simple prospering

I'm your host, Brooke Thomas, and I am a self employed lifer. I help the helpers- people who have tiny, but mighty service providing businesses.

If you're here, you might be self employed a freelancer or an entrepreneur with a small team. And the things that you do come from your heart with an earnest intent to make things better for the people that your work serves. You may also have discovered that one of the people your work life serves is also you and that for as much as you give, you too should get nourishment and support back from your work.

In Simple Prospering, we explore just how to do that.

After taking a year off from this podcast, I'm back! The reason why I took a year off is because I knew that I was deep in a transition phase with my business.

In this episode I talk about the twists and turns that any self-employed person is likely to encounter, and also (re) introduce myself by way of telling you some of my own twists and turns.

What's Jeremy Bearimy? Listen to find out!

www.simpleprospering.com

This is the final episode in the series about compass points we can use for our businesses. We've talked about how to make progress, how to simplify our work, and what it means to have a financially beneficial business. Today we will talk about how to create something every human being deserves: humane work lives.

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES:

Tim Kreider The Busy Trap: https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/

Tim Kreider It's Time to Stop Living the American Scam: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/opinion/work-busy-trap-millennials.html

Tara McMullin The Valuable Business of Maintenance Work: https://explorewhatworks.com/disruption-vs-maintenance/

This is part 3 of a series about the compass points that I use as the true north for any business. In the first 2 episodes in this series we covered how to make progress and the things that can get us caught in the weeds, and in last week's episode we discussed strategic simplicity and some of the more common things in this cultural moment that can keep us mired in needless complexity.

Which brings us to the topic of today's episode, the one most service-based business owners, myself included, would rather put their heads in the sand over than talk about! Businesses should be financially beneficial to those who run them and work within them.

Here are the top 3 common issues around money that I want to get to today:

1) We tend to over-give and under-receive which creates Chronic insufficiency, often experienced as underearning.

2) We usually do not know how much we need to earn and therefore we do not know what we need to charge (meaning we don't have informed pricing or financial planning for our businesses).

3) We do not set up systems so that finances are tracked and taken care of; and then we wind up short when it comes time to pay taxes, take a vacation, or take some sick or personal time off. OR we simply don't know where all the money goes and why we don't feel like we're earning enough even though our revenue numbers look pretty good.

If you can relate to some or all of these, you are not alone! I see this over and over again when I work with very small business owners. And of course, I have done all of these things myself. I came to financial recovery work the hard way.

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES:

Financial Recovery Institute: https://www.financialrecovery.com/

Wealth Addiction by Phillip Slater: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/wealth-addiction_philip-slater/451973/#edition=2213787&idiq=10966918

Underearner's Anonymous: https://www.underearnersanonymous.org/

Earn What You Deserve by Jerrold Mundis: http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/118580/

Overcoming Underearning by Barbara Stanny (Huson): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/682878.Overcoming_Underearning

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz: https://mikemichalowicz.com/profit-first/

Profit First Professionals https://profitfirstprofessionals.com/hire-pfp-form/

Xero: https://www.xero.com/us/

Today is part 2 of 4 in my series on the core values, or compass points, that Simple Prospering orients as its True North, and values that I think can be mighty helpful for all businesses.

I talked about value 1, make progress, in the last two week's episodes. Today we are talking about value #2: how to keep it simple!

Simple is in the name of my business, so obviously it's important to me, but "keep it simple" is often thrown around like trite advice and it's easier said than done when you are in business for yourself.

In this episode I focus on 2 common barriers I see to effective simplicity in one's work. Really I am sacrificing 2 sacred cows in this week's episode:

Barrier number one/aka Sacred Cow number one (especially in service-based businesses): Workism and The Passion Principle.

Barrier number two/aka Sacred Cow number two (for nearly all entrepreneurs) Frankensteining your offerings until you've created, you guessed it. a monster.

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, Workism is Making Americans Miserable https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/

Erin Cech, book, The Trouble With Passion: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303232/the-trouble-with-passion

Kelly Diels: https://www.kellydiels.com/

Last week began a 4-part series on the core orientations that I believe provide a solid true north compass point for small businesses.

In the last episode I talked about how to make progress. After publishing that episode, I realized that I had left out the approach that I actually use THE MOST to make progress. I'm using it constantly, it's my go-to. So I decided a brief addendum episode was warranted.

Here's how I actually make sure I do "the thing".

