cross the cringe chasm” by remembering that the risk of losing your identity is greater than the risk of losing approval.

As today’s guest Henna Pryor writes in her wonderful debut book, Good Awkward:

“The idea of releasing this book into the world without knowing how you’ll receive it makes me cringe. But it makes me cringe even more to imagine walking through life as a person who doesn’t write and release the book that matters so much to her because she’s worried how it will land. Either one is a risk.”

The Approval Paradox that we all confront is that we are social, communal creatures; for most of us, what other people think of us does matter. And yet, we can’t allow others’ approval to outweigh whether we personally improve. Cheers to the real reel, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! Awkward bits and all :)

More About Henna: Henna Pryor, PCC is a highly sought after Workplace Performance Expert and an award-winning keynote speaker, author, and executive coach. Her clients call her their “secret weapon for impossible change,” an honor she wears proudly. She’s known for her science-backed approach to improving the performance, habits, and actions of hungry high achievers – in her fun, no-nonsense, no-jargon way – to move them from their first level of success to their next one. Today we’re talking about her bestselling book, Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become The Bravest You, which received the rare Kirkus Star for excellence in writing.

📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/358

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Holding space for thousands of others, primarily those who have experienced unspeakable trauma, is not for the faint of heart, nor should it be swept under the rug as simply par for the course of doing social work.

Today’s guest, Dimple Dhabalia has written a forthcoming book that’s part memoir, part manifesto—Tell Me My Story—Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self—a must-read for humanitarian professionals. While working in the field in Zambia interviewing asylum-seekers from the Rwandan Genocide, she experienced autoimmune disease and recurring nightmares that she spent the last decade figuring out how to heal and solve for fellow service-oriented professionals.

In this conversation, Dimple shines an important light on what it’s really like to serve in this capacity, and how to do it sustainably. Only by addressing the debilitating side effects of burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma, can humanitarian workers heal themselves while so generously serving others.

More About Dimple: Dimple Dhabalia is the founder of Roots in the Clouds, a boutique consulting firm specializing in using the power of story to heal individual and organizational trauma and moral injury. She is also a writer, podcaster, coach, and facilitator who brings over twenty years of public service experience working at the intersection of leadership, mindful awareness, and storytelling. Her first book, Tell Me My Story—Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self launches in February 2024, and you can find her podcasts Service Without Sacrifice and What Would Ted Lasso Do? wherever you listen.

Notice one moment of your day where you’re trying to push through. Allow yourself to stop and take three nice, deep breaths. Come back and see how you feel.

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📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/357

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Are you running a Franken-Brand? A quick, inexpensive logo here. And then someone a few months later tries to write the brand strategy. And then another junior hire adds in graphics and you don’t even know where they came from. Suddenly, you have this brand that is cobbled together, and no one on the team is feeling compelled.

In part two of today’s Free Time crossover episode, returning guest Adam Chaloeicheep and I are diving into the four personas of clients who are ready to do brand work.

Sit with one of the creative questions from Together Agency’s client intake/exploration survey: What texture is your brand? If your brand were a plant, which one would it be? A song?

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📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/356

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What do a flying money emoji, a stray takeaway coffee cup, and a heart have in common? Those were the starting clues I brought to Adam Chaloeicheep and his cofounder Marisol at Together Agency before starting work on the Free Time brand—as now expressed in my latest podcast, website, and book.

This is a two-part crossover from the Free Time podcast; this episode originally aired in November 2021. We’re discussing the strategic thinking that goes into brand strategy long before the visual assets are produced, the biggest misconceptions clients have about the investment and process, and why brand is so important for a business.

More About Adam: Adam Chaloeicheep is co-founder of Together agency with his wife, Marisol Dahl, who I had the great pleasure of working with for five years in the early days of JBE. Adam is a creative business leader with over a decade of experience in a variety of startup areas including product and service concepting, building teams, operations, and brand-focused design and digital solutions.

He is one of my closest friends (12 years and counting!), and a creative business leader with over a decade of experience in product and service concepting, building teams, and brand strategy. Together Agency is behind every big brand I have launched into the world including Pivot and Free Time.

Sit with one of the creative questions from Together Agency’s client intake/exploration survey: What texture is your brand? If your brand were a plant, which one would it be? A song?

❤️ Enjoying the show? I'd be grateful for a rating and/or review! Even better? Share this episode with a friend :)

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📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/355

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How do you “un-rut” yourself? If you want to say yes to exploring a pivot, what do you need to say no to? What's the secret dream? These are just some of the questions that recurring guest host Adrian Klaphaak and I answer in today’s live Pivot podcast taping.

Are you looking for a little support and guidance on finding your purpose, or best next step? Check out Adrian’s Career Pathfinder Program and apply promo code PIVOT for a special offer on his group training. If you’d like to work with him 1:1, he just opened up a few new spots—book a free consultation here.

More about Adrian: Adrian Klaphaak is a coach, purpose guide, entrepreneur, and founder of A Path That Fits Career and Life Coaching. His coaching approach is holistic—a constant balance between getting results and a quest for meaning and fulfillment. He describes himself as “a deep seeker with a constant itch to make things happen.”

"But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!"

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?”

—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet—On Joy and Sorrow

Let yourself be moved by genuine, embodied, resonant excitement. Put yourself in the room with your experiments.

❤️ Enjoying the show? I'd be grateful for a rating and/or review! Even better? Share this episode with a friend :)

💌 Get my curated twice monthly PivotList newsletter

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💻 Check out Pivot courses on LinkedIn Learning: Figuring Out Your Next Move, Holding 1:1 Career Conversations, Managing Introverts, Coaching New Hires, and Coaching New Managers

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Pivot listener survey

☎️ Submit a question or comment for future episodes

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to ‘casts

📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/354

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices