022: Become a Thought-Listener
8 Dec 2025 · 14 min
Jenny Blake argues against the pressure to be a thought leader and proposes becoming a thought listener first. She maps five modes of listening, from intuition to expert interviews to learning from people with lived experience, and shares how her blogging since 2005 and newsletter work shaped her thinking.
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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners at work as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.
Hello my friends. How many of you listening feel pressure to be some kind of thought leader in your industry to become an expert? The go to person for Fill in the blank. This episode is a riff on a couple different conversations that have happened recently. One was with the beloved Leanne Hughes who was in episode 17, Teen of Free Time. I love Leanne so much and we talked about the advice Ellen Weiss gave her to position herself as an expert and we had a great conversation around that and that that's how you elevate out of being a commodity or so replaceable and you can charge premium pricing and you can really attract interesting clients that way. And right in that same week that Leanne and I recorded, I also heard an episode of Jay Acunzo's unthinkable podcast and it's fantastic. I will link to all of this in the show notes and the episode was titled Expert vs Explorer. Jay says, your knowledge is finite, your curiosity is infinite. So why do we usually rely more on our existing knowledge than our boundless curiosity? He even starts the episode with a clip from author Andrew Davis, who is joking about attending a conference. Andrew says, I met a lot of coaches that are experts. I actually met a coach who was an expert in coaching coaches on how to coach other experts. Of course that made me chuckle. And I know as somebody in my case, I like to think of myself as an ideapreneur. I didn't make that term up, but ideapreneur is really what motivates me. I love researching, learning, synthesizing, simplifying, curating and sharing information and ideas back out with all of you. That said, the whole industry of thought leadership gets a lot of flack. There's the hilarious parody of giving a TED Talk. I'll try to find that and link to that in the show notes. And there are people who just say, oh my gosh, we have Everybody wants to be a thought leader now. Or the new term that I actually can't stand, nor do I want to be, which is an influencer for me. I've always I would much rather hang my hat on ideas than pictures of me cavorting around the planet to illustrate some kind of fabulous lifestyle. I don't want you here necessarily because of my lifestyle, although of course free time is a philosophy. It's about working with joy and ease and earning abundantly in less time and unhooking ourselves from the shackles of a corporate factory system. And by the way, big corporate, you can free yourselves too. I just am specifically speaking to heart based business owners because you all have direct autonomy over your time and you can influence how you set up your day and your weekly. So yes, lifestyle is a small part of this concept, but really I know I'm doing my job when I'm bringing ongoing public, original thinking out into the world. That is my name for thought leadership. It's a bit of a mouthful, but the reason that I say that is that sometimes I think we can feel pressure that you have to force it somehow. You have to come up with such brilliant new ideas all the time. I've been blogging and have had an online presence since 2005. I even had a monthly newspaper called the Monthly Dig up when I was a kid. I started that when I was 10 years old. I had extended friends and family who were subscribing. So ever since I was a kid, one of my main activities was researching new technology, interviewing friends and family members, sharing a little monthly tidbits column about whose birthday it was or what news there was. And I had a lot of fun doing this. I used Microsoft's I think it was called Publisher to lay out the newspaper. I would xerox 11 by 17, fold it, mail it. People paid $5 a year for their subscription and that was my OG form of blogging. Before blogs were blogs. That was my way of curating content, learning and sharing and helping to connect our friends and extended family in that way. I did this all the way up through high school and at our peak we had four 50 subscribers. I still have a big fat binder at home with every single issue of the Monthly dig up again. Imagine the progression, starting from when I was 10, all the way up to my senior year in high school. I was also the editor in chief of the Oracle. I went to Gunn High School in Palo Alto. And so you can imagine that the sophistication grew as time went on. When then I took a little break, I wrote for the Daily Bruin. I was a news reporter for my first year at ucla. And the deadlines, the stress, the pressure, it just didn't work for me. Not only that, but as I looked over at my peers who were working at the Daily Bruin, so many of them told me that they were like, failing out of school. They were getting Cs and Ds because they would drop their papers or their schoolwork in order to meet these crazy deadlines. Because with it being a daily newspaper, it was just such a tight turnaround time and really hard to juggle school with being a news reporter. That is a long way of saying that. When I discovered websites and blogging in 2007 is when I really started. I converted my website that I had taught myself how to hand code HTML and I got lifeaftercollege.org, my first site, set up 2005. I added the blog in 2007, and for 10 years I wrote two blog posts just about every single week. I started my newsletter in 2010. So it's been over a decade of sending a newsletter out and I've had these podcasts now for over six years. These are my preferred ways of thinking out loud, putting