Growing Steady | Intentional Creative Business Podcast

We try to keep our podcast light-hearted but we’re also two human beings that deal with the ups and downs of life. One of those downs is Caroline’s anxiety which has flared up recently. We wanted to turn on our mics and have an honest conversation of what being in the middle of dealing with a mental health condition is like. This is not the, “I had anxiety and everything is fine now” episode. This...

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is real. In this episode, we want to share our mindset shift of FOMO NOMO. Share that phrase with your friends, they’ll think you’re suuuuuuuuuuper cool. When it comes to running your business, there’s FOMO around every corner. We share our thoughts and how we’ve dealt with and continue to deal with FOMO. We also lightly chat about NFTs and cryptocurrency, but not too mu...

We hope this episode gives you a real look into a couple and how to navigate tough situations and conversations. We want to be 100% clear: We are NOT licensed therapists or mental health experts. We don’t claim to be, and any “advice” you might hear in this podcast is just our personal experience (and should be taken with a big-ole-grain-of-salt!) Movies discussed: Equilibrium and Italian Job ** M...

Ahhh, “The Art of Making It Hard…” that age-old saying that no one has ever said before as it relates to business 😂. Innuendos aside, the point of this week’s podcast episode is to share some advice that goes against all the growth hacking, overnight success, slippery funnel, etc talk. To share how we INTENTIONALLY make some things a bit more difficult for our customers/subscribers/followers. Why...

We want to first acknowledge we know COVID-19 isn’t over. In some countries, cities, and states, cases are on the upswing and it’s scary. As vaccines get a more widespread rollout there’s an underlying anxiety about returning to life as it was pre-March 2020. Going to restaurants, gathering with friends/family, etc etc. When will we all feel comfortable and will there ever be a moment of returning...

Whether it’s your job, buying a house, or starting a family, there are pressures from all angles on what you *should* be doing. As we’ve learned over the years, pushing back against some (read: most) of these societal pressures can actually provide us a life we love. Sure, it may be hard to feel like the black sheep in our families and friend groups, but we enjoy knowing we’re living life on our t...

If you’ve been thinking about starting a paid membership community, boy-oh-boy do we have the podcast episode for YOU! We break down everything we’ve learned these past three years growing our paid membership from nothing to a thriving business (with predictable income AND a wonderfully amazing group of humans). Even if you aren’t thinking about starting a paid membership, hopefully, you’ll learn...

In this week’s episode, we share how we’ve cultivated strong boundaries when it comes to our work. We also talk about a recent product that we got a lot of requests to sell but decided not to (a hard thing to say “no” to as a biz owner!) Let’s talk about the importance of intentional decisions and how thinking a bit longer term can make future-you a LOT less stressed and burned out. Also, movies t...

What season of business are we in right now? How do you gain confidence in your pricing? How do you balance client + digital product work? What advice have we've given that we'd change? Wait... Super Mario originated from the first Donkey Kong game??? A few weeks ago we asked our peeps in IG if they had any business questions for us… and they did! We answer a handful of those but we ALSO talk abou...

If we've learned anything in all our time as online biz owners (and humans existing with other humans) it's that perfectionism DOES NOT SERVE US. Instead of perfection, we like to focus on completion and imperfect action. Perfectionism affects us in many ways and in this episode we explore how we’ve navigated its evil clutches over the years. From business perfectionism, like thinking something is...

To succeed in business, does your idea have to be truly original? Do you have to come up with the most unique business concept ever? Or... has everything already been done? Let's discuss! When it comes to ideas for business products or even your entire business, how much does originality matter? In this episode, we chat about original ideas and the importance (or lack thereof?) of being completely...

Marketing your online business can be confusing and overwhelming but our goal in this episode is to change your perspective on marketing AND give you concrete marketing ideas to try moving forward. Marketing, marketing, marketing… merrily down the stream? No idea. Anyway, what even is marketing? How do you market and promote your creative biz? In this episode, we share our Marketing Bridges 🌉  co...

As with every episode of this podcast, we aim to dig deeper and ask the important questions when it comes to making decisions for your business (like using new social media apps or pivoting to other marketing channels). The new hot social app is Clubhouse , a “drop-in audio” application where you can join active discussions (think: live podcasting or a panel at a conference). We talk about our fir...

