A Brilliant Gamble

Silvina Marchisio talks about her year long journey with depression and anxiety. She shares her personal experience of dealing with burnout in a foreign country and how visual thinking and visual metaphors help her share her own thoughts along her journey back to the world.

Today’s guest is Zoe Cohen, a former NHS Trust board member who became a very successful executive coach. Zoe has now pivoted her life to focus as much as she can on activism and peaceful civil disobedience to push for the much needed system change to tackle the existential threat we face from climate and ecological breakdown.

It was a life threatening illness that first got Catherine thinking about how she could earn money outside of the 9-5. Today she earns 4 times what she was earning in her corporate role and has a lifestyle that works much better with her health and personal priorities. In this interview we talk about how she started her business and how she’s grown it through her focus on constant marketing.

Failure is normal. Most of what happens when you take a Brilliant Gamble is failure. It’s just a part of the process of change. And I want to share with you a different way to think about failure and how to incorporate failure in to your business. Maybe you don’t like the word failure and you’d rather I called it something else. But I want to take the charge out of the word so that it doesn’t have the power it might have in your own mind.

Creativity is hugely important to developing that sense of balance that so many of us are looking for and so this week, I talk to Sandra and Tara from Kick in the Creatives. They have podcast of the same name, a website and a 1000 member Facebook group aimed at helping people incorporate creative challenges in to their lives.

We often think that we’re working up to a big change, that the hard part is making that change happen. So we spend years planning how we’re going to leave our job with the hope that, once it finally happens, we’ll be living the life of our dreams. When Edina De Jong-Hodzic became a mum it was a wake up call for her and although she didn’t leave her corporate job immediately a series of events made it clear to her that her future lay outside the corporate 9-5. And THAT’s when the real journey of change begun.

Brought up during apartheid in South Africa, making a difference is in Rebekah's genes.Her mother ran an illegal mixed race school, bringing children from Soweto to learn at a school with white kids and Rebekah learnt that it’s always possible to do something to change things. Today she combines her corporate career with raising the profile of flexible working, diversity, inclusion and the menopause.

This week I’m talking to podcaster and digital nomad, Debbie Arcangeles. Debbie makes money from podcasting even though she doesn't have a huge audience and she’s found a business model that allows her to live wherever she likes for as long as she likes.

There are lots of things to keep yourself busy when you run a business and many of them are important. But unless you set aside time to do the activities that get the money in you’re going to find yourself back in a 9-5 job. I learnt these lessons the hard way, by nearly going out of business because I was spending my time doing what I enjoyed most and not making sales, closing and keeping prospective clients moving through the funnel.

On this week’s show I’m sharing 10 good reasons to leave your corporate job. I’ve identified 10 really good reasons to quit the rat race. How many of them apply to you?

Today’s guest, Ursula Tavender, couldn’t find a job that that suited how she wanted to live her life as a parent—certainly not without making sacrifices she didn't want to make! So she set up her own business, helping change that story for other women.

Tim Tavender runs courses helping people create online courses but he started professional life as a PE teacher. Since then he’s pulled together pieces of experience from all over his personal and professional life to become, first a digital marketer and now an online courses expert – businesses that simply didn’t exist when he was at school. The driver for change was his family and the desire to be more present to his own health and the wellbeing of his wife and kids.

It’s all very well knowing you don’t want to carry on working and living the way you do right now. But it’s not always clear what you should do instead. If you’re unsure what to do when you escape the rat race one place to start is to think, not about what you want to DO, but what business model would work best for you. In this show I share 23 ideas for different business models so that you can start thinking about how you might set yourself up outside of the conventional 9-5.