Back a long, long time ago, I used to have a blog called ‘RANT’ - my 20-something self, who was in public and in person very quiet, would use the space to go off on people’s behavior in public, why certain things happened the way they did, and how the world in general didn’t make sense. It was the opposite of myself externally and I loved having a space to just process the world.

I walk a line

Now, I’m a bit older and the internet is not a place to do that anymore without being seen in a light that’s unflattering in some way. Some people build brands on their own way of being, housed around authenticity, swear words, and crackling, biting humor which is entertaining to read or interact with but if you had to sit next to them at a dinner you’d probably lose your mind. Or at least I would. I have my own list of who those people are.

For me, there’s a fine line that I’m walking now between how I really feel, and how I desire to be seen. I never want to be that person that can be read but not tolerated in real life. I want to be approachable in both. I keep some parts of me for my closest of friends and confidants, while others may lay it all out there for everyone.

This is why in some ways I peel back from interaction in the public space because it’s hard to feel like you say the same things over and over again. It’s hard to see the systems and be gesturing broadly to a crowd of no one that can change it. It’s hard to keep having the energy for it.

I feel like most of what I’ve posted here is the same - all leaning toward the same idea that how the system is setup is not for us and it’s erasing our sense of self-understanding and sense of self.

I know that something has to be repeated many times for someone to ‘get’ something, and that a lot of what most are saying in certain spaces is going on deaf ears.

I know that the ears that need to hear this aren’t the ones that are reading, but perhaps if I every once in a while pop up with a new way of approaching this concept I’ll accomplish a few things:

• I’ll be able to be creative in my words, which I like

• Someone else for the first time might read this and go ‘yeah, that’s right!’ - which is a total win

Now that I’ve gotten that out there, to the heart of the matter that keeps me up at night, wakes me up in the morning, and at random like a cat with the zoomies, gets me ramped up at random parts of the day.

We have to shape the professional futures we want to see, as a whole, as a movement

I’ve spoken to tons of job seekers and done a fair amount of research into the issues we see today. We all know the job market is a mess and that companies no longer lay people off only when there’s financial trouble but also when they are printing money. These things I don’t need to repeat.

But I do think what’s worth speaking about, even if it very much feels like zero shock to anyone, is that companies, stock markets, systems that employ and bring clients will not change on their own.

They have to be forced. Or, we need a different system to play in.

Companies have been going along just fine for a long time shoving people into boxy job titles while leaving out their non-traditional skills, their hobbies, and their life-won achievements that don’t fit into the corporate narrative. They erase what context doesn’t suit them. Or, there’s not even an option for it to exist at all.

They build a job shaped hole that everyone has to walk through everyday when they start work, and walk out of when they end their day.

We can have it both ways, and so can they

I get why companies pick and choose what they need to filter through and see in the moment. I have an attention problem so I deeply understand the need for no more information than what’s needed.

But, with that choice comes a concrete wall separating what will likely be of incredible use. As a whole, all of us, the places we work, the people we interact with are seeing fractured parts of our existence and what we have to offer the world.

But, perhaps someday instead of companies having to put up the walls because they don’t have a proper mechanism, people could decide in a concise and data-driven way what they might want to let through.

Maybe all versions of ourselves meet at the gate

Instead of a concrete wall, we form a gate that organizes life’s stream of work, curiosity, and achievement into readable functions for organizations, educational institutions, and communities to see the whole value someone could bring. If they want to bring it.

Whatever the person doesn’t want to let through, they don’t.

We’re trying to build this gate, and we’re finally getting around to positioning it in a way that hopefully makes sense.

As much as I like to play with words and explain things, explaining this issue and how we’re trying to go about fixing it has been one of the hardest things I’ve done (yet).

But I do think I’m starting to get somewhere with the difference between a job-shaped hole in a concrete wall and an individual-controlled gate.

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When I began my career, there were so many tools, ways to work, things to sign up and learn from. Now twenty years in, I’m drowning in possibilities and a bad habit of signing up for newsletters in the hopes it’ll make me a better person by it hitting my inbox. Things I never read but clog up my mental time in so many ways.

I am starting to equate them to the optimistic purchases I used to make at the grocery store that would end up sitting in the back of the fridge until they just wilt away.

It’s not the kale’s fault. It’s not really even the newsletter, either. It’s me wanting to solve a larger complex issue in one easy transaction without putting in the effort.

I’m no longer content to give away information, to be stalled by unfocused time, or skimming social media. I still do it, but I want to move away from so much of it.

I need to reclaim my time.

I know this won’t be an easy journey, the world is setup for me to pay into the attention economy with clicks. But if I’m to get to my goal of building an economy of impact through clearer understanding of the value I (and others) bring to this world, I have to start with some audits of my time and attention.

I started to put together a personal and business audit to reclaim my attention, my time, and most importantly, the ‘keys’ to my own information.

These are my slow, methodical moves toward a more sovereign self.

Here are the questions I’m asking myself, and of my business:

Phase 1: The Personal Audit (Cognitive & Identity)

Goal: Reclaim attention and keys. Use my personal time to build more skills, focus on what I want, and reduce stress.

• Identity Decoupling: List every critical service (banking, health, government) with “Sign in with Google/LinkedIn/Facebook.” This will make it much easier if I decide to move away from these platforms or get locked out of them.

  • Sovereign Move: Transition these to a dedicated email or a Passkey stored in a non-ecosystem manager (like Bitwarden or 1Password). I might also start by just making an Airtable (or the like) to quickly log if I don’t have time to move things in the moment.

• Algorithm Fasting: Audit my default news sources and other information. Am I seeing what I chose, or what a feed chose for me? Does it serve me, truly?

  • Sovereign Moves:

    • Use RSS Readers (like Feedly) or direct Substack subscriptions to pull information, rather than having it pushed to via a social feed that leads to doomscrolling. Ground News is a really great one as well that Shayne uses often. I’ve come to realize my inboxes are a wealth of research available to me, I just have to use it correctly.

• Noise reduction audit: How much of the email that I get do I actually read or do anything with? How much of it do I want to be aware of but not go into a deep dive on?

  • Use Gemini or another tool to audit unread emails in the morning for a summary, assess what you really care about them, and if you see a pattern of disinterest, unsubscribe from that source. I’ve been doing this for about a week personally and for my business, and it’s been really helpful. Here’s my prompt: Access my emails in Gmail from the last 24 hours (read or unread) and email me a digest of them all. Suggest items to unsubscribe from, and any emails that in particular that are pushing for purchasing/sales vs. information.

• Biometric & Key Custody: Check if my “recovery codes” for 2FA are stored in a cloud I might get locked out of.

  • Sovereign Move: Print recovery codes and store them in a physical safe. If I lose the cloud, I shouldn’t lose my whole life.

Phase 2: The Business Audit (Operational & Data)

Goal: Ensure the business survives a ‘de-platforming’ or a major vendor outage, as well as has the adaptability to move from systems based on our values.

1. The “Off-Switch” Test

• Critical Path Inventory: If Microsoft/Google/AWS shut down our account today, how long could our business operate? For us, we’d be DOA immediately, and we’re working to fix that. We’ve moved our consulting website to Infomaniak, onto European soil, and will work on moving away from Google Suite over time to their KSuite offering.

• Data Portability: Audit SaaS tools (CRMs, Project Management). Do they have an “Export All” button that produces usable files (CSV/JSON), or is the data trapped in their proprietary format? I’m starting to investigate this now, as well as the potential of having a CRM and Project backup setup between more than one tool, both to learn new tools and keep skills fresh on data mapping, migration, and interconnection. I don’t want to lock myself into one system and not use it as a chance to learn others.

2. Data Geography & Legal Reach

• Jurisdiction Mapping: Where is our customer data physically? (e.g., Is our EU customer data on a US-owned server subject to the CLOUD Act?) We are moving things to the EU, slowly, as we reassess our setups.

It’s truly time to nerd, and I love it.

This is just the beginning of a long journey to diversify my personal and business focus, tech usage, and safety. I’m sure I’ll be talking about this more as I dig in and try different tools.

As we build our ideas away from what we’ve ‘grown up’ seeing in terms of tech, I have to imagine this will get more interesting and only expand my knowledge of tools, ideas, and ways to make things work. I started my career with startups diving deep into U.S.-built tools as a near-default, and now that I’m exploring outside of that realm, there’s an interesting wealth of options that I didn’t even realize.

This major exercise isn’t just for data and security reasons, but to open up my mind and understand the possibilities.

It’s amazing how much being ‘born’ into U.S. tech has stifled my ability to look elsewhere and consider other options.

Here’s our roadmap so far, and how much we will be saving.

We’re investigating new tools not just for security, consolidation, and cost savings, but also considering what aligns with our values and our drive for transparency.

We’re also considering Open Source models and companies that align or aspire to be teal organizations, S3 (Sociocracy 3.0), and/or are members or follow the values of Openorg.

Heartfelt sidenote: This will not be a once-and-done thing, but an ongoing project to align ourselves personally and professionally with tech, products, and communities that help us grow as humans.

Cloud hosting and website: Wix to Infomaniak - saving about 200/year

Email & Office: Google Workspace to KSuite - once implemented will save about 300/yr. Will likely keep some version of Google email since professional and personal sharing of GSuite files is the norm. But wherever we can move off of Google, we will.

Graphic Design: Canva to (perhaps) Penpot - 100/yr - moving from Canva to be able to have more Figma-like experience between development/marketing/product

CRM/Marketing: Hubspot (free) to ?? - Investigating Attio next. Still unsure here as I’m a true fan of Hubspot and will probably always have an account to keep skills up.

Browser: Chrome to Vivaldi - no cost difference, but Vivaldi is really cool.

Relational Database/Project Management: Airtable to SeaTable or Baserow - still considering this one - no real cost savings, but considering Open Source alternatives has opened up my mind to possibilities. Also, again I might pump a source of truth to another system and back to keep my migration skills up and be able to say ‘yes I can use Notion/ClickUp/whatever is the new latest thing’.

Keeping up with the latest is much easier than one might imagine

For a professed ‘tool nerd’, these are really fun and interesting times. I’ve been having a blast exploring the EU Tech Map to find European replacements. I used to spend hours on the weekend using Zapier or IFTTT’s available integrations lists to just see what all tools are available in certain categories to keep up. Even knowing what tools exist in a category like Project Management is amazingly helpful in conversations.

Let me know if you are doing the same. I’d love to nerd with you!

If you are replacing tech or considering diversifying your personal or business tech stack, honing your focus, and/or reclaiming your time, I’d love to hear what you are considering, how you are approaching the migration, and the favorite tools you’ve found so far.

And if you feel stuck and don’t know where to start, I’d be happy to get on a call or in DMs and help you figure out the best place to start.

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It feels like somewhere along the way, where it seems like so much of the internet is focused on what one can monetize, we lost the simple act of a loving info dump for the sake of it.

In thinking about this more over the past weeks, I’ve come to realize that there are perhaps some correlative aspects to this loss that are particularly tragic.

So, I’m going to go deep into this topic, talking about why going deep into a topic and letting others do the same might just help us get back to the world we need to see, and be the change we want to see in the world.

Erasing psychological safety for the sake of clicks

A few weekends ago, I got sucked into the television series related to Anne of Green Gables (the more recent Netflix one, and the one from 1985 - because when I focus, I hyperfocus).

I continually throughout felt that the character of Anne would have had a really hard time in today’s world for a number of reasons, and the other characters in the series underscored this perfectly.

When someone shares a niche interest, they are sharing a part of their inner self that’s a bit vulnerable, maybe nerve-racking, requiring some courage to put out there. They are giving a gift of their true selves by diving into their love of birding, or rocks, or video games. Or in Anne’s case, literature. The signal that this level of intensive information is too much or problematic erases the idea that we can share ideas without them being particularly thought out to the -nth degree. We create the need to be performative in this type of society rather than real-life interactions.

Some will label unbridled enthusiasm as ‘cringe’, making sincerity a dangerous thing to share. Mocking someone’s passion for something means we are saying that apathy is safer than caring about others and what they have to offer the world. And mocking isn’t where it stops, it turns into othering, dismissing, and ignoring. How much is not learned or left to be forgotten with this approach?

Loss of a third place

I used to love to go to the hardware store as a kid, it had a couch in the back and a coffee pot that seemed forever warming an ancient sludge that once resembled coffee.

The older men in town would basically hang out at the hardware store and BS most of the day. I always thought that was the coolest concept. They said everything and absolutely nothing. Sociologists often talk about “Third Places” as community spaces separate from home and work where people can connect.

Now in my town, there’s a certain tiny bar on the major throughfare that I pass when I go to the grocery store (or just about anywhere). I see the gentlemen in town who clearly have stories to share, nursing tiny beers and watching everything. Sometimes there is some hand flailing or what seems like an intense conversation. This happens at 10 in the morning, and goes until they close which seems to depend on when everyone goes home, not a true set time. I cannot understand the bits and parts I do hear because my Portuguese is still lacking.

