Podcasts about so jessica

TJ loves to tell "Dad Jokes"...but like most Dad Jokes, they are all TERRIBLE!!! So Jessica stepped in with some epic jokes to help TJ out! Not sure it really helped! Photo Cred: Saga Comm

02:28 - Jonan’s Superpower: Jonan’s Friends * The Quality and Reliability of One’s Personal Network * Finding Community * The Ruby Community in Particular – Focus on People and Programmer Joy * Happy Birthday, Ruby (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)! 09:07 - How Developer Relations is Changing (DevRel) * Kicking Off New Relic (https://newrelic.com/)’s New Developer Relations Program * Outreach and Community Growth Value * Developing Developer Empathy & Adjusting Content in the Spirit of Play * The Correct Role of DevRel 22:41 - Doing DevRel Right * Feedback Loops * The Definition of Success 31:45 - Engaging with Communities & Networks via DevRel * Using Twitch, YouTube, Discord, TikTok, Twitter, etc. * Consider the Platform * The Relicans (https://www.therelicans.com/) * Emily Kager's TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@shmemmmy?lang=en) * @theannalytical (https://twitter.com/theannalytical) * @cassidoo (https://twitter.com/cassidoo) * @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) 40:22 - Internal DevRel * Content Review Meetings * Make Friends w/ Marketing/Internal Communications (Comms) * Be Loud & Overcommunicate 53:32 - Addressing Trauma & The Evil in the World “I respect facts but I live in impressions.” In The Mouth of Madness (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113409/) Reflections: Mando: We are who we spend time with. Rein: If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and experiences. Jess: If it works, it’s going to be obvious it works. Jonan: Talking about the things that suck and talking about who you are in a real way. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JONAN: Welcome back to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 227. I am Jonan Scheffler and I'm joined today by my guest, Jessica Kerr. How are you, Jessica? JESSICA: Thank you, Jonan. Well, I’m great today because I get to be here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Aw thanks, Jessica. And I'm here with my friend, Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, Rein and just to bring it back around, I'm here with my friend, Jonan Scheffler. Jonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic. He has a long history of breaking things in public and occasionally putting them back together again. His interest in physical computing often leads him to experiment with robotics and microelectronics, although his professional experience is more closely tied to cloud services and modern application development. In order to break things more effectively, he is particularly excited about observability as of late, and he’s committed to helping developers around the world live happier lives by showing them how to keep their apps and their dreams alive through the night. Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jonan. How are you doing today, bud? JONAN: I am great. I liked the part where I got to intro your podcast. That was a lot of fun, actually. MANDO: It was fantastic, man. JONAN: This bio, this guest sounds really interesting, if I would be permitted to say so myself as the guest. MANDO: So we like to start off every podcast with our normal question that we ask every guest, which is, what is your superpower, Jonan and how did you acquire it? JONAN: My superpower is my friends. They are my superpower and I acquired them after a long career in software and talking to a lot of humans. I don't know actually why, but it's been easy for me to make friends in software. I felt like early on, I found my people and then I just got lucky and it's going okay so far. I'm very fortunate to have them. MANDO: Well, we're fortunate to have you, bud. It's interesting that you say this, I mean, just like Slack for operators, DevOps folks, and Savvy folks, there’s been a lot of discussion as of late on the quality and reliability of one's personal network in things like finding new jobs, finding new opportunities, learning and growing in your career, and stuff like that. It’s been interesting for me personally, because my experience, Jonan sounds a lot more like yours. I was very lucky to find some strong communities of folks that were very welcoming to me. I found my people pretty early on, but a lot of the folks in this other community that I'm tangentially related to seem to have had wildly different experience. I don't know if it's like a software development versus operator kind of thing and in-person versus not in-person kind of thing. It's something that struck me as weird. JONAN: I think it varies by community, too. I've gone to a lot of conferences for a lot of different languages and depending on the conference and depending on the community, I think that you're going to have a different time. I think if I were starting over again, I would probably follow about the same path—attend small conferences with tight focuses and get to know a couple people early on who seem to be having a lot of those conversations, watch for a social butterfly and tag along for a bit and you'll get introduced. MANDO: I'm pretty sure that I met Rein at a local Ruby conference here in Austin. Is that right, Rein? REIN: Sounds right. Sure, yeah. MANDO: But I think it was one of the first Lone Star Ruby Conferences where we met. REIN: Yeah, that sounds right. JONAN: Yeah. I think speaking of butterflies, I also met Rein, I think at one of the very first conferences I attended back in the day. Being welcomed and seeing the application of the Pac-Man rule, where when standing in a circle, you always leave a space for a guest to join and someone joins and you open up again in-person back in the Ruby community in that day was, I think inspiring for me; directed how I decided I was going to be when I showed up here. So thank you, Rein. REIN: It's funny. I remember when I was new to the Ruby community and not sure what to do. I was new to programming, too. I started going to the local Austin meetup actually and the welcome I got as someone who didn't go to college for computer science, someone who wasn't a professional programmer, someone who was just thought it was cool and thought maybe that I could get paid to do it at some point in the future really made a big difference in my life. JONAN: Jessica, how did you get started? JESSICA: Good question. Before I answer it, I noticed that we're talking about Ruby conferences and Ruby programmers and indeed, I learned Ruby in order to go to Ruby conferences so that I could talk to Ruby people because part of the superpowers that that language gives you is friends or buds back in the day, but still is because the Ruby conferences are still super friendly back when we had them. REIN: Yeah. MANDO: Yeah, that's a really good point. I was a professional programmer for probably 5, or 6 years before I started doing Ruby programming. I would say that for those first 5, or 6 years, before I joined the Ruby community, I didn't feel at all like I had any kind of community or group of people. JONAN: What do you think inspires that in a community? I think strong leadership is part of it. Matt has certainly received his share of criticism over the year, but I think that fundamentally, he was trying to build a place where people focused on people instead of the glyphs that we type into our little boxes. I think that matters. What else do you think there is to that? REIN: We here at Greater Than Code also agree with that sentiment. [laughter] JONAN: Seems to align, doesn't it? JESSICA: Yeah, that focus on people and Ruby was always about programmer joy. It was always about the experience; it was always about being happy and there wasn’t that expectation that the optimal thing to do is to go in a corner and type. JONAN: Yeah, I think it's very fortuitous timing that we're actually discussing Ruby so much on the 24th, which was the day that Ruby was named 28 years ago on February 24th, Ruby became the name of this language. So happy birthday, Ruby. JESSICA: Aw. Yeah, happy [inaudible]. JONAN: It really has changed my life. I have regularly, whenever I've seen Matt at a conference, got up to thank him for my house and my kids' college education. Before I got into software, I did a lot of things, but none of them would have brought me either of those. I spent probably 10 years in factories and hotels and casinos. I was a poker dealer for my last gig before I got into software and the number of opportunities that Ruby opened up for me, I can't as long as I live be too grateful; I'll be paying it forward till I die. JESSICA: Yeah, but not the language it's the community—the people, the friends. JONAN: Yeah, exactly. It's the community. It's the people who welcomed me with open arms and made sure that they were contributing to my growth in a far more altruistic sense than, I think is reasonable to expect. I mean, I had nothing to offer in return except a good conversation and high fives and hugs and they spent their time in their energy taking me around conferences and making sure I met people and it was great. REIN: I remember when you first went to New Relic and you were first thinking about, “Hey, maybe I could do this developer relations thing.” What I remember about that, in addition to your obvious aptitude at talking to people about things, is the help that you got, the advice, the mentorship that you got from your friends in the community. I remember at the time being blown away by that; by how many people were willing to just take an hour of their time to talk to you about what it was like for them as a DevRel and things like that. JONAN: Yeah, and I'm still very fortunate to have those people who have helped me build this team here. When I did the onboarding, I put together an elaborate onboarding process. I was able to hire all ten of the DevRel engineers here at the same time. We spent a week doing improv training and having speakers come in as guests and I was able to invite all of these DevRel leaders from over the years to give a perspective on what DevRel was in their eyes, but it is today and always has been clear to me that I am only here where I am by the grace of the communities that I was lucky enough to join. I wonder if developer relations is changing; if it's at a different place than it was when I started out. I feel like certainly, pandemic times have affected things, but all that aside, the segment of the industry is still pretty small. There are only maybe 10,000 people doing this work around the world. It's hard to believe because we're quite loud, right? [chuckles] We’ve got a lot of stages. You see a lot of us, but there are many of us and I think that the maturity of the discipline, I guess, is progressing. We are developing ways to measure the effectiveness. Being able to prove the value to a company is going to change the game for us in a lot of ways. REIN: Yeah. I would love to talk to you about that at length, [chuckles] but for the purposes of this podcast, let's say that you're someone who wants to start a program at a company that doesn't have directly tangible make numbers go up in a business sense value, but you believe that if you're given the chance to do it, that you can show them the value. How do you get that opportunity? JONAN: That's a really good question. Kicking off a developer relations program is, I think it's the same as building most major initiatives within a company. If you had an idea for a software project that should be undertaken, or a major feature that mattered to you, it's about building allies early and often. Making sure that when you show up in that meeting to have the conversation with the decisionmaker, that nine out of ten people in that meeting already know about the plan. They have already contributed their feedback; they feel ownership of that plan and they're ready to support you so that you have the answer going in. I think the mistake that I made often in my career was walking into that room and just pitching my idea all at once and then all of the questions that come out of that and all of the investigation that is necessary and the vetting appears as though this wasn't a very well-thought-out plan, but getting the people on board in the first place is vitally important. I think also you have a lot of examples to look through. You have a chance to talk about other programs and the success that they've brought, the companies where they started off. It's not a thing that you need to start in a big way. You can put a couple of people on the conference speaking circuit, or a couple of people focusing part of their week on outreach and community growth and see where it takes you. If you start to see the numbers, it becomes a lot easier case to make. REIN: You were talking about how you're excited about being able to make this value more tangible in the future. What do you think is the shift that's happening in DevRel that’s making that possible? JONAN: So I think there are actually kind of a lot of factors here. One is that DevRel had a division almost of method where some people, probably by the leadership of their companies, were convinced that what they should be doing is talking about the product all of the time. You're there to talk about the product and evangelize the product and get people to use the product. That is part of your role, but it shouldn't be, in my opinion, the primary role that you play. You should be there in the community participating. In the same way that Rein stood in that hallway and welcomed me to Ruby, I need to stand in that hallway and welcome newcomers to all the communities of which I'm part and in so doing, build that group of friends and build that understanding of the community and their needs. I develop empathy for the developers using our product and, in the industry, generally and that's invaluable intelligence. I sometimes think of ourselves as these like operatives—we’re undercover marketing operatives out there in the developer world talking to developers and just understanding them and it at one point, took a turn towards, “Well, I'm just going to talk about New Relic all the time,” for example. It feels good to see all that content and see all those talks. However, you're only talking to your existing audience. No one is Googling “what exciting things can I do with New Relic,” “seven awesome New Relic tips.” No one's searching for that. They're out there looking at things that are interesting. They want to click on a link on Twitter that is about some random topic. Running Kubernetes on Raspberry Pis and soldering things to Yoda dolls. That's the kind of stuff that I'm going to click on in my free time and in that spirit of play, that's where I want to be engaged and that's where I want to be engaging people. So I think there was this turn. That's part of it and then in reaction to that, I think that the teams who were doing DevRel well and actually seeking out ways to lift up and support the communities and gather that information for their companies—and yes, certainly talk about their products when the situation warrants it. But I mean, how do you feel about that person who shows up to a conference wearing a New Relic hoodie and a New Relic shirt and a New Relic backpack and says “New Relic,” the first 10 minutes you meet them, a hundred times? But you're like, “Wow, this is a friend who is here for my best interests.” MANDO: Right, or every presentation that they give is 30-minute infomercial for whatever company. JONAN: Yeah. So I think people are headed away from that and in response to that, you saw a lot of success from the people who are doing DevRel well. In addition to that, it's becoming to measure these things in hopefully less creepy ways. We can track the people who show up to anything that we do now. If I have a Twitch stream, I can see how many people were there; Twitch provides good stats for me. I can pull those stats out via an API, I can connect them to my podcasting for the week, I can connect them my blogging for the week, and I can show that my audience is growing over time. So whether or not it is valuable yet, we're building the machine right now. We're finding ways to measure those things and that will allow us to adjust the content in a direction that is popular and that’s really just what we're trying to do. We're trying to give the people what they want. We want to talk about the things that people want to hear about. I want to talk about the fun stuff, too, but I'm very surprised sometimes when I learn that hey, nobody wants to hear about my 3D printer API project with Ruby. They want to watch me solder a Raspberry Pi to a Yoda doll and that's great. I'm down for both of those things, I really don't care. But being able to adjust your content towards the sort of thing that is going to interest your community is really valuable obviously to developer relations and we're getting better at it. We have more data than we've had before and not in a way that, to me, feels like that is violating people's personal privacy. REIN: Where do you think that DevRel ought to fit in a company's structure? Is it part of revenue? Is it a sales adjunct? Like, what is the correct role of DevRel? J: I don't think it's part of revenue. I think that it leads to that. But in developer relations, we talk about orbits a lot instead of funnels. We talk about bringing people into the orbit. You generate content so that you generate gravity and you move people in the orbits closer to the company so, you can talk to them more and help them with their problems. When you tie that to revenue, it changes the goal. Is the goal to be out there and help, or is the goal to get the cogs into the machine and continue turning them until they produce coins? When you tie developer relations to revenue, you become trapped in this cycle because look, we’re hackers. If you give me a number you want me to hit, then I can hit the number. But am I hitting the number in the most useful way? Am I generating long-term value for the company? Almost certainly not. 
