That Solo Life: The Solo PR Pro Podcast

Episode Summary

Two résumés land in front of a reviewer. Same skills. Same experience. Same note that AI helped write them. The only difference is the name at the top: one says James, the other says Emily. James earns a 97% approval rating. Emily gets a comment that she can't even write a résumé herself.

That experiment, and the research behind it, opens a hard but necessary conversation for a profession that is roughly two-thirds women. When men use AI, they're called resourceful. When women use it, their integrity gets questioned. And the same pattern shows up far beyond a résumé, from the late Hayden Panettiere's account that Neutrogena ended their decade-long partnership after she spoke openly about postpartum depression, to a 2026 gender pay gap that has widened rather than closed.

Karen Swim, APR, and Michelle Kane don't stop at the anger. They answer the most common pushback, share a three-question filter you can run on your own reactions and your clients', and walk through exactly what to say when a client asks, "Did AI write this?" For solo PR pros who set their own rates and answer to no salary band, this episode is about pricing with confidence, disclosing AI as a workflow rather than a confession, and protecting each other in the rooms where these judgments get made.

Episode Highlights

[00:18] The Thought Experiment That Isn't Hypothetical

Same work, same skills, same disclosure that AI helped, but one version carries a man's name and the other a woman's. Which one gets asked, "Did you actually do this yourself?" Karen and Michelle have both lived the answer, and now there's research to back it up.

[01:28] Resourceful vs. Cheating

Gini Dietrich's Spin Sucks article frames the problem in one headline: when men use AI, they're resourceful; when women use AI, they're cheating. Lean In's survey puts numbers to the worry, with 29% of women fearing they'll be seen as cheating compared with 22% of men.

[02:57] Emily vs. James

In Zehra Chatoo's study of 1,000 UK adults, the only variable on an AI-assisted résumé was the first name. James earned 97% approval, Emily 76%, and doubts about her competence were twice as high. The researcher's takeaway: with men we question effort, with women we question integrity.

[04:18] The Competence Penalty Women See Coming

Research published in Harvard Business Review found identical AI-assisted code earned lower competence ratings when the engineer was a woman, and women anticipated that penalty. The rational response is to use AI less or use it quietly, and that silence carries its own cost.

[05:19] Low Adoption or Low Admission?

Harvard Business School's updated global synthesis puts generative AI use at about 48% for men and 39% for women, a gap that has stalled. Men are also more likely to be praised and encouraged by managers for using AI. For comms teams, low reported AI use may really mean low admission, especially in a women-dominated profession.

[07:18] Hayden Panettiere and Neutrogena

Panettiere said Neutrogena ended their partnership after she spoke publicly about postpartum depression in 2015, an account she shared in her memoir and on Jay Shetty's podcast this spring. After her death, Neutrogena acknowledged she felt unsupported but never addressed why the partnership ended.

[10:04] The Question Underneath

The stakes are different, but the question is the same: what is a woman allowed to be seen doing and still be treated as someone who's good at her job? Many women choose quiet, and when everyone stays quiet, the data makes the problem look smaller than it is.

[11:11] The 2026 Gender Pay Gap

Payscale's 2026 report shows women earning 82 cents for every dollar men earn, down from 83 cents, with the gap widening with age and career level and persisting at every education level. In communications, a 2023 Ragan survey found women earned about 92% of men's base salary, with an even wider gap in bonuses.

[13:02] The Good News: Visibility Moves the Numbers

Payscale found that nine states with pay transparency laws, including California, New York, Illinois, and Maryland, closed the gap when comparing similar work. When the numbers are visible and someone is paying attention, things change.

[13:29] Solos Set the Rate, and Clients Test It

As solos, nobody hands us a lower offer, but nobody audits our pricing either. Clients may still push for a discount or ask if you really wrote it yourself, and FreshBooks research found the pay gap persists among the self-employed. Quiet discounting feels safe, but quiet is how a skill stops counting.

[15:27] Three Objections, Answered

"This feels overblown": one person's experience can be real and still not be the pattern. "Just ignore it": ignoring a documented penalty asks women to absorb the cost. "I don't want to make everything about gender": this isn't women versus men, and there are small, specific actions anyone can take.

[18:53] The Three-Question Filter

First, the swap test: would I react the same way if a man had done this? Second, am I judging the output or the origin story? Third, is the work visible and are the numbers visible, from describing AI use as a workflow to benchmarking your rates and sharing pay ranges with subcontractors.