some thought into what can I share? What am I learning? What am I experiencing? How am I suffering and how am I solving that? And how can I somehow try to make things easier for all of you? Contrast this with a lot of the advice. Now. I think people feel very scattered and spread out and there are a lot of shoulds around social media. In fact, I call it sailing the sea of shiny shoulds. Or put a different way, sailing the sea of sexy shoulds. I should be on LinkedIn. I should be writing articles. I should be on Twitter. I should be on Clubhouse. I should be on Facebook. And on and on and on. Where does it stop? How can anybody hear themselves think when you feel this constant pressure to create micro bits of content across every single platform? And as we talked about in the episode with Jordan, Harbinger, will link to that in the show notes. You know, I actually think it kind of dilutes how people learn from you. Because on the one hand, sure, it's good to Be in a lot of different places and you definitely want to make yourself discoverable. That's something I talk about in Pivot. That just like your Bluetooth devices, well, you both need to put them in discoverability mode in order for them to connect. So if you want to implement serendipity as a business strategy, as I titled the episode with Leanne number 17, then, yeah, you gotta be discoverable. It's true that it just like with dating, if you only sit on your couch, no, most likely you're not gonna meet someone. Of course these days you can sit on your couch and flip through dating apps, but you do need to get outta the house a little bit. So when it comes to positioning yourself as some kind of thought leader or expert, of course you gotta get out of the house a little bit. You have to pick some format that actually sparks joy, that resonates, that you can, in an ongoing way, put out your own public. Original thinking. The reason that my moniker for this is a little bit of a mouthful is that there's a couple different parts. Ongoing, meaning pick a cadence that works for you. So I'm publishing this free time podcast once a week right now, although I have aspirations of bumping it up to twice a week. I put out Pivot twice a month. I put out the newsletter weekly. Ish. Although Michael, my husband and I, we. We put it. Now, his cadence is random, random flea. And I think that's what I'm going to have to do because I haven't been as consistent recently. And that's it. So when I'm clear on my cadence and how I want to produce anything in an ongoing way, that's the ongoing part. Public. You got to hit publish. It's never going to be perfect. It never is perfect. Nowhere close. I celebrate awkwardness here on my podcasts. I celebrate imperfection because it's the only way. Otherwise I wouldn't have a show at all. There are so many things that could be fixed or little bugs that happen. Errors. Thank goodness for Lisa. She's our incredible podcast producer and she helps make the sound what it is and make me make sense somehow on these solo riffs. But it's never perfect. You just gotta ship. So ongoing public and. And then what's the second piece? Original thinking. It is not easy to be original. I am not a fan of the Pablo Picasso. Like all great artists steal. Pablo Picasso was a notorious jerk. Okay, I'm going to keep it, like, family friendly in case you have kids in the car. He was notoriously just cruel, cruel to the women in his life mean to the people around him. Do all great artists steal? I'm not so sure. I prefer to be as original as possible. That does not mean that everything out of my mouth mouth is some brand new original, most brilliant idea that no one has ever heard. However, you can be original by incorporating your story, your perspective, your history, your background, your life experience, your particular position on the planet at this moment, the sources of information that you listen to and curate, and your unique original twist on that. It does take some effort to be original and in fact, if you have been putting out your own public original thinking, you know what it feels like when people copy you. It's, it's, it's actually makes my stomach drop. Makes me sick because I know how much work I put into trying to be as. Again, if I'm not going to be original, then I'll cite my sources. So for example, explorer versus expert. I want to let you know about Jay Acunzo's fantastic podcast. It's so good, unthinkable. It should be on your radar. I love him. I love his vibe. I don't know him personally yet, maybe I'll have him on this show one day. But it's a great show and I want to tell you about it and I want to cite my sources. So if you're not going to be original and you are going to curate from a lot of different sources, at least try to give people the breadcrumb trail of how you got where you got. I've been playing a lot recently with the idea of being a thought listener. What does that mean? It goes to what Jay was saying about knowledge being finite and curiosity being infinite. Shane Snow talks about intellectual humility. Being a thought listener is about getting curious. Now, I'm not going to say that there isn't a benefit to becoming an expert at something a hundred percent. Absolutely. There's no question that if you want to stand out in your field, in your industry, that yes, over time developing true legitimate expertise and becoming a thought leader can be a way to differentiate yourself in whatever it is that you're doing. If you are a dog trainer and you can develop your own method, your own process, your own way of onboarding clients, your way of interacting with animals, all of these things can start to position you as the go to person. We all know there are certain famous dog trainers where you just say the word dog trainer and somebody's name pops into your head. So great, that can be super helpful. I find that trying to force it though is not going to work.
