Action's Antidotes

Loneliness and feeling disconnected are common experiences today, affecting how we feel about life. The longing for real connection is stronger than ever. But it's not just about having lots of friends; it's about having meaningful connections that make us feel understood and valued. How do we close this gap and build relationships that truly matter? In this episode, I have the pleasure to chat with Coach Lee Hopkins, the founder of Patterns of Possibility. Coach Lee Hopkins is an expert in helping people build more meaningful connections in both their personal and professional lives. Throughout the episode, Coach Lee guides us through understanding the nuances of genuine connections, both online and offline. He talks about the complexities of modern-day interactions, offering actionable strategies to enhance the depth and authenticity of our relationships. Learn how small, intentional steps can lead to profound shifts in our relationships, bringing us closer to a life filled with genuine connection and fulfillment. --- Listen to the podcast here: Building Real and Meaningful Connections with Coach Lee Hopkins Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you selling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about loneliness, lack of connection. Now, you probably heard a lot of talk about the loneliness epidemic. One of the decisions I often cite in some of my presentations is that a survey was conducted around how many close friends people have, because loneliness is not just about how many people you’re around, it’s not just about isolation, it’s also about the meaningfulness, the depth of the connection. A survey conducted in 1990 showed that over 60 percent of all people said they had five or more close friends, how they would define as close friends. That same survey conducted in 2021 put 48 percent of all people in the one to four category for how many close friends they had and an alarming 12 percent actually reported having zero close friends and this is impacting just our quality of life in general so it’s good for us to kind of regroup and think a bit more about how we actually form meaningful relationships with other human beings. And to that topic, I bring you my guest today, Coach Lee Hopkins. Coach Lee Hopkins is a social connections coach, founder of a company called Patterns of Possibility. With this company, he uses a simple three-step process to help his clients find and maintain closeness in their friendships. --- Coach Lee Hopkins, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m so glad to talk about this topic because it affects so many people. Let’s start with what’s affecting people. What are you observing in the world today, like right now, regarding the quality of our connections we’re making between human beings? The quality of our connections. What I observe is there’s all kinds of statistics out there. As you pointed out, there’s some statistics about the relationships that my own observations is searching through TikTok and being on social media, listening to what other people are experiencing as well as watching and seeing my own experiences is that we’re not as connected as we were before and I would love to just tackle that and look at it from a different angle because what I define as connection is a little bit different than what most people do. They think simply because we are focused on being online so much that we’re disconnected.Click To Tweet Of course, that keeps us separated but even when we’re in person, we’re also not making the intentional kind of connections there too. We’re just like in spaces with people and not being connected. The phenomenon that I’ve noticed is we’re disconnected online and then we’re so unattached to people that when we get into spaces with people, we don’t know how to be either. And so disconnection is just pretty rampant.

Chronic diseases are on the rise, affecting millions globally. How can we handle and even reverse the progression of these chronic conditions? Our guest, Oliver Eehn is the Founder of Optimum Fitness Systems and brings over 40 years of expertise in health and fitness, specializing in diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and stroke recovery. He holds several certifications, specializing in athletic/sports conditioning, injury/post-rehabilitation, bodybuilding, powerlifting, senior fitness, and other areas. Throughout the episode, Oliver discuss the ways of managing various chronic diseases, from physical injuries to mental conditions like Parkinson's and dementia. He also shares his plans to expand his impact on public health, reaching out to both the general public and fitness professionals. His goal is to raise awareness, educate, and empower individuals and businesses to prioritize health and wellness. Tune in to learn how small lifestyle changes can make a big difference in your health journey. --- Listen to the podcast here: Reversing Chronic Disease & Recovery Strategies with Oliver Eehn Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the problems that we’ve observed quite a bit today and had a really big uptick over the past, say, half a century is the prevalence of chronic diseases. This is something we haven’t talked about quite yet on this podcast but we have talked generally about health, both mental and physical health, and health can definitely get in the way of you being able to follow whatever dream, whatever passion that you’re trying to pursue. Today, my guest, Oliver Eehn, who is the founder of Optimum Fitness Systems, is going to talk a little bit about what we can do about chronic diseases, both from the recovery and prevention side. --- Oliver, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. It’s a pleasure to be here. Well, thanks for joining and thanks for talking to us about a topic that we have yet to really talk about these chronic diseases. So, obviously, you’ve seen this, you have a passionate about it. What is making some of these chronic diseases so prevalent today? Unfortunately, it’s just lack of activity, poor food planning, dieting, and everything that ties along with that, and it’s just, of course, not to mention just the quality of the foods that are available today, along with all the added preservatives and processing that goes into it. And so you put all that together, yes, that is definitely an equation for disaster down the road. My quest, if you want to call it that, is to now help educate the public about this as well as to encourage them to just better lifestyle and healthy living.Click To Tweet Yeah, it is disturbing to see how many people are living with some kind of chronic disease. What brought you into this particular pursuit? What did you observe that made you decide that Optimum Fitness System is what you wanted to do? It wasn’t planned that way, it’s just kind of as a lot of your other fellow business people, some of your other guests have talked about, this is kind of how life --- as life just kind of flows along, we just move along and then it’s --- some of it, it’s just more by default, if you will, because that was kind of your tip, growing up as an athlete myself, and endure a lot of my own injuries, football being my main sport, of course, you play football, yeah, you’re asking for injuries over the years, just become my own patient. And then just through that process, just became a weightlifting, fitness enthusiast through that process and just made sense to now, it’s obviously tried to do something business wise in that regard. And so, as I started just working with folks and just the typical like most personal trainers do early on is help people lose weight and just kind of get back in shape and that’s, ’til this day, I mean,

Despite being underrepresented, the truth is, women can thrive, excel, and lead. Their resilience, creativity, and determination often outshine the barriers they face. In this empowering episode, our guest, Rhonda Skallan founder of Spark Alchemy, is here to prove just that. She shares valuable insights and strategies on how women can not only survive but thrive in these challenging environments. Rhonda's passion lies in empowering women to not just join the conversation but to lead it with confidence and authority. Through her work, she ensures that women have a seat at the table and are equipped to make impactful contributions. Listen in as we discuss typical male-dominated industries, the experience of women in these fields, leadership barriers, and the power of building supportive networks. Tune in now and empower yourself to rise above limitations! --- Listen to the podcast here: Taking Their Seat: Women Leading in Male-Dominated Industry with Rhonda Skallan Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, we all have our dreams, we all have our passions, we all have what we want out of life, and, hopefully, some of the episodes you’ve already listened to is giving you a good idea of how to figure out what it is that you actually want. But once you figure out what it is you actually want, there’s many different barriers that can get in our way. Nothing is really that easy, especially developing a life that’s a little bit outside the box or outside of what’s expected. Some of these barriers could take the form of feeling like you don’t belong, feeling like you don’t really have the right to communicate. So, today, my guest is Rhonda Skallan. She is the founder of Spark Alchemy and she helps women in male-dominated industries. --- Rhonda, welcome to the program. Thank you, thank you, and thank you so much for having me here today. I really appreciate it, Stephen. Well, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me and my audience today. So, first of all, I want to start off by asking what is a typical male-dominated industry and what does that feel like for some of your clients? That’s a great question because most industries are male dominated. My background tends to specifically be in construction, technology, finance as well as education, healthcare, and entertainment, and I would say all of those have a healthy dose of male dominance, especially when you think about combining them. So doing healthcare construction and technology construction. I decided I could go ahead and double down on that male dominance in a couple of those industries. Now, are there industries that are female dominant or are there industries that are balanced, that have found a way to kind of work through some of this? I really haven’t seen a balanced industry as much as maybe some female-dominated industries, maybe in the younger children, preschool, elementary-type education spaces, some of the service spaces of retail, sales, things like that, but I really haven’t seen a balance as much as I’ve seen one or the other. I will say what I know from some of the research that I’ve done with the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Women, the only industries where women make more money than men tend to be in childcare or those type of service-oriented businesses, which are also some of the lowest paying businesses. Now, you also talk a lot about how a woman feels in a male-dominated industry. Are there any industries out there that just the percentages work out one way but do a better job of preventing making people feel like outsiders, like a woman in construction versus technology versus a finance industry? Maybe healthcare, where you’re dealing with a lot of more traditional nurses, especially pediatric healthcare, which I have a pretty strong exposure to. I think, at some point,

