The Career Butterfly

You know companies and products have personal brands, but have you ever thought about individuals having them as well?

Personal branding expert Amanda Miller Littlejohn is here to explain what a persona brand is (hint: even if you haven't been intentional about it, you already have one!), how it can help you personally and professionally, and talks about how to build yours.

She shares wisdom from her own journey and also draws upon the expertise she shares in her book, Package Your Genius: 5 Steps to Build Your Most Powerful Personal Brand and companion workbook.

A mom of two, she even has a book for parents on this topic, Find Your Child Genius: 50+ Questions to Help you Find and Guide Your Child's Unique Talent

You can find Amanda at Package Your Genius Academy, on her personal website or on her podcast.

Pauses come in all shapes and sizes, but they also can be planned or unplanned. 2020 is shaping up to be the year of unintentional pauses for millions. This week's guest, cartoonist Chari Pere, finds herself in that category and is here to share how she's managing this phase of life.

She has freelanced for most of her career working with everyone from author Gretchen Rubin to the corporate brand Red Bull. Along the way, she's become known not only for happy comics, but also for cartoons that tackle hard topics like miscarriage and bullying in an accessible format.

She shares how she's managing the transition from corporate back to freelance with three young kids at home and a world pandemic that has impacted her personally. One tip she shares is her 15 Minute Musing habit that keeps her creative and productive.

You can find Chari's work, including her Coronamama cartoons, on her website or Instagram.

We're celebrating Father's Day this week in North America so we're keeping with tradition and getting the dad's perspective once again. In this episode, the guest's pause looks more like a permanent break - from corporate life.

Dom Vogel has a story that's familiar to many. He had a dream of reaching the top of his chosen field. He worked hard over a decade in cybersecurity to achieve that dream - only to discover he no longer wanted it once he arrived. Even worse, he didn't care for the person he'd turned into along the way.

He shares in the interview how he funded an abrupt exit from corporate life and his journey to building the dream entrepreneurial life he never knew he wanted. Today, he finds a way to build kindness and empathy into his business and his every day work life.

Times are tough in so many ways right now. Politically, economically, socially. It might seem like the worst time to launch a business, but Katie Morland has found success doing just that.

Do you ever have an idea at 1:00am that just won't let you sleep? When it happened to Katie, she got up and acted on it. That was the birth of her group Mommy Needs a Laugh. Despite all that is heavy in the world - and the interview delves into that as well - Katie knows that sometimes we need a moment of levity as well.

She's talking to all the moms out there who are homeschooling their kids, wondering if their spouse is ever going to work outside the home again, and missing their friends.

Today, she's leading her nearly 3000 followers through weekly Happy Hours, monthly workouts, and daily doses of light and laughter in her Facebook group and on Instagram.

The fact that tomorrow isn't guaranteed was a painful lesson that Ashley Bugge was forced to learn. She was pregnant with her third child and living an idyllic life in Hawaii when her military husband died tragically in a scuba diving accident.

Ashley shares deeply in this interview how she coped in her darkest days and how, today, she works every day to build her life into exactly what she wants it to be - even after the unexpected loss.

The career pause she took was unintended, but it led her to discover herself as a writer, speaker, and storyteller. Today, she is looking forward to the upcoming release of her book, Always Coming Back Home: An Emotional Tale of Love, Adventure, Tragedy and Hope. After failing to find a book that helped her small children understand the death of their father, she wrote A Hui Hou: Until We Meet Again from their perspective to help other children facing this big issue.

As a newly single mother of three, Ashley was worried that she'd have to give up her love of global travel, but this resilient mama found a way to plan the trip of a lifetime - with the help of some amazing friends. Check out Two Months, Eight Countries on her website.

Do you have an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset? Do you make decisions from a place of "there will always be enough... time/money/love" or the opposite? Has the pandemic had an impact on this for you? Tune in to learn more about these opposite mindsets and work towards cultivating an abundance mindset.

Karin Pfister always assumed she'd be a stay-at-home mom, but it was a few years of motherhood until she finally had that chance. While she loved it for several years, she eventually discovered it wasn't the best balance for her. Despite the fact that she was doing the most important job in the world, she also found she lost her own value in that time.

She was lucky enough to find her way back to work when she was ready. Her career has always been centered around education and has included everything from full-time to part-time teaching roles, corporate work focused on technology innovation in education, as well as starting her own consultancy.

Today, she works remotely from the United States for a university in Australia. This gives her the opportunity to keep one foot on each continent, which is particularly important since she has one teenager living in each country.

Being back at work, she's regained that confidence she once felt in the classroom - and even thinks she may return one day to her first love of teaching math!

Happy Mother's Day to all the hard-working moms out there. I see you and I appreciate all you do every day to raise all the children of the world.

This episode is dedicated to my own mom and comes on the heels of one of the hardest weeks of our lives together. We said goodbye to my dad this week and I want her to know she is not alone.

I also want all of you to know that. Sometimes it might feel that way if you're just looking at the shiny highlights that people post, but deep down, I promise, there's a lot more going on.

Reena Friedman Watts has done everything from producing Jerry Springer to researching CourtTV shows to booking sponsors for major online entrepreneurs, including Cathy Heller and GaryVee. Today, she considers herself a social mediaholic and uses that talent to help businesses and individuals find their own voice in social media.

She's a huge fan of LinkedIn, but doesn't limit herself to just that platform. She runs a Facebook group called Business, Laughs, and LinkedIn where you can find her every day sharing her fun, positive attitude. As a mom of four young kids, she's been in and out of career pauses, but seems to always land the exciting job. How does she do it? If I had to say what I learned in the interview, I'd say persistence and connection are the two words that come to mind.

Her energy will motivate you and her tips can help everyone have a better social media experience.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Third Door by Alex Banayan

What does your soul need? Do you ever think about it? It's not the word that comes up most often on my podcast so I was really moved when Patricia Medranda referred to her desire to teach middle school kids as something her soul needed.

Had she always dreamed of becoming a teacher? Not even close - she originally wanted to be a surgeon. After her first career pause, she worked for a pharmaceutical company. And then she paused again.

In her interview, she shares how her early interest in medicine served her as a mom and a daughter attending to the medical needs of her children and her father. And she shares how she developed a love for teaching through her volunteer work with the Hemophilia Foundation.