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So there are five ways that I like to be a thought listener before I ever claim any amount of expertise. But if you enact these five lenses or types of listening, you very well will work your way into a place where are you the end all, be all expert for all time, forever? No, of course not. So I like to say when I say the word expert, I mean with all due intellectual humility and kind of admitting that true beginner's mind is admitting what you don't know and always entering any situation or interaction with that beginner's mind. However, if you've been the listener, the explorer, you've gone through that hero's journey, you've collected wisdom, you've researched something very intensely, you gotta share it with people. It feels so good and it's so affirming and it's such a way that each of us can serve in the world. And of course you would never want to hold that back from people either. So it is helpful to stake a claim sometimes and say, I I have figured something out and you gotta know about it because it's gonna make your life and your work so much easier. Let's get into these types of listening. The first type of thought listener mode is internal listening to your own thoughts, specifically your own intuition. Sometimes I think, you know, we're too caught up in the mind. We're listening to the wrong thoughts. We're caught in the movie of our lives. We're caught in the drama of the day to day. Not every thought that drops into your head is helpful. This is where Byron Katie's the work is so powerful because any stressful thought can be turned around. She believes that any stressful thought is an alarm clock waking you up to something that is more true. So anytime you have a stressful thought, I encourage you to do the work. Is that true? Can I absolutely know that it's true? This is a meditation. How do you feel when you think that thought? Who would you be without that thought? Turn it around. Flip that statement as many times as you need until you land on capital T, truth. The better you get, though, at listening to that little whisper within that inner voice, the knowing within you. The intuitive hits that come from a lifetime of experience, good and bad, those are so powerful. And I actually think that we're caught up in so much noise about what we should be doing and who we should be and what's out there and just the crush of the inbound and of information in the world that sometimes that inner voice and that intuition gets drowned out. It is a skill, it is a habit to get to know your intuition, to make a point, to ask your intuition, and to listen. You will not always have a logical reason for your intuitive hits. And this is so powerful. I have read business books. It kind of makes me, like, want to pull my hair. It's like I read business books that say, do not listen to your intuition. It is not an effective way to run your business. And I could not disagree more. I think intuition is one of the biggest, best tools that you have to run your business. You don't have to give anybody else a reason if you feel friction. And in your gut, in your heart of hearts, you know that this revenue stream or this way of marketing your business or this potential client, something's not right. Listen, you don't need a reason. You don't have to. If, let's say you're my. You're my bff, you're my friend, you don't need to tell me anything other than it doesn't feel like a fit, it doesn't feel right. And, I don't know, some people think that feelings can't go with business. I just. I just could not disagree anymore. Gavin de Becker wrote a book called the Gift of Fear, and it's really powerful. Thank you, Dorie, for recommending it. He says that we often pick up subconscious clues about our environment and people, and it's our mind that will rationalize. Well, you don't want to seem mean or you don't want to. Oh, I'm sure it's fine. Because our mind. So that's the type of thought listening. It's really a deeper listening in this first internal piece. And try not. What if you. What if you Give yourself permission not to have to have a reason and not to rationalize with your mind some kind of data that your body is picking up. And when I say your body is picking up, that can very well be for your business. I wrote Pivot, my second book with In Complete Communication with the Universe. I remember picturing Pivot having wings. And that's cool because it now fits with the free time branding. I just made that connection in this moment. But I remember asking it, what do you need to fly? What do you need to fly? It was my friend Jen Raccioppi who told me, just talk to your book. And I would picture all the future readers and I would say, what do you need? How can I. What can I offer you? How can I create the best possible book for you at every single step in the process? So are these body readings? This internal listening is huge. And I really believe that this is where you can imbue soul into your business, into what it is that you're creating. When somebody bakes cookies and they're baked with love, you somehow know that versus when you eat a cookie from McDonald's. I'm sure it's good because they make them like crack. You know, most fast food has some element of crack in there to get you to just love it and want more, like French fries. But is it baked with love? No. I think you could