”In a society that glorifies titles, visibility, reach, and the grind, taking a beat to opt out of all that isn’t easy,” today’s guest Mel Dizon writes in the origin story to her pop-up Substack.

“Whether you’re here by choice or via a cosmic 2x4 like a layoff, illness, transition, not-so-nervous-breakdown breakdown, or surprise life event, straddling where you were and what’s next can be unwieldy, ungrounding, and equal parts exciting and scary-as-hell.”

Mel shares how she defines an accidental sabbatical; the energetic urgency and pent up ambition that let her know it was time to leave her job; the permission she needed to give herself; navigating the fears that followed; how publishing her process out loud has helped with courage and accountability; and trusting herself to make important decisions when it’s time, while also not rushing that process.

Just because you use pretty words that sound nice doesn’t mean they are effective. Although we know what we do because we do it all the time; it’s hard to separate that from what your audience wants and experiences. Thankfully, today’s guest is here to help.

Ben Guttmann is a marketing and communications expert and author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win — and How to Design Them.

We discuss why business owners often muck up their sales pages (what I call invitation letters), how to reduce friction when attracting clients and customers, and the toll that writing too much takes on the receiver.

The phrase is emblazoned at WeWorks across the globe: in large neon lights across lobby walls, bedecking laptops via swag stickers, and printed in playful cursive on the mugs that facilitate bottomless free coffee—with the addition of always in small print at the top.

But what becomes of the adage to do what you love when the company blasting it everywhere declares bankruptcy? What about the rest of us?

Today’s essay is a crossover from my paid Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h. I encourage you to join us there if you haven’t already!

“The biggest breakthroughs came from the random side projects that I had no expectation would turn into anything.” Josh Kaufman is a longtime friendtor (13 years and counting!) who I admire for his streamlined approach to running his business in a way that supports family life and creative solitude.

In our last conversation we spoke about releasing the ten-year anniversary edition of his bestselling book, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, that has since surpassed the one million books sold milestone. Today, we’re diving into the systems behind that success.

Are you running a Franken-Brand? A quick, inexpensive logo here. And then someone a few months later tries to write the brand strategy. And then another junior hire adds in graphics and you don’t even know where they came from. Suddenly, you have this brand that is cobbled together, and no one on the team is feeling compelled.

Today, returning guest Adam Chaloeicheep and I are picking up where we left off in episode 259: Has your Business Brand Become a Liability, diving into Together Agency’s four personas of clients who are ready to do brand work, the three types of clients that are deal-breakers for Adam, and the perils of navigating the brand strategy process with a CEO who is in the midst of a spiritual awakening.

Has your business brand become stale, perhaps to the point of being a liability? After a few years, especially with major pivots, you may run the risk of losing clients and credibility. Sometimes it’s time for a tune-up and fresh tires, and sometimes, it’s time for a whole new brand engine.

As today’s returning guest, my good friend and part of the team behind the award-winning Free Time brand, recently featured on Behance. Adam Chaloeicheep says, “It’s about building the relationship with your customer. First impressions are really important.”

What do you do when a business area becomes energetically draining, or the income isn’t flowing? Today’s guest has many intuitive superpowers, and one of them is “following the data points of truth.”

In this episode, Erin Weed and I discuss why you shouldn’t just stick with something that is no longer aligned; the tragic event that launched her journey into entrepreneurship; the moment she knew it was time to release her first business; how she came up with her unique process, The Dig®️ (then later trained a dozen facilitators to help conduct sessions); volunteering as one of the best ways to try on new business ideas; and setting intentions with a word of the week and for the year, in addition to your core word at the center of who you are.

How can you get paid for who you are, not just what you do? Today’s guest, Terry Rice, is teaching us his Golden Link Strategy for creating a steady stream of potential clients, without giving them (or you) “the ick” through cold outreach misfires.

He also shares speaking and marketing tips he pulled from one of his mentors, Daymond John, how he reframes business development activities, why it’s vital to get your offer right before you focus on branding, how he makes time for 12 hours of creating each week (even with four kids), and the sacrifices he made after his business started taking off.

“What am I pretending not to know?” There is tremendous power in asking better questions, whether it comes to ideal day design, creating systems in your business, or teaching someone how to help tame your inboxes.

Today’s conversation with Claire Giovino covers all that ground and more. We talk about what qualities make email so vexing for many business owners, how to reduce fear and friction when delegating replies, and the importance of asking better questions—of yourself and in your business.

