Anaïs Comot is owner of HerCode Podcast and HerCommunity. In this episode, she tells her story about how she is originally from France and the corporate journey that led her to London where she is now a career strategist who helps women build a career they're truly happy with. Coming from a procurement and consultancy background, she has made multiple career transitions herself and experienced the struggles associated with a career that is not fulfilling, even impacting her own health and other aspects of her life. She has found connection with other expats who are living and/or working abroad and the unique set of challenges that comes with that. Ultimately, she is enjoying the freedom she can have to travel back home with the option to work from a traveling home office while visiting friends and family on occasion.Anaïs has worked with 200+ professionals from various backgrounds and industries, generally meeting with her clients in 1-on-1 online coaching sessions, but she also offers group coaching and runs HerCommunity virtually as a free space that includes weekly resources available to anyone looking to make the most out of their careers. She strongly believes that life is too short to fill unfulfilled at work and actively supports her community through various channels, including the HerCode podcast in addition to HerCommunity.Anaïs can be found in the following places:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anaiscomot/Website: https://www.hercode.co.uk/

Joe Gallant is from Kent, England, and he is the owner of Be Gallant where he designs websites and other content and helps create visual identities for small startup businesses and charities. His passion is helping people and organizations to find their voice online, through effective branding and quality content.In this episode, Joe tells his experience of how he has worked for a variety of small companies and also churches and how his family recently made a move from a coastal location back to closer to home now that he has a wife and young daughter and dog and what it was like to build a home office that was more intentional this time around. Joe is officially leaving some of his former part-time and in-person work in order to dedicate his attention to his remote business at this time.Joe recommends finding ways to make a workspace enjoyable to be in and personally finds that starting his day with prayer and meditation sets his day on the right path. Joe believes if someone can find what works for them in terms of a routine, they can discover more productive times of day but don’t sweat it if it doesn’t always go to plan.You can find out more about Joe and his work at begallant.ukInstagram: Jgchurchcomms

Kelly McGinley, from Mechanicsburg, PA, is the principal consultant and owner of her company Function & Flow where she serves as a productivity specialist who loves to explore different tools and tactics for time and task management. She comes from a background of working in a remote job where she was working long hours and felt overloaded and working all the time and has transitioned to her new role where she has much more autonomy over how and when she works which has shifted her balance so that it feels so much closer to the perfect fit. In this episode, Kelly discusses how she organizes her work day and how she has had to combat letting her work bleed into the rest of her life life, especially when she didn't plan her downtime. She has put defaults in place so she can do a better job of enjoying life outside of work as well. She and her spouse have both been working from home, and she tells the story about how she's accidentally trapped her husband on one end of the house while conducting meetings in a shared space. Kelly offers productivity coaching for people and project managers and has actually just published her book Start With Better Meetings, a tool for managers of any kind of team, but especially practical for those leading remote and hybrid teams with an aim to help foster more effective meetings and ultimately restore about 2-3 hours of usable time to a given work week while still making steady progress toward goals and deliverables. She often meets with small teams remotely to work on meeting management and also offers group and individual sessions on calendar and time management help as well as assistance with task prioritization and teaches reflection. Her Procrastination to Action Package focuses primarily on identifying "procrastination preference," roadblocks, distractions, key goals, and a path to consistently make progress toward those goals. She comes with a rich history of working with nonprofits and other organizations including connecting classrooms to communities, designing productivity strategies for corporations and non-profits, and turning a maximum-security cell block into an award-winning, tail-wagging incubator for compassionate change at the HOPE Dogs Program. Kelly has spent the last 25 years designing and building programs, partnerships, and place-based projects and is a professional member of the National Association of Productivity and Organization Professionals (NAPO) where she serves on the Education Advisory Committee.Ever on the hunt for the best remote-work tools, Kelly has decided that ClickUp is her favorite app for managing multi-stage projects and loves how she can map a project any way she likes and then have reminders automatically integrate with her Google calendar. Kelly can be found on her website: https://www.findfunctionandflow.comInstagram: @findfunctionandflow