tell that if you had these two cookies side by side. The second type of listening, being a thought listener, is your asynchronous learning. When I say asynchronous, I mean that you're not in the same room with whoever you're reading, listening, curating, you're on the go. Like, I love, love, love listening to podcasts. This is why I have two of them. Because I learn so much every single day. When I take Ryder out for his morning walk, sometimes I have my phone tucked under my shoulder, like on top of my shoulder. I don't put earbuds in, and I'm listening to a podcast and there's really no one around, so hopefully it's not bugging anybody. But I love. I'm obsessed with books. I joke that books are my best friend. Books have been my mentors, guides, teachers. So much of what I know, so much of how my intuition is trained, has come not only from friend tours, conversations. We'll get to that, but also books. I am so grateful. I feel like every single book is a treasure trove of that author's efforts, their research, their wisdom. And so many authors will say, I stand on the shoulders of giants. So it's like you're getting just generations of information, at least from the right books. So when you are a thought listener, your ears are attuned. You are learning very specific things in a very specific way to you, and that counts for something. There's also asynchronous story sharing. So let's say you run a survey among your community or you invite people to submit questions. You're learning not just from other experts, let's say authors, podcasts, but you're really understanding. What do people struggle with? What are their challenges in this area of your curiosity? Because thought leadership doesn't happen until you've become a thought listener and you're curious enough about something to dedicate time. After Pivot came out, I created an Evernote folder called Curiosity. For three years, I saved articles and clips and stories and anecdotes into this curiosity folder because I knew that, I knew that I had a lens on the world. But you know, I didn't know what that next batch of learning and research was pointing me toward. I'm working on a book now and I will say not all of that. That waned it into the Curiosity folder. It's not really the same, kind of went in a new direction. But about two years ago I started another Evernote folder called How We Work. And I was just. That was the thought that came to my mind and I, I knew I'm not going to write a book called How We Work. However, I was thought listening to creative ideas and ways of working and new ways of working. And this is just something that was kind of on my mind. And so my asynchronous learning and the even asynchronous story sharing and collecting started to go down that path of how we work. And now a lot of that is directly relevant to free time. The fourth category is real time interviews with related experts. So having a podcast is a beautiful way of having ongoing public, original interviews, let's call it where with the lens of your thought listenership, whatever you're curious about at that moment, you can connect with other experts and interview them. And your again, your perspective, your lens is going to be unique. It's going to be interesting here at Freetime. You know, it's really about exploring principles like heart based business and working with ease and joy and earning abundantly in half the time by freeing ourselves from the typical shackles of as I said Monday through Friday 9 to 5, who made that up? Who does that work for? If you're self employed, you get to make the rules. You don't have to work Monday through Friday. You don't have to keep typical hours. It's a blank slate. But so many of us still ascribe to what everyone else does, the way that everyone else works. So here I'm doing real time interviews, exploring these topics and curating, starting to curate and hone my own thought listener ear. The fifth category of thought listenership can come from real time interviews and questions from those who have stories and experiences. So not every single person that you're going to learn and listen from is an expert, nor do they need to be. So the whole to go full circle, the whole point. I even said in episode one of Free Time, I said for 10 years I did not give myself permission to really go all in talking about business. I even taught a course in 2012 called build you'd business byb so it's called Build you'd Business. It was this boot camp. I can't remember if it was 30 days or eight weeks, might have been two months. And I loved it. The participants loved it. I think it was like it was less than $100 and people said I paid $2,000 for a course and I learned more in one week in your course than in that one. And the feedback was so good. But I guess the imposter monster overtook me at that time because I just felt like I don't know enough yet. I had only been self employed for a year. I didn't want to become the go to expert on building a business or even building a location independent business. I didn't, although I did have a lot to share and the way that I shared it seemed to be quite helpful for the participants. I looked down the road at being a thought leader in that regard and I just didn't feel qualified yet. Was that the right decision or not? I don't know. But it led me to keep searching. 