123: Peeking Out from the Plateau — My Latest Pivots (and Why Plateaus Actually Signal Progress!)

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the only Move that Matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello my long lost friends. Did you miss me? I ended up taking an unexpected, oh, I don't know, six month hiatus from publishing this podcast. But don't worry, it was for very exciting reasons that I'm going to share more about in a minute and I'm even more thrilled to be back in action, more energized than ever. So I hope you stick around and listen to today's show on Peeking out from the Plateau and why plateaus are often a good thing, especially if you're someone I call high net growth. Several very big personal updates and pivots that I haven't shared publicly on social media or anything. But I want all of you insider listeners to know and also what's coming down the pike in business for all of you who are here listening and want other ways to get in touch. Wow, there's so much to say. I'm even a little nervous. Recording this episode is just dusting the rest off of having taken a break before I get into talking about my own plateau of sorts. Although I can't even really call it that because I've been energized in many different ways. I do want to say that I made the decision not to take sponsors for this show. I've thought long and hard about it. It's been over four years of podcasting, often off and on, and I keep debating. It's a lot of work. The life of an episode is about 30 different steps in the process, from start to finish. I really do think that podcasting itself is a full time job, even if you're a solopreneur. If you're adding a podcast, it's like doubling the workload. And so I've been thinking about how do I make it sustainable. But I just do not feel right about hawking random products on this, even if I believe in them or could get myself toward believing in them. I really don't want to be selling mattresses and meal boxes and this kind of thing. I'm just not interested and I don't want to spend the time. Even when I was considering a sponsor at one point, I remember changing ever so slightly my release schedule, the topics and wanting to kind of please them. That's not what I'm about here. I want to only share with you the things that are from my heart, from my soul, from that I really believe in. And I don't want to be paid to say anything that I don't want to say. So for that reason I am going to pivot slightly. I was doing Patreon for a while but I want to make things even simpler so I'm micro pivoting to a listener supported model and I would really love your vote of confidence and if you believe in the show, if you've gotten value from this show and want to keep supporting it into the future, you certainly don't have to donate anything. But if you do, I would be extremely grate. And in return I'm going to do a monthly Q and A call that's private, just for Pivot Podcast Insiders. This is already something I do every two weeks for Momentum, my private community for side hustlers and solopreneurs and it's my favorite thing in my business. We have so much fun on these calls. I really love them and I really love building a more tight knit relationship. Because as much as I love being here and talking out to all of you, I can't see you, I can't hear you, I can't know what follow up questions are on your mind. If you're interested in supporting the show, you can visit pivotmethod.cominsider and again, you'll get a monthly private Q and A call with me. You can ask questions in advance even if you can't make it live. And you'll get all the recordings as well as archives as we build up the Pivot Podcast Insider archive. And I also want to give away a Pivot Mastermind toolkit as a bonus as a thank you for being part of the Round two founders. We did Patreon for a while, but there was just too many bells and whistles and it added complexity. That's not the goal here. This is $8 a month. You'll get a Pivot Mastermind Toolkit to launch either a pop up Pivot Mastermind for three months with a small group of friends or in an ongoing way. And I'll give you facilitator guides and toolkit and even an audio to kickstart some tips for leading a Mastermind. So that's@pivotmethod.com insider. Thank you so much in advance. And I know it's a little weird to put that out there right when I'm just restarting the show and you haven't heard from you for six months, but that's what brings me into today's topics. So I'm going to share some personal updates. And also part of my pseudo plateau is rethinking how I can make things more sustainable moving forward and how do I do the things that I love without getting bogged down by the details or the shoulds or how things need to be done in a way that just isn't sustainable. Okay, first, personal updates. I can't even believe I'm saying this out loud. In November of 2018, I got married to my love, Michael. He and I met walking down the street in opposite directions during my year of serendipity, might I add. It was 2016. Pivot was coming out in a couple months. I was wearing a pair of overalls and he was walking with a friend looking to buy some overalls. I think he just didn't realize he was looking for a girl in overalls. So he complimented me. We crossed and in that moment, truly, the universe spun on its axis. I turned back, I said thank you. He and his friend turned back. We're yelling halfway down the street and the rest is history. So we got married. Tiny little city hall ceremony. As I said, it's not even on social media, so if you go to my Facebook page, you won't see anything about it. And actually it's been so not only so us to do it that way, but kind of fun because every time we tell someone, maybe with the exception of this podcast, we're telling them live, one on one, in person, and we get their real IRL reaction, not just a like button. So that's my big news, you guys. I'm a married woman now, which is really crazy. I'm 35 for inquiring minds. I turned 36 in October 2019 and I had just, I was pretty sure I was never going to get married because at a certain