[20:16] The Drill: "Did AI Write This?"

When a client questions a strong strategy deck, steer back to the work: you drafted the structure, rewrote the positioning from interviews, and checked every number against the source. The tool supports the process; the judgment and strategy are yours. Karen points back to Kara Ryan's advisor-led, AI-powered approach from Episode 341.

[22:01] Make Disclosure a Standing Practice

Add a line to your proposals about how you use AI and how every deliverable gets reviewed, and talk with your attorney about AI language in contracts for yourself and your subcontractors. Then if a client pushes back on fees, you've already shown you're charging for judgment and expertise, not the tool.

[23:13] A Gentle Pushback in the Room

If you hear "she probably just used AI" or "she's a bit much," pause and ask, "Would you have said that if she were a him?" It doesn't blow up the room, and it helps all of us check reflexes we may not notice.

[24:39] You Don't Have to Carry This Alone

So much of this pressure comes from carrying it quietly. If you've had your own Emily moment, the Solo PR Pro community offers a private, supportive space for men and women working the same way, and you can always reach Karen and Michelle directly through thatsololife.com.

Resources & Additional Information

Host & Show Info

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

You've pitched the proposal, answered every question, and left the discovery call feeling great. Then — nothing. Or maybe you've sat in a client meeting nodding along as someone circles back on the synergized learnings of the integrated touchpoints, wondering if anyone actually knows what's being said. Or perhaps a prospect has just emailed asking for a Wall Street Journal feature in nine days, for a product that doesn't have a brief yet. Sound familiar? In this Halloween edition of That Solo Life, Karen and Michelle dig up seven industry patterns that have been frustrating PR and communications professionals for years, including jargon that obscures instead of clarifies, ghosting that stalls careers and pipelines, last-minute PR requests that set everyone up to fail, internal misalignment that undermines even the best strategy, underbriefed PR requests, crisis-only client engagement, and the vanity metrics trap. They back it up with real research from Cornell, the University of Florida, and Mural, work it through a practical three-question filter, and close with a live drill on a scenario every solo practitioner has lived through at least once. This one is cathartic, useful, and, because it's October, appropriately spooky.

Note: The PR News/CSNA crisis plan survey referenced in the episode is an older study. Figures cited are directional; verify against current research before citing externally.

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

If a client asked you right now to prove that anything you did last quarter actually moved their business, could you do it? This is the provocative question that opens today’s episode and sets the stage for an honest discussion on what PR practitioners are missing when it comes to measurement.  According to the Meltwater and WE Communications State of PR report,  21% of PR pros still name measuring impact and ROI as a top challenge, not because they don't have tools, and not because they don't know it matters. This leaves many practitioners continuing to report on activity rather than impact.

The problem is structural: a standards and accountability gap that has been sitting under the industry for more than a decade. The Barcelona Principles are fifteen years old and still not reaching the majority of practitioners who need them most. Just as CCOs have earned a formal seat at the strategic table, 91% of Fortune 500 CEOs say polarization has increased the importance of PR —you have a profession that has been handed an invitation it isn't yet fully equipped to accept. 

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review https://www.thatsololife.com/rate/. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Episode Summary

Kaitlin McCready calls it 'many lives of communications',  a career that has moved through corporate tech, the MTA in New York City, Jacobs Engineering, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation inside the federal government, and now Communio Strategies, her solo practice that is about one year old. But the through line across all of those chapters is the same problem: the gap between what an organization says and what its audience actually believes, understands, or acts on. 

Kaitlin joins Karen and Michelle to talk through how that through line became the foundation of her practice, the WEAVE framework she developed to bring change management discipline into communications work, the 90-day project-based consulting model that is working exceptionally well in the current market, how a relationship with her masseuse led to a county government client through a mayor introduction, and the Substack she started not primarily to grow an audience but to maintain a writing practice and own a topic she had genuinely earned. This is a rich episode for practitioners who want to think more rigorously about what communications is actually for, and for solos about a year in who need to hear that the path from interest to paying client is slower than it looks but more networked than it feels.

Episode Highlights

[01:52] The Through Line That Connects Many Lives of Communications: Karen asks Kaitlin to name the thread that connects a career that has moved through tech, government, engineering, federal agency work, and now solo practice. Kaitlin's answer is specific and immediate: it's the gap between what an organization says and what its audience is prepared to believe or act on. In tech, the problem was differentiation. How do we stand out when everyone claims to be different? At the MTA, the problem was the opposite, everyone was a customer, but trust was not assumed, and moving millions of people from one belief to a new one and then to action was the whole job. Those two poles of the same problem became the thing she kept working on, and the thing she now builds client engagements around at Communio Strategies.