2013 was incredibly difficult year personally, and by the time I was trying to work my way out of it, it's what sparked Pivot and the Pivot Method, the four stage framework to map what's next. And so that Pivot method is an example of ME Having read 200 books on change, uncertainty, risk, financial markets, real estate, every single category, personal development, mindfulness, spiritual texts, and really trying to say if change is the only constant, how can we get better at it? That was me being curious about my own life because I didn't feel very resilient in my own life. And only then once I could synthesize Hundreds of books and interviews and stories and surveys that I conducted and my decade of experience coaching and my time at Google launching a global drop in coaching program, then I could kind of reverse engineer all that. And I created this framework. And yes, of course now on the Pivot Method website I say the Go to Career change expert. I know I don't like superlatives that say the number one career change expert in the world, because who, who can ever know that? But I don't mind saying, okay, a go to career change expert or something along those lines. But honestly, even phrases like that are a little borderline for me. I use that kind of statement to honestly to help, you know, if organizations want to bring me in to speak or to teach workshops, which I love to do, they they can know, okay, I'm really getting one of the go to experts in this arena of how to figure out what's next even within your current role in the context of free time in heart based business. Do I claim to be the end all, be all business expert on how to become a gazillionaire? No, but that's not my interest. My interest is being a thought listener for people who do business differently, who give themselves and others permission to go their own way, who operate with incredible integrity, generosity, delight, ease and joy. In fact, one of my filters for this podcast is, and I told Brenna as we review, we don't really take guest pitches too often. As in if someone just randomly, we get a lot of those for both shows. I said to Brenna the other day, I said, if you're gonna look through people who have pitched themselves, you know, only pass it to me if it sparks joy. Like I want the person, if you read their pitch and their story and you listen to their voice, if it sparks joy, share it with me. And now I also want to bring you people who their voice has some joy in it. So joy is a filter that I'm putting onto this free time podcast and that's a filter of thought listening. I'm listening for joy. I'm listening for people who are engaged and happy and present in their lives. I care less how much you earned or your business earned, if you were miserable or burnt out or you barely see your family, I don't care. I'm not interested in that. So this is my thought listenership. And where it can turn into thought leadership for me is after a long process of listening and curiosity. And what's so interesting about being a thought listener is that you start to attract through what's called Your Reticular Activation System. You attract information, so you become an information magnet for information people. Clips, sound bites, because that's where your attention is. The Reticular Activation System. Shout out to Melanie, who told me the proper name for it many years ago, is that if you just bought a red car, you start to see red cars everywhere. Once you get curious and you say, I am curious enough to name a folder in Evernote, or I'm using notion a lot now called Curiosity, or something as broad as how we work, you, you pick whatever your thing is that you want to become an explorer, that you're curious about, that you want to listen more deeply around. You don't have to know the title, you don't have to be the go to expert. Yet after enough time researching, curating, synthesizing, simplifying, talking to other people, that thought listenership does start to shape itself into something. And then it takes concerted effort. You don't just become a thought leader because you throw up a badge on your website that says, like, I am the number one world's leading expert in how to run a business. Sorry, no. At least that's not the kind of stuff that appeals to me. You become a thought leader because you actually put your mind and you say, there, there's a better way that this can be done. Now, the reason we're talking about thought leadership, why is the word thought in this at all? Because what I'm talking about is in the realm of ideas. I'm not talking about creating a widget or a physical product. You can certainly do that too. You can be an industry leader in any kind of industry, in any business, when it comes to thinking. It does take effort to convert what you've curated, what you've heard, what you've been curious about, into a format that people can understand and that you can communicate clearly through stories, through philosophy, through a framework of some kind. It doesn't have to be all of the above. I kind of, when I reverse engineer what helped make Pivot as successful as it has been. It sold about 40,000 copies. At the time of this recording. There were a couple things. There was a mantra. If change is the only constant, let's get better at it. There's a metaphor. Think like a basketball player. You gotta have one foot planted so you can double down on what's working as you look to what's next. So mantra.