point you got to think, you know, nothing is guaranteed in this life and maybe that's just not my path. Maybe I'm not cut out for marriage. And although that thought made me Sad in my 20s, there came a point where I realized, all right, I'm not going to lose sleep over this. I'm not going to feel bad about myself. I'm going to embrace it. And I do love spending time alone, for sure, but it's also been really joyful. So during my first semester at Union, I was adjusting to four classes. I was also taking theological French to try to pass a language requirement. I was rapidly preparing for this quick, not quick, but quickly planned. We didn't do any rigmarole. I was never unfianced, I was never a fiance. We just were preparing for the City hall ceremony and had a beautiful, delightful day and then taking vinyls and buying a house in New York. So that was another. I mean, I can't say it's a house, it's a condo, let's not get it twisted. It's still New York City. But I lived in the same apartment building for seven years. Michael and I both work from home. As I mentioned, he's an artist and we were both working from home from a studio apartment for two years. The fact that we didn't kill each other, we didn't lose our minds, we made it work for two years. But at a certain point, it was time to spread out a little bit. So school, getting married, buying the house, and then in the new year, I was starting second semester and we were moving into the new place and I just hit this point where I could no longer juggle all those balls in the air. There was no way. And on top of all of that, I was still maintaining my business. Not only the podcast, the newsletter, but even more importantly, the client work that pays the bills. I make a good majority of my income. On keynote speaking. I deliver two main workshops, pivot for individuals, oftentimes within companies, teaching people how to pivot and map their growth even within their current role. And then I also teach managers how to get better at holding one on one career conversations. So I was flying around, working with clients, getting ready for trainings. I even did one of my first, not my very first, but an early version of Pivot Train the Trainer, where I was training a group of 30 trainers within an organization to carry the material on even past my ability to be there in person. So this was. It was a lot. There was so much going on and so many big life changes between getting married and moving and making all these decisions together. It was so intense. One of the first things I did was give Myself permission not to send a newsletter that week. Who knows, list those sometime in February. And I gave myself permission not to record a new podcast episode. I started giving myself these permissions. And then I also hit this crucial decision point around school. So the TLDR version, the too long, didn't read or didn't listen is I also took a leave of absence from Union. As many of you longtime listeners know, I had put myself in the path of pivot. There's a whole episode on my choice to apply and get into seminary and start a master's degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. I was halfway into my second semester and I have to say, really, really loving the material, the books, the professors. There was so much brain food in that program. It was really, really intense. I was doing a full time master's while full time running my business, while full time adjusting to getting married and setting up a new home. And so I just started to question, well, is this the right thing and is it the right thing right now? I was studying Interreligious Engagement and had really interesting classes, actually. Second semester, Double Belonging and Spiritual Fluidity. I had one on Socially Engaged Buddhism and then another on Mark and Healing. As I started to question, part of what was happening was I would come home at the end of school days. I stacked my classes so that I could do meetings and coaching calls. The other days of the week, I would come home kind of drained, not kind of really drained at the end of the day. And part of it was the culture and the environment. It was really intense. And part of it was I was just getting really tired that even if I made it all work first semester, I hadn't yet figured out how to get it all to a sustainable place moving forward. I was trying to give myself time to do that, but I just hadn't cracked the nut yet. So there was this distinct weekend where I remember thinking, what do I do? I'm approaching the halfway point in the semester. It's not too late for me to at least get a partial refund on my tuition. Otherwise, if I cross to the halfway mark, there was no refund on tuition. So I pulled the Tosha Silver, something I've learned from her, and I surrendered it. I just said, universe, I surrender this to you. Show me a sign. I'm stuck. I don't know what to do here. I don't know what the right thing is. And I let it go. 24 hours later, I had two of my biggest corporate clients email me. Five training dates had come through. So within 24 hours of me putting out this decision and asking for to be shown, asking for guidance, I had five training dates. All of a sudden, that made the answer so clear. I needed to pause school, go on leave. And these five dates, not all of them overlapped with the semester, but many of them did. And I already had one professor who was saying, if you miss even one more class, I'm going to have to drop you. And I had already missed one for an in person training gig that was even international. I was like flying back early from Paris the first semester just to get to class. My teachers don't know how much wine and cheese I gave up for them. But anyway, these five gigs came through. I decided to take a leave. And I did. And immediately I felt huge relief. That's all I can say. Immediately I felt such relief. And I didn't know, you know, I think you never really know right away if you're doing the right thing. Or maybe you do know. You'll see. There's a. There's a. Penny Pierce and I are doing four more episodes coming up and so we