[03:33] What the MTA Unlocked — and the First Thing Kaitlin Did When She Didn't Know the Answer: Michelle asks what the MTA experience unlocked for Kaitlin beyond the scale of the challenge. Kaitlin names a weakness she had to confront: asking for help. She came into the MTA as her first public sector role, hired in part because of her private sector background. But she didn't understand how to navigate city council relationships, how to work with public officials, or how to move a population of millions. Her first move: find people who had already solved a version of the same problem. She located practitioners in London, Sydney, and Los Angeles who had managed high-profile disruptive infrastructure projects, asked them what worked, what didn't, and what they wished they'd known. That body of external knowledge accelerated her onboarding by an order of magnitude and gave her a platform to prioritize immediately. The practical lesson: before you try to figure something out alone, find the person who has already done it.

[05:14] The WEAVE Framework: What It Is and Why Communications Without Change Is Just Information: Karen invites Kaitlin to explain WEAVE, the framework she built to integrate change management thinking into communications work. The origin: while leading internal change management at Jacobs Engineering during a major digital transformation, Kaitlin was trained on the Prosci change management philosophy and realized it described everything communicators already do — she just hadn't known it had a name or a structure. The framework runs five elements. W: Why — the organization's origin story and reason for doing the work. E: Edge — what uniquely equips them to do it. A: Attune — aligning the organization's message with the actual beliefs, worldviews, and wants of the audience. V: Viable — how you translate belief into action that is visible and creates momentum. E: Engage — the ongoing, durable relationship that sustains the change beyond the initial campaign. Kaitlin's line that has resonated strongly in recent pitches: communications without change is just information.

[10:43] One Year In: What Surprised Her About the Solo Journey: Michelle asks what has genuinely surprised Kaitlin in her first year. Her answer is honest: she thought it would be easier to move people from interest to action. The interest is there, people respond to what she says, they like talking with her, they engage with her thinking. But translating that engagement into paid engagements has been slower and more circuitous than she expected. She names a recent client win as the example that reframed this for her.

[11:46] The Masseuse, the Mayor, and the County Contract: Kaitlin traces the origin of a recently won county government contract, working backward through every step that led to it. It started with her masseuse, an entrepreneur who knows Kaitlin's transportation background and introduced her to a client of hers who turned out to be a local mayor. That conversation led to another introduction from the mayor, which led to the client who is now a paying county government account. The lesson she draws is not just the value of networking but the value of showing up consistently, being curious about other people's work, and letting relationships develop without a transactional frame. Karen's footnote: this is also proof that making time for self-care has a professional return.

[13:05] The 90-Day Project-Based Consulting Model: Karen asks Kaitlin about the 90-day consulting model she has built and why it works in the current market. Kaitln explains that clients almost always come in with a tactics request, such as get me into the New York Times, get me mentioned in a trade publication. The model starts by walking them back from the tactic to the actual business problem, which requires patience and a particular kind of coaching. From that clarity comes a very specific, focused 90-day plan. Ninety days is enough time to solve a defined problem, get real results, and test the client relationship from both sides, because as Kaitlin notes, solos should be evaluating fit too, not just demonstrating value. It's also short enough that the client doesn't feel they're committing to a large open-ended engagement. And within every organization, Kaitlin says, there is a whole network of partnerships and adjacent problems that 90 days of proximity reveals, creating a natural path to follow-on work and niche development.

[17:35] Turning the Practitioner Lens on Yourself: Michelle raises the question that trips up many solos: how do you apply to your own practice the same diagnostic and positioning rigor you apply to clients? Kaitlin was helped by an unusual circumstance — when she left the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, her former colleagues (many of whom were also navigating unexpected career transitions) asked her to help them tell their own career stories. In building a framework to help them identify their unique differentiators, she essentially built the tool she then used on herself. The schema for helping others translated directly into clarity for her own positioning.

