Pivot with Jenny Blake

I love celebrating big milestones here on the pod, so in honor of my 40th birthday tomorrow, I decided to do something a little different for today's solo episode.

In lieu of a “40 things I’ve learned in 40 years listicle,” since I am only sure of less as time passes, I asked my husband Michael if he could think of four questions for me to answer. He threw in a bonus in the middle that nearly made me spit out my coffee :)

"I've talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation. If I could reach through this television and sit on your sofa or sit on a stool in your kitchen right now, I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire. They want to know: 'Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?’”

✍️ Connect with me on Substack: http://substack.com/@jennyblake

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📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/343

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“So many things in my past were painful because I stayed on too long.” How do you know when it’s time to say goodbye to something, no matter how good it may seem or how hard it is to leave? For today’s guest, Nicole Antoinette, staying too long created a pattern of “scorched earth change,” where dramatic moves became the only way out.

In this conversation, we discuss where she thinks the creator economy is heading, why she shut down her successful Patreon, and how she makes tough decisions about what to leave behind: whether it’s a romantic relationship, a job, a friendship, alcohol, or one of her biggest income streams.

More About Nicole: Nicole Antoinette is a writer, long-distance hiker, and former indoor kid who never imagined she’d wind up spending months of each year pooping in the woods. In 2017, stuck in a loop of codependency and people-pleasing, Nicole set off to find her self-belief and inner resilience by doing something she did not for one second believe she could actually do. The results are two adventure memoirs, How To Be Alone: An 800-mile hike on the Arizona Trail, and What We Owe to Ourselves, and a weekly newsletter on Substack called Wild Letters.

✅ Try This Next: Break out of the all-or-nothing mindset. Give yourself permission to end things early, with grace—and no other “good” reason than you want to—before you reach “scorched earth” burn-it-all-down mode from staying too long.

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

📝 Check out full show notes at http://pivotmethod.com/342

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“I was in the wrong environment, playing the wrong game . . . so I started self-sabotaging.”

That’s how today’s guest, Paul Millerd, knew it was time to opt out of conventional thinking about his career, and turn slowly but deliberately in a new direction. In this conversation we talk about how important it is to define enough, develop an immunity to what other people are doing, and his mantra, “coming alive over getting ahead.”

Be sure to listen to our Free Time conversation 205: Why Paul Millerd Turned Down a $200K Two-Book Traditional Publishing Deal, and our conversation for Paul’s podcast, Pathless Path on 156: Saying "no" to something good.

More About Paul: Paul Millerd is an independent writer, freelancer, coach, and digital creator. He is the author of The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life, in which he explores the invisible scripts that constrain our lives. He is also the host of The Pathless Path podcast where he talks with the most interesting people on unconventional paths**.**

Paul’s process for new ideas: ship, quit, and learn. What small experiments can you set up that you can quit quickly? How can you take action in the next week, and design it for quitting?

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

💌 Get my curated weekly(ish) PivotList newsletter

✍️ Connect with me on Substack: http://substack.com/@jennyblake

💻 Check out Jenny’s Pivot courses on LinkedIn Learning: Figuring Out Your Next Move, Holding 1:1 Career Conversations With Your Team, 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/341

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We are celebrating a very special milestone today—the Pivot podcast’s eighth birthday! It's a veritable third-grader by now.

This podcast first launched in September 2015 as a teeny tiny scrappy side project to supplement the Pivot book while I was writing it. I had so much fun interviewing people and hitting record that by the time the book launched in the fall of 2016 one year later, the podcast had almost eclipsed it as the favorite thing that I do on a day-to-day basis.

Now, thanks to you, we have over 2 million downloads and 340 episodes (not including another 230 on the Free Time podcast). There have been many ups and downs along the way, where I wondered if I should stop doing this podcast. Today, I'm sharing eight things that help me stay in the game.

❤️ 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/340

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“To live a rich, joyful, and connected life . . . achieve less.” That’s the counterintuitive path to MoneyZen that this week’s guest Manisha Thakor shares.

For the first half of her life, money represented a scorecard of self-worth and a sense of safety. She says, “For a long time, the equation I operated on was net worth = self worth (which has no end in sight).”

Even with abundant salaries from her financial services roles, Manisha fell into The Cult of Never Enough, often displayed in “the peacock feathers of possessions.” Listen to learn more about the powerful shifts she made toward joy-based spending instead.

More About Manisha: Manisha Thakor is the author of MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your "Enough” and has worked in financial services for over thirty years, helping individuals of all ages to balance financial health and emotional wealth.

Try joy-based spending. Take a piece of paper, and every time you spend money, write down the item and the amount. At the end of the week or month, highlight anything you spent money on that didn’t bring you joy, what Manisha calls money leaks. Bonus: Every day, eliminate one thing you no longer need from your life (either clutter around the house or even obligations or meetings you no longer want to keep).

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

💌 Get my curated weekly(ish) PivotList newsletter

💻 Check out Jenny’s Pivot courses on LinkedIn Learning: Figuring Out Your Next Move, Holding 1:1 Career Conversations With Your Team, 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/339

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“Legacy isn’t something you leave, it’s something you live.”

These are just some of the wise words from this week’s guest, Mandy Lehto, who shares strategies for letting go of being a hard-o-holic, nexting, navigating mid-career pivots, and busting all manner of other “not enough” scams.

More About Mandy: Mandy Lehto is a speaker, writer and coach with a Doctorate from Cambridge University and in her former career she was a director at a global investment bank. Mandy is the host of Enough, the podcast, a show for recovering perfectionists and overachievers. When Mandy isn't coaching leaders, she's parenting her two musical teenagers with her husband, or walking Herbie, her toy poodle, on Wimbledon Common.

