Hack The Process: Mindful Action On Your Plans

Being a man in modern society comes with a lot of assumptions and negative stereotypes. JuVan Langford took a look at his own struggles with finding a positive masculine identity for himself, and made it his mission to help men identify with their integrated selves. JuVan currently runs a nonprofit that counsels young men in school, and works as a men's empowerment coach, running events and working directly with clients around the world. In this episode, JuVan will share how he turned his feelings of vulnerability as an abused child into an asset, how he trains his clients to choose and use affirmations even when they don't believe them at first, and how he identifies and connects with mentors from the past and the present as part of his personal development.

Dr. Kesha Moore's ongoing focus on understanding how we can thrive as individuals in a complex society helps her integrate her passion for studying across a wide range of fields, including Psychology, Sociology, and Community Organizing. Kesha currently divides her time between working as a professor of Sociology, parenting, activism, and building a business in life coaching. In this episode Kesha will tell us about finding the creativity to frame ideas in the language of specific audiences, staying productive and balanced despite a schedule that is never the same from one day to the next, and how it feels to build a side business as a life coach while maintaining a career in academia.

Lisa Dale Miller is an integrative psychotherapist who uses somatic experiencing therapy to help people deal with trauma, handle internal and external stressors, and learn to become awake and present. She's also the author of "Effortless Mindfulness," an academic textbook positioning the clinical work she practices in the context of traditional western psychotherapy. In this episode, Lisa will tell us why engineers are some of her favorite clients, how her years of mindfulness practice and study have informed the work she does today, and what promoted her to change careers and become a trained psychotherapist after 25 years as a pioneering installation artist.

Omar Zenhom realized a semester into a Wharton MBA program that his ten years of independent teaching experience already gave him the background to teach people what they really needed to know to run a business. His popular $100 MBA podcast now has close to 900 episodes, and it's helping to grow the audience for his library of business training materials. Along the way, he realized he needed a better tool to host his online classes, so he developed the Webinar Ninja service to scratch his own itch, and turned it into a software-as-a-service business by popular demand. In this episode, Omar will tell us: - why he believes that having immigrant parents broadened his perspective and strengthened his resolve, - how leveraging your strengths can help set you in the most sustainable direction for your business, and - what it's like running a company with a cofounder and partner who's also your spouse.

Finding the confidence to enter the privileged world of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is hard enough, and all the more so when you come from a different country with a background of poverty. But serial entrepreneur Ricky Yean found ways to turn his differences into advantages by recognizing less obvious solutions to shared problems. After building Crowdbooster, a successful social media analytics firm, Ricky is now planning to disrupt the world of public relations, making metrics-driven journalist outreach accessible to small businesses on a subscription basis. In this episode Ricky will tell us how he positioned himself to attract venture capital, what his experiences with startup incubators taught him, and how he turned his people skills into leadership by helping others around him achieve.

Knowing what you don't want is sometimes just as important as knowing what you do want. That was definitely the case for Nicole Holland, who literally escaped from jail by quitting her job as a correctional officer to discover a more fulfilling way to make a living. Now Nicole hosts online summits about how to build a business, and helps experts learn how to present themselves effectively on podcasts. In this episode, Nicole will discuss some of the possible paths she pursued and abandoned along the way to her current career, tell us what qualities she thinks make podcasts unique in the media landscape, and explain why the process of writing things down on paper is valuable regardless of whether you ever refer to those notes later.

Curtis McHale took his training as a counselor and applied it to his work in web development, writing books and articles and hosting a podcast to help small businesses define their processes. He also coaches freelancers about how to optimize their work around the life they want to lead. Along the way he's learned how to delegate the tasks he doesn't enjoy, while holding onto the ones he finds energizing. In this episode, Curtis will explain how he trains his clients not to send him emails, he'll share the process he follows to separate his work time from his personal time, and he'll tell us how he turned his passion for Lego into a branding tool for his business.

If you're looking to build a business making and selling mobile apps, Carter Thomas has answers for you. His team at BlueCloud Solutions has provided the source code for over 1,500 apps, and sells templates and training to help people with no coding background go from idea to product to market. In this episode, Carter discusses how working with mentors and mastermind groups helps him build his own business while helping others do the same, he'll share his sustainable approach to hiring, training, and managing a remote team, and tell us why it's important to audit your project backlog regularly, and let go of the things that aren't keeping you motivated.

The publishing industry has changed dramatically in the past ten years, and Tom Corson-Knowles is helping new authors navigate the choppy waters. Tom took the lessons he learned when he set out to self-publish his first book and started sharing them, building a following and a new mission along the way. He now publishes courses for writers and provides boutique publishing services. In this episode Tom will explain how his early failures in traditional publishing guided him toward self-publishing, what it took to get his first ebook to monthly sales of over $10,000 in its first year, how he leverages the power of collaboration with other industry leaders, and what techniques he uses to delegate tasks to his team so he can focus on what he enjoys doing most.

Tara Hunt is a networking pioneer who has considered herself a native of the online social landscape since before there were web browsers. Her enthusiasm for learning how people use new tools and techniques to connect with other people still keeps her engaged, even as the context evolves constantly. Tara's work has included writing blogs and books about social capital (aka whuffie), creating co-working spaces, consulting with organizations large and small on social strategy, and developing video channels to support personalized brand marketing. In this episode, Tara will tell us about the challenges she faced being a single parent while her career shifted back and forth from employment to independent consulting, how she turned her own fear of missing out into an asset, and how she's learned to keep herself steady as she surfs the turbulent waters of the social web.