Ever struggled to decide between doing what you love and finding the right way to do it? Do you wonder about the differences between a standard company and a nonprofit journey? These questions lie at the heart of our discussion today as we talk about the nuanced decisions that shape career trajectory, and influence our creative endeavors, and aspirations. In this episode, I sit down with Hanna Yaritz, a passionate advocate for philanthropy and impact-driven work. Hanna shares insights into the unique aspects of choosing to work in nonprofit versus for-profit entities, emphasizing the role of mission alignment and personal connection to a cause. We touch base into the concept of conscious capitalism and conscious business, where organizations focus on both profitability and social impact. She emphasizes the importance of finding alignment between personal values, career goals, and the organization's mission. Listen in for insights that inspire change! --- Listen to the podcast here: Deciding Between Non-Profit and Standard Company with Hanna Yaritz Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. So, perhaps you have your idea or you have your passion, you figured out what you want to bring into the world, and then you get asked a couple of other questions come in, what kind of venue you want to pursue your idea in, and one of the key questions a lot of people ask that has yet to be covered on this particular podcast is the whole standard company versus nonprofit path. A lot of people, whether it is what kind of job you want or what kind of business you want to build, there is a big question, do I want to build it in one format, a standard LLC to start out, or do I want to build a nonprofit? So, here to talk a little bit about the nonprofit space and what that could potentially mean for you, your career, your business, your ideas, your passions, we have Hannah Yaritz, a nonprofit fundraising consultant. --- Hannah, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen. I’m really happy to be here. Well, it’s wonderful to have you, it’s wonderful to finally cover this topic as we haven’t covered it quite yet on this particular podcast. Let’s start with your passions, what made you decide that the nonprofit route was the space that you wanted to be in this world? Yeah, thanks. This is one of my favorite questions to answer because, for me, it really is about one of my strongest values, which is being of service to others and I really was inspired, I had the privilege and honor of going to college. I think that that truly is a privilege in our country and I was the first person in my family to do so so there was a lot of weight on my shoulders to be able to --- yeah, to pursue something that was bigger, would provide more opportunities to me and my family. And while I was in college, I volunteered a lot. I got really connected with a number of volunteer groups, learning about social justice, being exposed to different communities, different ways of living, different ways that people are trying to make a difference in our community and uplift others, and so it was through my volunteerism and activism while I was at college that I really started to hone in on what I wanted to pursue as a career. During school, I actually studied television broadcasting and while I loved that, I wanted to do something that really aligned my skill set in broadcasting and media and communications and marketing with volunteerism, with nonprofits, with making a difference so I started to pursue communication opportunities at nonprofit organizations. I thought that would be a really great alignment with my skill set and with my passion. So that’s for me where it really started. So then what brought you to fundraising for nonprofits as opposed to, say, becoming the leader or CEO of a specific nonprofit? Yeah, so fundraising was something I always did on the pe...

Perhaps you've heard of spirituality but aren't sure what it means. Spirituality is a broad concept that provides meaning, purpose and connection to something greater than ourselves. It cultivates a deeper sense of self-awareness and can serve as guiding light during the storms. But have you ever wondered how spirituality shapes our relationship and perception of the world? In this episode, I have Wendy Watson, CEO and Founder of TBR Spiritual Health. We discuss how spiritual therapy works that helps clients tap into their spirituality. Wendy discusses several self-care practices, meditation, energy communication and how peoples’ spiritual practices can change over the course of time. Tune in and connect with your spirituality today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Connecting with Your Spirituality with Wendy Watson Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In the last episode, we briefly touched a bit on spirituality and on how we’re at a time period where things may be changing, may be evolving, we may be changing the way we’re even thinking about spirituality and how it relates to everything else that we’re doing in life. Today, I would like to bring on Wendy Watson, who is the CEO and founder of TBR Spiritual Health, to talk a little bit more specifically spiritual therapy. --- Wendy, welcome to the program. Hi. Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it. Beginning with what you do with your spiritual therapy, I know you have a few different offerings with your business and a few different manners in which you work with your clients, but tell us about what it means to go into spiritual therapy and how it relates to any of the endeavors that we all have in our minds. Yeah, so I really focus on getting the individual person in touch with their spirit, their higher self, their intuition, and whatever is above and beyond that for them I have no judgment on whether or not you call it God or Vishnu or Freya or whatever vocabulary, whatever name you use, I just want to get you in touch with it so that you can communicate and develop your individual relationship with yourself and whatever is above and beyond for you rather than what people tell you your relationship with God should look like. And so your clients, when they come to you, are most of them in a place where they already have some sort of a spiritual tradition or do you commonly get people who come with absolutely no, purely like everything’s just logic, science, and how atoms come together, blah, blah, blah? No, I get more --- I get people that already have some sort of relationship already established, whether they grew up Catholic or Christian or very much into the spiritual world, more on what people call the woo-woo side. I get all walks of life. Really, all I do is I try and build on what they’ve already cultivated for themselves and get them to look at that more on their own, helping them to define it for themselves. Like, okay, what does that mean to you versus what has somebody else told you that it means and how can you use that in alignment with yourself and how can we set up a self-care routine in order to keep your spirit clean, in order to keep you in connection with spirit, with God, with whatever you want to call it? We can get really caught up in our day-to-day lives and get really busy so most people that come to you, are they people who just generally have the time, are they generally too distracted, are they generally constantly busy? I’m from New York where everyone’s constantly busy all the time and that’s a code of honor, what state is that relationship with the spiritual usually in when people come to you? So, I get a lot of people with high anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies or suicidal thoughts. They’re so focused on the right here and the right now that they’re in fear of the future or they just f...