Steve Mellor is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA and he is owner and executive coach of Career Competitor LLC for 2 Years. His "first & final 30" advice is his key to every day where, in order to maximize productivity and mental health, he focuses on how he uses the first and final 30 minutes of his day in order to make the most of his time. In this episode, Steve shares how he feels that having commitments that intentionally pull you away from your desk throughout the week are vital for social reasons and to provide some variety for certain tasks.As an executive coach, Steves's motto is "pursue your optimal self," and he likes to bring everything back to clients who work from home to the importance of serving the optimal self. He works with clients currently on ensuring they are focused on their optimal selves so they can build a workday and lifestyle that embodies their growth of it. To this end, Steve wrote a book called "SHOCK THE WORLD! A Competitor's Guide to Realizing Your Potential" which could certainly be a powerful resource to anyone looking to better lead their work-from-home lifestyle. Steve actually has almost 2 decades of experience working with elite performers within high-performance environments as an olympic swim coach, and he talks about how Covid-19 helped push him into coaching for business execs and more. Whether in his role as an executive coach, culture consultant, speaker, or author, Steve’s work targets bringing the best out of individuals, while ensuring teams and organizations are optimized through the process. This native of England, former top-50 world-ranked swimmer, husband, father, and lifelong competitor is driven to pursue his optimal self by working with those that are eager to do the same.Email: Steve@careercompetitor.com Website: Careercompetitor.comInstagram: @Coach_Steve_M

Jill Wright is is an author, podcaster, and coach at Grow Like a Mother based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has two gigs and is currently commuting into the city for her corporate job while building up her coaching business with an eye toward perhaps eventually transitioning out of her 9-5 to focus solely on her own business. In this episode, Jill shares some time management and productivity tips for working mothers, including those who juggle things as work-from-home mamas. Jill shares some tips that might be of use, especially to single moms and those with shared custody, and gives some of her own advice about how she has managed her time around her family's unique schedule which, for her, sometimes means that her down time and a chance to decompress happens on her commute to her day job so that she has more time for focus on her coaching business and clients when she's working from home.Jill has dedicated the last 4 years to personal development as she grew her business and taught others how to achieve alignment and balance in all of their roles through a variety of techniques. She does have free workshops, digital courses, and offers 1:1 and group coaching, and is willing to share her free 5-day video series. She is an entrepreneur-turned-life coach focused on helping moms achieve alignment with themselves and balance in all areas of their lives.Jill can be found in the following places:Website:  www.livingwithheart.caPodcast: Grow Like A MotherInstagram: @growlikeamother

Jessica Rhys-Griffith, from Shropshire, UK, is a work/life coach for female "mum" executives who are feeling not quite good enough. She helps her clients get to a place where they feel, calm, and confidently in control of their lives as the role model they want to be for their children and the leader they want to be in their professional life. In this episode, Jessica shares insight on her own journey coming from a corporate world where she was considered a key player in senior management to working from home for the same organization (1 day a week was adjusted to 5 days a week starting in 2020), and then the more recent transition to working for herself. She shares some of her personal experiences as she's made the shift and how she can now turn around and help others, including remote executives, in making their day-to-day better. She comes from the perspective of being someone who has had to juggle the challenges of building a supportive and positive home environment for herself and her child while handling the increasing demands and expectations of an executive role in what has become an increasingly volatile world. At the beginning of her remote-work life, Jessica experienced some discomfort with the changes and experienced some of the ups and downs but has worked to minimize the negative aspects and enjoy a more balanced life.Jessica now runs JRG Coaching, Ltd, and her coaching is centered around health and positivity, time management, and manageable to-do lists. She offers tips for connecting with children and different ways to keep them motivated in the home environment. Jessica enjoys being able to walk her child home from school in the afternoons and has just planned for that as part of her daily routine. Some of her strategies also include heading to a local coffee shop for a change of scenery and ensuring she has meetings scheduled to help with motivation and keeping engaged. She speaks about adjusting her mindset and being present for family and changes she made to herself as a leader to ensure that she keeps positive and energized. When she made key decisions around being clear on what kind of life she wanted for herself and her daughter, by setting boundaries, asking the right people for help, and changing aspects of how I worked, she found a way to enjoy home and work and even find time for herself!Jessica has always been motivated by working with individuals and teams to achieve their best and wants to take what she's learned to support others in similar situations to find their way to be their best selves and be successful at home and work. She does offer a 30-minute free consultation (with no obligation) to do a work/life balance audit and provides some practical tips that people can start to implement. Jessica can be found in the following places:jessica@jessicarhys-griffith.comhttps://jessicarhys-griffith.com/