As a serial entrepreneur, Justin McGill has embraced the concept of radical transparency, sharing the successes and failures of his ventures openly every week as the co-host of a public podcast, Zero to Scale. That's allowed him to turn both his internal and external research into marketing, and grow the audience for his current company, LeadFuze. In this episode, Justin will tell us how he went from working in a trucking company to launching his first business, what he learned from reaching out to the author of the book that taught him about sales, and how he's integrated both his personal and professional life through the project management tools he uses.

Thriving through adversity is something today's guest, Luis Congdon, can speak about with authority. Having survived a childhood marred by drug abuse, abandonment, violence, and homelessness, Luis has turned his life around, going from trying to help himself to finding ways to help others. From relationship coaching to helping entrepreneurs launch their businesses, Luis now makes it a point to support himself while improving the lives of those around him, and giving away as much as possible for free. In this episode, Luis will share with us some of the personal mindfulness practices he follows to keep himself centered and grounded in difficult situations, tell us how learning to see himself differently helped him present a different face to the world, and walk us through how he manages his own thriving business today.

You don't have to turn off your heart to succeed in business, and Mark Silver wants you to know that every act of business can be an act of love. Mark has been teaching entrepreneurs why it's important to remember the divine while developing solid and sustainable business practices for over fifteen years. In this episode, he shares with us how his own business has evolved, while staying true to its core focus as the online publishing landscape changed. Mark will explain the differences between contemplative and devotional practices for mindfulness, walk us through a brief guided remembrance, and show us how business development concepts as complex as building strategic alliances can boil down to a simple cup of tea.

It takes courage to be funny, and Sarah Cooper can tell you all about it. She left a comfortable position in management at Google to become a writer and a stand-up comedian. But she took inspiration from her work, sharing a series of comics and blog posts with her observations about office behavior that eventually led to a publishing deal and her first book, "100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings." In this episode, Sarah will tell us about how she drew on her childhood dreams to validate the difficult choice to change careers, the value of sharing imperfect ideas early instead of waiting to refine them, and how she's adjusting to the transition from employee to entrepreneur.

Serial startup founder and lifestyle entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur has made a career out of discovering amazing people and helping them share their ideas with the world, from more than a decade running Le Web, a tech conference in Paris, to launching a new company called Leade.rs this year. He's let his own personal passions and frustrations guide him from one business to the next, and according to him, that may be why he's been so successful. Loïc will share with us his thoughts on why most people never manage to get their ideas out of their heads and into the real world, what he learned from the mistakes he made launching one startup that failed, and how his daily mindfulness practice helps him filter reality, recover from upsetting experiences, and maintain his trademark positive attitude.

Ask Kate Swoboda what it takes to start a business and she'll tell you it takes courage. In fact, courage is such a central element in her message that she often goes by the name Kate Courageous. Kate went from college English professor to life coach several years ago, and now trains life coaches to move through their own doubts and fears and accept the challenges they come up against. In this episode of Hack the Process, Kate will discuss how she realized that life coaching was her next calling, why chasing motivation can be a distraction from getting things done, and how one common core fear keeps many of us from pursuing our dreams.

Brennan Dunn is on a mission to get freelancers to start thinking of themselves as business consultants. His company, Double Your Freelancing, grew out of his own experiences moving from independent developer to running his own agency, launching and selling a software-as-a-service product, and eventually publishing books and classes and running conferences designed to help other people selling their services learn the tricks he discovered along the way. In this episode Brennan will explain how he benefitted from joining a $2,000 a month mastermind group, why he prices his conferences to break-even rather than doing them for profit, and why he would never again start a business by launching a software-as-a-service product.

Andi Galpern is the founder of Cascade SF, who open-sourced her own Design education by inviting experts to teach the subjects she wanted to learn. Andi also hosts events she describes as speed dating for mentoring, which give designers the opportunity to share their knowledge and learn from each other without the overhead of giving a presentation to a large group. But small sharing can lead to larger sharing, and Andi talks about how the mentors in her program come to realize that they actually know more than they thought through these interactions, and move on to become leaders in their own areas of expertise. Andi discusses how learning to delegate expanded her potential, and the importance of putting ideas out there and sharing them with more people, to build a brand and develop confidence

A lot of us might say we want to be writers. The trick is doing it sustainably, and in a way that can help sustain us. Jon Dykstra has managed to turn his desire to write into a career running profitable niche authority websites that serve the needs of people who share his own interests. He also blogs and teaches on the side, helping others who might want to follow in his footsteps. In this episode Jon will tell us how he was originally inspired by exposure to early blogging platforms while working as a lawyer, how he developed and adapted his process as the industry grew and changed around him, and how being true to his own interests keeps him motivated as he works with a team of writers and editors to build and run his publications.

Quick, explain the differences among Sales, Marketing, Engineering, and Product Management. If you work in a company with one or more of these organizations and the answer doesn't trip easily off your tongue, then you might want to listen to Rich Mironov. Rich is a Product Management expert who helps companies understand and respect the differences, and improve how these groups work together. Rich makes the case that "Product is not in charge of shipping on time, but Product is in charge of shipping the right thing that customers need and will pay for." In this episode, Rich discusses exactly how he builds and maintains his strong social network, explains how leading workshops helps him stay on top of his industry, and points out the importance of defining a problem/solution set that will allow you to sell a benefit that addresses a problem your customers actually have.