Permission to Grow

When you were growing up do you remember the first time you quit something? Did you quit the band or the soccer team? What did it feel like? Did you disappoint people or yourself? I have spent the last five years quitting a lot of things. I have quit jobs, I have quit hobbies, but most importantly I have tried to quit a lot of things that were not helping me be my best self in my career. This week Samuel Emni put out a list of 9 things that he suggested we trying quitting and they were things like quit trying to please others, quit being afraid of change, and quit thinking you are not good enough. I wanted to take this week to reflect on the things I quit and am trying to quit, and hopefully, this will inspire you to quit a few things that are dragging you down as well! Thanks for joining me!

Act on your curiosities. Be present, think about what you are curious about, and take action. This week we are talking to Heather and she is the CEO & Co-Founder of Bogobrush. Heather has allowed herself to be led by work and information that she is curious about - this led to her excelling in law school, work in venture financing, non-profit lobbying, study yoga, music, and travel, just to name a few. In this episode we dive into her entrepreneurial journey, how Bogobrush is seeking to make an impact in their community and abroad, and how she is continuing to go after things, work, and activities that she is curious about. Go explore, be curious, and as Heather says, find a way to replace stagnancy with action!

How can we bring together people, with all their unique gifts and talents, to truly make an impact in our communities and in our world? This weeks guest is Gabriele, and she has spent close to ten years as an advisor to corporate, government, and humanitarian organization leaders, to help them understand and prepare for disruptive trends on the horizon. Most recently she has expanded this conversation with her organization, Rise of the Bulls which she founded last year. This organization brings creative communities to the table to work alongside government, corporate, and humanitarian organizations to solve the challenges facing our community and our world. Gaby’s approach to trusting her path, working through the tension that arises as we navigate new paths, and allowing herself to keep moving forward toward work that gives her energy, makes me so excited to share her story with you. Enjoy!

New episode! This week we are talking to Sarah, the podcaster, writer, coach, and creator of the Write Now Podcast, and the new hit audio drama, Girl in Space. Sarah spent almost a decade in corporate roles that incorporated writing but never truly had enough space to let her love of writing thrive. We explore Sarah’s strategic time she spent in the corporate world where she began developing new skills, learning to ask for what she wanted, and worked to get comfortable in trying new things. This desire for consistent learning and growth eventually led to her launching her podcast (while still working full time), writing for Forbes, and speaking at events in her community. She gives us a truly insiders perspective of what it took to transition from the corporate 9-5pm to working full time on her creative adventures. We are diving into the importance of building a financial runway, how we can practice asking for what we want, and remembering that done, is better than perfect. Enjoy!

This week is our second technical episode and it is all about building and maintaining our networks. Alyson is a Career Coach and Speaker who works with clients all over the world on identifying their strengths and creating a path toward a more fulfilling career. One way we can best create a path toward a more fulfilling career is by creating and cultivating relationships with individuals who are either 1) in our existing network, 2) are individuals who are doing work that we want to be doing, and/or 3) are companies or industries that we are curious about and we want to learn more. Alyson takes us step by step how we can start to build these relationships, how we can connect and leverage our existing network, and how we can continue to maintain these relationships long after our initial meeting. This is an episode that I plan on coming back to often to make sure my networking plan is focused on long term relationships instead of temporary or short term gains. How are you building a genuine network? How have you started to build your network in a brand new field? I would love to hear what you all are working through!

From a lawyer, to photographer, blogger, content creator, and the woman behind RainbowPlantLife (vegan based Instagram, blog, & YouTube channel), Nisha is sharing with us the importance of allowing ourselves to try something else. In this episode, we explore the work and environments Nisha experienced early on in her career that led her to look deeper into what contributed to her overall health in wellness. This exploration led to travel, the understanding of ones need for downtime, and her first blog, Law of Bliss. After just a couple of years this blog, along with her love of food and photography, grew into RainbowPlantLife which is a positive, informative, and kind vegan community that I cannot get enough of! Check out the episode and see what Nisha is cooking up over at RainbowPlantLife!

What happened this week that made you feel really proud? Take a moment, reflect, think of the big moments and the small, and celebrate all you have accomplished. This is just a taste of the goodness and inspiration that you will find filled in this episode with Toni Purry, entrepreneur, visibility strategist, speaker, and author of My Hype Book. In this episode we follow Toni through her professional journey of over 20 years in PR, to how she learned to harness her strengths and use them as a springboard to help propel her from not knowing what’s next, to a speaker and author of an empowerment journal we can all use! One of my favorite takeaways this week was this idea that our confidence is our superpower, how can we strengthen it, how can we develop it, so when the new challenges arise, we are ready.