Shane Spraggs left his role in the office at the start of the pandemic and joined Virtira, a Canadian company that helps organizations work without boundaries by optimizing their remote teams and processes. Virtira had been working remotely since 2007. It was interesting for him to learn their best practices while remote work was evolving as a result of the pandemic. He is now the CEO of Virtira. He lives in PST a few hours from Vancouver, but most of his team is out East, and the company serves teams in the USA as well.In this episode, Shane talks about his experiences working remotely as a CEO. He is passionate about remote management, strategic planning, and culture. They have a "no meeting Friday" policy at their company that is followed, for the most part. If someone can book at least a week in advance, they'll be guaranteed to be able to pick any time of day. He feels that at this point in his career and his role, he has a pretty good handle on being able to moderate his work with everything else and enjoys how he has the flexibility to go for a morning hike with friends every morning and can fit in the occasional urgent project. He shares some of his remote-work advice: "Don't eat at your desk - it's far too easy to overeat, plus you miss an opportunity to take a break." He's also a fan actually using his sit-stand desk. Shane has been driving successful projects for a variety of notable media and software start-ups for 25 years. Shane recently co-authored a book with Cynthia Watson, The Power of Remote, which just launched on February 7, 2023. Virtira's website offers a remote readiness assessment that reviews an organization's fitness for remote work.Connect via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-spraggs/Virtira website: Virtira.comhttps://books.forbes.com/books/the-power-of-remote/

Janet McKenna Lowry is a small business owner running Massachusetts Tax School for Practitioners out of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Janet says that she is not a tax expert and never was particularly confident in her math skills, but she's learned that preparing taxes is more about organization, and there's very little math involved. There's a huge demand for the work despite more and more people having access to the software to do it themselves, droves of people would still rather pay for help. It's a great field for anyone who needs flexibility (moms, artists, people who want to travel so many months out of the year, gig workers who have a slow season, etc). Janet and her business partner had been running their course onsite at a local university but moved everything to an online format with the blessing of the IRS during the pandemic, and they've decided to keep it online as it offers more flexibility to the attendees. She's now wearing multiple hats as CFO, webmaster, marketing, registrar, and operations. This tax school partners with tax experts who teach the courses to meet the 72 hours of continuing education hours tax preparers are required to complete every 3 years. In this episode, Janet shares how the topic of tax preparation has become an especially exciting one, because she's helping get people access to flexible work in a way she wishes she had earlier in her life, like when she had younger children. There's actually an extreme deficit of tax preparers as many of the people in the field are entering their retirement years, so if people want flexible work or to just work 3-4 months out of the year, this is a great field to look at (and it can be lucrative too, especially for those who go on their own and/or take the extra steps to do business taxes and trusts and estates). Some big name tax preparation sites do require their employees to have a degree, but it's actually something that is available to people with or without high school diplomas or college degrees as the methods can be learned just by working alongside someone in the field and learning online, keeping up with the continuing education hours. Some people do go into accounting to have more consistent work throughout the year, but it's not necessary.Janet has actually been living the dream working from home on and off in different capacities for about 10 years, and currently she has gotten it to where she has a busy season where she's working 40 hours a week for a few months while they're putting on their course and then it relaxes down to about 25 hours a week for the rest of the year where she focuses coaching and consulting around being a better boss, skills like learning boundaries and negotiation skills as an employee. She went back to school at age 50 and earned her MBA from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Janet can be reached through her website at:Massachusetts Tax School for Practitioners mtsfp.comShe also has a podcast Working 9 to Thrive: https://working9tothrive.com/

Justin James owns Let Your Nerd Be Heard where he operates as a virtual event producer out of a home office in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Justin offers oversight and technical support to make virtual events run smoothly for his clients, who are often entrepreneurs, speakers, authors, course creators, and coaches. Justin is brilliant with making Zoom look good and work well for his clients with all the bells and whistles. He helps with transitions and monitors the chat and managing any technical support issues that come up for guests so that the presenters can simply do the talking and still look and sound professional.In this episode, Justin talks about his work-from-home journey. He's worked from home for 9 of the last 23 years, first for 4 years, was back in the office for awhile, and then now fully remote again for the past 5 years. He currently has a three-monitor desk for his long-term day job work as a software developer and another with more like 9 monitors in the same office for his other production projects. He has a red and green busy light outside the office that functions as an "on-air" light, so that his family knows when they can enter the office and when to knock to ask to enter.Justin also offers event mentoring services. He has ranked 4 times as an Amazon International Best Selling Author and currently has an upcoming project, a course called The Tech Made E.A.S.Y. Solution: How to Keep Your Focus on Your Content, Offer, and Coaching, Not On Complicated Tech which can be found soon on his Let Your Nerd Be Heard website.Justin James can be found in the following places: Website: https://letyournerdbeheard.comBlog: https://blog.letyournerdbeheard.com/Facebook: facebook.com/letyournerdbeheard

