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How many people can say they’ve never worked for anyone else? Selling eggs door-to-door at 14 years old began a lifetime of self-employment for speaker and small business consultant Jeffrey Shaw. Jeffrey helps self-employed and small business owners look through different lenses to build strategies and compose the often-chaotic pieces of life and business into sustainable success.
Jeffrey grew up in a small, rural town in New York. Jeffrey’s father worked for IBM, and his mother ran her own hair salon. While in high school, Jeffrey developed an interest in photography. He was introduced to it by his father, who had built a darkroom in their home. Jeffrey’s talent as a photographer began to emerge, yet when he graduated from high school, he did not feel a sense of direction, so he took a gap year. The following year he decided to attend photography school.
For four decades, Jeffrey has served generations of families in his highly successful portrait photography business. Then, he reached a point where he wanted to do something different. He had heard about the coaching profession, found it appealing, and enrolled in a training program to develop those skills. Since then, he has added speaker, author, and podcast host to his professional titles. He has retained a small number of photography clients as he holds a deep value for the relationships he has nurtured over the years.
In 2021, Jeffrey created and launched the Self-Employed Business Institute to educate and support entrepreneurs in growing their businesses. His two books, The Self-Employed Life: Business and Personal Development Strategies That Create Sustainable Success and LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible have been smash successes. Jeffrey is currently working on his third book. Stay tuned!
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Jeffrey’s journey:
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David Lancefield is a catalyst, strategist, and coach to senior executives, professionals, and entrepreneurs. He also is a speaker, facilitator, and host of the Lancefield on the Line podcast. David enjoys helping leaders and their organizations achieve greater strategic clarity, enhanced resilience, breakthrough performance, and sustainable impact.
David grew up in modest surroundings with his sister and parents. Mom was an educator who ran the local school system. Dad was a nuclear physicist. David says his parents never pressured him or his sister to achieve anything specific or ‘be’ something other than to put in their best effort. Yet, David held himself to high standards and always enjoyed intellectual, complex challenges. He studied economics, earned a master's degree, and went to work for a large management consulting firm. By 32, he became one of the firm’s youngest partners.
In 2012, David and his wife welcomed their son into the world. He was born with significant brain damage, requiring a high degree of care. David has thoughtfully crafted a life where he brings excellence to his work and to his son’s life by providing home schooling and caregiving.
Today, David brings the skills, frameworks, and experiences of a strategy consultant, transformational leader, executive coach, and futurist to his work with CEOs, senior executives, professionals, and entrepreneurs from start-ups to corporate, private to public, local to global, and media to utility. These include the BBC, Microsoft, Royal Mail, Standard & Poors, Vodafone, NBC Universal, NHS, Virgin Media, Technicolor, IHG, and The Guardian.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about David’s journey:
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On paper, Katie McDonald had it all. She was an international sales rockstar who beat the competition and crushed her goals in the U.S., Europe, and Canada. But Katie’s relentless drive for productivity came at the expense of everything that mattered: her relationships, her time, her health, and her emotional well-being. The demands of her corporate career occupied her every waking moment. Then, one day, she missed one meeting. One.
Her mental health was already precarious; that’s all it took to push her over the edge. Facing life-threatening mental and physical health crises, Katie’s have-it-all-together world was quickly crumbling. She had to take action for herself – immediately.
Katie left her corporate career behind…and life started to get better. As she started to move past her self-destructive patterns, Katie made meaningful investments in her well-being. Then, something incredible happened: after years of trying and failing, Katie conceived a child. By letting go of her perfectionist habits, she started making intentional choices. For the first time in her adult life, Katie started implementing what she knew about self-care but had never practiced.
Today, self-care is at the center of everything Katie does. Fully recovered from years of self-neglect, she now coaches fellow-doers to embrace self-care so they can lead healthier, more intentional, and more nourished lives.
As a speaker, Katie leads with tough love to inspire, empower, and challenge audiences. She dispels the myth that self-care is an obstacle to productivity and teaches that self-care is, in fact, a tool to create a more powerful and impactful legacy.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Katie’s journey:
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Kay Allison has been living alcohol-free since 1999. She is a successful entrepreneur, author, and leader of an alcohol-free community. Through her company, Juicy A.F. Kay helps woman transform their lives by stopping the drinking spiral and creating a rich, rewarding, joyful future to get free – free from booze, shame, and anxiety.
