Strategic Momentum

Justin Lafazan and Dylan Gambardella are Co-Founders and CEOs of NextGen HQ, a mentorship platform dedicated to helping Next Generation Leaders succeed at work and life. And when I first heard about this platform, I knew I had to talk to the people who created it. I had the benefit of wonderful mentors and friends who supported me along my own growth journey, and I really don’t think I would have...

In the last episode, we talked a lot about The Great Reshuffle — about the record number of resignations, new hires, and new entrepreneurs. We’re in the midst of this huge period of uncertainty, but people are choosing to take this big risk… even though data indicates that most small businesses fail. People are clearly seeing an opportunity here, or there is such a significant mindset shift in our...

Flywheel Associates conducted the inaugural wave of the State of Work and Career Success Study in 2020 to understand the U.S. workforce’s attitudes, behaviors and perceptions with respect to their career journey, goals, and needs. Our goal was to identify strategies and opportunities to help move them forward in their careers. When we got the results, it was clear that workers’ goals and needs hav...

We started this season with a thesis: Creating meaningful work-life fit in today’s ever-changing world requires redefining success as progress. Both my team and myself — and just about everyone else — have been riding the waves of this very weird year, personally and professionally. So we wanted to sit down as a team to reflect on what it has meant for us to redefine success as progress and what w...

Jennifer McDonald is Chief Client Officer of North America at VMLY&R, where she leads a 250-person client engagement team. We had Jen on the show back in episodes 70 and 71 to talk office politics, but we had to have her back on the show to discuss the transformation that VMLY&R underwent through 2020 and 2021. We wanted to share how an organization this large could respond to the unknowns...

Alisa Cohn is an executive coach who’s been working with startup founders to grow into world-class CEOs for nearly 20 years. She’s been called the #1 Startup Coach in the world and she’s the author of the new book “From Start-Up to Grown-Up.” Her breadth and depth of experiences working with companies like Esty, Foursquare, Invision and The Wirecutter — coupled with own personal journey — has give...

What does it look like to do something that you’ve never done before -- that no one has ever done before? What does it mean to be a pioneer in this new world of work? What does it look like when you take responsibility for crafting a new role for yourself, both internally and externally? Hear all about it from Larisa Bolivar, a long-time social justice advocate and a pioneer in the cannabis indust...

Nick Loper is an author, entrepreneur, and lifelong student in the game of business. He’s Chief Side Hustler at SideHustleNation.com, host of top-rated podcast The Side Hustle Show, and someone who is obsessed with progress. Nick chose to pursue the side hustle life because he wanted freedom that the corporate life didn’t give him. While this is a path that many others are also interested in pursu...

Dorie Clark shares valuable insights and perspectives from her new book,  "The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World .” And along the way, we hear about Dorie’s career mashup journey and how becoming a long-term thinker helped her get to where she is today.

We can see that too many people are unhappy. We can see that businesses of all sizes are struggling to adapt in a way that drives both business success and employee satisfaction. So we think it's time to change how we as individuals — as well as the companies we work for — define success. Creating meaningful work-life fit in today's ever-changing world requires redefining success as progress. And...

In this last episode of the Biz of You mini-series, we’re getting an inside look at Connie’s own career journey and the experiences that shaped her perspective on career success. Who is Connie Steele? What inspired her to write Building the Business of You? And what does she hope people ultimately take away from the book? Today, Connie answers these questions and more. 

This season on Strategic Momentum, we released a series of podcourses in tandem with the launch of Building the Business of You — a book about understanding what the future of work really means for us as individuals and, most importantly, how to create and execute a plan that establishes our own career mashup so that we can be our whole selves. And the guests we heard from shared their own stories...

In this episode, Connie Now, explains how companies can approach each of the five components in Building the Business of You to help employees reach their potential, as well as how the fluid system can help organizations stay ahead in a rapidly evolving business landscape. Because fluidity isn’t just about the future of careers, it's about the future of work.

We all know the importance of building necessary skills to grow in our career and often we emphasize building and optimizing hard skills - like coding, writing, or design. Yet in today’s new world of work, soft skills matter even more to create the strategic momentum we are looking for. Because at the end of the day, we are dealing with people not machines.  Kyle Hunter AKA K. Sparks is an ac...

In this episode, Connie covers the fourth part of the five-part fluid career system, Networking. It’s all about creating that value exchange and building your village to help you reach your potential. She explains how it fits into the overall system and why it’s so critical to career success.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  In today’s work world, who you know is even more important to creating the momentum around what you may want to pursue. That means networking needs to be a priority as you work towards your personal and professional goals, but unfortunately, many people see networking inevitably as a four letter word. They see it as being incredibly transactional...

In this episode, Connie covers the fourth part of the five-part fluid career system, Networking. It’s all about creating that value exchange and building your village to help you reach your potential. She explains how it fits into the overall system and why it’s so critical to career success.

Being agile, adaptive and even fluid may have been a means of survival for the past year, but it is fast becoming a habit as uncertainty is the new certainty. Yet the thought of pivoting or forging a different path can still leave us stuck, inhibited by fear and frozen by indecision.  So how do we prepare for career change in a positive way that helps us push past this inertia and turn fear i...

In this episode, Connie covers the third part of the five-part fluid career system, called Preparing for Change. It’s all about accepting change, managing fear then turning it into excitement, and pushing past the inertia we face. She explains how it fits into the overall system and why it’s so critical to career success.

There are times in life when things do go as planned. You realize that you want something more and life inevitably throws you curveballs where you have to adapt and adjust in order to get you to where  you need to go.  For Sabrina Woodworth, there were personal and professional milestones along the way that forced her to reevaluate what she wanted to do. Sabrina is a Fortune 500 Project...

In this episode, Connie discusses how to Create Your Compass on your way to career success.  It’s all about creating clarity on what you're aiming for, by being able to map out a strategic plan to help you see the bigger picture and identify those tasks you will need to do to help you achieve your goals.

We all have goals that we want to achieve in work and in life but oftentimes we aren’t sure where to start. There is a need, not only to bring our whole selves to work, but also to deliver meaningful impact, yet the task at hand can feel insurmountable. Catharine Bowman knows this all too well. She’s an accomplished medical researcher, board member, medical student, speaker and change agent. And s...

In this episode, Connie covers step one of the five-part fluid career system, called Spotting the Trends. It’s all about identifying the challenges, threats, opportunities and potential to help you research and analyze where you are and where you want to go. She explains how it fits into the overall system and why it’s so critical to career success.

The notion that “change is constant” is practically our new motto here at Strategic Momentum, as we study the workforce trends shaping the future of work in the coming years. Due to COVID-19 and the numerous crises over the last year, we’re all coming to terms with the fact that we’re living in an increasingly dynamic world. We’re shifting from singularity to multiplicity, from linearity to inters...

In this short-form series, Connie Steele shares tips from her #1 Amazon new release book, Building the Business of You . In this episode, Connie introduces the concept of “Fluidity,” the individual and operational mindset that is critical to building the business of you. What does it mean to be fluid? What are examples? And how can we use fluidity to create our career strategies?