Todd Paulsmeyer is a former software developer and consultant who has turned to product development of some innovative baby nail clippers he’s selling on Amazon. He works from a home office and his garage workshop in Denver Colorado but is looking at expanding to outsourcing more of the manufacturing process once his production really takes off. He is building on his problem solving strategy from his previous line of work and applying the concept of working with experts for business strategy and leaning on the expertise of some coaches as he embarks on this new project. Todd has worked from home longer than a lot of people, with more than 3 decades working as a software developer, more or less logging on from a home office since 2003 when the internet was still just gaining popularity in private homes. For 28, years he was working as an independent consultant, working for large and small projects for big clients such as IBM, The State of Utah, The State of Alaska, General Motors, and the New York Transit Authority. He was managing and running his own software business for time tracking that tens of thousands of work-at-home consultants were using but, ultimately, went into consulting and is now dedicated to bringing the safest nail clippers in the world to help parents trim the nails of their tiny infants without risk of causing injuries and pain.Todd's invention, LuvClip nail clippers, has been awarded seals of excellence by three organizations who recognize safe and effective products for parents to use on their children and are getting good reviews from parents of young children and other caregivers. He attributes the development of this product to working from home when his children were first born because it allowed him to be more involved with their care including trimming their teeny-tiny nails. He painfully became aware of how all of the baby nail clippers on the market suffered from major design flaws which resulted in both him and his wife accidentally injuring their newborns fingertips even while trying to clip their baby's nails as carefully as possible. Working from home now, his time is split between preparing the LuvClip nail clippers for distribution versus the business development and marketing aspect of an entrepreneurial business selling physical products instead of services. With the change in workflow, Todd manages his time by exercising first thing in the morning to set the tone for the day and then utilizing Focusmate while he’s in the office to help minimize distractions. You can find Todd in the following places: Facebook: www.facebook.com/luvclipWebsite: www.luvclip.com

Anna Burgess Yang is a former product manager turned freelance content marketer, journalist, and workflow consultant from Chicago. She is passionate about educating and equipping people to take control of their remote work lives and their careers. Anna has been working from home for 16 years now and currently works from home full-time, which for her is about 25 hours per week. She's worked in different settings in the past and appreciated the results oriented workflow and prioritizes working efficiently now to get a lot done in a short time rather than feeling a need to sit at her desk 40 hours a week. In the past, she was at one time the only remote employee, then she was with a company that transitioned to fully remote, and she's worked for a company with global remote employees. She's experienced different work flows and worked synchronously and asynchronously and even hired new remote employees. This all helped Anna build foundational knowledge about "what works and what doesn't work" for her.In this episode, Anna tells a few stories including one about a cat who likes to get into the ceiling and another about how she first started working from home which involved quitting her job to take a new job, with her boss letting her work from home to keep her with the company. Awhile back, she wrote a LinkedIn post about remote work and her husband quitting his job when his employer ordered him back into the office, and he decided to get a different job instead, one that allowed him to continue to work remotely as they both like to be able to share in the kid-related stuff that comes up during the day. They've noticed some differences in expectations from remote employers with some being more flexible (small companies) and others requiring people to be on camera and in meetings all day. Anna now works for herself and prefers to embrace flexibility which allows her to maintain a good balance, even when she goes to pick up her children in the middle of the day or go grocery shopping on a Friday morning. She doesn't think about working early or late as an inconvenience, because she knows she is taking control over her own life.In her work as a workflow consultant, Anna helps solopreneurs and small businesses automate workflow with tools like Zapier. She writes about working remotely in her Substack as well. Anna's goal is to educate others about remote work, the future of work, and how work can be better. She typically focuses on writing about fintech and product-led content. She's found many collaboration tools to make remote work easier now, including project management tools, video tools for asynchronous communication, etc, that didn't exist when she first started working from home.You can find Anna in the following places:Website: https://annabyang.com/Twitter: https://annabyang.com/Gumroad with free resources for solopreneurs: https://annabyang.gumroad.com/Substack: https://annabyang.substack.com/The Linkedin post that went viral (4 million views) and got picked up by LinkedIn's Talent Blog: Why Professionals Quit to Find Flexible Work:  https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-engagement/viral-post-highlights-why-professionals-quit-to-find-flexible-work