Portugal has more Third Places to share stories like coffee shops and parks to just be human and connect than the United States, but the loss of a third place, particularly if one doesn’t have funds to enter and pay for coffee or beers, is disappearing.

When these places disappear or aren’t accessible, conversations move elsewhere. It moves to transactional places like networking events or algorithmic ones like social media. This results in these conversational places feeling like a constant state of one-upping one another for the outcome of a lead, a connection to use later, or being seen at all. Anyone who has ever had to post a “pic for algo” knows what I mean.

Stifling Innovation or Cross-Pollination

History is full of people that studied many different things that seemed ‘useless’ but integrated deeply into their careers and contribution to the world. Leonard DaVinci studied military engineering, sculpture and art, and anatomy.

Now there seems to be a sense of a ‘useless’ knowledge trap. We obsess over utility. If a topic doesn’t make money or solve an immediate problem, it is deemed a waste of time. But this is exactly where innovation can come from is that collision of two or three seemingly unrelated passions that someone took the time to go deep into. Not the only place, but if we cut off a known path of innovation, where does that leave us?

When we stop listening to people go into depth about things for the sake of it, and don’t support them just learning for the sake of it, like mycology, basket weaving, or video game structures, we lose the ability to understand how so many various things can give us a different viewpoint on our own lives.

There are so many other things about not being able to share freely and ‘nerd’ that hurt us. I could go on with many others, like the lessening of neurodivergent voices to our attention spans being shortened.

Leaving Gifts of Ourselves Unwrapped and Forgotten

When we deny people the space to speak on what they truly love, we create a much more beige or even grey world.

We teach people that joy or curiosity without a clear outcome is a burden and not a gift. We shut down the ability to hear others with different opinions and possibly find a middle ground.

This is where so many things that make us human die. Things that define us like art, discourse, and relaying emotions. The things that make us truly unique.

Perhaps like my ability, for instance, to just go completely HAM on this entire topic (and often, many others) with no real solution to the problem - just an observation for the sake of it. It’s not shiny and perfectly crafted, it’s certainly got errors in the approach/grammar that I’ll find as soon as I hit ‘post’. I started writing this post weeks ago and actually got fearful it made no sense.

And that’s exactly the point, sometimes it doesn’t have to make complete sense. Sometimes we can have thoughts that need to marinate in a public space to come to life a bit. So I’m going to post this and see what happens.

If you had a space to just go super nerdy on any topic of your choosing and had interested people who wanted to listen, what would you talk about?

I’d truly love to hear about it.

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Main photo by Jon Callow on Unsplash

I also said typically. Nothing is typical anymore. But let’s focus on what we can control.

This is a great time to reflect on your job search, your career, and where you want to go.

The simple truth is, saying “I just want a job” or “I want new clients - I’m open for business!” isn’t really enough anymore. There are a lot of people flooding the market that say that, so it is harder to be unique with that statement alone. I know that sucks, and I know many have bills to pay. But this is the situation we are in, unfortunately.

As much as the internet is great and us all being connected more easily has changed so much of how we operate, it’s flooded the market.

The rise of remote work post-COVID has made the competition global as opposed to local, exacerbating things. Whether or not the target is correct, people from Utah can apply for jobs in London. There’s nothing stopping them from having a bit of hope that someone will take a chance on them, give them a work visa, etc.

Just sit with that idea for a second. As much as you can search for jobs all over the world (let’s pretend you have the ability to work any of them, anywhere)….it goes both ways. Companies can hire anywhere now that there are services that let them build entities in your country or state with very little lift. If they want to take the risk.

This becomes so much more important in understanding your market, and theirs.

They have the world at their choosing, depending on how they structure their business.

So…where do we begin to understand who our customers are? Why should we care?

Simply, it’s all about risk.

Our customers pains - whether our boss or client - is what we are there to solve. That’s what someone is risking time and money to fix. So the important thing is to show you understand that.

And, honestly, don’t put your pains in there. At least not in the beginning. Everyone’s pain if they are looking for work or clients is revenue - that’s a given. The less you circle on that the more ability you’ll have to connect with the people making the decisions that will get you to your goal.

Ever been in a conversation with someone that clearly knows how to message their worth? It’s electric. It’s interesting, or at least they make it seem so even if it’s the most beige and boring work in reality. They’ve connected with their value and why it matters, they are good at seeing when they are talking to the right people to understand that, and in particular are good at showing they understand pains.

Getting a resume together that shows you solve what people need is the first thing. If you struggle with putting together a resume that tells the story, message me. I’m happy to get on a call to go through it. But there’s so much more than just that, it’s being ready to talk about it, and talking about it wherever it makes sense.

But let’s talk about figuring out your customer/bosses/buyers so if you end up in front of them you are ready to relate, be memorable, and connect on a level that will get you to your goals - by understanding theirs.

1. Start with those that you’ve reported to in the past. Make a list of all of them and their titles, and who they reported to.

2. Think about the things that stressed them out or the things that they were responsible for. What got them worried? What made them feel safe/calm? Think about the old statement of ‘what keeps you up at night’? Apply that.

3. The more you do 1 and 2 constantly, the more you’ll understand where you solve their pains, and how your work impacts the business as a whole. Look at who their work rolls up to, then the person above that, again and again. Is it work? Yes. But in times where competition is very tough, this is the type of work that gets you remembered.

4. Don’t forget to look at industry type, company size - throw all of it in a visualization with stickies to try to see any similarities.

5. Looking at a few job descriptions you are interested in, or companies to consult with, look at the company structure. If you are looking at bigger companies, this can be more difficult, but the more research you do the more you’ll understand how the work needed impacts the whole company, how you’d fit, etc. This is all great to understand the pains and be memorable in an interview. All of this is practice, remember, the more reps you do the easier this becomes.

   1. Go to LinkedIn, it’s a great tool for this. Search the company → People → filter by department & job titles.

   2. Look for Manager, Director, Supervisor, Lead roles connected to the job.

   3. Look for clues like “reports to…” or references to a specific team or project that’s mentioned in the job description.

   4. Search that title on LinkedIn to find the likely manager.

   5. Check the company’s “Team” or “Leadership” page for department heads. This also gives you an idea of how they operate.

   6. Use Google searches like: Company + Department Manager or Company + Job Title + LinkedIn.

6. If you want to go a step further and really dig into how things are structured, use something like a free version of Miro, Canva, anything to layout who reports to whom. As you learn more about the company you can continue to update this, follow people, comment on their content.

7. Now, think about their pains - truly. Are they trying to push information in the messy middle of a big corporation, or are they a business owner trying to keep pipeline going? Those details make a difference.

For example, I typically report to and build relationships/contracts with CEOs and business owners whose companies are under $10M/year and they have less than 25 employees, but might have a hundred or more freelancers. I freelance and do 1099 work, I don’t look typically for employee level work.

I also typically work with companies that are in the marketing agency or creative space, but sometimes in marketing automation implementation space which can be a hybrid area of marketing, creative, and tech. That actually shaves down quite a bit. I like to work EST hours which helps me target even more.

The pains that my ‘paycheck writers’ face are keeping the pipeline full, keeping employees and freelancers happy, making sure clients get what they need, and growing successful businesses. I directly solve those pains in my work.

What I do? I reduce friction in automation, processes, systems, and communications so that business leaders can focus their teams on the human-centric work. This helps teams to build better client connections that result in long-term client growth, and short-term quick revenue and time wins in a crunch or moment of transition. I support owners to build companies that can grow off of word-of-mouth from elated clients and become destination employers through clarity of communication and trust.

Knowing this makes it much easier when I am talking about what I do and with whom. I now have people in my network that truly know this, and honestly, that’s how I get leads. They remember me - I’ve been helpful to them and very clear on what I’m looking for. I, in turn, keep an eye out for them.

This work, and my example, is all part of understanding your audience and how to show you understand their pain better than another candidate for the work.

This makes it all the more easy to say to people you know who exactly you might be looking to learn from, talk to, or make a connection.

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The summer? We had to stop the creative and start the reality.

• Full of working with Shayne to build a business plan.

• Tons of meetings with job seekers to help them along.

• Eyeball searing financial breakdowns.

• Very little break time other than a few well-placed days couch-rotting and doing absolutely nothing because my brain was totally done.

• A reset (for me) of my view of myself as a leader and building my toolbox for the future.

I learned more than I want about customer acquisition costs, but I also had a weirdly great time? That ends in a question mark for a reason. I never considered myself a person to spend months in the financial components of anything, and yet I did.

It’s amazing how we can surprise ourselves sometimes. I learned I’m actually a fit for the role of building a company and understanding how to approach and build a community around a problem.

A lot of this time in the last months was looking at what I felt was monsterous in the past, putting a leash on it, and taking it out for a walk (hat tip to The Oatmeal for the calendar picture from years ago that has long since been useful when I need a push).

Clarity Quarter

I will forever call the mid-summer into mid-fall my clarity quarter. Wrestling with fears of how to approach this problem, making sure I don’t get married to any one solution, and keeping my eye on moving us forward as a team of two.

There’s just the big issue of making it happen. Which is terrifying.

I think that’s where the clarity came in. Admitting I’m terrified and don’t know where to begin. Being real about the problem we want to solve and unsure of where the solution is.

The world is so certain on social media - everyone’s got a masterclass or a slick way to position themselves. But is it really all realistic, or is everyone just following a pattern of confidence that they’ve seen others take?

Where are the uncertain people with the continual testing and tweaking? Where are the folks that are spending their time asking if they need to pivot? I want to talk them.

People talk a lot about building software in public, but what about people’s confidence, approaches, mindsets, and purpose?

Where do all the introverts hang out and build? Do they even exist if they don’t talk about it? Why does it seem like the world is built on how loudly someone can scream “Look at me!” as opposed to “Look at what I did, and who I am!”.

We have people building resumes but not lives.

Teach the test, breach the trust

I remember in school (at least my district), the teachers seemed more interested in the students passing their exams that kept the school accredited than making sure students had the knowledge for the long term. There was a term called “teach the test” which meant that they taught to get us past the test, but not really much farther.

Honestly this is what a lot of the job market feels like a performative space where people come up with zingy taglines about their value. Their monetization of eyeballs is really a pay check, or a new client. But, beyond that there’s not a long-term learning or vision. It’s a job market and situation for the now. Totally understandable when staring down trying to pay bills.

But as a sustainable career approach? Feels tenuous, at best.

But how do we fix this?

But where’s the long term learning? The impact on an economy as a whole?

Sure they can maybe pass the test of getting MRR, a job, a client, but in the long term can they keep it? And is what they are saying even real?

I see far too many people touting numbers about their reality that just don’t add up.

One person will say “I’m trying to raise my MRR from $50K per month to $60K” but when I do the math on the community that they’ve build that has paid (because I have access), there’s absolutely no way their MRR is even half of that.

I see far too many people working so hard to get a job for almost a year to get laid off a few months into their new job. To start over. Again. Barely enough time to get into a habit of the new job.

There’s loss of trust everywhere.

It seems like we have to start with ourselves. Communities of trust.

After months of digging into so many different things, there’s one thing to me that is the most apparent.

We can’t trust anyone but ourselves to lift ourselves out and to build trust. If we have trust in each other we can go forward as groups to make the world easier to manage.

What do I mean by that without sounding like I’m adjusting a tin hat atop my head?

Get smaller, not bigger. Be intentional and real, not poised for likes or going viral. We have enough viruses.

• Small communities of practice. Of whatever the practice whether it is building software, making jam, or playing board games. We need more real humans interacting together, preferably in person or at least on video. We’re not interacting enough as humans.

• Normalizing nerding out. Maybe groups of friends have nerd events where everyone gets together and one person each time gets to go all in on something that they are weirdly passionate about. Like plants or rocks. Maybe it’s architecture. Whatever, but just get comfortable and make spaces for people to download their passionate weirdness.

• Practice talking about what and how we learn, and why. There’s too much “what I didn’t know until I was today years old” going on. We’re not sharing enough about what we know from our families, our passed down knowledge, or what we know that seems just normal to us. I know how to fold fitted sheets. Apparently this is considered magic. Why don’t we have a place for this?

• Solid, intentional, and consistent mini/micro movements toward connection with those we know now or used to. We live in a world where we can ping someone with a short sentence to say hello. But it doesn’t seem like people do this. I’m going to start challenging people to do micro-burst catch ups, connections, or conversations.

As we go into the new year, I’m going to be investigating ways to get small pockets of trust going, understand how they operate and perhaps how they can be built to scale.

What got us here won’t get us any farther, but we can get out of this together.

