196: Agile Public Original Thinking

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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 Pivot. 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.

Today's podcast short is a listener submitted question from Kirsten who's asking about the impulse and call to serve, even without waiting for all of her systems to be set up.

Hi, this is Kirsten. I came across you with the Dori Clark webcast last week and I really enjoyed your message and I wanted to thank you for your authenticity and how you shared your experiences and how vulnerable you were being. I really enjoyed that part and so I signed up for your newsletter and I'm really excited to be on it. My situation is that I started Pivoting last year towards entrepreneurship, starting up an emotional intelligence coaching and consulting business. So I currently was working on website, getting all the systems up, writing content, started to engage with some potential customers. But then the pandemic hit and so now I feel this strong urge for writing content, for sharing ideas. But I don't have any systems up yet. So my question is how could I get my message out there and help people not even thinking about business, just you know, with emotional intelligence. It's so needed these days and I have some ideas on resilience and how and I would like to share this with people to help them. So the question is how can I do this quickly without having to think too much about systems and yeah, just spread the word and help people get through this hard time.

Thank you for submitting this great question, Karesten. I love your desire to serve and I love your impulse to just start somewhere without waiting for all the perfect systems to be set up. You're absolutely right. The first thing I recommend, if you feel the call to support others in some way, just start writing first and foremost, no matter where you end up publishing, no matter what systems you end up using or platforms. You gotta write it down and there's no better time to capture what you're noticing, observing learning challenges you're facing, even around emotional intelligence for yourself or others than right now. I often tell people think of yourself as patient zero. Whatever it is you're passionate about, however you want to serve others, you are in this front row seat right now. So track yourself, track your day to day journal. Maybe you do even freehand writing every day. There's a book called the Artist's Way that talks about morning pages, three pages freehand, just totally whatever comes to your mind in that moment. Of course I also hear in your question the desire to get this out into the world. So I'll share a couple options that I think are relatively quick and would help you get the word out. Before I get to that, I would also suggest figuring out who do you feel most passionate about serving during this time. So we know the high level umbrella topic is emotional intelligence. Who in particular needs this most? Who is struggling the most? Who do you feel most called to serve? With so many topics, especially this one, you're not going to win over everybody. And not everybody necessarily even has the self awareness to know that they need to hear from you during this time. Who do you want to serve? What are their unique challenges and also what's your unique lens? Emotional intelligence is a big subject area. So what is it about your story, your upbringing, your background, your expertise, your inner landscape of feelings and emotions the that gives you something unique to bring to the conversation. Let's say you've figured all this out, especially if you're following Dori Clark in her work. She is so wonderful. And by the way, Dori has a great course called Rapid Content Creation that I highly recommend. If you're looking for even more support around not just writing quickly, but even pitching to high profile publications, one of the quickest ways that you can get articles out would be signing up for a platform like medium. So medium.com is a good kind of marketplace of open articles. You don't have to get approval from anybody in order to post there. I personally at a minimum would recommend a Squarespace website. I used to be on WordPress. I wrote on Medium. About that time I lit 10 grand on fire. This was back in 2016 and I paid for this big expensive Upgrade to my WordPress sites and then scrapped them all and built three websites in Squarespace over the course of a weekend. If you create a very simple Squarespace website, you can have a landing page, you can have I Highly recommend a newsletter capture. You can set up pop ups and you can create a very simple blog where you can start posting your articles and your thoughts publicly. This is what I call public original thinking. I think it's a great idea to get in the habit of thinking out loud or, or thinking to yourself and then synthesizing what you're noticing and hitting publish, making yourself discoverable. And you seem to have that urge and that calling as well, which is awesome. Of course, once you post an article or create something like a podcast, which you could do too in a very scrappy way, that's how this podcast started. Then you could chop it up into key takeaways or tweetables and spread that on social media. So you could post on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter. Depends where you enjoy hanging out most often. Depending on what formats you enjoy the most, maybe you want to do a Facebook Live or LinkedIn. Now they're piloting their LinkedIn Live feature, which is the workshop you saw with me and Dori the other day and everybody. I'll link to that in the show notes because I also published it here on the podcast. Sometimes when you're starting out, I know it can feel overwhelming. There's all these things to do and. And like you noted systems that you could set up and then it also feels sometimes like you're speaking into the void. Is anybody listening? In the beginning they might not be and that's okay. There is still so much value in understanding what you think and how you think and getting into the habit of expressing that publicly that just start and let momentum build slowly from there. You might want to get in a habit of posting one article a week just to challenge yourself to think of something. Seth Godin has a blog post that's called Nobody Gets Talker's Block. He writes every day. He sends a message to his list. Maybe you want to do that. Something short and sweet. Think about who you enjoy listening to, what articles and newsletters you most enjoy reading and receiving, and you can start to take inspiration. What is it you like about those? Is it that they're short and sweet and thought provoking? Is it that they provide a lot of helpful resources and recommendations? Or is it something else altogether? Eventually, when you are ready to take that next step. I mentioned earlier having a newsletter list. This is crucial because if you only have a website, you really never get to interact with anybody stopping by. I use the analogy of a shopping mall stopping by your storefront. They just look in the window and keep moving. Having an email list or newsletter is starting to build a relationship. It's as if you've welcomed them into your store and now you get to send them your catalog of offerings at regular intervals. Newsletter the word itself sounds very boring, but it doesn't have to be. So if you go to you can see some examples of my Pivot list newsletter@pivotmethod.com pivotlist posts and I'm just starting to post these publicly because otherwise they get lost in people's inboxes and maybe some of you who aren't yet subscribed can look at them and see if you want to receive Pivot List moving forward. I like naming the newsletter something because it's more interesting again than just calling it Please sign up for my newsletter that doesn't have the what's in it for me? Of your potential future readers and community.

