Podcasts about so michelle

Over the last 18 months, our social lives have been impacted. We have likely made new connections but have lost connection to some of the most important people in our lives. We have been forced to grieve and manage this ever-changing life in ways that we (for the most part) were NOT ready for. My guest today is Michelle Wolfe, and she is one of those charming, inspiring, high vibrational women who just makes you feel good about yourself. And so as soon as we became friends, I wanted to share her light with you all. Michelle is all about building community, sharing struggles and working together to help you MUVE forward. Her own personal struggles, her trauma, her grief have all lead her down a very dark road that had difficult and challenging impacts on her life. However, she was on a mission to do “the work” and knew deep down that life was bigger than the way she was experiencing it.   The foundation of her healing journey (and adapting to her ever-changing life) is to keep moving forward. Making one decision at a time, one move at a time, one step at a time.   The idea is that we don't get stuck in the past or project ourselves into the future… We stay present and keep moving forward in this moment. Time moves, and thus, so must we. So Michelle created something called The Muve Collective, which is an online space for women to share their stories, learn from others, connect with each other and be inspired by stories of overcoming struggle. How cool is that? Health and Wellness is her passion, a self-care advocate, a motivator and beautiful thought leader and today's episode is a fun, inspiring and genuine chat about life, our struggles and what is all means.   I think it's Michelle's goal in life to come together as strangers and leave as friends… so let's get into this episode so you can fall in love with her just like I did. Listen to the episode and find out more about Michelle at: http://www.themichellewolfe.com/ (www.themichellewolfe.com) Or on Instagram at:  http://www.instagram.com/themichellewolfe (www.instagram.com/themichellewolfe)

In this episode, CEO of Performance Physical Therapy, Michelle Collie, talks about the business of physical therapy. Today, Michelle talks about the lack of business knowledge of physical therapy graduates, the belief that marketing and sales are bad, and the importance of encouraging entrepreneurship. How do we change the public's understanding of our roles in health care teams? Hear about the challenges Michelle has faced, how she maintains her company culture, and get some great advice, all on today's episode of The Healthy, Wealthy & Smart Podcast. Key Takeaways “I do think that it's our responsibility for the well-being of our profession that we do include some basic business information.” “People don't know what we do. We don't do a good job of explaining the value.” “Any way we can support small businesses is going to be helpful for the future of our profession.” “You definitely have to work on yourself a lot, and be very mindful of what you need as a person if you want to be a leader in an organisation.” “How you act at a holiday party or social event, is going to have a big impact on what your organisation is like.” “Get comfortable with the word ‘money'. It's not a bad word. Just think of money as one of the things that helps us be able to evolve as a profession and serve more people in our communities.” “Be curious about learning more about business.” “Believe in yourself earlier, and address the fears that you have of your lack of knowledge and your inability to do things. Make your mistakes earlier.” More about Michelle Collie [caption id="attachment_9677" align="alignleft" width="150"] headshot of Michelle Collie[/caption] Michelle Collie PT, DPT, MS is the CEO of Performance Physical Therapy, a privately held practice with clinics in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Celebrating 21 years since it was founded, Performance employs over 230 people, with ongoing growth plans, including 2 new clinics opening this month. Performance PT has celebrated many accolades including being the recipient of the APTA-PPS Jane L. Snyder Practice of the Year, and 7 times, Rhode Island best places to work award. Michelle currently serves as the president of the RI chapter of the APTA and chair of the PPS PR and Marketing Committee. She was a member of the PPS Covid Advisory board and is a two- time recipient of the PPS board service award. Michelle is a board certified orthopedic clinical specialist. Suggested Keywords Well-being, Knowledge, Business, Physiotherapy, Culture, Marketing, Sales, Money, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Healthy, Wealthy, Smart, APTA, PPS, Therapy, Recommended Resources August 20th Graham Sessions: https://ppsapta.org/events/graham-sessions Marketing Resources: https://ppsapta.org/practice-management/marketing-resources.cfm To learn more, follow Michelle at: Website:          https://performanceptri.com Facebook:       Performance Physical Therapy Instagram:       @performanceptri Twitter:            @performanceptri LinkedIn:         Performance Physical Therapy RI YouTube:        Performance Physical Therapy BizPT Round Table Talk Subscribe to Healthy, Wealthy & Smart: Website:                      https://podcast.healthywealthysmart.com Apple Podcasts:          https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healthy-wealthy-smart/id532717264 Spotify:                        https://open.spotify.com/show/6ELmKwE4mSZXBB8TiQvp73 SoundCloud:               https://soundcloud.com/healthywealthysmart Stitcher:                       https://www.stitcher.com/show/healthy-wealthy-smart iHeart Radio:               https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-healthy-wealthy-smart-27628927   Read the Full Transcript Here:  Speaker 1 (00:03): Hey, Michelle. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so happy to have you here for this month, where we are talking all about the business of physical therapy. So welcome. Speaker 2 (00:13): Thank you, Karen. It's great to be here. Speaker 1 (00:15): And I mean, you and I have talked business in the past, like I said, in your intro, you have several offices within your business and you've really grown your business into a really great place to work. And I think that that's so important. It seems like your employees are happy. You're happy, and that is not an easy thing to do these days. So kudos to you for that. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted you to come and be part of this discussion this month, because you are a physical therapist with multiple locations. You're not just a solo preneur, right? So how many people before you go on, how many people do you employ, just so that people can get an idea of, you know, the, the breadth and width of your practice. Speaker 2 (01:04): We currently have approximately 230 employees. Now we've got openings case. Anyone's looking for a job, but as I know, everyone else is looking for employees as well. This is a common problem throughout the nation at the moment, but yes, 230, but still growing. Speaker 1 (01:21): Yeah. Which is amazing. I mean, that's, so I always think about that as they're in, like you're helping 230 people grow their wealth, improve their families, keep their lives going. I mean, it's a big deal. It's a lot of responsibility. Speaker 2 (01:37): It's a great point. And I kind of guess I love that opportunity to do that because people often say to me, oh, do you miss treating patients? And I am like, well, I do. But now I feel like I get to somehow have a larger impact on a whole lot more people. And I, yes, I love to treat patients. I love the care that we provide as physical therapists, but I do love knowing that I'm helping to provide a place for an employment for lots of people to work. And I especially felt that through COVID and the way that we were actually able to keep all of our stuff on, we did have to furlough for some of our administrative staff, but then ultimately we're able to bring everyone back. And and that was something that helped me get through the pandemic actually, knowing that I was able to have a positive impact on the fiscal sanity of all, for lack of a better term for many of the people in our community. Speaker 1 (02:32): Yeah. Which is amazing. And now, you know, this month we're talking all about business, you have a growing thriving business. So how much of the business of this business knowledge did you get when you graduated as a physical therapist? How much did you learn in PT school? Well, Speaker 2 (02:48): Probably about the same amount that every PT that's graduating these days you know, and to be fully transparent and clear, I took over performance. I actually purchased from the original founder. I was a clinic director there. It was a smaller practice with 16 employees and I was very pregnant, eight months pregnant. So I thought I was invincible. And through a seller finance note and an SBA loan, I somehow ended up with this practice and a lot of debt. And the first day that I officially owned it, which was I think three weeks before I had my first son, I walked into the office manager and said to them, don't tell anyone this, but people keep talking about financial statements, but I don't really know what they're talking about. So I prided myself on being a good PC and really loved that the value of physical therapy and what it provided to our community and patients. But when it came to actual business knowledge, especially those off to do with the financial management of an organization, and even thinking about things such as marketing and human resources, I would say I was completely ignorant and didn't have one scrap of knowledge. Speaker 1 (04:04): Right. And so this is obviously a huge deal challenge for our profession, right. So what can we do should, should these topics be included in school? Speaker 2 (04:16): I mean, I, of course I'm a proponent of it for a number of reasons. And I do, and I really respect those folks had in academia and I bought them, challenged them. You know, why don't you include some more business information and the curriculum. And the response is usually I revolve around time. We don't have enough time. And the other one is, is that always students don't want to learn that they want to learn physical therapy things. However, I do think that it's Sarah, truly a responsibility for the wellbeing of our profession, that we do include some basic business information. And that's not just because some people will want to go and start a business or be part of the business. So yeah, it will help those folks. But I do think for, let's say the staff PT, if a staff PT has a little bit more understanding of, let's say what marketing is, then they suddenly are better at advocating and speaking to their patients about the value of what we do. Speaker 2 (05:17): If someone is able to understand some of the communication skills that align with marketing and even sales, then we will suddenly see word of mouth referrals go up. When someone understands financial management a little bit more, they have a better understanding of how to code, how to negotiate your salary, the meaning of different kinds of salaries and what they mean in the longterm. So I think having some basic business information seats up every individual, no matter what setting they're working in to be a better manager and better, better more knowledgeable for the career and the longterm. We hear so often PTs talking about burnout. We hear them talking about lack of reimbursement and not getting paid enough and obviously student loans. But I think with empowering our graduate San UPTs with some bitter understanding of business and how it works, it actually gives them some foundational knowledge. So they actually can do something and make a difference rather than just this overall overwhelming complaints we hear, oh, we're not paid enough. Reimbursement keeps going down. Student loans are too high. We have at least problems with their proficient, but we need to empower our next generation to have some business knowledge. So they can ultimately help do something about this crisis that we're headed into. Speaker 1 (06:44): Yeah. And, and I think even being able to make a financial statement for yourself, it doesn't have to be a business. You don't have to own a business, but you should know, well, how much money are you bringing in? What are your costs after that money comes in? What are your debts and your liabilities? And you can look at that and, and make a budget. It may help you be able to better budget yourself to be able to pay off those student loans or, you know, do the things that you want to do. I mean, I find, I found that learning all of that has just been so eyeopening for me. Speaker 2 (07:19): Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And especially these days, we, you see different compensation packages coming out, different kinds of variable salaries. Oh, you know, if you work per diem versus full time, or maybe I do wanna, you know, have a side hustle, but understanding the long-term financial implications of those decisions can be really important and again, and how you to make the decisions that are best for your career. So you can actually work in the seating and provide the kind of care that you truly want to, and being out of balance out the money side of it and in the clinical side of it. Yeah. Speaker 1 (07:55): I couldn't agree more, I think, and I, you know, I do hope that at the very least when it comes to teaching business courses, I mean, at least help therapists understand the financial aspects of a business, whether that be a hospital, a skilled nursing facility, an inpatient facility and outpatient facility. I just think understanding that will give them a better idea. Like you said, of salaries negotiations, how much are you getting paid? Whether it be per code per patient, like you said before, you started a little, a little tweak and what you code and how much you code can compound exponentially. Speaker 2 (08:35): Exactly, exactly. Very small changes in your coding changes of business. But I also think speaking to that, having a knowledge of the kinds of employers that are out there, and that's a side of businesses as well, understanding the difference between for profit nonprofit, understanding the difference about PE and corporate owned and public on versus privately owned. There is not one that is better than the other at all. There a great PTs who are in corporate practices. There's also crappy PTs and corporate practices, same thing for private practice. It's all over the place. However, if individual PTs have a basic understanding of the, those different businesses and how they're set up, it gives them a more well-rounded approach to being part of that team, no matter who they decide to work for, or at least they want to go out in the business on their own. Speaker 1 (09:30): And, and I don't know if you have the answer to this, but do you have, can you think of off the top of your head, any resources that may be practicing PTs or new graduates can utilize to help them understand? Let's say to be more financially fluent in the physical therapy world. So let's say you didn't get it in school, which odds are you probably didn't. Where do you have any resources that people can learn more? Well, Speaker 2 (09:57): The one that's out there, which we don't actually do, I don't think a good enough job of messaging and marketing and here's, I can do that right now, but obviously the private practice section or, you know, and maybe it should be called the business section because it does have all the resources there for, for business. And again, that doesn't matter if you're a pediatric or orthopedic or in a hospital or in home care, the business of PT is everywhere. And I think the private practice section has tremendous amounts of resources for that they have, for instance, a whole series called finance 1 0 1, which is multiple videos, just on finance marketing 1 0 1. So educational opportunities, webinars, all of those, there's a huge amount of resources through the private practice section, their annual conference, and many, many people who work in all kinds of different settings come to get a through that chapter of the AP TA. So I would say for anyone with any business interests, it is a very non-threatening welcoming chapter for peoples that people at all different times in their career and all different kinds of practices to come to. Speaker 1 (11:09): Yeah. Excellent. All right. Thank you for that. So now you've said it a couple of times marketing and sales, and I know you're on the marketing committee, so we are going to dive into that. So what about the belief that marketing and sales is bad? Like it's icky. It's like people should know what we do. Why do we have to go out and market ourselves and be like, quote unquote used salesman, used car salesman, not use salesman. Speaker 2 (11:38): So incredible. I tried to flip it and say that to me, marketing and sales, we should call it advocacy because what it is is actually advocating for who we are and what we do. I was speaking to a student the other day, actually. And I love speaking to students because it's really interesting to hear when and how they learn their sort of opinions and biases. And this student was telling me about their clinical affiliation and that he couldn't understand why all doctors weren't telling their patients about direct access and we have direct access, but doctors don't tell their patients. And I see this, I say to the student, I see, did you, did you, does your mother know what [inaudible] is? And he goes, no, I had to explain it. And I see it. So let's first of all, stop using this word direct access because no one understands what it is we like to use it. Speaker 2 (12:36): But first of all, we have to be able to communicate and let people know. And then I said, do you think that the average doctor healthcare professional knows that you could see us without a referral? I don't know that because we never tell them how are they supposed to know that? So I think what it is is when we're marketing is really about advocating or educating people don't know who we are and what we do Magento here's my random guests is that 40% of PTs. And I just made that number up. But I asked a lot of people, 40% of PTs got into the field of PT because they were injured as teenagers. And they learned about the field and I was one of them. And I, I would love to know what percentage of PTs out there had ACL tears, because there is every second PTI made is like, yeah, I told my ACL when I was like 15 and I fell in love with my PTs. Speaker 2 (13:28): And I realized what a difference it made to my life. And then I decided I want to be a PT. Like, why do we have to be, you know, we experienced it. That's how we found out about it. But yet we don't want to tell other people about it. We think it's icky for some reason. So I just always try and push people. People don't know what we do. We don't do a good job of explaining the value. People have biases and think, oh, you just helped someone after they've had a stroke to walk things like that. But I think it's time that we don't just say, yes, we take care of all different kinds of people. Get them back to their life and doing what they want to love. We actually have to take it a step further and say, no, no, we're actually a major solution. When it comes to the issues with MSK, MSK ailments are a huge problem in our society. And we have the ability to keep people moving so we can decrease those downstream costs, such as knee replacements, hip replacements, chronic illnesses, your diabetes, your obesity, your hypertension. So the value in Walt we can do and create is way, way more than even what we message on a day-to-day basis at this stage. And we have to do a bit, your job of it. Speaker 1 (14:40): How do we do a better job? That's the question, the million dollar question, great. Speaker 2 (14:46): How do we do a better job? You know, I've worked at PPS and we've tried to pull PR committees and PR companies to help us with it. But I think at the end of the day, what we've found most useful is is doing grassroots advocacy work, ensuring that every student comes out and understands how to describe and how to talk about and the meaning of it. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (15:14): And, and I, like, I always tell people, if you want people to know what you do, what we do as physical therapists and you have to put yourself out there to do it. So it's not just talking to each other within the profession. We know what we do. You know, I always encourage people like you know, pitch yourself to your local newspaper, get a column, right. Like I said, this too, like in my PPS talk that was online last year. I went step-by-step and taught people how to do that. And then a couple of weeks later, I got an email from a woman who watched it and she said, I, I, I was able to get a column with my local newspaper Speaker 2 (15:59): Colson. Exactly. You put yourself out there and don't think I just have to be a PT in the clinics. I like you do a podcast. Mine's very different. My podcasts I do with different healthcare providers in our community, including PTs. And we discuss things such as how to stop running or picking your right running shoes, or what do you do if you've got back pain or how did you manage through COVID, but putting out information so that people in the community see, you see you as experts in movement and health and wellbeing and not just the clinician that your primary care doc seems to you once they don't know what to do with you because of your ongoing back pain. We're a whole lot more. Speaker 1 (16:44): Yeah. Yeah. And I think physical therapists in general, this is just my opinion, but they really need to get off the sidelines and start taking control because a lot of this, like, is it up to the AP TA to do all of this? No. You know, as an individual physical therapist, you have to put yourself out there as well. Speaker 2 (17:03): You really do. And I, I do get a little frustrated when I see people on social media bashing the, a PTA about all the things that a PTA should be doing. I think what we've seen in the year, we've seen changes in our profession such as, Hey, we're all now doctors, a PT thinking that this label would suddenly change how the public and how healthcare providers perceived us a new title, a new label, or a fancy ed doesn't change who we are. It's how we behave. So we have to behave like professionals. We have to stop being on the sidelines and actually get in and play the game. When it comes to health care, sit at the right board tables, be confident and comfortable calling out local docs, countable care organizations, insurers, and letting them know the role and the value that we provide. Speaker 1 (17:57): Yeah. Perfect. Couldn't have said it better. Excellent. Now, you know, this whole month is all about small business or not small business, but about businesses, entrepreneurship. And, you know, in speaking, before we went on the air, we were saying how important small businesses and entrepreneurship is to I think bringing back this country after hopefully as COVID starts to recede. So can you talk a little bit more about that? Speaker 2 (18:27): Yeah. I mean, you see it in every industry, that's entrepreneurship, these are where the new ideas, the crazy ideas and small businesses have the opportunity, the luxury to be savvy and make quick changes in what they do. COVID sore that, I mean, who were the first folks to suddenly provide telehealth services? It wasn't the big corporate or hospital run facilities. It was the savvy small businesses who were able to flip their operations overnight and suddenly implement telehealth. And of course that led the way for everyone else being able to follow. So I think COVID helped to prove it and show that that is the way that the world works. Entrepreneurship, small businesses seems to drive innovation. I think now in the world of physical therapy, we are seeing major challenges with reimbursement and payment. I personally, and a big fan of my moving towards value-based payment. Speaker 2 (19:24): I really despise the whole, you know, the more you do, the more you get paid, I would much rather the, we are paid to keep or get our patients healthy and have good outcomes and just find the journey to get there. But I think it's small businesses that had the opportunity to, to take on risk and try different ways, whether it's with employers or whether it's with healthcare insurance, healthcare insurance companies like go to these different organizations and pitch, then pitch different ideas. Now you're going to get turned down probably 90% of the time. That's okay. But then you're going to find little pilots and you're going to find opportunities. And even when I look around the country, now I hear from colleagues and peers who are like, oh, I'm in this kind of financial model where we're doing health screenings and we're just taking care of the lives. And someone else says, oh, we've got a subscription paced program to keep people moving. So there's different pilots going on. And it's small business that has the ability to be innovative and do those that then we can ultimately model after. So I think any way we can small support small businesses is going to be helpful for the future of their proficiency. Speaker 1 (20:39): Yeah. And I love that. You said they could be more innovative and nimble and, and that's true. That's true. Most entrepreneurs because they don't have to go through a million different boards and get approval from XYZ. They could say, well, this is what I'm seeing in the market. This is what our clients want. So let's try it. Speaker 2 (20:59): Exactly, exactly. And you can do it at a clinic level. You can do it at company level. You can do it with, oh, let's try this program at this clinic and see if it works. And yeah, you can be very savvy and very timing and get these things done quickly. It's small business might not have all the resources and may not have whether that's financial or brains like people power, but usually entrepreneurs are pretty savvy about finding solutions to some of those challenges and problems. And that's where the likes of PPS and a PTA can be really helpful because it's pretty easy to find other people with that business or entrepreneurial ship desires that can come together and help each other. Yeah, Speaker 1 (21:41): I agree. And now, you know, as we're talking about business and you have a thriving business at this point, but what were the challenges of your business and a view as an entrepreneur now, I think you mentioned one of them earlier being, having no idea what financial statements were, I'd say that's a challenge. But for people listening for who might be maybe wanting to dip their feet into the entrepreneurial pond, so to speak, what are some challenges that came up for you and what did you do to overcome them? Speaker 2 (22:21): As you said, that I started writing out a list of challenges because I've made a lot of mistakes. I've had many challenges. I heard an interesting quote. I read an interesting quote today, actually. If I could have my time again, what would I make? All the mistakes, same mistakes. Yeah, I would, I would've just done them a lot sooner. So I could've got the mistakes out of the way earlier, but I think some of the challenges, a lot of the challenges were with delegation and leading things go, it's very hard to step away from patient care when that's something that you're very comfortable with and you think you're good at so managing time and I hear that coming up a lot with business owners, how much, you know, should I treat patients or not, not, there's no right answer there. You know, it depends what makes you happy. Speaker 2 (23:06): And it depends what you enjoy doing. So delegation was a big pot. Someone else told me the other day, I liked this quote as well. You know, you're delegating enough. If you want to have a growing business that if three times a day, you cringe now you cringe because you had given something, a project or a task or something to do at work to someone else so that they have the opportunity to grow and evolve. But you cringe because you look at them doing it and thinking, oh, I could do it a little bit faster. I could do it a little bit better, or I might do it a different way, but that's okay. And you have to get to that stage of going like, you know, you could call it 80 20 rule, but that rule of going like it's, it's actually a gift to be out on power and allow other people to grow and evolve. Speaker 2 (23:53): So learning how to manage that can be had the culture things interesting. When you've got a very small practice, the culture just happens automatically and you have this amazing culture as a practice grows and evolves. You have to become much more disciplined and diligent about how to actually execute on maintaining and having a great culture. So something you have to be aware of putting the systems in place as you grow and evolve, the more systems you have in the place in place, the smoother things can run. And it creates actually a structure, a structure that actually allows innovation and allows people to be creative, but they've got the walls and the guidelines of how to do that in a safe way. So I don't know, those are the key things that came to mind for me. You know, it really comes back to managing your time, how you delegate, how you let go of things. Speaker 2 (24:47): You got to keep becoming more and more humble that every year I realized how much I don't know. And it just seems to be almost, it's like my list of things I don't know, actually is increasing. So I'm not sure if I'm just getting older and losing my memory, or if I'm just becoming more aware of how clueless I am, but I guess I'm comfortable owning that at the stage. So I think, and being comfortable with who you are and your own skin, you definitely have to work on yourself a lot, take care of yourself a lot and and be very mindful of what you need as a person, if you want to be a leader in an organization. Speaker 1 (25:20): And what is your advice to maintain culture as your company grows? Because that's like you said, I'm really glad you brought that up because people join your company because of the culture. And if you grow and you let it go, or something happens, then people are going to leave. So how did, how did you do that? How did, what is your company culture and how did you maintain it? Speaker 2 (25:44): I liked the question. What is your company culture? Because I mean, I think of our culture is a very much like work hard, play hard, definitely a lot of fundraising up a lot of philanthropy, a lot of giving back to the community. Now, maybe what would happen 15 years ago, it would have been like, Hey, let's all dress down this month for this great organization and get together and do a 5k for them. And they will go out to her via what's. The net would stay the same for a great culture and getting to know people as individuals now, as with a larger organization, we have to be much more diligent about or more mindful about hearing from all of our people who should we dress down for and choose carefully based on the feedback and then communicated appropriately, have some PR involved the social media, making sure everything's much more streamlined. Speaker 2 (26:38): So all of the good happens, but it just takes a lot more work. It just doesn't happen quite so easily. So you just have to put the work into it determining what kind of feel you want it, social events, what kind of behavior expect again, you know, speaking your late leadership, how you act at a holiday party or at a social event is going to have a big impact on what your organization is like. And if you want to dress up like a pirate and dance around, which is what I do then yeah. You're going to create a different kind of culture to someone who's going to come across in a different way. So you just gotta be really mindful that as you grow, people are watching you and how you behave and that's going to drive it a lot of the culture. Speaker 1 (27:20): Yeah. I think that's thanks for elaborating on that because I feel like that's a piece of the entrepreneurial pie that often doesn't get addressed. Speaker 2 (27:30): I agree. I think especially if you have a smaller company as that grows, you think you can, it's easy to forget about culture because it almost seems fun and that is fun. And it almost seems like, is it silly that we're talking about what events or what we're going to do to build culture, what team building things, but it's really, really important because your people are everything. And if we're, I always just say to my stuff, sometimes people say to me, what do you actually do? And I'm like, really my job is to keep you all happy. That's really all it comes down to because when you're happy, you'll give good care. If you're miserable, the care you give sucks. If you're happy, you give good care. And if you happy you'll stay. So my job is to keep everyone here simply saying Speaker 1 (28:16): You're the C H O chief happiness officer officer. Exactly. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, that's a great title. Actually. You should put that on your cards. Bring that up to PPS. Ask how, asked how many businesses in PPS have a chief happiness officer. Yeah. And see, see what we can see what shakes out on that one. But yeah, I, thanks for elaborating on that. I just really wanted the listeners to understand that your business is more than dollars and cents Speaker 2 (28:48): Completely, completely. And if it was just business dollars and saints, it would be kind of boring. I do think it's wonderful. Seeing the PTs, who own practices, they do it with no matter what the size you do. It, we all love people and making people happy and better. And whether you're their employer or their physical therapist, it's not that much different. Speaker 1 (29:09): Right. Absolutely. And now before we wrap things up, what are the key takeaways you want the listeners to come away with with R D from our discussion today? Speaker 2 (29:19): I would say that get comfortable with the word money. I know I'm going to go straight to business. It's not a bad word. It's not a bad word. And as PTs, we don't like talking about it. Oh, I don't want to talk about my salary or I don't want to do this, or I think I should get paid more, but I don't really want to understand it. Like, it's just, just think of money is just one of the things that helps us actually actually be able to evolve as a profession and serve more people in our communities. I don't know if that came across very professionally or not, but I do think people should be comfortable with it. Be proud of what you do. And when someone at the local bub you're a barbecue, or when you're grilling with friends, complaints to you about your back, their back pain, help them and tell them what you do and make sure they get the care they need. And don't sit back and, and let them have to try to figure it out on their own. And and just be curious about learning more about business. It's not scary and it will help. The more you understand, you'll have more control over the decisions you make. And I actually think you become a better clinician because you're more mindful of the value of the services that you're providing. Speaker 1 (30:32): Excellent. And where can people find you if they want to get in touch? Do they have questions? They want to learn more about your business? Speaker 2 (30:39): Pretty easy to find live up in little road, mighty Rhode Island. We like to call it. So email's the easiest way. You've I, and through my practice, performance PT, R i.com. You'll find me on Facebook and on Twitter as well. I'm not as savvy on social media, some of you, but I love getting emails from people and helping other PT students, practice owners, different kinds of business owners out there. Speaker 1 (31:06): Great. And we'll have the link to your website at our website at podcast at healthy, wealthy, smart.com in the show notes for this show. So people can one click and get straight to your website to see what your business is all about. And if they have any questions, like Michelle said, highly encourage you reaching out to her and emailing her to ask questions. That's what we are here for. And Michelle before. Last question is knowing where you are now in your life and career. What advice would you give yourself as a new grad? Speaker 2 (31:39): Well, that's a good question. What advice would I give myself as a new grad who as a new grad, I would just as a new grad, I would say, believe in yourself earlier and address the fears that you have of your lack of knowledge and your inability to do things. So, yeah. Maybe make your mistakes earlier. Michelle is what I want to say. Speaker 1 (32:06): Excellent advice. Well, thank you so much for coming on for our month of business. And of course, we'll see you in a couple of weeks at our business round table, which will be on the 27th of July. Think at 8:00 PM Eastern standard time where it will be you and Eric and mellow and Josh funk and Shantay Cofield AKA the movement. Maestro people probably know her better with her Twitter, with her Instagram handle than her actual name. But I'm really looking forward to that. I think we'll a really robust conversation because we've got just like PPS, we've got those four different personas, totally nailed down. We've got your solo preneur, we've got your more traditional PT practice, which is Michelle's. We've got a newer grad with an, a growing practice in Josh and we've got a non traditional PT. So working as a physical therapist, but not with patients in Shantay. So and that was total coincidence. I didn't even know that when I plan this out. Perfect. So I'm really looking forward to it. Speaker 2 (33:15): So, and I just think it's really cool when you get these different kinds of business owners who are PTs and all different kinds of businesses. It's awesome. Yeah. Speaker 1 (33:24): Yeah. We'll have a nice, a nice step meeting of the minds. So everybody definitely sign up for that. And the link for that is also in the show notes for our round table. So Michelle, thank you so much for coming on and I hope to see you hope to see you soon. I hope to see you too. Speaker 2 (33:41): Karen. Thank you so much. Of Speaker 1 (33:43): Course. And everyone, thanks for listening. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy and smart.  