Pivoting in life and business can result in growth. The thing is, making decisions on it is challenging. Moreover, knowing the right time to make changes in our path is quite difficult. How can we be able to confront these uncertainties that lie ahead when we decide to pivot our directions to change? In this episode, I talk with Mike Laezer, Founder of Astrology Wolf. We discuss how pivoting in business and life can lead to new paths and growth. With Mike's experience, he highlights the importance of trusting your guts, intuition, and facing your fears to overcome problems ahead. Additionally, he points out to follow our intuition for career pivots, even if the path is unclear. Join us to learn how to pivot with the expert! --- Listen to the podcast here: Thriving Through Change in Business and Life Through Pivoting With Mike Lazear Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about pivoting, because what we all know about really building anything, whether it be founding a business or starting something else on your own, is that you need a little bit of stick-to-itiveness. You need to stick to it, you need to not give up right away, because it is not an issue of instant gratification as so and so our culture is right now. However, there are times when it does become time to pivot, whether you need to find a new way to promote your business, try a new business, or just try something new in general because the time has come to move on. And one of the challenges that we all have is when is it time to move on and when is it that you're giving up too soon? Today, my guest is Mike Lazear. He is the founder of Astrology Wolf and also the founder of a business he recently sold, 515 Media, to talk a little bit about all the pivots he has made in life. --- Mike, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks, Stephen. It's good to be here. It's good to have you as well. Now, obviously, you've done a lot of pivoting in your life so let's just start with your story from the beginning. When did you first decide that you wanted to found your own businesses as opposed to what I usually describe as living by the script? Yeah, thanks, and it's so funny because when I actually did start my first real legitimate business, I wasn't even necessarily trying to do it. I had always wanted to before I went that direction in my life sort of live more independently and I had this whole thing of like if I could find a way to just have enough time to do as many creative projects as I could and not have to spend all my time earning a living and it felt like it was almost an obstacle or a problem to solve so that's kind of what got me first into it. When I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I had a degree that didn't really have a lot of translatable skills with the bachelor's, I was a psychology graduate. So, I was always interested in programming, computer stuff, got into that. I took some courses at Portland State, mainly HTML, CSS, and I got a job out there working for a really great company called One Economy. They're wonderful, but I don't think they exist anymore. Oh, that’s too bad. The area where I worked, I don't even remember exactly what happened but a bunch of us got laid off kind of at once and I had started kind of getting my own clients doing web development, doing frontend coding, CSS, HTML. This was back in the days too where CSS was kind of a newer thing and I was learning — when dev is a lot more complicated today. It certainly became that way. So it was sort of by accident. I just was getting so many clients that I was kind of frantically looking for another job and I'm like I'm actually making enough now where I can almost see this just continuing. Then I started thinking about my dream of not having to go to a nine-to-five and just do what everyone else is doing.

In the past, the process of finding a job was often laborious and time-consuming, especially in the tech industry where specific skills were in high demand. However, with the rapid advancements in technology, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Today, job seekers have access to a plethora of online platforms and tools that streamline the search process. But how can we easily navigate or get a job with the use of AI? In today’s episode, I have Vilas Tulachan, Founder of JobsGuru AI. We talked about the challenges of the current job search process and how Jobs Guru AI aims to help address these challenges using artificial intelligence. Moreover, we discussed how the application tracking systems, cognitive biases and how Jobs Guru AI analyzes resumes and job descriptions to determine good job matches, generates customized cover letters and interview questions, to help streamline the job search process and reduce frustration for job seekers. --- Listen to the podcast here: Streamlining Job Applications Using Generative AI With Vilas Tulachan Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. How many of you out there listening has searched for a job lately? And, lately, I mean, since the pandemic, it’s gotten even crazier than it was before. It’s a really tough process and a process that I’ve seen frustrate a lot of people, myself included, as you may have heard about in one of my past episodes. My guest today, Vilas Tulachan, started a company called JobsGuru.ai to help with this process that’s really become frustrating for so many people. --- Vilas, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. Great to be in your podcast. I’m excited to share some of the ideas I have on how to help people get jobs faster with you today. Yeah, so let’s start with where the process is right now. Right now, a lot of people are frustrated by the job search process. What do you think is going on that’s making it so cumbersome, such a hard process when all people really want to do is find a job and then work it? Stephen, great question. It’s amazing. We are living in an amazing time. As Charles Dickens said, the best of times, the worst of times. The best of times, because unemployment rate in the US is the second lowest in the history of 3.7 as of end of last year. Wow. It’s amazing, right? So there’s 1.7 jobs opening for every job seeker. That’s the stats, that’s the economic news. But on the ground level is a different ballgame for job seekers. I’ve talked to job seekers that have applied at 50, 100, 200, 500 job application, they hardly hear anything back. Or they get a good thank kind of response from email back and maybe they’ve gotten maybe two or three interviews and they get ghosted by the employer. It’s been a really weird kind of job market. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And there are a couple of things I see, and the reason I got into this whole idea was as — I met you when you did the startup at Denver a year and a half ago and then I was looking to applying the AI and the ML into helping smaller businesses implement an AI in their businesses. And then I talked to a lot of people who were having issues with jobs, I’m wondering this sounds like a crazy idea, when there are so many jobs and I really did some research and found that a lot of people have a couple of challenges. Number one is called, it’s a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect. So you must have heard about this where people either overestimate or underestimate their skill sets. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it’s strange. So, if you look at the industry stats, about 73 percent of the job application, according to LinkedIn, are rejected right away before even a human sees the resume, and mainly because the resume doesn’t match fully the job requirements. So that’s the first thing. So you only get 30 percent chance of ever getting a resume ...

The subconscious mind is like a hidden library in our brains, quietly influencing our thoughts and actions. When ideas are consistently reinforced, they sink into the subconscious, becoming automatic responses. Positive or negative, these beliefs influence our decisions and behaviors without our conscious awareness. Have you ever wondered how your subconscious beliefs might be guiding your choices without you even realizing it? In this week's episode, I have Austin Tani, Founder of Bringing Balance Back. Today, we discussed how negative beliefs are often formed in childhood based on experiences, and how those beliefs can then impact our lives unconsciously. He also shared transformative techniques for clearing subconscious beliefs, including breathwork and somatic therapies to release emotional charges from the body. Ready to transform your beliefs? Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Power of the Subconscious Mind With Austin Tani Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I am confident. I am competent. I am smart. I am good enough. I will make things happen. How many of you out there have said things like this to yourself in the mirror? How many of you wake up every day or have some sort of regular ritual around saying things like that? And what kind of results have you gotten from these affirmative messages that you said to yourself? Now, chances are, those results are kind of mixed. Maybe some of you start to notice a difference as you repeat these mantras to yourself, but maybe some of you did not get the results that you desired. Maybe some of you, for some reason, one reason or another, tried it for a while and still kept falling back into some of the same patterns and some of the same beliefs. My guest today, Austin Tani, of Bringing Balance Back, has a different approach to some of these instances in which this set of affirmations may not have particularly worked. --- Austin, welcome to the program. Thanks. Thanks, Stephen. Thank you. How are you doing today? I’m doing good. Doing good. Had a slight headache this morning but it’s starting to go away. Well, not bad. Now, Austin, have you ever initially before starting a business tried this set of affirmations, kind of those repeated mantras, whether they be in the mirror or meditation or anything like that? Yeah, I’ve tried some affirmation stuff but it didn’t really help me too much, but, yeah, I’ve given them a try. And what kind of experience that you have with these affirmations? Kind of just scratching the surface, you’re using your conscious mind and you’re hoping that you impregnate the subconscious mind with that affirmation and it becomes your belief. But with what I’ve learned and what I’ve seen through experience, a lot of times when we’re trying to drop an affirmation in, that usually means we’re carrying the opposite belief in our subconscious mind. If you’re trying to say, “I’m worthy, I’m worthy, I’m worthy,” probably means you’re carrying the belief of unworthiness in your subconscious mind. That’s why you’re trying to drop that information in and that’s why that worthiness came up as an affirmation for yourself. So I’ll explain it like this. So if you’re trying to drop in, “I am worthy,” into your subconscious mind, which is actually your body, the body is your subconscious mind, so if you’re trying to drop in, “I’m worthy,” in your subconscious mind but you have a big bubble of unworthiness stuck in your body, it’s just going to bounce right off you and you’re going to still feel unworthy, until you remove that feeling of unworthiness out of your nervous system and then you can drop in, “I’m worthy.” So let’s talk a bit about this feeling of unworthiness and talk about a little bit from the standpoint of a personal journey. A person you encounter that has this feeling of unworthiness in their subconsci...