 It's like the leader that you bring in. So like, “Hey, revenues are up because I fired customer support. Yes, all of them.” In the short-term, there's going to be some great numbers. You just believe yourself and entire team. Long-term, you’re the new Xfinity with the lowest customer support ratings that have ever existed for a company. So I think that actually the majority live under marketing right now and I think it makes sense. I think that developer relations people do themselves a disservice by not understanding marketing and understanding the role they play there. I actually think it belongs under its own organization. But if you try and think about that means from a corporate hierarchy perspective, that means that there's probably a C-level who is responsible only for community growth and C-levels by design, they have numbers, they have dollars that they are bringing in. So until we get to a point where we can prove that the dollars are coming in because of our work, there's not going to be a chief developer relations officer at any company. But give me 5, 10 years, maybe I'll be the first CDRO. MANDO: It's interesting to hear you. I didn't know that they were usually grouped under marketing, but that sounds right. In my most recent life, I worked at two different companies who did a combination of social media management, analytics platforms, and stuff like that. A majority of our customers at both of these places were in the marketing org and they were hitting the same kinds of things that you're talking about that developer relations groups are hitting. They're trying to provide numbers for the kinds of stuff that they're doing, but there's that inherent, not contradiction, but discord between trying to give customers what they want, but have it also not be infomercials. JONAN: Yeah, and I think that that is a tough spot for DevRel teams. I think no matter where you stand in the organization, you need to be very close friends with marketing. They have a tremendous amplifying effect for the work that I do; what I want to do is produce content and I am uniquely suited to do that. I’m a person who can show up on the podcast and wax philosophical about things like developer relations. I enjoy that. I would like it if that was my whole day. What you need to try and design is a world where it is your whole day. There are people who are better at that than you are; that's why you're there as a team. Your job is to get up and talk about the thing, explain technical concepts in easily digestible ways—a process called vulgarization, I guess, a more commonly used word in French. But I think it's very interesting that we vulgarize things. I mostly just turn things into swear words, but the marketing organization puts a huge amount of wind at your back where I can come onto a podcast and spend an hour talking words and then the podcast is edited, tweets go out, images are made and it's syndicated to all the various platforms. If you can get that machine helping you produce your work in the background, you don't have to know all of the content creation pieces that most of us know. Most of us are part-time video/audio/any content platform, we mostly do it ourselves and taking the support of your organization where you can get it is going to be tremendously helpful in growing the team. REIN: So if you can't tell, this is a personally relevant topic for and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the short-term pressures of there might be for DevRel orgs to produce numbers that the business likes and how you balance that with your long-term vision? What's the story you tell leadership that's effective there? JONAN: That's a really good question. So I talk about this developer orbit as being almost pre-funnel work, that there are people that we have within the company who are real good at turning an email address into a dollar and turning a dollar into 10. There are people who have spent 20 years learning how to do that thing. What I'm really good at is getting people to care in the first place and that's my job here. I describe it sometimes like an awareness campaign in marketing; this is the thing that you put the money on the billboards all over San Francisco and people spend millions and they'll go and get VC events, spend every dollar, making every billboard look like their logo because it works. Because just making people aware whether or not they like the billboard, making people aware that you exist is a first step and I would rather that people complain about our product and complain about our company on Twitter than just not think of us because then you're irrelevant. You're not even part of the conversation. Being able to shift sentiment in the community and being able to hear people, genuinely hear people. It doesn't matter to them, when they're angry on Twitter, that they're factually incorrect. Wrong answer. It's your fault. Show up and just address it, “Hey, that sucks. I hate that. Wow, I'm sorry that happened. Let me see if I can fix it,” and go talk to the product team. So I talk about it in that way as this kind of pre-funnel work. And then I talk about how we are measuring it and where we measure it as a team is this care orbit where we have a curiosity and awareness step that work in tandem, where people either have seen the words New Relic, or they've seen the logo, and this is awareness. Or they are curious and they've actually clicked on a thing; they've actually followed that down the rabbit hole. And sometimes, they may be aware because we sponsored a conference one time; they've seen us, they know that we exist, but they have no idea what we do. So if they are curious, they're getting to a step where they could buy a free word association exercise, connect New Relic and observability, for example. And when they're doing research, I don't think there's a whole lot of interactivity we have there as a team there. When I go and research product – think about how you'd buy a developer product. I hear someone say something three times, tail scale. I've been seeing a lot of conversation about tail scale lately. So I hear someone say tail scale three times and then I think to myself, wow, I should probably care about that thing because it's relevant to my career and I don't want to fall behind. In a couple of years, this may be the thing that everyone is using for whatever it does. I don't even know what it does. I better go figure it out and then I go and I do my research and, in that step, I'm reading documentation and I might have run across a blog post, but I'm certainly not watching webinars. I'm just not going to be in that step. And then there's entry. I say entry instead of sign-up because I just want people close to us. I want them to enter the orbit. I want them to be bought in on the dream of the community and hopefully, we've expressed our values in a way that makes it clear that this is the place for them and we're talking about values and not features of a product. Think about how Apple has been successful. Apple is selling a dream. Apple's throwing a woman throws a sledgehammer through the screen in front of people and that's the dream. That's what you're actually buying is this identity, this tribe. I think companies more often end up creating these bulleted lists of checkmarks. I saw one the other day that was probably 50 items long. Here are the 50 things that we do and look at those 2 checkmarks. Our competitor doesn't have those. Gotcha! I don't care. Prove to me that you value the things that I value. Sell me on the purpose and that's the kind of thing that we're really good about talking about. And if you can demonstrate that in a boardroom, then your program will be fun, but you've got to measure it, you've got to show that people are making progress, and you've got to show growth over time. “See, look, we may not be pointing the megaphone in the right direction right now, but it's growing. We're getting a better megaphone. Is that enough for now?” And then we can direct over time, our contact direction towards the place that is being most successful for us as a company and hey, maybe it's I just talk about New Relic all the time, but I'm willing to bet it won't be and when the time comes, I'll have data to prove it. REIN: In the meantime, how do you know whether what you're doing is working? What are your feedback loops look like? JONAN: My feedback loops, our feedback loops as a team right now, we know what we're doing is working when our total audience size is growing. This is kind of a sketchy metric because there are different values to different audiences. For example, Twitch versus Twitter. If I'm going to follow on Twitter, then I follow on my personal account or I follow on the New Relic account because those both provide a place for me to use my voice to engage people. It's a much lower value engagement platform, though from a one follow perspective. 30,000 people I tweeted in front of, 5 will click or 5 will care about the content and that's great and maybe I'm really good at Twitter. I'm not, if I fail, I don't spend as much time on it as I should, but maybe I can refocus my content. I get more via the platform. If you look at something like Twitch, however, someone follows me on Twitch, that means that every time I go live on my stream, they get a notification on every single one of their devices by default. I mean, you can turn it off, but what's the point in following someone, if you're going to turn off the notification; you want the notification. You're saying, “This is the content that I am here for, watching Jonan solder on this silly thing or teach people how to write Ruby from scratch. That's the stuff I signed up for. That's why I'm here on Twitch and I want to be a part of that.” Those have a kind of a higher value. So there is something to weighted consideration across the platforms. But first of all, is your audience grow, just generally? Are you getting a bigger megaphone and more importantly, how are you doing it and moving people from “I'm aware that you exist” to curiosity, “I'm investigating you”? And that's a step when they're aware they've done something like click on a Twitter profile. It's a hard case to make that if they click on my Twitter profile and they see that it says New Relic, that they will have no idea what New Relic does. I have now at least made it into their brain somehow and they will say, “Oh, I've heard that name before.” But the next step of getting people over to curiosity, let's say that we successfully get 10% of our audience over there and 1% of our total audience size, this quarter actually ended up creating accounts and that's where things get real hard because companies tend to have really entrenched MarTech, measuring marketing technology, measuring, and Google analytics setups. And it's hard to bind that piece together to be like, “That signup? That came from us.” We did that and you need to stand up and say it loudly within a company because everyone else is. Everyone else is real excited to take credit for your work, believe me. You’ve got to stand up and prove it, stand up and say, “DevRel did this. DevRel was growing the company.” We're doing good things for the community. We're helping people understand how to use our product. They're caring more about us because we care about them first and here are the numbers to show it. Did that answer your question? I tend to ramble. REIN: Yeah, no it did. Can we do a thing? Can we do a little improv thing, Jonan? JONAN: Yes. REIN: Okay. So I am a chief revenue officer and I hear your pitch and what I say is, “Okay, so I get the DevRel increases engagement. So how much are you committing to improve conversion? How many percentage points are you guaranteeing that you'll deliver in the next quarter?” JONAN: In the first quarter of our existence, I'm going to go with none. I would say in the second quarter of our existence, we will have developed a baseline to compare against and I can guarantee that we will be growing the audience by 10% month over month, over our previous audience size. As the audience grows, it is very directly correlated to numbers that you care about like, signups. If I talked to a 1,000 people, I get 10 signups. If I talk to 10,000 people, I get a 100 and that's the baseline. I mean, that's just the math of it. And if I'm doing a great job, maybe I get 15. So if we want to actually do the math, give me a quarter to do the math. Give me a quarter to establish a baseline because I don't know where our company stands in the market right now. If I'm starting off here at this company and you're Google, I'm not going to have a hard time raising awareness, am I? I think most people have heard of you. If you're Bob's awesome startup and you don't have any awareness out there, then we have some different things to focus on and our numbers are going to look different. We're have a slower ramp. But if you're asking me to commit to where you are right now, then I need numbers first. I need to be able to build the machine, I need to be able to measure it, and once I have those metrics in place, I can tell you what those goals should be and we can set them together and when we exceed them, we will adjust upwards because we are aggressive by nature. We like to win at these things. We like to be good at it because for us, it means that we're doing a better job of loving our people. That's what success means by the numbers. The numbers that to you mean money. If we're doing DevRel right, to me, they mean that I am living with purpose. So yes, I can measure those things, but you’ve got to give me time to get a baseline, or the numbers that I make up will be meaningless and we'll be optimizing for the wrong things. How'd I do? REIN: I’d buy it for a dollar. JONAN: Yes! Sold! MANDO: Yeah, I believe you. So tangentially related; you talked about Twitter and Twitch as two platforms that you're using to engage with prospective folks and grow and welcome the community. I was wondering if there were other places, other things that you use either personally, or as part of your DevRel work to do that same kind of stuff, or if you have specific types of interactions for specific different types of networks? JONAN: Yeah, absolutely. I had left one of our primary platforms off of there, which was YouTube because we're still headed in a direction where we can make that a lightweight process of contributing our work to YouTube. So our strategy, as a team, is to head for platforms that offer two-way engagement. I think that in our generation, we've got a lot of criticism for being the Nintendo generation. “Oh, you were raised by television; you have no attention span.” I have no attention span for TV news. I have no attention span for this one-way oration that has been media consumption my entire life because I live in a world where I have “choose your own adventure” media. Where I can join a Twitch channel and I can adjust the direction of the conversation. Where I can get on Twitter and have a real conversation with famous people, because I am interesting and engaging and responding to them in intelligent ways, hopefully. When you tweet poop emojis at people in your software community as your only game, it's not as likely to drive engagement, but they're very engaging platforms and so, we're aiming for things like that. YouTube being the possible exception. YouTube is still levelling up there. I'm not sure if you find out on the YouTube comments section lately, but it's a little bit wild in there. It's getting better; they're working on it. And those are the kinds of platforms that I want to be a part of. So as far as new things go, I'm going to go with not Clubhouse. Clubhouse has one, got some accessibility stuff to work out, but two, in my opinion, stuck in a trap where they're headed towards that one-way conversation. Anyway, it may be a conversation like this podcast, which I love doing, but our audience isn't given an opportunity to respond in real-time and to drive the direction. Clubhouse is eventually going to turn into a similar platform where you have a hundred people in a room. Can a hundred people speak at once in the same conversation? I don't think so. So there's the accessibility piece – [overtalk] JESSICA: In text! JONAN: In text, they could. JESSICA: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the combination. REIN: Clubhouse needs to innovate by providing a text version of their application. JONAN: Or when we get NLP, when we get natural language processing to the point where those kinds of things can become accessible conversations automatically, then it's different and people can contribute in their own ways. You can have a realistic sounding robot voice who’d read your thoughts aloud for the group. But beyond those, beyond Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, we're checking out TikTok a little bit, that's kind of fun content. It's a good way for us to reuse clips and highlights from our Twitch stuff without having to go through the old process of creating the new content and similarly, for YouTube. If I get on my high horse and I'm waxing philosophical about why you should use instance variables instead of class variables, I can put that piece out and I can make a YouTube video about why you should use instance variables instead of fostered. That kind of content does well on that platform, but you need to consider the platform and I would say, choose a few and focus there, look for the ones that actually have high engagement. Discord is another good place to hang out, love hanging on Discord. And then you've got to be blogging too, but blog in a place where you can own the conversation and make it about what matters to you as a community. We're real focused on learning and teaching, helping people become content creators, and focusing on the quality of software, generally. We're data people. We want to be talking about that. So we have our own community on therelicans.com where we talk about that. That's just a instance of forum. It's just like dev.to, but we own it and we get to period the content a little bit in a direction that is valuable. You want to keep them loose when you're going in community so that you can let the community take shape as it grows into those values. But that's my recommendation for platforms. MANDO: Right on. Thanks, man. It's funny that you bring up TikTok—not at all related how I've recently fallen down and continuing to fall down the TikTok rabbit hole and out of all the different types of content I see on TikTok, it is tech content that I have seen almost zero of. It’s just like, I don't know if there's just like a dearth of the content or if the algorithm hasn't set stuff up to me. JONAN: Yeah. MANDO: The algorithm is super good about all other kinds of things that I'm super into like, I'm inundated with cute dogs and goats and [laughs] you name it, but I don't know. Maybe the algorithm is telling me something about myself that... JONAN: No, I mean, you just have to click on it. JESSICA: Or something about tech content. JONAN: I always just cause answer. Yeah. Jessica, you have thoughts on TikTok? JESSICA: Well, TikTok is really cool but it t's just takes a ton of work to make a piece of content that tight, especially around something technical. JONAN: Yeah. I think that's a good point, actually, that it's not as easy as it looks ever producing a piece of content. You may watch a video for 2 to 3 minutes. I once had a 5-minute lightning talk, but I did 65 takes on it. it took me maybe 20 hours to just record the thing, not counting the 100 hours of research I put into the actual content. So depending on the piece of content and how polished you’re going to make it – TikTok’s initiating platform, though. Look up Emily Kager. If you go watch Emily Kager’s TikToks, you'll head down the right path, I suspect into the good tech ones. MANDO: Awesome. Thanks, man. JONAN: I really like the ones that are explaining algorithms with M&Ms. That kind of video, I like those ones a lot. Here's how databases work under the hood. This is actually what in the endgame using toys or whatever is handy. Cats, I saw someone that worked with their cats and the cats are running all about it. [chuckles] It was fun. MANDO: Oh, that's awesome and that's the kind of stuff that, I mean, I don't know what the time limit is on TikTok stuff, but our TikToks, if they seem to be about a minute to a minute and a half, it's not like you could do any kind of in-depth deep dive on something, but something like describe what Kubernetes with Legos, or something. It seems like you could fit some sort of bite-size explanations, or a series of definitions, right? JONAN: Yeah. MANDO: I mean, there's someone, whose videos I see all the time, who does these videos on obscure Lord of the Rings facts. She'll describe this intricate familial family tree of beings whose definitions have spanned not only the Silmarillion, but other – and she fits it all in a minute and a half. It's fascinating and it's amazing to watch. I'm sure, like you were saying, the stuff she's been researching and she knows this stuff. She spent probably years and years and user for life gathering this knowledge and gathering the ability to distil it down into a minute and a half. JONAN: Yeah, and I mean, it's not even – look, I think a lot of people have the perception, especially starting out creating content, that you have to be the expert. You don't have to be the expert. You just have to do the work, go read about the thing, then talk about the thing. You're actually better suited to talk about it when you've just learned it, by far. Because you know the pain, you have a fresh memory of the pain and the parts of that API you're describing that were difficult to understand and once you become a Kubernetes expert, those things are lost to you. They become opaque; you can't find the parts that were terrible because the memory of the pain goes away. So TikTok is a good place to explore with that kind of stuff in a short-form piece of content. I have a couple more recommendations for you that I'll drop for you in the show notes, too about the people on Twitter—@theannalytical is great at that thing, @cassidoo, and @laurieontech. I'll put them all for you in the show notes. But there are, there are some people you can emulate early on and if you're just starting out, don't be afraid to get up there on the stage. The bottom line is in life in general, we're all just making it up as we go along and you can make it up, too. What have you really got to lose? You're not doing it today. Tomorrow, you would still not be doing it if you don't try. REIN: Continuing with my program of using this podcast to ask Jonan to help me with my personal problems, do you have any thoughts about internal developer relations? Or let me ask this a different way. There are companies that are big enough that there are teams that have never met other teams and there are teams that produce platforms that are used by application development teams and so on. What are your thoughts about building more cohesive and engaged developer communities within a company? JONAN: Yes, do it. I've considered this a huge part of what developer relations needs to be doing generally. Binding those departments together and finding the connections for people and advocating the use of internal software, those internal tooling teams. This is why a lot of DevRel people have a background in internal tooling, myself included. It's just fun to be helping out your friends. That's why you get into DevRel. You like helping your friends and developers are your friends and they're my favorite people. The point that I was making about internal developer relations is yeah, you should be doing it already as part of a DevRel team, but there are actually dedicated teams starting to form. Lyft, I think was one of the first people I heard of doing this where there's an entire team of people. Because the bottom line is DevRel is a very, very busy job. Because you don't have this marketing machine behind you working very effectively, you're probably doing a lot of the production work of your role anyway and it takes a full day to do a podcast well, in many cases. So you're losing a day every time you spend an hour on a microphone. But if you're doing that and then you're going to conferences and then you're writing blog posts and then you're having the usual buffet of meetings and everyone wants to talk to you all the time to just check in and sync and see how we can collaborate; we need forms for that. When people come to me and they want us to speak at their event, or they want us to collaborate on a piece of conduct, I have a form for that and once a week, the entire team sits down and we review all of those in a content review meeting and that guarantees that person, the highest quality of feedback for their project, all 10 of us, 11 of us counting myself, are going to look at that and give them the answers they need and we have guaranteed timeline for them. We have a deal that we will respond to you by Friday 2:00 PM Pacific if you give us the thing by Thursday morning, every single week like clockwork and that encourages the rest of the organization to engage you the way that makes sense for you as a team, instead of just little random ad hoc pieces. So yes, it should be done internally. You need to make space for it. If you are doing external DevRel, too, but it's already part of your job and having a dedicated team actually makes a ton of sense. I would love to see more of that. REIN: Let's say that I am a technical lead, or a senior developer and there's this thing that my team has been doing and I really wish the rest of the company knew about it because I think it could help them. What should I do? JONAN: You should find marketing people. You're looking for the internal comms team in your marketing organization. There are people whose whole job is to communicate those things to the rest of the company; they're very good at it and they can tell you about all those avenues. We all have that internal blog thing, whatever. They're all pretty terrible, honestly, especially in larger companies—nobody reads them, that’s the problem—but they can help you get engagement on those things, help them be shared in the right channels, in your chat platform. That's the people I would work out to. There are humans who are real good at helping you talk about your work and they're in marketing and it's a difficult place to engage, but look for your internal comms person. Failing that, make sure that your project is on point before you take it to people. If you don't have a read me that is at a 110%, that's your first step. Make sure that people understand how they can get involved and how to use the project and try it over and over and over again from scratch. Break it intentionally and see how painful it is to fix. Make it just the most user-friendly product you possibly can before you take it out there and you'll get better. MANDO: This is something also that not just techniques and senior engineers should be thinking about management should be thinking about this for their entire teams and the people that they manage and lead. Because if you can provide visibility for the stuff that your people are working on and have worked on throughout the year, when you, as a manager, go to your management when salary reviews and unit reviews come up, it's much easier to make the case that your team mates or your people on your team should get the salary increases that you're trying to get them. If they have had the visibility for their work. If you can say, “Oh, remember this big thing,” and you can point to the blog post and you can point to the Slack conversation where 10 people congratulated Sam on her upgrade for Costco or whatever it is. You know what I mean? JONAN: Yeah, and you have to talk loud here. MANDO: Yeah. JONAN: You’ve got to scream about it. Look, people are only going to hear 25% of what you say anyway, and it feels like bragging, but overcommunicate and often, especially people in management. I mean, really think about how many bulleted lists go across a manager's desk and how you want yours to matter. Better make it longer and more relevant and as detailed as possible so that some portion of it actually makes it through to their consciousness and they can communicate it on there's superiors. Superiors is a terrible way to say that; they're managers. MANDO: They're managers, right? Yeah. This is something that I learned as I was going through management and something that was never taught to me and it's something that I advocate really strongly about. But if you're managing people, if you're leading people and you're not advocating for them and for their work, like you're saying, as loudly as possible to the point of possibly being annoying, you're straight up not doing your job. JONAN: Yeah, you are. I learned early on in my career that the loudest people were the ones getting the promotions and having the career success, whether or not they were good, or they were actually contributing things that were value. I watched someone merge 600 lines of untested code against the objections of his coworkers and get a promotion about it. That's about conversations; it's not about quality. REIN: Yeah, I also think there are things that companies can be doing to make this easier. So you can have a weekly show and tell email. JONAN: Yes. REIN: You can let people pitch stuff to it, you can track engagement with it, and see whether people are getting value out of it and try to make it better. JONAN: And that's exactly it: you have to have a feedback mechanism so that you can adjust the direction of your content. We actually have plans, when we get our feet under us a bit, to do a morning news show like of us had in high school. Just 5 minutes in the morning where we take a question a day and explain it. There are a lot of people who work at our companies who have no idea what a virtual machine is, or at what layer it operates, and how it differs from a container. Telling them the difference between LXC and VMs, that's a thing that DevRel people do well. So we can actually explain, I can take Kubernetes and I can explain it with M&M's in 5 minutes, and then I can invite people to come and talk to the devil to come hang out in the Slack channel. There's a Q&A form. We answer one of these every morning, maybe your question will be next. By the way, here's some fun and interesting stuff that we're up to this week, come check it out. You can find this all on therelicans.com and we've got the internal page over here, and we've got this over here. And then you just have an opportunity daily to communicate this, what feels like a waterfall of work coming out of your team, but getting those daily touchpoints, or maybe weekly to start is a good place to go. MANDO: I love the idea of morning announcements, especially as for specific teams. You assume that a certain size of an org to be able to do this kind of stuff. The place that I'm at right now, there's 4 of us total, so we're not going to be doing this kind of thing. But my last gig, there were thousands of people who worked there and I was in charge of the operations team. JONAN: I actually think the morning news show is a really good way to do that, but you're right that in a smaller team, it's not as relevant. I would argue however, that you're doing it anyway, because with 4 people, you're able to communicate everything that you're all working on all the time. MANDO: That is exactly what happens. JONAN: And you don't have to scale. MANDO: Yeah. JONAN: But it's nice to be bought in on the dream and to feel like you're living your life with purpose and work is a huge part of our lives whether we like it or not. We live in this system and we get to choose every day. I choose to live a life that feels purposeful. I choose to seek meaning because I want to wake up in the morning and be excited to come to work. I want to help lift up the rest of my team so that we're out there making more developers who get to turn this into their dream, which we can't know or predict. I just want to help those people get over the line because I now have desperate it feels on the other side of the fence. I mean, I worked 16-hour days for several years at 