We have a second biz-baby and its name is Teachery . Teachery has been around since 2013 when it started on a whim when Jason couldn’t find an online course platform he could customize to his liking. Teachery has always been a side project but in 2020 we invested a ton of time and energy to rebrand and redesign the entire interface (all done by Teachery’s newest employee: Caroline 😂). Hope you en...

With Valentine’s Day ❤️  right around the corner (or around the corner depending on when you listen to this), we wanted to answer, “36 questions that lead to love.”  While these questions are more for the beginning of a relationship, we enjoyed watching Johnny and Iz Harris answer them and thought it would be fun! If you want to answer the questions with your significant other (or a complete stran...

When it comes to business, we are all VERY accustomed to tracking metrics (views, likes, sales, etc). But when it comes to life, there’s no system for tracking the really important things: happiness, relationships, etc. In this episode, we explore the idea of tracking your “Life Metrics” and how we might be building a system/process for this. If this episode was exciting to you and you’d like to l...

One of our “cinnamon rollers” brought up a really great topic for discussion that we chat about in this episode. If things are going to plan, how do you avoid the urge to switch everything up?? This episode especially goes out to all our creative business owners (us included!) who constantly want to redesign their website or create a new product. So, when do you stay the course and when do you cha...

This week’s episode is going to be different. Just a heads-up: If hearing us talk about a family member having COVID or thinking about a family member passing away (we did NOT have a family member pass away, thankfully) is triggering for you at all, feel free to skip this episode.   We wanted to record an episode during a tough period for us. Caroline’s dad and brother got COVID and we’ve had to f...

In this week’s episode, we take on one of the biggest buzzwords around, “ intention .” First up, we do our best to define intention without using the word intention . 😂 Then, we share some of the biggest and smallest intentional choices we’ve made in our lives and businesses. These aren’t meant to be prescriptions for you but we’re hoping they can inspire changes you’ve been wanting to make in yo...

Listen, James Clear (author of best-selling book Atomic Habits ) is a great guy and all, but sometimes we don't want all the science-y bits and critical analysis of habit-building. We just want to make some changes in our lives! In this week's episode, we explore habit-building for normal people. Caroline comes at it from years of trial and error, exploring all kinds of processes, and Jason is onc...

Hold on to your butts, it’s our first-ever Top 5 Draft on the podcast. We decided to rank our Top 5 Christmas Movies using a fantasy sports draft format (snake draft for this one). Then, we obviously had to argue about each other’s picks. 😂😂 We’d love to hear if you do a Holiday/Christmas Movie Draft (or any draft!) with your loved ones, family, friends, etc. Be forewarned, it can get a bit… com...

Welp, 2020 is finally nearing its end and it's time for us to look back. We really like doing year-end reviews as it helps us see where we've been, what we've learned, and what we can improve/change moving forward. Grab our Yearly Planning Notion Template (fo free!): https://www.notion.so/Yearly-Planning-f7f24c8972ce4a00b3c8c198dd0add0d We know 2020 brought many challenges and we hope you made it...

No matter what you're creating, the last 5% of a project is ALWAYS the hardest part (and sometimes it can take as long as the first 95% - eeeek!) In this week's episode, we share our journey of completely redesigning our online course software Teachery. We talk about what it's like to be in the last 5% of a big project and how we're working through all the ups, downs, and inbetweens.  ** More good...

There's a fallacy in modern society that you have to turn your passions into money-making opportunities. In this episode, we share our ideas about using "work" as a means to fuel/fund your passions. It can be really hard to monetize your art, so what if you gave yourself permission not to? We explore Caroline's concept of Longevity work vs Legacy work in this podcast ep. We hope it helps you see t...

HOLY MOLY, PEEPS! Get ready to hop in the Zook 👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲 time machine and listen to an in-depth discussion of our past 10 years together (with a ton of lessons shared that we learned along the way!) Did you know our relationship started long distance? Or how about the fact that Caroline convinced Jason to hire her? Or that Caroline almost didn't create her first online course? Or that Jason w...