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Main photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

If you haven’t seen just about everyone on LinkedIn talking about it, you’ve felt it. You might have been recently laid off and left to the chaos, or have been swimming in an endless churning ocean of chaos for months or more.

The hiring process is broken.

• Hundreds or thousands of applications.

• No response from anyone.

• Scam jobs and recruiters.

• Weeks of waiting to make a decision.

• Overcomplicated processes.

• Endless layers of approval.

• Skill tests & reviews.

And it’s not just those seeking traditional jobs. It’s also freelancers experiencing the same pains. Months of post-pitch follow-up to result in absolutely nothing.

Hiring doesn’t just apply only when you need a job, it’s the churn that keeps markets, industries, companies from working better.

If you are employed, the hiring market mess still affects you:

• Work stress, layoffs, and economic instability lead to higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other health issues, burdening health systems and public safety as a whole.

• Shortages in healthcare, education, and public safety put entire communities at risk.

Skills are lost, expertise is misunderstood or overlooked, and systems don't truly match people, skills, and expertise to goals and reality. The problem isn’t a lack of talent, systems are outdated.

Good candidates aren’t disappearing. They’re moving on. It’s time to let go of outdated hiring processes.

If you want to attract the best talent, the best freelancer, the best consultants…

Make it faster. Smarter. Human. And fill skill gaps with training.

We’re using archaic ways to define ourselves

The world used to rely on titles to help everyone fit within a heirarchy, to understand where they fit in the world. Titles used to hold people to who they could interact with, what roles they had, and held them to certain levels throughout their lives.

The world isn’t that way anymore, but we still focus on titles in our systems to help align to roles in the job market, define what we do, and help explain our contributions to the world.

• AI tools are creating floods of untargeted noise

• Panic is causing candidates to mass apply

• Mistrust in hiring systems is causing an cycle of depression, distrust, and despair

• Job titles don’t define us, yet we lean on them to do so

• Years of experience doesn't necessarily equal expertise

• We have less than 7 seconds to impress someone with a resume

What if we could build a system for us, ourselves, not companies.

Faster.

• Start uplifting the companies that have transparent hiring processes that don’t involve 11 interview rounds.

• Take that 7 seconds that’s used to scan a resume and use it to dig into differentiators, not pattern matching.

Easier.

• Match people and those seeking their skills

• Unfocus from titles which don’t describe what people truly bring.

Smarter.

• Define expertise by competency level, not years of experience.

Human.

• Connect with a real human to help guide your approach

• Build support systems with friends, colleagues, community to bounce ideas, resumes, and approaches off of.

• Get a buddy system going to keep motivated during the hard stuff.

This is slowly what we are trying to build. Until we do, I’ll be talking about ways to make everyone’s experience in the market - job seekers, freelancers, consultants - faster, easier, smarter, and more human.

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No one follows me yet so I can say tons of things like the below that would start a storm on LinkedIn:

• ATS (applicant tracking systems) can’t really be ‘beat’ there are over 60 of them. The best thing to do is keep your resume clear, concise and focus on value. Anyone that tells you they can beat the system I’d have questions for.

• The hiring system is broken and the only way we’ll fix it is if we go around it. By broken I mean inundated, flooded, so competitive we should use another word. Using connections to get to hiring managers, not systems. Ask internally if a job is real or just something that’s posted over and over. Many companies have rules where recruiters can give no feedback on interviews, systems setup to ‘ghost’ and repost jobs again and again, none of this is public. Tap into whatever you can to get the reality outside of the normal ways you might think.

• Org charts are almost totally useless in solving communication issues. The real A players in an organization can be hidden on this chart, and are often misunderstood and let go - only later do people realize how many places that person touched and improved.

• Employee surveys aren’t anonymous to everyone, beware.

• People want to do a good job, no one wakes up and says “I choose chaos today” - but our brains get in the way all the time.

• Bias exists everywhere unfortunately, even the idea that you have no bias is actually a bias.

• Job seekers that don’t treat their job search, and their career, like a business will have a hard time from now on. Gone are the days you could just post your resume to a platform and get calls in a matter of hours. If you can do that you are one of the very few.

• Building community requires showing up constantly, being vulnerable, and letting the community alter in the way it wants. People who force a community to exist in their image alone will end up alone, or with a bunch of sycophants.

• Anyone with skills that are now buzzwords needs to learn different skills immediately.

• Companies will not come to save you if things get hard for them, they aren’t there to be good employers as much as they’d like to be, they are ultimately there to make money and please investors. We will only change the environment by changing how companies are incentivized to exist. So…maybe tax cuts for companies that have the best benefits, the happiest employees, etc.

• The only way to truly get most jobs is to triangulate your situation and get a few people going to a hiring manager and saying ‘this person, right here’. Networking and making connections should be most of what one does to get a job. Again, treat it like a business.

• Sales isn’t bad, we are actually all sales people if we do anything in this world. We sell ideas, products, services all the time. Tell me something you did that was a success and I’ll show you where you sold something to someone, somewhere, to make it happen. I can’t say I’m happy about this being the case, but it seems to be whether I like it or not.

• There’s an entire generation of people that mistrust systems because they were told we’d have Jetson cars and an ability to retire without fear.

• We all overestimate how much we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can do in a year - why aren’t we taught approaches in school to help with this?

• Complaining about the problems in the market in the largest microphone you have probably won’t get you where you want to go. Unless it’s being known for pointing out problems. Now, if you come at it with ideas and solutions, or talk about ways to get around it - that’s completely another. Yes, it’s awful, but miring in the negative and awful doesn’t help the nervous system when you are approached with an opportunity.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were younger?

If you haven’t read that and are just joining me in this one you don’t truly have to go back first, but it’s recommended.

You’ll understand a lot more of what I’m talking about if you have a foundation of skill measurement.

And you’ll be able to address the challenges I’ll have in this post a bit better.

Why does the expertise level matter to…anyone?

Years of experience is a measuring stick long given by hiring managers and recruiters to give an indication of the skill level needed in a particular role.

It’s also used on resumes and in conversations to denote expertise, but it doesn’t tell a true story.

Largely, the reason for this is that there hasn’t been an easy way for people to determine the expertise level of a person quickly. And, a lot of people default to say they are an expert in something to help them get the role. Others assume because they’ve been doing something for decades that it automatically puts them into an expert bucket.

What does this mean if the expertise level is clearer for everyone?

More true understanding of what’s needed, rather than just defaulting to ‘expert’.

Recruiters can better educate hiring managers on the levels of skill as they relate to a job function. Perhaps an expert is not needed in every skill for a role, but one or two major skills.

Honestly, if someone is hiring for total expert knowledge in all the parts of their role they may find themselves either looking for a long time, or get someone that will tap out the role quickly in search of something else to reach for.

Ability to use expertise to mentor others.

It’s also important when hiring to consider if you have a true expert, they may be so far into their zone that they can’t actually teach others.

They are too far away from the learning period to rewind and put themselves in the place of someone learning something they do innately.

Better ability to advocate for oneself, understand their value and placement in the market.

Job seekers and those planning out their career trajectory or skill growth can better understand where they really are.

This understanding also helps in things like driving a car, caring for children, and making home improvements.

It’s like trying to understand your location without a map, and all you have surrounding you are trees. We need some milestones, some ways to understand where we are.

Want to continue to learn more about how you can accurately represent your skills?

A challenge:

• Take what you feel your top skills are

• Rate what competency you think you have in those skills

• Then ask someone you trust to do the same, someone that would understand your level of that skill. Send them the competency levels post, along with your skills (keep it low, maybe 5).

Getting really honest with where you are, and clear on where others believe you to be will help you start to set up plans and pathways.

Because if you don’t know where you are - how can you plan on where you’ll go?

We believe this part of hiring and skill representation is fundamentally broken.

If you agree, subscribe to our paid Substack to help support and fund the building of a platform to show your true skill level.

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Main photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

This is not ideal.

It leaves skilled people behind, and people will to stretch the truth to get the roles. In both of these cases even if people feel they are being honest, the true level of skill they have might be inaccurate.

What if it were easier to see true expertise level?

Rather than a recruiter wasting time to mentally calculate if you have the right number of years of skill, presumably to understand your expertise level, we want to flip the script and have people rate your skills based on how people acquire skills.

Someone with two years of experience in something might be an expert, having developed an instinctual level of response and the ability to deeply understand context and nuance.

Someone with eight years might be an advanced beginner, as they are just starting to see recurring patterns. Perhaps they haven’t needed to build the skill as in depth, based on the needs of their role. They might have had a situation where they need to repeat the same functions day-to-day, with no need to expand.

So, why is this not ideal?

Someone with eight years of experience might get put into a role over their head, while the person at the expert level very well could be overlooked.

Think about it like hiking, if you hike a lot on flat land but never work on elevation gain, you are going to have major problems at altitude. You’ve shaped different muscle groups, and even if you are in phenomenal cardiovascular shape, that won’t help with skills you don’t have.

Let’s not forget that using years of experience can backfire as a measuring stick without proper context

It happens fairly often that someone wanting to hire for a skill or set of them won’t understand how long the skill has been around.

If someone wants someone with 10+ years of experience in a software that has only been around for five years, they are setup for failure.

As shown, below. I’ve heard of stories like this, even seen job posts where someone wants a skill I have with an amount of experience that would be impossible based on how long the actual tool has existed.

So what do we do about it? Let’s use a way to measure accurately

There are many models to use to measure skill, we’re choosing this one as it’s pretty widespread and it fits our needs. Every model has it’s fans and critics, what we’re using right now seems easy to learn, absorb, and apply.

The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is a framework that provides insight into how individuals develop expertise over time. It identifies five stages of skill acquisition: Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, and Expert.

There’s mastery above all this, and individuals in that space change the approaches to how to define the skill in general.

They break unbreakable records, and they set a new set of possibilities. The field of the skill fundamentally shifts in the zone of mastery.

Despite what some of our parents have told us, the likelihood of most people achieving this level is pretty low. Not impossible, just unlikely. We’re leaving mastery out of the mix here for now, though.

Each stage of this model represents a different level of understanding, competence, and autonomy in performing a skill.

Novice:

• Beginning to acquire the skill

• Little or no prior experience

• Heavy reliance on rules, guidelines, and instructions to perform tasks

• Require clear and direct guidance, because they do not have the experience to understand the context or nuances of the skill.

Their focus is on learning basic steps or procedures, and this often happens without a deep understanding of why those steps are necessary.

Advanced Beginner:

• Can recognize recurring patterns and contexts in which the skill is applied

• Reliant on rules, but they begin to adapt them to specific situations

• Can perform tasks with some degree of competence

• Might often struggle with prioritizing or managing more complex situations

They might start to appreciate the importance of context, but still lack the experience to make nuanced decisions.

Competent:

• Gained enough experience to handle more complex tasks and make decisions with a much greater degree of independence

• Can plan, prioritize, and execute tasks effectively

• Have an understanding of the broader context of how the skill is applied

• No longer solely reliant on rules; they have begun to analyse situations, weigh options, and make informed decisions

There may still be a struggle with unpredictability and the need to have time to deliberate, think through, or collaborate with others before taking action.

Proficient:

• Demonstrate a deeper understanding of the skill

• Can intuitively grasp the context and nuances of complex situations

• Have developed the ability to see the “big picture”

• Can quickly assess what is most important in any given scenario

• Relying less on rules and more on experience-based intuition. This allows them to respond to situations more fluidly and effectively.

They can adapt to changing circumstances with greater ease and are now capable of teaching or guiding others.

Expert: The height of skill acquisition.

• Possess an intuitive and holistic grasp of their domain. This allows them to perform tasks with effortless precision.

• Do not rely on rules or guidelines. Instead, they draw on a vast, diverse set of experiences to respond to situations almost instinctively. This is where their knowledge seems almost like magic.

• Often see patterns and solutions that others miss

• Can innovate or solve problems in ways that are not immediately obvious

The decision-making they’ve developed is characterized by a deep understanding of both the fine details, and the broader context.

Want to continue to learn more about how you can accurately represent your skills? Read up on the second part of this and take the skills challenge!

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A lot of people can fit into a role, or freelance, and excel at it, but at the end of the day it is the hiring manager or decision maker that will likely have the final say (perhaps along with input from the potential team members, and leadership). No matter if you are a job seeker, freelancer, or consultant, these are your customers.

And your customers have pains. It’s likely these pains roll down from what their customer wants.

Their customer is whoever they ultimately serve - sometimes this is multiple people, sometimes it is one.

These customers could be anything:

• subscribers

• patients

• students

• end users

• consumers

• clients

• audience

• patrons

• buyers

• retail customers

• employees

The important thing is to understand whatever that end point is, your customer is solving for them. And perhaps more than one at a time.

It’s not just about the skills, it’s about ‘fit’.