actually are going to talk about how do you understand intuition and make the decision that's right for you in any given moment? So definitely subscribe to the show if you're not already. But I felt bad, you know, I felt like I'm not a quitter. I don't quit things. Halfway through not only my master's degree, but even the semester I did six weeks of work, really sweat over six weeks of a ton of essays and writing and I wasn't going to finish. That was really strange. And I also felt accountable to all of you and everyone that I had shared the news with. There were so many people that were really excited when I told them that I was going to seminary school. And I, I felt bad about that to an extent. But on the other hand, I knew that this is what needs to happen right now because I had been building toward this level of momentum in my business for 10 years. I started my first website, Life after college in 2005 and it became a blog in 2007. So that's even. That is 12 years ago. And I left Google. We're right around my 8solopreneuriversary. So this was all converging at the same time. And I thought surely that as soon as I went on leave from school, I'd get right back into the saddle and start doing podcasts and newsletters again. But there was a lot of resistance there too. For some reason at that Moment in time. Something about the podcast was feeling like a shit and it wasn't sparking joy. Now, before you misinterpret that, I love this show. I love all of you for being here, listening. I love my guest and I really love the podcast. It has been the most priceless gift these last four years. But there was something that needed to shift because as I mentioned at the beginning, it just wasn't set up in the most streamlined, sustainable way. So I just let myself be at this plateau, at least let's call it a public facing plateau. And I talk in Pivot, the book, about heading plateaus and pivot points, and that it's not a bad thing. Hitting a plateau or a pivot point is not a problem. It is not a personal shortcoming. It's almost always a sign that you've outgrown your previous career incarnation or set of projects. So in my case, this plateau was also really kicking off a big business renaissance. I started to get this rush of energy coming in. Marisol and I started redesigning her role. We started documenting all of our systems, all of my operating philosophy, how I make decisions in my business, all of our automations. And we realized we wanted to bring on one or two more team members as well. So in saying no, there's this John Maxwell quote, say no to the good so you can say yes to the best. And I've had that. I've known that quote for a long time. But this was really one of those cases where in saying no and freeing up time and more importantly, energy, I started to get this surge of momentum again. And of course, this is why I named the private community Momentum. I think that at the end of the day, momentum is what we're really after. There's no there, there. Any one of you who listen to this show, you're on board with that. You know that this moment right now, this is what we have. And that learning and growing and making an impact is as important as any end result, as any launch moment, as any accomplishment that gets frozen in time. It's really a sense of forward momentum that we're after. And doing that with a sense of fun, freedom and flow. Those are my metrics for business success. It is not just about the money. It's really, money is so secondary to me to am I having fun? Am I following the flow of what I'm meant to do, and am I working in a flow state where I'm super energized and am I experiencing greater and greater freedom in my business? Because those of you who have a side hustle or your own small business. It's not meant to feel like an albatross. I often when I'm coaching clients, I'm often telling them, don't think that you're just going to quit your job and start your own business and all of a sudden everything is sunshine and rainbows. If you don't address your boundaries and your values and how you define success and freedom, you are going to become that boss in your own business. It's very, very easy to recreate the patterns of shoulds and stuckness that you experience working for someone else while working for yourself. There is no law that says just because you quit means you suddenly know how to be the best possible human being. Really. Penny and I are going to get into this on the next few episodes coming up, but I think there's so much wrong, actually, with the way that we work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, 9 to 6, 9 to 9. It's such a construct. It has nothing to do with our actual energy, our bodies, how we're most energized when our energy peaks and drops during the day. It has nothing to do with it. Side note, I just read the book it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work by the founders of Basecamp and it is so, so, so good. So I will put that in the show notes. You can get the show notes@pivotmethod.com 123 that's kind of cool. I like that this episode is 1, 2, 3. I'm back. Anyway, it doesn't have to be Crazy at Work is so good. Highly recommend. And I highly recommend just rethinking assumptions about how things need to be done. That's what I'm right in the thick of. I'm calling. I'm nicknaming this JB 3.0. Even Momo 3.0. We call Momentum the members. We call it momo for short. Momo 3.0. This is about saying, okay, I'm going to walk you exactly through the pivot method. The four stages boil down to what's working, what does success look like a year from now? What's out there, which includes people skills and projects, and what can I try? So although I took a much longer hiatus than I was planning, I really needed that time. I started rereading all kinds of business books, things I just hadn't been interested in in years. Binging on business podcasts like Beautiful Minding in My Notebook and Google Docs and creating strategy presentations for my team and documents. And I have now a nine page document on my operating philosophy on how I believe in running business. And