"For the first time in a decade, I feel free again." That’s how one of my earliest blogging friends, longtime community leader David Spinks, was feeling when I caught up with him in-person in the middle of his yearlong sabbatical, after selling his community-based business.

David and I discuss best practices for creating and nurturing communities, for engineering serendipity, what it’s like to build and run a conference (and later sell it), and the freedom that comes with taking a deliberate sabbatical.

“The world doesn’t need another expert.” So says today’s guest, Andrew Davis. Experts rely on hacks, tips, tricks, teaching, preaching, and over-promising. Visionary leaders a) tend not to call themselves that and b) focus on the quest for knowledge itself, with enough humility to admit what they don’t know, or the problems they are exploring even while still in process.

In today’s conversation, you’ll learn how to move past commoditized content toward launching a quest that builds trust and brings your audience along for the ride—while embracing digital doppelgängers to help you get there.

“You do not need to cannibalize your healing for content.” Today, I’m in conversation with longtime blog-turned-IRL friend Nic Antoinette, diving deeper into her decision to shut down her Patreon community (taking a $30,000/year haircut to do so), then pivoting to a private paid Substack while she navigated her way through decisions about what might follow.

We discuss the generosity of being honest, the trap of wanting to be special, knowing where to draw the line on how much or how little you share, and much more. Be sure to also check out our earlier Pivot conversation in episode 342: “Whatever Comes Through Me Comes for Me First,” with Nicole Antoinette.

If you have been in business for any amount of time, then you know the feeling when a launch just isn’t working. The sales are crawling, you start doubting yourself, wondering if you created the right thing in the first place, if you built a big enough audience to sell anything at all.

All kinds of additional questions and insecurities follow when sales aren’t flowing: is that the offer that’s off? Your sales page invitation letter? The pricing? Is it you?

It’s so hard not to get a big morale dip in the middle of the sales dip during a launch. So this month’s bonus is on a few strategies that I’ve picked up over the years.

“I only write books for problems I can’t otherwise solve,” Nir Eyal says. “I don’t write my books for my readers; I write my books for myself.”

Driven by curiosity to fix his own problems, Nir’s books have sold over one million copies. Listen to today’s conversation on how he weathered the criticism storm around his first book, Hooked; the one essential skill to being an entrepreneur; how to turn your values into time, and turn time into traction; and if you’re an aspiring author, why the fear of not being qualified should not be one of your fears.

Abundance was my word of 2019.

I’d love to tell you I meant abundance in the broadest possible sense, appreciating the bounty already in my life, financial and otherwise.

But mostly, my theme was about money.

What is your relationship to rest? How about your caretakers’ relationship to rest while you were young? What examples did they set? What attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors did they hold, and how does that still influence you today?

Today I’m talking with Ximena Vengoechea about the five rest profiles, productivity dysmorphia, “tiny transition time,” why paid work (no matter how much you love it) doesn’t count as pure play, and how she designed the book to deliver a restful experience beyond just the words themselves.

“Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer, and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.”

—Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

We are not meant to compare ourselves to eight billion people. I know I’m not the first to remind you that social platforms are status games on globalized steroids. With so much exposure to people who are (actually) smarter, funnier, prettier, and/or fill-in-the-blanker, the logical conclusion would be not to jump in. Right?

You can calm chaos at work, but it starts with a reality check from Charlie Gilkey, delivered with his signature wit and generosity: You might not have a team problem; you have a you problem.

It’s time to stop catering to air sandwiches, Crisco watermelons, broken printers, ghost plans, and other corrosive practices, and start implementing Charlie’s finely-tuned, road-tested systems instead.

“As long as we settle for thinking inside the brain, we’ll remain bound by the limits of that organ. But when we reach outside it with intention and skill, our thinking can be transformed. It can become as dynamic as our bodies, as airy as our spaces, as rich as our relationships—as capacious as the whole wide world.”

—Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind

In this second half of a two-part solo series, I’m sharing X more strategies that have helped me build (and trust) my intuition at increasingly subtle levels. If you haven’t already, be sure to listen to Part One here first.

I’m excited to bring you this crossover episode with Rose Cox, founder of The HSP Business School and host of The Sensitive CEO Show podcast. She is one of the people I have been most excited to connect with across the globe the last few years, even though we have yet to meet IRL!

In this conversation, we dive into the world of highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, and introverts in the business world, with plenty of permission slips to stop doing what drains you. We discuss how to build a sustainable, soulful business that aligns with your energy, while embracing the strengths and challenges of being a sensitive CEO. Finally, we touch on Rose’s decision to pause her podcast (at least for now) after a year of releasing weekly episodes.