Pick your inner critic that hogs the mic and name it, even something provocative (Mandy’s is Judgy Janet). And also name your inner champion, the wise voice that’s always rooting for you. Give them fun names so you don’t take this all too seriously :)

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

💌 Get my curated weekly(ish) PivotList newsletter

💬 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/338

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“How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” —Ernest Hemingway

That’s the kick-off quote from returning guest Khe Hy’s recent pivot-in-progress big reveal, taking us behind the scenes of his business in a recent post titled, “The $645,099 business pivot.” Khe is the founder of RadReads and former Wall Street managing director.

Khe returns to the pod today (as our first three-peat Free Time guest) to share his experience from the belly of the Pivot beast. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Khe’s earlier Free Time appearances, linked in the Resources section below and in this Spotify playlist: RadReads x Pivot x Free Time.

This crossover episode originally aired on the Free Time podcast on March 21, 2023.

More About Khe: Khe Hy is the founder and CEO of RadReads, an online education company that helps professionals lead productive, examined, and joyful lives. Khe is creator of the $10K Work productivity method and teaches the popular cohort-based course Supercharge Your Productivity. RadReads provides guides, trainings, and coaching for over 36,000 professionals to help them gain back free time, scale their impact and make their little dent in the universe.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

📝Permission: To feel. To cry. To fully experience and talk about what you’re going through. Your humanity in the situation is not at odds with who and how you want to be as a founder and CEO—they are perfectly intertwined.

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Get quiet: What is it that you truly want? What part of my business is driven by ego and “borrowing other people’s goals,” and what part is driven by the pure magic of it? For any friction area where you feel stuck or drained, take a page out of Khe’s business playbook and “follow the fun.” What would following the fun tell you to do next?

📘Books Mentioned:

🔗Resources Mentioned:

🎧Related Podcast Episodes:

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“You have to live spherically—in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm—and things will come your way.” —Federico Fellini

This week’s delightful guest, Madeleine Dore, reminded me of this wonderful quote while reading her book, one that I know you will love as much as I did: I Didn’t Do The Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt.

We talk about widening the measure and meaning of a day beyond our to-do lists, discovering the call of a new topic, shaping a big idea “blob of clay,” how she collects all the great quotes and stories for her book, why she sees herself as more of a guinea pig than an expert (and freelancer valuing independence even more than business owner), and how she decides when to sunset a project, rather than “maintaining something at all costs.”

This crossover episode originally aired on the Free Time podcast on April 25, 2023.

More About Madeleine: Madeleine Dore is a writer and interviewer exploring how we can broaden the definition of a day well spent. As a labor of love, Madeleine spent over five years asking creative thinkers how they navigate their days on her popular blog Extraordinary Routines and podcast Routines & Ruts. The lessons culminated in her first book, I Didn’t Do The Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt. Madeleine continues to write, speak and ask questions—but mostly tries to hold things lightly.

📝 Permission: Stop measuring the day by how productive you were. Be curious and expansive when reviewing your day, including your internal accomplishments, moments of connection, or even moments of idleness. Instead of trying to optimize your day only through the lens of productivity, occupy and embrace your day for what it wants to be.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Identify one area of your business or creative projects that may be languishing. What would happen if you gave yourself permission to close it out completely to create space for what’s next?

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One thing I love about Jay Acunzo is that his body of work is a love letter to craft and quality. We talk about mindset shifts and practices to help you focus more on resonance than reach; how to do work that matters to you so that your work can matter more; how he worked through his own existential creative crisis upon hitting the 200th episode milestone of his podcast; thinking like an explorer, not an expert; and “making the leap from what best practices say you should do to what your intuition is urging you to try.”

This crossover episode originally aired on the Free Time podcast on April 18 2023.

More About Jay: Jay Acunzo is one of the world’s most sought-after business storytellers and brand consultants. He’s worked in marketing for Google, HubSpot, and ESPN before launching his award-winning podcast, Unthinkable, and authoring multiple books on creativity. Today he helps creators learn to increase the power of their creative work, not just the volume, through his membership platform, the Creator Kitchen.

📝 Permission: Focus on resonance before—or even at the expense of—reach. Let go of the idea of adding more people until you have a small group reacting in a big way.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Define your Even More Meaningful Metrics. For example, Jay’s Unsolicited Response Rate (URR): When he publishes something and someone feels urged to respond in some way without being prompted, or Cackles Per Piece (CPP): points during the process of creating that cause so much joy he cackles out loud.

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What’s it like to be at a conference with “fancy” people, when you’re the one feeling like you snuck in a side door as a seat filler? Okay, okay — that’s just my imposter monster talking. In today’s experimental episode, I’m taking you behind-the-scenes of the recent 5-day main TED conference in Vancouver, building on Pivot episode 325: 10+ Conference Networking Strategies with Alisa Cohn.

In full-on morning voice with a travel mic, I do a daily check-in about what I was nervous about, spontaneous serendipitous invites, fan-girling my favorite authors and podcasters, falling off the energy cliff, what gave me FOMO and JOMO, and my daily quest for coffee. Always. Find. The. Coffee.

This crossover episode originally aired on the Free Time podcast on June 9, 2023.

📝 Permission: Embrace JOMO, knowing you’ll be at your best if you say no to situations that tend to bring out your worst.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Send a follow-up note to reconnect with someone you met in the last year. Bonus: schedule a small group reunion event over brunch or dinner (or Zoom).

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