Living a scripted life is like going through the motions, you know? It's when you're not really calling the shots in your own life. Everything's laid out in this script, and the main goal is to make things super comfy and easy, not necessarily exciting or purposeful. It's like we're all on autopilot, just doing what's expected rather than what we really want. So, are you cool with sticking to the script, or are you itching for a life with a bit more personal flair and purpose? In this week's episode, I have Daniel Aaron, the visionary Founder of The Art of Vibrant Living. As a transformational coach, Daniel guides people in elevating their vibration and embracing empowered actions across mindset, health, and emotions. We explored the essence of vibrant living and delved into practical strategies for transitioning from a routine existence to a life filled with genuine vitality. Daniel shared his concept of an 'invincible mindset' and shared valuable insights on breaking free from limiting beliefs. Tune in and unlock your vibrant life now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Breaking Limits and Living Vibrantly With Daniel Aaron Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing I talk about quite a bit is living by the script, and what I mean by living by the script is being in a state where you’re not really creating your own life, you’re not really creating anything that you actually personally decided on because the script itself, as of the beginning part of 2024, the script is really created to maximize comfort and convenience as opposed to maximizing, say, enjoyment, maximizing purpose, maximizing excitement. And that’s where my guest today comes in. Daniel Aaron is a transformational life coach and the founder of The Art of Vibrant Living. --- Daniel, welcome to the program. Cool, Stephen. Thank you so much. It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to have you here, Daniel, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and talk to my audience. Let’s first by starting a basis. Now, when you talk about vibrant living, what does that look like in your view? Okay. Well, let’s start with what it doesn’t look like and what it doesn’t look like is it’s kind of like Emerson said that the masses of people are living lives of quiet desperation, or what I call sometimes the cult of meh, it’s mediocre, monotony. It’s people just going through the motions of life. And I came to this as a little boy, I remember being three years old in the front yard of my family home and back behind me inside the home, it was like just chaos and pain and drama. My family was all kinds of dysfunctional. That’s why I was hanging out in the front yard as much as I could. Across the street, I saw my neighbors and they were slump shouldered and just going through the motions and I thought there’s got to be more to life than this, and so that awareness just stayed with me. So what is vibrant living? It’s living with passion and joy and excitement and taking ownership for one’s life. So I’ve thought about the cult of meh quite a bit. One we’re just like crazy, living by the script is meh or the idea of escaping of meh and my story behind that is when I talk about 7:15 a.m. on a Tuesday at a train station and you see everybody commuting to work, the same way you observed it as a kid, you don’t see that excitement from that many people. Maybe you see one person, somewhere here and there but the vast majority of people, you don’t see life, in a way, you don’t see that excitement about living life. How do you think it came to be that state? Do you think that’s a natural state of humanity or do you think something happened in our culture to bring us into a world where so many people are living by the script and living by what you would call the opposite or what vibrant living is not? The question is how did we get into this predicament? Yeah.

Everyone possesses a personal brand, often unconsciously, and authenticity is the cornerstone of its development. To construct a compelling brand, delve into understanding your target audience, studying competitors, and identifying the unique aspects that set you apart. But the question remains: how can we embark on this journey? In this week's episode, I sit down with Kim Russo, Founder of On Brand Designs. We explored her journey, starting with packaging design and transitioning to a full focus on branding. We discuss the lessons she learned along the way about establishing systems and processes to run a successful business. Additionally, we delved into the importance of connecting with people and joining a mastermind group that can help take the business to the next level. Tune in for insights that will elevate your branding designs! --- Listen to the podcast here: Taking Your Brand to The Next Level With Kim Russo Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to generally talk about branding. I think we’ve all heard the phrase, “You are your own brand,” or some kind of iteration on that. My guest today, Kim Russo, is founder of On Brand Designs and also an expert in transitioning people from one level to another in general. --- Kim, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. And thank you for taking time out. So what is that phrase, I know I didn’t probably say it right, the idea that each one of us is a brand of some capacity? Basically, what we’re saying is we’re all our personal brand so when you’re talking about small business, especially when you’re growing a business, building a business, and being the face of your business, your brand is your personal brand as well, and that’s something that I do strive to bring into account with my clients. So I do a whole strategy process. And, in that, I’m looking at target audience, I’m looking at competitors, but I’m also looking at you, what are your likes, what do you love, who as you as a persona, that shows up in your brand. So, does it ever work out that someone is trying to be a brand that just isn’t them? So, for example, someone might say, “I wanna do this,” but if it’s too much in conflict with their natural personality, you kind of have to tell them, “Hey, wait a second, I know this is the brand that’s gonna sell this product but, sorry, that ain’t you. That’s not who you are. You might wanna go back to the drawing board and think it through again.” Yeah, and I think it goes both ways. There’s that and there’s also pushing too hard to be like somebody else. Yeah. So it’s maybe not following your own brand but it’s also trying to mimic somebody else without pulling in your own self to it is sometimes something I come across, because, at the end of the day, you have to love it and you have to feel it and you have to live it. It definitely helps with the cliché, like know and trust. They’re going to get to know you and know and trust you with how you’re showing up in your brand.Click To Tweet I do often work with a lot of uplevels so when people are kind of stagnant in where they are with their brand and need kind of a refresh or there’s too many things going on with it that’s confusing, too many fonts, too many colors, and you’re just confusing who you’re trying to attract and who you are, is a lot of times, I am going to have to come and kind of simplify and really hone in on who they are but also I like to keep an essence of their original brand. So I always say to people who are starting out there’s going to be something in your brand that is going to hold true to you, to be cohesive and give you longevity, but you can always uplevel it, you can always change it. So, if I’m redesigning something that is just not working for somebody, it’s not who they are,