Christine Reed is an author and freelancer who has traveled extensively around the states in three different vans as part of the vanlife movement, and she's looking forward to partnering soon with a company that builds out vans for people who intend to travel and live in them as opposed to RVs or other styles of tiny homes. She loves the rugged outdoors and long-distance backpacking and wrote her first book, a memoir titled Alone in Wonderland. In her book and in talks at events such as TinyFest, REI and other outdoorsy supply stores, Christine shares her personal journey from sedentary office worker/retail worker to a lifestyle of freedom and adventure. Christine likes to inspire people to see something bigger for themselves but is also quick to share about her own struggles with loneliness at times on the road or trail and how she's come to find ways of embracing some of that discomfort and connecting with her own self as well as with others.In this episode, Christine talks about what it's been like to be a self-published author on tour during a global pandemic and how that's affected the timeline of her book tour while also running a freelance business as a writer and social media manager. She does work from her home base in the Denver and sometimes Phoenix area, sometimes a few weeks or a month at a time. When she went from hiking extensively on the Appalachian and Wonderland Trail to staying somewhere different nearly every night while on tour, it was socially and physically exhausting for her as someone who tends toward the introverted side. She's learned to balance the amount of time she travels with the amount of time she can spend outdoors and working and resting. Her days are often spent at libraries and coffee shops for wifi, and she generally has signal and access to wifi as she generally stays close to metropolitan areas when she's working. Christine loves the freedom that her vanlife lifestyle has allowed, but she recommends that people who are considering it for the first time go ahead and rent a van first to see if it's something that they really want to invest in, most people know within the first 6 months if it's sustainable for them.Some of the tools and tips that Christine recommends for working remotely, and specifically while on the road to some extent, include keeping a structured calendar to avoid work creeping into free time and scheduling Zoom sessions with work-from-home and other vanlife friends for accountability and socialization. Her book was really a sort of a catalyst for her to get where she is now. It was the first move into a more alternative lifestyle, and she wouldn't be working remotely without it; but the book, at the same time, also helps give her the freedom to keep hiking every year. She intends to write her second book soon, so stay tuned!Christine can be found in the following places:Instagram or Tiktok: @ruggedoutdoorswomane-mail: ruggedoutdoorswoman@gmail.comwebsite: https://www.aloneinwonderland.com/

Jillian Yetter is a former high school English Teacher turned Audiobook Narrator who is based out of Delaware with her family. She loved working in the classroom but was strongly encouraged by a doctor to find a different profession so she could focus on her health; and, after a short stint baking macarons for parties, she discovered she could make a career out of reading books as a voice actor/narrator. Jillian dug in and started recording and engineering around 30 of her own books before hiring an editor to help more with the postproduction side and has been a narrator now for 4 years with about 80 titles in that time. She has a warm, bright voice with a youthful tone perfect for narrating young adult and new adult titles, and she uses a pseudonym if publishing anything over a PG13 rating.In this episode, Jillian explains that audiobook narrating takes quite a number of hours of work, researching, and editing for each hour of published audio. She been able to balance working while her kids are at school or sleeping. For those who are considering audiobook narration, she recommends doing the research as there is more to it than most realize at first. However, it is an industry that offers more flexibility than many others which has worked very well for her and her family. She typically schedules out her books with a turnaround date about three months in the future, and this gives her enough time to meet her deadlines even when she becomes sick or has a health complication, and she can accept jobs and record on her own schedule while still caring for her kids before and after school and in the summertime.Jillian has moved from recording in a closet to her very own in-home recording studio built by her husband, and she's upgraded her equipment a few times over the last couple of years as well (currently recording with a Neumann TLM 102 microphone). In order to give herself accountability while working on her own schedule, Jillian uses Focusmate or sometimes records live on TikTok, and she has joined groups for those in the audiobook industry and works with a mentor and coach for business growth. She is a member of the APA (Audio Publishers Association) and PANA (Professional Audiobook Narrators Association) and has worked with publishers such as Tantor, Brilliance, The Audio Flow, and Bloomsbury Publishing.If you'd like to reach out to Jillian, you can find her on the contact form of her website or on Tiktok.TikTok @jillianyetternarratorhttps://www.facebook.com/JYetter.Narrations/https://www.jillianyetternarrator.com/