Metaphor. There is a method. The Pivot method is a four stage framework. Plant scan, pilot, launch. You can repeat it. It's circular, you know, it's not a linear process. Memes are a really good way of conveying humor. So if any of you know that clip of Ross from Friends, he's trying to move the couch around a corner in a stairwell and he goes, pivot, pivot. We have to pivot. It's funny, it makes people laugh. I don't show it every time I speak, but there's a meme as a way to just convey a feeling and convey some information and so on and so on. So mantra, metaphor, mindset. Oh, pivot as a mindset and a method. So there's the mindset piece, which is we're pivoting all the time. There's no there there. You don't have to have a whole career plan. You don't have to know what's five moves out. The subtitle of the book is the only move that matters is your next one. So it's a mindset, it's a method. There's a mantra, there's a metaphor, there's a meme. These are all little packets. These are ways to translate information to make it sticky and memorable and help people like, am I the world's most leading expert on change? Of course not. Because again, the only reason I had a front row seat to understanding how unmooring it was going to be when the world was in upheaval. I didn't know a pandemic was coming, but I knew that I didn't feel very resilient. So when you have a front row seat to something you're struggling with, it actually attunes you. It actually lifts your antenna to say, this is really hard. How can I, how can I help? How can I figure this out for myself? And then how can I share it back out so that I can be in service to others? If, for example, I have some friends who are like wild, adventurous, risk taking types, I think I'm married to one. I don't think I know. I know that I'm married to one. He is not going to write the book on pivot because he doesn't need it. He doesn't struggle with, like flowing with his life and adventures and spontaneity, he being my husband. But like anyone of this mindset, there are people, when I gave keynotes that I showed the riskometer diagram of stagnation zone, comfort zone, stretch zone, the optimal range for change and panic zone. And I had someone raise his hand and say, well, I love my panic zone. In fact, if I'm not in my panic zone, I'm worried. So Those, they're adrenaline junkies who love change and big risks and mortgaging their house to go all in on a new idea, well, that's never been me. I'm more shy, I'm more hesitant, I'm more self conscious, I'm more risk averse. So I had a front row seat and I call that patient zero. So this is another lens that you can use. I should have added this to my outline, but I'm only thinking of it now. I just wrote down those five categories. Well, here's a sixth. Patient zero, what are you, what do you have a front row seat for? Another way that I phrase this is you are in the petri dish. What are you observing in the petri dish of your life that, that you can try to unpack and then share back out. And if you weren't suffering or struggling with something, it's unlikely you would even notice it. It just wouldn't even be in your field of awareness. So that's why each of us has a unique perspective and unique life experience and a unique internal personality constitution that gives you a lens for your curiosity and your thought leadership. A while back, this is more of my emo kind of melancholy, but this phrase came to my mind of suffering is a quill dipped in ink. And I think the reason that came to me was just that during a period of suffering, this idea that while you're suffering, no, you can't really do much, like to just stand up every day and get through the day is a win. But that the suffering is a quill dipped in ink is that if you're any kind of journaler, reflector, writer, thinker, speaker, you know, any of those that, that once you come through that crucible, the quill dipped in ink is like you, you take the quill and you, you can actually write and reflect and share. Or as my friend Sarah said to me the other day, it's another day in Earth school. And even if you think that we're all living in a simulation and that hahaha, isn't it funny? We're all in this game of life and we take it so seriously. Even though it's all gonna be okay and life is intense, so another day in Earth school, that perspective is like, what are you learning today in Earth School? What are you learning at this moment? And how does your unique lens and your unique curiosity and curation, how can it lead to transform your thought listenership into thought leadership? That's all I got for you here today. Am I the expert on becoming a Thought leader. Of course not. But this is what helps me. This is what gives me confidence. And that's why I'm sharing it with all of you to make that transition when I'm ready, from just a mode of listening and collecting and curating to having the courage to raise my hand and say, okay, I think I have something to share over here. Because I can tell you that, and I did share this in Pivot, that for the people who are more intelligent, it's called Dunning Kruger Syndrome. The more intelligent you are, the less you think you know, the less confident you feel because you're aware of how much you don't know and that people who are actually ranked lower in intelligence tend to rate themselves more highly. If you know this about yourself, if you're that type kind of like me, where it does take you building up a lot of courage and a lot of kind of ammo is not the right word, but a lot of building your bench of information and data and stories and experience in order to share. Great. You can just say, of course I still feel, of course I still have an imposter monster sitting next to me. And also, if you can try on this notion of thought listenership, maybe it frees you a little bit from having to be the end all, be all world's most foremost expert on whatever it is that interests you. And instead, if you can come to people with a little bit of humility and owning, of course you should own the things that you can own and that you feel genuinely super confident in and that there's no doubt that you are an expert in certain things. I'm not trying to take that away from you or from anyone. I'm just also I will end, as we end every episode on this permission that you have permission to be curious, to let your curiosity lead you to be a thought listener long before you ever transform that into being a thought leader.
Have a beautiful rest of your day, everybody. Thank you so much for being here listening. If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show, and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.
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