Growing up, Kay felt like she was the fifth wheel in a family of scientists and teachers, having arrived five years after two older sisters who were close in age. Kay comments that her home environment felt like ‘fifty shades of beige’ while she was creative and colorful. She sang and studied cello all the way through her major at Northwestern University. Her parents supported all of her creative endeavors; they simply could not relate to them.
In 1999, Kay was a Senior Vice President at a global ad agency and a single mom of two children. Her drinking escalated to the point that she decided to go alcohol-free.
Since then, Kay has helped hundreds of women face their struggles with alcohol and come out the other side to live amazing lives. She increased her income 6x, married a man she’s still crazy about 21 years later, helped Fortune 200 companies generate $2 billion in new revenue, adopted a child, invented successful businesses, traveled around the world, and moved to her dream hometown in Colorado. Kay is the author of two books, Secrets from the Innovation Room: How to Create High-Voltage Ideas That Make Money, Win Business, and Outwit the Competition and Juicy AF*: Stop the Drinking Spiral, Create Your Future.
Most importantly, she is happy with herself. Kay truly lives a Juicy AF life.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Kay’s journey:
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Dr. Gena Cox is the CEO of Feels Human, LLC. She is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and award-winning author. After a decades-long career advising leaders in some of America’s largest companies, Gena felt that the pace of progress in workplace inclusion was unacceptably slow. She harnessed her experiences, expertise in organizational psychology, executive coach insights, and understanding of C-suite dynamics to write her book, Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel. It is a comprehensive guidebook for building inclusive organizations from the top down.
Gena helps leaders to connect the unfamiliar dots to drive inclusion from the top of their organizations. She asks her clients to remember one simple idea: inclusion tops diversity.
Throughout her career, Gena has looked through a global lens, sensing that the world is actually small and humans are more alike than different. She was born in England, and at three years, her parents split, and Gena went to live with her grandparents in Barbados. She had a wonderful childhood and later attended college in the United States, where she studied psychology. Gena had also wanted to be a journalist, so she worked at a newspaper for two years, covering the business beat. To this day, when she sees reporters on television, Gena is fascinated by how they get to the core of a story. Interestingly, her father, who had worked at The Guardian newspaper in England, encouraged her to study something other than journalism and then write about it. Ultimately she pursued her interest in psychology.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Gena’s journey:
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Etta Jacobs is an executive career transition coach and facilitator who supports mid-level and senior managers to become more effective, confident leaders. Powered by 20 years of senior-level corporate experience and an intuitive insight into her clients’ strengths, she guides them to navigate the ambiguities and complexities of their organizations and the world around them. Etta inspires her clients to cultivate compassion and consider divergent perspectives as they envision the impact they want to have in their careers.
Etta began her career as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator in New York City. She quickly learned that the most important factor in building a sustainable business was nurturing her relationships with clients and colleagues. It was these relationships that opened the doors to each successive phase of her career—first as a corporate design director and today as a coach and facilitator.
Etta gained her corporate expertise as an award-winning executive at two Fortune 500 companies, where she coached cohorts of managers and directed teams of creative professionals working on innovative instructional design products. She shepherded teams through many technological changes and corporate reorganizations, nurturing their resilience and cultivating their creative problem-solving skills.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Etta’s journey:
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Grant Tate helps people learn how to thrive in our unpredictable world. He is a servant leader, transformational coach, and business consultant who challenges leaders and emerging professionals to answer the questions: Who am I? What am I called to do now? Who am I going to work with to get it done? Grant is the CEO of Bridge Business Transformations and the author of Hand on the Shoulder: Binding Freedom in the Confluence of Love and Career.
Grant grew up in a small working-class town in Virginia. He started school early, the smallest and youngest in his class. Grant quickly developed strategies to use his brain to survive conflicts on the playground and became friends with one of the tough kids who taught him a few jiu-jitsu moves. At 15, Grant got a job at the local furniture store, where he was tasked with cleaning and other physical jobs. Within a week, the store’s owner realized Grant could not sweep a floor if his life depended on it and offered to teach him bookkeeping skills which he continued to do there while attending the University of Virginia.