Navigating a career change is often challenging; it's about breaking free from the confines of a single job title. When you're not passionate about your current role and it doesn't bring a sense of pride, contemplating change becomes crucial. It involves self-reflection, identifying your true interests, and embracing the courage to pursue something new. How do you navigate the complexities of transitioning to a career that better aligns with your passions and values? In this week’s episode, I talked with Elizabeth Burke. She shared her journey from feeling disconnected and unsatisfied in her career to making a significant change. She took us through the disconnection and dissatisfaction she experienced in her career to the pivotal moment when she decided to make a substantial change. But that's not all – she also offered valuable insights on navigating the lows of life, whether in your career, relationships, or family. Tune in for a candid conversation filled with inspiration and practical wisdom. --- Listen to the podcast here: Journey of Transformation, Growth, and Fulfillment with Elizabeth Burke Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One question I think so many people are tired of being asked is, “What do you do?” Now, I want you all to think about that question for a second because, first of all, no human being really only does one thing so it’s really kind of compartmentalizing people into just job titles. But, also, how do you respond to that question, “What do you do?” when you’re not exactly in love with what you do right now? When you’re not exactly proud of what you do, you don’t exactly feel it, and it’s not the thing that you want to talk about? I know what it feels like to be in that situation and my guest today knows what it feels like to be in that situation and she even presented a wonderful speech at the recent Denver Startup Week, recent as in two and a half months ago now. --- Elizabeth Burke, welcome to the program. Thank you. I’m so excited to be here, Steven. Really appreciate getting to share. Well, I’m glad you’re here to share this wonderful story because I think that a lot of people listening and a lot of people in the world, in general, out there aren’t necessarily content. They’re not seeing all the purpose as well as the alignment. “I’m doing this for this reason and it’s aligned with how I live my life,” and stuff like that. So, well, let’s start off by telling us a little bit about your story about how you made the career change from when you were in that situation, how it felt and what you did to get to where you are now? Yeah, so I’m happy to share about that. And we’re kind of like not going to start with what I do first purposefully so that you can hold the tension of how does it feel to not know what I do as a first part of my story but you definitely will get to hear that. So, yeah, I have a background in public education and I think, for me, I went into that career and I loved it, I loved working with high schoolers, I taught high school art, built up an amazing program, taught four levels, and always felt like there was room for me to just find new parts of myself as I was teaching. And I started to notice a shift. I think there are times in our life when we maybe have been doing something for a while and we’ve gotten really good at it and we’re kind of looking for that next step, that ability to expand, and I began to just not be able to find it anymore. And I think, for me, that was starting to happen but what really kind of just became a catalyst for really seeing some things that I could no longer unsee was being a teacher during the pandemic and being a teacher during, specifically, the fall of 2021 to the summer of 2022 school year. That school year was my eighth year teaching and it was just truly like the worst school year that any teacher on record has probably ever had.

As we near the year's end, we shift from looking back at the year to thinking ahead to 2024. We take a moment to figure out what challenges we've faced and spot areas where our life might be a bit off-kilter. This sets the scene for considering what we want to shake up in the coming year. What tweaks can we make for a more balanced and enjoyable life in 2024? In this episode, I have Sabrina Morris, a lifestyle Promoter and Entrepreneur. Sabrina shares about the importance of work-life balance, employee wellness programs, and workplace vacation policies. Moreover, Sabrina highlights how being part of a supportive mastermind group can bring positive changes mentally, and spiritually. Tune in as we unravel the keys to a fulfilling life. --- Listen to the podcast here: Juggling Work, Life, and Holidays with Sabrina Morris Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to start talking to you about something a little bit more light, a little bit more fun, and that is going on vacation. We all need rest, we all need time away, and sometimes we all oftentimes need a change of scenery, a different point of view, a different perspective. To embellish on this topic, I’d like to introduce you to my guest today, Sabrina Morris, or Sabrina the Lifestyle Promoter. --- Hi, Stephen, and thank you so much for having me on today. I’m looking forward to working with your audience, having conversation. Oh, for sure. So, I had read somewhere and I don’t remember the exact numbers, the startling facts around how much PTO, vacation time, etc., goes unused in this country right now. We’re in a situation where a lot of people just don’t feel like they can take their time off and they don’t feel like they can essentially take vacation. What do you think people need to do to feel more comfortable and taking what they should see is like just a normal part of their life and something that any person that works reasonably hard deserves to do? Love yourself. And I’ll elaborate. I am known as enterprise architect, and as an enterprise architect, you go in and solve basically executive’s problems. I have an engineering background, a business background, and when you go in as a niche consultant and solve those problems and you’re wanting to take a vacation so that you can reboot, re-energize, and renew your mind, there’s an assumption that, all of a sudden, you’re not, and I’m going to put quotes, “dedicated.” So what I did is allowed that Sabrina’s not dedicated because she wants to take a break, influence a decision to use the time off or to take the time off. Now, even as a niche consultant, we have a little bit more flexibility because we can take time between projects. I did not. I caution each and every one of you not to make that. Take care of you. Love on yourself. Do what you enjoy doing. I really liked the way the Europeans do it. They work so that they can enjoy life. A lot of times, Americans and American companies live to work. The employees live to go work. Get up, you get ready, grind it out, for those of us who are still commuting, you’re commuting, you got the people who cut you off, you got to resist the road rage, then you get to work, deal with the fact that they don’t have enough staff, deal with the fact that they don’t love on their employees or appreciate what you do, you deal with all of this, and then you have to go back in the grind, drive back home, resist the road rage, and if you can rest, then it starts all over again. So you have to make sure that you love on yourself and your family. Especially for those of you who are married or have a significant other, love language is quality time.Click To Tweet f you’re not spending that quality time, I’m sure they have reminded you of that. It’ll come out one way or the other, right? Yes, it will. So love yourself. Focus on taking a healthier approach to your work life...