Guest Co-Host:  Bonnie Shay:  bonnie@mariposaphotoorganizingBonnie's website:  https://mariposaphotoorganizing.com/Podcast Guest:  Michele Heftman:  mheftman@gmail.comMichele's Website:  https://www.inthebestlightpossible.com/ Michele's Instagram:  Best Light Collections Transcription:Kris Parsons00:00Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too. Join us with your lively host Ray Loewe also known as the luckiest guy in the world.Ray Loewe00:13Hi, everybody and this is Ray Loewe. And I am the luckiest guy in the world. And I'm sitting here in our wonderful studios in Woodbury, New Jersey. And I've got our engineer Taylor here, and he's going to make sure that this podcast actually works in spite of me. So everybody, good morning. And we're talking as usual, about changing the rules. And you know, throughout our whole lives, we're fed a bunch of rules. And those rules start to accumulate after a while. And some of them that were pertinent once are no longer relevant. And what we find is that if we're living our lives by other people's rules, we're not living our lives. And so we need to figure out how we're going to change those and make those rules work for us. And we've had a series of guests, and we've got another great one today, that's going to talk about her journey and to changing her rules to make rules work for her. And she has redesigned the life that she wants to live and she's living it. So we have a co-host this month. And our co-host is Bonnie Shay. And Bonnie is a photo organizer from Chicago. And the theme that we're working on today is something we call the power of the story. And Bonnie and I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago, and we talked a little bit about the fact that there are different ways to tell stories. But if you can weave stories into your life, you add power to the way you communicate with people. And so Bonnie Say hi, first. Good morning. Hello, everybody. You didn't say hi. You had to say good morning, you change the rules didn't you. I'm on the right podcast, Ray. Yeah, I know. And you're good at changing those rules. And Bonnie certainly is one of the luckiest people in the world. And if you want to know more about Bonnie, we've had several podcasts with her and you can go back into our archives. And it would just take me too long to say too much. So Bonnie, why don't you introduce our guest today. And I'm excited about this particular interview in zoom land because it's really an exciting story.Bonnie Shay02:30Excellent. So I am introducing to our podcast listeners, Michele Heftman. And I want to explain how I met Michelle, a mutual friend introduced us because she realized that both Michelle and I have our own businesses, and we curate large photo collections. And we happen to live in neighboring suburbs in the Chicago area. I personally work on large printed photo collections that are my clients, personal family photos. So they are the family's specific photographic story and their history. Michelle, on the other hand, works on large photo collections that are her clients. And they have purchased these photos, typically, and she'll share lots of good information with the basic summary is her clients collect photographs, mostly done by well-known photographers, and or that they follow a specific theme, like a collector of anything collector of antiques, right? They have a theme, and they have what they love. But all of the photos, intrigue, and interest, Michelle, so excuse me, her clients, so they collect them, and they love them, but they need some help on these curated collections. So that's where Michelle steps in. And the overall arching similarities that we both work on large photo collections. And we both do a lot of detective work. So Michelle will share some of the detective work that she does. As we chat with her. So Michelle, can I ask you directly, what is your story? How did you get to this point where you have your own business called the best light? And you do some extraordinary work? Michele Heftman04:16Of course. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. I've really been looking forward to the conversation. Um, my background, a little bit about me, I'm from the Detroit area. And my mother was an artist and my dad was a computer guy and I kind of landed somewhere in the middle. So when I went to school, I went to art school, I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I focused on photography, that's my own passion, and also arts administration, to work in museums. That was my drive as a young adult. And I started my career right around the time when museums were moving on from their old card catalog systems and starting to embrace these large museum databases to manage their collections. And that's really where I found my niche. It was really my computer skills that got me into this very competitive career. Or it opened the door for me, I should say.Ray Loewe05:18You know, Michele, it sounds like you were bred for this job. I mean, here you are. You got a mother. That's an artist. You got a father who's in a databases and computers and stuff like this. I mean, what else could you be? Right?Michele Heftman05:32It really did feel like it's a very unique niche, but it was made for me. Cool.Bonnie Shay05:37And I need to ask you, Michele, what did your parents get you for your 13th birthday? They built me a darkroom. Yeah, I mean, what a gift, right? Yeah.Michele Heftman05:49I've always loved to like hands-on making photos like working in the darkroom, the way, the way it should be done back in the day, you know.Ray Loewe05:59So you have this background in photography. And I think for a while you, were a photographer, and then you kind of did some museum photography. And then you kind of got where you are. So what does a museum photographer do?Michele Heftman06:15Well, primarily, the museum photographer works with the objects in the collection, documents, their condition, any restoration processes, they might go through, and works with the database manager to pair those photos with any information associated with the pieces. Museums usually have a larger staff where the photographer can just focus on photography. Now, I kind of my umbrella is much larger than that I need to manage both sides of those things, the database, and the photos.Ray Loewe06:50Okay, so we're gonna get into where you're going a little bit. That will further tell the story about what you do. But let's take a minute and go back and talk about you specifically because you took a break from all this, you started this exciting career, and then you took a break to raise a family, right?Michele Heftman07:07Like so many people do. Right? It was time and I had my son. And I wanted to stay home. So I put my career on pause.Ray Loewe07:18You know, and like most or many moms do. And yet you're able to work your way back into the industry in a way that made you happy. And this is something that a lot of moms don't get to do. So why don't you talk for a minute if you're willing to about how you made this transition? I mean, because you still have young children at home, is that correct?Michele Heftman07:43Yeah, I mean, my son is now entering high school, and my daughter entering Middle School. So about five years ago, I was looking at my life, and it was time to focus on me, my kids were old enough, and they're independent. And it was really time to turn that focus back to myself and how I wanted to return to my career. I started by working in arts education, teaching some art classes. But the museum world is very competitive, and how was I going to do that. But on my own terms, that was something I always grappled with. I was working with a friend and they had an opportunity that they wanted me to be involved with, it was for a larger organization. And so in order to apply, I had to fill out an online job portal application, which was not something I had done or really intended to do. So I filled out the profile. And as I was doing that the system bleeped and brought up a job posting, and it was very obscure language, part-time, flexible hours, so that piqued my interest. And looking for a photo file, someone who loves photography, and database management, and all these things, but there were really no specifics surrounding the job. But I just looked at the skillset, and I thought, hmm, that kind of sounds like me, that sounds like what I do. And without really thinking about it, I just hit Send and I sent off my newly formed online resume. And I got a call and it was my first client. It was a private collector who was looking for some way to help manage his large collection. And I felt that was very serendipitous the way this all happened is and I'm so grateful to this person for helping me get started in this industry again, and really sharing my good word, and letting people know what I'm all about.Ray Loewe09:51Well, you know, we all get breaks, but I think the people that are lucky enough to find those breaks really have a sense of what they want to do and I think you've defined early in your life, this whole concept of categorizing things, the photography, all the pieces kind of came together. And, so now you're a happy camper, you're managing young children at home, you're able to get out there and work and you're building back, you're a business that you have control of, what can we do better than that? Oh, I don't, not much. Okay,Bonnie Shay10:27And I want to outline Ray, I just want to pause for a moment, because I think, as our listeners are listening to the story, I want to sort of declare some universal strengths and choices that Michele made that I think were key in this whole process. She said, Yes, instead of No, you clicked on that, you know, that pop-up message that came? And she's like, Oh, yeah. And she said, Yes, instead of No. And I think she follows the signs of the universe. I think those are her words, actually, that she was sharing with us.Michele Heftman10:58I do know, I meant to add to that little story is that when I started to realize, Hey, this is really my niche, this is something that I can really do. I sat down and I wrote on a card, I am going to make this happen for myself. And I put it upright in front of my door that I pass every day. So it was like the first thing I saw in my mind every morning. And you know, I worked to make it happen.Ray Loewe11:28Absolutely outstanding and this is a key, I think, to other people who are listening to this who want to get out of, or make changes in their life and redesign their life that you have to do. Take some time, figure out what your strengths are, figure out what you want to do, and then put up the sign that says, I'm going to make this happen. I think that's a great idea. I think I'm going to have to do that now. So I can get my life under control. Anyway, Michele, so that was the past. And I'm sure we'll kind of get back to that at some point in time. But let's talk about the future. Let's talk about what you do. And what you want to do. And where are you going because you have a business when where you can control it? And, and I love the name of your business, by the way in the best light. It's, just such a great way of focusing on what you're trying to do. So tell us about your future. Where are we going?Michele Heftman12:25Well, what I've done with these large collections. These collections are 1000s of photographs. So I have some collections more than 5000 photos large and they need accessibility. So what I've done is create computer systems, databases, and apps for my clients where they can scroll through their collection, they can flag, and determine what they want to donate or what they want to loan to a certain place. And they can easily access these photos and engage with them. In you know, some of these photos, they spend their lives in storage. And this is a way for my collectors to see them and enjoy them. And so really, that's where I started was building these systems just simply for their needs. And each system is different based on what my collector wants to use it for. Now, what I'm pivoting, that's the word right. What I'm doing is taking these systems and we are now granting access to the public, and creating accessibility to use these photos as a tool for education.Ray Loewe13:47Okay, so talk more about this. So first of all, this whole world of private collections is kind of strange to me, because especially when you have 5,000, 10,000 photos, and they're kind of bundled, then hidden away. How do you enjoy them? And I think you're saying this is how you do this, but talk a little bit about making them public for education and what you do there? And is this anything I can access? Can I get online and Google Photos by theme and find out where they are?Michele Heftman14:24Well, sure, we're working towards that. Some of my clients do have their own website up. But right now what I'd like to do are we are starting to partner with universities or nonprofits, like-minded organizations that might be interested in using these photos, maybe exhibiting them in their offices or using them to teach students about current events or past events. I mean, Bonnie talks a lot about storytelling through photos and I love how our jobs are kind of like two heads of the same coin. And I do a lot of storytelling with photographs. But I also think about history telling through photographs. So one of my clients, he's very passionate about social justice initiatives. And so we are partnering with the university to share some photos from the civil rights movement in some of their classes, and they're using those photos to teach about the march from Selma to Montgomery, and I think that's very exciting.Ray Loewe15:35Okay, so you're doing these projects where you're bringing photos out of the closet? Can I use that word? Sure. Okay. And, you know, I think one of the other things that Bonnie mentioned that I want to get into a little bit about you guys think you're detectives here, right. There is detective work for sure. Well, and you mentioned this thing about James Joyce a while ago when we were talking earlier. So there's a whole story here and I don't know how to begin it, but I think you do. So why don't you talk to us about this? Because it's one of the reasons I think you get excited about what you do.Michele Heftman16:11Absolutely. This was kind of just exciting research. I love research. Some research is  not as exciting as others. So we acquired this client acquired a series of portraits by the photographer, she's El Frond, and they were some beautiful portraits, one of James Joyce, one of Simone de Bouvier. But there was also a photo it just tucked into the room, which was a bookshelf and a chair. And I thought, well, you know, what is this about? And I don't know why I was drawn to this photo, but I was there were a lot of knickknacks on the shelf, I spent a lot of time looking very closely. But there was also some notations from the photographer on the back. So these were handmade photos from 1936. And the photographer had made them in the darkroom and had written certain things. And the on the back, it said, shae Lucy Leon. And I was like, well, shae Lucy Leon, like, Who's Lucy Leon. And the, you know, it said James Joyce's chair, and I was like, Well, why does she have James Joyce's chair? And so that's kind of where I started. And I began to research Lucy Leon, she was very interesting in her own right, she was an editor of French Vogue. She was a child, prodigy, pianist, and also the subject of a painting as a child. I could go on and on about her but her husband Paul, had a friendship with James Joyce, and they wrote together, and every day he would come to their house in Paris and sit in this chair, and they would write and they wrote Finnegans Wake and, you know, well Joyce did, Paul Leone helped him with languages and that sort of thing. And they had a very good friendship. So, in 1939, Nora and James Joyce and Lucy and Paul Leon fled Paris together, they fled the Nazis to unoccupied France. And James Joyce lived his final years with this other couple out there. And after he passed, it was Paul Leon, who stole back into Nazi-occupied Paris, to rescue items that had been left in the Joyce's apartment because they had fled so quickly. And he boxed up all these papers, the original papers of Finnegans Wake and portrait of an artist, his very early writings, and he put them into 19, brown Manila envelopes. And he brought them to the Irish embassy with the proviso that they should not be open for 50 years. And they sat there for 50 years. And he rescued all of these writings for James Joyce. But he was in danger. And so before he returned home, he was captured by the Nazis and he was murdered in the deportation of French Jews. But this photo was taken after the war, not in 1936. Like we had originally thought it was taken in the 50s by Giselle Frond she had returned to the house at Lucile Leone's request to document the items for which Paul Leon gave his life. And the story is a long-forgotten story. It was actually the story how I found this story is kind of funny too, and another indicative of me following the signs of the universe, if you want to call it that, I was with my son who was pursuing Eagle Scout, he's going to, he's doing his Eagle Scout project and to that end. And he was volunteering at a local library after a flood in their basement helping them clean up. And I was there just waiting for him to finish. And I was in the basement and I saw just like, it was almost like a beam of light shining onto a pile of books. And there was a book about Giselle Frond. And I picked it up because I was that photo was in my head. And I started paging through. And the last photo in the book was the photo of the chair. And it had the story and the photo in the book had been out of print since the 60s. So I never would have found it, I never would have unearthed that story. And it's still one of my favorite little piece of detective work.Ray Loewe20:52I think, Michelle, you found a way to have a blessed life here. Okay. I think you found a way to, you know, stay interested. I mean, you know, talk about the power of a story that came out of a picture. Now, you know, you had to do some work to get the story out of the picture. But it's there. And I am envious in a way of the fact that you've got a career right now where you get a chance to follow these passions. And, o these things that you're excited about using skillsets that, you know, were ingrained in you from the beginning of your life. And I think you're a very, very luckiest person, a lucky person. And welcome to being one of the luckiest people in the world.Michele Heftman21:34Oh, well, thank you so much. I feel very lucky.Ray Loewe21:37Good. Yeah, we're almost out of time. So let's do two things. First of all, Michelle, do you have any last-minute statements that you just want to make about what you do or where you're going or anything? 21:50Well I, guess it would be about you know, this outreach. Now, you know, I'm lucky enough to look at these photos. And I think other people should, too. I, you know, I said before these photos spend their lives in storage, and isn't that a shame, we should bring them out to the public? And so that's where I'm moving right now.Ray Loewe22:11Okay, you know, how do people reach you give us your website, and then we're gonna post this with our podcast notes, people will be able to find you.Michele Heftman22:20Okay, so my personal business page is inthebestlightpossible.com. But if you'd like to see what I'm working on, and the photos that I handle day to day, Instagram is a great place to find me at best light collections.Ray Loewe22:37And, Bonnie, your turn, any last-minute comments you want to make before we showing off here?Bonnie Shay22:44No, I just think Michelle is such a great representation of putting the pieces of a puzzle together for what she wanted to do with her life. And I think I thought about for a lot of my life, you know, we go to college, we go to become a stockbroker, a lawyer, a doctor, a museum, you know, specific things. And we think that's all there is out there to do. But Michelle was able to piece together parts of different professions, quote, unquote, and figure out what made her happy and where she is strong. And, Michelle, I want to thank you for what you do. Because now with your outreach, you're really making a difference not only in your client's lives, because you're helping with them with their challenges or what they need help on. But you're helping our world in education and outreach with people that will learn from these projects that you're doing.Ray Loewe23:36Well, you know, thanks to both of you for being here. And there's a lot of thought that's going to go through my head on this a lot of thought about the journey that you're taking Michele, where you're winding up, the things that you're doing is all very, very exciting. So, unfortunately, we got to sign off. So we want to thank our listeners for being with us today. And join us next week, we're going to have Bonnie Shay back as a co-host. Again, we're going to continue with this theme of the power of a story and different ways that you can tell it and Taylor it's that time.Kris Parsons24:11Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do that too. Join us with your lively host Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