[21:06] The Substack as Thought Leadership Infrastructure — Not Audience Building: Karen highlights that Kaitlin has built a consistent Substack practice, posting every Tuesday on her newsletter called Trust Issues, which explores how and why ideas and people change, and the role trust plays in that. Kaitlin's framing of why she started it is the part worth listening to: she did not start it primarily to grow an audience. She started it as a forcing function for a weekly writing practice, as a home base for documenting what she knows, and as a way to own a topic she had genuinely earned through a range of experiences, corporate, public sector, federal government, and elected local official. The writing practice has surfaced things she had forgotten she knew and created a body of work that is now generating teaching opportunities with college students. Karen's observation: you picked a topic you were passionate about and had genuine experience in. That's the difference between a Substack that compounds and one that becomes a slog.

[24:17] The Alignment Brief — and the Role of Communications as Chief Alignment Officer: Kaitlin describes a tool she developed at Oracle and repurposed at the MTA: the alignment brief. It is essentially a structured questionnaire that gets all the teams working on a project onto the same page about what the product is, what the benefits are, what success looks like, and how it will be visible. She now gives it away for free because people ask for it constantly. She also names a framing she heard on another podcast that resonated: the communicator's role is often chief alignment officer. Getting everyone pointed in the same direction is not adjacent to the comms work.  it is often the precondition for the comms work to do anything.

About Kaitlin McCready

Kaitlin McCready is the founder of Communio Strategies, a communications consultancy that helps organizations close the gap between what they say and what their audiences believe, understand, and act on. Her career has spanned corporate technology communications at Oracle, public affairs and stakeholder engagement at the MTA's New York City Transit, change management and corporate strategy at Jacobs Engineering, and federal agency work at the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation — where she led communications for EV infrastructure deployment across the US. She is also a local elected official in Northeast Ohio. Kaitlin developed the WEAVE framework to integrate change management discipline into communications planning, and she writes the weekly Substack newsletter Trust Issues, which explores how and why ideas and people change — and the role of trust at every stage. Communio Strategies is approaching its first anniversary.

Website: communiostrategies.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kaitlinmccready

Substack: Trust Issues

Resources & Additional Information

Communio Strategies: communiostrategies.com

Trust Issues: Kaitlin's Substack on trust and change. 

Prosci: Change Management Certification Program (referenced by Kaitlin)

Solo PR Pro membership community: soloprpro.com

That Solo Life podcast website: thatsololife.com

Host & Show Info

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Episode Summary

Fractional roles seem to be growing in scope, including in Public Relations. Over the years, we have seen our fair share of creative titles, but does the Fractional title in Communication roles have longevity? In today’s episode, we take an honest look at the fractional title, extract what's actually useful, and give solo PR practitioners a real framework for deciding whether fractional positioning is a fit for them, or whether it's a fashionable label with a new set of obligations attached. The hosts discuss the rate data for fractional roles and adoption projections for midsize companies.  

Episode Highlights

Resources & Additional Information

Note on sourcing: Karen and Michelle flag on air that some of the broader fractional adoption statistics are difficult to verify precisely — treat aggregate figures as directional rather than definitive.

Host & Show Info

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Episode Summary

In a recent episode (Episode 350), we addressed burnout and called it out as a business risk.  Today’s episode addresses a different reason to step away from your business with a micro retirement. Unlike burnout, micro retirement is a planned business response and not a crisis break. It is a deliberate, designed pause that you build into your practice before you need it, the same way you build a financial runway or a contract clause. Michelle opens with a hypothetical question: what if she wanted to disappear for four months next year, and Karen's first reaction is not alarm but logistics: let's talk about how. What follows is a clear-eyed conversation about what micro retirement actually is (a planned break of weeks to months, taken periodically across a career, not a one-time event at the end) and what the research shows across two very different surveys. The episode also discusses how solo practitioners are uniquely positioned to give themselves permission that employees have to negotiate along with the real risks in a tumultuous 2026 economy. Karen and Michelle walk through four objections with straight answers and provide a three-question framework for figuring out if and when micro retirement is realistic. The episode closes on something that goes deeper than logistics: the uncomfortable question of who you are when the work goes away, and why that discomfort is data worth paying attention to, not something to push past.