5 different jobs and I came home and the world was telling me to live myself up by my bootstraps. You’ve got to be kidding me. That's your American dream? Come on. MANDO: Yeah, I got no more bootstraps. JONAN: Yeah. I want you politician to go and spend 3 hours getting a jug of milk that you pay twice as much as it's necessary for it and have to take two buses to find. I want you to have that experience, how desperate and time consuming and expensive it is to be poor in this country and then lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Because it's not a thing. We have a finite amount of motivation, of will in our day to spend and you've got to make the room. You've got to pay yourself first in that. Get up in the morning and write some code and then go exhaust yourself so your employer gets shortchanged. Your fourth job of the day, they're going to get a little bit less of your time and energy because you gave it to yourself first. That's how you're going to build a wedge to get into tech and I want to be there to help people do that thing. That's what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is making more developers and supporting them as that grow. I mean, I can see dystopia from here. The tech is headed towards a place. MANDO: Oh, yeah. JONAN: We have 1% of people on earth able to program today and we're about to double the global access to high-speed internet. When Starling comes on board – they're launching 70 satellites a month now. When Starlight comes on board, everyone on earth will have access to hopefully low-cost, high-speed internet access. We will double the global audience for many of our services. That's going to be real bad for the world if that 1% who can program and control most of the money in power on the internet becomes half a percent. Historically, that has not worked out great for humanity. So we need to start loosening that up. We need to make more developers yesterday by the thousands, by the millions. We need more people writing this code and helping us to turn this industry into a place that we want to be because the model culture is not going to make it. We will extinct us. We will eliminate humanity whether only the soul or in reality, if we continue down this path where we have a whole bunch of people collected in Valley somewhere, who are defining the rest of the planet. Facebook had no small part in recent revolutions around the world. That's tech. That's us. Whether you want to own it or not, you contributed to the culture and the software that built that monster. REIN: And the other side to making more developers is not having work that chews up and spits out their desiccated husks at a profoundly troubling rate. JONAN: It's true. It’s absolutely true and I think that that's equally, if not more important, that we're not feeding more to the machine. We have toxic spaces in our companies and in our communities and we define them. We need to change them. We need to create better ones. That's, I think a better option, even because you're not going to change that many people's minds. I think that especially this late in the game, for many people—people who have had success with their bad opinions—they continue to spout those bad opinions and believe them. Make a new space. Make a new space and prove it. Show your community, the numbers. If you have another meetup, because the one you're going to has had 18 months of 18 white men speaking and mostly the same people, then make a new meetup and see if the community likes it better and I bet you, they will. I bet you, they'll come. If you build it, they will come. But we got to do the work to make these places better before we just bring people in and watch them suffer. I can't do that anymore. I can't be that person in the world. For a while, I stopped speaking at code schools and bootcamps because I felt like a monster because I knew what I was setting these people up for. I was looking around tech and seeing the poison and I was bringing people, who I genuinely cared about, to the slaughter and I couldn't do it anymore. But I think that now I can do along the way is advise them how to avoid it, what red flags to look out for, how to find the good parts in between, and that's a better approach. It enables me to feel good about my work. MANDO: Yeah. Building up that, I don't want to jump us to reflections yet, but the thing that I keep coming back to is the desire to help your friends. JONAN: Yeah. MANDO: And for me, personally, something that I've been struggling with for a long time now and it's really crystallized over the past, I don't know, year or so, is seemingly how few people have that desire. Maybe not have the desire, I think it's natural to have a desire to want to help your friends. But maybe there's so few people who see everybody as someone who is potentially your friend and someone that you want to help. It's like, they'd be willing to help the person that they hang out with every weekend. But they're going to step over the homeless guy who is standing in front of Target while they walk in. You know what I mean? JONAN: Yeah, and I don't think that they're bad people. Like, I’m not actually a big believer in bad people; I think that there are good misguided people. I don't think there are a whole lot of humans on this earth, with the exception of maybe a handful, who wake up in the morning to do evil. Who wakes up and is like, “Man, today, I'm going to make some real bad days for those around me.” They mostly, I think, believe that they're contributing too good to the world and many of them are very misguided in those attempts, to be clear. There are people actively contributing harm every day, but they don't see it as such. So we have that piece of the conversation and the other part, where I just fail to have empathy for other people, is probably in part about not having good experiences. When I reached out to other people, having a form of attachment in my life, maybe when I was younger, that was traumatic for me. That taught me that I could not trust the world to catch me when I fall; that I couldn't trust other people will be there for me and to show up. Because of that, I had to rely on myself and here I go again on my own. This song I'm off on this walk and it's just me and I need to look out for myself because nobody else will. It's the hurt people hurt people. We saw a church sign when I was driving with my son when he was quite young and he said, “Hurt people hurt people. Why do they want to hurt people so bad?” So internally, in our family, this became a chant: hurt people hurt people instead of hurt people hurt people conversation. But I think the part where we are perpetually enacting our traumas on those around us, because as a society, we've decided that addressing your own traumas, getting your own crap out of the way first is somehow a taboo subject. Like, just go to therapy, people. We just have to put mandatory therapy for people. I want to see a government program that institutes mandatory therapy for people. I'm sure the people will love that. “Oh sure, everyone gets to see a doctor now. I bet you don't want people to die of preventable diseases either?” No, I don't. I want people to get over their collective trauma and stop harming other people because you were harmed and it takes work. Because you got to do the work if you're going to make the world a better place. MANDO: Yeah, I don't know. I personally feel like it's difficult for me when it seems as though the trauma is ongoing. Without this turning into my own therapy session, it makes me sad to see how different I've become over the past year. Is it a year ago? I would've said the same thing that you did, Jonan where I didn't believe that most people were awful monsters hellbent on destroying me and everyone that I love. I don't know so much that I believe that anymore. JONAN: I think JESSICA: They don't think of themselves as monsters. MANDO: Right, right. JESSICA: They may be hellbent on destroying you because they really think that's somehow good are wrong. MANDO: Right. At the end of the day, you're absolutely right, Jessica. How much of that matters? How much of that distinction matters? JESSICA: It does matter. JONAN: I think it does. JESSICA: It matters in what we do about it. JONAN: Yeah. JESSICA: And I don't want to destroy them either. I do want to segregate them off in their own little world. JONAN: Yeah. I love that. MANDO: For me, the ratios make it work in the other direction. JESSICA: Like you want to segregate off in your own little world? MANDO: Well, just that there's way more of them. JESSICA: Oh, okay. MANDO: And so, putting them off someplace would never happen. JONAN: Yeah. I think it's worth noting here that I am a large loud white man speaking from a place of tremendous privilege in that I maybe have experienced less of that “You don't get to exist.” Like, “You're not welcomed here in life in general.” Not even a maybe but that like over my lifetime, very few people have come out to me and just said like, “I wish that you weren't a thing. I wish that you as a human didn't exist on this earth, that you were never born, that your parents were never born.” I've not had that experience. I mean, I have when I've received somehow particular malice from someone usually as a result of my ridiculous jokes. JESSICA: But then it’s personal which yeah. JONAN: But then it’s personal and that’s [inaudible]. People who don't even know me. So yeah, I do. I speak from that position, but I think that this is another – gosh, I'm really not trying to be like let's all come together and have a conversation person because some are too far gone from that. But I think that I'm not ready to give up on humanity as a whole just yet, as much as I'm inclined to. I might be ready to give up on the United States, looking into options overseas. [laughter] REIN: I think for me, the reason this distinction is so important is because when someone claims that there's just evil in the world and these chaotic forces, it decontextualizes people's behavior from ideology, from culture, from socialization, from the worldviews that they have that mediate these behaviors. So I think it's important to understand that people aren't just evil. People have certain worldviews and ideologies and that those manifest in these behaviors. JONAN: And that we built the – JESSICA: Which meant the ideology is evil. JONAN: It makes the ideologies evil. JESSICA: Yeah, which causes the behavior of the people to be evil. That if – [overtalk] JONAN: And these are the systems that we build and perpetuate. JESSICA: Right, exactly and if we keep blaming the people and saying, “There are evil people,” then we will never fix the system. JONAN: Exactly. REIN: The most profound example of this I am aware of and if this is too heavy, we can cut it out of the show is [laughter] when Jordan Peterson claimed that the Nazi's final solution was because they were just evil, chaotic forces. In fact, their worldview demanded it. Their ideology demanded it. JESSICA: Yeah, there was nothing chaotic about that. JONAN: No, it was pretty organized. JESSICA: Yeah. MANDO: Thanks, IBM. JONAN: Yeah. JESSICA: Did you say IBM? MANDO: I said thanks IBM for their efforts. JONAN: And Bosch and every other company, right? MANDO: Yeah. JONAN: I mean, the world would not be able to sustain its current population without the work of Bosch creating nitrogen out of the air and also, then the Nazis used it to get gunpowder when they had no access. So we have a lot of those kinds of systems that we've built over the years and that's absolutely a part of it. You talked about the industries that are involved across these bridges. You don't get to show up to work, team and just be like, “I don't actually care about the impact that I have on humans. I care about the impact that I have on this graph.” You can't be that person anymore if we're going to make it and you can't walk around and point at those people and be like, “Yeah, they were fundamentally flawed from birth.” Whatever that thing means to you, you can't just say like, “Yeah, that person's evil. They probably had bad parenting.” Yeah, maybe they did. But I know a lot of people who had bad parenting or no parenting and turned out okay because they fought their way up that mountain. They overcame it. JESSICA: And they found friends, it helps them. JONAN: Yes. JESSICA: It's not, “Fight your way up the mountain, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” No, it's, “Keep looking for a better place,” and by place, I mean friend group. JONAN: Yes. Surround yourself with people who genuinely care about you and care about the things that you care about. I wish I'd learned that earlier in my life. Man, I hung out with some people who had different values than I did over the years and I changed my life just by finding a good friend. JESSICA: Yeah. Because we are social animals and we really are the people we're closest to. MANDO: Yeah, absolutely. JESSICA: That's what makes sense with us. That is the world we live in. What was that John Gall quote from earlier? “I respect facts, but I live in impressions.” Especially the default appropriate behavior is whatever the people around us do ad that is what we will fall back to witho

When the food industry promises to police itself and pledges to improve nutrition in public health, can it be trusted to make meaningful change or must government mandate those changes? Our two guests today have done groundbreaking work to help address this very question. Dr. Jessica Fanzo, Professor of Global Food and Agricultural Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Jennifer Harris is Senior Research Advisor for Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. Interview Summary So Jess, let's begin with you. You coauthored what I thought was a very important and novel report released by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition on product reformulation by the food industry. Would you might explain what's meant by reformulation? When we think about reformulation, it's really defined as the process of all-terrain a food or a beverage product. You can alter that by improving the products' health profile or reducing the content of harmful nutrients or ingredients. So it's a process of either removing those negative ingredients or nutrients or adding back positive ones into foods. Why is that done? Because people consume a lot of processed foods. Almost every food that we consume has gone through some form of processing, but there's a whole range of that processing from very minimal to very highly processed, what's often called ultra-processed or junk food that doesn't have a lot of nutritional value. In the report, we were looking at what are the challenges with reformulating food? What are some of the opportunities to reformulate food? And in the realm of reformulation, has it had a positive impact on public health? So we were looking at those aspects of the reformulation of processed foods. So I'm assuming there could be enormous advances to public health if reformulation were done on a broad scale and or if it were done in a meaningful way. So what were your main findings then? Have there been examples of industry being successful with voluntary reformulation? Somewhat. And absolutely it could have potentially really important positive impacts for public health, but it's also not a panacea for improving diets and nutrition. And while there are some examples where voluntary reformulation has had some impact, the UK with salt and some other examples, overall we found that it's important for governments to mandate reformulation through different tools, whether it's labeling, taxes, et cetera. For foods that are not reformulated, we felt that it was really important for governments to mandate with clear, transparent and direct targets, particularly removing the unhealthy ingredients like added sugars, salts, unhealthy fats like trans fats. The food industry should be involved in implementing reformulation policies but not in their design. And governments need to really step in and step up. But that said, that doesn't mean that reformulation is going to solve all the problems. Governments also need to invest in many other tools to protect consumers and to invest in other ways to improve diets for nutrition. So reformulation shouldn't be the only answer. So I'm assuming the reason that food industry won't go far enough on their own is that these things that make the food less healthy also tend to make them pretty palatable, or give them long shelf life or properties that make people enjoy them a lot. And that why in the world would they do something that would make their products less desirable? Does that pretty much the case or do you see other reasons why? That's definitely true. I mean, these highly processed foods are cheap in their ingredients to make, they are very palatable, there's a high demand for them. We're seeing this shift now into low-income countries like with tobacco when consumers catch on that these foods are not so healthy, they go to populations where there's a bit of a lag in that knowledge. But also reformulating foods from the industry's perspective is not so easy. It's quite expensive to do it. It's difficult to reduce salt and sugar, which are vital not only for the taste of foods, but for their composition and shelf-life and texture. So it has a lot of ramifications to remove those ingredients. So meeting government mandates around reformulation can be really challenging and sometimes impossible for companies. So they often will deal with getting a warning label, for the example in Chile, they'll just take the warning label because they can't reformulate some foods. But there's a change in consumer demand and tastes. Consumers like their brands, but the more and more consumers are caring about clean labels, environmental sustainability, their health, people are concerned about the amount of sugar in foods so they're going to have to answer to that, that changing demand as consumers demand better foods whether it's from a health or sustainability or transparency perspective. Let me ask one more question related to this. Is it also the case that it's pretty difficult for some company to be the first out of the gate if they were inclined to do this voluntarily because then their products would become less desirable and their competitors would be kinda stuck in the old ways? So isn't that another argument for government intervening that everybody is on the same playing field? Absolutely, yes. I mean, why not hold every player accountable and to the same standards and mandates? It pushes them all to take action. So when we were interviewing some of the industry players, they really struggle because when they did try to reformulate some of the foods, consumers no longer bought them because they're very wedded to their brands, they're wedded to certain tastes, it's a real challenge for them to keep their consumer base. But at the same time, try to adhere to government mandate. And some companies care more about health and sustainability than others. We definitely learn that some companies have no interest in that, because they know they'll always be a big consumer base for these quote less healthy foods. So there's a real issue from company to company of who's willing to take more action to reformulate and who doesn't really care to reformulate at all and they're willing to live with warning stickers and taxes. So Jennifer, let's turn to you. So you've done really pioneering work on the impact of food marketing on children that began when we were colleagues together at the Rudd Center when it was at Yale University. And there I was witness to the fact that you created a very impressive methodology for studying what's a pretty complicated issue. And you paid a lot of attention to industry promises for self-policing of children's food marketing. Do you mind giving us a quick sense of what's being marketed to who and how, and how much marketing children are exposed to? Annually, companies spend over $13 billion in advertising food to all consumers. And just to put that number in perspective, the whole chronic disease prevention budget at the CDC is 1 billion. So the companies are really controlling the messages about what people should eat. And most of that money is spent to advertise very unhealthy products. The products that are contributing to poor diet and disease in this country. The biggest ones are fast food, sugary drinks, sweet and salty snacks and candy. Those categories represent about 80% of all foods that are advertised. Healthier categories of foods, if you look at all of juice, water, fruits, and vegetables and nuts combined, it's less than 3% of the total. So they're really pushing these very high fat, high sugar, high salt products extensively. Companies spend most of their advertising dollars on television ads. On an annual basis, kids see about 4,000 of those ads per year. So almost 4,000 ads, that's over 10 a day for unhealthy food. Kids of color, so black kids see twice as many of those ads. A lot of the worst products, their advertising is targeted to Black and Hispanic communities and especially adolescents. But TV isn't the only way companies advertise. And in the last few years, the ways that companies market just increased exponentially. Now with smartphones and tablets, they can reach kids any place and any time through things like ads on YouTube videos, social media, smartphone apps, with games and ordering programs, even educational websites teachers are using in grade school have ads on them. This kind of marketing is personalized. So what you see depends on what you do online. They know who you are and they can reach you. And unfortunately, this kind of marketing also is the kind of thing that parents can't monitor as easily as what your child is watching on TV. So the companies basically try to be wherever the consumer is to reach them with their advertising. Well those are really stunning numbers. I know one of the arguments the industry has made for years, and one of the things that you've addressed directly in your research is their claim that this food advertising doesn't really make kids or adults eat an unhealthy diet, it just shifts their preference from brand to brand. So if Coke is advertising a lot, they might say, "Well we just wanna take market share from Pepsi, "but we're not encouraging sugar beverage consumption." What would you say to that? That is something they've argued for a long time. And one thing that we showed is that just watching a television program with food advertising makes kids and adults eat a lot more both while they're watching and afterwards. And another of our colleagues, Ashley Gearhardt has done some really interesting research showing how the food advertising actually activates the reward regions of the brain and leads to increased consumption. So that's one way that food marketing affects more than brand preferences. There's also been a lot of research showing that if you advertise Coke, it increases consumption and purchases of all sugary drinks. They also affect sales of the categories, not just the specific brands. So with you and others doing so much work showing how much of the marketing there is and how disastrous the impact is, you can imagine the industry feels vulnerable to the possibility of outside regulation or perhaps even litigation. And so one of the things the industry has done and this links back to what Jessica was talking about in the context of reformulation, is to say that they can police themselves. So can you explain how they've gone about doing that? Well in the US there's a program called the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which is the food industry self-regulatory program to address food advertising to kids. And there are similar programs in countries around the world. But basically what the industry has promised is that they will only advertise products that meet nutrition standards in child directed media. That sounds really great. They implemented the program in 2007, but you said Kelly, we've done a lot of research showing how many limitations and loopholes there are in this program. One is that they only define children as 11 years and younger. So they only have promised to reduce unhealthy advertising to young children. And more and more of the research is showing that adolescents are just as affected and maybe even more effected by the advertising. Since their program was implemented, they've increased their advertising to the slightly older group that isn't covered by the CFBAI. Another limitation is their definition of what is child directed is advertising in media where children are the primary audience. So on television that would basically be children's TV. So Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, those kinds of programs. But children watch a lot more television than just children's television. And so they can still advertise anything they want on programs that are also watched by adults and older children. And then the third major limitation is that they've set their own nutrition standards. So they have defined what is healthy. And maybe not surprisingly, a lot of the products that they say are healthier choices that can be advertised to kids are things like sugary cereals, fruit drinks that maybe have less sugar but they also have artificial sweeteners in them. Things like goldfish crackers, fast-food kids' meals, all of those can still be advertised to children under their nutrition standards. What we found is since the program was implemented in 2007, food advertising on children's television has gone down quite a bit, 45%. But at the same time, advertising on other types of television that children watch has gone up about 30%. So now kids see almost as much food advertising as they used to, but most of it is not on children's television, it's on the other kinds of television that they're watching. And a lot of the harder things to monitor, things like apps and social media and websites do not qualify as child directed media under this program. Now the reason I asked both of you to be on this podcast at the same time as I figured there would be interesting similarities, even though you're working on somewhat different topics, and boy does it turn out to be they're real themes weave through this. So let's talk next about what might be done then. So Jessica, with your work on industry reformulation, what have you concluded can be done voluntarily? Kelly, I think government needs to be much more involved than they are. The challenges that we see with voluntary regulation, whether it's in reformulation or marketing of unhealthy foods to children, we know that voluntary reformulation, industry sets its own agenda, they set their own targets, they have no accountability to meet those targets, they may pledge to reduce harmful ingredients but if the product has a very high level of these unhealthy ingredients, the reformulation may not make much of a difference from a public health point of view. So I think we need much more regulation. Governments need to hold industry accountable and ensure that they are meeting national standards for public health. I think government has been too laissez-faire about industry and the power that they hold. And I think now we're seeing the consequences of that not only in the United States, but everywhere in the world with rising levels of obesity and NCDs and unhealthy diets being a big risk factor with these processed foods playing a huge role in that. So we really need to see government step up in a much more profound way and hold industry having public health goals. It's a little bit of enough is enough. So Jess, just out of curiosity, let's say you were the government official in charge of taking such action and you have the authority to do it, where would you start? Would you start with particular nutrients across the food chain or would you start with certain categories of food and would you worry first about sugar, salt, fat? That's a good question. In the paper we outline four types of processed foods. To me I would probably look across the entire food supply chain at those highly, highly processed foods. And it would be good to start with at least the three categories of sugars, salt, and trans fats to even start with and setting key targets for those and marking those ultra-processed foods that go beyond that target. Chile had the great food law that's been enacted that's put warning labels on the front of packages and has regulated I think some of the advertising of those foods. Jennifer you probably know about this. And I think that's been an important case study for the rest of the world to look at of how Chile has done that because sales of those foods that have the warning label have gone down somewhere in the ballpark of I think between 23 and 28%, depending on the population. But I think there's lessons to be learned of how Chile has done that that other governments could learn from. Now I'm happy that you pointed out the advances in Chile because there have been some very impressive impacts reported from the studies that have been done so far. So I agree that that is really a model to look to. So Jennifer, let's just get your opinion on this. Where do you come down on this issue of voluntary versus mandated? So we've given the industry 12 years now to show that they can market healthier products to kids. And basically what they've done is they're marketing slightly healthier products to kids but the products they're marketing are not nutritious products that children should be consuming a lot of like sugared cereals. So it's pretty clear that they can't do it on their own and that regulation is required. In the US, we have a little bit of an issue that not all countries have because of the First Amendment. And advertising is protected speech according to the Supreme Court. So we can't just say companies cannot advertise anything. So we have to be more strategic about the kinds of regulations that we can implement here. If we could do anything we wanted, Chile is a great example. In the next year, they won't be able to advertise any products that are high in fat, sugar and salt before 9:00 p.m. So it's not just children's programming, they won't be able to advertise it. They had to take all their characters off their packages. And so Tony the Tiger can't be on the package of frosted flakes anymore because it's high in sugar. They've done a lot of great things in Chile and sure we can adapt some of what they've done. In other countries also, for example the UK has very strong laws about marketing foods in digital media. So that would be another thing that we could import from other countries.   Bios   Jessica Fanzo, Ph.D., is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA. She also serves as the Director of Hopkins' Global Food Policy and Ethics Program, and as Director of Food & Nutrition Security at the JHU Alliance for a Healthier World.  From 2017 to 2019, Jessica served as the Co-Chair of the Global Nutrition Report and the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition. Before coming to Hopkins, she has also held positions at Columbia University, the Earth Institute, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Food Programme, Bioversity International, and the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya. She was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation's Sustainable Diets Prize in 2012 for her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. Jennifer Harris, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Advisor, Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center. Previously, Dr. Harris worked as Director of Marketing Initiatives and was an Associate Professor in Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Harris received her B.A. from Northwestern University and M.B.A. in Marketing from The Wharton School. Before returning to graduate school, she was a marketing executive for eighteen years, including at American Express as a Vice President in consumer marketing and as principal in a marketing strategy consulting firm. Harris completed her PhD in Social Psychology at Yale University with John Bargh and Kelly Brownell.