What is good friends! I love my next guest. She is an awesome human being and reminds us anything is possible at any age! Please welcome Michelle Johnson. Michelle went from being a broke, single mother at 25 years old to a financially successful attorney, but at 40 years old she was lonely and depressed after being in a 10 year unhealthy relationship. She was making 6 figures but wasn't satisfied professionally. She felt guilty for not being more grateful in her career because she previously experienced being broke and never wanted to be that again. Michelle almost settled for a less than mediocre relationship thinking that everyone has issues and at least she knew her ex's habits, issues, and challenges. That thinking was all wrong and she knew that she wanted and deserved more! So Michelle had to make one of the hardest yet necessary decisions in her life to cut ties one last time with her former partner (I know many of you know what "one last time" means!) - this time for good. Then, she went through a TRANSFORMATION! And after being transformed, Michelle was married in less than 1 year and had a baby later that year at the age of 41 and another baby at 43 years old. In the interim, she created a "Pregnancy After 40" my Group, Community, and Podcast, and her passion for her livelihood was reignited! Not only did her husband become her partner in life, but he also became her business partner and best friend in their unexpected new venture. At 44 years old, Michelle now empowers other amazing women to "Rethink & Redesign Their Lives After 40 in Love, Relationships & Career." Her audience is mostly comprised of High-Achieving, Successful Women near or over 40 years old who are Bosses by day but unfulfilled in other areas of their life. It is possible to have it all, you just need the knowledge, information & belief to get you there! To follow Michelle, click any of the links below: https://www.tamikamichellejohnson.com/ http://linkedin.com/in/tamikamichellejohnson https://www.facebook.com/groups/pregnancyafterforty/ Support for Label Free Podcast is brought to you by ​MANSCAPED™​, who is the best in men's below-the-waist grooming. ​@MANSCAPED offers precision-engineered tools for your family jewels. They obsess over their technology developments to provide you the best tools for your grooming experience. MANSCAPED is trusted by over 2 million men worldwide! We have an exclusive offer for my listeners - 20% off + free shipping with the code: LabelFree20 at https://www.manscaped.com​ As always thank you for the support, to contact me directly follow the link below: https://www.labelfreepodcast.com​ Stay Healthy, Stay Ready- Deanna Marie Kuempel #ad​​ #sponsor​ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/labelfreepodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/labelfreepodcast/support

The single best way to build a million-dollar business is to solve a problem you have in your life at the moment. For John Fio, one of those problems was stress and anxiety.  One day he was talking to a doctor who casually mentioned that sleeping under a blanket that’s equal to 10% of your body weight, triggers a calming response in your body that can dramatically reduce anxiety.  A light-bulb went off, and John went to work…A few months later, he launched the idea for the weighted blanket on Kickstarter.  No one knew what a weighted blanket was, but people just seem to intuitively understand how it could help them, and how it works.  Within 24 hours, they’d sold over $1 million in pre-orders. Within their first 30 days, they’d made over $5 million in sales, and the Gravity Blanket was born.  Today, John’s going to fill you in on the entire story, and we’re going to discuss several important pieces of the puzzle that will be incredibly useful for everyone…For example, should you invest time and money into patents? And how do you fend off lower-priced competition, which they were swamped by within months?  Next, John and I dive into the dark side of entrepreneurship, including the hustle and grind lifestyle, and the expectations we can put on ourselves to accomplish big things, and make a difference in the world.  This is an absolutely fascinating interview with some lessons that will serve you for the rest of your career.  Now before we dive in, I have some pretty big news for you…  I’m incredibly excited to share that I’m launching my new business on March 1st.  After nearly 3 years of being sidelined by my health crisis, I’ve spent the past year personally focused on a single topic, which is creating passive income. Dealing with a brain injury and unable to work for more than two years was insanely hard. Dealing with all of that without passive income made it 10 times harder, and it was an eye-opening experience.  The company is called Richer Every Day, and our mission is simple…  It’s to show business owners how to get a little richer every single day, by turning their active income, into passive investment income.  If you’re a business owner, it’s safe to say that 99% of your time is focused on revenue and growth.  But unfortunately no one in this industry talks about what to do with that money once you make it, and that’s a massive problem.  So Michelle and I made it our mission to hit $100,000 per month in passive investment income within the next 5 years.  If you’d like to see how we’re doing that, I’ll show you on March 1st. But our strategy is just one piece of the puzzle.  What’s even more important and valuable than a strategy, is invisible work taking place in the mind behind it.  Specifically, your mind, and how all of your financial decisions in life are driven by your neuro-chemistry and subconscious programming.  These two factors are ultimately what determine a person’s financial success in life, and unfortunately, 99% of people in the world are completely unaware of them, and how to rewire these dominant mental components in a way that will allow you to create wealth and financial security in a truly effortless manner.  If you’ve ever read my book Magnetic Sponsoring, you know that it introduced a completely new paradigm shift that changed an entire industry. Richer Every Day is going to do the same when it comes to money and investing.  I can’t wait to show you what I’ve learned and what we’ve been able to accomplish using this system. If you’d like to be one of the first people in the world to see it in action, just head to RicherEveryDay.com now.  Resources: FioCreations.com Follow John on Instagram GravityBlankets.com MoonPals.com Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike Music: Song: Jnathyn - Dioma [NCS Release] Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds Free Download/Stream: http://NCS.io/Dioma Watch: http://youtu.be/r2Ig85ycGKQ