Think of a hiring manager like a buyer, and your resume, your interview approach, all of the ways you go into conversations as a sales pitch. This makes it bit easier to visualize how one can set themselves up for better success.

Hiring managers want talent, but they also want fast, low-risk, and familiar. They want someone to get hired and start solving the issues. The job (if it’s real) represents gaps in a team or company. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a need.

So when it comes to your audience, and helping them understand you can solve their problem, knowing their needs/pains is crucial.

Set a visual of life on the other side of the buy

Think of it like buying a house or looking at an apartment. There are certain things that you’d want to see, and certain things that might bring too many questions.

That’s why when people buy and sell homes they make things a bit more crisp, they take out the personalization so it is easier for someone to walk in and imagine what their life would be like. I call it ‘beige-ifying’ since everything becomes a potential canvas. Even if the person doesn’t live that life now, they can walk into a house and start to see themselves ‘being’ that person that the house represents. They are being marketed to.

If the house is particularly specialized to the current occupants, like all the walls are wild colors, it starts to raise questions about how much work it might take to make the colors more approachable. Yes, some people might love that the house has 15 different colors, but others might look at that as days, weeks, or even months' worth of work to fix. It’s not ‘move-in’ ready.

Now in terms of candidacy of a role, or to fit into a need as a freelancer, you need to be able to give the impression that you’ll be able to give that potential manager or client that life that they want nearly immediately.

This is why it’s important to have a resume and career assets that really fit what the hiring manager and job description want. This is where the whole concept of editing every resume to every submission becomes a task. Unless you already are a total fit, with industry and company-specific wording.

You can be a highly skilled candidate, but if your approach or methods are unconventional, someone might look at that and think that it would be harder to get started, require more onboarding, etc. All of that is a cost, and they’d need to be willing to invest. It brings too many questions.

Remember: they are making a huge investment

It’s really easy when seeking out a career opportunity to forget that the decision maker is looking at this as a major investment. It costs a lot to hire someone, and it costs a lot to continue to employ them. It’s a bit easier in business to see this because there are longer-term contracts with higher dollars (typically) than what’s on one paycheck.

If you think of the yearly cost of your salary, plus benefits, it’s easier to see why such a decision is a hard one to make.

If we consider the true investment in their eyes, it’s also fair to try to consider the competition and what is truly needed.

Trying to remove yourself from the situation and consider:

• Who might your competitors be in this space? If you are job-seeking, looking at who might apply for a job like this helps you understand where your strengths related to others might be. It’s not easy research, that’s why not a lot of people do it. So even if you make an attempt, you are ahead of the game. Get on LinkedIn and start searching for people that do what you do. Are there gaps in skills or education? Do they position themselves in a particular way?

• What are the client/hiring manager’s pains? What keeps them up at night? Can you look between the lines of the job description and see where the asks in it affect the person who would be overseeing this work? How does solving the issues listed there help impact the manager for that role? What about the impact to the business as a whole?

• Everywhere someone can see you interact professionally, are you solving those pains? On LinkedIn are you talking about and showing proof that you ‘get’ them?

You are playing a B2C and B2B marketing game, here.

If a recruiter just doesn’t ‘feel’ right about a candidate’s approach, they probably won’t move on. It sucks, but that’s where the market is right now.

It’s very much an emotional sell to one person initially, which is very B2C (business to consumer) marketing.

But, as you move into the interview process, and perhaps even into the final decisions that becomes more B2B (business-to-business). B2B decisions are made less by emotion of one person (usually), and more about fit and the factors that affect a team of people.

If it’s a small company, it might be a B2C decision all the way to the offer, but the likelihood of it being both is much, much higher.

What does this mean?

You have to be able to hit the emotional sell of being clear about the pains you solve for those first people, so you can move on to the group/team as a viable solution for many.

It might be the other way around, depending on the setup of the company - either way, understanding you need to hit both of these areas is important.

This is what resumes and cover letters, all the things that exist to basically get people enticed to contact you, are for. They are marketing assets to pull people to want to know more. LinkedIn, any marketplace platform like The Dots or Fiver, anywhere you show up to ‘sell’ you want to be positioned for this.

Once they want to know more and contact you, that’s when we get into Sales.

Good sales people know their audience, as do marketers. So where do you find this audience, or know if you are positioned for the right one?

Make sure you are speaking to the right audience

• Follow them on LinkedIn, read what they talk about, what bothers/worries them

• Find any article those people you followed might be in, what they talk about

• Don’t be afraid to ask ChatGPT about the pains of those groups and give references for you to dig into

• Use all your platforms where your buyers might be and be clear about what you offer. This is why people have multiple Insta accounts - a personal one and one for their buyers, for example. Don’t assume they’ll sift through content to get to something that’s relevant to them. Make it easy - if you make it easy, that shows you’ll make their life easy.

• Check your audience. Are you getting reactions on LinkedIn from potential buyers? If you are getting people in your target audience to interact with you, you are doing it right!

The key here: understand basic functions of a business, like Sales and Marketing. Because that’s exactly what you are doing when you are looking for a client or a job.

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When we first begin anything new, it’s important to understand where we are at before we can begin to implement any sort of plan.

Assessment is an ongoing process aimed at continuous improvement of any sort. Ugh. That sounds super corporate speak, but honestly, that’s what it is. We need to assess where we are to know where we need or want to go.

When we think about assessment in terms of someone’s personal development story, we’re looking for some key aspects of what in the story might not be quite clear yet.

In our case, our aim is to build a story for everyone that they can articulate, put out to the world, and be proud of. That story needs to have certain components to be memorable and engaging.

Parts of any good story, including yours

A good story requires things like:

• Character(s) – This is YOU. A compelling protagonist (or multiple) that the audience can relate to or root for. Usually in our coaching, it’s one person bringing main character energy, but there are also supporting characters that help the main character grow, learn, and bring conflicts.

• Goal/Desire – What the protagonist wants. In traditional stories, that could be love, survival, revenge, power, or self-discovery. For our purposes, this could be things like a fulfilling job, connection, a mentor, skill development, or personal growth.

• Conflict/Obstacle – The challenge(s) preventing the protagonist from achieving their goal, creating tension and stakes. What is creating a stressor to the goal being met? This could be anything from a career ‘gap’, a micromanager, unemployment, lack of career growth at a company, or needing more skills. It also could be the current job market or positioning within it.

• Setting – The time, place, and atmosphere that grounds the story and makes it immersive. In the case of the people we help, is the setting your home work environment, a toxic workplace, a supportive company culture, a big massive company, or a small scrappy team? Is it a mix of these things?

• Plot (Beginning, Middle, End) – A structured sequence of events, this is where you start to get into the questions people ask in interviews like “tell me about a time you resolved a conflict with a team member”. If this part isn’t well practiced, it’s where one can also lose the plot getting too detailed in an answer to '“tell me about a time” or “tell me about yourself”. It’s ok, this take some work to get down.

  • Beginning – Introduces characters, setting, and the central conflict.

  • Middle – Escalates conflict through struggles and turning points.

  • End – Resolves the conflict, offering closure (or a twist).

• Theme – The deeper meaning or message of the story, sometimes in movies or books that’s things like "good vs. evil" or "the cost of ambition". This can still somewhat ring true in your theme of development. Perhaps it’s overcoming the adversity of a lack of ways to upskill and having to get creative. This one also takes some work and isn’t necessarily apparent.

• Emotion – A story should make the audience feel something—excitement, fear, joy, sadness, etc. Considering the emotions that you have and bring to your work, your story is key. What you do impacts people, but we often don’t think of the emotion behind what we do. If you want to dive deeper into that I’d suggest reading How does your work make others feel?.

• Transformation (Character Arc) – The protagonist should change or learn something by the end, making their journey meaningful. So, what did you learn, how did you solve, what did you alter after digging into that? What about you as a person changed, or how you see the world?

Alright, now that we have that down, let’s do some digging into what to do next.

Where do we even begin? Other stories.

When I was in college, I majored in creative writing. Yes, in some part, to avoid as much math as I could, but also to learn how to write a story. I cannot say I stopped learning how as soon as I graduated, every day I use the skills I learned and continue to hone them.

We didn’t just start out by writing a ton immediately. We had to begin with some examples of what good writing meant to us, and to others.

We read so much in college. I once stacked all the books for one semester and it met at my hip. I’m 5 feet 1 inch tall, by the way, so that’s a lot of books.

We talked a lot about the approach toward stories, what we liked, didn’t like, what made sense to us, and what left us confused. We took tons of notes, tabbed parts of books that resonated, and started to consider how these approaches worked.

Musicians, painters, designers - many people tap into the inspiration from others to start to form their style.

Working on a career story isn’t much different.

You are appealing to a large audience with it to get an idea and a picture across.

It will not suit every single person. That’s ok.

The key is finding how the story you are telling can resonate with the audience you are targeting. And one that has some meaning for you.

If it doesn’t have meaning for you and isn’t one you are passionate about telling or continuing to evolve, then it’s worth asking yourself if you are focused in the right area.

We can’t love every bit of the work we do all the time, but life is honestly way too short to hate talking about who we are, what we do, and how we operate.

What are some stories that interest you? More importantly, why?

I loved historical fiction in college. I loved the fact that a person could take some facts from references like weather, newspapers, articles, and memoirs and build a whole lovable set of characters, setting, and theme.

I found that fascinating that something so mundane could be made into a story.

The hardest thing I ever wrote was the opening scene to my college capstone work, which was focused on the suffragette movement and a strange happening where one suffragette slashed a very expensive painting in the National Gallery in London.

I spent days sourcing bus routes, weather reports, and newspapers to see what clothing was sold (fabric, weight, look). Honestly, it was weeks because the material took forever to even source. Some I had to go into an actual library, some I had to order from overseas. I looked at writings of the time to craft an idea of what a moment in time would look like when this person arrived at the museum on that day. I felt more like an investigator than a writer half the time, trying to knit together the smallest of details to build a picture.

It was exhausting to compile an opening scene. I started from one small point in this picture I was building, and zoomed out.

Two cannons from Napoleon’s fleet sat in the shapely form of lions, basking in the early Spring sun, looking out over Trafalgar Square.

Why is this important? Because I recognized the extreme work behind what that sentence represents.

You will recognize the same as you begin to craft your story.

Now, I’ll ask you to do the same. Go find some inspiration.

Go talk to people that you respect. Go look on LinkedIn. Go find people that do what you do but freelance or solopreneur it. Go find people with your skills and goals.

They’ve likely put a lot of time and work into crafting their story, their approach, their seamless and seemingly simple pitch.

• How do they talk about the depth of skill it takes to do what they do?

• How do they set the scene for others?

• What emotions do they pick and pull at to make you care?

• What are their obstacles, and how do they talk about them?

• What are they doing differently that’s appealing or innovative?

Then ask yourself what do you like about those approaches?

Follow the people that you really appreciate or admire.

Continue to ask yourself why.

If you feel like you can, straight up ask them for an informational interview so you can learn how they got to their story. Most people who have worked hard on their story won’t have a problem talking about it. They’ve had the practice, they know what it took, so someone recognizing that effort is in itself a compliment.

Practice their approaches. Don’t publicly copy. Privately study.

Some writers will take their favorite works and rewrite them, in actual handwriting on actual paper, to get a formula or rhythm down.

Some artists will take a painting or a concept and do a study on it. Many, many pieces of art that have a vibe toward one concept but they keep poking at it from different angles.

Musicians will play others’ music to learn a flow, an approach. Upon that, they slowly start building their own style. Years later they’ll talk about where they got inspiration from.

That’s what you are doing here, is studying their work, and how you can adopt some patterns and insert your own.

If it’s in writing, take the words and write them down. Learn their pattern but put in your own as you get more feedback. Ask you continue to find your own voice this will naturally happen.

If it’s video, try shooting it with their words. How do you naturally do it a bit differently? Get feedback.

Everyone’s work is a template for someone else to jump off of, take inspiration from, and turn over differently.

This is where practice comes in like a freight train

Taking time to talk through, shoot a video, write down, or otherwise record and practice your story is essential. The more you tell it, the more you’ll find what resonates and doesn’t.

You’ll hear one little phrase that you love and start intertwining that into your story. You’ll start to see foundational components of how you got where you are, and where you want to go.

You never know when your story will resonate, so figure out a way to tell it as much as you can in and outside of your comfort zone.

You do not want to practice this only when you are looking to ‘sell’ your story. You do it because it’s yours to share, and it’s worth it.

A billion (exaggerated, by maybe not) writers write their entire lives to get down something that resonates and finally gets picked up.

Your story is how you talk about the art you create in this world. This art can be how you approach serving teams, or building software. We’re all artists of our particular focus.

Your story is never finished, so neither is the practice.

That’s ok, that’s actually normal. If you never stop learning and growing the story is never done.