This week, Nicole Evans and Sophie James are joined by a gang of girls ready to hash out this weeks controversial topic. Do we have corrupt judges in our competitions!? After an anonymous article was posted on Whippet Media accusing some EGA judges and regular judges of being underhand and playing favourites, we decided to hear from those where it's close to home. This week we are joined by Joanne Angus and Naomi Jordan Samuels. A judge an organiser and a competitor. We get a wide range of views and have a bit of a giggle at the same time! This week is full of debauchery- yet again- so make sure you don't have your sensitive ears turned on and if you are easily offended this ones probably not for you! corrupt judges If you want to take part in the discussion or you have anything you would like Sophie and Nicole to talk about, message us on our Facebook page The Whippet Media or comment on our group. Whip It Out. Dog Grooming podcast. Keep sending in those voice notes and messages and you will probably get a shout out live on the podcast! corrupt judges Enjoy! AND DON'T FORGET TO RATE US ON APPLE PODCASTS AND ON SPOTIFY! The winner of last weeks competition is... JESSICA BROMAGE! So Jessica send us a message and we will get the following prizes sent out to you. With thanks to ALPHA BLADE SHARPENING for providing the AMAZING prizes: Blade Magic spray Blade cleaning brush The MAC 30W 10W 7FW 5FW 4FW --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/whippetmedia/message

“The world mirrors yourself back to you. If you love, nourish, and appreciate yourself internally it will show up in your external life. If you want more love, give more love to yourself. If you want acceptance, accept yourself.” ~ Debbie Ford Cindy: (00:00) This is episode 7 with Life Coach, Mental Health Counselor and Social Services Advocate Jessica Nixon. (00:09) Welcome to Exploring the Seasons of Life, a podcast for everyday women who are trying to be everything to everyone and forgetting themselves in the process. Each week, join Cindy MacMillan as she interviews coaches, spiritual explorers and celebrants from all walks of life about beginnings, endings and the messy bits in-between. Self-love, well-being, and mindset are at the heart of our conversations because once you change the inside, the outside will begin to change as well. (00:09) Hello friends and welcome back to Exploring the Seasons of Life podcast. I am thrilled to share my conversation with Jessica Nixon. Welcome to the show, Jessica. Jessica: (00:52) Thank you so much for having me, Cindy. I'm really excited about today. Cindy: (00:55) Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. I am starting off all the podcasts with the same question. What does exploring the seasons of life mean to you personally or in business? Jessica: (01:10) To me, the seasons of life are addressing the various developmental stages that we go through in life and how we continuously progress through that process. Each developmental stage has its own lessons and struggles that challenge us to become wiser, stronger, more resilient. I feel it is necessary to have the relationship, responsibility, work ethic, learning, sharing and suffering experiences in each stage in order to better prepare us for the next stages in life. Cindy: (01:40) Thank you. I've mentioned this before; I love hearing the answers to this because everybody has a different viewpoint on that, so thank you. I love the name of your business, Finding Your Inner Compass. Is there a significant meaning or story behind that name? Jessica: (02:01) Yes, actually there is, as I was going through what would be a good name to define what kinds of needs that we have in life is we're constantly searching as humans, we are emotional creatures. We're, you know, cyclical. We, we try really hard to be in a linear pathway of life in order to find and see our progress. But I think that we get lost along the way and that we have so many different external variables that are constantly influencing us and drawing us one direction or another that we forget who it is that we are in long our path in our developmental stages and all the things that we are planning and then how we stumble in and fall or get distracted. So I feel like we have to re Intune within our self and center within ourselves and finding your inner compass is really what that's all about is coming back into who you are, not what you do or how, you know, the other definitions of what society puts on us to define us. But finding our own inner compass. Cindy: (03:18) I absolutely believe everything starts on the inside. Jessica: (03:21) Yes. Cindy: (03:23) How did you first become interested in becoming a life coach and what were your professional or personal challenges along the way? Jessica: (03:34) So I started out as a guidance counselor because I wanted a job that was going to compliment my life and the schedule of being a mother. And so I am still, you know, integrated in that field as well that I can continue to reach out and help people. I also worked with families as mental health professional and became a counselor that I work individually with people or couples. But I realized that life coaching gives you the actual tools that you need in order to be able to make changes in your life. Counseling is a lot more talking about your feelings and processing things in your past, whereas life coaching is about where you are now. Your past does influence and impact you into who you are now, but it doesn't define you now. And life coaching will address what your pain points are, your limiting beliefs and be able to help you work through what it is that you're dealing with so that you can continue to be successful from this point forward. Cindy: (04:51) And in the coaching certification that I had done in the past, we talked a lot about those self-limiting beliefs and those, those can stop us in our tracks, that's for sure. Jessica: (05:04) Yes, yes. So, it's good to be able to identify those and get help along the way. Because I think that even for myself, I still reach out to coaches and mentors to be able to help guide me. Because I get wrapped up in my emotions and then I forget logically where it is, I need to do in order to move forward from those pain points or limitations. Cindy: (05:32) Yes. Can you give our listeners three actionable tips to finding their inner compass? Jessica: (05:42) Yes. I think that one of the things that is really important, we get wrapped up in how we can't control situations. And I think that if we're able to identify whether it's their problem or whether it's our problem, so if somebody is coming to us and maybe being upset or angry, it's natural for us to just react to that situation, to that person instead of asking is that something that they're dealing with and I need to give them time and space to do that or if it's something that I did wrong and what it is I can do to fix it. So that's one thing I always tell my clients is to ask is it their problem and I don't need to take a personal or is it my problem and I need to do things in order to make things right. Jessica: (06:32) So that's one point that I really recommend. The other one is that emotions, like I said, have a very strong influence over us. And even though we know the right thing to do, sometimes we'll react with our emotions. So it's really important that, that when we're faced with the situation that we step back from that and we ask the motivation behind it so that we can better understand why we want to react in that certain way or why somebody else's versus just getting wrapped up into it. So asking yourself why is really important. The last one is when dealing with people and relationships whether it's a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, kids, coworkers, et cetera. There's a certain amount that we need to be productive. We need to work and show our progress and our value and be successful in whatever arena that we're working with and whomever we're working with. Jessica: (07:43) But at the same time, it's important to understand that if we're doing so much, then sometimes it doesn't allow that other person that we're working with to be able to have that space to step up and work with us instead of us being overpowering or if maybe we're sitting back too much that somebody else is now having too much influence over us. So having that balance, I mean I always tell people, imagine yourself in a boat in that you're rowing together, it's gotta be an equal balance between the two and knowing when is the time to pick up the oars and start rowing. You know, finding that motivation between the two of you versus when it's time to lean back and allow somebody else to have some time and space to figure that out and realign that balance between the two of you is important. Cindy: (08:39) So Coach Jessica, I have a question on your last point. How do we know when to step back and when to move forward? Are we just receiving those cues from the other person? How do we know when to step back? Jessica: (08:57) So I think that the cues are there. When we start to get upset about something then using one of the earlier points that I said, asking yourself why? Why am I getting upset with my husband? Why am I getting upset with my kids? Is it because they're not doing what my expectations are or is it because maybe they're doing something more in being able to understand the difference between what your expectations are of a situation versus what it is that person is actually bringing to the table. Sometimes we get upset about that and our anxieties will rise, and it becomes a necessity. But in all reality, we may be creating a stressful situation because it has nothing to do with the actual situation, but it has to do with their anxieties of maybe feeling like we need to be within a timeline. Jessica: (10:03) We need to have certain things done. We need to have things look a certain way. Those expectations sometimes will inhibit our ability to, to grow through that situation. And that's when we had to stop and say, why is it I'm getting upset and I need to lean back? And I knew, let some other people step up. You know, letting your kids do the chores. That is perfectly okay. You don't have to be a superwoman and clean your house and work a full-time job and run the kids everywhere. It's okay to let the kids clean the house. It's okay for your husband to be able to help out with certain things and maybe load the dishwasher or I know everybody has their preferences of how they like things done, but when other people have an opportunity to be able to step in and help and alleviate some of that extra stress and burden from us, then maybe they don't do it your way, the way that you prefer that you like. Jessica: (11:02) But it's still a very helpful thing that they can do that and then we can lean back. We can take a breath and just calm and relax. So it doesn't become an overshadowing on that relationship because it does become a habit sometimes that we get emotional, we have anxiety, there's stress and tension and there are some situations that maybe we don't need to. So other times we may need to lean forward because you know, say your husband is sick or your boyfriends, your kids are sick. And so we had to step up that plate in order to compensate for what it is that they need at that time. So the leaning forward and the leaning back do have a delicate balance and that's more things that I work on with my clients in order to understand and better implement that based on the situation that each individual person is coming to us with. Cindy: (12:00) Thank you for explaining that. I appreciate it. What do you wish you had known when you were starting out as a coach? Jessica: (12:11) Coming from the mental health professional field, I felt like I had a really good foundation and base to transfer in and kind of grow and evolve into the coaching realm. They are two different entities. Yes, we're dealing with human beings. We're dealing with emotions, we're dealing with logic, all the basic human behaviors and needs. But coaching is a different approach than counseling. And I realized that after I got into it, I thought it was going to be a very easy transition and there are things that I use from both aspects that are very helpful in order to best serve my clients. I think that for myself as a business owner, it would have been nice to have more background in the business aspect, just for myself personally. And then that, you know, it alleviates a lot of the hiccups along the way, but coaching itself has been a very smooth transition and I've been able to embrace that and be very successful in helping my clients to overcome their challenges and find that level of success and feeling reconnected with themselves. Cindy: (13:40) So Jessica how do you define success? Jessica: (13:44) That's a tough question because there are so many different variations of it and I think that it does depend on the individual. What are your goals? What kinds of things are you striving for? And also based on the season of life that you're in is also what you need you're fulfilling. So we have various needs in life that we're fulfilling in different stages of our life. So for example, as a child is obviously very different needs of wanting to fulfill yourself with fun and freedom and exploring versus as an adult with children or as a professional or in a relationship, our success is going to vary based on what we're dealing with and what our expectations are. And expectations are a little bit tricky because sometimes those expectations aren't necessarily what is our reality. Jessica: (14:42) You know, it's our reality for ourselves, but it's not necessarily practical for our lives. So I think that success is for me personally, I define success as the ability to find a sense of balance, find a sense of peace, find a sense of happiness. And I really focus a lot on being grateful because if we put the focus on what we've lost or what we've messed up on or what we didn't do right, then we never have an opportunity to appreciate what we've gained through it. And all of our mistakes give us the opportunity to learn and grow. So success is kind of an evolution of all of those things. But at the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and say, yeah, I may not have liked today, but it was an okay day or I did this well, and every day if we're able to do that, I think that we'll realize how successful we are. We're extremely critical of ourselves. Which is okay, it does challenge us to continue growing, but we also need to be able to be content and satisfied with who we are as a person in everything that we did accomplish and celebrate that. Cindy: (15:59) I absolutely agree with that, Jessica and especially about celebrating who we are. Jessica: (16:05) Yes, I love it. Cindy: (16:09) So now, what is your biggest failure and what did you learn from it? Jessica: (16:15) Well. That's so hard because my last answer was all about if we make mistakes, we learn from it and then, you know, we can't regret them if we learn from things. So I've really had to adapt that mantra because I have to say that, you know, perfection is not on my resume. So, I think that my biggest focus is a lot on relationships, and I didn't start out life coaching with that intention. I really wanted to be able to help everybody because along the lines of counseling. That's what we do was that okay, you have a problem but to identify the problem that solve it, it's a very generalized focus. Whereas life coaching is, is more specific to your actual pain point. So when I started life coaching, I wanted to help everyone help. Jessica: (17:07) I'll help everybody. It's fine. And I was told I needed to be more specific. I needed to be more intentional. And I understand why now that I'm more involved in it. But I think that relationships ended up becoming more of my specialty because I realized that relationships are in every person that we encounter. It's not just who you're married to or who you know, your children or your family or your coworkers. You legit have a relationship with every person. So as I have grown in my personal life, I have experienced divorce and I have experienced a shift for myself in my life due to that. But also, I have two boys. And raising those boys their developmental stages, I realize I have to also shift for them. And that's not something they tell you in the parenting books is how as a parent, you know, I was really great caring for them as a child. Jessica: (18:15) You know, when they were children, I was great at taking care of them. I knew exactly what to do. They get to be a teenager and it's a different type of parent altogether, like 180 degrees. So my failures per se, I don't define them that way. I define them as it was very painful to go through a divorce. It was very painful to raise teenagers. It was very painful. My boys are now moved out and grown, and now it was very painful for me to let go, being a mom to them in that caring role and redefining myself, and as I've developed finding your inner compass, I've realized that all of those stages, as a woman, personal and professional, they have their own set of pain points. So I've had to grow through my quote-unquote failures. Jessica: (19:11) But I don't like I said, I don't define them that way. It's just I've had to grow for myself and I realized, wow, there, I don't want to talk about that with people. You know, sometimes that's, that's kind of a personal thing, but I do need somebody to guide me through them because I think I'm going crazy and we're not, I swear to you ladies, we're not going crazy. It's perfectly normal to react that way to an abnormal situation based on what is part of our norm in our reality. So yeah, my failures have every day I take something and go, Oh well that was really not good. I don't want to do that again. I don't want to say that again. And then, you know, be able to apply that kinda to my little toolbox. But I love being able to help people when they're at that point. They, they, we need to go through that in order to grow. Like all of our struggles help to give us that wisdom and give us that resiliency and give us that ability to find that inner courage and strength and say, man, I got this. Okay, I totally messed that up, but it's okay. I got it. Cindy: (20:19) You know, as I'm listening to you talk about your children and then teenagers and now they're out of the house. My children are grown, and I will say to them, oh, I miss being a mom. And they'll look at me like, you are still a mom. But it’s different now. It's totally different. Jessica: (20:40) It is. It is. And I granted like you said, like you, I mean, I loved being a mom. I'd love to have all the kids in the neighborhood over was great. But every stage that they went through, I learned how to just be grateful for that stage and now that they're grown, I can enjoy them in a different way. And you know, having that just gratitude every day is something really important. Cindy: (21:04) Yeah. Thank you. So this is a different question. What are you reading now? What kind of books do you enjoy? Jessica: (21:15) I feel like it's really important to constantly be filling your own cup. We as women give and give and give and give from the minute that we wake up to the minute that we lay down. We are a fluid vessel of giving and I love being a woman because of that, but it's completely exhausting. So I sleep well at night. Let me tell you. So I feel like I need to fill my cup and I have to re-energize myself and to replenish my positivity because even if it's a really great day, I still gave a lot away to for everybody else energy-wise. So I like to read things that help me to feel good, things that are uplifting, things that are enlightening and that I can also take an apply to help my clients as they're going through different things because it's how we're able to become better and versatile is by having that knowledge base. Jessica: (22:17) So right now I just started a book, it's called The Yoga of Relationships by Yogi Amrit Desai. And it's a practical guide for loving yourself and others. And I'm a certified yoga instructor as well. So I do have an attunement with yoga and how we give ourselves time and attention. We honor ourselves we are finding that inner balance and peace and compass. So I really enjoy reading those kinds of things that help to rejuvenate ourselves and to refocus on. Oh wow, that's really important that I'm relating to me because as women we relate to everybody else all the time. So that's what I'm, I just started reading that and it's a, it's a small book and I'm very full of some good information and good reminders. Cindy: (23:12) Yeah. Sometimes those reminders are what we need as we're, as we're going through our day or going through our life. So, Jessica, how can people follow you on your journey? I mean, do you do workshops? I know that you've got a website. Can you just talk about the Finding Your Inner Compass, your actual business? Jessica: (23:33) Sure, sure. Finding Your Inner Compass is where I work predominantly with women, but again, as women, we have a multitude of relationships. So it ends up whatever your need is, whether you're a mom, whether you're a working professional, it might be you're a working mom, your, your inner relationship with somebody that you'd like to have better communication or better understanding of interaction either even professionals that are dealing with coworkers and those kinds of conflicts or struggles, how to evolve yourself professionally to the next level. So I, any stage of life that you're kind of going through empty nesters, retirement, that I'm a very emotional shift as far as our identity is concerned as well. So re-identifying yourself finding a sense of balance and peace. So my website is https://fyicnow.com/ for Finding Your Inner Compass Now because we've got to find it right now. Jessica: (24:39) So I really liked that and I am on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter as FYICnow. So if you search for me there, then you can find me. I have published and co-authored a book of Light at the End of the Funnel with Danielle Fitzpatrick Clark and the information is there on my website so that you can order books and we can have it personalized autographed for you. And that does talk a lot about my professional journey and some of the things I've talked about here, you know, but how that's evolved in what kind of things I've learned about my business itself as I've grown through this new profession. Cindy: (25:27) All right, well thank you so much for being on Exploring the Seasons of Life. This has been a really good conversation and I really appreciate it. Jessica: (25:35) Yes, I've really enjoyed myself. I do appreciate it, Cindy, and I hope that, uh, if you guys need anything, you feel free to reach out. Cindy: (25:42) All right. I will. Thank you and I will put all your information in the show notes as well. Jessica: (25:47) Oh, perfect. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Bye. Bye. Cindy: (25:53) Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Exploring the Seasons of Life. I enjoyed my conversation with Jessica. I especially liked it when she said, "All of our mistakes gives us an opportunity to learn and grow." Let’s face it; sometimes mistakes can be embarrassing but they can also be a stepping stone to future success. The question really is…Do we have the courage to get back up again after a failure and use it as fuel to move forward?  Journal on these five questions after a setback: What mistake did I make? What can I learn from it? What could I have done differently? What good is here that I’m currently not seeing? What am I grateful for? Make sure to visit our website, CynthiaMacmillan.com while you're at it, if you found value in this show, we'd appreciate you simply telling a friend that will help us out. Until next time. Live inspired.