This is a more advanced piece of software, but the 1next system or software that I would recommend after setting up a basic website on Squarespace and using the blog feature is Kajabi. I made the transition to Kajabi in 2019. It is a wonderful all in one platform where you can host your email list, courses that you create, sales pages, registration for webinars or events, and a whole lot more. You can even create affiliate programs. There's a lot that it can do. A lot of that may be more sophisticated than you need right now, but it's the kind of platform that can grow with you. So I'll put the link to that in the show notes. You could even check out an example, the free course that I created called Free Up Founder Time. Just go to pivotmethod.com FFT and you'll see it's really easy. So you could even think about once you're really clear on who you're trying to serve, how and what your unique lens is. Maybe you want to create something similar. A free mini course, something that adds value. You said it. You are just interested right now and how can you serve business aside, and I personally feel that's the right thing right now. We are all letting the dust settle a little bit on this last crazy month. Almost a month and a half. So I am with you. It's a time for deep listening, learning, reflecting and rapid content creation. Because if you wait for everything to be perfect like you hinted at, the world is going to keep changing and it's changing right now faster than ever. Another way to get content out for people is doing something like this podcast or what Dory did on the LinkedIn live, you can. You could interview experts on the subject. You may be an expert in your own right, which is awesome. And it's a way to quickly build up content and expertise while serving all involved. That's one of my favorite things about podcasting, is that when I find somebody that I admire or a book I love, I get to write to that author and invite them to be on the show, even if I've never met them. And what I'm offering to them is facilitating some of their public original thinking by me getting curious, asking questions. We record that conversation and then release it back out into the world. So ideally it serves them too, because that conversation is not just lost behind the scenes. A recent example is episode 195 of the Pivot Podcast with Bishop William Swing. Here was somebody who my brother met serendipitously on a sidewalk waiting for a store to open, and next thing I know he texted me a photo of Bishop Williams business card and I said, instead of saying let's have a networking call, I just invited him directly to the Pivot podcast. So episode 185@pivotmethod.com 195 was the first time we ever spoke, but lo and behold, it was a great conversation. He's a fascinating person. It's recorded and saved and documented now publicly, which is pretty cool when you think about it. Now, I will say that doing an official formal podcast is a lot of work. There's a lot of moving parts. If you want to learn more about how I set mine up and still do that in an agile way with smart systems and templates, I encourage you to take the heart of podcasting course. You can find that@pivotmethod.com heart at a very minimum. Even if you're not going to do all the fancy editing and the intro and the outro music, you could still go on Skype or Zoom, hit record. You should have a good mic. That's kind of a requirement these days, and then release it to SoundCloud, for example. SoundCloud allows others to embed those files. Or you can embed them. You can create a SoundCloud playlist. You don't have to have a podcast for the rest of time, but maybe you do an album. 10 episodes, 15 episodes. It's a pilot and see how it goes. The mic I recommend is the Blue Yeti. I don't have that one, but many people do. It's relatively inexpensive, so a good mic is a requirement there. But if you listen to the very first episode of the Pivot Podcast. There is no fancy intro and outro music. Or if there is now, it's because I added it later. I would also start Whether you're writing or speaking, start by imagining real people in your life. So for example, I happen to know that my sister in law Jill, love her dearly, listens to the Pivot podcast from time to time. Or another friend of mine, certain friends that will text. In a way, if those were the only people that listened, I would be grateful and I would keep going. And it makes those episodes if just one person writes to me and says they got something out of it, it makes the entire thing worth it. Same thing with the LinkedIn Live with Dori Clark. You were someone who actually took the time and effort to reach out, leave feedback and even ask a follow up question. Amazing. It makes me so happy that I took that time with Dori, which I'm always happy to spend time with her and release it publicly. So when you're starting, sometimes people almost water down their message by trying to write for everybody. I encourage you to invite people in your life, your actual life, who you think could benefit from what you're sharing and write directly to them that will give it a more personal voice. And even what you mentioned at the beginning of your question of being authentic. I always like to check in before I create any piece of content and say what is most true for me today. So not only do you have your expert hat on and even your listening hat, listening to the people who you feel most passionate about educating and teaching and inspiring and then also your truth telling hat. Nobody's perfect. So what's true for you today? What can you share today that even if people don't learn something in the traditional sense of the word, they can relate or they feel comforted or they feel relieved, or they feel they have a new sense of permission that they didn't previously have. So the last resource I'd recommend if you are going to create a mini course is my rapid prototyping lesson. You can go to pivotmethod.com rapidprototype and you'll see how I recommend really quickly creating something like a course without spending so much time that it becomes instantly obsolete. Thank you so much Kirsten. I hope you found this helpful and I welcome follow up questions from you or anyone else anytime. You can just leave me a message@pivotmethod.com ask happy writing.

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 podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny Blake.

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