To close, I’ll tell you my story, for now. It will shift again and again and evolve, because that’s what a living story does.

Hi! I’m Jenn. I grew up and lived across many different parts of the United States and saw many diverse ways of living and existing - from mountains, to beaches, to ranches, to cities. I’ve had the great fortune working across many different industries from government, recruiting, professional services, agencies, and technology.

I found my passion and mission to help people find and tell their unique and valuable career and personal development stories after finding out that a job, and sometimes a person’s feeling of worth and their story, can disappear instantly.

I knew at that time I had to own my story, path, and it’s data and impact along with it. I saw a need to help others break outside of any organization’s wall to do the same.

For the past seven years, I’ve taken my non-linear, squiggly career experiences and my drive to help on their personal development path and formed it into guidance, templates, and services.

I ask myself daily, “What would Mr. Rogers do?”. I push myself daily to continue to help others see their value and tell their story, so they can take control of how they operate and speak to their value and personal missions. I give a lot of time to those seeking work and trying to crack into the confidence that’s right under the surface.

I’ve learned through this time that we all have a story to tell, a hidden superhero inside of us, and we all have the capacity to inspire others with our unique outlook and experiences. I believe we all common drive to do great work and be good neighbors.

Interested in getting to what your story is? Need help?

Connect with me on LinkedIn, I’d be happy to take a few minutes to help you get started.

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They need support. They need someone to relate to, talk to, and bounce ideas off of.

So many people do certain things in a silo for whatever reason I have no idea. But we do. Some job seekers are getting more vocal about what’s broken in the job market on LinkedIn, but I honestly don’t see too many people trying to really connect and fix things.

I wish there were a push for people to just connect with one person a week 1:1, even if it’s just a DM. Bonus points if you actually talk to someone.

And this is coming from someone who is averse to meetings. I used to be that person that was like “this meeting could have been an email”.

We all want someone to just walk in the front door, change from a sport coat to a cardigan, from sneakers to slippers, and tell us it’s going to be ok.

We want Mr. Rogers. Or, at least I do.

That’s why about a month ago, I made a pact with myself to be more of a helper, be more of a person who pulls people together, share knowledge, and connect folks.

Now, I ask myself every day “what would Mr. Rogers do?”. A few weeks in, and I have a house sweater already, and I’ve helped dozens of people.

I get asked a lot how I have the energy to do it. I started thinking about it and realized it wasn’t taking long. So I started to log it.

Yes, I have actual data on it now. Of course I do. I’m ME.

You know how some companies have monthly recurring revenue (MRR)? I have a monthly recurring helping metric (MRH) I’m working toward. I started at the first of April trying to help 25 people, I knocked out that number in about ten days.

What I learned in this last month-ish from this so far.

• Most people want to help in some way, they just have no idea how. Totally fair.

• A lot of people have very little trust in others after having been burned by recruiters, systems, companies, and the state of the world. Understandibly.

• It actually takes very little time to:

  • connect one person to another (if you struggle read my post on how to intro people and it not to feel weird): 5 minutes

  • Tag someone on a LinkedIn post of someone hiring. I counted. It takes less than a minute to say ‘hey this might fit you!’ and tag them: 2 minutes

  • Send someone a message very quickly and just check in. “Hey, I just thought of you because of xyz reason. How are you?” Think of it as if you saw them on the street, what would you say. You’d say ‘hi’ and you might mention the last time you saw them. Keep it short: 5 minutes

  • Reshare a job or someone looking for work: 2 minutes

  • Buzz through a resume of a friend: 5 minutes

It can take less time to connect with someone than it takes to do…a lot.

Did you know that 8 minutes is a magic number for personal connection? Short, focused periods of connection with friends or loved ones can help one feel connected without that all-too-awkward long goodbye.

Things That Take Longer Than 8 Minutes:

So…places where you could probably catch up with someone.

Tech & Work

• Refreshing your inbox and skimming emails you won’t open: 15 minutes

• Trying to reset a forgotten password and get the confirmation email: 9–15 minutes

Mental Load

• Deciding what to eat for dinner if no one can agree: 15+ minutes

• Talking yourself into or out of going to the gym: 10–30 minutes

Phone Time

• Watching one YouTube video essay: 12–25 minutes

• Mindless Instagram scrolling: 20 minutes easy

Daily Life

• Doing the dishes after a full meal: 15 minutes

• Folding laundry while rewatching a show (download that viewing party app into Netflix and watch together!): 30 minutes

• Sitting in the Starbucks drive-thru on a Saturday morning: 12–18 minutes

• Having a coffee at a cafe in Europe: 15 minutes to hours

Transit

• A one-way commute in most cities: 20–45 minutes

• Waiting for a train that’s “just around the corner”: 10–20 minutes

• Airport security on a light day: 10–20 minutes

Alright so let’s rethink about that 8 Minutes of Connection

Compared to all of the above, how would 8 minutes of feel?

• Uninterrupted conversation

• Eye contact + shared silence

• Deep listening or storytelling

• Doing a check-in ritual

• Laughing at one shared inside joke

Would it feel intensely human, effective, maybe efficient?

Would you learn something about someone, or feel closer to them?

Building the village is much easier than we think. We just have to start.

We can all be support to someone, while helping ourselves.

If you challenge yourself to just take a few minutes each week to reach out to someone, a month from now you might be amazed at the difference in your life. And they probably will for themselves, too.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither are connections. But you can do a little bit at a time to build a solid foundation for yourself and others.

Like Mr. Rogers so perfectly put it (and just about everything):

“If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”

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You can learn about how to create the right paradox for yourself, and how questioning your actions can be a gift. I went back into the past and popped links across those posts to get you safely back here.

We’ll be focused on the final movie in the Back to the Future trilogy and some of the learnings within it. As we close out this three-part series on how small past actions can drastically affect the future, I’m going to nerd for a second to start us off.

Skills can come from the most random places

Video games can teach a lot of interesting skills that one wouldn’t even think about at first. I’ve played Civilization for years now. I used to feel bad about the amount of hours logged, until I started to realize some of what it’s been teaching me.

That’s why I chose the main thumbnail of this article to be a sign I saw in New Orleans years ago “Attempt the absurd, achieve the impossible”. For some it would be absurd to spend so much time playing a game, even more so to talk about how it taught them life and business skills.

If you told me 15 years ago what I would have learned I would have told you it’s impossible.

I could go into a ton of depth (clearly) but to be concise, I’ve learned over the years about:

• interconnectedness of society

• long-term impacts of small decisions

• visual design and representation

• importance of culture and kindness

If you want to really nerd over my stance, you can read about how Hobbies help humans be better humans. Now, let’s take a little trip into the past and see why this is relevant. I promise, I have a point.

Everything we do teaches us something, whether we know it or not

Back to the Future III takes us to the Old West of the United States, where Doc Brown is sent backward 70 years from 1955 to 1885. We’re greeted with a very young and growing Hill Valley full of dirt, cows, wagons, and cowboys.

During a night time town dance party and festival, Marty is chided by a local gun maker to try his luck at a shooting game. Given how young Marty looks, and likely how he sticks out a bit in this environment, the gun maker clearly doesn’t think Marty has the skills needed to do well at the game.

Marty begins shooting at the targets with the wrong hand, misses entirely, and hits the top of the sign for the booth. He switches hands and immediately hits every single target.

Where’d he learn to shoot like that? His answer: “7-Eleven”. Which, for those not alive or raised in the 1970s or 80s, was a regular hang out spot that often had video games. The ones that didn’t have video games were the worst, and their Slurpies didn’t seem as good.

We never know the skills we’ll learn from our hobbies or interests that seem not to serve at the time. Even a little bit of time, a short burst, spent on doing something new or even fun (gasp!) can teach us something we can use in the future.

Understanding the dimensions of our adaptability and possibility

Near the end of the movie, Doc Brown and Marty get the DeLorean ready to go back to 1985. The only option to get the car to 88 miles an hour is to use the train to push the car on railroad tracks. The railroad tracks stop at a ravine, where a bridge hasn’t been built yet.

Marty is scared of falling off the cliff. Doc tells him, “you’re not thinking fourth-dimensionally!”, to which Marty replies, “Yeah, right, I have a real problem with that”. He is reminded that in 1985, the construction of the bridge would be complete and will continue to be safe after decades of service. He’ll just pop into 1985 on that bridge.

He arrives in 1985 on the train tracks:

• 1980s cars honking at him from the road

• To the sound of the dinging of an oncoming train notification

• About to get hit by a train

Sometimes, all the planning in the world will throw us into situations we thought we had mapped out, only to find when we get there we have to pivot, and fast.

If we are launched into a different environment, what we know can be immensely more useful or less so. The more diverse sets of skills we have, the more we’ll be able to pivot. And again, we never know where those skills will come from.

This is why it’s important to understand:

• Our abilities in the current environment, how much can we do, or take?

• What the new expectations in the environment might be

• What gaps there are that exist to make that jump

• Once we make the jump, be ready to pivot

This is incredibly useful when starting a new job, understanding how you might have a conversation around ‘fit’ when interviewing, or when looking at joining others in a business venture. What we know and the skills we have aren’t on a two-dimensional map. They are much more fourth-dimensional as we go into new environments, or if the ones we are in change.

Understanding your skills, your strengths and your gaps is an act of love

None of us can tell the future. In all honesty, if we are fortunate we can guesstimate a very short time span in small bits throughout the day.

One of the biggest acts of self-respect and self-love is to understand how much energy, skill, and focus one can bring to any scenario. To pull this completely around to it’s close, the power of love is a curious thing.

The possibilities we have to face in the day, our work, our community, the issues of the world, are endless. But we’re not machines to just keep going.

Our emotions, our reactions, the way we make decisions, and how we approach the world is what makes us all amazingly unlimited and human.

“Your future hasn't been written yet. No one's has. Your future is whatever you make it.” - Doc Brown

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If you missed part one of how we can use past short bursts of action to help us in the future, it might help to read about it here. I went back into the past and posted a link to this article so you’d know to come here next.

We know that small actions can have massive impacts, but how do we know what actions will help or hurt us?

We don’t, so asking questions is essential.

Selfish actions can backfire

Marty, while in 2015, buys a sports almanac with the previous 50 years of events listed in it, as a way to make quick money. Doc talks him out of it, and throws the almanac away. However, this is when an elderly Biff Tannin rolls in with the stolen DeLorean, grabs it from the trash, and hops back to 1955 to give the almanac to his younger self.

His actions alter the future completely through his ability to win money on sports and stocks for years and gain massive amounts of control. He ruins Hill Valley, the central location of the films.

Did Marty set himself up where his future self would be ok with this turn of events? There’s no way they could have known Biff was right around the corner in 2015.

We can never truly know what’s coming, but we can look for patterns from what we’ve learned already. We can ask ourselves: are we lifting up every rock possible and adjusting it to ensure we’ve got a solid foundation?

“Am I considering as many angles as possible to ensure a better future situation?”

“Am I doing this thinking it will result in some magical quick win?”

“Is there any pattern here from what I did that I can consider before I move forward?”

Every single time I ask myself this and answer truthfully, future me loves past me.

It’s when I’m not truthful or I don’t ask these questions, it can be problematic. It sets me up the entire opposite direction. Like the purchase of the sports almanac, if I’m doing something for a quicker win than is realistic, or not focused.

• I wake up with a ton of emails to filter through that throw my day off

• My surroundings aren’t set for success, so I can’t focus

• I went to bed scrolling through news and didn’t sleep well

There’s an entire economy built on the idea of the quick win: invest in this one stock, get this software and set it and forget it, buy this course and you’ll make $10,000 a month, buy a lottery ticket.

Most things that seem like quick wins probably require more digging. That rags to riches story of someone that built software in their basement? They might have had someone fund them a ton of money to get it off the ground. The video/song/art that goes viral and launches someone into fame? They likely spent years before that honing their craft or approach.

This is called survivorship bias - how many people tried the thing and failed? We usually only hear about the successes. Which is why it’s important to talk about failures. More on that in a second.

The stories of people just randomly meeting success with zero to little previous effort is rare. You are probably more likely to get struck by lightning.

Failing fast is good, not learning from it is bad

Failing at something is absolutely ok, and sometimes having those fails in short bursts keeps the risk low. Doc Brown had a lot of failures, but learned from them, took notes, evolved ideas. He didn’t stop tinkering with concepts.

This is where taking a minute to assess the situation and why it didn’t work so you can learn from it. Some organizations call this ‘failure bow’ where people embrace when things don’t work out. Because that’s life. We cannot be absolutely sure the things we do will work out in our favor.

Celebration is key to building habits

I actually thank ‘past me’, sometimes aloud. I could be when I’m tucking into an overnight oats breakfast I’d prepped the night before. Or when I look at a post I wrote during a few minutes of intense writing before bed, inspired by an idea (like this one that started out as one short post, and morphed into three).