Today, I've got a special episode, where I'm talking about how to find success during coronavirus. Yes, it is possible if you know how to pivot your business. These are scary times, especially as online business owners, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. We've watched our Catch My Party traffic fall by half in one week! But if we can solve problems for our audiences, we will be okay. I believe that in my heart. And our businesses will be stronger for it. My advice: Be the light for your readers because we all need more light right now. My hope is that this episode gives you a roadmap for how to look beyond the paralysis, fear, and panic that we're all feeling, and shift your focus back onto your audience so you can become a resource, guide, and helper. And your audience will reward you for it! How to Find Success During Coronavirus Host 0:04 Welcome to The Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here's your host, Jillian Leslie. Jillian Leslie 0:11 Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Wow, what a time we are living in. The word that just keeps popping up for me is "unease". I just feel like everything is off balance. But that is why I'm going live with this interview early because I want to give you more balance, especially in your online business. I'm interviewing Matt Molen from Personalized Paths. He is my email marketing guru. What we are talking about is how to move your business in the right direction during this uncertain time, how to be there for your audience, and still build your business. MiloTree BlogStart to Start Your WordPress Blog Also, for those of you who have not yet started your entrepreneurial journey, David and I have started a service called MiloTree BlogStart, where we will set up and optimize your WordPress blog for you. Setting up a WordPress blog can be tricky. There's a lot of tech, there are a lot of settings or a lot of features, and we know how to do it. We know how to set you up and get you started on the right foot and be there for you with any technical help you need. So, it's MiloTree.com/blogstart. If you're ready to take your fate in your own hands, definitely let us help you. Okay. This interview, I think you are going to really get a lot out of it. What I love about Matt is he gives actionable, practical real tips and ideas. For those of you who need to feel inspired, this is the interview for you. I got off this call, and I just felt lightness and excitement, and a way to really be there for my audience. So without further delay, here is my interview with Matt Molen. Matt, welcome back to the show. I am so excited to talk to you right now. Matt Molen 2:29 Well, Jillian, thanks for having me. I know that there's a lot on people's minds right now. And, you know, you and I have been chatting a little bit. I think there are some things that people could be doing in my area of expertise that they're not doing, and I just want to have a chance to talk about it a little bit. Jillian Leslie 2:45 And first of all, I have to say you reached out to me yesterday and you said, "Hey, do you want to talk about how people can respond to this very uneasy time?" And I will tell you that you gave me a feeling of solace because of the normal seat like, "Of course, I want to talk to you." Because when I talk to you things are normal, and we're talking about business. Even just when we got on this call, hearing your voice, I said that to you. I said, "Oh, it just feels comforting." Mostly because I'm doing what I normally do. And by talking to you, I'm not checking the news. I am not thinking about my family and all the worries of the world. So, I want to thank you for reaching out and for just giving me let's say, 45 minutes of normalcy. Matt Molen 3:36 Well, thanks. I love that you think of it that way because that's how I've been thinking about it is that most people right now, myself included, are feeling very uneasy, very uncertain. Not just about blogging, but about life in general. And, I'm getting all these emails. You are too. In fact, I got one in my inbox. It kind of made me laugh. It was so ridiculous. It was from a life insurance company that I don't even have a policy with. And the message was, "Hey, this life insurance company is open." Thanks so much, guys. What a help that was. And so, I think that we're getting so much news. It's distracting. It's hard to concentrate. And if you're a blogger in this in this environment, you're worried about your ad revenue. You're worried about your site traffic? Just the general feeling of where is this going? Jillian Leslie 4:34 Yes. How long is this going to last? Matt Molen 4:38 On top of that, our routines are disrupted. So that's weird. It's hard to focus. And then, I think that I've seen this other thing and I feel it too. Is this desire to reach out and help somebody somehow. Jillian Leslie 4:50 Yes. Yes. Matt Molen 4:52 All of that usually is leading up towards paralysis or a lack of strategy going forward. Now my area of expertise, of course, is with email marketing specifically for bloggers. I have the benefit of talking with content creators every single day about their email. On top of that, I'm looking at email campaigns that are coming across. And I'm just going, "Man, you guys are blowing this." Because this is a situation unlike any other. And what I thought that I would do, I know I've been on the podcast before and I shared kind of my system. Many people may actually, or not many, but some people may actually be familiar with the way that I think about things and my system. Jillian Leslie 5:29 Yeah, and we will of course link to your previous episodes. So, definitely. Matt Molen 5:35 Awesome. But this situation is so different that I wanted to come and share perhaps an email strategy that your listeners could think about employing for the next few weeks or months if that's how far this thing goes on. Hopefully not. But that's what I want to talk about today. Jillian Leslie 5:56 I'd love it. Love it. How to Think Differently About Your Business During Coronavirus Matt Molen 5:57 Okay. So, what I want to tell everybody, first of all, is that I want them to lace up their running shoes. All right? I want them to think that they're getting ready right now mentally to get out and work. Okay? Because so much of this is preparing your mind to take action. These are unprecedented times and it's going to require… I'm not saying unprecedented levels of work, but it's going to require a different way of thinking and a little bit of hustle to really optimize and be of the most service that we can be. I recently did a talk on this. I was telling some of the people that were on my list that I was doing it. I got an email back from a lady that runs a Disneyland website. Her website is 100% about Disneyland. Her message to me was, "Email saved me so far." And what I'm going to talk about today, and I'll come back to her. Her name is Jessica. I'll come back to Jessica's story at the end about what she did. But email saved her. Think about what it must be like with her site. Disneyland closes. She's got nothing to talk about. Nobody's doing any searching. Her ad revenue has got to be tanking. They're not buying her products. For her, she is probably staring down the barrel of an uncomfortable gun, if you will. What I want to start with though, is that I want to start with an overarching principle. This principle always works. This is the principle that I live by for marketing in general. And that is solve your reader's problem. Solve Your Readers' Problems Now Jillian Leslie 7:37 Love it. Matt Molen 7:38 Solve your reader's problems. If you keep coming back to that over and over again, it's going to change the way you think about your opportunity here. So, let's talk about email in general, and what to send to your subscribers right now. I have seen… You've probably seen this too. And I don't fault people for sending this. They're sending emails that say, "How can I help?" Now, the spirit behind that is I want to help you. I want to know what you're going through. Here's the problem with that, though. Everybody is uncertain because this is new to all of us. Your readers, they don't know what they need. Jillian Leslie 8:19 Exactly. You're putting the onus on somebody to tell you what they need. Matt Molen 8:27 Exactly. And they don't know what you can do. They don't know what they need, but you as the subject matter expert, you do know to a degree, what they need within your sphere of knowledge and influence. So the question I have for anybody listening is, "What problem can you solve in the right now? How would you provide value in this environment right now?" I got some examples of some really positive examples that I got from some emails from people. Just today I got one from the best ideas for kids. It was a hundred plus indoor activities. There's a lot of moms with kids at home. That solves a problem. I received one eight days ago, which I thought was almost prophetic. But it was, "Don't panic. Be prepared. Free 14-day meal plan and shopping list." That was from Favorite Family Recipes. One of the sub-headers in there is, "A little panic planning can bring great peace of mind." And so I thought that was good. I got another one that was an activity binder for teens. So, some people are understanding the value that they can provide to their readers. But let's talk for just a second. There are some blog categories that are really hard hit. We've got travel. We've got fitness. We've got finance. Or just "lifestyle" in general. Who's thinking about even Easter activities right now? Jillian Leslie 9:59 Absolutely. I think in terms of fashion, for example, the last thing I want to do is buy clothes right now. I'm in my pajamas. Matt Molen 10:10 So, the brainstorming activity that I would do if we had people in the room here together is I would say, "Look, let's think about it for a second. Fashion blogger, travel blogger, finance, blogger, fitness, blogger, what problem can you solve for your readers right now?" If I'm a travel blogger, and I actually do have a travel blog on the side, we need to be thinking about what's going through our readers' minds right now. Well, they're sitting on vacation plans. Maybe not right now but down the road. They don't know should they keep them. What are refund policies like? What are cancellations like? Is now a time to actually book cheap flights in the future? Do I go look for hotel values right now? As an aside, we have some trips planned out late in 2020. Those hotel rates have dropped. So, do you advise them on how to go change those? You see what I'm saying? There are ways that they can solve a reader's problem that is unique to this situation. Jillian Leslie 11:11 Absolutely. I have my assistant for Catch My Party and I will tell you that our traffic has died because if you were planning that mermaid party for your daughter next month, you're not planning it now. We have a content schedule where we have our blog posts blocked out for a couple of months, and we literally said, "Oh my God, we seem tone-deaf." If we are posting about a fun summer party, even summer, because who knows? And what we did was we step back and we said, "People are home." Our users are typically… Our visitors or moms. How can we bring some festivity or some lightheartedness, or just something to moms? And what we thought about was… Well, a couple of things. How to Plan A Virtual Party During Shelter at Home One, how do you plan a virtual party? What platforms can you use to do that? What kind of games can you play online with a group of people? What if it's a group of, you know, five-year-olds versus what if it's a group of 15-year-olds? We're right now building out a bunch of content about how would you do that. Or we give printables away for things like… We have like game night printables. Well, guess what? You know what? Maybe for your family you could print out a couple printables and put out some games and have a game night just to break up the monotony or just have a little bit more play in this stressful time. So it's amazing how quickly we said, "Oh, my God. Our normal content doesn't work anymore." We understand because my assistant and I are both stressed out. Like, what would we want? And that's kind of the direction that we're heading in. Matt Molen 13:10 I love that. And you know what that tells me? This is the type of people like you who get into this business, for this reason, is to innovate. It is to create. And quite often we get into a rut, we get into our routines, and we stay in our lane. What this is forcing you to do is look at your expertise, and twist it a little bit. Turn it on its head, and come up with the solutions to the problems using your expertise. You know how to party. Jillian Leslie 13:40 Right. Matt Molen 13:40 And being able to convert that into today's dynamic, wow! I could see NBC News interviewing you just because that type of content is going to be so readily available, or so readily adopted. People are going to want that. They want to have some fun for all the reasons we've been talking about. So, that's the power though. When you figure that out, that's the power of having a robust email list. Because the traffic isn't necessarily coming to the site now. Now, we need to use our list and drive people to the site so that they can absorb it, so that they can then share it with their friends. Why Email is More Powerful Than Ever Jillian Leslie 14:21 Absolutely. Because for example, I don't have the time right now to be hanging on social media to be like, "Let's go to Pinterest and just kind of browse around." But if something comes into my inbox, I probably will open it. Matt Molen 14:36 Exactly. So, if you and your team and everybody within the sound of my voice, if they write down three to five problems that they can solve for their readers in this current situation, and maybe different problems than they ever otherwise would have been. The good news is that in most cases, you probably can leverage your existing content. You just have to twist it a little bit. Sometimes you got to make new content. That's why I was talking about we got to lace up our running shoes, it's time to hustle. The next question that I want to address is how often should you now email these people? One of the most common rebuttals, I guess, from people that have not adopted email is, "I don't want to annoy people." Well, yeah. You know what's annoying? It's that email from that life insurance company. You didn't ask for it. Jillian Leslie 15:12 Good question. I call them the tone-deaf emails. Like, how many of you have I gotten in the last week? Matt Molen 15:39 They're not solving my problems, therefore, those are annoying. However, it's not spam if you're providing value. If you are solving your readers' problems, especially right now, they are all yours. So, let me give you a little analogy. I used to work in the daily deals industry. In that space, as you can imagine, ecommerce Q4 was huge but especially Black Friday weekend. There are deals left and right. We sent so many emails and people absorb the emails. They wanted the emails because they're deal seekers and they wanted to know what was hot then. Would that activity have been appropriate in a different time? No. That would not have been appropriate. But for you Jillian with Catch My Party, and the example that you just talked about, this might be your Black Friday. You can probably serve more than you currently are. And I say that to everybody who's listening. This might be your Black Friday. People need to hear your solutions. So, what does that mean for you? How many emails do you send per week? That's going to be up to you. But here's a couple of things for your consideration. I have four things. Number one, do your automated emails make sense? If you've adopted the Matt Molen system, you know that I love automated emails. My Forever Series, for instance, is a big part of what I do. But, like right now with my Disney Cruise Forever Series going, where it tells people what to expect on the private island? Does that really make a lot of sense? Time to Pause Your Email Series When I could take that slot, I could pause the Forever Series, pause that automation, and I could take that slot and send something that helps them right now. That's number one. Do your automated emails make sense? Number two is to recognize that you can serve more. What I mean by serve more is you can send them more emails. More emails than you think. Heck, you could have done it before. You just didn't believe me before. But now for sure, you can serve more than you think. What does that mean for you? It might mean an email every third day. It might mean if you're doing one email a week, it might mean two. For some of you who have a ton of great content, it might be an email every other day. I don't know. And you might want to test and experiment with it. But if you have the spirit of service, and you're solving your readers' problems, you can do more. Number three, we're sitting here. So much has changed at the date of this recording. So much has changed just in the last few days. It feels like it's been weeks. Things have progressed in a crazy fashion. Plan Out Your New Emails But I think we've settled into what the normal probably looks like, at least for the next few weeks. So, plan it out. I have a resource for you. If you want it, we'll drop it in the show notes. Jillian, if you're willing to do it. Jillian Leslie 18:42 Of course. Matt Molen 18:43 And all it is is a very simple calendar that shows the dates, the day of the week. And it asks you what problem can you solve for your reader? What is your reader thinking about? So basically, you just go through that and you say, "Well, okay. If I'm at Catch My Party, I know that they're wanting to do a virtual party with friends." Well, that would be fun because the kids get stir crazy. Okay, that would be one thing. Number two, mom wants to just make the quarantine shut up in the house. I want to make that more fun. Okay, we could do our scavenger hunts. Or, you know, we're going to have a dress-up day. And so, we're going to take the elements from our princess parties, and we're going to add those together into, you know, 10 ideas of how you can have dress-up time at home. There are three emails right there, and I don't even know your content. So, if you did that with your team, and plan that out, would your audience be receptive to that? Absolutely. If you find out they aren't, well, then you just don't send them. But you've started the planning process. You've thought it through on how you can serve them. That's number three is to plan it now. Don't wait and sit here and just go in, "Boy, I'm going to hit CNN one more time." Number four, the last one is write the emails. You can write them advance. Write them in advance, and then you can just not send them if this thing miraculously goes away and the world changes again. I don't think it's going to miraculously go away. I think that we've got two months of this. That's my guess. But I could be wrong and I hope I am. But what if I'm not? You could have that stuff done. So, do your automated emails make sense? Number two, decide to send more and serve more. Number three, plan those out now with a calendar. Number four, write those. Jillian Leslie 20:34 Imagine growing your Instagram followers with no work. Highly engaged followers. Now, imagine it with Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube. How about new email subscribers? Seriously, no work. This is all possible if you install the MiloTree pop-up on your blog. David, my husband, and I, started our blog Catch My Party in 2009. We've since grown it into the largest party idea site on the web with millions of pageviews per month. We did it with hard work, and our secret weapon, our MiloTree pop-up which David built for us. We've grown our Pinterest followers to over 1.3 million, and our Instagram followers to over 164,000. And right now 8000 other bloggers just like you are using MiloTree to grow their businesses. With MiloTree you can focus on growing one platform or switch between several. But here is the important thing. If you aren't converting your visitors into followers, subscribers, and customers, you're honestly wasting your own traffic. Make this asset, your visitors, work for you. Since we're bloggers, we get bloggers. So we've optimized MiloTree like crazy. It's a snap to install, it won't slow your site down, it's Google-friendly on mobile, and it's so darn cute. You can even add animated sparkles to your pop-up if you like. Sign up now and get your first 30 days for free. Please pause this episode and head to MiloTree.com to sign up. I know you will thank me. As a bonus, once you sign up, I'm going to send you weekly actionable business tips to help you grow your business. I've been at this a long time, and I have a lot to share. Remember, your scarcest resource is not money, it's time. So let MiloTree free up time for you so you can focus on the other important parts of your business. So what are you waiting for? Hit pause. Head to MiloTree and sign up today. I think that if you can reach people where they are… This is something I've been thinking a lot about, which is I want to touch you, Matt, where you are. Like, let's say I'm freaking out in my brain. I don't want to touch you with that. I want to touch you with me in my highest self when I've had a moment to kind of calm down. And even if I'm going to freak out in another minute, I want to be one half a step ahead of you. But I don't want to be five steps ahead of you. I want to be able to touch you where you are, and point you in the direction to give you solace or to solve that problem. Does that make sense? People Want to Be Lead Matt Molen 23:27 Absolutely. People want to be led. They want to be helped. Jillian Leslie 23:30 But I don't want to be the authority. Meaning, I don't want to be like, "Guys, look, you don't have to worry about this. This is going to be over in two months." No. I want to say I'm vulnerable. I'm feeling this way. And I have a solution for you that has that worked for me. So, I'm like half a step ahead of you. Because I'm like holding my arm. I'm like holding my hand out. Kind of like I'm a couple of steps like higher up on the stairway and I'm just going to put my hand out and gently lead you up to steps so that you can have a little bit more calm or peace or whatever. But I'm not four flights up. Matt Molen 24:14 You don't have to solve the virus thing for them. All you have to do is help them with one little aspect of their life during that time and you achieve hero status. Jillian Leslie 24:24 Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's funny. It's like I want it. I just sent an email to my list because I was feeling just so much unease and so much confusion, but I had a moment of clarity. What I did was I took my to-do list that has been there, that's written on like a scribbled piece of paper of all the things I hope to get to. Right? And all I did was I took that piece of paper, and I took a new clean, fresh piece of paper. I took my to-do list and I just organized it on a new piece of paper. That's it. I can't tell you the peace of mind that gave me. I wrote an email. I said, "Here's something that worked for me." This is really a very… I have all these feelings, and I feel really vulnerable. I'm sure you do too. And, I believe in doing small things. Like laundry and cleaning out your kitchen junk drawer. And I said, "Here's what I recommend for work. This is what I did. This worked for me and I recommend you find those small tasks that push you forward, but aren't so taxing that they're intimidating or they're overwhelming. Go do something small." Matt Molen 25:48 Absolutely. Jillian Leslie 25:51 And I got the feedback of saying, "You know what? I needed this. Thank you." Matt Molen 25:58 That's fantastic. I think that's the spirit that I want to convey here is you can do more of that than you are doing. You can do way more of that than you're doing. And what I'm seeing… I saw it from a blogger that I greatly respect. I got an email from her today. It says, "I want to help. Fill out this survey. I really want to help." And I'm sitting there thinking, "You know what? How you can help me is you give me some ideas. You can give me some suggestions on how to occupy my mind, or how to make more of this." That to me is the opportunity. I know it's in your all's heads. It's just a matter of sending it to your people and sharing that with them. Don't be selfish about it and keep it to yourself. Jillian Leslie 26:40 Yes. It's Time to Server Your Audience During Coronavirus Matt Molen 26:41 With this dynamic comes an opportunity for you to serve more people by getting more people onto your list. I know that is counterintuitive. And maybe what I mean by that is to capture more people and convert out of the traffic that you're currently getting. Even travel sites that are way down. Even Catch My Party if the traffic is down. The traditional way we do that is through an email hook. Printables, downloadables, checklists. If you listen to my previous discussion on this podcast… The last time I was here we talked about the Quickstart Guide. That's still my favorite. So, I'm going to push you to do that. The question is, does your email hook solve the current problem? Jillian Leslie 27:26 Right. Does it make sense? Matt Molen 27:27 I have a client food blogger. And before all this was going down, we were on the normal schedule. We put together an Easter quickstart guide with an Easter pop-up and the whole thing. Guess what? Nobody's thinking about Easter right now. So, it launched and it went. You know, we're not getting subscribers from that. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that have worked. If you go to a favorite family recipes. They have one that is killer copycat recipes. That's their pop-up. It's the most popular, like restaurant copycat recipes that you can try at home. We're not going to restaurants right now guys. If you still want to make the outback cheese fries or whatever, here's how you do it. And you can have some fun with that. That's blowing up for them. There's another one, Sally's Baking Addiction. She put out a post with a whole bunch of home baking projects. These are things you could do with your kids to teach them to love baking. It went crazy. She's like, "You know what? People love this." She converted that into her opt-in. So, the question I have for people is what is your current opt-in? Take a look at it and put together an email hook that you can launch right now that is more appropriate for the here and now. You're going to capture more subscribers and therefore grow your list and serve more people. Jillian Leslie 29:00 Let's say you do like a quick start guide, right? And let's say you've got four emails in your quick start guide. Guess what? You can launch it with one email, and just then quickly write the other ones. Meaning, you don't have to sit back and go, "Oh, it's going to take me four weeks to write these four emails, or however long." Go launch it! Matt Molen 29:25 Yeah, very true. You sound like me right now. And the other thing that I would even say normally, "I love to have something that's three to five emails long in a quickstart guide." Heck, I'd be happy with a one page PDF. If it's more relevant, put that out there. So again, I'm adapting to what's happening right now. I firmly believe in my other program, you know, the Quickstart Guide and the Forever Series and all these things. I'm adapting to the current situation. Jillian Leslie 29:57 I have this philosophy that I have been preaching called B- work, which is I recommend all of my students, everybody that I talked to from my podcast to do B- work. I'm going to say now, maybe C+ work. And what I mean by that is done is better than perfect. And because I want to reorient everybody that if… Let's say I can be of service and helpful, but my emails are not going to look pretty and I'm not going to have a great beautiful graphic or whatever. It might have some typos. But if I can get it out there and calm people or help people or touch people, it's much better if that is B-. So, be thinking about how can I get it out there? How can I move quickly? Meet people where they are. Matt Molen 30:52 Go fast. Break stuff. Jillian Leslie 30:54 There you go. There you go. Matt Molen 30:56 I like the perfect is the enemy of done. I like that. Jillian Leslie 30:59 Yes. Matt Molen 31:01 So, let's talk about a technique or two that people could go try right now. I want people to understand, these are just ideas. They are not going to work perfect for everybody. They may not be right for your situation. Take the idea and see if there's a plausible way to apply it to your current business. The first one that I'm going to share with you is called "swipe up to sign up". I just got done reading an article about how much people are on social media right now. They're obviously at home. They have a little bit more time to do that. Plus, when you're kind of in a daze that's where you default. It's a source of news. It's a source of comfort. It's a source of commiseration. Well, go to your Instagram stories. Use the Swipe Up Feature on Instagram to Grow Followers If you've got 10,000 people or more followers on Instagram, then you're qualified for the swipe up feature of Instagram stories. I want to tell you an example. I did this last year with Ralphie Jacobs. Her Instagram handle is @simplyonpurpose. She is a parenting expert. She doesn't even have a blog. We created a quickstart guide that was four emails deep. It's called "Why we yell, why it doesn't work, and what to do instead?" She started with zero subscribers. She launched a little simple landing page,.Very simple. All it was was the title of the thing and a name and address. Yes, I want it feel. That's all it was. After two weeks, she had 20,000 subscribers. Remember, did she had 20,000 followers to begin with. So I don't do well at math. But that's approximately five billion percent, right? Conversion. That's pretty awesome. So, she was able to take and get 20,000 subscribers in two weeks by sharing this resource. Let's go all the way back. What problem do you solve for your readers? I asked you to identify what problems were. Then I asked you to think about what your opt-in might be. Create that opt-in and then share it. And any other opt-ins that you have. Maybe you've got printables on your site. This is a great time to share those. Trade that printable. Trade that course. Trade that quickstart guide for an email address. So that's one. Oh, gosh, I've got another example. You guys have seen this one in action. I hope by the time that you hear this recording that you get it because Janssen at Everyday Reading is doing this right now. So, to understand this, Everyday Reading is a website for moms who want their kids to develop a love for reading. So, everything she does is in that vein. She created a list of her favorite online educational programs. I think she made a PDF of it. That was it. She went on to her social. This was last Friday. So, this is one week ago. And in a week's time on her Instagram stories, and through a post on Instagram, she said, "I'll email it to you right now. Just swipe up to sign up to get this list of online educational resources." She has a base of 40,000 Instagram followers. In the first five days, she had 1100 new subscribers. And in the two days since, she's averaged 75 new subscribers per day. Not only that. She gained 1600 new Instagram followers while she was doing that. That was a curated list of online educational resources that she put together and then shared with them. She made life easy for them. She identified the problem that she was solving and she's having tremendous success with it. And serving while she's doing it, while she's growing her list. So, here's a very practical piece of advice for anybody that has a large social following. Create your opt-ins or make a list of them. Get out your calendar and say, "Okay. On the 25th, I'm going to share this. On the 28th, I'm going to share this. On the first, I'm going to share that." And just make a calendar so you don't forget your days in checking out Fox News or whatever it is. You'll have a plan to go promote your opt-in. So my question for everybody, what email hook can you share on social media right now? Do Small, Doable Tasks Now Jillian Leslie 35:33 What I like about what you're saying is I love the idea of having your calendar and filling it with doable things that are small enough so that you can do them and get out of your own way, and get out of the news, and get out of your own anxieties and fears because you know, you have this one task? Matt Molen 36:01 Yeah. Even if your days, right, you know, you're feeling it yourself. Yeah, like, are you gonna do that thing, Jillian Leslie 36:07 You know, I always recommend I use the Pomodoro Technique, which is this, I go to tomato-timer.com. And it's a timer for 25 minutes. And I get my work done by saying I can do this for 25 minutes. And I find it to be incredibly powerful. And I use it when I have tasks to do that I don't want to do. And I feel like what you're saying is here, create these concrete tasks that you probably could do in about 25 minutes. And go do that because not only will it by the way, not only will this serve your audience, it will serve yourself. Yeah. Matt Molen 36:48 You'll be moving your business forward, you will feel a sense of accomplishment when you check that off the list. Absolutely. It takes you out of the malaise that we're all kind of stuck in. Unknown Speaker 36:57 Yes, that paralysis Matt Molen 37:01 I, I have another idea for people that they can actually go see, this one's a little bit more of if you've got like, let's say, your this blog, this might make sense for you. And that is to create a challenge. Create a Challenge For Your Readers The idea behind a challenge, it's kind of, but it's an email chain is about what a reader needs to do. And so you can create an email challenge where you have, you know, say three to five emails in a row, which might include a welcome email, it might include a daily email for three to five days and each email includes a principal, teach them how to do something or why they need to do something, and then assign a task and explain how to accomplish it and then ask them to report back. There's a really good example of this. That is, she's always doing it. I wish I knew this woman. I wish I could say I had anything to do with it. It's the simple green smoothies channel. Yes. Calm Yes, she right now has on her website, the 10-day smoothie challenge. Now I when I saw that I've seen this 50 times, but I'm sitting here at home and I am I'm eating all the comfort food, aka junk food just because I'm stressing or something I don't know. And then she shares this thing that says 10-day smoothie challenge boosts your immune system with tasty smoothie recipes. And she's got dates on there. Like, Oh, you do it during these days. Oh, okay. I mean, right. It's a sense of community. It's a sense of, I'm taking action taking control of my life. So anyway, I don't need to spend a ton of time creating a challenge because a lot of people won't ever do that. But if that's appropriate for you, that can be an interesting way to grow your list as well and to gain community while you're doing it. Jillian Leslie 38:39 I love that. I think that that is really, I think that especially something that is doable. Something health-related is terrific. Something that is self-care, especially for moms who are stressed out. You could even put it to put together like a Kindness to Yourself Challenge like what One day bath, you know, the next day do a Korean face mask. I mean, whatever it is just to, you know, find a way to touch your audience and help them through this, you know, difficult time. Matt Molen 39:16 Totally. Now, the last thing I think people are struggling with, and I'll kind of wrap up with some, this will be a rapid-fire series of ideas. These are income boosters. Some people have been really hammered with, you know, low RPMs from ads from pageviews. Or just, you know, whatever, it might have no sponsorships, what have you. So here are just some ideas. So take these ideas if one of these hits you, then awesome. So the first one I'm going to talk about is if you make money off of ads, that means you need more pageviews and you need higher RPMs. So one tactic is Jillian Leslie 39:53 RPM is revenue per page. Matt Molen 39:55 Exactly. So that's how people are calculating revenue per dollar. Jillian Leslie 40:00 In eyeballs. Matt Molen 40:02 So the first thing would be to increase your page views is increase your email schedule, we already talked about that. But if you're solving more problems, now might be the time to bring more people back to your site, even though a visitor does not pay out as much, you can kind of solve a little bit of your issue by getting more people to the website through your email. Okay, so you can recoup some of that. Increase the Number of Emails You Send So by increasing your email schedule, the other thing that you could do is if you're, if your ad network tells you what your highest earning pages are, like, for instance, a Disney Cruise, usually, content about Disney Cruise usually pays more than, say, a Disney coloring page. So if I if you sent more readers to those higher RPM pages, you're going to make more so you could deliberately plan out your content around what is going to be more valuable right now. Yes, now it's a little bit of a guessing game with what because brands are in their own unique funk right now too, but you get my point. Yeah. Another way to make money is through affiliate sales, affiliate sales. Some people do it great. Some people don't do it at all. But if you're going to get into this, make a list of brands that you love. This is where authenticity comes into place. You just start there. One thing you can do once you have that list is you could create a roundup of your favorite resources. If you're a food blogger By the way, people love the behind the scenes of what's in your pantry. What's in your kitchen. Yeah, what knife set Do you use and all of that and especially Jillian Leslie 41:35 How about this, you know, if people because everybody now is cooking at home, what are the top five tools you use to make homemade meals fast? Matt Molen 41:50 Absolutely. And then take it to the next step. This is what I really like to do. This is where you can go beyond just a what feels like a little bit of a money grab within a field. The thing I think some people don't like that is create a how to series. So, a how-to series is ... I mean, you know, Cricket has got an amazing affiliate program, they are gonna they're gonna probably their business is probably going to not die during this time because maybe we're teaching our kids how to do crafts or we're because we're not going out we use that time for crafting. What if you did a how-to series on how to make x how to make y how to how to use your machine for this? Yeah, you probably can make more by doing that. And by the way, the reason I'm sharing all these things is you're using email to push people there to these point to these to these opportunities Jillian leslie 42:44 And again solving their problem Matt Molen 42:46 sSolving their problem. Oh, I just thought of one that I forgot. So if you go back to food blogging for a second, but it applies everywhere. If you're a food blogger, and you do well with Instant Pot. Instant Pot has so many accessories that most people don't know how To use, but I bet you do. You know, accessories are fantastic. And they're probably not sold out. So that's, that's a way that you can keep your business going. Last but not least on affiliate is why not just in your outgoing emails, just add some relevant skills and steals to the bottom of your email. I'm actually borrowing that from that phrase from Corey who runs Hey, Let's Make Stuff, because I was just looking her email earlier today. I have to give her full credit. It feels authentic, it feels natural, but it's just deals and steals. And she's mentioning some of her favorite brands and the sales that they have going on. And it's kind of a, it's kind of a footnote. But hey, any of that that flows through is going to help her out. Jillian Leslie 43:52 And by the way, I of course I'm getting a ton of emails from businesses, you know, like West Elm, and there's struggling. So guess what, I can get 30% or 20% off right now. So just you know, know that these businesses want sales and they are offering discounts. So letting people know, of the sales is beneficial Matt Molen 44:17 in the days of the the 2008 financial crisis that we had. So many daily deal sites cropped up out of that. The reason I bring that up is that some people are going to say, that feels weird trying to push a product right now. what I'm telling you is that people are saving their pennies. Yes, they still want to shop, they still want to get a good deal there's gonna be people are going to take advantage of the situation for the good and get a good deal. So if you provide that and look at it from that lens. And if you believe in these tools as well. Then you tell your friends about a one, two, absolutely. So to get over that, I guess is what I'm getting at now. This one's a little bit out there. How to Work With Brands During the Coronavirus So we'll see if this one's useful to people. But for those of you who are doing sponsorships, I realized that those may have dried up. So there's a couple of things that you could possibly do. Number one, you go to some of your favorite existing sponsors, and you offer to sell email as an add on. Now, this requires you to have a list. But if you have a list of any sort, you can say, hey, look, in addition to our current contract for another 10%, I will send out x number of emails or you could go to old sponsorships that have expired and off and refresh it and not just offer an email thing but you could say, hey, let's reengage this what do you say it's tough you know, it's a this would be a good fit for the current environment. Now of course it needs to be you but then you can offer to send that to your email list as well. And lastly on that, if it is a brand that is cash strapped, but still, they still you know, you have got a marketing manager over there. That still needs to hit some goals and his boy, they'd look like a hero. If they did, you could this is this is, you know, thinking outside the box, you could defer payment for that brand in exchange for a better deal in the fourth quarter with them, or just pay me later, kind of deal. Now, I know everybody's situations are a little bit different. I'm just saying that there are ways to think about this a little bit differently. And of course, if you can make up a product man, do it. You know, there's a ton of graphic designers out there that can make digital resources for you. So if you can think of an affordable digital resource that's perfect for your audience. You could bang one of those out and use your email list to share that. And if you're an e-commerce company, you should be manufacturing reasons for people to buy from you right now. I'm getting emails from restaurants, for example, that say, yeah, we're open. But I'm like, yeah, I'm not going anywhere. Here's the difference though. I got an email from a local restaurant. I went to the Italian restaurant and they said $35 family plan deal. And this is like, like a little bit higher-end restaurant. And it's Wednesday and Thursday only. And it's takeout only. And it includes all these amazing things. And they show pictures of it. And I'm like, Huh, I wasn't thinking about going there. But they gave me they manufactured a reason for me to buy from them right now. Jillian Leslie 47:22 I think that's great. I think that is so great. Again, put your brand in front of people with solutions and you will break the kind of stupor that people are in right now. And in fact, I might argue that if you do it in a way that is helpful, that is heartfelt, that is humorous, whatever it is, if you can break that stupor, break that haze that we're all walking around in, you will have tremendous success because we're all in uncharted territory. And we're all uncomfortable. And if you can find a way to give people something positive, I think it would actually be even more valuable than in the normal hubbub when we're all just kind of caught up in our lives. Matt Molen 48:19 So, I want to come back to Jessica, I'm going to close it all out with remember, Jessica is the main blogger. So Jessica, hustled, she thought this through. Again, I don't take any credit for any of this. This is all Jessica. She inspired me. She anticipated here's what she did how email remember she said, email saved me so far. She anticipated that Disneyland was going to close and so she wrote a blog post about it. And she wrote an email back before it even happened. The minute they announced the closure, she was the first to send it out. So she's got all those people going oh my gosh, what? So she beat the news outlets to the punch by using her list. So she benefitted from that traffic, people coming and the brand building. So she prepared her email content. She prepared her web content ahead of time. Second, she changed her opt-in to something that was more appropriate updates about Disneyland closures. So if you go there right now, the happiest blog on earth calm in the midst of this crisis, that's what you'll see. And so she's actually growing her list in the midst of nobody going to Disneyland. But the people who are searching and kind of landing there, she's getting she's capturing more of them. She turned off her automated welcome series that was, you know, that pitches, you know, more information about making the most of your time at the parks because it's not relevant at this moment. And she increased her frequency of her sense. All of almost all of the things that we talked about here that she did, she is living. Jillian Leslie 49:55 Right and it seems counterintuitive because it's kind of like when you normally zig, you gotta zag. Right? And, if you catch people when they are vulnerable and you can comfort them or you can provide information or make them feel safe, they will be that much more loyal. Matt Molen 50:19 I think that we have so much this audience, this group has a lot more to give. I think number one, we've got to pull ourselves out, we got to put our running shoes on, number two, we got to think about how we can serve our readers. Number three, we need to change a few things that we're currently doing and be prepared to change back. Yes, it's not an all-time forever strategy I'm talking about for the right here right now. And we need but we can take action and we can, we can help many more people including ourselves in the process. Now there's a couple just to finish things off. Mainly my intention in talking with you today. Jillian, is not to sell anything. I have a free resource for people. If they want To check it out and learn more about the quickstart guide, if they want to learn about how I write emails, and if they want to learn about this thing called the forever series, they can go to emailjumpstart.com, it's free. There's three videos there. each one's about 10 minutes. It's, it's like I'm giving away a lot of a lot of stuff there. But it's awesome. And you can go put it in play right now, if you want. I, Jillian Leslie 51:19 I just I was going to sing your praises. And I will say that you are my email guru. I learned so much from you, and you are the real deal. Matt Molen 51:32 Well, I appreciate you saying so it's been it's a pleasure to work with you. Look, here's the thing. I do have a course, if, it's not out of place, I will put a 50% discount code on that. I don't think I've ever gotten that low before because given the circumstances, I'll give it to your readers. If any, if it happens to be the time you've got time you want to invest in email, maybe that course would be helpful to somebody out there. I'll give the code to you, Jillian. Good luck everybody. Jillian Leslie 52:04 Okay Matt. How can people reach out to you if they have questions or want to learn more that kind of thing? Matt Molen 52:13 Personalizedpaths.com is my website. My email course is called Email on autopilot. Discount code is: BLOGGERGENIUS to get 50% 0ff. And yeah, hit me up. Anybody has a question, I'd love to hear what people do. I'd love to hear what changes do they make? Is there something that they put into play? This is a time to be creative. And I'm just throwing out ideas that popped into my head. I'm sure that there are, you know, some seriously creative folks out there that can turn this situation into a much more positive. Jillian Leslie 52:47 Well, Matt, I have to say you I have so enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for getting me out of my stupor. You've gotten my wheels turning. You've made me excited. To figure out ways that I can serve my audience, and be proactive. Matt Molen 53:09 I'm so glad it was helpful. Join the MiloTree Mastermind Facebook Group Now! Jillian Leslie 53:11 I hope this interview with Matt gave you the inspiration you need to move forward in your business and to see it in a whole new light. If you are looking for more community and want to especially in this uncertain time, be with other like-minded entrepreneurs and join me please join my Facebook group called the MiloTree Mastermind Group. I'm in there all the time. And it's such a supportive community of like-minded bloggers and entrepreneurs, people just like you. And I feel like this is a time when we are alone isolated in our own homes, where we need to find ways to connect To feel like we are part of something bigger. So please again, head to Facebook, go Google, or Google search for the MiloTree Mastermind Group and please come join me. I would love to meet you. And I will see you here again next week. Please stay safe.

