Hack The Process: Mindful Action On Your Plans

You have to be scrappy to make it in business and in life, and nobody teaches scrappiness like Kimberly Wiefling. Hear how she went from studying Physics to working as an executive in high-tech companies to publishing books on project management and leadership for women and running her own successful business speaking and running training seminars internationally. Kimberly will share the formula she uses to structure her live presentations for maximum learning and audience engagement, and explain how important mentoring and coaching have been in her work, and tell us how she built her business one face-to-face relationship at a time.

Mindfulness might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of law school, but University of San Francisco Professor Rhonda Magee makes a compelling case for connecting the two. Rhonda believes mindfulness training for law students may be able to help the legal profession overcome a history of systemic bias, and raise awareness of the fundamental values that were always meant to be at the core of our legal system. In this episode, Rhonda will take us through a short mindfulness exercise that can fit into any busy schedule, and share the story of how she translated the religious contemplation she learned from her grandmother into a secular practice that she uses to help herself and her students stay grounded and focused.

Jina Bolton has gone from Web Design to Web Engineering and back again, so she understands what it takes to establish Design standards for a project and make them attractive, both visually and technically. In addition, Jina's talent for evangelizing has helped make her Lightning Design System for Salesforce popular both inside the company and across the open source community. Hear how she built on her community organizing skills, and went from hosting local meetups to creating Clarity, a conference all about Design Systems. Jina will tell us how organized a small team to line up speakers, solicit sponsors, and get the word out, all while still holding down a full-time job, and managing her own open source projects on the side.

A lot of people think of a coworking arrangement as renting a desk when you can't work anywhere else. But Alex Hillman, the founder of Indy Hall, sees it as an opportunity to build a community, and maybe even help define the future of professional relationships both in and out of physical space. In this episode, Alex will tell us how the loneliness of freelancing drove him to start looking for alternatives to working in isolation, what it takes to train a team to nurture solid connections, and how a third-grade experience with fish sticks got him started down the path toward changing the world one relationship at a time.

When Ashe Dryden gets angry, she does something about it. She writes, she speaks, she tweets, she hosts conferences such as AlterConf, and she organizes fundraising programs. And as an engineer who knows what it's like to be a member of a marginalized group, the issue at the heart of Ashe's anger is diversity awareness in the tech and gaming industries. Ashe's outspoken activism has gotten her a lot of attention, both positive and negative, but she manages to find balance in her own life by maintaining friends and hobbies outside of the tech world, and paying attention to her own needs while fighting for the needs of others. Hear how Ashe turned herself into an expert and an internet celebrity, how she structures her time, and how she applied new learnings along with the skills she already had when she got started.

Instead of asking what people do, Jenny Feinberg advises us to ask people what they're working on, what they're struggling with, or even what they need help with. That's one of the core ideas behind the quiet tribe Jenny's building with her pop-up co-working community, Make Space. Jenny took her background in feminist theory and political science and applied it to the real issues she saw in her community in San Francisco. In this interview, Jenny tells us how she incorporates rejection into her process, how she makes a space that welcomes both introverts and extroverts, and how owning her own shortcomings helps her delegate more effectively.

I first came across Daniel Coffeen when I listened to his popular 2008 Rhetoric class after the entire semester of lectures was made available online for free by UC Berkeley. His powerful and enthusiastic approach to teaching a traditional academic subject impressed me, and I've been following his career ever since--or at least I thought I had been. As I found out in this interview, there's more to this philosopher, blogger, writer, podcaster, and teacher than I ever knew. In this episode Daniel tells us how he stays motivated after more than a decade freelancing, and how he knits together the seemingly unrelated strands of his successful and distinctive career.

Our guest for this first episode of season two of Hack the Process is Alex Cespedes, who hosts Wits About You, a topic-driven podcast for freelancers in their twenties and thirties about the soft skills in life that their parents and teachers may not have warned them they'd need in order to succeed. But the advice Alex shares is applicable to anyone facing the confusion and uncertainty of making their way in the current economy. Alex tells us how the idea for his show's distinctively clean and crisp radio-like format was inspired by his own struggle to embrace, rather than overcome, one of his personal challenges. He'll also tell us how he made his show appealing enough that sponsors started reaching out to him, and how he both both built and built upon his personal network to attract guests like Marketing guru Seth Godin.

The previous episode of Hack the Process marked the end of the first season. At this point, I thought it would be a good idea to take an episode to review what I’ve discussed with the different guests, and share a little more about what my motivation was to create this podcast and put it out into the world. I’ll also tell you a little bit about what I was expecting from this podcast, and compare it to what actually came out. (I’ll give you a hint: it was a delightful surprise.) First of all, I want to thank all my guests from the first season: Tracy DeLuca, Adam Siddiq, Pace Smith, Paula Jenkins, Malek Banoun, Vinay Patankar, Alex De Simone, Andrew Nance, Ron Lichty, Ankit Shah, Hampton Catlin, Tara Byrne, and Ryan Waggoner. I don’t know if you fully understood what you were getting yourselves into when we started, but I appreciate each of you being so candid and open with our interviews. Your generosity and honesty made the season what it was. One of the things I like to bring to my work no matter where I’

Freelancing can be tough, but after nine years consulting as a mobile developer, Ryan Waggoner has learned some ways to make it more approachable from the start, and more profitable as your business grows. Ryan still consults with clients directly on mobile projects while also running LetsMakeApps.io, a curated daily lead service that helps other freelancers find new opportunities in design and development for web and mobile. In this interview he shares with us the patterns he's built into his daily routine to make sure his top priorities are always addressed first, where to put the focus when planning a new project, and why he thinks charging by the hour is a disservice to both the client and the freelancer.

