Pivot with Jenny Blake

I have had such a blast talking with Penney Peirce about her Transformation Trilogy on intuition, frequency, and now perception. Talk about a dream come true! Today’s Pivot Podcast is our third in the series, and we dive deep into the nature of our holographic universe, the shift toward right-brain perception, why attention is the new intention (forget the law of attraction), how to find flow in p...

Today I’m thrilled to share an interview with my good friend and business author doppelgänger, Dorie Clark. I interviewed Dorie while writing Pivot on the big ideas from her book Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It. When we’re not scrounging up interesting New York activities to try, we both love thinking about how to reinvent careers and the best way to d...

Meditation has re-wired my brain. I don’t walk on clouds every day, but I do feel like a new person three years in to maintaining a daily practice (and 120 days in to a consecutive streak). I know, I know. One shouldn’t promote meditation as a miracle cure. But if you have an active mind, one that veers toward anxiety and stress like me, take a listen to this week’s Pivot Podcast. 📝 Check out ful...

What are the key ingredients to leading a movement? How do you motivate fellow travelers to traverse the change process, within themselves and within your organization or community, even when all they want to do is quit? What happens when you hit a natural plateau in the growth cycle? These are the topics I explore in today’s show with Nancy Duarte, master of systems thinking, speech writing, and...

Dreams. Although we often laugh them away today (if we remember them at all), many ancient and tribal cultures treated the dream world as absolutely real and worthy of our respect, an extension of the waking world. As Penney Peirce writes in Be the Dreamer, Not the Dream: A Guide to 24-Hour Consciousness (previously published as Dreams for Dummies), “Everything we do in the dream world is real; it...

When was the last time you were in the zone? There’s nothing I love more than working with time flying. The sun rises and sets and I barely notice because I’m so engrossed in my work. Cal Newport calls this deep work, and says that contrary to what many assume, it is a skill, not a habit. That means it takes deliberate practice, and is a cognitive muscle that can atrophy with disuse—something we a...

All big projects require trade-offs. Scratch that, all big life choices do. What trade-offs are you making right now? What are your non-negotiables while working on a soul goal? What are you willing to let slide a bit in exchange for intense focus? 📝 Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://pivotmethod.com/28 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

Intuition is an innate gift, one available to all of us, and a skill—a muscle that you can build with practice and attention. I am thrilled to bring you today’s podcast, an interview with intuition expert Penney Peirce, whose books have had an enormous impact on my life. Reading The Intuitive Way kicked off two years of coincidence tracking, intuition studying, and surrendering to serendipity—and...

We have all had the experience of sharing something that’s on our mind with a friend, family member, partner, or co-worker — then bristling in frustration or quiet defeat as they jump straight into trying to solve our problem with their brilliant advice. What’s the alternative? Curiosity and a few simple coaching questions. That what I dig into on today’s Pivot Podcast with Michael Bungay Stanier,...

Why is it so challenging to say no to something good even when we know we have outgrown it? The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. We often accept “the devil we know” for longer than we should out of fear. Hey, at least there is some security and safety in our current devil. Who knows what lurks on the other side! And what if we can’t find a better one? What if we regret our choice...

I can hardly believe it, but the Pivot manuscript is DONE! D-O-N-E, done. It didn’t sink in until after I reviewed the copy edit and made my most recent round of changes. After I turned it in, my editor told me I wouldn’t be touching the Word file again. Huh?! Are you sure you don’t need me to take just oooooone more look? Says the perfectionist afraid to let go. Nope. The next (and final) time I...

“The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. It is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”—Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote I read Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote a few years after it came out, and it quickly ascended to the top of my al...

“To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.”—Derek Sivers, Ask Me Anything My dad started a band called Mr. Gasoline that he ran for 25 years, and recall...

Happy New Year Everyone!! Greetings from Tulum, Mexico where I’m taking a (solo) week of R&R with yoga, reading, and hanging out by the ocean. Gotta get myself prepped to head back to snowy NYC!  I am also celebrating (and decompressing from!) ten years of running Life After College, and turning in the final draft of Pivot mid-December. After 14+ months of working on the manuscript, we are now mov...

It’s the final countdown! Time to wrap-up the final days of 2015 then dream-and-scheme for what’s to come. I don’t set New Years Resolutions, but I do choose a theme for the year, do fun mind-mapping exercises, set quarterly targets, and hold myself accountable with mastermind groups. In today’s final Pivot Podcast of the year, I share practical tips to help you set a 2016 strategy by doubling-dow...

I woke up and the room was spinning clockwise. Am I wasted? No . . . I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in weeks. Is this some kind of immaculately conceived hangover? After an hour of laying in bed hoping it would pass, I stood up and stumbled. Grabbed for a nearby wall to prop me up. I felt nauseous. Do I have food poisoning? No . . . I haven’t eaten anything different this week, or any typical pois...

Get your geek on! This week’s Pivot Podcast is all about robots, artificial intelligence, and automation. How can we become more agile in an economy that is increasingly transformed by these areas? What skills and mindset will best position us for success in the future? How can you become a “robot whisperer” like today’s guest, professor Tom Guarriello? I could talk with Tom about all this for hou...

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That’s the gremlin I hear behind the slight nerves I feel about sharing today’s conversation with my good friend Nicole Antoinette. As we both hit eight years of blogging this year (ten since I started Life After College), we decided to take an honest look at the social media fatigue that sometimes washes over a life lived online. These periods of being public v...

Did you know that just the way you sit might be causing anxiety? Or that by straightening your spine and scanning the horizon you can calm your central nervous system, just as deer in the savannah do? Stacy Sims, founder of True Body Project, is an expert on somatics, or how our physical and psychological bodies relate to one another. I had the great fortune of stumbling across her workshop in Bal...

“The explorer is the person who is lost.”—Tim Cahill I rode the high of hitting my 50,000-words-in-a-month NaNoBlogMo goal for exactly one day last week. For one day I was over the moon! I did it! I wrote almost every morning for one month, and came out with 50,000 words by the end of November. It was like running a mental marathon! Combined with my October practice of trying to write for 30 minut...

Happy November! As I shared in my latest JB.me behind-the-business update, Pivot for Pivot, we have postponed the book launch from March to next September. My initial resistance turned to great relief as I realized I could actually enjoy some time off over the holidays! Read the behind-the-scenes recap for the biggest mindset mistake this move highlighted, and how I corrected course. While my edit...

“These days we are expected to live our lives at the same time we brand the shit out of it,” my friend Stacy said to me last year. That sentiment stuck with me, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. Selfies, Snapshat, blog posts, Periscope, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—when do we get a break to simply live our lives and do the work? It can be a tough tradeoff to make—particularly...

When is it time to wipe the slate clean and start over when you hit a breaking point in your career? How can travel play a role in the reflection process? How do you bounce back from zero when you have wiped out your savings? What makes graduate school worth the time, energy and money? How do you build a business, even when you don’t love the initial work that is coming in? How can you embrace fea...

How often do you come down with a Case of the Mondays? It can be a strange feeling to avoid your to-do list on a big project when you run your own business or side hustle: if you are the one calling the shots on schedule and strategy, shouldn’t it be energizing much more often than not? However, for one reason or another, we often let fear and shoulds take-over (myself included) and suddenly find...

HUGE thanks to everyone for all of the wonderful emails, tweets and comments about last week’s announcement for The Pivot Method. I think my emoticon-loving heart might explode from seeing so many exclamation marks in one week! As promised, I’ve recorded two very scrappy “podcast” calls for those who submitted questions. 📝 Check out full show notes and links from this episode and share it with a...