Karen Cole lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is an experienced attorney who works from a home office. After law school, Karen clerked for a state Supreme Court justice, and then for a U.S. district court judge. These judicial clerkships provided a solid foundation for a career in civil litigation. After her clerkships, Karen practiced law, first as an associate and then a partner at a large law firm, and then as an associate and a partner for a medium-sized firm. Now Karen has her own firm, Premium Legal Writing. She works with other lawyers on their cases, thinking through strategies, doing legal research and drafting motion documents and appellate court briefs.More and more lawyers are finding that they don’t need to work in law firms with brick and mortar offices. Karen says that most of the resources she needs for her practice are available via the internet. When she was in law school, students and lawyers used hard cover books to do legal research. Online legal research services are now readily available. Karen subscribes to a legal research service that she says is top notch. Zoom and other virtual services make meetings with other lawyers and clients easy. The pandemic led many more lawyers to work from home offices or in virtual offices. During the pandemic, bar associations started to make meetings and continuing education classes available electronically. Depositions in preparation for a trial that used to be held in an office are now handled electronically. And many court proceedings now take place via Zoom or a service like that. The shift to electronic meetings and court hearings that was necessitated by the pandemic will continue into the future. Electronic resources make connecting with people much more cost-effective than brick and mortar alternatives. That helps those working in the legal system generally, but particularly those who work from home offices. Karen discusses these and other issues in this podcast.For more about Karen or to reach her, go to her website: www.premiumlegalwriting.com

Marshall O'Leary is known as Mister Marshall in his city of Richmond, Virginia, where he was a traveling music teacher for many years. However, in the last three years, once he switched to online lessons for pandemic purposes, he decided to teach online only. Marshall has retained some of his original local students who have made the switch but is now expanding to accept students from other regions who, for whatever reason, also prefer online lessons. Teaching remotely has not only saved time and gas money, but he's appreciated some other nuances as well, such as not being limited to working with students who are within driving distance only, the ease of arranging make-up lessons when someone has a conflict, as well as having his own piano in his studio so he can play along with his students.In this lesson, Marshall shares some tips for online music students. In the first few online music lessons, he and his students (sometimes with the help of parents) work to establish preferred camera angles and get familiar with the technology. It eventually becomes second nature in future lessons once everyone knows how to get the camera set up correctly so both teacher and student can hear each other properly. Marshall has learned it's completely worth taking the extra time to get these set up so that it's easy to see and hear at least 90% of what's happening in the lesson. This cuts down on having to repeat himself or the student missing a concept because they couldn't see or hear well or vice versa. Another tip for online teachers is to make sure that your marketing is such that the clients/students know that you only teach remotely to find clients who are looking for the same thing to avoid a mismatch, as it's so much better to teach to someone who expects and wants lessons online than someone who is settling for online when they really want in-person lessons.Marshall O'Leary has been teaching for 17 years and playing music for 39 years. He plays and teaches the guitar, piano, and saxophone and also performs with his band, Glass Twin (they make music similar to what might happen if Pink Floyd met Radiohead). Currently, he is teaching out of his home, which is also a home recording studio called Rabid Ears Recording, run by his friend. Marshall can currently be found in most places under Mister Marshall Music but will soon be adjusting more of his branding to his name, Marshall O'Leary.If you'd like to reach out to Marshall, you can find him in the following places:Email:  marshall@mistermarshallmusic.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mistermarshallmusicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/marshalloleary/Rabid Ears Recording: https://www.facebook.com/rabidearsrecording/

Renee Seevers has lived in a tiny home for several years and is now in a “shorty” school bus. Renee is the CEO, a.k.a. crazy event organizer of TinyFest. This event helps give people exposure to more options for their life, a gathering for people who live in or want to consider living in tiny homes on wheels or on land. In this episode, Renee talks about how her lifestyle with a tiny house on wheels gives her a chance to explore all over west of the Mississippi without ever really needing to pack. She loves how she can drive to work at a coffee shop and pop back into her house to make lunch. She’s become an expert in adjusting and adapting to each situation, including the neverending changes in technology and ways to connect to the internet for work. She sometimes stays in one location for six weeks to six months to get to know the area and meet some people or prepare for her next event. Now that she’s recently married, she’s sharing the living space, but her husband works primarily outside and doesn’t need desk space. Currently, she and her husband have a home base in Oregon on 160 acres of land where the short 5-window bus is their home. Renee hasn’t always lived in a tiny house. After living and maintaining a 3300 square foot, five bedroom, four bathroom house – Renee decided in 2015 to sell it all after her youngest daughter was heading to college. She bought her first tiny home on wheels – an 87 sqft home nicknamed “Big R” she towed with her truck and took to a few festivals in 2016. She kept thinking, “We need to have more of these festivals because it gives people a great way to experience tiny living, ask questions, and see things in person.” Renee has met a lot of entrepreneurs and remote work folks through TinyFest and is part of the tiny living community herself. She recommends that everyone “enjoy the quest for balance and the quest to understand what that balance is for you and at which point along the work/life scale you are most happiest now. It will likely change later, so be ready to go with the flow!”For Renee, the idea of “Going Tiny” is more than just buying and moving into a moveable home. It’s about fun, sustainability, autonomy, flexibility, and freedom--financial freedom, freedom of mobility, freedom from stuff and stress. At the TinyFest events, they have two stages with people teaching about the tiny living lifestyle; because she feels that, more important than simply buying or building a tiny house, Renee wants to help others understand they can create a life that serves them well - including topics of housing, travel & entrepreneurship. TinyFest started in the midwest, in Des Moines, Iowa, and has branched out to TinyFest California, TinyFest Northwest, TinyFest Texas & TinyFest Southwest. TinyFest is a great place to explore alternative living options for work-from-home people. There are two upcoming events on December 3 & 4 in Phoenix, Arizona, at WestWorld (Scottsdale). The next one will be on March 11 & 12 in San Diego, California, at Del Mar Fairgrounds.If you’d like to learn more about Renee, TinyFest, or see who is going to be at her next event, you can find her in the following places:Website: http://tinyfest.eventsEmail: info@tinyfest.eventsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TinyFestEvents