it doesn't just include agile development principles. It includes things like go with the flow of energy, read the signs, always aim for the highest good for all. Invol Really a blend of those two things and it's been so fun I can't tell you. I love building my small business. I'm starting to call it Solo Pluspreneur because if I say solopreneur much of the time of these last eight years I was but increasingly, I mean Marisol has been with me for five years. We met when she was still a junior at Yale. And it's not that solo or at least it's solo. Plus, I still don't have anybody on the team full time, but I'm super excited to be welcoming longtime Momentum member and JV advocate. She even hired me to speak for Life After College prior to joining Momentum. Stephanie Houston. She's now launching out onto her own journey into solopreneurship and then a really wonderful woman named Brenna who's coming on to help with podcast production and who knows, maybe even expanding beyond. But so far this is really fun to have a tight knit team and I'm also upgrading online services that we're using, so starting to use Zendesk for ticketing and possibly a new platform for hosting courses. And I'm just it's just time for a refresh. So although plateau tends to have a negative connotation and certainly it looked like a plateau if not just Mia. In fact, I'm very sorry to have ghosted all of you. I didn't do it on purpose. I really thought the break would be much shorter, but it wasn't a plateau on the inside. So I think that's what's interesting. There's a difference between a rut where you just have no energy at all and you're drained and you're burnt out, and then a plateau where you just kind of hit the wall on something or need to pivot. I mean, this is why I wrote Pivot, because I knew that for the rest of time I could hang my hat on exploring change and how do we get better at navigating the change process. With that, I'm very excited to share what's coming up on the podcast. One of my goals is getting more becoming more strategic about planning content, mapping it out, possibly even batching interviews to one or two weeks in each quarter just so that I can move those episodes through their 30 step journey in a more consistent way. And of course, the end result as well is to get you more consistency. It's not ideal, although I'm giving myself permission and saying it's okay to take breaks when you need them, even without explanation or knowing when they're going to end. It's not ideal. Of course. I don't want to just ghost on you every time. You know, it's really comes back to a mantra that I have. Stress is a systems problem. And in fact, now the more I work in social justice spaces, that can be meant in two ways. I mean, stress is a systems problem, as in, we're actually all part of systems, huge systems and invisible systems, invisible privilege. That's for another show. But on a personal level, on a small business level, stress is usually a systems problem. That so much of the time, if it's not a total misalignment and you generally like what you're doing, it's a sign that, okay, there's room to shift a little bit and say, what's energizing me? What's draining me? And of the drainers, which. I got that language from my friend Josh Allen Dykstra. I just got certified in a new instrument called Strength Scope. That's really cool. We'll have to do another show on that. And there's a workshop on it in momentum for any of you who want to join us there. But you can look at your drainers, and for any drainer, ask yourself, what do I need to do? Or most want to do? What can I drop? Nobody needs to do it. What can I delegate and what can I automate? Marisol and I had some very fruitful discussions about designing her role, looking at what it's going to look like for the next year, now that she has five beautiful years that I'm so grateful for under her belt with working with me. And in designing her role, there was some stuff that we decided to move off. And always those conversations lead to insights and innovations for us around automating and getting even better and more tightly honed in our systems. Because my goal with anybody on my team is I don't want anyone doing work that drains them. Maybe there's an 80, 20, you know, maybe we're all doing. Hopefully 80% that gets you in the zone and that you love. And 20%, to an extent, might be work that drains you, but you just got to do it. Sometimes email meetings can be that way, but in general, I don't want to force anybody to do work they don't want to do. And if that's the case, we can together get creative about how do we automate this or move it off your plate altogether. And even if we can't answer that right away, solutions do tend to unfold over the weeks and months that follow. Okay, so what's coming up on the podcast? I keep going on tangents. See, that's what happens on these solo episodes because I don't like to script things out. By the way, I am not reading off of a tight script here. I'm mostly riffing. I have some topics that I wrote down, but I'm trying to get better about not being a perfectionist with these solo episodes. I have talked about that in the past. Exactly. About podcasting, but all it does is hold me back. My friend Petra Kolber, we did an episode on her book Perfection Detox. She says at the end of the book, and it was so powerful. She said, the world needs your imperfect voice, not your perfect silence. And that's how I'm showing up here today with my imperfect voice to just get something out there, say hello, and reconnect. All right, what's coming up? I mentioned my beloved friendor mentor and just one of my author heroes, Penny Pierce. We already have seven episodes of the Penny and Jenny Show. You can listen to them@pivotmethod.com PJShow I'll put all of this in the show notes, but we're doing another four. A series of four. So again, subscribe. We're talking about things like navigating liminal space. How do you trust your intuition and make good choices. We're talking about stepping into your power and even shifting common language around abundance and abundance