On this episode of Hack the Process we talk with Tara Byrne, a powerhouse in the field of social entrepreneurship, organizing events and helping to launch startups with a common theme of supporting both personal and professional development for people who want to make a positive difference in the world. Her inspiration to establish Under 30 Changemakers has become a worldwide movement, which she shepherds through her passion for collaborating , and the art of productive procrastination. In this show, Tara tells us the three keys she's found to effective marketing, how she uses social Aikido to make sure everyone wins in any confrontation, and how liberating declaring a failure can be at the right time.

In all likelihood you have visited a website built using techniques pioneered by my guest this week, Hampton Catlin. Among his other accomplishments, Hampton created the mobile site for Wikipedia, and invented web development languages such as Haml and Sass that revolutionized the way the modern web is built. Hampton credits his outsider perspective, growing up gay in Florida, for challenging him to see problems differently, and recognize solutions that seem obvious only in retrospect. And fair warning; Hampton uses a lot of jargon specific to the world of web development in this episode. If that squicks you, try to imagine he's using terms from any other industry you understand where people work together to build something. That may help you relate to Hampton's stories about the confidence to see how your own weird ideas can help real people, provide real value, and change the world.

You might not see the concept of spending an hour or so chatting with strangers over tea as a business opportunity, but maybe you will after you listen to Ankit Shah, Founder & CEO of Tea With Strangers, tell us how he discovered and recognized the real need for his unusual organization by accident. Ankit thoughtfully frames his perspective on the difference between a traditional business with company values posted on their "about us" page, and the truly values-driven structure that emerges when something the world needs attracts and supports the people who tend it and bring it into existence. You'll hear how Ankit keeps himself motivated, how he measures the success of Tea With Strangers, and why he wouldn't go back and try to change the mistakes he might have made along the way.

In this episode of Hack the Process we chat with Ron Lichty, who discovered his passion for technology early on, when he realized that programming in assembly language was easier for him than writing in English. And he knows the difference because he’s also worked as a journalist and published several books with co-authors. His most recent book, Managing the Unmanageable, is about how effective management can help software engineers achieve the ecstatic state of flow that Ron says coding in a productive environment can produce. We ask Ron about how he gravitated toward management despite his enthusiasm for programming, how and why he took his career from full-time employee to independent consultant, and what his experiences writing with co-authors have taught him about collaboration.

Andrew Nance is a Mindful Practitioner who enjoys bringing the gift of using the breath to focus the mind and body to classrooms of students as young four and five years old. And if you giggled just now trying to imagine a group of kindergarteners practicing mindfulness, you need to hear Andrew describe his experiences teaching children to breathe quietly, all the while thinking to themselves, "with this breath my mind grows stronger so I can focus a little longer." Andrew relates the practice of mindfulness to his own experience with theater arts, and discusses pursuing his passion amid the practicalities of work in the nonprofit sector. He'll also tell you a little about his upcoming line of children's books, which might be able to teach all of us how to relate to our inner puppy minds.

Alex De Simone is a serial entrepreneur who helped found the popular job search site Jobr, and is currently launching his second company, CallerZen. And he’s still just in his second year of an MBA program at Stanford. Find out his opinions about the relevance of business school in the current business climate. And check out the links and the video in the show notes on HackTheProcess.com if you want to find out about Alex’s role as lead vocalist for 90’s cover band Cloning Dolly, which he says is run as a RaaS startup - and that’s rock-as-a-service!

In this episode we hear from Vinay Patankar, the CEO of Process Street, an online service to help businesses set up intuitive training programs for tasks and processes using checklist-based workflows that can be sequenced, shared, and reproduced in parallel. Vinay tells us how Process Street works, and shares how the lessons he learned from earlier experiences starting companies helped guide him. He'll tell us about launching his company through AngelPad, finding his cofounder in a hostel in Buenos Aires, and how he suspects that failing to do enough user testing might have helped bring down his last company.

In this episode, we hear some wise words from Coach Malek Banoun, a fitness and life coach combining physical training with support for personal goal setting and continuous learning. Malek tells us how he overcame his shyness as a child, and emerged with the confidence to face his fears head-on, preferring to sprint directly toward them as soon as he recognizes them instead of running away! He also reveals his secret to measuring success, and here's a hint: it doesn't have anything to do with results that are out of your control. Find Malek online: Website: http://www.malekbanoun.com/ The Coach Malek Show: http://www.malekbanoun.com/category/the-coach-malek-show/ Instagram: http://instagram.com/malekbanoun Snapchat: @malekb Twitter: http://twitter.com/malekbanoun

In this episode we chat with Paula Jenkins, a transformational life coach with a background in project management who decided to apply her practical experience to the universal quest for joy. She's also the host of a podcast called Jumpstart Your Joy, where she talks with people about the ways they make joy part of their lives. We'll find out who her top fantasy podcast guests are, how she reconciles her work and her family life, and she'll teach us the most joyful technique ever for responding to failure. You can find out more about Paula here: Website: http://paulajenkinsonline.com/

This episode we talk with Pace Smith, a pathfinding coach who helps sensitive spiritual nonconformists live wild crazy meaningful lives. We'll find out more about how she bridges the profound with the practical. Pace will tell us what pathfinding means, and how the motivation to seek and reconnect regularly with your own path relates to balancing both material and spiritual life practices. She'll also explain how the fun she has writing limericks fits into her routine.