Moonshot Mentor with Laverne McKinnon

Hi friend. When I was fired from a job I cared about deeply, I was devastated. At the time, I didn’t have language for what I was experiencing. I thought I needed to get back on the horse, get a thicker skin, and get over it. It took me ten years to realize that I was carrying grief. Career grief. Once I understood that, I got unstuck. I gave myself permission to mourn what had happened and all th...

The week I got fired from a job I loved, I kept opening my laptop and staring at a blank screen. I didn’t know what to update. I wasn’t sure who I was updating it for. My job title had been the answer to so many questions, including, it turned out, the question of who I was. That’s the thing nobody warns you about: career disappointment. The professional loss is real. But the identity loss is the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Robert got the call on a Friday afternoon. After trying to find a job in his industry for eighteen months, he faced the hard truth that for someone at his level, there were no viable openings. So he pivoted to Pharma doing sales. A far cry from Vice-President of Marketing at a film studio. He would start the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com I was having lunch on the patio at Kiwami with a long-time colleague — we'd served together on the board of the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment — and we were debating whether to order the Kiwami tray or go à la carte.  And then, I felt the energy around me shift. I didn’t turn my head, but I coul...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com You know what you’ve lost. But can you name your wins? Most people in a career transition can recite their losses on demand. The VP title. The 401K contribution. The Friday happy hours with the work family. The satisfaction of knowing what the job is and how to do it. Ask them to name their wins? Awkward sile...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Remember when lockdown happened and there were all those stories about people showing up to Zoom meetings looking perfectly presentable from the waist up — and if you got a peek below the camera line, you’d find them in their underwear and socks? I loved that. It was so human. So real. It was a great contrast...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Most of us are gonna hit turbulence at one point or another in our careers. A faceplant. A missed opportunity. A project that goes sideways. A job that ends in a way that feels unfair or messy. The painful part is not just what happened. It’s what happens inside of you afterward. When a professional failure g...

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Okay confession time. When I was getting my MBA, I had to take my statistics course twice. The problem wasn’t my capacity or that I was “bad at math.” I’m actually quite good at it. The issue was the teaching method. It was lecture heavy, and that’s not how I learn. It didn’t matter how hard I worked or how t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com You got the interview. Yay. You prepared. Well done. You had great rapport with the hiring manager. Love that. You left thinking, “That went really well.” You send your thank you email. You tell them you felt energized by the conversation, you’re excited about the opportunity, and you’d love to be considered....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com What if the reason you’re not getting what you want at work has nothing to do with your talent and effort? What if it has everything to do with where and how your actual workspace is set up? Maybe you want more money. More growth. More work-life balance. More freedom. More stability. More belonging. More mean...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com There’s a moment that hits a lot of people right after a promotion or a new role. You have the new title. The bigger scope. The visibility. And then your brain goes: who do you think you are? If that’s happening to you, I want to offer one reframe that changes the whole experience. Imposter syndrome is not pr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Mental health is a hot topic these days - as it should be! According to the World Health Organization anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorder with approximately 4% of the world’s population affected. And stress is right there on its heels. According to the American Institute of Stress, around 35...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Career grief is not just an emotional experience. It’s a physiological one. Most of us expect grief to look like tears, sadness, maybe anger. But a lot of the time, grief shows up as: “What is wrong with me lately?” For me, it’s looked like this. I wore my pants inside out and didn’t realize until I was alrea...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com If your career is shifting, your money story gets a vote in every decision you make. And it’s not because you’re bad at math or you “should have planned better.” It gets a vote because money is not just money. Money touches safety. Options. Identity. What you can say yes to. What you have to say no to. And wh...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com My birthday is this Wednesday. I usually like to fly under the radar but this year I’m trying something new. Instead of hiding out feeling self-conscious about my warped relationship with age and time, I’m choosing to go on a mission to spread joy along with cool things I’ve been learning. Take a full watch o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Most of us think the problem is energy. If we could just get a little more, we’d update the résumé, write the cover letter, follow up with a former colleague, get the certification. But when you keep making promises you don’t keep, the real cost isn’t momentum. It’s self trust. And once self trust takes a hit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Your career isn’t broken. Your heart is. And if you’ve been feeling this heartbreak for a while, you may also be feeling stuck and not sure what to do to get your mojo back. I’ve been there. And I want to talk about the kind of stuckness that doesn’t respond to a new resume, a new routine, or a new burst of m...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Before you decide what to do next in your career, it helps to understand why you’re doing it at all. Career strategy gets a lot of attention. Especially from me. I love vision boards. Five year plans. Action steps. And all of that has its place. But strategy on its own is not going to hold up for the long run...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com If you’re anything like me, downtime doesn’t come naturally. I get the value of stepping away from work and yet I still find myself filling open space with something productive. Over the weekend I found myself filling downtime with re-organizing the pantry. And when I say downtime, I mean the kind of pause th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com What It Really Takes to Pursue a Moonshot Let’s be honest. Ambition is exciting until you’re staring down the possibility that you might fall flat on your face. Moonshots bring that tension out of hiding. They ask more of us. They stretch us. They expose the gap between who we are now and who we’d need to bec...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com You know that moment when you say yes to something, you mean it, you see the upside… and then you can’t get yourself to actually do it? Procrastination is unbelievably frustrating. And demoralizing. And confusing. Because you care. You’re committed. So why does the follow-through stall? Most of us don’t even...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com Let’s be honest—most of us don’t plan our careers. We react to opportunities, chase what looks good on paper, and hope it all somehow adds up. But if you want to stop winging it and start steering it, you need a strategic career plan—think of it as your personal GPS—connecting where you are today to where you...

Today is a departure from the usual career strategy talk, but still applicable to anyone who’s going after a moonshot and is in need of inspiration. I’m joining a community experiment launched by producer Ted Hope to bring together NonDē filmmakers on Substack. You’ve heard of independent filmmaking? This is non-dependent filmmaking and honestly I find that inspiring in itself – to boldly state we...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit moonshotmentor.substack.com “I can’t find a job.” If that’s what you’ve been saying to yourself, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common things I hear from people in transition. What’s really underneath is that mix of dread and “oh no, what if I’ve peaked?” Here’s the truth: often, the problem is that we’re looking for opportuniti...