mindset. And we're going to be talking about why is it that we don't step into our full selves? Like, what prevents us from being even more fully ourselves? Definitely tune into that. And I also participated in a really fun inaugural pilot day that James Altucher and his business partners at Stand Up New York put on called Podcast Row. So they invited a group of entrepreneurs and a group of business podcasters to come together for one day at Stand Up New York on the Upper west side. And I interviewed six people that day. So they had all the audio production and they had studios for every podcaster. There was this crazy and amazing grid of interview schedule and it was so fun. I really loved it. I got to interview a whole handful of people for 30 minutes each. Rapid fire. We didn't know too much about each other. That was really great. And so you're going to see some of those episodes coming out. They're a little, they're shorter and punchier and I kind of liked it. There was part of me that felt nervous, how do you say hi to someone and interview them and close it out all in 30 minutes? But it really worked. I might experiment with that a little bit moving forward, and then I'm excited to be connecting with some fellow authors who I don't know personally before knowing about these books. One of them is Ultra Learning by Scott Young and the other one is Indistractable by Nir Eyal. He is the author of Hooked. So that's just a sneak peek of this episode peeking out from the plateau. I also want to bring you more solo shows and most of all, I would love to know what you're interested in. One of my reflections as I was paused on the podcast is what makes this show unique and what can I continue to build for you? I mean, part of it I'm just following my curiosity and my intuition and the guests that I'm most excited to connect with, the books that I geek out on. But I'm always open to your feedback too. I've really, really simplified the listener survey. So if you're willing and you have a few moments, I'm genuinely curious. There are so many podcasts that exist now, certainly way more than four years ago when I was getting started, or four and a half, please let me know. Pivotmethod.com survey what can I bring you? How can I serve? What would be most interesting or just gets you most excited when you see it coming down the pike in your podcast queue? You can also submit a question. So I'm going to try to batch some questions I've already received and do a listener Q and A episode from time to time. So at any time, if you have follow up thoughts or questions on any episode that launches, go to pivotmethod.com ask so those two links, pivotmethod.com survey and pivotmethod.com ask are great ways to truly make your voice heard and give feedback and be part of creating the show. Because I'm here with and for and side by side, all of you. Finally, I did mention momentum. That's my private community for side hustlers and solopreneurs. We are making major changes. It's only going to get better and better. You can sign up and or join the wait list. It may be in waitlist mode by the time you get there, which means we're really close to another exciting relaunch. And always, always I give people who are on the wait list the best possible deal because I'm grateful. Anybody showing interest even early on, it means something to me and it motivates and it encourages me and hopefully for you too. So go to pivotmethod.com Momentum and if you want to be a beautiful benefactor of the show and help support this podcast and help support all the nuts and bolts that go into production and keeping it alive, I would be so grateful. You can visit pivotmethod.cominsider and every bit counts. I'm really so thankful. And you'll get a monthly Q and A call with me, as well as the Pivot Mastermind toolkit. So that's a ton of links for today, but I just wanted to re welcome everybody, reorient everybody, and let you know what to expect. Coming up. I don't think I have to even say, if you're not subscribed, that's a good idea, just so you don't miss a future show. And more than anything, I even decided to stop asking for ratings and reviews because it just seems cumbersome. You're listening. It's just a pain to do that. I would just rather, if there's an episode that you like, either this one or moving forward, share it with a friend. I believe that the best work out there is work that you genuinely want to send to someone. I don't have to ask you, I don't have to tell you, I don't have to trade you. You can just say, hey, this was really good. And maybe one or two people come to mind who, you know, could benefit. I am one of those people that does subscribe to. If you build it, they will come. I think it's gotten a bad rap recently, at least in the online marketing world. It's like, no, you have to build it and then tweet about it and then post it on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and then they'll come. That's not my style. So if you like what's here and you want to share it, I'm always grateful. Thanks again, everybody for being here, for sticking around. If you're listening to this episode, it means you did not unsubscribe just because you saw that I was on a break. So I really appreciate that and I want to keep bringing you the best show that I possibly can. Thank you so much, everybody, and I will see you on the interwebs pivotmethod.com survey. If you want to tell me some quick thoughts and pivotmethod.com Insider will give you access to that free monthly. Well, it won't be free because you'll be supporting the show, but the monthly Q and A call with me. And again, you can submit questions in advance and listen to the recording so there's no pressure to have to make it live. You're amazing. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening and I wish you all the best and a feeling of wind flying through your hair as you experience forward momentum, fun, freedom and flow on everything that you're working on right now. Thank you everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblazer.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.