When is the last time you thanked yourself?

Thanking myself is part of the thrill of it all.

The tiny, yet seemingly large win of just getting things accomplished. An important part of establishing a habit is the celebration. Celebrating small wins helps our brains say ‘yes, this is good’, and we keep doing it. So…celebrate even if it seems silly.

Whatever you think future you might appreciate, if it’s for you alone, your household, your business, your community - it’s all in the end for you at the core as a start. Your actions radiate outward from there.

Think about your future you and try to use a few minutes to give your own self (and possibly others) a gift. Particularly in times of stress and uncertainty, the little things can matter so much.

It’s about tackling what we can control that can help us when everything is out of control.

Short burst stretches

I think about the last time I did yoga. I love it because it’s a large chunk of time I can spend doing one thing while giving me time to focus on myself. I enjoy the stretching where I can slowly feel my muscles give in just ever so slightly. Then the pose shifts to another.

I think of these actions I take in the same way. They are so small, and so fast they are easy to discount but as a whole, and with practice, they can morph a person’s abilities so strongly. Consider one yoga pose, then think about how an entire session of them can impact the body. Now compound that all over the course of months. But it is sometimes that first burning stretch at the start that’s the worst.

These short bursts for me work well if I ask myself if I can do it in 5 minutes. For me, there’s something about the idea of it just being 5 minutes that takes the heat off of it.

Marty McFly might say it shouldn’t be a “heavy” lift.

Especially when low on energy, the short burst is much easier than a deep-focused dig in for me. Especially if I’m pushing myself on something uncomfortable or something I just simply don’t want to do.

• reach out to people in my network I’ve not talked to for a while, see how they are, see if they want to connect on a call.

• send a message or react to a post for someone looking for work, offer support or to connect them with someone

• knock out one email that’s pretty straightforward

• write down

  • what I’m feeling and trying to accomplish

  • something I don’t quite understand or find throughout the day I can’t stop thinking about

• log what impacts I’ve made in the week, no matter how small they might seem

So how does this help you build skills to meet your goals for the long term?

Successful people do this to focus and use their time to the fullest

The actions you take to make your tomorrow (or even a few hours later) easier can take about as long as it took for Marty’s clothing to dry, or a few cycles anyway.

Think about email for a second, this quick jacket drying concept works really well here. Successful people manage email very differently, and they keep those messages super short. I’ve been on the receiving end of them. The ‘thanks, talk soon’ is a bit jarring until you understand why.

Think about what you could do to setup a habit forever in a few minutes that truly serves you:

• setting a processing time for email

• unsubscribing to things you don’t read

• replies or thank you’s that take less than a minute

• turning off notifications

How do we know which habits will truly help us build skills or set a good foundation?

Well, we don’t. The best thing we can do is be like Doc Brown and keep trying different things, be like Marty and learn from mistakes, and keep pivoting.

Check out the final chapter in this three-part series where we dig into the importance of adaptability.

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Truly, sometimes it even scares the cat.

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It’s the bits beyond that make us sweat, keep us up at night, and cause anxiety. But to really grow you do have to move beyond the comfort zone.

"If you want something you've never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done." - Thomas Jefferson

Let’s first talk about what it all looks like together. I’m going to use an example that I struggle with everyday, being that I work from home and often find myself focused far too long and needing to be amongst other humans, outside, in the fresh air.

I believe the meme is “going on a stupid walk for my stupid mental health”

I guess this is the point where I mention we are introverted desk workers with focus issues, so getting out of focus mode to go out into the world is sometimes more difficult than it really should be. Especially when building a business, if we aren’t in the ‘doing’ mode, we feel like we’re somehow failing. Also, another factor in that is that we relocated to Portugal where we are still learning language, culture, and some basics that take a lot more mental load for daily tasks and interactions. All of this means sometimes going on a simple walk seems too far outside the zone of comfort.

The Comfort Zone: A Space of Familiarity

The comfort zone represents a state of ease and routine. In this zone, individuals operate with minimal stress, engaging in tasks or situations they know well. This is why it’s comfortable, it doesn’t take much thought at all. If this zone were clothing it would be your favorite pair of socks or a comfy sweater.

While the comfort zone fosters feelings of safety and control, it can also lead to stagnation if one remains there for too long. Think about how motivated you are to go outside, explore different things, maybe even do things around the house if you are in your comfy clothes/socks. You may not make it off the couch.

Growth requires stepping beyond this boundary. When I coach people, I tend to advise them to step outside the boundary at first in small intervals, then congratulate yourself. It’s forming a small habit. You have something that triggers you, something you do, and some sort of treat to entice you to repeat it again at some point. It’s hard work, and you don’t want to over do it. Sometimes even a few minutes of the day can do it.

If you want to learn more about habit building, check out Habit building can help reduce the noise and stress of transitions and growth.

Did you know 1% of your day is a little under 15 minutes? That’s more than enough time to try something new. Especially if you are following the 1% better idea.

The Fear Zone: A Barrier to Growth

Beyond the comfort zone lies the fear zone, often experienced as the first barrier to leaving one’s familiar surroundings. This can be as simple as the comfy sock scenario where you have to put on what I call “outside people clothes”. My mind goes into so many things from my feet will be cold while I’m looking for acceptable things to wear outside the house, to asking if it’s raining or cold. Then wondering what I really need to be doing out there in the first place.

The fear zone is characterized by self-doubt (am I going to have to deal with something I don’t understand, or have the mental energy to do it?), discomfort (cold feet during the switch), and external challenges such as criticism or comparison to others (everyone else will seem so much more awake, I’m sure they know I just changed to go get lunch, it’ll be clear I’ve not mastered my verb conjugations). It is so much more comfortable in the house.

While it can feel unsettling, this zone is an essential step in the growth process. Moving through it allows individuals to access the learning zone.

Key aspects of the fear zone include:

• Self-doubt: Questioning one’s abilities or worthiness. Me: “Why is the simple act of going outside is such a blocker for me?” “I moved here to learn culture and language and now I’m freezing up and forgetting words, I don’t have the energy to do that today”

• Excuses and avoidance: Using external factors as reasons to return to the comfort zone. Me: “I really need to focus on that content/accounting/client thing”

• Sensitivity to feedback: Struggling to handle criticism constructively. Me: “I’m going to run into that neighbor that gives me kind but stern feedback about my Portuguese, and I just don’t want to deal right now” or “I don’t want to run into the nice guy at the restaurant that gives us 1,000 bits of advice about his health tonic tea and his physical workouts”

To move past the fear zone, individuals can build resilience, seek support, and focus on incremental progress.

For me, sometimes that looks like support from others, like my husband who I work with. We’ll form a team agreement to get outside, get some fresh air, then come back in and re-focus our energy. Sometimes we’ll just walk down the park and back, a few blocks at best. At least it’s something.

Sometimes we’ll walk a different direction out the back door if we don’t want to interact as much with people, but go straight toward the waterfront. Sometimes we’ll habit stack and take out the recycling to feel better about ourselves for getting something done in the house as well as a quick walk.

The Learning Zone: Growth Through Challenge

Just beyond the fear zone lies the learning zone, where individuals encounter new challenges and opportunities for development. This is the part of the going outside story that starts with me saying something like “it really is a nice day out, we need to do this more often”, “this isn’t so bad”, or we run into someone we really enjoy seeing.

In this zone, people face manageable stress levels that encourage adaptation and skill acquisition without becoming overwhelming. Tasks here are slightly beyond one’s current capabilities, promoting growth in knowledge, skills, and confidence. This for us could mean we push a little farther and walk out to the beach, which means I probably didn’t wear the right shoes and my feet will hurt the next day. Or maybe we try to go to run an errand and do it in our new language.

This zone was the zone years ago where I’d push way too far, basically pulling mental and actual muscles to make up for lost time somehow. It never worked, and in fact, made my growth more difficult.

Key attributes of the learning zone include:

• Increased focus and engagement: New challenges activate curiosity and problem-solving. Often when we do get out we get a chance to talk through business (still) and find different ways to come at things. Walking meetings are really, really useful. And yet we still need to be reminded constantly.

• Skill development: Exposure to unfamiliar tasks or ideas fosters the acquisition of new competencies. Sometimes while we are out we run across something we don’t understand in Portuguese or some cultural thing that gets us talking.

• Resilience building: Overcoming small, intentional challenges strengthens perseverance and adaptability. Like the well-meaning locals here that give us more advice than we really want, for example. These small little challenges help us learn how to operate in a culture and environment that is very different.

The Panic Zone: A Space to Avoid

If the challenges exceed one’s capacity to cope, they may enter the panic zone. In this state, stress becomes unmanageable, often leading to feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, or fear. Learning is hindered, and performance suffers.

Story time! I practiced a phrase for an hour in Portuguese: “Hello, good morning, I’m here to pick up a package, please”. When I got to the desk the lady said one or two words I didn’t know and were not in the movie I’d played in my head. I got nervous and said “evening good, I’m here, hello please”. I didn’t entirely panic, but I didn’t not panic either. I was right on that edge. Made it work through some miming and pointing, but I left in a full-on sweat.

Any therapist will tell you that while occasional exposure to high-pressure situations can build resilience, staying in the panic zone too long can lead to burnout or negative mental health outcomes. Yep, that tracks.

It’s safe to say we can easily get burned out, and have negative mental health outcomes like not wanting to try anymore, not today, I want to go hide, please.

The Dynamic Balance Between Zones

Personal and professional growth comes from intentionally navigating between these zones. But you really have to listen to yourself. And to listen to yourself you also have to know yourself. Here we are with the whole ‘you’ part that so important.

• Recognize your baseline: Understand your comfort zone and identify areas where you feel too stagnant or complacent. You might have to do this over and over again.

• Stretch your boundaries: Deliberately step into the new zones with tasks or challenges that push your limits without overwhelming you. Don’t stretch too hard, you can pull mental and physical muscles here. Think of it like gentle yoga for boundaries.

• Monitor your stress levels: Stay attuned to signs that you may be approaching the panic zone and take steps to recalibrate. Now, depending on the situation that can be exiting the post office quickly and eating a burger, or that could just be retreating to your comfort zone.

Benefits of Stepping Out of the Comfort Zone

• Increased creativity: Novel experiences foster innovation and new perspectives. Your brain is hard at work creating new synapses, firing new pathways.

• Enhanced confidence: Successfully navigating challenges builds self-assurance. You are feeling better about whatever it is, you might be getting excited at your progress and wanting to share it with someone.

• Stronger adaptability: Regularly stepping into new experiences develops the ability to handle uncertainty and change. Practicing certain moves over and over builds muscle memories that build on one another over time, pushing your comfort zone for that skill into the realm of being near-automatic.

Strategies for Growth

1. Understand your zones: Recognize where you are and identify small steps to move forward. I’m going to take a note from the Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi was a master at understanding zones, like ‘paint the fence’.

2. Prepare for fear: Accept that discomfort and self-doubt are natural parts of growth. Everyone in our town knows we are trying, and they are really kind about it but wow does it sting sometimes when you try and you get an answer back in perfect English, “let’s speak English?”

3. Stretch intentionally: Challenge yourself in ways that push your limits without overwhelming you. Like perhaps practicing parts of sentences and getting them down really, really well. Don’t go for the whole crane kick at once, don’t try a soliloquy in Portuguese. Get the moves down, get the basic words.

4. Seek support: Surround yourself with mentors or peers who encourage and guide you. Everyone needs a good foundation.

5. Celebrate progress: Acknowledge your achievements as you expand your boundaries. Treat yourself, even if you fail epically, at least you tried.

No one ever goes from the comfort zone to a zone of genius and mastery without taking small, measured steps. You can sometimes leap but the likelihood of success is really, really small.

If you want to learn a trick I use to push out of my comfort zone, you can read about how I would dress up like a superhero, and how I still use this concept to tap into my inner superhero today.

For now, I’ll leave you with a little bit of The Karate Kid breaking down the basics in a comfort zone to push into the zone of mastery.

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I entered the LinkedIn room and the overall job market when it was mostly people in business casual talking about a session they were holding at an event, and the occasional “I’m looking for work” post. Yes, it was boring, but at least it was clear what people were doing there.

Now, well. It’s…a lot.

Hate to say it, but I kinda miss the old days even if they were a bit boring. No one had to have a shiny brand approach. Everybody and their dog didn’t have a masterclass. It was much easier to see what people actually wanted, and there wasn’t even the concept of MLM job scams.

The fact that people are scamming job seekers…there’s a special level of hell that those folks fit into. That’s an entirely separate topic that I’ll address at a later time.