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES

Last week's episode: https://www.simpleprospering.com/podcast/how-to-make-progress

Simple Business Incubator and Simple Business Accelerator: https://www.simpleprospering.com/work-with-me

Tom Hanson at KNVP Studios https://www.knvpstudios.com

Today's episode kicks off a 4-part series where I will be talking about the core values of my work here at Simple Prospering.

I work with many different types of service-based businesses, and have run a few different types myself, but no matter what the business does, these 4 values describe the kind of container I would love to see all businesses existing within because they are the values that make for healthy business ecosystems, and healthy humans who operate within those ecosystems.

So regardless of what it is you do in your work, these 4 values provide great compass points for any of us who are self-employed or running a small business.

In today's episode I will tuck into value number 1: Make progress! That might sound like, "duh", but it is the thing we often bump up against when working for ourselves.

I discuss the trap of the 3 P's (perfectionism, procrastination and paralysis), the growth mindset, the difference between being in motion vs. being in action, and the difference between interest-curiosity and deprivation-curiosity.

This episode comes with exercises you can try out yourself to get out of any of those 3 P's.

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES

Dr. Carol Dweck: https://profiles.stanford.edu/carol-dweck

James Clear on Taking Action: https://jamesclear.com/taking-action

Dr. Judson Brewer book Unwinding Anxiety: https://drjud.com/book/

Jordan A. Litman and Paul J. Silvia study on interest and deprivation curiosity dimensions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16740115/

Part 3 of 3 in our series titled You Don't Have to Be An Influencer.

In today's episode I'm delighted to have a special guest: Jane Clapp. Jane is the founder of Jungian Somatics and an advanced candidate with the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts. She has worked at the intersection of the body and psyche as a movement coach and an embodiment educator for over two decades.

Jane and I met in the embodiment space years ago, and just about one year ago we went through similar reckonings around social media and both left the platforms.

We discuss Jane's experience of finding success for her small business by marketing on social media platforms, how that effected her both for good and for ill, how platforms have changed since their early days, the broad scope of how algorithms determine the landscape of our world, her academic paper titled: Social Media and the Collective Unconscious: Archetypal Algorithms and the Colonization of the Psyche, and why she chose to leave social media platforms even though it would cost her revenue.

SHOW NOTES

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

For more of Jane's work www.janeclapp.com (subscribe to her newsletter to follow her work since she is not on social!)

My first episode with Jane on Liberated Being about why we were leaving social media https://www.liberatedbeing.community/podcast/episode/3766fa39/ep-97-how-social-media-is-changing-us-with-jane-clapp

Jaron Lanier's website http://www.jaronlanier.com/

Jaron Lanier's TED talk How We Need to Remake the Internet https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet?language=en

Renata Ramirez on Data Mining https://www.sandiego.edu/blogs/business/detail.php?_focus=76022

Dr Iain Micgilchrist https://channelmcgilchrist.com/

Article Jane mentioned on how hypernudges in the algorithm affect us: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2017/01/algocracy-as-hypernudging-new-way-to.html

This episode is part 2 of 3 in a series titled You Don't Have to Be An Influencer.

Today's episode is for those of you who listened to last week's episode and thought, sure, sure, but I know I don't want to be an influencer, and even that I don't have to be an influencer, so what about using social media for marketing? Many service-providing businesses, of course, do use social platforms to market their businesses.

We differentiate between content marketing and social media marketing, discuss the 4 (but really 5) cardinal rules to follow to make sure posting to social doesn't just become a new unpaid job, and discuss why you might actually just want to bail on social and focus on other things.

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES

The Future Isn't Female Anymore by Michelle Goldberg

Good reading related to this episode:

10 Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

LEARN MORE ABOUT WORKING WITH BROOKE:

Register for the Marketing Without Social Media workshop on August 3rd, 2022 at the workshops page www.simpleprospering.com.

Today's episode kicks off a 3-part series all about how you don't have to be an influencer. I decided to do this series of episodes because I work with many people who run solid service-based businesses who have expressed to me that they feel like the only way their business can remain viable is if they force themselves into the influencer mold.

In part 1 I am looking at what that mold actually is; If we examine what an influencer is through the lens of it as a business model, we can begin to tease apart if it truly does or does not benefit us and our work lives.

You can find more of my work here: simpleprospering.com

SHOW NOTES:

Taylor Lorenz in NY Times: Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down

Martina Mascali in Monster: Hustle Culture: How "Every Day I'm Hustlin;" Became a Mantra