GUEST BIO: Jessica Ivins is a user experience (UX) designer and faculty member at Center Centre, the UX design school in Chattanooga, TN, where she prepares students to be industry-ready, junior UX designers. Jessica dedicates much of her time to the UX community. She founded the Chattanooga UX Design Meetup. She publishes UX articles on her blog and on Medium. She also speaks internationally at conferences such as SXSW, Midwest UX, IA Summit, and UX Cambridge (UK). EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s show is Jessica Ivins. She started her IT career working as a web developer using mainly HTML and CSS. But, soon became interested in the UX field. Her design school prepares students to become truly industry-ready, junior UX designers. Jessica is the founder of the Chattanooga UX Design Meetup as well as a prolific international conference speaker. She also spends quite a lot of time sharing her knowledge via her blog, social media, and tech articles via the Medium platform. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.06) – So Jessica, can I ask you to expand on that brief intro and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Jessica explains that, by trade, she is a UX designer. But, these days, her focus is teaching others to become industry-ready designers. To achieve this, she takes her students through an intensive two-year course. Once they have completed it, they are fully ready for the workplace. (2.00) - How long have you been focused on UX itself and how long have you been teaching other people? Her answer is since 2007, but Jessica explains that, before that, she was a front end web developer. A skill she still uses from time to time. She has been focusing on teaching since 2011/12. However, Jessica has been running regular workshops and attending meetups for far longer. (3.10) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Jessica’s advice is to always be preparing yourself for your next job search, even if you are happy in your current role. That does not mean applying for jobs before you are ready to move on. Jessica’s advice is to constantly improve your reputation. It is important to portray yourself as a professional, at all times. That way when you need to find a new job, you will be in a good position to land the role you really want. Making a name for yourself within the industry makes any job search far easier. (4.10) - Do you have any examples of what you might do to get your profile out there? Jessica says you can dive deep and begin blogging. That works well. So, does writing a book or public speaking. For Jessica, it was speaking at conferences that gave her career a real boost. Attending networking events helps too. As does, maintaining a strong presence on social media. You just need to hang out and be active where others who work in your field spend time. For example, if you are a designer Dribble is a particularly good platform to participate in. You can also listen to podcasts or read articles written by experts who work in your field and reach to and thank them. Plus, maybe ask a question or share something with them. Do that regularly and you will stay on people’s radar. LinkedIn has great feeds that make it really easy to do this. If you do a few of these things you will end up with a good online presence. So, when an employer Googles your name they will be able to find up to date information about you. Someone who is known in the industry and has a good reputation will find it easier to land a good job. Phil particularly likes the suggestion that you provide positive feedback for articles and podcasts. He knows this is effective, especially when you submit your comment not long after the article or podcast has been published. (6.50) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. At one point, despite being inexperienced and in a junior position, Jessica was expected to complete senior level work. As a result, she ended up working on some high profile and demanding projects. Unfortunately, she did not have enough experience to do everything that was expected of her. It was a very unfair position to be in. Several other people who were involved in the project were in a similar situation. Unsurprisingly, fairly quickly, everyone involved became very frustrated. However, it did make her realize that she needed to become a better facilitator. She had to develop the skill to lead individuals and teams toward consensus. It helped her to realize that being able to rally the team was an essential skill. The difficult experience she had, early on in her career, taught her a skill she still relies on heavily, today. In the end, that experience is one of the things that ended up pushing her career forward. (9.00) – What was your best career moment? For Jessica, getting into public speaking has been a highlight of her career. But, it was not something she wanted to do. She resisted, but her boss pushed her to do it. At the time, her presentation skills were not great, something her boss saw as a big issue. When she finally gave in and, she started out by speaking locally, on a subject she was passionate about. It was nowhere near as scary as she thought it would be and her public speaking ended opening a lot of doors for her. For example, while speaking at one conference she met and got to know her current boss. (10.32) – When did you actually start public speaking and how many talks have you given and do you enjoy it? Jessica explains that she started to speak publically around 2011/12, and since then has delivered dozens of talks. However, she still gets butterflies, when she speaks publically. But, she has learned to manage them better, so they are not as bad as they used to be. (11.56) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The way in which technology is becoming so integrated with our day-to-day lives excites Jessica. The pace of integration means that there are always new and interesting problems to solve, especially when it comes to the user experience. (12.40) – What drew you to a career in IT? When Jessica was in college, taking a computer programming class was mandatory. At the time, she knew very little about computers, just how to use two pieces of software and handle emails. Naturally, she was nervous about taking the programming class. But, when she did, she loved it. So much so, that she nailed her first exam. She switched majors and ended up studying to become a web developer using HTML and CSS. That is when she knew for sure that an IT career was for her. The fact that she could make enough money to live comfortably was also a win. (14.30) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Jessica says she would probably start by sharpening her self-learning skills. As a student, she had a conventional mindset. She thought the way to learn was to just go to class and do what your teacher told you. Now, she realizes that this conventional approach will only take you so far. In today’s world, you have to be really good at teaching yourself. It is the only way to remain marketable and knowledgeable enough to be really good at your job. (15.26) - Is that something you've built into a habit? Or is it something you plan out? For Jessica, it has become habitual. If you focus on learning and sharpen it as a skill, you'll get better at learning. You will learn faster and recognize which skills you need to focus on. (16.05) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Jessica is working to improve her management skills for her next cohort of students. At Center Centre, they take a different approach to education. The environment in which the students are taught is more like a workplace than a classroom. Students report to Jessica or a faculty member and have regular one-on-one meetings. Projects are managed just like they would be in the workplace. It is a sound process which produces fully trained junior UX designers. Workers who are able to do the job, from the very first day with their new companies. Jessica is pleased with the way things have gone but is working to continually improve. That means striving to manage things even better than they are now. (17.07) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? For Jessica, that is having strong facilitation skills. Being able to run meetings and lead people towards consensus and achieving goals is an invaluable skill set. Jessica feels that the ability to do this is one of the things that sets her apart, in a good way. It has also helped her to be a good educator.   (17.46) – Phil asks Jessica to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Jessica’s advice is to be intentional about how you portray yourself and make sure that you continually make small investments in your career. This will ensure that you are as ready as possible the next time you need a new job. At Center Centre, they work with students from day one to lay the groundwork for their getting a job, when they graduate, two-years later. They are encouraged to identify who they need to meet, the opportunities that will help their career and what else they can learn to boost their job worthiness. BEST MOMENTS: (3.28) JESSICA – "Lay the groundwork for your next job search now, even if you're happily employed" (8.07) JESSICA – "Public speaking opened up so many doors for me" (15.04) JESSICA – "You have to be good at seeking out new opportunities to learn, so you are marketable, hireable and knowledgeable enough to be effective at your job." (15.17) JESSICA – "If I could go back and talk to my earlier self, about the beginning of my career, I would definitely push myself to sharpen the skill of self-learning." (17.58) JESSICA – "Be intentional about how you portray yourself." CONTACT JESSICA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessicaivins LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaivins/ Website: http://jessicaivins.net

My guest today is a second time visitor to the podcast. Jessica Turner was on 2 years ago talking about her first book "The Fringe Hours". Definitely check out her episode on that here. And now she's back to talk about her second book, "Stretched Too Thin." This book will really offer support and insight to working moms who feel like they have a lot of balls in the air and they are trying to do it all. So Jessica talks about why she wrote the book and she shares basic tips for all moms to prioritize their values. Definitely pick up her book if this topic resonates with you. Show Notes:  Follow Jessica on Instagram here Listen to her past episode about the "Fringe Hours" here Pick up a copy of "Stretched to Thin"

​Composer Jessica Meyer recently had the kind of experience that gives musicians nightmares. She traveled to the desert in northwestern Colorado to perform a new piece in concert on her viola. It was built on layers of electronic loops. But the unique acoustics at the venue -- known simply as The Tank -- caused those loops to dissolve into a squall of feedback. So Jessica tossed aside the music she’d carefully composed and created something unlike anything she’d written before. She called it “Luminous Prison.” Hear the world premiere of the piece, and the emotional backstory, in this episode of Centennial Sounds from CPR Classical and Colorado Public Radio.

So Jessica threw a party. For interns--sixty of them, recommended by agents and editors. With a small recorder and a lot of luck, she asked them YOUR questions from the Facebook group--most of them fitting into one of three categories: 1) What advice do you have for interns? 2) What advice do you have for writers? 3) How would you change the industry, if you had all the money and power in the world? We love their answers, and talk about what it means to be the least cynical people in publishing today--and what it means for the future of the industry.

Jessica Moorhouse travelled from Toronto to Las Vegas over one week using only a chip and pin credit card. It's October 2017 and I'm at the SIBOS global financial services conference in Toronto. I post something about the conference on Facebook and my friend Jessica Moorhouse comments that she'll be at the conference tomorrow. I had just found out that she would be participating in this payments race - think of it as the amazing race for money nerds. It turned out the race was going to start the next day from the conference that I was already attending. I was able to get an interview with all 5 contestants in the race, Jessica being the only Canadian. All 5 racers had to make it from Toronto to Las Vegas in a week, using different methods of payment. There was bitcoin, gold, contactless ring/apple pay, cash, and Jessica had to use a chip and pin credit card. Maybe you're thinking, that's easy. You can pay for everything with a chip and pin credit card in North America, right? That's what the race is all about. The organizers didn't do a trial run from Toronto to Vegas and try all of those methods to see if it was possible. The race was created to find out if it is possible. So Jessica and the other contestants headed out into the unknown to see whether it would be a breeze or if they would run into obstacles along the way. Jessica joined me a few weeks after the race to tell her side of the story. LINKS FROM EPISODE If you want all the details about Jessica's payments race journey, you can find them here: https://jessicamoorhouse.com/youtube https://jessicamoorhouse.com/survived-trip-across-america-using-chip-pin/ Personal finance bloggers who helped Jessica along the way: Cait Flanders: https://caitflanders.com/ Michelle Jackson: https://michelleismoneyhungry.com/ Barry Choi: https://www.moneywehave.com/ NEXT EPISODE 18 - Amélie Arras Click here to book a FREE 15-minute personal finance consultation with Beau Humphreys, Personal Finance Coach Click here to become a patron of The Personal Finance Show via Patreon To register for my next available personal finance webinar click here.

Hey! Welcome back, glad to have you with us for Episode 29 of The BibRave Podcast! Tim, Julia, and Jessica are headed to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon as part of the Running USA industry conference in Orlando, and there are mixed feelings in the group. Jessica is a HUGE Disney fan, Tim could take it or leave it, and Julia is pretty uncertain of what to expect and whether or not she'll like the whole Disney experience. So Jessica guides us through a Disney race weekend experience, sharing her tips one what to do and what not to do.  Along the same lines, we end the show by talking about "Runcations" vs "Racecations," how both can be great but that each needs to be planned with different priorities in mind.  Show Notes: Disney Princess Half Marathon Running USA RunDisney Lincoln Presidential Half Marathon Meet -O- Matic: The World's Simplest Meeting Scheduler (which we use for runcation planning) Google Flights For those digging the sweet ukulele intro music, that comes to us from the talented musician and running coach, Matt Flaherty. Check out his site for more audio goodness!    If you like what you hear and want to get more, please subscribe in iTunes and leave a review. That pleases our overlords at iTunes...