This week is our first technical episode and it is all about familiarizing ourselves with the career field we want to transition into by first learning the language. Erin started out as a teacher and before she made a successful pivot into her role as a learning specialist in a hospital and she took a handful of very intentional steps to make it happen. Erin takes us step by step how we can start to understand how people in our desired profession speak and engage with their clients by doing things like informational interviews, observation or shadow hours, being willing to ask for help, and then taking what she’s learned and integrating into her job application materials. This is an episode where you can take 15 minutes and leave to start your own action plan of how you are going to make your pivot a reality - go get it!

New things coming up for Permission to Grow! The first thing is we will be slowly rolling out new episodes on youtube, it’s not full video interviews (yet) but youtube will be another place for you to tune in to the awesome stories that people are sharing each week. The second thing you will see on an ongoing basis, is the website getting updated. The third and final thing, which I am really excited about is we will be sprinkling in some technical episodes which are going to focus on a specific trouble spot that many of us hit throughout our career journey. These technical episodes will be step by step short conversations on things like, how to push through fear/failure, negotiating a job offer, how to build a genuine network, how to to figure out your why, how to gain experience in a new field when you have no relevant experience, and how to conduct a helpful informational interview. Remember, no story is too small, no journey is too trivial, your story is valuable and it helps others.

Getting Unstuck? But how? How can we make a move professionally when we feel like we don’t have any options...when we feel stuck. This is a question I have been getting a lot from listeners and it’s one I myself have spent a lot of time on. In this episode, I talk about how easy it is for us to notice all the things that are making us feel stuck, whether we are feeling stuck because of our job tasks, or our environment, or our salary, but the tricky part comes in taking action to improve that feeling. Today I take a quick glance into activities I was doing (e.g. searching google for hours) that were not helping me get unstuck, and focus in on the ways I got less stuck, which was by talking to people, learning from their experiences, and then taking action.

Meet Meghan - she is an entrepreneur and digital project manager who spent over a decade in the corporate world, gaining extensive skills and experience in the areas of marketing, business operations, and innovation and she now uses this expertise to create more time, more wealth, and more connections for business owners raising young children with her business “Nesting Your Business.” In this episode, we are tackling what her career transition looked like, to go from the corporate world, to freelancing, to building a business while building a family, and all the excitement, stressors and decisions that come along with all that. One last reminder she gave for everyone listening, who wants to start or has started a business, she reminds us to treat your business with as much time and respect as you treat your clients. Enjoy!

New Episode!! We are all more alike than we are different, so don’t be too hard on yourself, keep learning, and ask for help. This was the advice Didi shared with me as we ended this weeks episode. Didi is a clinical therapist in New Mexico and she offers guidance to those suffering from substance use and mental health disorders in a medically supervised facility. In this episode, Didi talks about her early years in college and what it took for her to develop her confidence and strength in herself. She went back to grad school after spending six years as a teacher and has now spent almost her first year in the field as a clinical therapist post-grad school. In addition to her experience in the field, we explore the burnout that can occur in this type of field and Didi gives some great tips on how to have a conversation with your boss about boundaries. She also shared how she looked inside herself to see what she needed to feel cared for, while also figuring out how to balance a demanding new career with her life and relationships. So much goodness - enjoy!

Don’t stay stuck. This week we get to learn from the incredible Abby Wolfe, who is a health educator and freelance writer (who spends time learning and sharing individuals career stories through her work at The Muse) and she is graciously sharing her own career story with all of us. Her journey has taken her through grad school, internships, job successes and rejection, and along the way she has made time to learn about herself, breaking down what she does and does not like in a role and understanding what type of work fulfilled her and what type of work drained her, and then using that information to help guide her next career step. The overarching message I took away from this episode, aside from how to plan in advance for a career transition (which she did an awesome job of), is the idea that we are built to figure things out, even if stuff gets hard, or if decisions do not make sense right away, we can continue to learn about ourselves, take time to explore new areas, and figure things out. Enjoy!

The better your business the more good you can do in the world. This week we are talking to Rachael, a Social Impact Strategist and Founder of Defining Good and she is giving us an incredible introduction into her career transition into entrepeneurship after spending six years in corporate social responsibility roles. I love this episode because not only do we get a chance to hear about how she tested out her idea of a business before making the full transition and how she made the leap out of the corporate world, but we also get a great glimpse into the arena of social impact for anyone who is listening an may be interested in a career path in that space. Rachael is a wonderful human who is doing good, spreading joy, and keeping us informed, so that when we know better, we can do better. Check out this episode and let me know what you think!

It takes a community to build a business. We have an awesome new episode this week with the phenomenal woman behind Six Degree Society, Emily Merrell! In this episode, we learn about Emily’s career transition from a life in fashion events & marketing in NYC, to tapping into her genuine love of connecting to humans and creating a space where we could all grow our own community of friends and colleagues. Emily talks in this episode about the moment she realized she could no longer remain in her full-time job while trying to get her new company off the ground and we talk through the steps she took to make Six Degrees Society her full-time hustle. Enjoy!