It feels like the job market as a total is a very loud conference hall with thousands of people yelling ‘over here’, bright flashing signs, and just overall chaos. Getting noticed in this environment doesn’t necessarily mean you have the best thing to say, it just might mean you are the loudest, flashiest, or are giving away something to pull people’s attention.

Ok, so yes, at a conference you might have the prettiest booth, a happy hour, or a massive unicorn to take pictures on, but are any of the people you interact with in your target market? You are collecting contact info and scanning badges like mad, feeling like you are getting leads, but when you go home and try to contact them you get no response (true story).

You might post selfies on LinkedIn constantly to cheat the algo, or have a support pod help forward your content, but in a pinch will all those likes get you a job, a deal, insight, or growth? Job seekers now have AIs applying for 100 jobs a day. I cannot even begin to imagine that’s targeted.

We’re tired.

It’s all exhausting, expensive, and depressing. It’s just gumming up the already broken system. We’re wearing ourselves out for this attention based economy that we are paying to setup, attend, interact, and deal with.

I talk to a fair amount of job seekers who struggle to keep up the energy, differentiate themselves, and protect themselves from scams. They’ve got trauma from toxic roles prior to a layoff, they are exhausted from reject after reject of what seems like they are a grand fit.

The other day, after I admitted I was worn out and out of steam to a coachee, he let in on where he was at. It was an incredible visual. He said “I’m making water to make steam”. We have people tapping into non-existent reserves, pulling energy from the thin air to keep going.

Something has to give. That give can’t come from the people. It has to come from the systems around us.

How do we fix all these problems? I’m not here to just complain.

Do we need things like:

• breakout rooms instead that have a better focus on what we really want

• systems that don’t repost jobs that thousands have applied to already

• a rating system for companies on their interview process and hiring transparency

• an ability to hit the mute button

Yes, and more.

Conferences make money off the chaos and traffic.

A massive conference hall wants you to stay in the chaos and mess of the tradeshow floor. That’s where they got their money from to have the conference in the first place is all the booths. Ticket sales make dollars, but those booths also cost a ton. Let’s not even touch the sponsorships.

Those booths are all hoping that they’ll just find one person that will invest or sign a contract that will make their investment and time worth it. Having been on both sides of that scenario, I’ve rarely seen people feel like they got out of it what they need. But these big shows have enough chaos and churn to keep selling tickets and booths, with that vibe of hope of the big sale.

Social media makes money off the chaos and traffic.

Social media platforms are the same. They are compensated by your presence, not your lack of it. Their ads are bought based on potential eyeballs. This is why people have literally said “let’s monetize those digital eyeballs”.

It’s all highlight reel stuff - everyone is keyed up and at their most energized. They are in sales mode, not doing mode. They are all going to 11.

All the world’s a stage

Shakespeare knew it. It’s not the everyday real detail of how any of the people or products truly operate. But it appeals to our emotions. It’s exciting, it makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. We can build up these personas in life and sell them for a living.

If we are merely players, let’s change the game

But where do we truly learn how to do the work, when do we do the work, and does this approach help us really solve the problems of the world? Or does it just bring more noise, waste, confusion, and disconnection?

I can’t imagine think tanks are a full on conference hall vibe all the time, nor are universities, brainstorming meetings, or coaching sessions.

The biggest and most useful lessons I’ve learned in business that I’ve carried with me, and the most lasting relationships and deals have not been from these environments.

They are from the DMs, the 1:1 conversations in a real or digital hallway, or the digging into a problem.

It seems like we’re missing something, here. What if these spaces and events compensation came from getting things done and having an impact on the world?

ChiliPiper recently had a booth at Inbound, a marketing conference, that had a very simple screen.

• # of meetings booked

• Pipeline generated

• Forecasted new customers

For prospects: that meant motivation, they want to be on that screen.
For booth staff: they want to up those numbers
For everyone else around: they get to see it be a game and how a booth actually performs

It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t dramatic. It was real life.

Why is this important?

Maybe we’re losing the ability tell what’s real, or separate our everyday from the highly curated feeds. We already know that social media’s lens can have dramatic effects on mental health, but yet we’re doubling down.

Would it be so bad if we started building social media to be more real to show true impact. Show the receipts of the time we spend on this planet. Take our focus away from likes:

• impact scores on how it helps our communities or planet

• rolls up how we protected revenue or teams, or increased revenue or productivity

• how we mentor or help others learn

• validate other’s work and help highlight it, build a knowledge base

• build communities of support around each other

• use our collective knowledge to build action plans

Along these lines

• Ecosia shows how many trees it’s been able to plant through search

• Catchafire.org shows how much time, and the associated dollar value, people have volunteered to organizations in need

What if you could choose a platform to improve on:

• deforestation

• micro loans

• hunger

What if we reduce the chatter and pull in the sound of impact instead?

I’m going to challenge anyone reading this to reach out to a real, actual human - make a goal of doing it at an interval.

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Main photo by Tristan Ruark on Unsplash

At times, the reasons why someone gets stuck is a lack of definition of where they are truly at. Consider being lost at sea, or in the woods. If you only have one clear landmark to say “I’m here”, but you maybe don’t know how far away it is, you won’t know your position.

A person can stand in New York City and feel like the Empire State Building is much closer than it truly is. It just seems a few blocks away. Once you ask a local or check a map, you realize quickly that you might need to take a cab, or the subway. How close we are to something can be deceiving depending on how big it is in relation to everything else around us.

If you have a few landmarks it becomes much easier to understand more exactly where you are, although anyone with a GPS driven map function on their phone knows sometimes there’s a pause in the delivery of data.

This all goes for positioning in a city, in the woods, and with skills.

Imagine you are in a field all you see are trees around you, it might be pretty difficult for people to find you if you said “a field, surrounded by trees”. But if you look and see you have mountains to your right, you can hear a river to your left, and the sun is front of you, you now already have a better idea of your position.

Now let’s think about that in terms of skills, particularly those that can get caught up in the grey zone and/or be a skill or a role. We’ll choose project management because it can be vastly different depending on company, industry, or needs.

You are standing in the zone of your skills. You tell others that you see around you ‘resource allocation’, ‘client coordination’, and ‘data analysis’. Now, we are getting into a point that’s used in navigation, we are essentially drawing a triangle around ourselves and landmarks to where we are. We are centering in on where we are much more clearly.

Now, someone else might say ‘resource allocation’, ‘client coordination’, and ‘communication’ which puts them near you but in a different location.

Why is this important?

If we don’t know where we are in relation to others, we cannot speak to where we can currently be of help, or where we want to go. This other person who has ‘communciation’ might be someone you want to get to know and learn from as that might be a focus for you next.

Like identifying a physical location, this skill triangulation allows you to assess your strengths, gaps, and how far you've come in your career journey.

Mapping your destination and your goal.

Career and personal development goals are like any milestone or destination. Triangulation helps clarify what success looks like for you by aligning your strengths with your aspirations.

This clarity makes it easier to chart a course toward your next role, industry, or opportunity. It also helps you begin to form a plan, build connections with fellow travelers, and be balanced in your approach toward the goal.

By analyzing your current skills against your goals and the demands of your desired field, you can identify the shortest or most strategic route to success. This might involve acquiring new skills, gaining certain experiences, or repositioning yourself.

It might involve meeting others with the same goals. It likely, depending on how long it takes to get to the goal, will require being able to pivot based on changes in the route.

Consider if you are wanting to go to school to study something or change your career entirely, that takes some time, and within that time some of the variables of the route might change like technology needs, understanding of certain processes or systems.

Iterative quick looks at your own position as you make your way toward your goal, and understanding the route ahead is essential. You wouldn’t jump in your car, look at your GPS once, turn it off, and drive across the United States from California to New York. You’d check your route, road closures, weather, supplies like food and fuel. You’d probably plan your schedule for driving, rather than go straight through.

This level of understanding your location helps to highlight the transferable skills and how they connect across industries and roles. For example, if you're transitioning from government work to the private sector, understanding how your public administration and policy coordination skills apply to your focus industries, new AI trends or remote work is crucial.

Without a clear understanding of your position, you might pursue opportunities that don’t align with your strengths or goals. Getting your current position down and your route planning prevents you from wasting time on detours that lead you away from your career aspirations. You still might have to take detours based on industry shifts or the economy, but they will be much better informed.

Knowing where you stand relative to your goals and industry trends allows you to make informed decisions about what to learn, whom to network with, and which roles to pursue. This helps you maximize impact and efficiency. Career planning and growth takes a lot of energy, and you want to use it wisely.

Some people absolutely live for career-constant approach, always networking, selling, etc. But that’s not required to make your career a success.

If you center in on what you want, where you are, and pay attention to your goal and route at intervals, you can enjoy the journey. You can meet people along the way and build true connections with them.

Planning is everything.

The career landscape shifts rapidly, especially with emerging fields like AI, with layoffs in companies popping up, and shifting industries and needs. None of us can tell the future, but we can prepare for what’s directly without our path and be ready to pivot.

I believe it was Eisenhower who said “Plans are worthless, planning is everything” or of more recent years in the words of Chumbawumba: ”I get knocked down. But I get up again. Ain’t never gonna get me down.”

Thinking of it like driving a car. You have a small rear view mirror to keep informed of what’s behind you, you have a huge windshield to keep you informed of what’s ahead. But you can’t drive the car well if you are planning only for what’s a few miles ahead, you have to pay attention to what you are about to drive over, around, or through.

The act of planning develops strategic capability and broad situational awareness, so that you can respond effectively when the plan invariably fails. Driving the car you are looking at a number of factors, quickly and constantly to balance out what needs to be done in the moment.

You might want to get over the mountains in your car before dark, but then you get stuck behind a truck. Making sure your headlights work as you cruise into town at dusk keeps you safe, able to keep moving, and able to pivot the plan. Planning for snags, hiccups, trends, and changes is better than locking into a plan thinking everything will go perfectly.

Triangulating your skills regularly ensures you’re always positioned to pivot effectively, leveraging both your existing capabilities and new opportunities. If you triangulate in small increments, much like driving a car and looking at the dashboard in quick glances, your journey will be much more enjoyable. If all you do is stare at the dashboard you might run off the road, but if you don’t take a glance every once in a while you can also overheat or run out of fuel.

Triangulating your skills and understanding your position is about orienting yourself in your career landscape with intention, so every step forward brings you closer to where you want to be.

You have to prove your position.

It’s not just about where you think you are at, but where others know you to be.

Any person can say all they want that they have a certain skill or bring a certain value, but truly without outside validation it’s pretty difficult to believe anyone.

The old ways of marketing screamed things like ‘we’re the best’ without any real backing. The old ways just told people where a product or service was at. Now, marketing of any sort really leans in on customer reviews. Think about Yelp, Uber Eats, Tripadvisor. So many people educate themselves on what something is before they buy, and they listen to where others say the product or service is at, not who is selling it.

Just saying you are somewhere without validation from others doesn’t magically put you in that place just because you say so. Now, sometimes faking it before you make it works, absolutely, but even the people faking it know they are faking it. They are using some sort of markers and ways of being that signify where they want to be. That’s a bit different than just saying ‘I’m great in product development’ when you’ve never managed a product before. You might have some skills that align with product development, sure, but there also might be some gaps.

How many people can navigate well in a place they don’t know without a map? Without GPS or some sort of indicator of where they are, a milestone? Before Google Maps, people would stop and ask for directions. I know, it’s a crazy thought but it did happen.

Validation of skills and where a person is at, much like what a GPS does to understand a location is really important. The way others talk about a skill or location might be drastically different, which can make it difficult, perhaps sometimes impossible, to center in on where you really are.

Let’s work through a scenario: You are amongst people that understand deeply a skill, let’s say user experience, and you have a background in physical space design and call yourself a user experience expert (UX) because it seems like the skills are similar.

Although there are some overlaps in balance and composition, there are technical knowledge and user behavior differences, not to mention the assumption of similarity may signal a lack of appreciation for the complexity and depth of UX design as a discipline.

This very well could lead to you scrambling to keep up with a conversation and tripping over yourself, and/or a loss of trust from the people around you. I’ve seen scenarios like this happen because someone was interested in something that seemed close, but it really wasn’t.

What seemingly might be a small issue can result in things like:

• parts of a department (or a client) not trusting the people on a particular project because they positioned themselves as understanding a role, when they clearly didn’t.

• confusion in direction to team members and vendors because industry standard language was not used, resulting in weeks of lost productivity

• projects being cancelled or funds cut due to progress.

Skills can often be misunderstood out of pure excitement of being interested. But don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. Know what you carry into any conversation.

The more we know about how our skills we have can intersect into new learnings and skills, the more we can still be in those conversations, learn something, and not lose trust. It is totally ok to not know something, it’s normal. You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room, if you find yourself in that situation, go to another room.