Hi peeps! This was going to be a power-up then I started researching and it turned into a full-length episode. So Jessica – this one’s for you. Hope it helps! And anyone who hasn’t heard already, Yay With Me.com is now officially launched. Check it out peeps. Anyhoo, if you are listening to this because you have a rollercoaster dieting style, or you tend to go into an unconscious compulsive state when it comes to food, I think this will be enlightening and helpful in some way. It’s also got some info on the effects of stress and the difference in kinds of stress that’s harmful and not – so hopefully this will be helpful outside of food. As usual there are three parts, the what, why and how – the tools.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Jessica Jackley Co-Founder, kiva.org Date: September 29, 2008 Jessica Jackley: Kiva Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO for the National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT. This is one in a continuing series of interviews that we are doing with women who have started either IT companies or organizations that are based on information technology. We are very excited that we have Jessica Flannery here today from Kiva to talk to us. Also with me is Larry Nelson, from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: It's really a pleasure to be here and I must say we are getting tremendous feedback from not only adults who are having their children listen to some of these interviews, but some of the employers that are looking for more women and more technical people to get into the business which is sometimes a very good step to becoming an entrepreneur. Lucy: Also with me today is Lee Kennedy who is a Director of NCWIT and a serial entrepreneur herself. Right now, her current company is called Tricalix. Hi Lee. How are you? Lee Kennedy: Hi Lucy. Hi Larry. It is so good to be here. Larry: It is. We are the three L's, right? Lucy, Lee and Larry or something. Lucy: Or something. Welcome Jessica. We are very happy to have you with us today and the topic that we are going to talk about, I mean, you're fabulous social entrepreneur, and I think that this whole area of micro-finance and what Kiva is doing is just fascinating. And as part of this interview, we all went and spent time on the Kiva site and just really got lost in all the wonderful stories that are our there. So welcome. Jessica Flannery: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Lucy: Well, for our listeners, I'm sure everybody knows but it bears repeating that Kiva is the first peer to peer micro loan website. It really demonstrates how the Internet can be used to facilitate these meaningful types of connections between people who want to lend money and entrepreneurs all over the world especially in developing countries, how we can all help each other really move the economies ahead. It's a really fascinating website. So Jessica, why don't you just spend a minute and tell us a bit about Kiva. Jessica: Sure. You said it very, very well and very concisely. We are the world's first person to person micro lending website so anybody in the world can go onto the site, browse business profiles and entrepreneur profiles really I should say. Whether that person is a farmer or selling small goods in their village or a seamstress or a restaurant owner, there are all different kinds of small business. And you can lend as little as $25 to that entrepreneur and over time you get updates on that business and then you get paid back. Larry: Wow! Lucy: Well, and Kiva is a fairly young organization. I read someplace that you started a bit of a hobby website and it just exploded. Jessica: Yeah. It's been a very, very busy last four years. Four years ago, I learned about micro-finance and decided that's what I want to do. I quit another job and I went to East Africa for a few months to see it up close and personal. While I was there it was impossible not to be deeply moved by the stories of success of people that I was meeting. People who had used often just a $100 to change their lives and lifted their families out of poverty. So, I became really excited about these stories and wanted to share them with my own friends and family. And as I did that, my husband Matt and I kept asking not just "Oh, this is great. Micro-finance works, but wow, how do we, and our friends and family, how do we enable people to lend money directly to these individuals we're meeting?" So, it started out with a very specific way, very specific context with individuals who we had met face to face in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda who we wanted to help. We wanted to participate in their amazing stories, and we wanted to see them get to the next level. So what we did was basically Matt came to visit me during his time in East Africa, and then he went back home, built our website. We emailed our friends and family and said "Hey, we have seven businesses in Uganda that we'd like to lend a total of $3,000 to. Do you want to pitch in?" Then overnight that money came in and we sent that along to Uganda. We had a six month kind of beta round with these seven entrepreneurs in Uganda. After the six months they had repaid, we took the word beta off of our website and that launched us. And that was just in October of '05, so not even quite three years ago. Our first year was $500,000 a month, the second year was $13.5 million more, and today we're just around $45 million, and we haven't even finished our third year. So it's grown very rapidly. Lucy: And you have an incredible payback on the loans, incredible payback percent. Jessica: Yeah, it's in a high 90 percentage. That's representative of a micro finance alone, not just our site. Lucy: But wow, that's just and incredible history and such a good cause as well. One of the things that I noticed there was a Soft-tech video on YouTube that I watched that I thought was very interesting. Where you mentioned that you all created the tool that Kiva uses really to match lenders and entrepreneurs without really knowing how the world would use it to your previous story. This gets us to our first question which is around technology, and I thought you would have a really interesting spin on this. You know, how in general do you see technology helping missions like those of Kiva? Slightly different than potentially a four-profit business but you have incredibly interesting uses of technology. So what do you see in the future? Jessica: Kiva does a lot of different things, but our mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. The real key there is to connect people. The money transfer is very interesting, and technology obviously helps that happened, but what really we care about is this connectivity. Loans happen to be a great tool for poverty alleviation as well as connectivity. I mean, if you lend me something and I have it and I'm fully giving it back to you, you're going to pay a little bit more attention usually, than if you just donate something and I tell you how that's going forever and ever. That back and forth communication is obviously free or a lot less expensive. It's quick. It's real time. You can see on the other side of the planet how this person is waiting right now today for that $200 that's going to allow them to start their business. So there are all these elements, but then technology makes it faster, more efficient, less expensive and just overall easier to have that human connection happen. Very specifically while I said the money is not the point, it's a great tool for a lot of things. For example, we've had a lot of help from great technology leaders out there that we've been able to leverage. So PayPal, we're the first non-profit to have PayPal generously agree to provide free payment transactions. So we have literally zero variable costs for sending these little bits of money back and forth all around the planet every day. Lucy: Well, one thing too, I'm a technologist so I'll get off this question in just a minute. I know Larry and Lee are looking at me like "Let's move off the technology." But I do have one more thing to observe here, because this is a different kind of interview than we've done. There is a whole growing area called ICT for D which is Information and Communication Technology for Developing World and one of the things that I have read that you either have done or will do is you make an offline browser so that people can conserve power on their computer, sort of a low energy kind of browser so they don't have to be always plugged in. That's an example of the type of technology around ICT for D that you have to start thinking about the climates and the situation and the resources that people have all around the world. Jessica: It's been very, very interesting for us to see, even how sometimes we'll have really wonderful generous lenders say, "Hey, I also want to donate financially or otherwise." And let's say they send a great batch of brand new video cameras for us to send out to the field. Well, sometimes actually a lower tech solution is better, because of the technology that's available in the field. So maybe we don't need the highest quality photos, the highest res photos, maybe a lower tech solution is better. That's been interesting to watch, just figuring out really what's the best and what's the most appropriate tools to get the job done. Lee: That's exactly right. Lucy: So, we normally ask what it is that you love about being an entrepreneur, but since you're working with entrepreneurs it would be great to hear about the stories from the entrepreneurs out of Kiva, as well as what it is that love about this whole environment and the entrepreneurship. Jessica: OK. This is a really good question. What I found is the idea of being an entrepreneur, I think that's really attractive to a lot of people. I think there are some, I don't want to put value judgments on it, good or bad, better or worse, but I think sometimes it has to do with freedom or this idea of being your own boss, or something like that. For me, my introduction to business and my entrepreneurship at all was in Africa seeing people who were gold hunters, or subsistence farmers, or fishermen, or people who were basically entrepreneurship to them was doing what they needed to do every day to survive. It was definitely not an option. They had to do the next thing, figure out the next step to get closer and closer to their goal to find food, and they could survive that day. It was very hand-to-mouth sort of entrepreneurship. It wasn't what we usually think of in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurship being super innovated perhaps or anything like that, but in context it was as innovative as anything else in Silicon Valley would have been, and as much entrepreneurship as anything else that you would see in other places of the world. For me, it's funny. I guess yet that it's true, when you look back at what we've done in Kiva the last four years, great! We have been social entrepreneurs, but we didn't go out thinking, I definitely thought over the years, over the last few years, "Oh, social entrepreneurship. How great! I want to do something like that." Then what happened is you have to get specific. You have to start with something specific. So, we started to do Kiva, a very, very specific mission of Kiva, and then retroactively we're like, "Oh, yeah. I guess that's what we're doing. It's pretty entrepreneurial, isn't it?" It came down to, "We have this mission, and we're going to do whatever we need to do everyday to make it happen. We're going to be scrappy if we need to. We're going to iterate. We're going to put things out there that maybe aren't even perfect. We're going to keep moving, and everyday say, 'What can we do next to meet our goals?'" That's what it felt like to me to be entrepreneurial. I think it's really been informed by the people that originally inspired us in the first place, and these micro-entrepreneurs all over the world. Lucy: You know what? That's just what entrepreneurs do. Everyday they're looking around, trying to figure out what they can do better. Do you have a story or two that you can share with some of the entrepreneurs that have taken loans and been successful, and then paid the loans off? Jessica: Sure. I mean there are so, so many. It's actually one of the hardest questions I get, because really I mean every one of them is amazing. If you want an amazing success story, I can tell you for example there was a woman that really was one of the very first people I ever met in East Africa. She did such amazing stuff. She had started one business, like a charcoal selling business. She had gotten them $800. For that initial business, she did like the equivalent of what a multi-national corporation would do, like all the principals were there. She started the one business, and then she diversified. Then she expanded, not from her local market, she went to markets in other trading centers and other villages. She extended beyond her geographic region. She started five other small businesses of all different types. I mean really things that you really wouldn't think would be related. What she did was she got practice, and then she got very good at seeing market needs and seeing opportunities. So, she had the capitol after time, and she was able to say, "Huh." I think of a very small caring business that you could start with $200 or $300. I think that's what made it. So she did that, and she did the next thing, and the next thing. She just blew me away, because you knew that had she just been dealing in another environment with bigger numbers, she would be the head of a huge multi-national corporation that was doing all sorts of different things really well. So, people like that just always blow me away. I would say truly, it sounds like a bit of a cheesy answer, but the real truth is any story that you read on the Kiva site, there's something to learn, there's something to appreciate, and there's something good. I think say, "Hey! Good job there, " to the entrepreneurs for doing it, because each person is taking a risk even just in accepting a loan, and putting themselves out there and saying, "I'm going to try. I'm going to try to do things differently. I'm going to try and make my life better, and life for my family better." Just taking advantage of that opportunity is something I think should really be applauded, and in and of itself is really a triumph and a great thing, a great thing to see happen. So, that's the hardest question to answer, because all of the entrepreneurs that you can see, I truly find inspirational in something. Lucy: Well, thank you for sharing that. That really is inspirational. Lee: Well, the other thing, and I'm sure somebody has already tumbled to this, there's a business book in this. When you said that she was making all the right entrepreneurial business moves, there's got to be a lot of nuggets of wisdom in there. Larry: You had mentioned offline Jessica, that you are involved with Ashoka? Jessica: Well, yes. I mean, I have found a lot of inspiration in Ashoka over the years, and sort of been introducing the idea of social entrepreneurship through Ashoka. Additionally, he has been honored with the Ashoka Fellowship very recently. We're really excited to be part of that community. Larry: Congratulations! Let me get on with another question here. Who has been either a role model or a mentor in your career, in your life? Jessica: Oh, my goodness! Now, that's the hardest question. I feel like I have been so blessed and so surrounded by encouragers. I mean, can I say like my top five? Larry: OK. Jessica: My parents first and foremost have always given me... Actually, it was really funny. I watched the Emmys last night. I actually don't have a television, but I was with and brother and sister-in-law in L.A., and we were watching the Emmys a little bit. She was saying something funny. She was like, "Thanks to my mom and dad for giving me confidence, that was to the portion that was my looks and ability." It was like "that's what my parents said." My parents first and foremost made it without question an obvious thing, that I could do anything I wanted to in the world. So, that was kind of the foundational piece in a very supportive family. There's been a few others. When I heard Dr. Hamadias speak, his story spoke to me like no others had at that point. That's what propelled me to quit my job and go off and try to figure out micro-finance for myself, and try to do something like what he did, like walk around meet people, listen to their needs, and help. So, he gave me a huge inspiration. Then I guess, the other person I'll mention is Brian Reynolds actually gave me that opportunity to go. He is the Founder and Executive Director of a really great organization called "Village Enterprise Fund." They give $100 grants to entrepreneurs for business creation. They really start people on the very first string of the economic ladder. These are actually folks who are doing such risky things like their systems filing that "If it doesn't rain, everything is lost." Really, really small businesses, who their commissioners wouldn't take a loan probably because they would be not in the right position to do so. Their organization is amazing. I basically met with Brian right around the time I decided I was going to figure out a way to work in micro-finance. He really gave me that opportunity. He listened to me, kind of met me where I was and said, "Hey." Even though I had no skills that I could really name. I had studied philosophy and poetry undergrad. I had done event planning, and administrative things in my job. I really didn't have a lot to go on to say "look, this is why you should hire me, and let me go do micro-finance," but he gave me that chance. On that trip. out to East Africa with Village Enterprise Fund, that's what changed my life, and that's where we had the ideas for Kiva. So, I am absolutely grateful for him, among many, many other in my life over the last decade. There's a lot of people. Lee: Well, that's the good thing about entrepreneurship as well that there are lots of other good people around to encourage you, and to offer wisdom. One piece of wisdom that we've been getting lots of interesting answers too on this particular interview series is the toughest thing you've ever had to do. So, we're curious. What is the toughest thing so far, that you've had to do in your career? Jessica: That is a really good question. I would say without a doubt that it has been...really tough to... you know when you do something that you care about so much, and also something that is like with the social mission I think, it becomes your baby. It becomes like your...I don't know there all these analogies, your right arm, you just feel so attached. It has been a challenge I think to do the work life balance thing in any way because you just feel so driven, so consumed by it, and you want to spend all your waking hours on it, but that can be unhealthy and actually lead to burn out and that sort of thing. So finding the right balance has been probably the biggest challenge and also being removed enough to make objective decisions. You know, it's always a challenge when you are so in love with the work that you get to do. Lee: So speaking of personal and professional balance what do you do to bring balance with all the entrepreneurs you're trying to help, and the changes on the website, how do you manage that? Jessica: Well, I think it's just about kind of knowing what your priorities are and knowing what your boundaries are of what you can control and what you can't and then just working away. I think it is just a daily reminding and daily recalibration saying, "OK, here is what we are about. Here's what we can do. Here's what we can't do and let's just keep moving forward." I think another trick too is just checking yourself often to make sure you are not making decisions others fear or panic in any way. We haven't really... we're an interesting state where we haven't had a competitors per se really, and we don't even think that way. But if we were forced to look at other kind of collaborative organizations out there as competitors, even if we saw them as such, I think it would be the wrong move to be driven to make any sort of decisions, or move to out of the place of fear. Just like it is in life, just kind of knowing who you are, and what you're about, knowing who you're not and just doing that, like the trying to respond to what else is out there or what someone else is doing. I think staying true and pure to your own mission is what it is about. It will make you stay sane. Larry: You have actually kind of covered part of the question I was going to ask you and that is, you've done so many things Jessica and you work with all kinds of people around the world but if you were right now sitting down in front of a young potential entrepreneur, what advice would you give them? Jessica: OK, I have the privilege of getting to do this quite a bit. This is the number one thing I would say, two things. Follow whatever you are really passionate about. It can be something that doesn't make a lot of sense like what do you do when we were passionate about the stories, how do you follow that? We loved them, we celebrated them, we read them ourselves, we laughed, we cried, we just got into those stories and then by sharing those stories, the thing that we are passionate about with the people that we were passionate about, our friends and family, that led to some really great stuff. So just follow as best you can, the stuff that you are passionate about would be number one. Two, if you're going to do something and start something and you really believe that's kind of what you were meant to do next, I would say don't be afraid to start small. In fact, that is really the only way to begin. I just finished my MBA at Stanford. I can't say enough good things about that place and that community. It was amazing. Additionally, it's a place where it is easy to think big very quickly and say "let's go change the world in these huge huge ways and let's have..." you know you don't want to start something unless it's scalable and unless it is going to touch three million people in its first two years or whatever. Easy to say think big or go home and what's your plan for scalability? You need to know that right now. I would say to a budding entrepreneur, don't be afraid, to be very, very specific about what you want to do, and how you want to begin. You should definitely think long term, too. But goodness, it's not a bad thing to start small, and in fact I really really believe that is kind of the way you have to do it and just do a little plug. There's a wonderful man who I would consider a mentor and certainly someone I have looked up to and learned a lot from. His name is Paul Polak, and he wrote a book called "Out of Poverty." He really talks a lot about being in contact like designing whatever you are designing, particularly if it's a program, or a service, or a product to serve the poor, go be with the people that you want to serve. Go get to know them as individuals and design things for individuals not this group of statistic of statistics or the masses. Go meet real people, design for them, start with the, serve them, and then see how you can grow things. That would be my recommendation, don't be afraid to start small and be really passionate about what you are doing because that's the way good things happen. Lucy: Dare I say that that I am old and wizened woman but you know your advice about starting small and don't be afraid to do that, it feels a lot like something I've come to view as being true. You just often don't know what the next turn is going to be. You have to live it a while, and see how things change and mature, and then be opportunistic about which way things are going to go because you often don't see the end. Jessica: Oh, yes and you can't. Lucy: You can't. Jessica: You actually probably sometimes cannot see the next step. It is totally impossible until you make the first one. Lucy: That's fine and that's actually part of the fun, isn't it? Larry: It is part of the fun. It's also by the way a big part of the book that I'm just finishing. Lucy: Oh, you had to plug your book. Larry: "Master and change," yes. Lucy: You had to plug your book. Larry: Oh well. Lucy: Well so I think we have a book here. So I have to ask you though, is there such a big about entrepreneurism and Kiva about teaching the basic elements of entrepreneurship? Jessica: No, not yet, but I think there are about 20 books we can write with them, different angles, different experiences, Web 2.0, the power of connecting people, what have we learned about business from the entrepreneurs out there? There's a lot of potential. Lucy: Oh, absolutely. I look forward to it. Jessica: Yeah, me too. Lucy: You've already really achieved a lot. It's quite inspirational to talk to you and kiva is just such a great organization. What's next for you? We just talked about how sometimes you can't see around the corner, do you have any long term vision that you want to share with our listeners about what's next? Jessica: No, I don't, but I will say that something that's been crazy is just this feeling that... I mean this is like my life dream. You read my favorite business school. I would say it was from three years ago. I would say it was basically someday maybe maybe I will get to be a part of something like this. I feel like the luckiest person in the world and to think that there could be other things in the future just blows my mind. I feel overwhelmed even thinking about it but overall in the most positive way because I already feel like this is my life. If my life ended tomorrow, I would be very a really thankful, happy person because I feel like I've gotten to see my dream kind of come true. Everything else is icing on the cake. What I am trying to do is to stay open to possibility, and learn, and read, and talk to people, and stay open to observing what is going on out there. I am thankful for kiva, and I am thankful for whatever the future hold, but yeah I'll let you know when I know. Larry: All right. Lucy: That has to be the most inspirational thing I have ever heard. I mean just to hear the passion in your voice and the excitement, it gives me goose bumps. I'm happy for you. I hope other people benefit from all the work that you are doing. Jessica: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I just feel very very lucky. Larry: Wow, Jessica I want to thank you for joining us today. This was marvelous plus. Jessica: Thank you. Man 1: By the way you listeners out there, would you pass this interview along to others who you think would be interested. We will make sure that we have a website link to kiva. Say your website. Jessica: It's www.kiva.org. Larry: Sounds wonderful. This has just been great here we are with the National Center for Women and Information Technology. You are doing some great stuff by bringing these messages out for people who are doing wonderful things. Thanks. Lucy: Well thanks and listeners can find these interviews at www.ncwit.org and at w3w3.com. Larry: You bet. Lucy: So thank you very much. Larry: Thank you. Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Jessica JackleyInterview Summary: Jessica is a remarkable social entrepreneur who is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of www.kiva.org -- the first peer-to-peer micro-lending website. Kiva connects lenders with entrepreneurs from the developing world, empowering them to rise out of poverty. Release Date: September 29, 2008Interview Subject: Jessica JackleyInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 25:02