Climate change is an imminent crisis, fueled by escalating greenhouse gas levels and altering rainfall patterns. The consequences, from disrupted seasons in Guatemala to devastating forest fires in Canada, are evident worldwide. The alarming shift demands a collective focus on adaptation and resilience. Can we navigate the impending challenges, such as water scarcity in Colorado and the relentless fury of unmanageable wildfires, to secure a sustainable future? In this episode, I interviewed Michael Scanlon, the Founder of ClimateCon. ClimateCon was a conference that celebrated climate innovation and encouraged actionable solutions through breakout sessions and workshops. Our conversation revolved around recent advancements, climate sustainability, transportation solutions, and the looming threat of ecological collapse. Moreover, we delved into the impact of greenhouse gasses, citing examples from around the world, including Guatemala, Syria, and Canada. Tune in and take a step towards a greener future! --- Listen to the podcast here: Climate Innovation and Sustainable Solutions with Michael Scanlon Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, I’ve been studying quite a bit about what’s gone wrong with society a little bit psychologically, why so many people are in a terrible emotional state, why there’s so much depression and anxiety, and a couple of themes have come around in many of the things that I’ve read, many of the things that I’ve watched, many of the things that I’ve heard from people, and that is what’s lacking in our current society that we used to have plenty of at some point in the past, and that is community and purpose. And so, as a result of hearing this and seeing this, I’m here wanting to support any time people can gather together a community, especially if they can gather together to serve some kind of a purpose, and that’s why I’m here to showcase to you an event coming up here in Denver in roughly two months from when this podcast will initially air called ClimateCon!, and to share a little bit about this event, I’m here with ClimateCon! founder, ClimateCon! organizer, Michael Scanlon. --- Michael, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Steven. It’s an honor to be here. Well, thank you for coming on and talking about it. I mentioned in my intro, we all need community and we all need purpose, and one of the things that’s going to help get us out of what I refer to as the little dark age of the last 15 years, a period of time in which we’ve been lacking it, is to bring more people into something like that. So, let’s start from the beginning. Michael, what first brought on ClimateCon!? Because I know you’ve been planning this for several months at least by now. Yeah, yeah. It launched in April 2023, started it in Earth Month. So my background, I had been doing increasingly larger and bigger events leading into the pandemic. In 2019, I actually founded a conference company and I was doing major conferences. I had a conference on March 5th and 6th 2020. The governor was going to come and then the security guy came back and said, “The government can’t come, he has to tell the world coronavirus is here,” and so that company kind of scattered into the wind with the coronavirus. And as I was literally driving rideshare to make a living. I kept thinking at some point, I got to get back into conferences. The series of conferences previous had been around cannabis, cannabis policy in particular, and I wanted to do something more impactful, something more meaningful, something that could have big impact and I kept coming back to climate so that’s where the climate came from was it’s something I’ve been obsessed with for 30 years now and I keep thinking why aren’t we doing more about climate? Why aren’t I doing more about climate? And so, finally, I am.

Upon entering a new job, there's a palpable eagerness and optimism to contribute meaningfully to the organization. Yet, with the passage of time, this enthusiasm dwindles, tainted by strained relationships with supervisors or higher-ups. This all-too-familiar story exposes the harmful consequences of toxic leadership, transforming dedicated employees into disengaged onlookers who actively oppose their own company. How can we disrupt this cycle and cultivate a workplace culture that prioritizes the well-being and sustained productivity of its employees? In this episode, I have Laura Baxter, Founder of The Voice for Leadership, who has helped individuals enhance their voice, body language, and connect with the audience effectively. During our discussion, Baxter talked about her journey from coaching to publishing to becoming an opera singer. Moreover, she discussed cultural differences in leadership and decision-making, and superficial breathing. --- Listen to the podcast here: Addressing Toxicity in Organizational Hierarchies with Laura Baxter Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I want to tell you about a story that I’ve both lived and heard countless times. This is a story of someone who starts a job and starts a job actually quite optimistic about it. They’re excited to do something, they’re excited to join whatever organization that they’re joining, but then, somehow, over time, they become really jaded, usually by problematic relationships with their immediate supervisor, with their boss or someone in a higher leadership position. And there’s so many complicated reasons why that happens but the story has happened so many times that it is definitely something that we need to address because I’ve seen so many people suffer through some sort of situation where they normally would be good productive workers but, as a result of whatever’s going on above them, they just don’t care and sometimes become actively disengaged, which are the employees, they’re actually rooting against their own company, which happens almost a third of the time. Quite terrible. And my guest today, Laura Baxter, is not only an opera singer and a book publisher but she’s also a speaking and leadership coach. --- Hi. Thank you, Steven. It’s great to be here. So you have a lot going on. You have a lot of different endeavors, which is always wonderful. How do you manage all of that? How do you bring it all together? Good question. I was gonna say don’t sleep much, but, I actually get enough sleep. I think the clue is that, really, I love what I do, and all of it, both of the coaching people on the presentation or giving talks or also helping people with publishing their books or whatever it has to do with helping people find their voice. So although it may seem like it’s a lot of different aspects of that process, it really comes together with just helping people get their voice out there, be it their physical voice, that kind with presentation coachings, their ideas in a book or in a talk, it really has to do with finding their voice. And, of course, singing opera, you’re using your voice? Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t do opera anymore. That used to be my life. I do still do concerts, though, and I wouldn’t give that up. I love that. There’s something, some depth with music, so, yeah. And so do you think that’s something that most people are looking for in this life as people try to think through, okay, what job do I want, what do I want to do even in my social circles, personal life, family life, is people looking for a voice? Yes, I do, actually. And it can be something relatively small or seemingly insignificant, just like wanting to have some recognition for what you’ve done in your job or being able to share your ideas and your opinions on your job and your everyday life or it can be on a larger stage.

Managing your reputation is a crucial aspect of success in both business and life. Whether you aim to launch your own venture, pursue a thriving career in a medium to large-scale organization, or simply wish to be a valuable member of your community, your reputation plays a pivotal role. Selecting your associates becomes a pivotal part of this reputation management process, as not all connections are created equal. Some associations might not be the right fit for your goals or values. So, how can you discern which people are truly beneficial for your life and reputation? In this episode, I talked with Amber Wyatt, Founder of Millennial Matrix Media, a dynamic agency specializing in marketing, video production, graphics, and branding, with a strong emphasis on SEO. Our conversation delved into intriguing topics such as media bias, addressing wrongful convictions, navigating the complexities of untrustworthy business partners, and how to maintain energy alignment within the world of business. Don't miss this enlightening discussion! --- Listen to the podcast here: Connecting and Building Reputation with Amber Wyatt Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about one aspect of business that really kind of applies to the rest of our life as well, and that is reputation. Whether you’re trying to start your own business, whether you’re trying to have a good career at a larger or even midsize company, or even if you’re just trying to be a good neighbor and have a good kind of presence in your neighborhood in your community, you need to manage your reputation and part of managing your reputation is choosing the people that you’re going to associate with because not every association is going to be equal to each other and not every connection you make is going to be equally beneficial and, unfortunately, there are some people out there that are, I don’t want to say not worth it because everyone’s worthy of something in life, but maybe not the right match for you and maybe not the right people for you to have in your life. To dive further into this topic, I’d like to introduce my guest, Amber Wyatt, the founder of Millennial Matrix Media. --- Amber, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for joining. Amber, we met back in April when you were providing the media for an event that I was at. Tell us a little bit about Millennial Matrix Media. There’s so many different ways that media works for so many different types of events and types of organizations. So, we’re a full service marketing agency that focuses specifically on video production. So, I do video marketing and that’s mainly where all my clients come from but we also do graphic design for branding, we do logos, we do websites, we do copywriting, we do headshots, we do photography and events, so all of it. So all purpose media, and, of course, there’s social media, there’s standard, old school print media, there’s new media. Do you tend to specialize in customers that do the whole package or do you tend to look for people that are more geared toward one or the other? A lot of the clients start out like wanting professional headshots and like blogs or articles, and then we kind of like warm them up to the video, because whereas like blogs and articles may be good for the search engine optimization, putting those keywords, those industry terminologies and things like that in there, you really want to boil that down eventually into a one- or two-minute-long video, because people don’t want to read that stuff anymore. It will drive traffic to your website but if we’re really going to tell a story and we’re really going to brand you and what you do, we got to do it through video. So almost always sell the video eventually but it can start from needing a logo or needing a headshot or needing a blog or an articl...