Tara Jaraysi Kenning: "Teamwork makes the dream work." John C. Maxwell. I'm Tara Jaraysi Kenning, and I'm a Tri-Cities influencer. Paul Casey: So to be a go-to guy or a go-to girl, you must push through your fear of failure. Announcer: Raising the water level of leadership in the Tri-Cities of Eastern Washington, it's the Tri-Cities Influencer Podcast. Welcome to the TCI podcast, where local leadership and self-leadership expert, Paul Casey, interviews local CEOs, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit executives to hear how they lead themselves and their teams so we can all benefit from their wisdom and experience. Here's your host, Paul Casey of Growing Forward Services, coaching and equipping individuals and teams to spark breakthrough success. Paul Casey: It's a great day to grow forward! Thanks for joining me for today's episode with Michelle Whitney. She's the superintendent of the Pasco School District. And fun fact about her, she's sort of a driver. So she said she can do a two-minute meditation a lot faster! Michelle, tell us about that. Michelle Whitney: Well, I just think it's about efficiency. You've got a lot to do. Two-minute meditation, we do it in 30 seconds. We move on to the work. We have things to do. I don't have time for that. Paul Casey: And her staff teases her about how fast she walks. Michelle Whitney: Right. Paul Casey: It's with intention. Well, we're going to dive in after checking in with our Tri-City Influencer sponsor, Mario Martinez, Northwestern Mutual. Mario what types of services do you offer? Mario Martinez: Hey, Paul. Thank you for letting me be on here. We run bifurcated practices in that we focus in two areas of financial plan. The first one is we do protection pieces, which include life insurance, disability insurance, long-term care insurance, really the things that people should be focused on to protect their families, their businesses. On the other side of our practices, we do investment services. On the investment platforms, we do both the brokerage platform, and we do the advisory level services. So depending on what someone's looking for as far as guidance on their investment strategies, we can curtail and build a strategy for them that makes sense. Paul Casey: Mario, how can people get in touch with you? Mario Martinez: The easiest way, you can reach out to me directly on my business cell phone is 509-591-5301. You can send me an email at mario.martinez@nm.com. Or you can reach out to us on our social media platforms, the easiest one being Mario Martinez Northwestern Mutual on Facebook. Paul Casey: Thank you for your support of leadership development in the Tri-Cities. Well, welcome, Michelle! I was privileged to meet you seven years ago in Leadership Tri-Cities. You were class- Michelle Whitney: 18. Paul Casey: And another one of the best classes ever, right? Michelle Whitney: That's right. We were actually the best class. Paul Casey: Oh, okay. I see. As opposed to number 11, which really was. Yes, and you had a different job at that time in the school district. You had gone from being a middle school principal into HR. Michelle Whitney: Yeah. Everyone was glad to see me when I was a middle school principal, and that changed drastically when I became director of HR. So it was tough transition. Paul Casey: HR managers, we love you! Thanks for listening. So Michelle, tell us your career highlights that got you to where you are today so our Tri-City influencers can get to know you and why you love what you do. Michelle Whitney: Well, I appreciate that question. I have a huge commitment to public service. My grandparents were both public servants. My grandfather was a police officer and chief of police of Pasco. My great-grandmother was a nurse at Our Lady of Lourdes, so I really come from a foundation in my family of civic service, and in particular, civic service to the community of Pasco. So I always wanted to be a teacher, and it was only right for me to tailor my education to be able to come back to a community that I loved and that my family had served in such amazing roles. And to be important in the lives of the students in Pasco has just been a gift. Michelle Whitney: And I've been extraordinarily blessed to serve in a variety of roles. I was a kindergarten teacher. I taught fourth grade. I was a counselor. I was a technology facilitator, a librarian. Paul Casey: Wow. Michelle Whitney: And it was always really just about offering my unique skills and talents to the organization so that I could be of best use to the organization and the kids of Pasco. Michelle Whitney: And then I really started a leadership journey, which I never intended to end up in a leadership role, but I was invited to the leadership table, if you will, by a mentor of mine. And I just feel a lot of gratitude towards the amazing mentors I've had over my career. I never saw myself that way, and it was by someone else recognizing those leadership talents in me and encouraging me in that direction that I took the risk to do an administrative internship program, became an assistant principal and then principal at the middle school. Then that started the trajectory into the district office with director of HR, which, having been a middle school principal and a counseling background, I was really uniquely prepared to do that job. Paul Casey: Yeah! Michelle Whitney: And I actually really loved that work. People joke with HR managers, but I do believe that in any organization, being able to be at the front line of hiring talent into an organization is just an extraordinary opportunity and gift. So that was amazing, and then I stepped into some other district office jobs. Michelle Whitney: And again, I would love to tell you I had this trajectory. I was going to teach kindergarten and then be the superintendent, but it wasn't really like that. And the opportunity to apply for the superintendency became open, and it really was about me throwing my name into the hat for a leadership position in a district I loved my entire life. And to be awarded that position was one of the greatest moments and has continued to be great moments since I was awarded the position. Michelle Whitney: I'm going into my fifth year. Every single year has had its complications. Every single year, I've been proud to be on the team and honored to do my part. So I have the best job ever, and the best part of my job is the students for sure. So sorry adults, you're second. Kids will always be first. Paul Casey: And I heard you tear up pretty easily when you think about those wonderful students. Michelle Whitney: I do. I do. In our organization, it's not uncommon for me to stand in front of a group of people, and I say, "We are," and the response is, "Pasco." It really for us is an outward commitment to our value of standing in the gap and bridging the divide for the students who need us the most. So when I'm in front of students or I'm in front of staff, it is not uncommon for me to be emotional about it because it isn't just a job for me. It truly me living that outward commitment every day. Michelle Whitney: And even when it's hard, I feel so extraordinarily blessed to be able to be part of what we're doing. And then when it's great and there's a success, those successes are just that much sweeter, and they really do truly move me to tears. Even talking to you about it, I get goosebumps. I live my purpose every day. And they say if you live your purpose, you never work a day in your life, and I truly feel like that I'm lucky in that way. Paul Casey: I think we're done here. That was an amazing- Michelle Whitney: Well, there you go. See? Efficiency. Paul Casey: ... story. Michelle Whitney: I told you. Paul Casey: That was an amazing story. Now I want to cry too. But living your purpose, so huge. Obviously, that's why I do what I do as a coach is to help people do exactly what you are feeling right now, so that's awesome. Paul Casey: Let's go back to that crossroads where you are going to take the jump into leadership or not, and you decided to move that direction. What helped you make that decision, and also what advice would you give someone else who might also be at a crossroads? "Should I take the jump into leadership, or should I just stay as a individual performer that I'm doing really well at?" Michelle Whitney: Right. So I think what helped me make that jump and take that risk was the courage of the support of the mentorship I had. So had it not been for Jean Carlton, who was the person who very first invited me into a leadership role, she really stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me in those early years in making sense of who I would be as a leader. And without that personal connection with her, I'm not sure I would have had the courage to take that first step. So I think that, as a leader now, I find that one of my purposes is to recognize other leaders and invite them in and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. I don't think you can ever underestimate the power of somebody with that invitation and that offer of support.... I could give you a list of 100 people that have been amazing mentors to me. And I just I think it's that support from trusted mentors that gave me the courage to do it. Michelle Whitney: Really as I reflect back on it now as having had some experience and I hope some wisdom, there's really, all of us, no matter what role you play, you're a leader in your own right. So there's never really a downside to leaning in to the desire to explore that leadership characteristics of yourself. The worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to learn some great skills and learn some things about yourself that will make you even better at what you're currently doing. But if you take that little bit of a risk, and maybe it's just a toe dip, it doesn't have to be a full jump at first, you'll likely find that it's a good fit for you. And then that success breeds success, and the more you try it out a little, and it's like you put the sweater on and it fits pretty good so you wear it around a little bit. But I would just encourage people, especially if you're nervous, find a trusted mentor, start slow, start small, but just continue to take those steps, and it's only going to make you better at whatever you choose to do. Michelle Whitney: You may never choose to be the person that is the front of a large organization, but leadership skills, regardless of what you choose to do, will always just make you a better contributor. And that's really what we are as leaders is contributors. So I would encourage anyone to take the risk if you're thinking about it, and again, find a trusted mentor that you can lean on because there are times where it's challenging, and you'll have self-doubts and having that mentor you can go to and be vulnerable about that is very important. Paul Casey: Fantastic answer because leadership is influence wherever you're at, and it will fill up your game no matter what you're doing. And I love how you said mentorship was a courage builder for you, even up to 100 people, which is probably true. It's probably not hyperbole. There's just a ton of people that we would not have taken that extra step had it not been for someone giving us that boost and saying you can do it. Maybe you're further along your journey, and you're like you need to turn around and bring somebody with you and mentor them, even if it's informal and you don't call it mentoring, but you want to help somebody along their journey. Paul Casey: Like you said, in five years, you've had a lot of issues to deal with in your position. You're smiling still! That's good. A lot of hassles, a lot of disappointments, a lot of things that get in the news making some people choose one side of an issue or another. But then there's the rewarding part of the job. We're not going to go into those other places. Here's the rewarding question, What allows you to focus then on those most rewarding things, and what is actually the most rewarding part of your job? Michelle Whitney: Well, I was very serious when I said the most rewarding part of my job is students. And, from the very first day that I started as superintendent and actually even prior during my successor year, I had a transition year, which was gift, I prioritized being in classrooms. There is nothing more magical than the relationship between students and their teachers. So I scheduled on the calendar Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays every morning when we were in person to start in classroom. Michelle Whitney: Most days I would get there. Some days I wouldn't. I got there more than I would if I didn't schedule it in. Some days I could stay a long time. Some days I could only be in one or two classrooms, but I always prioritized that. And it does a lot of different things. Michelle Whitney: One, it keeps me connected to what teaching means now. It's been a while since I've been in a classroom, and teaching is not the same as when I was in a classroom. So I think that's very important to stay in touch with those you're in service to so you can do right by them in your decision-making. Michelle Whitney: But there is nothing that feeds my soul more than students. So in this pandemic environment, I've done the same thing in that I am scheduled to go into Zoom classrooms. And one morning, I was in a kindergarten classroom, and they were doing this good morning routine where they would say good morning to one another. And of course, I'm in tears. There's nothing more sweet than kindergartners saying good morning to each other by name. And it's those moments where you can really connect with why we do our work, the sweetest kindergarten doing the most genuine thing by saying good morning to one another reminds you that those hard moments are worth it, that there's students depending on you, and that there's this kindness in our system. That's what makes the hard moments for me worth it is I stay connected to those things that are closest to students, students, teachers in the classrooms. Michelle Whitney: And I have to tell you, that's what's made this pandemic so challenging is we're thrust into the really hard parts of our job for most of our job, and you have to be a lot more intentional about getting out and participating in those things that the really feel your soul, feed your bucket, whatever those things are that you say. For me, I have never lost sight of what it means to be a teacher. I walk around with a teacher's heart, and I think that's why I cry is it touches that part of me that is so important. And like I said, I stay really closely connected to students, and that for me is the difference in those dark moments. Paul Casey: So cool that you kept your goal of being physically present, even, well, Zoom is not physical, but you still kept that goal alive. You found a way to still be in classrooms, even though it's online in order to do that. That's pretty neat. Michelle Whitney: Yeah. It's incredible. I get to read stories, and the kids bring their puppies and baby sisters to the Zoom. So in so many ways, you get to experience even more of a student's life. So it's been a gift really. And while in-person education is what we're about and who we're about, there really truly have been some silver linings to this environment. Paul Casey: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I was an elementary principal so I totally get teacher, vice principal, principal, the journey. And playing with the kids at recess was a bunch of fun. I even sprained my ankle one year playing freeze tag. Michelle Whitney: Mine was flag football. Paul Casey: Was it? Michelle Whitney: So yes. I, yeah. Paul Casey: It's like the scar of courage- Michelle Whitney: Yeah, it's a rite of passage. Yeah, uh-huh (affirmative). Paul Casey: But that is where the joy was for sure. So leaders must keep growing or they become irrelevant. How have you matured as a leader, I'll just say in these five years of being superintendent? Michelle Whitney: Oh, that's a great question. I think the number one way that I've matured as a leader is by listening. I do a lot of listening to the people that I'm in service to. So I meet with parents a lot. I've done lots of different ways of doing that. Of course, pre-pandemic I did community coffee events. I've done Soup with the Superintendent. Since the pandemic, I've done some virtual town hall meetings. You go out and listen, but it's listen with intention. And it's really listening to understand those you're in service to, what they need from you, and reflecting on those decisions that you need to make and the kind of leader you need to be on behalf of those you're in service to. Michelle Whitney: I also do a lot of listening to teachers and staff in a lot of the same ways by being present, and I have the most amazing thing. I have a superintendent student advisory council. So I have 30 high school students that meet with me six times a year, and we tackle really difficult issues together, whether it's planning for a new high school or changing boundaries or overcrowding issues or social, emotional, health issues. Again, it's about being present with them and listening to them and tailoring my leadership and the way that I make decisions and what I prioritize and focus on in a way that they need me to do right by them on their behalf. Michelle Whitney: I would love to tell you it was some professional development training I went to or some class I took, but it really wasn't. It was being present in my system and listening to those that I've made a commitment to represent and learning from them how I can be better and different in order to serve them in the best possible way. Michelle Whitney: High school kids know what they need from us, and know what they need from us around very complex issues. The most diligent group of people that I saw work on a set of boundaries in a couple of facilities plan was that superintendent student advisory council. Michelle Whitney: So I joke that really we should let the students run the place. I just need to buy lunch and give them a ride. They truly do know what they need from us, and we just have to create opportunity for them to participate. And it's in those moments where I feel like I'm my best self and I'm my best leader for them. And I feel like it's a gift. Paul Casey: Learning by listening. Yeah, I was part of a group in Richland School District. I feel like it was called Focus years ago. I don't know if it still exists today. I was part of the faith community then, too, to come in, and it was all the folks that cared about students and could provide auxiliary services. Plus, the principals were in there. Plus, these cream of the crop students were in there, and they blew me out of the water! The maturity of speaking in front of these scary adults, and they're holding their own and saying, "These are the programs that we got growing. These are the thing we needed." I could totally see how that would be an energizing meeting for you. Michelle Whitney: Oh, it's incredible. Paul Casey: Just to further validate the whole listening post, I had a boss who do a listening post, he would call it. He would invite a dozen of the constituent monthly, and he would ask the same set of questions to each one to hear on the ground level of how to serve them in a nonprofit. And then just yesterday, I'm part of the National Speaker Association, and a board member called me from the Northwest Chapter and just said, "I'm a board member, and I'm just trying to get ground-level intel of how we can best serve our constituency." And I was like, "Wow!" He followed up with an email, and we even played with a couple of ideas for the pandemic of how to speak virtually. I'm like, I think it's always a great move when a leader gets down on the ground with the frontline people, who know all the answers, like you said, they how to run the school, and listen to them. Paul Casey: Well, as a superintendent, it must be hard, with a huge to-do list and probably a billion emails coming in, to know how to spend your time, how to triage tasks, how to know what to delegate and what you have to own. How do you sort how to spend your time? Michelle Whitney: Yeah. That's a great question, and I'm going to be really honest with you because if I'm not, the people that know me will call me on that. That probably is my biggest weakness, because I believe so deeply in every single person that I'm in service to, and we have a large organization, almost 20,000 students, which represent 40 to 60,000 parents, 2,200 employees, five board members. And every single one of those interactions is important to me. So the whole delegation and all of that is absolutely a work in progress. Michelle Whitney: For me, I think one of the biggest pieces that I'm blessed with, and this may sound cliché, but it's absolutely critical is to have an executive assistant that you trust. My assistant is absolutely incredible. She knows what I need to work well. She knows what I need as a person to function well. She's my number one fan. I'm fairly certain I'm her favorite person in the universe above and beyond everyone else. And on those hard days, I know for sure that my assistant still likes me. That's just that, not only does she help me organize myself professionally, she makes sure I'm where I'm at with what I need, my calendar is organized and squared away, but she's also that person that's there to bolster and support on the days when days are tough. Michelle Whitney: And I think that executive assistant and, for me, superintendent of management relationship is so important to have a person that you can go, "Oh my gosh. I don't know how to... I'm not going to be able to get all this done," and something that you can delegate and help follow through with those priorities. Michelle Whitney: The other piece is I have a great team. And we're learning about the strengths of the team together over the last five years. We've utilized a book called StrengthsFinder 2.0. And that was really a game changer in terms of knowing and understanding where people fell out around those strength characteristics and really now trying to organize work function up against and those and trying to collapse some of the siloed nature of the way work is typically done in a large organization to be able to align work tasks with people's strengths. Michelle Whitney: So I'm not a great executor. That's not my strength. I'm big vision, relationships, but the details of beginning to end is not my strength, but I know I have a colleague and a teammate that that is her strength. So when I need help with that task, I go to that person. I think knowing the strengths and talents of the people around you is a real efficiency builder, and then having someone like an assistant like I have, Jenny is amazing, that really can help you prioritize, especially for someone like me that everything is equally important all the time. And that's just not viable in the long term. You can do that for a short period of time, but at some point, you need some help in making sure that you're keeping the right things up front all the time. Paul Casey: What do those meetings with Jenny look like? How do you sort, prioritize? What do you discuss? Is it regimented? Is it ad hoc? What does it look like? Michelle Whitney: Yeah. That's a great question. I think with Jenny and I, it's evolved over time. We started out with it being scheduled that if I get to go to a kid thing or meet with Jenny on virtual. Paul Casey: That's going to bump it. Yeah. Michelle Whitney: Yeah. So Jenny was getting bumped all the time. Then it became more ad hoc. Lately, what's been amazing about this virtual environment is she just comes to the meeting, whatever meeting I'm in that I feel like I'm going to need her in, she is in there virtually, and she can listen to the meeting and help me prioritize that way. My thinking post-pandemic, when we're back to a more normal environment, I think that organization works best for us. So those meetings that she can be at with me or helping facilitate or there as a note-taker, I think that, we've landed on that arrangement for us probably works better. Michelle Whitney: But I think the key to all of that is you have to figure it out for yourself. That management system with your assistant is going to be very assistant-and-manager-specific in terms of how your personality works. So the key is finding something that works. I don't think it has to look any single way, but it has to work for both of you. Paul Casey: Sounds good. Well, before we head into our next question on external relationships, a shout-out to our sponsor. Mario Martinez, Northwestern Mutual. Mario, why should people work with a financial advisor? Mario Martinez: Hey, Paul. That's a great question. Really, I think there's two types of people who should be seeking out a financial professional. The one person is somebody who has very limited access to financial guidance. Maybe they're a younger professional or somebody who just hasn't had an introduction to a financial professional yet. And the other type of person is really someone who has a lot of different exposure to different professionals. They just haven't found the one person that they really trust to take guidance from. So there's really an over-information in that sense. Those are really the two types of people that should be looking to be introduced to a financial professional. Paul Casey: Fantastic! So Mario, how can people get in touch with you? Mario Martinez: The easiest way is to reach out to me directly on my business cell phone, which is 509-591-5301. You can send an email to mario.martinez@nm.com, or you can find us on our business Facebook page, which is Mario Martinez Northwestern Mutual. Paul Casey: So it's been very clear, Michelle, that leadership is relationships for you, that you believe that like I do. You've talked about a lot of internal relationships within the school and school system. Now you've got this community around you. So how do you intentionally develop relationships with the City of Pasco and beyond? Michelle Whitney: That's a great question. I feel very lucky. The City of Pasco, the city manager, Dave Zabell in Pasco, we have what's called a Create Group. It's the port, the city, the public utility, the county. I'm sure I'm leaving someone out, but it's the leadership of the infrastructure of Pasco. And we meet monthly, and we keep each other updated on those core functions that would overlap. So for me, I often report out on facilities or potential construction projects. They're also very interested in our educational programming. So we give updates there. That, I think, is an incredible unique opportunity for us to partner as a collective for the good of our community. Michelle Whitney: I'm also a Kiwanian, and we have representation at all of the local groups like the Chamber of Commerce and so on. I think that's very important. Maybe it's not always me that's at those tables, but there's someone from our organization at those tables that can act as a liaison. Michelle Whitney: The other piece, though, for me is, like I mentioned earlier, those community coffees, that I do them monthly. I've done that almost consistently in at least the last four years if not five in some variation, whether it's at the Starbucks, or we did Soup with the Supe at the Booth Building one time. But that really is just an open invitation to anyone who wants to come and sit knee-to-knee, shoulder-to-shoulder with me. And we talk about whatever they want. It's not a pre-canned presentation that I do. They just bring topics and discussion and we talk about, and I answer whatever questions there are. I think those are the relationships, too. Michelle Whitney: So there's the organized groups that you would expect an organizational leadership to be interacting in. Certainly we participate in all of those, but there are people out there who want to build relationship or want to be in a relationship with the school district and don't maybe know how, or maybe don't know what they want to do. That's where those more informal opportunities like a community coffee come in really handy for people who just come and say, "Hey, here's a skill or talent I have. I want to get involved. How could that look?" And then I just am a big connector at that point, and I'm like, "Hey, you need to get in contact with that person." The night Jenny's there, and I say, "Hey, Jenny, will you get them in contact?" Then she takes care of making those connections. But it's that central location at the Starbucks community coffee that they know the superintendent will be there and listen. Michelle Whitney: Then over the last year or so, I've started to invite some of my executive team there, too, so that there's other people other than just me there that I can connect folks to. So that's been a great relationship builder. Then we have phenomenal programs like our PEAK! Partnership Program where I have a staff who go out and talk to organizations in the community that want to partner directly with schools. So we have some real innovative organized efforts like that as well. Michelle Whitney: We don't do the work for educating kids on our own. It's truly a system-wide and a community-wide effort to build that network of support and lift all of our students. And I'm proud to work shoulder-to-shoulder with the best in the community. Paul Casey: Well, Tri-City Influencer listeners, Soup with the Supe, so you could steal that idea if you're a supervisor- Michelle Whitney: There you go! Paul Casey: ... not just a superintendent. Michelle Whitney: That's right! Paul Casey: And post-COVID you can have with you. I love it! So we rarely talk about money on this podcast, but every leader has to know their organization's financials. I know you've got a whole finance department, I would assume, within the district. But what do you have to stay accountable to? What does evaluation of finances look like in your position? Michelle Whitney: Yeah, that's a great question. Education finance and funding has been in a state of flux over the last three or four years…Probably longer than that, but since I've been in the superintendency, it's been in a flux and change post-McCleary. So I've had to stay very in tune with learning all the new legislation and how the laws are impacted because it was a complete shift in the way things were done. One, it was legislative advocacy around the McCleary decision, pre-McCleary decision, and then post-McCleary, it was about learning and understanding those aspects of the change in the way education funding was done. Michelle Whitney: But then it's really about my interfacing with the school board to build some benchmarks and goals and priorities for a philosophy about the way we spend our dollars. So my interface with the school board to ensure that we're building budgets that are in alignment with their philosophy and their goals and to meet our strategic planning priorities. So that's really the level that my leadership and influence is at is making sure that the way that we're budgeting and prioritizing dollars is in alignment with our strategic plan and our board's vision for our district. Michelle Whitney: And then I work very closely with our business office. I typically supervise directly assistant superintendents. My business officer is an executive director, but I directly supervise him because he is in charge of the district finances. And that was personal decision that I made. Not all superintendents or supervisors do it that way, but one, he was new. The funding was new, and I was new. So we all are learning together, and it's again, that spending time together, knee-to-knee, shoulder-to-shoulder learning is the best way, I think, to build team and accountability together, especially around something as important as finances. Michelle Whitney: We also do a fair amount, or I do a fair amount of interfacing with the community around things like bond planning and levy planning. And we do that through community task forces. And I had an assistant superintendent who did an extraordinary job in interfacing with a group called the Community Builders who helped us plan out a district strategic plan around our facilities. And then of course, layered on top of that is bonds and how those cycles will work. So it's really a multi-tiered effort as a superintendent in a school district, and there's a variety of stakeholders who are involved in different ways in education and finance decision-making. I think it's a really fascinating part of the work. It's a very complicated part of the work. Michelle Whitney: Recently, in the last couple of years, we've had to make some adjustments because the McCleary funding that would require us to repurpose dollars and really there were some areas that we were going to need to reduce. And we got teachers very involved, staff, building-level staff very involved in that. I went out and did a budget presentation, actually two presentations at every single building, and then invited people to come to the table to help us build some budget efficiencies. So we're really working hard to broaden the ownership and leadership around educational finance in Pasco. And we just started to get traction around that work pre-COVID, and then of course, COVID hit. So once we get back to something that appears a little more predictable, we'll get back to that. Michelle Whitney: But I felt like that was an extraordinary opportunity to peel back the curtain of finance of any big organization is complicated. I'm really excited about picking that work back up. Paul Casey: You mentioned strategic planning. You also mentioned in your StrengthsFinder. Vision is huge for you, by the way, huge StrengthsFinder fan. It's called CliftonStrengths now, but Tri-City Influencer listeners, please look up StrengthsFinder 2.0 the book or CliftonStrengths. There's a $19.99 version which will give you your top five. You'll be like, "Someone's reading my mail when you look at it." You're like, "Wow! This is what I love." And if you can be doing that 80% of your work day, you're going to love what you do. And talk to your supervisor about that. You can do it as a whole team. Paul Casey: I can facilitate that for you. It would just be a super fun thing to realize, "Wow, you're so good at that. You should be doing more of that!" And, "Wow, you don't do good at that? What's a way that we can move that around on a team?" Paul Casey: So when you think about the next hill to climb as a district, and you think about continuous improvement, what's your process for that? Michelle Whitney: Well, right now our focus really was derailed in the face of and the impacts of COVID. My eye now is on transitioning our students back into some kind of in-person learning that's safe for them over the course of the next few months and then really getting specific and intentional about how we bridge the impact of the disruption to their educational experience. Michelle Whitney: So we had a really nice trajectory of focus starting in my first year with identifying some outrageous outcomes and strategic plans, and we just refreshed and got a brand new strategic plan approved in January before COVID. So those things really are push-pinned on the bulletin board right now as we're getting really hyper-focused on how do we met the needs of our kids during a pandemic in this just extraordinarily complicated environment. Michelle Whitney: We will need to get back to that. Matter of fact, in January, we'll start again with the board re-calibrating our expectations of the strategic plan, and it will then be focusing on what is life after, post-COVID, or as we start to get kids back. It will be about how do we fill those gaps that have been created by a disruption in the traditional education environment. So those processes for me are done in coordination and collaboration with stakeholders that are closest to the work. So we involve our teachers and our students, and there's a lot of listening that happens and serving that happens and focus groups and task force that happen. So I would envision those things starting to occur. Michelle Whitney: Once we get back to something that's a little bit more predictable, right now, people's priority and focus is dealing with the current crisis. And it truly is still a crisis for us. We've been in a crisis mode since March 13th, so it's really difficult to get people to, and really probably inappropriate to try to get people to think about something more long range. It's like you wouldn't be thinking of building your next house while your current house is on fire. So we really just need to honor where we are right now and know that there'll be work to be done when we get back to something that's a little bit more normal. Michelle Whitney: But my process is really around valuing those closest to the work. They know what they need from us, empowering them in the decision-making, and then being really specific and strategic and intentional about a few key priorities, and I think that was mistake I made early on as a leader is taking on too many things. I'm a person that likes to do too many things, but organizations don't. And I don't mean any single person in an organization. Just systems don't. So when you think about a system like a rubber band, if you stretch it too tight, it'll break, and systems are the same way. So that's been a huge learning piece for me as an individual leader, that you really have to be keyed into systems don't work the same way as you do as an individual leader. Michelle Whitney: So part my leadership responsibility is to help narrow people's focus so that we can get really good at a few things versus having our attention spread across a lot of different things. And I'll tell you, we're not quite there yet as an organization, but we certainly have our eye on that. And this strategic plan that we had in place pre-COVID puts us in a nice spot for that. So we'll be able to pick that up post-COVID and move forward. Paul Casey: Great. Yeah, that makes total sense. I like to say too much change too fast kills change, and it kills you! Michelle Whitney: It's true. It's true. Paul Casey: Well, finally, Michelle, what advice would you give to new leaders or anyone who wants to keep growing and gaining more influence? Michelle Whitney: So, new leaders, I would just say, be kind and gentle with yourself. Find a network of people that you can talk to and that you trust, and be vulnerable with them about what you don't know. Maybe don't be vulnerable with everybody about what you don't know, but find a few people that you really, really trust because none of us as leaders know everything. There is such great learning in vulnerability. So that would be a huge piece of advice for new leaders. Michelle Whitney: And like I said, be kind and gentle with yourself. There are things looking back now, I wish I would have done differently in my first couple years, but I learned from that. We make changes, and we move forward from there. Michelle Whitney: Continuing to evolve in your own leadership, while I talked about listening as learning, that's one part of learning. But there really is the piece about extending yourself beyond your current knowledge base and whether it's through a professional organization that you're involved in or a group or a network of people, reaching out and maybe targeting one key professional development that you want to extend, one in a year, and just being really thoughtful and strategic and gentle about that choice. I think that's always a good thing, to pick one thing that you're going to really extend, maybe beyond your own comfort zone and lean into something that maybe scares you a little every year, and making a commitment to doing that. And either doing it as an individual leader or as a leadership team, I think is always also a really a great thing to keep in mind. Michelle Whitney: Because it's easy in the busyness of our lives to forget about extending ourself in some formal professional development, too. So there's the informal listening and learning to be a better person and a better professional, but there's certainly that formalized professional development that also meets a need for us as leaders and influencers. Paul Casey: Well, Michelle, how can our listeners best connect with you? Michelle Whitney: Well, email is always the best way to connect with me. I'm on that thing all the time. Just ask my husband. He'll tell you. But I do take great joy in interfacing and being a support and assistance to fellow leaders. People always say, "Oh, but you're so busy. We don't want to bother you." It is never a bother to sit with someone who needs me to be a good listener. Email's always a great way to get in contact with me, and I'm always happy to help and be of support and assistance. Paul Casey: Well, thanks again for all you do to make the Tri-Cities a great place and keep leading well! Michelle Whitney: Thank you. Paul Casey: Let me wrap up our podcast today with a leadership resource to recommend. Michelle was just talking about getting more leadership proficiencies in your professional development, especially if you're an emerging leader or a young professional. I offer a program called Leader Launcher. Paul Casey: Leader Launcher is a Tri-City program for young professionals and emerging leaders where I do a training two hours every month on a leadership proficiency. You'll turn that into an action plan, be able to bring that back to your workplace and use it right away in your workplace. It'll be professional growth or leadership, and you can go to leader-launcher.com to sign up. For a full-year program, you'll get 24 hours of training that you'll be able to then apply right on the ground there at work. So leader-launcher.com. Paul Casey: Again this is Paul Casey. I want to thank my guest, Michelle Whitney from Pasco School District for being here today on the Tri-Cities Influencer Podcast. We also want to thank our TCI sponsor and invite you to support them. We appreciate you making this possible so we can collaborate to inspire leaders in our community. Paul Casey: Finally, one more leadership tidbit for the road to help you to make a difference in your circle of influence. It's a quote from Zig Ziglar. He said, "What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." Until next time, KGF, keep growing forward! Announcer: Thank you to our listeners for tuning in to today's show! Paul Casey is on a mission to add value to leaders by providing practical tools and strategies that reduce stress in their lives and on their teams, so that they can enjoy life and leadership, and experience their key desired results. If you'd like more help from Paul in your leadership development, connect with him at growingforward@paulcasey.org for a consultation that can help you move past your current challenges and create a strategy for growing your life or your team forward. Announcer: Paul would also like to help you restore your sanity to your crazy schedule and getting your priorities done every day by offering you his free Control My Calendar checklist. Go to www.takebackmycalendar.com for that productivity tool, or open a text message to 72000 and type the word Growing. Paul Casey: Tri-Cities Influencer Podcast was recorded at Fuse SPC by Bill Wagner of Safe Strategies.