For the last few years, Jason Dion was running his cybersecurity training business, Dion Training, from his guest room in his home in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. However, his remote-first company recently acquired office space near Orlando, Florida, where he and his family are now located. Although he does appreciate moving his office and recording equipment from his house to a shared location, he continues to work with his employees and contractors in six countries using primarily remote-work strategies. Some of these strategies include asynchronous communication using Slack and offering flexible work hours for everyone, except for their once-weekly meeting. Jason makes his own hours and still works from home on occasion; so, he feels like he has tremendous flexibility, even as the lead instructor and founder of a growing business.In this episode, Jason shares how he transitioned from a naval officer to a college professor. He has worked as a network engineer, director of network operations and security center, and as an information systems officer for large organizations around the globe. He eventually needed more flexibility with his schedule, which led to him teaching cybersecurity courses on Udemy. Between the basic Udemy courses and the more robust courses on his website, his training program has grown to 1 million students. Dion Training now prepares students for IT, project management, and cybersecurity certificates. Many people who go through this training program will end up in remote-work positions, as IT work lends itself well to working from a home office.Jason explains that there are dozens of roles within the cybersecurity realm, with something for nearly every personality type. Of note, most entry-level cybersecurity positions do not require a college degree, so he encourages high schoolers and recent high school graduates to seek experience in an IT help desk situation while earning certificates so they can enter a career position making $70-200k within a couple of years. Job seekers need to obtain specific certificates for different fields, and sometimes a combination of more than one is required. Jason personally holds multiple information technology professional certifications, including Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Certified Network Defense Architect (CNDA), Digital Forensic Examiner (DFE), Digital Media Collector (DMC), CySA+, Security+, Network+, A+, PRINCE2 Practitioner, and ITIL, among others. He also holds a master of science degree in information technology, specializing in information assurance, but he reminds the listeners that the bachelor’s and master’s level degrees are usually only needed for management and higher positions. Dion Training does offer a track that includes career counseling which is especially useful for those who are pivoting their careers. Anyone who would like to hear more about how to get into cybersecurity can find Jason and the podcast Your Cyber Path and can also contact him through his website with the same name.Jason’s podcast and contact info can all be found on his website: https://www.yourcyberpath.com/Some products that he and his team use and recommend include Descript and Restream. Descript website: https://www.descript.com/ Restream website: https://restream.io/

Erin Tennant of Columbus, Ohio, is the owner of Grow Well Coaching. She is a mindset and weight loss coach for wellness who meets remotely with her network of local clients and those from other regions. She built her coaching business after losing 130 pounds to share how she's transformed her mindset from reactive, ready to sit on the couch eating, to an intentional mindset that doesn't automatically think about food, even when she goes through the kitchen. In this episode, Erin shares how she has built a routine for herself where she practices time blocking for her morning and afternoon work schedule and then takes a two-hour lunch each day to get out of the house and hit the gym. Time blocking prevents her from getting distracted with household tasks. She recognizes that she performs best when she keeps conversational work, such as interviews, to the earlier morning hours. She then reserves her afternoons for focused and active listening when meeting with clients. Erin and her husband work out of the same office space in their basement, which works well for them since they rarely have overlapping meetings.Erin views her brain and body as tools and likes to remind her brain of why she loves working from home. Many of her clients work from home for various reasons, some temporarily and others permanently. She talked about some challenges she and her clients face regarding motivation, scheduling, and transitioning to and from the home-office setting. Erin describes herself as someone who specializes in helping people live a better quality of life, based on improving their wellness through their relationship with food, their bodies, and themselves. Whether they're "looking to lose weight, create healthy habits/behavior changes, improve their perspective, attitudes, emotional management, time management, decision making, or problem-solving skill, through the lens of wellness," she is ready to help. Erin has personally invested in personal coaching for her own life and has found it helps her manage her mindset and emotions to improve her own work-from-home experience, as it can be isolating.If you'd like to learn more about Erin, you can find her in the following places:Website: www.thegrowwellcoach.comIG/FB @growwellcoachingLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-tennant-b77626245/