Episode Highlights

Resources & Additional Information

Host & Show Info

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Some industries are on fire right now, hiring, growing, and spending. And some are bone dry. If yours has gone quiet, you've probably already heard the advice to pivot. Karen and Michelle are not here to tell you that pivoting is possible. They're here to tell you how. Episode 354 is a practical guide to breaking into a new industry when your current one has stalled. This episode is for the practitioner who is sitting in a dry sector right now and needs real steps to take. Karen and Michelle start by busting the myth that skills plus reputation walk seamlessly across industries, clarify exactly what does and doesn't travel with you. The episode is tactical and includes: how to reframe your existing portfolio through a new industry's lens, how to land a flagship project without working for free, four pathways to first opportunities in a new vertical, the mistakes to avoid when you're tempted to cut your rates, a realistic 3-to-6-month timeline with honest caveats, and the one concrete step you can take today. Karen is clear from the start that she is not speaking theoretically; she has had to take some of these steps herself, and the advice reflects it.

Resources & Additional Information

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent practitioners or microagenices. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape. That Solo Life was recently recognized as one of the Top 33 Solopreneur Podcasts on the Web by Feedspot.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Most PR wins are hard to see in real time. The brand building, the reputation work, the slow accumulation of coverage that eventually shifts how a client is perceived.  Those results are often invisible until long after the campaign ends. Mitch Leff's World Cup campaign for the city of Decatur, Georgia was the opposite. The goal was clear: get people to the square. The measure of success was visible from day one. And by the time the Indigo Girls closed out the 34-day Watch Fest on the last night of the tournament, Mitch and his partner Kim Speece had delivered 170,000 attendees, daily media coverage for every single day of the World Cup, international press from Japan's Asahi Shimbun, features in Southern Living and Garden & Gun, and the best sales month in 29 years for one of Decatur's most beloved bars. Even more amazing, they did as two independent practitioners. There was no junior staff, no agency overhead, just decades of experience, meticulous timing, and a daily 8:30 pm video blast to TV stations so that the morning shows always had something to run. In this episode, Mitch joins Karen and Michelle to walk through how the campaign came together, how they set expectations without a baseline, how they managed story angles that didn't pan out, and what it means for the case that independent practitioners can do what large agencies do and do it with excellence.

Mitch Leff is the founder and principal of Leff Associates, an Atlanta-based independent PR firm with more than four decades of experience in public relations, media strategy, crisis communications, and event PR. His work spans sports, government, nonprofit, and corporate communications — including the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — and he is widely recognized as one of Georgia's most connected and experienced independent practitioners. Mitch also leads the Georgia Independent Professionals Group, a community of solo and independent PR and communications professionals across the state. He is an active presence on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, and is a frequent resource and connector for the Georgia independent PR community.

Website: leffassociates.com/our-team

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/leffassociates

Email: [email protected]

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Episode Summary

In this episode of That Solo Life, Karen and Michelle discuss five headlines from newsletters, online news, and blog posts that caught their attention recently. From the hotly debated AI content watermarking to how negative SEO is being used as a competitive weapon to the giant hairball that rolled through the streets of New York City, they provide their point of view and offer actionable takeaways for Solo PR Pros.

Episode Highlights

Resources Mentioned

Host & Show Info

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Episode Summary

Quiet cracking,  distinct from quiet quitting, describes employees who are still showing up, still performing, sometimes performing really well, but are internally under pressure, uncertain about their job security, or unclear on what's expected of them. They're not checked out. They're just cracking quietly while holding it together on the surface.  In this episode, co-hosts Karen Swim, APR, and Michelle Kane address this trend and how it impacts Solo PR Pros.

The Talent Trends 2026 report found 54% of respondents have experienced some level of quiet cracking, with one in five saying they experience it frequently or constantly. Gallup's 2025 engagement data shows only 31% of US employees were actively engaged at work. Karen and Michelle make the case that this is not an HR headline — it's a communications problem that solo PR pros are already standing in the middle of, and one they're uniquely positioned to surface and address. They walk through what quiet cracking looks like in client organizations, the say-do gap it creates between internal reality and external messaging, four objections practitioners will raise (with honest answers to each), a three-question filter for identifying quiet cracking clients, a live scenario drill on handling a client who just went through quiet layoffs, and what to do when the same isolation and uncertainty you help clients name applies to your own practice.

Episode Highlights

Resources & Additional Information

Host & Show Info

That Solo Life is a podcast created for public relations, communication, and marketing professionals who work as independent and small practitioners. Hosted by Karen Swim, APR, President of Solo PR Pro, and Michelle Kane, Principal of Voice Matters, the show delivers expert insights, encouragement, and practical advice for solo PR pros navigating today's dynamic professional landscape.

Listen to all episodes and catch up on previous conversations at thatsololife.com.

Did this episode inspire you? If you found value in this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more solo pros just like you! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.