Data is the lifeblood of modern sports. It powers decisions, strategies, and player performance. From advanced analytics that fine-tune athletic techniques to the fan engagement that data-driven insights provide, its role is undeniable. How can harnessing data be the game-changer you've been looking for? In this episode, I had an enlightening conversation with Maya Love, Founder of Mile High Analytics, an organization that helps young student athletes through data-driven curriculum. We discussed the powerful application of data for positive outcomes, differences between generation gaps, and community support. Our conversation also touched upon the significance of support networks, diverse perspectives, and striking a balance between challenges and action. Get in the game – start listening now. --- Listen to the podcast here: Elevate Your Game through Sports Analytics with Maya Love Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era of big data. There's a lot of data being collected, a lot of data being used, and a lot of it being used for many different purposes, and one of the things that's always fascinated me is how do we use this data for something good? How do we use this data for something that's really going to help humanity as opposed to the joke I always make, help Instagram identify the moment you get pregnant so they can bombard you with diaper ads? My guest today, Maya Love, is a college basketball player as well as the founder of Mile High Analytics, where she helps people and organizations use their data for a lot of these kinds of good outcomes. --- Maya, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Well, I'm so excited to have you here because I do want to understand we tap into a lot of power with all this data collection that started really in earnest roughly when Google became the default internet search around 20 years ago or something like that and, obviously, kind of like how money is, kind of like how influence is, all these things, they're all tools, they’re tools that can be used for --- they're neither good nor bad until they're used by someone to do a certain thing. What do you see as the biggest challenge in this era that we've kind of somewhat recently entered where we have all this data and want to use it for things that are really going to help humanity? Starting off with the heavy hitters. I think a main challenge is to understand that these things are tools. I think I come from Gen Z and probably on the older side of Gen Z where a lot of our experience with these tools, per se, actually were intertwined with identity. When you look at Instagram, it's less about networking or connecting with maybe a friend you --- I know you used to have pen pals that you kind of met in a nice Discord chat but now, it can easily become an identity, how many likes, how many posts, have to have everything perfect layout, and so I think the first step is acknowledging that it is a tool, a very powerful tool, with so much information and access out there and with identifying it as a tool, I think next comes the educational piece, which I really like to be in that kind of wheelhouse with sports and data. There are so many ways to get out there and play, be active, and you can incorporate the data so whether you're trying to perfect your shot, Steph Curry did that with the researcher at Berkeley using machine learning, or you're really just trying to understand, okay, how does Messi kick, I'm this intrigued six-year-old, and getting out there and still going outside in nature. So I do see a balance of these tools but kind of having to break it down and being very intentional and I think that comes from the leaders around us and being intentional on how they're describing it, kind of the rules of play, but also just being innovative and not scared of it and allowing it in t...

Effective communication is often as crucial as the brilliance of your idea or the quality of your work. Sadly, even a brilliant concept can lose its value without the ability to convey it effectively. How can you become a proficient communicator to ensure your exceptional idea is recognized? In this episode, we were joined by Megan Heffernan, the Founder of Megaphone Coaching. Our discussion covered the nuances of effective communication skills, their application in diverse settings, and the importance of self-awareness in public speaking. Megan is passionate about assisting individuals in improving their presentation abilities, whether in public speaking, sales demos, webinars, and beyond. Tune in to unlock your communication potential today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Delivering Powerful and Confident Presentations with Megan Heffernan Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the lessons I learned many years back is that, sometimes, just as important as the quality of your idea or the quality of the work that you do is how well you communicate that with others, how well you convey it. And, most unfortunately, sometimes, you could have a wonderful idea but if you don’t have an effective way to communicate that with others to get anyone else on board, whether it be investors, whether it be customers, whether it be people within your own organization if you’re more in a kind of a large corporate role, then that idea ends up not really being worth that much, even though it could be a truly genius idea, it could be something truly amazing. My guest today, Megan Heffernan, the founder of Megaphone Coaching, helps people with the communication of their ideas and communication of their work as well as building relationships. --- Megan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. I am honored to be here. Super excited. Super excited. I’m always excited and I always love it when my guests are excited. Anyone out there in the audience listening, I hope we can get you to that point too where you’re in a place where you’re excited to be doing what you’re doing and you’re excited to be talking about what you do. So, Megan, tell us a little bit, just get us a little oriented about the people you work with and how you work with them. Thank you, Steven. I love --- the operative word here is “quality.” I heard you say it a couple of times and I’m in the business of elevating quality communication. That’s the currency I trade in, helping people think better of and put a little more time in and take greater care in their communication. And I use “care” actually as a product and an acronym of have your communication be clear for the C, aware for the A, regardful and refined for the R, putting the little polish on that communication, and engaged, connected to who you’re talking to. I think a lot of people walk around waiting for an opportunity to foist an idea onto a person rather than connect with them deeper in idea and I love, love, love helping presenters, any kind of communicator but presenters in particular, prepare for their upcoming communication, whether that’s a webinar or a gala or a town hall or a sales demo. Anytime words are leaving their mouth and needs to land effectively on somebody else’s ears, that’s the sweet spot, that’s so exciting, it’s organic, it’s in the moment, and it’ll never happen again. And so I love the gift of communication too because there’s this exchange of a person to person or a group to a speaker that won’t ever be replicated really. And I think we’ve fallen back, we’ve gotten away a little bit from protecting that connection and we’re relying on our mediums or our platforms, our resumes, things like that, to deliver our message for us and I think we could do better. So, now, what’s the difference between communicating in a formal sense,

Building a sense of community within the workplace is more than just a trendy concept; it's a powerful driver of employee satisfaction and productivity. When colleagues feel connected, supported, and valued, it not only enhances their work experience but also contributes to a positive work culture. But how can organizations effectively nurture this sense of community that benefits both employees and the company as a whole? Join us in this episode with Kelli Oberndorf, co-founder of Ekatā, a company deeply committed to fostering a supportive and enriching workplace environment. In this conversation, we delved into the topic of improving work culture through community-building. Kelli also shared valuable insights from her own journey of career growth and transformation. Tune in and let’s explore the keys to creating a thriving work culture together! --- Listen to the podcast here: Building Community Within The Workplace with Kelli Oberndorf Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Something I’ve covered in some previous episodes, although maybe not some of the most recent ones, is how the idea of work being a place you don’t want to be is really embedded into our culture. Think about what people say, “Sunday scaries,” “Wednesday is hump day,” “Thank God it’s Friday.” The premise behind all those statements and so many more is this general idea that maybe work isn’t something you dread, although Sunday scaries pretty much implies dread, but it’s a place you don’t really want to be. You’d much rather be doing something else. And while it’s probably never going to become the case that work becomes your favorite thing to do, and if you found a place in life where your job is the thing that you really want to be doing more than anything in the world, my hat’s off to you, you’ve reached something amazing in life, we can find ways to make our work culture and the environment that we’re around in work something a bit more favorable, something that we want to do, something that we want to be at. My guest today, Kelli Oberndorf, is the co-founder of Ekatā, an organization that helps improve workplace culture through some interesting ideas primarily founded around community. --- Kelli, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you for taking the time out to talk with me today about this interesting topic that’s kind of on this intersection of community, which is something that many of us are lacking in life over the past quarter century especially, as well as how we feel about our work and what our work culture and how it facilitates what we want to do and how we feel about life. Exactly, yeah. So, at Ekatā, we’ve really created our mission around building community within the workplace, which is definitely a relatively new concept around how we behave at work, although behaving at work is something that is quite a topic these days, especially around the pandemic when we saw the great resignation where hundreds of thousands of people left their work. Now, when we say that number, it’s a huge number and there are a variety of different reasons why people leave their work environments, especially around the pandemic, whether that was they can’t do a full-time job and take care of my kids the same time, which is certainly a different reason to leave work than what maybe we’ll be speaking about here today which is really more around how we behave at work, our interpersonal relationships and the quality of those relationships and the idea that we actually can create work environments that we want to and love to work at and it takes practice, it takes time, and also, mostly, it takes awareness of how we’re behaving now and then the inspiration to want to make that different, want to make it better for the people who work within our organizations. So what inspired you to think about it in this kind of fashion?