If you host television shows and travel all over cooking for a living, stuff happens. So Michelle asked Scott for some juicy BTS tales. One starts with friends squishing dog poop between their toes at the foot of their bed in the middle of the night. What? Sticking with this theme, Scott reluctantly shares the story of a morning after a night of eating street food while on a duck hunt in Mexico. We’ll leave it at that for now. Then Michelle asks about Scott’s go-to recipe for cooking waterfowl. What he does to change somebody’s mind if they say they don’t like duck. Then a go-to venison approach, which draws to the surface a pet peeve… something about backstrap medallions. And a go-to fish recipe. And Michelle scoffs at Scott’s claim of being a multi-tasker, a bold assertion for any man. Isn’t Scott going to ask Michelle for her go-to recipe? Of course: for “cheese.” What? You’ll have to listen to find out what happens after that.

  Michelle DeRusha joins me again on the podcast. The first time she joined me, our focus was her book True You—a worthy read. I knew then that she needed to be a return guest because she was such a good conversationalist. So Michelle is back and we discuss topics... The post Michelle DeRusha-episode 202 appeared first on Anita Lustrea.

On this episode I talk with Michelle about the opportunity and her family’s decision to stay at one duty station for another 5 years. So Michelle will be at the same duty station for 8 years (10 years for her husband) which isn’t really normal by military standards.They decided to stay because, for one no one likes moving. But more importantly because Michelle has established a career, they have purchased their home, and they have great friends. Pros of staying at one base: really making it your home, knowing the area better, keeping the same doctor, being at the same church, getting to know people better, and having stability while there are unknowns like trainings and deployments. Cons: not getting to experience other places.I ask about having friends come in and out of her life while she stays at the same base. She gives some great advice that any military spouse should take: continue to expand your friend group, even when you think you have a good one. Then we talk Michelle’s job and how lucky she has been to have a great career but staying in the lower 48 states was needed.I ask her about routines and Michelle says they aren’t routine people and hey, that’s okay. They don’t like routines but they love the stability and knowing they have a home to come back to especially since Michelle travels for work and her husband has trainings and deployments.I ask her what she likes about Fort Bragg because being in one duty station would not be fun if you didn’t like that duty station! She says it has everything a person could want. It’s driving distance to the beach, major cities and airports and just 4 hours to the mountains. She also mentions how Fayetteville is an awesome town and the people have great respect for their military community.Michelle’s Instagram Michelle’s PodcastPodcast InfoInstagram @hurryupandwait_

If the prospect of business growth makes you uneasy, you’ll find a lot to relate to in this episode. Jason chats with Michelle St. John, owner and president of IBS Incorporated, a self-proclaimed risk-averse leader whose company continues to find creative solutions to industry challenges in spite of, or perhaps because of, her conservative mindset. Maintenance, repair, and operational supply has proven to be an almost recession-proof market for IBS. “When there's a recession, people are maintaining their own equipment and we get business. When times are booming and people are building their breaking bolts and tearing up roads, we're making sales in that environment.” But Michelle is acutely aware that when challenges arise, they may require solutions that exist beyond her comfort zone. “What we're experiencing right now is some growth to a degree that has caused us to sort of expand at a rate that is a little bit uncomfortable.”  It’s a space that IBS wants to be in, however. So Michelle, who shares leadership duties at IBS with her brother Derek, relies on the lessons learned while watching her parents who started the company in the family’s basement. “Derek and I both watched our parents really closely and we took a lot of lessons away from my dad.” One of the most important was the 72-hour rule, the idea that if you haven’t implemented an idea within 72 hours of learning it, the tendency for it to produce any change at all become zero the longer time goes on. “So, by the end of the 72-hours,” she says, “chances are good  It's not going to influence your culture your environment.” The rule is a core value that IBS impresses upon its sales management team. “It’s really important that they’re in the field with our reps as soon as possible to reinforce that training.” To that end, IBS has committed to putting people in leadership positions who’ll challenge the status quo and help the company reach the next milestone. Michelle says, “We’re challenged with making sure that we’re surrounded by people that can continually stretch us and expand us.” Michelle recently wrapped up one of the greatest experiences of her life, a year-long tenure as president of STAFDA, Specialty Tool & Fasteners Distributors Association, proving that not all growth has to leave you feeling anxious. Trade associate participation has played a key role in her family’s professional development from the beginning. “We devoured the education. We took advantage of all the consultative access.” That access and exposure are just two of the reasons why she’s enthusiastic about association membership. “I know for me, times are evolving so quickly and keeping pace is really important,” she says. “We need ideas from people who are in the trenches and figuring it out every day.”  Michelle has so much insight to share that you’ll definitely want to tune in! Find out how IBS private label products created customer loyalty, learn which assessments her team relies on to gage candidate potential, and how her experience in the corporate world enhanced her leadership abilities. Thank you to our sponsor INxSQL, software built for distribution. *** Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth and achieve personal goals.   Edited & mixed by The Creative Impostor Studios. Connect with Jason on LinkedIn. Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn.

Marketing your interior design business is a business all its own. Social media marketing is essential, but so is marketing in real life, and spreading that all-important word of mouth. So on today’s podcast, we’re talking with someone who knows marketing inside and out, because she was a professional marketer before leaving her corporate job to begin her career in interior design. Darla and Natalie talk with Michelle about how her marketing career informs her interior design business, how brand marketing and direct-response marketing are different, and how she drummed up her first client with a simple marketing trick. In 2016, Michelle transitioned to interior design after spending 15 years as a marketer. Since then she’s worked on countless projects, has been featured in Design*Sponge and Room magazine. She’s also a former Roller Derby jammer, and she has her own podcast called Business Homies where she picks the brains of experts. What You’ll Hear On This Episode of Wingnut Social [2:15] Big news for the podcast [7:25] How Michelle’s marketing background has helped [9:21] Why Michelle turned to interior design [14:40] How Michelle drew from her marketing background [20:55] Why Michelle started a podcast [25:45] Managing social media marketing [28:10] The difference between brand marketing and direct response [36:18] Try not to do too many things [38:15] Whut up, Wingnut? [23:13] Bloopers Connect with Michelle Binette Michelle Binette Michelle on Facebook Michelle on Instagram Resources & People Mentioned LuAnn Live Business Homies Podcast Business Homies Facebook Group Marie Forleo Chaise Lounge Podcast Kimberly Seldon A Well-Designed Business podcast Michelle on the Business of Design podcast You Are a Badass at Making Money, You Are a Badass The Big Leap Get your Audible Free Trial! The marketing tip that helped Michelle get started Michelle spent years in marketing, but as she says she didn’t have a lot of experience with online marketing. However, she knew right away that she needed to put up a blog (even though she didn’t tell family about it) that attracted the type of clients that would want to work with her, and turned away potential clients that would not, in the end, jibe with her personality. That’s a hard lesson to learn for anyone starting out, but Michelle’s years in marketing helped her figure that out from day one. And knowing that, it allowed Michelle to really own her own personality, and not be afraid to be herself and share her true self as part of her business. It’s not always easy to be yourself in business, but if you’re going into business for yourself, it’s truly the only way to make yourself happy, and have an authentic connection with clients. Make Facebook groups work for marketing your interior design business Every interior designer should hear Michelle’s advice for maximizing the potential of Facebook groups. She lives outside of Toronto, and she’s a member of loads of Toronto Facebook groups, and each of those Facebook groups has rules about when you can post to promote your own business. So Michelle made a calendar for all of those Facebook groups, and she would make sure that on those days she’d go on to promote her interior design business. Michelle tailored her posts in Facebook groups to be less promotional, more sharing blog posts, etc. She wasn’t trying to be overly promotional, but she would leave information if someone wanted to schedule a consultation. And the very first time she posted in a group, she landed a consultation. Social media marketing works, people! Connect With Darla & Wingnut Social www.WingnutSocial.com On Facebook On Twitter: @WingnutSocial On Instagram: @WingnutSocial Darla’s Interior Design Website Subscribe to The Wingnut Social Podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, or TuneIn