At 16, Grant graduated high school and studied electrical engineering in college. By 25, he was a line manager at IBM with 100 employees working under him. He remained with IBM for 30 years in 15 different management and leadership roles. He has also taught engineering at universities in Connecticut, New Mexico, and New York. After two failed marriages, he moved to Europe to find himself and started a distance education and ed tech company with two partners. Five years later, he returned to the US and started his coaching and consulting business.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Grant’s journey:
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Alicia Butler Pierre is the CEO of Equilibria, Inc, an operations management firm she founded 17 years ago. She designs scale-ready business infrastructures for fast-growing small businesses. At Equilibria, she invented the KasennuTM System for business infrastructure and software by the same name. Alicia has successfully applied this system in over 30 different industries. She is also an adjunct instructor of lean principles at Purdue University and the author of Behind the Facade, How to Structure Company Operations for Sustainable Success.
A chemical engineer turned entrepreneur, Alicia has advised, designed, and optimized processes for enterprises, including Shell Oil, Coca-Cola, and Home Depot. She hosts the weekly Business Infrastructure: Curing Back Office Blues podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of the world with listeners in 60 countries.
Alicia attended private Catholic school through 8th grade, where there was a methodical, process-oriented cadence to everything. Her father was in the Air Force, and her mother was a health inspector. She sees how these foundations informed her work with clients today. Interestingly, when Alicia entered high school, she planned to become a journalist. She loved English, the arts, and writing. In 11th grade, she took chemistry, discovering she loved it so much that she opted to take the advanced course the next year and studied chemical engineering in college.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Alicia’s journey:
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Author, futurist, and speaker George Chanos served as Nevada's 31st Attorney General from 2005 to 2007. As a young child, George was struck by the outpouring of admiration and grief when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. From that moment onward, he was determined to serve, and during his most formative years, he aimed for the highest office in the land. His role as Attorney General was one step closer to his goal, but after spending a few years deep in the political arena, he determined there were ways to serve the greater good that would better align with his values, so running for elected office was no longer a goal for him.
George is the author of two books, Seize Your Destiny: Choices That Lead to a Happy, Successful, and Meaningful Life. and Millennial Samurai: A Mindset for the 21st Century. His original intent in writing his first book was to leave a legacy for his daughter and nephew after suffering a heart attack in his early 50s. Once he recovered, he realized that there was more he wanted to do to help prepare the next generation for the rapid changes that he saw emerging in our culture, business world, and society at large.
George serves on several boards, including as Chairman of the Board, Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop, Inc., with over 200 stores in 20 states. He also speaks to large groups regularly on a variety of topics: Think and Thrive: A Mindset for the 21st Century, How to Surf the Technological Tsunami, Change is Coming: Are You Ready?, and Finding Opportunity in Adversity.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about George’s journey:
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For most of his career, Nir Eyal has worked in the video gaming and advertising industries, where he learned and applied (and sometimes rejected) the techniques used to motivate and manipulate users. He helps companies create behaviors that benefit their users while educating people on how to build healthful habits in their own lives. Nir is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which was named one of the Best Business and Leadership Books of the Year by Amazon.
As a child, Nir was clinically obese. Growing up in Florida, where kids spent lots of time at swimming pools, he was often the object of bullying. Nir managed to transcend those early years in his teens by reading nutrition books and changing his food choices, although he blamed the fast food industry for creating the problems he struggled with. Then he turned the blame into fascination, a critical factor in his ability to transcend the challenges inherent in his obesity. Eventually, Nir became interested in how companies like General Mills could grab customers’ attention and change behaviors.
Today, Nir writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Previously he was a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Since 2003, Nir co-founded and sold two tech companies. The M.I.T. Technology Review called him “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.”
As an active investor, Nir puts his money where his mouth is by backing habit-forming products he believes improve lives. Some of his past investments include Eventbrite, Anchor.fm (acquired by Spotify), Kahoot!, Canva, Homelight, Product Hunt, and Byte Foods.
In this week’s Work From The Inside Out podcast, learn more about Nir’s journey:
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From the publisher's feed
Work From The Inside Out is a biweekly podcast focused on helping people to pursue work they will love. Inspiring stories of real people who overcame the barriers and unhappiness that kept them…