Sarah Duran is a freelance project manager based out of Denver, Colorado. She's the founder/CEO of Fruition Initiatives, where she works with clients she's acquired through referrals, generally comprised of research teams at universities as she has a background in curriculum design. On top of that, Sarah also runs her own podcast, The Freelance Revolution Podcast, and coaches freelancers, consultants, and solopreneurs on business strategy, time management, goal setting, and confidence.In this episode, Sarah talks about the paradox of working from home which is a topic she's addressed in a blog article with the same title awhile back. She's noticed that freelancers and remote workers often either hyper focus on their work without taking care of their own needs or, on the contrary, find themselves getting distracted by household responsibilities and other demands on their attention. She's adjusted her own work day, including when and where she works, especially now that she has a 4-year-old daughter and can't just work from bed all morning like she could before kids. She's also gotten creative with how she divides childcare between preschool and some local family members, and it certainly helps that she comes from a family of self-starters, with her parents and sister also working for themselves with some degree of flexibility to spend time with her kid when she has client calls. Sarah recently published her book, Instant Freelancer: How to Start a Business of One; and she is also opening registration for her Solopreneur Collaborative Mastermind now through November 11. She's taking the methods and strategies she's taught to her one-on-one clients into a group setting to help even more people and organizations turn their ideas into action and bring their goals to fruition. She’s an operational expert and has been a project strategist for over a decade, designing and leading projects for a variety of organizations, helping businesses refine systems and processes, and providing support to researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, and leaders.You can find Sarah, her blog, her podcast, and her upcoming mastermind in the following places:Website: https://www.fruitioninitiatives.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fruitioninitiativesIG: https://www.instagram.com/hustlers_manifesto/Substack: https://hustlermanifesto.substack.com/Referenced blog post: https://www.fruitioninitiatives.com/blog/the-paradox-of-working-from-homeSarah recommends:Instant Freelancer: How to Start a Business of One (Freelance for Freedom) by Sarah Duran: https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Freelancer-Business-Freelance-Freedom/dp/B09YQF2PDZ/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1666316275&sr=1-1Happier Hour by Cassie Holmes: https://www.amazon.com/Happier-Hour-Distraction-Expand-Matters/dp/1982148802Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport:

Molly Rose Speed of Destin, Florida, loves to help people take skills they already possess to start a virtual assistant business. Molly is an expert in creating time freedom for clients and is the founder of Virtual Assistant Management which provides virtual assistant training as well as solutions and flawless tech execution for busy entrepreneurs.In this episode, Molly Rose talks about how and why she created her company to help provide stable work for military spouses and others who needed to move often. She shared what skill set and personality traits are typically a good fit with this line of work and some of the variety of clients the VAs partner with. There is a demand for virtual help, with tasks that range from social media marketing to administrative assistant work and more, and VAs are a valuable resource for any entrepreneur or company needing more support. Molly Rose is the go-to professional for some of the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders in the financial and personal development industries.Molly’s own work has opened up flexibility and freedom for solo travel, and she’s expanded her offerings from supporting her own clients to preparing to launch new offerings. She’s been a remote work business owner since 2013 and has a lot to share as it relates to balance, time freedom, traveling while working remote, and training others to create work-remove careers with my Virtual Assistant Academy and is in the process of launching a program, The Online Business Accelerator, a one-stop shop program to put new authors, coaches, and speakers on Kajabi.Molly shares how she recently hired a health and nutrition coach at the beginning of 2021 which has been a game changer for her overall health and physical strength as well as helped her posture and eliminated pain from working at a desk. To compartmentalize her different hats, she often changes areas of the house to work in or goes to a coffee shop when she switches from one project to the next. She also swears by her priority 5 notepads, which outline the top 5 things she has to prioritize each day which she feels have been a game changer.You can find Molly Rose and her information at the following places:Links:Virtual Assistant Academy: http://www.virtualassistantacademy.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mollyrosespeedInstagram: @mollyrosespeedE-mail: hi @ virtualassistantacademy.com