Note: This episode contains explicit language   Prior to having Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, creators of New York Times Best Selling cook books, Thug Kitchen, on our podcast, I wanted to know, "Do they curse as much in real life as they do as a brand?" The answer was - not surprisingly (and yet still delightfully) - of course. This episode of #WeGotGoals is marked E for explicit, and in it we dove into the "why" behind the profane language. As lighthearted and fun Davis and Holloway are to chat it up with, they mean serious business when talking about eating healthy and taking care of yourself. "Take that shit f*&$!#% seriously," Holloway said. "We want to grab the audience and shake the s*#$ out of them and say, 'Eat a f*&$!#% salad, I'm worried about you!'" Davis interjected, "The swearing levels the playing field." She emphasized that you don't have to change who you are or completely change your life if you pick up healthier and smarter eating habits. In creating The Official Cookbook, Party Grub and 101 Fast as Fuck (I know we have a strict one-swear-word-per-post policy on aSweatLife.com, but these two make it impossible when the title of their Best Sellers also happen to be curse words) Holloway and Davis became leaders in the world of eating for your health on social media and IRL. But that's not what they initially set out to do. In fact, before the Thug Kitchen brand, the two were posting to a Tumblr page for fun, with no idea who, if anyone, was reading. "A big reason our blog went viral was because Gwyneth Paltrow talked about it on The Rachael Ray Show," Holloway said. "We don't have any connections with either of them, but that was like a boom in traffic for us." But the reason Paltrow probably took notice, Davis notes, is because they were already doing the "unsexy work" and were committed to it. Her advice to goal setters looking to achieve big things? "Work as hard as you can and perform at the highest level you can regardless of who's looking because when they crack that door open for you just a little bit, you can be ready to shove your f*&$!#% foot in and make the most of it." Based on the nature of their content and lack of censoring on the regular, I wasn't surprised but I still appreciated how refreshingly truthful, open and honest these founders were about the ups, downs and lessons learned over the past few years during their Thug Kitchen journey. From the outside, when we see people achieve amazing things, we see what they have. Davis pointed out, though, that she learned going after what she wants means other things in life have to give. She begged the question, "What are you willing to give up in your life that you also love to get what you want?" She added, "You have to be willing to not be caught up on Game of Thrones and to not be able to go on dates and to not see people as much as you want to because you are pursuing this dream. It's not always adding stuff to your life, sometimes it's taking away." But for these two, the give and take has been worth it. From the recipes in the best selling cook books to the Forked Up podcast, to the direct messages you'll receive on Instagram, all things Thug Kitchen come directly from the dynamic duo. Davis creates the plant-based recipes, Holloway photographs them, and the two together are in charge of the bluntly witty brand voice that stands out among any other plant-based cook books and blogs, making this company so unique. And based on their goals for the future, I don't think they'll be going anywhere anytime soon. This episode is presented by Chicago Sport and Social Club, reminding you that summer is just around the corner. Get into a summer volleyball league now and use code “GOALS” to get 5 percent off until March 15. If you like what you hear, subscribe where ever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. --- Transcript: JAC: Hi there, it's Jeana Anderson Cohen from aSweatLife.com. We're going to get to the high achievers in just a minute, but first we want to tell you about something we're doing over at aSweatLife.com, Until April 9th, we’re running a kickstarter, so if you or anyone you know has ever been impacted by any of the work we do at aSweatLife.com, whether it's the podcast that you're about to listen to here, the ambassadorship, or the content we create on a daily basis, or even the events that we host here in Chicago and across the country. We’d love for you to help us fund the growth of our ambassador program, helping women set and achieve big, hairy audacious goals. So if you'd like to contribute, check the show notes for this episode or aSweatLife.com and you'll find a link to fund our campaign. Thanks so much. Here's the episode. JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatlife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me, I have Kristen Geil and Maggie Umberger. MU: Morning, Jeana. KG: Hi, Jeana. JAC: Good morning. This week, Maggie, you talked to Michelle and Matt from Thug Kitchen—and for our listeners at home, be sure you take your kids out of earshot. There will be swearing in this episode. MU: Yes, I did speak to the founders of Thug Kitchen, Matt Holloway and Michelle Davis. I was fortunate enough to get to hear a little bit about the behind the scenes of Thug Kitchen, how it came to be and how these two have created an incredible brand, multiple best seller cookbooks and now a podcast called Forked Up. JAC: So what's interesting and has always been sort of a part of the brand is that they sort of use swear words to punctuate their language in different and interesting ways. It’s their way of sort of staying authentic. We have a policy on how we use swear words at aSweatLife, it’s one swear per post, but they clearly adhere to a different policy. Maggie, do you care to elaborate? MU: Yeah, so I even asked them, you know, why swear what's the, the need to do it and for them it, it isn't necessarily a distinct desire to swear. It's just the response to being a little bit more frank about what their business is. It's a cookbook, it started out as a tumblr page and then became this best selling cookbook, Thug Kitchen, but they use swearing to cut through the clutter of beautiful photography that is just fluffy language and they saw good food on the pages, but they didn't relate to the words behind how it was portrayed and so being very candid with their audience about how they view the importance of cooking good food to be healthy and to take it very seriously, but it is just that. It's just the importance that it is and and because they developed this brand that is so honest and open, they're running with it and people are loving it to the point where all of their growth through social media has been organic because they can't promote their posts on Facebook because they're explicit, but they've chosen to go that route, to be authentic to who they are and to trust that their audience is going to respond the way they're going to respond and follow them or not follow them and they're cool with it. KG: You mentioned their Tumblr page just now and they had a stroke of luck when celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Rachel Ray noticed their hard work and promoted it themselves because they thought it was something authentically cool. How does this tie in to how they view goal setting? MU: The more we talked about goals, the more I could tell they were lighting up about talking about them and about their experience with going through the journey of starting a page for fun, not really thinking anything would come of it and then they were putting in a lot of hard work and that's when they got noticed by Gwyneth Paltrow and that was part of their. their points that they made to me as advice to other go-getters and people who were setting goals for themselves, is to know that you're going to work hard and to put in that hard work when no one's looking because you never know when someone is going to be looking and then you have to be ready when they are looking so that you can take flight and run with it and that's really what they've done from cookbook to cookbook and now to podcast. They are very much in the weeds, working day in and day out to produce everything that you see through the Thug kitchen brand. JAC: And here's Maggie with Michelle and Matt. MU: Awesome. So I'm here today with Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, the authors and creators of Thug Kitchen. Thank you guys so much for joining me. MH: It's great to be here; thanks for having us. MD:  Yeah, we’re stoked, thank you. MU: And it's really fun too, because this conversation is about setting goals and I get to talk to both of you as individuals and as the co-creators of a brand that some people don't even know who created, but we get to, I get to hear the backstory and a little bit of the behind the scenes from Thug Kitchen, which I'm really excited about. So before all of the Thug Kitchen craziness, before the official cookbook and Party Grub and 101, Fast as Fuck, which there we go, now we're explicit. Um, I would love to hear sort of a day in the life of how did you spend your days before thug kitchen? MD: I worked full time at a grocery store. And so that was legit all I did, like anyone who works in retail knows you don't really have set hours, they change your schedule all the time. So it felt like I lived at the grocery store and then if I wasn't working I was cooking dinner for myself, for myself and Matt, and just trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life because I had been there for eight years. MH: I was a production assistant, so essentially fetching meals for executives. I would have to arrange travel, it was just sort of like … MD: Lots of diet coke and coffee runs. MH: A production week—anybody who's in entertainment understands it like it's a least a 12 hour  day. So you know, my, my work week was like 60, 70 hours, like every week. MD: For like a lovely, like, what? $12 an hour? Like what were you making? MH: I wasn’t making any money, I was broke as shit. MD: Same thing with me. I was making at most $12 an hour at the grocery store so. MH: So we were broke as fuck and Michelle was trying to get me to cook more on my days off and I'm like yo, I just want to sit on the couch like I don't want to cook. Like, so I get that immediate sort of like knee jerk response and be like now's me time and I don't want to cook. And I was having to like battle that as Michelle was like, dude, you should learn how to cook and like take care of yourself. MD: It’s an important part of being a full fledged grown-up. MH: Yeah. And she was being very encouraging with that and I was trying to, I was looking at everything, I was looking at cook books. I was looking at other websites and YouTube videos and I don't know, we just, when Michelle and I got in the kitchen together and start cooking and doing photos. Like I was just like, I don't, I don't fucking identify with these people who, you know, wrote this cookbook and they live in Malibu and have all the fucking time in the world to source their ingredients MD: And all the money. MH: Yeah, and all the money. It's like they take, they take literally half a day to cook lunch. MD: hat obviously wasn't our fucking lifestyle. And so we created Thug Kitchen, because that's what we wanted to read and thought it was like a fun thing to do when we happened to have the same days off together. MH: It was a very selfish endeavor. MD: Yeah. But it wasn't even like we, we didn't think anything was gonna happen of it. I mean it was a tumblr account. MH: Yeah, I mean we didn’t—it was just food memes. And we were just trying to encourage people to eat more vegetables and describing why they should eat those vegetables and like, you know, the health benefits that go along with adding this to a dish and it just fucking blew up. And like we're like, oh dude, like what does this mean? And we got, we got like some national press and then we got a book deal and we didn't even, even when we got the book deal, we didn't think was going to perform well. So Michelle and I like to sort of a hiatus from our day jobs. MD: Yeah, we didn't burn any bridges. MH: No, we were so ready to go back to our jobs because we're like, well it will be that thing. Where we were like, hey remember that time that we wrote a cookbook? MD: That was so weird! MH: But it sold like gangbusters MD: And here we are. MH: And we're very fortunate for it. MU: I can totally identify with the not relating to the beautiful Instagram-worthy photos of the food, even when I cook it and it tastes fine, it's never like gorgeous and I'm definitely not going to spend time to plate it and take a photo of it before I eat it. But I also like, I don't really know how to cook that well. It sounds to me like you guys sort of, you were teaching ourselves how to cook as you were going through this process of building the tumblr and or did you have like a— MD: I'm the cook. Yeah. I've always known how to cook; I’ve been cooking since I was a kid. It's always been like a hobby of mine. Also a way for me to eat, so. Because I’ve always been broke so I've always had to cook my own food. MH: And I’ve just been like the echo of a thousand excuses. MD: So it's more like I was teaching Matt how to cook through the process. MH: And all the fucking tropes that people are used to telling themselves like, oh well I can't cook because you know, I don't have time to grocery shop. Like isn't eating healthy super expensive or like, so I was like, I was the embodiment of all those things and Michelle just kept nudging me and nudging me and yeah, I just, after awhile it was like, man, that is just a bunch of bullshit. MD: And so we put it in the book. MU: And then it became an explicit cookbook. Partially. I mean why, why the explicit cookbook? I get the, the idea to do it very simplistically, but then to just go all out with it. I love it. Walk me through why. MH: Yeah, we wanted to be really aggro with like the, the tone because like, I mean we uh, we, we say this all the time, but like eating healthy and taking care of yourself and cooking a meal for yourself, like take that shit fucking seriously and we, we want to grab the audience and like shake the shit out of them and be like, eat a fucking salad, like I'm worried about you. MD: But also it shows that you don't have to be like, I feel like eating healthy and the idea of eating like a plant based diet, people think they have to be a totally different kind of person from who they are now. And I think the swearing really levels the playing field and like let you in, like—we’re not taking this shit super seriously. You don't need to take yourself super seriously MH: You can have some fun with it. Yeah. I feel like I was reading everyone else's cookbooks in like a hushed NPR tone, you know what I mean? MD: That's not how we talk to each other, that’s not how we talked to our friends growing up, that's certainly not how we talk in the kitchen, especially when we fucking burn ourselves. MH: Like, yeah, Michelle's from the Bay and I'm from Houston, like the, these, these sort of like Malibu cookbooks are not like reflective of us MD: Or anyone we know. MU: Yeah. I mean and, and now you have best sellers on your hands, which is incredible. So I love it. MD: It feels very surreal. MU: Was there a moment that you realized we're onto something, people people really love this or is it just that, that process of going from getting the book deal to it catching on fire. MH: I mean Michelle might think differently, but I still to this day I don't know what the fuck we're doing. MD: Yeah. Every time you know, a new book comes out or honestly anytime we post anything, I'm fucking delighted that anyone gives a shit. Like, every single time. I don't think. I mean, you know, just recently, last October we found out we've sold more than a million books in the US, but still when I meet someone and they've heard of the book, I kind of can't believe it. MH: I don't know, I guess in those moments that we see as sort of exists in the real world that, you know, it's not just me and Michelle in the office trying to crank out food puns and jokes like, yeah, like I was in Houston just a few weeks ago and a woman came up to me and asked to take a selfie with me and that fucking blew my mind. And then she talked about how she was like, she's not vegan, but she eats more vegetables because of our book and everything like that. It's like in those moments, that's when it's like, Oh wow, this is like a, this is like a thing. I mean, most of the time it's just, I feel like we're just kind of writing jokes in the ether. MD: Yeah. Just putting them on the Internet and just like, we’ll see what happens. MU: I love it. And then you launched a podcast? Yeah, that was kind of, that's actually been a really big goal of ours. Our last book came out October 2016 and we wanted to kind of diversify how we interact with people and kind of try to find new mediums to further our message, but we kind of couldn't figure out a good way to make that work. You know, we really didn't have time when we were writing, we wrote three books in three years. Matt does all the photography. I do all the cooking. We write all the jokes together, like we couldn't really brainstorm for future endeavors while we were doing that. And so we really took the last year to kind of figure out how we could interact with people and, and give a bigger platform to some of our opinions in the food space. And we finally got to realize that with the podcast. MU: So. So yeah, that's a huge goal and I think that what's something that's really cool that you were talking about is that it, it does open up the conversation about something a lot more than just food. Even though you could talk about food forever and I would love it, but you, you talk about politics and you talk about pop culture and so talk to me a little bit about how, how you want to keep sharing your viewpoints and those different endeavors in your life. Like through the podcast. MH: Maybe it's just me, but I feel like a lot of podcasts are sort of … I, I enjoy podcasts are very conversational and I like to maybe think of what other people were sort of like, you know, their point of view and that's, that's kind of what, I mean I'm aiming to do with the podcast is that we want to have conversations with people. And food is an anger, you know, it unifies all of us. MD: Yeah. It's like it's a really good inroad into a lot of different things MH: and it, and it weaves through everything, like you said, from like politics and pop culture and like we just want to have like constructive conversations with people who are in these spaces and just use food as that anchor. MD: Yeah. And I think that we want to keep bringing our different viewpoint to these conversations, the food, because I think a lot of people who are kind of the tastemakers and the big top line food writers and all that stuff kind of come from a homogenous background and you know, being the kind of kids who grew up with, you know, frozen dinners and living on a budget and buying cereal in bags like we, we want to bring that perspective to this conversation about food and healthy eating that we don't think gets a lot of representation. MH: Yeah, I mean I'm just tired of seeing the same fucking 10 people in the food space. MD: And everyone just talking about turmeric. MH: Yeah, just talking about the same shit. Michelle's right. There's, there's a lot of different perspectives and backgrounds out there and we want to have those conversations so that the audience is like, yeah, identify with that. MD: We want to, you know, kind of shine the spotlight on those people and also kind of vocalize that stuff ourselves. CK: So we’ll get back to Maggie, Matt and Michelle in just a minute. But first we want to thank our sponsors this week, Chicago sports and Social Club. With them, it’s more than a game it's a social sports experience. Whatever your personal goals are, big or small, Chicago Sport and Social Club that can list many reasons why you should play. It could be the sand between your toes, or meeting people and moving your social life outside for a season. Whatever your goals are or your reasons for playing, Chicago Sport and Social Club has a beach volleyball league for you. Go to www.chicagosocial.com and use code GOALS, that’s G-O-A-L-S when you register to get five percent off MU: When—if we take a step back and I hear what you say about you had to spend the first three years just really like making those cookbooks, spending that time and now you get to diversify and talk to more people and talk about different things. And it seems like that's sort of the way that you set goals is based off of what you see in front of you, what you can accomplish, and then going forth with enthusiasm and passion, is what I see. Talk to me a little bit about just your perspective on maybe how goals have shifted or how you think about goals now that you have multiple platforms, multiple cookbooks under your belt. MD: I think something we always keep in mind as we're moving forward is, are we creating content or a product that we ourselves would consume? MH: I wouldn't dare anyone spend $16 on a cookbook that I wouldn't buy myself. MD: Yeah. And so that is always been one of the guiding principles as we set goals moving forward is would we want this? Like as just regular fucking people, would we be interested in this? Would we feel comfortable, you know, spending our hard earned money on something like this? Are we presenting quality or are we just trying to like toot our own fucking horn? And that has really helped us kind of knock away opportunities that have come our way that really didn't serve us. MH: Oh there's been a lot of nonsense that’s come our way, with opportunities for like TV shows and shit and we're just like, no, like we're gonna, we're gonna do a book and we want to do, I'd rather do a good job on one thing than a mediocre job on three things. You know what I mean? MD: Yeah, and something that I would be embarrassed to be a part of just to do it for the money. Like we, we really have let that idea of us as consumers of our own product push us forward and help us find kind of the right path. MU: Yeah, your true north. MD: Yeah, exactly. MU: So where does the kitchen go from here? MD: You know, we want to keep, you know, normalizing plant based dining. MH: Yeah, I mean I would say that a big goal of ours going forward like is just giving plant based options in as many restaurants as possible. Nothing drives me more fucking crazy than going to a restaurant and I see six or seven gluten free options and like the only plant based options is a fucking salad. MD: Or a hummus plate. MH: So like yeah, we just want to normalize plant-based options in the eating space. MD: And in all the eating spaces, you know, we, we do that for people eating at home and we also want to make it more available to people who are dining out too. MH: Yeah. Most of our audience, they're omnivores and they want to eat more plant based dishes. They just don't know how. So yeah, a big goal of ours is to continue to normalize that just in the food space in general. MD: So, yo know, working with restaurants, helping them develop menu items that are delicious that anybody would order regardless of their dietary preferences. That just happened to be vegan and ideally one day opening our own space. MU: I was going to say, that sounds super intriguing. I think even just to be able to define what is plant based because we slap labels on so many things now where I don't even know what gluten-free really means. I don't even know, you know, people are semi plant based or like vegans on the weekends or like whatever it is. It's I feel like there's just so much room to clarify what's out there. MD: Yeah, absolutely. Clarify and hone and also just show that you know, it's good food that happens to be vegan. It's good food that happens to be plant-based, it’s not a different kind of food. MU: Right. In your cookbooks, do you have a favorite recipe? MH: Spaghetti pie! Hands down, that's one of my favorites. Is is great because not only does it tastes fucking amazing because it does, but like it's a great party trick. People fucking lose their minds over spaghetti pie. MD: Yeah. That's our third book, but for me, I love the spaghetti pie. It’s like choosing a baby. I like the Tex-Mex queso in our third book a lot too and I have a really special place in my heart for the chickpea dumpling soup that is in our first book. That was my take on my Nana's recipe of chicken and dumplings. I made it a fuck ton more healthy and threw in a ton more vegetables because hers was just like gray and white chicken and just like gray—it was not visually appealing. MH: No, you're right. That's that soup is something that I have served my family and friends who are not vegan and they're like, there is no better than this? I'm like, there’s none, none whatsoever. MD: Yeah. It's really hearty and super comfort food MH: It’s like velvety. MD: Yeah, it's. Yeah, that is a. That one has a really special place in my heart. MU: Oh my gosh. I have to make this, it sounds so good. MD: And the recipe makes a fuck ton. MH: Yeah, every I give someone that recipe. They're like, oh, you know, it takes like a couple of hours to make. MD:  It doesn’t really. MH: I’m like, yeah, but did you have soup for the rest of the week? Yeah. MD:  If you're terrible at chopping stuff, it's going to take you a minute. MH: It’s worth it, it’s so worth it. That's a good recipe. MU: Duly noted. Page marked. So I'm, I'm interested in knowing since you talked a little bit about how people aren't always sure like where, what the, the world of vegan dining is or where you can you go to get simple good food as one obstacle. Maybe as far as your journey has been so far, another obstacle along the way that maybe has tried to hinder you in attaining any of your goals? Have you encountered anything like that? MD: Um, yeah, I would say actually our swearing, while I think it's brought a ton of people to the audience, sometimes has hindered us in growing our audience. Like we can't promote any posts on any social media accounts. So all of our growth on any account you see has all been organic all through peer to peer sharing because we can’t advertise. MH: Yeah, we didn't find that out until like we were trying to um, advertise the first cookbook. And what was it like facebook, instagram, twitter, like all the social media platforms flagged us for language. MD: So even if we write a clean post, we can’t boost it. MH: There’s nothing we can do.  So, we, that just like we were like, all right, well fuck, I guess people will just buy the book. MD: You know, it really puts us at the mercy of our audience to share it with new people. MU: That is really fascinating. I know from being on the media side of things that that is true and that can be a huge, huge hindrance. MD: Yeah. But you know, luckily we have a really passionate and vocal fan base and so they’ve really stepped up and this shared it with people. I don't even think we've ever told them we can't advertise, but they, they're always tagging new friends and you know, sharing our posts with people and really that's what's made us survive as a business and we're so fucking grateful for it. MH: I mean it's, it's, you know, it's helps when we have a fucking book come out, but like going out and meeting people and speaking and like, like connecting with our audience like that. And that's why like with the podcast we can like, you know, we tell people on twitter like, hey, you got somebody or something. You want us to talk about fucking Tweet us, let us know. And that dialogue and that, that communication we have with our audiences has been so key to our survival. MU: And you guys together, you talked about it already, Michelle, you, you do everything yourselves together. You write the jokes, you do the photos, you create the recipes. How does your partnership help you guys go forward and keep chugging along and building this brand? MD: Yeah, sure. I mean I can't imagine doing this by myself. It's so great to have a sounding board and a different perspective, you know, we don't always agree but 95 percent of the time on our plans for moving forward like I'll vocalize something, and Matt’s like, I was thinking that same shit. And so it's really great to have that built in support and also this has been a weird couple of years for us and you know like this wasn't necessarily what we planned for ourselves to get to do all of this. So it's great to have somebody to talk to you that completely understands what you're going through and so it really helps keep the business anchored in reality and we just, we are each other's cheerleaders and taskmasters and I'm really grateful for it. Yeah. And we're, I mean we're still totally involved in every facet. Like if Thug Kitchen likes your post on Instagram or Twitter or anything, I mean, that’s us. Like we don't have anybody else. So you know, we know we get retweeted on our twitter account and somebody writes something funny like that's probably Matt. And like if someone's liking your photos on Onstagram and we repost it like that's me. MH: Yeah, we want to not like, it feels weird to hire someone to handle social media. MD: But it also goes back to that interaction with our audience that’s so important. Like we want to see what recipes people are responding to, to what jokes people think are funny and the only way for us really do that is to be in the fucking weeds with everybody. MU: And if you had some advice to give to either friends or significant others that wanted to launch a business or start something together as a partnership, what kind of advice would you give to them? MH: Don't. Don't do it. MD: I would say if you're in a romantic partnership, be willing to lose the romantic part of that partnership. If that's what this business idea of yours or whatever it is is that important to you. You really do have to prioritize what you want from that person and have realistic goals because it is really hard to work so close to someone and to be like, you know—we talk business 24-7 with each other. So it's, it's hard to then have space for whatever your personal relationship is and so you guys need to be upfront and honest with your expectations and what you want and I'm just always be super transparent with each other. MH: Yeah, I think that there—I was joking earlier. I think people should absolutely, if you've got an idea fucking chase it, like and if you got someone you care about like do it with that person because you trust them. MD: Yeah, trust is the partner is probably the most important. MH: But like just make sure that you care about it as much today as you do in two years or if things go great or if things don't go great, like you have to care about it and if that's what you want to do then fucking chase it. But I think that with Michelle and I specifically a lot of people, because Michelle and I get along so well and everything, I think that when we've talked about dating in the past, like Michelle and I separated before the first book came out. MD: Yeah, we weren't romantically dating before the first book came out. MH: Yeah. And you just have to, like Michelle was saying, it's just like you have to trust that person and you got to care about what you're doing. MD: And you might have to make a choice. MH: Yeah, you might have to pick that your project is priority over, you know, your love life and you have to be OK with that. Otherwise don't do it. MD: Yeah. There's a good quote I heard from, I can't remember who now, but it was like, you know, if you have this dream or this goal, like what are you willing to give up in your life that you also love to get what you want because it's not always going to be like, oh, now I have all of these things that I’ve always wanted. It's like, no, you have to give up things you also love. You have to be willing to not be caught up on Game of Thrones and to not be able to go on dates and to um, you know, kind of maybe not see people as much as you want to because you are pursuing this dream. Like it's not always just adding stuff to your life. Sometimes it's having to take stuff away. MU: It can take you to places that you didn't foresee. Like you say, you didn't think that in the last couple years would be as they are and here you are. So if you have maybe one last piece of advice for others that are, that are going after a goal and they're not really where they're going to end up. How do you navigate some of those dark spaces? MH: Just be ready to power through the valleys. You know it's going to be peaks and valleys and you can't have any ups without any downs and when, when you have the downs, like just power through it and just keep going like that. MD: And you also don't know who is reading your stuff. So work as hard as you can and perform at the highest level you can regardless of who's looking. Because when they crack that door open for you just a little bit, you can be ready to shove your fucking foot in and make the most of it. Because if you're not doing the work when no one's looking, it's going to be really hard to keep doing it when everybody's fucking looking. MH: A big reason that our blog went viral is because Gwyneth Paltrow talked about it on the Rachael Ray show, we don't have any fucking connections with either of them, but like that was like a boom in traffic for us and if you had told me to write like Gwyneth Paltrow, Rachel Ray were reading it, I would stop posting immediately and probably go back and like edit all the posts. Like they were all riddled with typos and shit and the photography was like whatever. MD: We were ready when someone said jump, we were fucking ready. And so it's about doing the work, putting in the hours during the un-sexy stuff of just doing the ground work for when that peak comes for you. MU: That's awesome advice for whatever goal you're going after, whether it's a new business or just doing your job well. MD: Yeah, exactly. Just do it for this sake of like accomplishing something that makes you feel proud about yourself because you can't always control what people's reactions to you and you can't control who's looking at your project, so you really want to just be able to be satisfied with the product yourself. So always perform as best you can regardless of who's patting you on the back or not. MU: Absolutely. So people can find you on the apple podcast for Forked Up. They can find you throughout social media. It's you. MD: It’s us, we’re just @ThugKitchen, we've never over-thought any of our tags. MU: And they can get any of your books through your website or through Amazon. MD: Yeah. Through, um, Amazon, Barnes and noble. Anywhere books are sold. MU: Amazing. Thank you guys so much for joining me. MD: Thanks for having us. We really appreciated it. MH: This has been fun. Thanks for having us. CK: This podcast is produced by me, Cindy Kuzma and it's another thing that's better with friends, so please share it with yours. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you could also leave us a rating and a review in Apple Podcasts, we will be so grateful. Special thanks to J. Mano for our theme music; to our guests this week, Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway; and to Tech Nexus for the recording studio.  

We’ve got some awkward news to share, folks: The producer of Orbital Path is claiming he’s been abducted by space aliens. So this week, we’re dusting off the theremin and returning to one of our favorite early episodes — “Must Be Aliens.” Dr. Michelle Thaller talks with Phil Plait — AKA the “Bad Astronomer” — about the Kepler mission to find planets circling other stars … and why we humans are so quick to ascribe the unknowns of the cosmos to aliens. In the two years since this episode was originally produced, however, the universe has not stood still. So Michelle has an update on the Kepler project — and a discovery that, once upon a time, had certain astronomers murmuring the “A” word. Orbital Path is produced by David Schulman and edited by Andrea Mustain. “Must be Aliens” episode produced by Lauren Ober. Production oversight by John Barth and Genevieve Sponsler. Hosted by Michelle Thaller.

Today my guest is Michelle. Michelle is originally from Bulgaria but now lives in Barcelona which is where I’m visiting her today. By day she works as a software engineer but since 2014 has also been a meditation teacher and had a consistent meditation practice since 2011. Earlier this year Michelle made a very courageous and vulnerable post on social media. You see, up until very recently, I knew Michelle as Martin. So Michelle announced that she was in the early stages of transitioning from male to female. I’m curious to find out today how her meditation is supporting her in this transition. Topics Mentioned: Today while recording in Barcelona, the Catalonian’s are also voting for their independent from Spain, so there is a lot of public demonstrations and a heavy police presence in the city. We talk a little about our own experience of the vibe of the city today and how it is affecting us. Michelle before meditation suffered from insomnia and describes herself as a do-er and planner and always trying to figure things out. We talk about what it was like to grow up in a communist country, which required you to follow the rules and wasn't open to differences, which created an underlying fear. A build-up and accumulation of stress between work and a relationship breakup meant that the only option seemed to be to learn to meditate or go insane. She rather sceptically started with the guided meditation app Headspace, but couldn’t deny that it seemed to work. She was getting 10 minutes of peace a day and the first most obvious effect was seeing an improvement with her sleep. But she was getting bored and was going from guided meditation to guided meditation always wanting more. But that changed when she met her first meditation teacher, which just happened to be last weeks guest, Sandy Newbigging. And she in him, a level of peace that she hadn’t seen before and she wanted it. Being a guy has been about being a people pleaser. She felt conditioned to be what others expected her to be, which was a boy. She was laughed at if she wanted to do the things the girls wanted to do, or like the Spice Girls. She wanted to just be able to enjoy the things she wanted to enjoy but was teased and bullied when she fully expressed herself. As an innocent child, she simply thought that although she was a boy she would simply magically grow up to be a woman. When she came to post publicly on social media that she was really a woman and was planning to start living as a woman, it felt very natural and she just wanted it done. She was ready to let go of Martin. “I couldn’t imagine myself doing that without the meditation, to be honest. I think I might have lived my whole life with surprising a part of myself if it wasn’t for meditation. I think meditation has been a very helpful tool with any strong moments in my life. Whenever I couldn’t find any stability in the outside world, meditation has been an amazing tool because on the inside I could always go back to this peace.” The challenge of transitioning. I have 30+ years of expressing myself in a masculine way so accepting that sometimes progress is slow and that sometimes it might seem likeI’m doing the same thing over and over again even though I want it to be different is challenging. I feel so much lighter and more open and at peace, though the more I express the more feminine side of myself. If I have to mentally plan it out, my current situation can look far from ideal. But I’ve always found it much easy to enjoy playing, and enjoy exploring, and enjoy just allowing myself to be exactly as I am right now. I just want to be myself. I’ve started moving in a certain direction and I want to feel open to doing things in whatever way they naturally appear to me without being bound to whether it fits in the male box or the female box. Advice to anyone going through a gender transition: Be yourself and never

Today my guest is Michelle. Michelle is originally from Bulgaria but now lives in Barcelona which is where I’m visiting her today. By day she works as a software engineer but since 2014 has also been a meditation teacher and had a consistent meditation practice since 2011. Earlier this year Michelle made a very courageous and vulnerable post on social media. You see, up until very recently, I knew Michelle as Martin. So Michelle announced that she was in the early stages of transitioning from male to female. I’m curious to find out today how her meditation is supporting her in this transition. Topics Mentioned: Today while recording in Barcelona, the Catalonian’s are also voting for their independent from Spain, so there is a lot of public demonstrations and a heavy police presence in the city. We talk a little about our own experience of the vibe of the city today and how it is affecting us. Michelle before meditation suffered from insomnia and describes herself as a do-er and planner and always trying to figure things out. We talk about what it was like to grow up in a communist country, which required you to follow the rules and wasn't open to differences, which created an underlying fear. A build-up and accumulation of stress between work and a relationship breakup meant that the only option seemed to be to learn to meditate or go insane. She rather sceptically started with the guided meditation app Headspace, but couldn’t deny that it seemed to work. She was getting 10 minutes of peace a day and the first most obvious effect was seeing an improvement with her sleep. But she was getting bored and was going from guided meditation to guided meditation always wanting more. But that changed when she met her first meditation teacher, which just happened to be last weeks guest, Sandy Newbigging. And she in him, a level of peace that she hadn’t seen before and she wanted it. Being a guy has been about being a people pleaser. She felt conditioned to be what others expected her to be, which was a boy. She was laughed at if she wanted to do the things the girls wanted to do, or like the Spice Girls. She wanted to just be able to enjoy the things she wanted to enjoy but was teased and bullied when she fully expressed herself. As an innocent child, she simply thought that although she was a boy she would simply magically grow up to be a woman. When she came to post publicly on social media that she was really a woman and was planning to start living as a woman, it felt very natural and she just wanted it done. She was ready to let go of Martin. “I couldn’t imagine myself doing that without the meditation, to be honest. I think I might have lived my whole life with surprising a part of myself if it wasn’t for meditation. I think meditation has been a very helpful tool with any strong moments in my life. Whenever I couldn’t find any stability in the outside world, meditation has been an amazing tool because on the inside I could always go back to this peace.” The challenge of transitioning. I have 30+ years of expressing myself in a masculine way so accepting that sometimes progress is slow and that sometimes it might seem likeI’m doing the same thing over and over again even though I want it to be different is challenging. I feel so much lighter and more open and at peace, though the more I express the more feminine side of myself. If I have to mentally plan it out, my current situation can look far from ideal. But I’ve always found it much easy to enjoy playing, and enjoy exploring, and enjoy just allowing myself to be exactly as I am right now. I just want to be myself. I’ve started moving in a certain direction and I want to feel open to doing things in whatever way they naturally appear to me without being bound to whether it fits in the male box or the female box. Advice to anyone going through a gender transition: Be yourself and never

The air conditioner is out in the Fresh Batch studio! So Michelle and her special guests Lauren Adams (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) and Chris Burns (UCB) are hot, sweaty, pale, and ready to break down Episodes 3 & 4 of Bachelor In Paradise. They discuss ABC's continuing coverage of the Corinne/DeMario incident, Carly and Evan's on-air ultrasound, "Bartender Wells," the depressing return of Jorge, the Dean & Kristina drama, and oh so much more. Plus, Michelle buys solar eclipse glasses on eBay for $20 and shadily picks them up from the concierge at the Park Lane Hotel! Fresh Batch is sponsored by BioClarity! Finally, an acne treatment that actually works. Go to BioClarity.com and enter promo code FRESH for your first month for only $9.95 plus free shipping! New Episodes of Fresh Batch every Wednesday (evening)! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE // RATE // REVIEW on #ApplePodcasts if you're a fan of the show and want more! And follow Fresh Batch on Twitter @FreshBatchPod.