The human mindset is a powerful force that shapes our thoughts, behaviors, and life experiences. Understanding and harnessing it is key to personal growth and success. But, have you ever wondered just how much control you have over your own mindset? In this episode, I had an insightful talk with Sean Marshall, a Mindset Coach and Founder of Future Pace Coaching and Consulting. Our discussion ventured deep into the human mindset. Sean discussed the idea of fluid mindset and shares tips for mastering emotional control when faced with triggering situations. Sean shared what Shadow Work is and how it helped his clients. Tune in for an enriching exploration of mindset and the techniques to harness its potential. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mindset Matters: Strategies for Mindful Living with Sean Marshall Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I start with this tagline every single time, “Your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less,” because, in its essence, this podcast is all about mindset. I share all kinds of stories about all kinds of people that have done amazing things and follow their true passions, follow their true dreams, but one of the things that is required in order to do that is the right mindset and it’s my hope that these stories, by being exposed to enough of them and being exposed to enough of the type of content that I provide, will help you improve your mindset so that you believe that whole, “I can, I will, and I should,” as far as whatever it is that you really want out of your life, in essence. My guest today, Sean Marshall, the founder of Future Pace Coaching and Consulting, is indeed a mindset coach and his work is all about improving his clients’ mindset. --- Sean, welcome to the program. Thank you, Steven. Thanks for having me here. Thank you for joining us and let’s start, let’s dive right into mindset. How would you describe your mindset as you approach Future Pace or any of your other endeavors in life? So what I find serves me best, okay, is my mindset, I would imagine, just like most people’s, is fluid. Sometimes, my mindset is better than others than at other times and so what I like to look at my mindset is I’m curious. If I’m on a roll, I’m curious. If I’m having a day or two where things might present some opportunities for me to grab a learning to help me move down the path, that’s where the curiosity comes in. And so I’m always looking at my behaviors and asking myself, by doing this, is this the person I want to become?Click To Tweet So that’s in any situation where you have a choice? Is that what you default to ask yourself? I don’t believe that anybody has arrived. Yeah. We are all on our own journey, we’re all on our own path, and when I find myself presented with situations where I might look at things a little sideways or they might have me curious and just kind of showing up in a way that maybe isn’t who I’d want to be, I have to ask myself, I really have to ask myself, “What’s going on here?” If I remain stuck, if I remain triggered, if I remain angry or trapped in some type of emotion, effectively, what I’m doing is I’m giving all my power away. And it’s one thing to say, “Oh, that person drives me crazy,” and you’re pointing your finger at somebody, it’s not so much that you have three fingers pointing back at you saying, “Well, take a look at yourself,” it’s the fact that the person that you’re pointing at is the very thing or very person that you’re giving all of your power away to. And so when I work with my clients, I have to be able to do this with myself too. Anything that I asked my clients to do, it’s something that I’ve done for myself. I have to be able to be congruent in what I’m asking my clients and for that space, for that reason, for that purpose, I’m constantly running myself through these questions,

Intuition, often our inner compass, plays a pivotal role in life's decision-making. It's the unspoken wisdom that guides us, helping make choices aligned with our authentic selves. By utilizing it, it empowers us to make decisions that deeply resonate. However, how can we harness it to lead a more fulfilling and purposeful life? In this episode, we're joined by Tara McFarland, a civil engineer turned intuitive leadership coach. Tara discusses the importance of tuning into intuition, how intuition and logic must work together in engineering and coaching. Furthermore, Tara provides a sneak peek into the highly anticipated Rocky Mountain Young Professional Summit 2023. If you're ready to embark on a journey of self-discovery and transformation, this episode is a must-listen. --- Listen to the podcast here: Tuning into Your Intuition for Lifelong Fulfillment with Tara McFarland Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This podcast, I always kind of describe as being a little bit of a fifty-fifty podcast in that 50 percent of it is centered around my hometown of Denver, Colorado, and 50 percent of it is with guests in some other places. In some of the more recent episodes, we featured some guests from other places but this episode is something we’ve kind of done before which we’re featuring a specific opportunity and event in Denver, Colorado, coming next month, October 13th, the Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit. In order to talk about that as well as her more recent endeavors is my guest today, Tara McFarland, intuitive healing coach, hopefully I got that right, and the founder of Create Conversation LLC. --- Tara, welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, I call myself an intuitive leadership coach. Intuitive leadership coach. I’m sorry, I tried to get that right. Yeah, no worries. Well, and I like the combination between the intuitive and the leadership because my background is in engineering and so a lot of the people that I work with are very analytical types and so when we talk about leadership, people understand what that means. The intuitive part is what they’re learning when they work with me. And one of your key endeavors has been taking people with a similar background to yours, engineering, and introducing them to kind of concepts that don’t necessarily come naturally to a lot of people with the engineering mindset. Tell us a little bit about your journey in that particular realm. Like I said, my background is in engineering and I was a civil engineer for over 20 years. Right about year 20, I hit a very major patch of burnout where I just completely shattered, had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. I thought my career was over. And this was predicated by being in a position where I had been a technical team lead, meaning I had been doing designs for most of my career, and then I shifted into a more non-technical program position and I became a project manager, program manager, I was suddenly leading multidisciplinary teams and I actually didn’t have any idea how to do it. Oh, wow. And I didn’t get the training that was needed to understand what the dynamics are within teams and really how to deal with people, like I had been evaluating dams almost 15 years at that point and now I’m having to lead teams and it’s a totally different skill set. And so I was on this project that was very high profile, it was politically sensitive, it was a really big project. It would have — like if I could have carried this project through to the end, it would have been a launching point for me to continue up the ladder. What happened instead was that it was just like a series of things that kept happening where I knew that something wasn’t quite right in the project but I didn’t know how to bring that up and I didn’t know how to bring it up to the project team and I didn’t really know how...