You saying ‘I’m in the woods, next to the biggest tree’ might not be as useful as someone who knows the woods saying ‘they are in the northwest corner of the woods, near the largest oak tree, next to the stream’. You might say ‘I’m a project manager’, while others might say ‘she’s excellent at creative project management, but doesn’t have skill in construction projects’.

Consider if you want someone to validate your work on a project for a marketing campaign.

You supported the growth of a sales pipeline in this marketing campaign to bring $20 Million. You might say that you worked on marketing campaign management. Others might say that you enabled sales, used project management and communication to drive outcomes. There could be others who saw the campaign as a whole, and since you worked on it they might assume you worked on the entire thing, from content development, social media, project management, and tracking.

Being clear on what you bring to a room, what you’ve brought in the past, and what you’d like to bring in the future is one of the keys, if not the most vital, to growth, building trust and community, and success.

Having people who understand your position, who can validate it as you move along keeps you focused, able to pivot, building trust and community, and sets your foundational confidence for your path.

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This can often happen to as some things just ‘stick out’ on a resume and then ‘poof’ that’s all someone sees. Sometimes, it’s a skill within a role and people confused the two. I know people, myself included, that became the de-facto “IT person” because they fixed an issue with one computer in the office, meanwhile the role they had might be something completely different. I also know people that did administrative work within a role that wasn’t admin focused, but they couldn’t get out of that zone.

For example, I’ve been known to my friends as a marketer for years, when in fact my entire career has really been project management across various industries and disciplines including marketing, technology, sales, and creative. I worked as a social media marketer long ago, but most of my marketing related background has been in project, account, content, and integrations management. But it was something my friends couldn’t shake.

The result? I spent a few decades moving away from the creative side of my brain. I did myself a disservice because I tried so hard to not get boxed in. I had to ignore part of what makes me unique to fit into organizations, clients, and the job market.

I had to coach a close friend for near a decade to stop calling me a marketer. He doesn’t slip up anymore, but now there’s a long pause. His brain is really trying to shift.

I mean, to get on a soap box, what IS a project manager? It’s someone that can manage timelines, teams, assets, issues, communications. People with an understanding of marketing clients are well versed in all these things.

So…what do we do about this? How does one get out of the box.

If we are talking about a real box, you have to open it and crawl. But perhaps it’s sealed shut. Perhaps you are actually stuck in it. You might have to crawl out feet first, which means you can’t see straight away what’s going on.

This is where those you’ve worked with, volunteered with, and helped along in this world can come in and help. They can cut through the tape so you can start to crawl out. They cannot completely pull you out, and even when you do get out your legs are probably asleep so you can’t break off into a full on run, but if we’re to go with this entire analogy let’s start with what’s sealing the box, or preventing it from being opened in the first place.

Imagine the box you might be stuck in.

Is there a pile of rocks on it? Is it taped up? Is it closed in that strange way where the flaps are intertwined but can easily be pushed on to open?

Sometimes you can’t tell from the inside of the box so you have to ask ‘hey what’s it looking like out there? What am I dealing with?’

Asking for the input of others is essential to knowing where you are at, what you are dealing with on the outside.

That can start with questions like:

• How do you see what I do?

• How would you describe it?

• How difficult would it be to get out?

• Are there dangers/obstacles immediately outside this box?

Understanding first your position, where you are stuck, helps.

What are the sticking points? Is it a certain type of skill or role that keeps you in that you need to work around? Can you find someone, whether a mentor or a person in the industry you are in to reference and help you understand what’s holding you back? How did they transition and alter their path?

It might be for a while that you need to reformat how you talk about your position. Perhaps you want to strike marketing from your background in a way to move into operations. Perhaps it’s educating people on the fact that your role requires many skills, some of which are sticking points.

We have so many skills they can sometimes get overwhelming. Sometimes the box is a safe zone. Cats know this instinctively. They are both predator and prey and flip between those things depending on the situation. Boxing skills can be a safety mechanism for the time, but how do we get better about using that to our advantage?

All of our passions and skills are what make us interesting, unique, and frankly useful to the world. Maybe it’s that we have all these boxes we can be in, and thinking outside of them all is really just organizing as we need to in the world.

The box shouldn’t own us. We should use it as needed in this world, and go outside of it when we need or want.

Some people call it compartmentalizing. They do it with work versus home life. Or in the case of spouses that work together professionally, they have to have separation of their two different lives.

Maybe we need to be more like cats. Boxes for comfort, play, safety, as we wish. Many of them. My cat has a sleeping box, and a play box. I’ve never questioned, just accepted this.

We crawl in these boxes when we want, and leave them just as easily. They might be fun for a while but then they become uninteresting, only a while later to become fascinating. We all accept this of cats, they have this confidence we just accept without question.

Try this idea for a day, a week, a month. Confidently own your ability to be in a box as needed, and move out of it as you wish to. Label them, be clear about them with others. But don’t let them own you.

Want to unbox your career and personal trajectory? We’re building a platform to do that.

Use evidence-based peer reviews for positioning, planning, and progress to map your personal development.

Your paid subscription to this Substack

• Funds the basics to get this running. We have some data costs, and basic ops costs. We’re a two person team trying to bootstrap this.

• Validates the importance of and interest in this platform. We need to make sure this is something people want. We only want to build what will solve problems.

• Unlocks pre-launch pricing. $5 for a monthly standard subscription to the platform once it’s built, forever. That’s about 50% off of what we’ll charge everyone else.

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Once we launch something to start with, we’ll invite you into the platform with a special code to set up your account and confirm your pre-launch price.

• It won’t be pretty right away. But we’ll let you in first, we’re willing to be embarrassed to get something to react to.

• We’ll ask for feedback. We’ll be asking for any feedback you are willing to give, and be immensely grateful for it.

This is yours. We’re individual- and consent-centric. We want to move away from spam and scams in personal and career development and platforms. We’ll do everything in our power to connect you with real people with your interests in mind. We’re sick of the BS, and we want to build something where you can feel valued, safe, and focused on progress and success.

These roles exist at an intersection of a number of different disciplines, so depending on who you talk to within industries, companies, or even teams, individuals with those same job titles might do drastically different things. Honestly, it doesn’t even feel like an intersection given the amount of input, more like a traffic circle.

That makes it really hard to advocate for oneself and makes a mess of how a job title could show value in a company. If you’ve got one agile coach that is a great facilitator, but another that isn’t, and yet facilitation is something that’s needed for what people think they need in that role, you’ve got a problem.

We all love being seen as unique and interesting individuals, but being a multidisciplinary, multi-passionate individual is hard to talk about. Although we might be increasingly sought out by employers for our adaptability, it’s on us to convey the value we bring. It’s also on us to do it in a way that doesn’t get us into a box or corner that we might want out of someday.

It’s exhausting.

Companies don’t actually lean into the adaptable nature.

Companies say they want people that will adapt to the needs of their clients or customers, but they aren’t adapting to a new way of thinking about how real people work.

Companies still lay off job titles in droves, not really looking at the skills they might still need in the business.

At best, companies get rid of all their product, talent acquisition, or coaching roles but then they open up roles for people to reapply for. At that point the trauma is set in, someone that was solidly in ‘role’ for years, even decades, is now running mental circles around how to position themselves for something they fit perfectly a week ago.

And the ‘new’ role they can apply for might not actually be any different.

Let’s not even get into companies that lay off a ton of people, calling them underperformers, but they want to make their books look better at the beginning of the year. Then they publicly say they’ll hire again for those roles later (I’m looking at you Meta).

Skills and interests first, job titles a distant second

Removing the job title, to start, and focusing on the skills is one way to do this. Someone who works across teams very well and is able to organize and breakdown work into manageable chunks can be a project manager - but they also could be a program manager or an operations consultant. It’s difficult to seek out new work this way, and if a particular role in a company goes away, the varied and amazing skills of the worker go with it, as opposed to fitting into another area that is more similar than different.

So why are we doing this to ourselves? To fit the mold.

The short answer is we’re using the model organizations want us to to fit into their mold, so we can pay our bills. We all are really passionate about food, heat, and a roof over our heads, so we tend to look at it in the short term (understandably) of defining ourselves as makes sense to them.

Organizations might want you to plan for your career more long term, but if they do it’s usually only in relation to their interests and focus. It’s very expensive to hire people, benefits are expensive, and if companies have them, learning and development plans also have an expense. The ideal for companies in terms of their balance sheet is to have employees for a long time, so if they want innovation they need to be able to balance the goals of their employees and their needs to build revenue. The best companies build cultures to keep people motivated and energized (aka destination employers), but there’s also a cost to that which some companies don’t or can’t invest in.

Looking at only the short term puts us in a position to have to be more reactive than proactive.

Imagine if you are sailing a boat and you aren’t paying attention to the changing weather patterns on the horizon at times, just the sails in the moment. You might get a surprise that you aren’t prepared for that will come on very fast. Perhaps too fast for you to adjust to without injury or loss of direction.

We might have to play both sides of a coin, here.

What if we did that while redefining ourselves based on what we really bring? What if someone was labelled a project manager but really dug in and knew that they worked best on visualizations for process, and excelled at bringing teams together through games, visualization exercises, and empathy? Knowing that, and having your peers back you in that, would be much stronger and more helpful when going into meetings with your manager, setting goals, looking for new work, networking, and seeking out the mythical jobs that are ‘hidden’ in the market.

What if we played their strange role-based game but had a much more rich dashboard of our own to guide us?

It’s not ‘new’, in fact some of the world’s greatest innovators were in the grey zone.

Consider Leonardo DaVinci, for starters. Not only did he pen the first resume to show off his skills, he had a wild array of interests. Most of us know what they are, but for some reason his skills seem like something that wouldn’t exist today - someone like him is for times of literal renaissance.

But what if we all have a little bit of da Vinci in us?

Consider him now, at a holiday party, trying to explain what exactly he does. What would it sound like for him to convey everything he does, or just say ‘I’m a painter and engineer’. That doesn’t exactly work, does it? It is either is too much and too confusing or doesn’t at all convey the skills he brings to the world.

But if he said something like:

I support and enhance the cultural, military, and technological statures of many different royal courts across Italy. I create art, mechanical, military, and civil works that forward the society by using and sharpening my skills in mechanics, painting, and anatomy.

Maybe it’s a matter of the formula we’re using to explain what we do. People care about the impact. They don’t care how you got there or your process. You might love your process and hone in on that, but clients, new acquaintances, they don’t. Sorry. They want to understand the result.

Now, in an interview or when talking with coworkers on an issue understanding how to explain your process is invaluable. Again, it’s on us to know the difference of when a process dive in versus a high-level explanation is needed.

Doctors - we pretty much know their responsibility. Lawyers, police, etc? It’s clear what their responsibility is. Project Managers? Honestly, maybe. Yes, managing projects - but what does that really mean? Do they keep client projects under budget? Do they manage risk?

If you throw the word ‘marketing’ in with project management you might forever be seen as a marketer (true story), even if you don’t create the marketing, you just manage it’s production.

Maybe we use their mold, but put pour our whole selves into another.

Organizations will want us to define our roles based on their needs, but maybe it’s time we define the value we bring outside of their systems.

We will still probably use these systems for them to navigate, but it’s like having a backup map on a trip.

You’d probably not go into the desert, or into the backcountry, solely dependant on your phone for navigation, you’d have something in case that stops working. We’ve all had navigation systems trip up, either due to being surrounded by too much concrete or waiting for the next ping from a cell phone tower.

We want to build in your own system of towers through your peers, colleagues, clients, and customers. They help you understand your location through validation of your work evidence. No matter what happens with your organization-assigned map, you always have a backup.

If you can understand where you are, even with a grey area role that is many skills and a multitude of definitions, you can know where to go.

We shouldn’t rely on companies to hold our direction anymore.

Want to define your direction in your career and personal development? We’re building a platform to do that.

Use evidence-based peer reviews for positioning, planning, and progress to map your personal development.

Your paid subscription to this Substack

• Funds the basics to get this running. We have some data costs, and basic ops costs. We’re a two person team trying to bootstrap this.

• Validates the importance of and interest in this platform. We need to make sure this is something people want. We only want to build what will solve problems.

• Unlocks pre-launch pricing. $5 for a monthly standard subscription to the platform once it’s built, forever. That’s about 50% off of what we’ll charge everyone else.

Subscribe now

Once we launch something to start with, we’ll invite you into the platform with a special code to set up your account and confirm your pre-launch price.

• It won’t be pretty right away. But we’ll let you in first, we’re willing to be embarrassed to get something to react to.

• We’ll ask for feedback. We’ll be asking for any feedback you are willing to give, and be immensely grateful for it.

This is yours. We’re individual- and consent-centric. We want to move away from spam and scams in personal and career development and platforms. We’ll do everything in our power to connect you with real people with your interests in mind. We’re sick of the BS, and we want to build something where you can feel valued, safe, and focused on progress and success.