So there are a few things that create ongoing discomfort for me as a professional, one of which is the lack of evidence in health and safety practice, and our tendency for so much of our practice to not be evidence based even when it exists.  I am guilty too.   I met Michelle Oberg last year when I was speaking at the Australian National Safety Convention, and she had me intrigued with her PhD research question, which I summarised in my notes as 'is less "safety" (in inverted commas) actually more safety?'.   So the results have been streaming in, and Michelle's PhD is almost completed.   So Michelle and I caught up to find out what she learned.   Before you go..... Next week I'm lucky enough to be speaking to the wonderful  staff at Safety Culture, the inventors of the iAuditor app many of us would be familiar with. They wanted my input to help their people, largely the technical boffins, to connect with their mission, the final output of their product - actual health and safety outcomes.  I'm honored to be asked to help, and impressed with their commitment to keeping their mission front of mind.  Lucky for you, they will be live-streaming my presentation and the following Q&A session on Facebook, that's 5-6pm Thursday 6th April (that's Sydney time), so if you want to watch that, Like Safety on Tap on Facebook and I'll post more details there.

Tony DeRose and Michelle Hlubinka discuss Young Makers, a collaboration between Pixar, the Exploratorium, and Maker Media to connect kids with adult mentors to develop projects for the Maker Faire (May 19-20, 2012 in San Mateo). www.youngmakers.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We are speaking with Dr Tony Rose who got his graduate degree from cal and is now the head of research at Pixar [00:01:00] and Michelle who Banka the educational director for our Riley and maker media. They are here to discuss the young makers program, this collaboration between Pixar mic magazine and the exploratorium teams, young people with adult makers to create and construct amazing projects for the maker fair. Each year they'll talk about the program and what you might expect to see from the teams that this year's maker fair at the San Mateo Fair gowns on May 19th and 20th how you might get involved next year and about the future of educating and encouraging more young people to make more things in the [00:01:30] physical world. And please stay tuned for a chance to win tickets to the maker fair after this program. Tony and Michelle, thanks for joining us. Thanks. It's nice to be here. Yeah, thank you. And can you tell us a little bit about the young makers program? Sure. I can start. The Speaker 4: program was based, at least in part on my own family's experience where several years ago, my older son who's always loved to build things, grew out of Legos and we realized there was nothing for him to really graduate into until we discovered maker fair in 2006 [00:02:00] so we went to maker fair a couple of times as spectators and then starting in 2008 we started creating our own projects to share and we had such a great time and we all learned so much that the young makers program is an attempt to try to bring that sort of experience to other kids and other families. Speaker 5: Tony came to us, uh, make and make are fair and was also having a conversation with our collaborators, Mike and Karen at the exploratorium about potentially doing some work that could get more kids [00:02:30] excited about science and technology. We all agree that this is something that really needs to be done and we're all excited about working together. Let's do it. So that can was 2010, right? We launched a pilot and we had 20 kids come create projects, which they exhibited at maker fair that year. Everything from a hamster habitat that functions also as a coffee table to a fire breathing dragon, all things that the kids came up with of their own design and worked with [00:03:00] mentors to create over the space of a few months leading up to maker fair. Speaker 4: So Michelle said in the pilot run in 2010 we had about 20 kids. Last year we had about 150 participants total. About a hundred were cads and a hundred were adult supporters in various roles, mentors and club managers. This year we have about 300 so we're growing pretty rapidly and what we're trying to do now is start to think about how to scale beyond the bay area and help to create similar efforts and at least other metropolitan regions, if not, you know, even rural [00:03:30] regions Speaker 5: nationally or eventually internationally. Eventually internationally. There's nothing that would constrain this to the U s we're already international. I think we have a group in Calgary, Alberta. Right. That's started up. And do you see an advantage or disadvantage? Young makers is mostly outside of schools. Speaker 4: It started mostly outside of schools, but we're really looking for early adopter kind of teachers like Aaron at the lighthouse school to see if we can adapt it to in school. School curriculum is a really complicated thing, so we don't want [00:04:00] to be gated on, you know, widespread immediate adoption. So we're trying to develop a lot of models and materials and resources and best practices in whatever setting we can run the fastest, which happens to be informal out of school after school. But I think a lot of the materials that we're developing will hopefully be usable by teachers address toward academic curriculum during the school day. Speaker 5: Hmm. I'm just to follow up on the lighthouse charter school. Sure. So we're hoping they're going to be [00:04:30] a part of a project that we're doing to get more making back into high schools. So I'm sure you know that a lot of schools have been getting their technical arts programs, technical education, really. They've got lots of vocational ads. They've also been calling these, we're trying to reverse that trend and we got some funding from DARPA to work on getting, making back into schools and it's called the makerspace project. So we are trying to find 10 schools in California this year and then a hundred the following year and then a thousand the year after that [00:05:00] all around the country have thousand and this is to try to create those kinds of shop spaces. So this kind of thing is happening at lighthouse charter school already, but we'd like to see a lot more of it happening. Are there other corporate sponsors that are interested in joining the program? Yes, there has been a lot of uh, corporate interest in getting involved with the maker movement. And so as part of that we are starting the maker education collaborative. Do you want to say something about that Tony Speaker 4: w [00:05:30] what are the motivations for the, the collaborative is w w we began to realize that there are so many different ways to connect kids with making the young makers program is, you know, out of school typically more ambitious, middle and high school level. But you could change all those traces to be in school younger. And so there's a whole bunch of variations and probably so many variations that no one company or no one organization could, could do it. But if you look at the [00:06:00] various different programs that could be created, there's a lot of overlap in the, in the needs and the resources and so one of the things the collaborative is trying to do is pull together a common platform so that as companies or organizations want to launch something, they don't have to start from dirt. There's a big network that they can plug into and you know, get off and running really quickly. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you are listening to the spectrum on k a l ex [00:06:30] today we are talking with Michelle [inaudible] of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar about the young makers program that promotes young people to make fantastic things. Speaker 5: Maker fairs, this really family friendly event. Tony came with his family and what we love about the family model is that it's a really nice way that people have been able to engage and get closer and work together with their kids. [00:07:00] In the way that I think we imagine happened back in the Norman Rockwell era a lot more than it does today. Now that we're much more in a screen-based society. But part of our job is getting kids to either get away from the screens or only use those screens when they need to find out what they need to do to get back off the screens again. What's certainly interesting coming from someone from Pixar who makes it relatively passive entertainment, right? Speaker 4: Right. But if you think about the, the, the kinds of people that we have now and that we [00:07:30] want to continue to hire, they're, there are people that know how to learn on their own. They work really well in groups. They're highly multidisciplinary. And those are, those are exactly the attributes that, that the young makers program is designed to develop. And the kids that participate have those traits. We're just trying to, you know, help, help them grow in all those ways. And one of the nice things about the, this more ambitious project that we have this year is it's not just our family, it's, it's five families working together. So it becomes really a community building [00:08:00] activity. And you know, the neighbors that walk by, you know, get drawn in because they see all this crazy stuff going on in the driveway and it, so it's just a really wonderful healthy thing that everybody can contribute to and feel good about. So you touched upon the kinds of people that Pixar is interested in. Are there other things that set Pixar and O'Reilly and exploratory in that part that make them natural fits for sponsors? Well, for one thing, we're not afraid to make mistakes. So when we started working on this program and none of us [00:08:30] knew how this was going to work, so in true maker spirit we just sort of jumped in and were figuring out stuff as we go. Yeah, we all appreciate, yeah, the Speaker 5: learning by making, I think all of us appreciate story in a different way. Mike and Karen, especially at the exploratorium, are very good about documenting the work that they do and sharing that story and helping other museums explore that same theme. Tony, obviously I Pixar, they're in the business of making stories and we're all about hunting out those stories and sharing them with others. Speaker 4: What do you think of [00:09:00] creativity in digital environments? I think we're all fans of creativity in whatever form it takes. My younger son is really into Minecraft right now. One of the things you can really see is his facial reasoning has become incredibly honed. He can go into one of these environments that he's built and you know, they're very extensive. He can, he can navigate through those. Those amazes very quickly. It has become a community thing too. So he has friends that, you know, get out and play together. [00:09:30] You know, I think you can take anything too far and so we have to work to dial that back a little bit. But I think our point of view is that there are lots of burgeoning virtual opportunities for creativity. Minecraft is one video editing, web design, but the opportunities to express creativity in physical form is diminishing. And that that's the trend we're trying to reverse. Speaker 5: What kinds of things did you make when you were younger? Uh, well I am well known in my circle of friends for making calendars [00:10:00] of all things. I had a character named to Bianca, obviously a pseudonym for Mays who went on adventures around the world and then I tried to pack in as many facts into this calendar as I could. So I did oodles a research trying to find something related to my theme every year. So one year it was being, it goes to ancient Egypt, it goes to the art museum and so I tried to find facts for every single day of the year to share with people. Part of the reason I left those calendars though is [00:10:30] because I was getting more and more excited that we learn in a hands on way. And so the kind of pedagogical stance of this fact filled trivia based calendar had nothing to do with hands on learning and so I've been trying to resolve them. Speaker 5: What do you think makes for a good project for the young makers? I think the most important thing for a project to have is that the person making it has a passion about it and is excited [00:11:00] to make it. Usually the more successful projects also have something a little bit quirky or unusual about it. Sometimes bringing together two disparate things that nobody has put together before. So I'm trying to think of a great example of that habitat combat for example of bringing together a need for a base for a hamster to live and wanting it to be an attractive centerpiece [00:11:30] of a living room in the form of a coffee table. If that would be an example of a quirky approach to solving your problem. Speaker 4: I think a couple of other attributes that make a project, you know really worthwhile as to is for the team to pick a project that is just beyond or maybe even a little bit further than just beyond their current abilities so that when they complete it they really feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not a done deal going in. There's, there are all sorts of twists and turns and one of the challenges that the mentors are posed [00:12:00] with is how do I assess the skills of the team and help to dial in so that you hit that, that sweet spot that's just, it's ambitious but not too ambitious. It's just a natural part of the process to hit failures and roadblocks and our approach is learn from the failures and figure out how to get around the roadblocks and pick up the pieces and go on. So for us, failure isn't something to be avoided. It's something to be embraced and, and learn from. Speaker 5: And are most of the projects finished to completion? [00:12:30] We were, we've been doing Speaker 4: very surprised the, my expectation anyway was we might get completion rates of maybe 30 to 50% something like that. And we've seen typically more like 80% completion rates. So Speaker 5: it's amazing how motivating a deadline is. Is it? A lot of that completion has to do with, we work very hard to help them find the mentoring that they need in order to complete it. I remember last year, something that seems like it was going to be pretty simple. [00:13:00] A couple of girls will not, the project wasn't simple, but finding them a mentor seemed like it would be simple. They wanted to create a pedal powered car. So we tapped into some of our bike networks because as you can imagine, the bicycling network and the network of people who are excited about making overlap pretty heavily sent out email after email. And then we discovered that part of the problem was that these girls were making it at their school, Lighthouse Charter school here in Oakland. They're working on their project at school, but they don't have the facilities for fabricating [00:13:30] and doing the welding there. And so it's also a matter of trying to get the kids to the fabrication facility or get that convinced that bike guy to haul all the welding stuff probably on his bike to lighthouse charter school. So those are the kinds of things that we're trying to figure out in these first few years when we're doing the mentor matching. You're listening to the spectrum on k a l, X. Today Speaker 6: we're talking with Michelle Lupica of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar [00:14:00] about the young makers program that encourages young makers to team with adult mentors to make fantastic projects and show them off at the maker. Speaker 5: Okay, and do you think the kids who don't finish still get a lot out of the program? Oh yeah, so they, they did finish, I want to say they did finish it. It was a beautiful pink pedal powered bike, but what it meant is that, you know, as we were getting closer and closer to that deadline of maker fair, we had to work harder and harder to persuade someone to come and [00:14:30] work with them and help them achieve what they were trying to do. But they of course I think also had to scale back a little bit. That's a big part of this is setting real expectations for what can be accomplished in time for it. One thing that we're very excited about this program in contrast to other programs is that we really put an emphasis on exhibition of our competition. This is an where you know whether you have succeeded or failed based on how you interact with others and how they can understand [00:15:00] what motivated you and what the project is all about and kids know whether or not their project worked or not. Speaker 4: One of the other things that distinguishes the program from a lot of other activities right now is that the projects aren't in response to a challenge that's posed by adults or organizers. The project visions come from the kids themselves, so they're very open ended. They're very broad. They're often extremely multidisciplinary, you know, combining in very natural ways, various branches [00:15:30] of science, engineering, art, music, and there's this unifying vision that pulls all those disciplines together. And I think the non-competition and open-endedness is one of the reasons that we see a higher percentage of girls than a lot of other programs. We're about 40% girls right now where I think a lot of other activities, science fairs and competitions are much more male oriented. Speaker 5: Is the way that the girls and boys approach a program different in any way? Speaker 4: Yes, there are a few gender [00:16:00] differences. I think that that that tend to occur, and not universally of course, but one is that the boys often want to work in small groups or alone, whereas the girls tend to want to work in larger groups. How large is large? Three or four is the typical size. Speaker 5: We had one group I think last year with about seven girls working together on a water totter. It was a pump that was powered by us. You saw, Speaker 4: I think another gender difference we've seen echoed in a number of projects. Has girls tend to want to work on things that are [00:16:30] socially beneficial and kind of right or or the hamster habitat. Whereas the boys often gravitate towards something that is a little edgier or more dangerous spits out fire. Yeah, fire is a good one. Yeah, and that's okay. One of our mottoes is, you know, anything cool is fair game. Do something cool, do something you're passionate about and it'll probably fit right in. Speaker 5: And how do you guys help recruit and improve mentors for this program? Speaker 4: Well, for recruiting, we've tapped into our [00:17:00] own social networks, so there are a lot of participants. For Pixar for instance, that are sort of natural born makers themselves. [inaudible] are interested in teaching. Speaker 5: Yeah. This upcoming maker fair I believe is our 13th event and at each one we have 600 to a thousand makers. So often what we'll do is we'll say a kid has a specific question, we'll try to find a mentor some times local, but sometimes they're okay with asking and answering questions from farther away. When the makers [00:17:30] would sign up for maker fair, we would ask them, would you be willing to mentor? I think for this round we actually took that question out because we found that most makers, again, because of that generosity of spirit that characterizes the bay area, and I think makers in any place, they don't say no when you ask them a question because they're for there to be more people like them that have this innate curiosity. So they're, they're happy to fuel that. Speaker 4: We also get people finding the website and you know, hearing stories like this [00:18:00] and they are drawn into the program through those means as well. Speaker 6: You are listening to spectrum on k a l LX today. We're talking to Tony Darrow's, a Pixar and Michelle Lupica of maker media about the young makers program that helps students create an exhibit, their projects and maker fair. Speaker 4: Another great example is a boy in Arizona, Joey Hoodie. So we got to talking with Joey, created a project, brought it to maker fair. It was a pneumatic marshmallow cannon and we'd come to find out that [00:18:30] Joey suffers from Aspbergers syndrome, but he's just flourishes in the making community. So he came to maker fair. He had a great time. I think they've been to basically every making event in every city since then. And it was really exciting to see him invited to the White House who was a wonderful picture of Joey and the president and this, it's the most wonderful you probably just off camera. Yeah. But the, the look on President Obama's face is just priceless. You know, his, his jaw dropped basically. So it was just, [00:19:00] I think it'd been a life changing experience for Joey and, and hopefully can be for a lot of other similar kids. Speaker 5: The kids at the next table. Two are in the New York Times picture kind of cowering in horror. They watch him launch this marshmallow into the wall of the state room. I'm also interested in if any of the young makers who have made projects before are interested in coming back and being mentors. Are they sort of Gung Ho about continuing the program? Speaker 4: We don't have a long enough track record to have kids that have graduated, come [00:19:30] back as mentors. Most of them that graduate go off to college. Typically studying engineering programs. What we have seen as some of the more advanced and older young makers mentoring some of the younger young makers in the program. And that's another reason that the club model is really nice because there's not only enter age learning, but we've seen intergenerational learning. In fact, we had one team last year where there was a young maker, the father was the main mentor and the grandfather was also participating. The grandfather was kind of an old school electrical [00:20:00] engineer and the project was to build police car instrumented with various sensors and sounds. So the grandfather's first reaction was, you know, let's build custom circuits for each of those functions. And somebody in one of the blessings sessions suggested looking at Ardwino, which is a, an embedded microprocessor system. And so they ended up adopting Ardwino for the project. The, the young maker ended up teaching the grandfather about embedded micro control software. [00:20:30] And so the, the learning goes both ways. How can people get involved with young makers next year? If you're interested in participating in the 2013 season of young makers, go to young makers.org there's a signup link on the left margin. We'll get you on our mailing list and we'll let you know as the season starts to spin up and can people expect Speaker 7: from maker fair in a couple of weeks. Speaker 5: So maker fairs coming up May 19th and 20th Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Expo Center. It's this fun filled weekend of DIY. Do it yourself. Technology and art is a little bit like burning [00:21:00] man without the drugs. Sandstorms and unity. The team that was working on the water totter. They were thinking of making a three hump lump from Dr Seuss, but scaled back. I think the original is a seven Hump Hump. We have everything from the Coke Zero Mentos fountains and that architect, which is a performance of Tesla coils and heavy rock music, which is fantastic to [00:21:30] 600 other people showing off their projects and arts, crafts, engineering, green design, music, science, technology, rockets and robots, felting, beekeeping. We've got it all. If you want more information, go to maker fair.com that's m a k e r f a I r e.com. Don't forget the e. It's the greatest show and Chow on earth. Thank you both for joining us. [00:22:00] Thank you for having us. It's been great. Thanks. Speaker 6: A regular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area. Over the next two weeks. We say Katovich and Brad swift join me for this. Speaker 8: One of the most fundamental questions in biology is why we age. On Monday May 7th the Department of Molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley will present the seminar cellular metabolism, aging and disease from four to 5:00 PM at the Lee Ka-shing Center. [00:22:30] The featured Speaker is Donica Chen from Berkeley Center for nutritional science and toxicology. Chen will address the aging process and therapeutic targets to slow down aging,Speaker 7: putting water online. On Wednesday May 9th the floating Sensor Network Team will conduct a major experiment. They will launch the complete 100 unit floating sensor fleet and introduce the fleet and its realtime sensing capabilities to the public. Wednesday morning. The fleet will be launched [00:23:00] from Walnut Grove, California and cycled through the Sacramento River Georgiana SLU environment for the rest of the day at 4:00 PM in sweetheart or dye hall and the UC Berkeley campus. There will be around table discussion and public seminar. During the round table discussion, water researchers will explore the implications of this emerging sensing technology on the future of California's water management challenges. For more information or to RSVP for the event contact Lori Mariano. [00:23:30] Her email address is laurie@citrus-uc.org the general meeting of the bay area and Mycological Society is on Thursday May 10th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM in room three three eight of UC Berkeley's Kaushal and hall. At Speaker 3: this free event, you can have your mushrooms identified and then listen to an 8:00 PM presentation by Alan Rockefeller on the mushrooms of Mexico. He discusses his extensive fieldwork from his most recent format strip as well as other trips over the past five years in seven [00:24:00] Mexican states. He'll show images of the edible poisonous in psychoactive mushrooms. Yes collected DNA sequences, phylogenetic trees, micrographs, and mushroom food. For more information, visit www.bayareamushrooms.org nerd night. San Francisco is celebrating their second anniversary soon. We all have the organizers on spectrum. On June 15th they host a monthly gathering of nerds with three presentations and drinking on the third Wednesday of every month at the rickshaw [00:24:30] stop, one 55 fell street at Venice in San Francisco. The 24th installment will be an audio show on May 16th doors at seven 30 show at eight and mission has $8 I'm excited to have two of my friends give me in Texas time around UC Berkeley. POSTDOC Brian Patton discusses atomic magnetometry. Megan Carlson talks about [inaudible] the art of super cute and Logan Hesser weighs in on the vagaries of the English language. For more information, visit sf.internet.com that's [00:25:00] s f dot. Nerd and ite.com and now for some science news headlines. Here's Lisa Katovich and Brad Swift. Speaker 8: A study presented at the experimental biology conference in San Diego in April reported that migraine sufferers are more likely to experience brain freeze by bringing on brain freeze in the lab and volunteers and studying blood flow in their brains. Researchers from the Department of veteran affairs, the National University of Ireland in Galloway and Harvard Medical School [00:25:30] found that the sudden headache seems to be triggered by an abrupt increase in blood flow in the anterior cerebral artery and disappears when the artery constricts. The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for a variety of different headaches. This dilation. Then quick constriction may be a type of self defense for the brain because the skull is a closed structure, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure and induced pain. This vessel constriction may be the way to bring pressure down in the brain before it reaches dangerous levels. Drugs that block [00:26:00] sudden vessel dilation or target channels involved specifically in the vessel. Dilation of headaches could be one way of changing a headaches course and that would be good news for the approximately 10% of the population that suffers from migraines. Speaker 3: Will Johnson sent in an ars technica summary of an April 22nd nature physics article by Zau Song, Ma and others from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Quantum entanglement is a process by which 14 one particle into a given state can make a second particle go into [00:26:30] another given state, even if it is far away. Ma's team has shown experimentally that through a process known as delayed choice entanglement swapping, the result of a measurement may be dependent upon whether entanglement is performed after the measurement. They use the pulse ultraviolet laser beam and Beta [inaudible] boray crystals to generate two polarized entangled photon pairs, we'll call them photons one and two and photons three and four photons one in four have their polarities measured. Photons two and three are each delayed [00:27:00] and then subjected to either an entangles state measurement or a separable state measurement, but the choice of this measurement determines what was measured for photons. One in for this quantum steering of the past challenges, the ordinary notion of space time, Speaker 7: DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago. All cattle are descendant from as few as 80 animals that were domesticated from wild ox in the Near East some 10,500 years ago. According to a genetic study reported by science daily [00:27:30] and international team of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History and see n r s in France, the University of man's in Germany and UCL in the U K we're able to conduct the study by first extracting DNA from the bones of domestic cattle excavated in Iranian archeological sites. These sites. Date two not long after the invention of farming and are in the region where cattle were first domesticated, the team examined how small differences in the DNA [00:28:00] sequence of those cattle as well as cattle living today could have arisen given different population histories using computer simulations. They found that the DNA differences could only have arisen if a small number of animals approximately 80 were domesticated from wild ox. The study is published in the current issue of the journal of molecular biology and evolution Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 2: [00:28:30] Okay. Speaker 9: The music you heard during today's program was by lost Donna David from his album folk and acoustic. It is released under creative Commons attribution only. License version three point here. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 9: spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Carnesi, and by Brad Swift Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 9: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Michelle Zatlyn  Co-founder and Head of User Experience, CloudFlare Date: March 12, 2012   [music] Lucy:  Hi, this is Lucy Sanders and I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women in Information Technology or NCWIT and our listeners know that we host series of interviews with women who have started technology companies, great entrepreneurs with wonderful wisdom and advice. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry:  I'm happy to be here, this sounds like a very interesting interview. Lucy:  We'll I'm excited, OK, because today we're interviewing Michelle Zatlin the co founder and head of user experience at CloudFlare and I took time to really go look at the CloudFlare site because I wasn't aware of it and I went and looked and I was so intrigued with this company and I'm sure our listeners will want to go and take a look. It's really off to a fast start. I say it's quite an accomplishment to be named the most innovative network and Internet technology company of 2011 by the Wall Street Journal. That is a huge accomplishment and congratulations on that, and I think we'll let Michelle explain a little about it about CloudFlare but I do want to say something about it. It's an infrastructure based business that is really making performance and security and access to the kinds of features that websites need much more accessible to all types of websites and not just the high end websites that can afford some of this type of infrastructure. Websites become part of a CloudFlare community and then their web traffic is routed through this I think is a top secret members only intelligent global network and Michelle is going to tell us much more about that. Welcome, Michelle Michelle:  Thank you Lucy, you did a great job I don't know what else I can add after that, that was perfect. I'm glad you got all that from our website. Lucy:  I like that idea it's members only, you know it's my kind of thing. Why don't you give us a bit of an update about what's going on over at CloudFlare? Michelle:  Naturally, CloudFlare is a performance and security service, so we make websites faster and safer for websites all over the world. At first glance sometimes people are don't think that's very interesting but if you think about yourself or when you're on the Internet and you surfing through a website and you go a certain website like Google or Facebook and it loads really quickly, you stay a lot longer . Then you go to another website and maybe it takes a lot longer to load, you find yourself leaving and so for extra hundred milliseconds it takes the site to load, you lose 2% of your visitors. That's a really big problem for website owners, it's like how can I make sure my site is fast for my visitors and you know there have been services that have been in the market place for a long time that really service enterprise members with, let's say, ten thousand websites online, the biggest websites online. But, you know, the Internet is made up of 250 million websites around the world from blogs, to businesses, to national governments, and all. There are all these sorts of presences online and you know, when we started to build CloudFlare it was how can we make a service that can make speed and security accessible to the entire Internet? And so that's what we've done. We launched to the public about a year and a half ago, so we've been live for 15 months, and we basically went from very little traffic through our network around the world to now we make the Internet faster, safer, for more than 430 million web surfers every single month. Lucy:  Wow! Michelle:  That's a really big number Larry:  [laughing] Yeah, I'll say. Michelle:  If we were independent website we would be the fifth largest website on the Internet. We'd be more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, AOL and Bing combined. And so the scale we've grown in the last year and a half, it's really hard to grasp, and I just think it really speaks to that there are so many people running websites and there's just was not a service before that made security and performance accessible. We thought to change that at CloudFlare and we've done an OK job so far. Lucy:  I say more than, more than OK. It's really really interesting and I would encourage all of our listeners to go check it out. I love your tag line, give us five minutes and we'll super charge your website. Larry:  [laughing] Yeah. Lucy:  [laughing] Just five minutes! So Michelle, this is really a high tech company, you're one of the co founders, why don't you tell us a bit about how you first got into technology. What technologies are particularly interesting to you today? Michelle:  Well, you know, I didn't have a master plan all along to get into technology. It just kind of happened, you know I worked in different industries. I was a scientist by training. I did a chemistry degree and then I worked in finance. I really got exposed to technology with a friend that I met who was an entrepreneur and kind of opened up my eyes to technology. I'm a really curious person and I love learning, and I just really kind of fell in love with it. I kept finding these opportunities that would present themselves and I kept kind of pursuing it, so I went from science to finance to technology where I've been ever since. So you know, for people out there that think I like the idea of technology whether it's I really love using Facebook or really love using Google or I love using different websites to generate other services or however you incorporate technology in your life. If you didn't know a lot about it before, you can still get into the industry as long as you're willing to learn. That's what happened to me. And today I mean I feel like there are so many interesting technologies going on. I just think my own life. Twitter totally changed the way I can fume information that I get news and that I have conversations online. It's amazing how this service can create these really strong connections with people I don't even know and you can have these conversations. And so that's for me personally, even for our business, from CloudFlare's perspective. It's been an incredible enabler to help us grow as quickly as we have over the last year and a half. I mean Twitter has been an amazing source for us to for people find out about us, to help us solve our user's issues that may come up or answer any questions. So I think Twitter is really really interesting. And then I think about something like Hulu which is really like an online entertainment website and it's totally changed the time that I spend on entertainment in terms of when and where I may watch TV shows or movies. Before you had to have a TV and get cable and you'd have to have you know you've got to set your TV player and DVR and you have to watch shows at certain time. Basically with Hulu you can get all the latest shows when you want it, whenever you want based on your Internet access. But now I only like to watch shows that are on Hulu and anything else I just I don't even see because I just the way I can consume it and I can do it on my time and it doesn't have to necessarily start at 8:00 or 8:30. If I want to start at 8:25 or whatever time, I can just do it on my time and it's been pretty amazing. And of course there is something like Drop Box which changes the way you share information whether it's with colleagues or with your family members. All these sorts of things that make these that used to be kind of hard, really easy, I mean those are just three examples but the list is very long. Lucy:  Well, I was intrigued with your example of Twitter and how you use it in the company for customer service because, I've been thinking more about that lately, because I have friends when they lose luggage, they complain on Twitter and they get a call back. You know, it's amazing. They don't get a call back, but they actually get a response. So I think that Twitter is an amazing customer service channel. Michelle:  It really is. I mean again ,business do their best to typically to try and deliver a great customer experience but sometimes you fall short and as a business you want to hear about that, tell me when I fall short so I can help fix it. And part of it is that if you're on Twitter you can just immediately send a message and get a response back. It's very powerful but it's just not when there are issues. It also enables people to talk about your service, it's like wow. In my case, I just added this website to CloudFlare and I can already feel that it's faster. And you kind of expressed that and you have people listening to what you're saying. It will resolve kind of like, I have a website and I want it to be faster, let me go find out more about this CloudFlare service. And so for customer services in terms of these one on one contacts it's been really powerful, but then also just people discovering the service is also really powerful. Lucy:  That's a great point. Larry:  It is, you know you mentioned that you didn't get into technology with a master plan behind it. How did you become an entrepreneur and what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Michelle:  I always think of this kind of like a lot of roles are either you're actors or you're advisers and for me it's like I get such a thrill. It's so self exhilarating being able to be part of the team that creates the service, makes the product. The actual making of things, I love that. I love bringing things together, sometimes you don't control the resources to make something happen. I mean that's what I strive to do. Entrepreneurship you do a lot of that. So then, a lot of times you start with nothing and you have to create all these sorts of things a long the time. Whether you're creating teams, you're creating material, you're creating products for your customers and you're kind of learning as you go, but being part of that, that energy to bring it all to fruition    I love it, it's very exhilarating. Larry:  Yeah, I love it too, yeah. Lucy:  Along that path of entrepreneurship, what kinds of influences did you have, you know people or event or who or what influenced you along this entrepreneurship path? Michelle:  Yeah, it wasn't this one defining moment, it was many defining moments over the course of my life and you know I'm only 32 so I still have a lot of life ahead of me. I remember thinking in high school and I grew up    I'm Canadian, I grew up in a very small city, in the prairies, where I didn't really know what entrepreneurship meant. But I remember in high school I played on all the competitive sports teams, that really showed me the value of perseverance and hard work and being dedicated to something, and you couldn't give up, that your team depended on you and leadership. You know, all those sorts of qualities that are important in entrepreneurship. And then I remember at university, meeting a really good friend of mine who exposed me to sometimes using emotion in decision making is really an asset and before I met her, I didn't really think about that. And you know, sometimes you do need to use your emotions when you're making decisions. And the emotional intelligence, people have different buzz words for it, it can be really powerful. And then early on in my career when I was working in finance and then I met this entrepreneur who was a tech entrepreneur, again he doesn't describe himself as a tech entrepreneur, but he was, He has been a serial entrepreneur and everything with him was just like of course we can do that, this is how I would do it, yes, everything was yes this is we do it, and it was so liberating, I loved that and I need to be a part of that. And that was really where it kind of opened eyes up, that you can create opportunity, you can create things, you can go out and create your own path, you don't always have to follow someone else's path, so I feel lucky to have these different role models throughout my life. Lucy:  I think that issue about "Yes", a culture of "Yes," we don't hear that enough, but I think it's really really important, because so many people shut conversations down before they ever get a chance to be explored? Michelle:  I definitely agree. Because opportunities present themselves all the time and people are their own of course enemy sometimes, and they said no I can't do it because it's too risky, or like financially, or what will my friends say. Nothing is as easy, everything has ups and downs, but if you are really passionate and seek your interest then you should go for it, and pursue these opportunities, because great things can really happen. Lucy:  You may be are only 32 years but you are very wise, I think you can always move from a "Yes" to a "No" ,and that's much harder than to move from a "No" to "Yes". Larry:  That's a fact. With all the things you have done and what are you doing right now, what is the toughest thing you have had to do in your career? Michelle:  There have been many, but if I have to pick one, CloudFlare is an infrastructure company. We run 14 data centers around the world, and we have very heavy technology, but I am not a technical co founder. Since I started this very technical company, which I knew about website performance and security, which I was not an expert on when I started as a non technical co founder    that was really hard, because those first three months where we were really early building the product and the most important thing that matters is coding. So we can actually get somebody to try it, see if it actually works. And I couldn't code. You obviously try and do some research, and try and talk to people, the value I added really early on, I constantly was second guessing myself like, "Shit, I'm on the team, am I actually adding value, am I the right co founder for this team?" And so those first three months when we started, it was just the three of us, and the other two co owners were very technical, that was really mentally challenging. I was trying to say wow like, you feel like you hold the responsibility to your other business partners to put as much in as they are, and I just feel like I was missing this core skill set, I just physically couldn't. So instead, I had to spend a lot of my time learning. I was a sponge. Every time I heard a word I didn't understand, I looked it up. I was constantly reading, I had a whole list of definitions that I would keep track of. And now three years later I am certainly a subject matter expert, and I wasn't three years ago. So for people who are non technical but want to build a technical company, you can, you definitely can. You need to pick your partners wisely, and you have to want to learn it, to be thirsty for information, but if you are, you can certainly play an essential part in the company. Lucy:  We hereby grant you a degree in computer science, [laughter] .... Larry:  Yeah, here you go... Lucy:  An honorary degree, that's awesome... Michelle:  Oh, thank you, thank you. Lucy:  That's a great story. In addition to don't be afraid to learn, get out there and create your culture of "Yes", what other advice you give a person considering starting their own company? Michelle:  I would say two others, there are so many but two others are I think important that sometimes are overlooked is, big problems are often easier to solve than small problems, because some of these incremental changes on technology, that's OK, but it turns out it's much harder to recruit people to come join your team, or it's harder to get funding, if your idea is just an incremental change on what already exists. But if you go after a really big audacious goal    like for us, ours was to rebuild the Internet, and at first when we tell people, some people laugh at us, and we said, no, no, just watch. We are on our way to doing that. And there are other people, who are just, "That's amazing. I want to be a part of that." Google's initial mission of "I want to organize the world's information," that's a huge goal and when they started it 13 years ago people thought that was silly, but that's what they've really done. And so don't be scared to dream big, because often the big you will find the people who are attracted to the same idea, and will search to assemble the resources to actually make it happen. Obviously on day one you don't execute it, and you lay the plans to get there. But by dreaming big, you start to attract the resources you need. Another one to keep in mind is, choose your partners wisely, either business partners or life partners, and so, when you start a company where you are a co founder, you really need to trust one another. You will go through lots of highs and lots of downs, and it will be very lonely, and it's challenging and there are moments when it's just like, why I am doing this? But when you have one or two or three other people who are also doing it with you and you know they're not going anywhere you feel responsibility for them and to yourself to keep going and that's how you get through those tough times. And same at home. You're working long hours. You're very consumed with your business or your idea or your passion and if you're coming home to somebody as a life partner you have to make sure that they're your biggest champion and biggest advocate and are rooting for your success. When you're an entrepreneur and you have a company your family and even your friends are kind of honorary cofounders too because they're in it. It affects them whether they're there every day or not. And people who are your big supporters make a huge difference. Larry:  Wow, that's great advice. Now I probably know the answer to this question already but what personal characteristics do you think you have been given that have given you the advantage of being an entrepreneur? Michelle:  If I can do it, anyone can do it. [laughter] Michelle:  Again, if you feel like you want to start a company you should totally do it. And these are some of the things that I think benefited me and it's going to be different for everybody else. I'm a sponge. I love learning. I'm really curious. If I don't know about something I want to learn about it. I don't need to maybe become like the expert on the subject but I want to learn enough to have a conversation about it. And that's really valuable when you're an entrepreneur because you end up doing a lot of different things and you might be working with a lot of different people. So that willingness to learn is really important. And then perseverance. Again, it's changing industries, starting something in a subject matter that I wasn't an expert on. You just kind of have to keep pushing forward. And I always use the visualization just move the ball forward. If you're moving the ball forward then you're moving in the right direction. Larry:  Good. Lucy:  Along those lines when you were mentioning that your life partners are honorary cofounders, what other advice do you have around bringing balance between personal and professional lives? Michelle:  It's really hard. I've been working on CloudFlare for three years and it really is a high priority. Especially when you start to expand your team and hire other people who leave other jobs to come and join you in your vision you feel a huge responsibility to make it successful. But it's important to still have time for yourself. And with your life partner whether it's a husband or a boyfriend or fiancé and then your extended family and friends. Again, you work a lot but there are some times where you just need to disconnect. And that means not checking    again, with Smartphone it's so easy to check what's going on all the time and that's a huge asset. But then there are some times you should just leave it, even if it's for an hour or two hours and you go for a dinner and you don't check it at the dinner table. That sounds so silly. But it can be really hard when there's just so much going on in the early stages of a company to just leave the Smartphone at home and go out either on a date or you're out at a dinner or whatever. You definitely need to. For me I try to exercise a couple of times a week. And whether that's go for a run outside or go to a yoga class or play a game of tennis outside, just something because again if you're not taking care of your body and your mind it's hard to be really productive at work. Eating healthy, sleeping a lot. Really simple things but for me it's I try and sleep because if I can't sleep I can't function then I'm useless at work and with my personal life. And then when I am with my personal life I try and shut off my phone and I try and focus on the person I'm with. So if that means if I can only be with them for an hour so that hour I'll make a commitment and then say, "OK, I have to go now," versus say, "OK let's hang out all afternoon," but then I'll be on my phone every other minute. That's not very fun either. It's hard but it's really important to have those friends and family that you spend time with them and to keep up those relationships. It really is important. But I'm not going to lie, it's really hard. [laughter] Lucy:  That's the truth. Larry:  You've got it. You've already achieved a great deal and I'm really proud for you. What's next for you? Michelle:  We want to rebuild the Internet. The Internet's amazing. Anybody with an idea or a voice or a business idea can put it online. I think that whole notion of the Internet is connecting us around the world is incredible. But the Internet was built 30 years ago and there were some inefficiencies built in. So we see us going forward as patching the Internet. Fixing all the inefficiencies so we can make the Internet a faster, safer, better place for everyone. So people can continue to go there and put their business online, their voices online in the easiest possible manner. So when we look ahead we just want to keep growing and fixing, patching the Internet. Larry:  That's excellent. Lucy:  Putting the thumb in the dike. [laughs] Larry:  There you go. Lucy:  That's awesome. Well thank you so much, Michelle, this has been really interesting. And good luck to you and CloudFlare. You've probably gotten a new customer here with our sites. [laughs] Michelle:  That would be great. We'd love to have you as a customer. Lucy:  Wonderful. Thank you so much. I want to remind listeners that they can find us at NCWIT.org and also at w3w3.com. Larry:  You bet you. We'll have it in our blog and our podcast directory too. Lucy:  All right. Thank you very much Michelle. Michelle:  Thank you. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Michelle ZatlynInterview Summary: Most people can hardly find the time to eat or sleep in this fast paced world, let alone find the time to wait for a webpage to download. This time crunch that many people are under these days explains the fact that "for every extra hundred milliseconds it takes a site to load, 2% of that site's visitors will be lost," as stated by Michelle in an interview. This is exactly why she co-founded CloudFlare, a service that decreases bandwidth usage, increases site speed, and stops malicious attacks, making for a faster and safer website. Release Date: March 12, 2012Interview Subject: Michelle ZatlynInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 21:37