Tag: podcast

Help Me Bootstrap a New Podcast!

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I’m launching a new podcast this summer!

Startup Pregnant: a podcast about women in leadership, work, and life.

The podcast shares the stories of women before, during, and after pregnancy and into early parenting. From working, to building businesses, to accelerating your leadership, to growing families, I’m interviewing women on their lives and livelihoods and what they’ve done to grow both.

We’re looking for our early sponsors — help me bootstrap our first season:

If you’d love to see this podcast get rolling, head on over to Patreon to support us.

  • Micro-sponsors: We’re looking for micro-sponsorships, so you can chip in anywhere from $1/month to $4/month to help us build momentum and record an amazing new podcast to add to the airwaves. For the cost of a cup of coffee each month, you can become a backer!
  • Show sponsors ($100): Got a company or project that you’d like to advertise? We’re looking for companies that are a great match for this audience that would like to sponsor one episode per month. You’ll get a 30-second advertising spot in the show every month for as long as you are a sponsor.
  • Master patron ($250): Get listed in the show’s front notes as a sponsor, a shout-out feature story about your company (90 seconds) in one episode each month, which I will work with you to craft to perfection. The story will land in the first 22 minutes of the podcast. You’ll also be listed on the podcast page of our website as a featured sponsor.

There are lots of different options to sponsor the podcast. Help us bring the stories of women in leadership, life, and work to the airwaves!

Support us on Patreon and sponsor the Startup Pregnant podcast!

About the podcast: what are we driving towards?

The podcast looks at deep human question around what it means to become a parent, to grow a business, to embrace a body of work, to deal with failure, to shift in identity, to learn, and to grow. Throughout both “Startup” and “Pregnant,” we look at what it means to undergo these most profound transformations that come with creating new things from scratch.

Startup Pregnant isn’t strictly about startups and pregnancy; instead, it’s about the deep transformative power that growing businesses and babies taps requires, and how we change as a result.

Transformation isn’t easy, in fact, it’s often painful, but it’s one of the most beautiful parts of being a human.

The podcast will address questions like:

  • What can business learn from women and pregnancy, and what can pregnancy learn from business?
  • How did the growth of your business or family affect how you showed up in the world? What strategies did you use to learn, grow, and adapt?
  • How can we re-imagine what women in the workforce can look like?
  • What do you wish your CEOs and colleagues knew about pregnancy and the journey into parenthood?
  • Does parenthood change your work life, for the better? How does it change your creativity or management style?
  • How do these powerful forces of feminine energy, willpower, and strength intersect and provoke better entrepreneurship, invention, and collaboration?

We’re Launching in July/August 2017:

  • We are bootstrapping most of the first season of the podcast.
  • When we hit $100 per month in backing, we’ll prep the launch of season 1!
  • When we hit $250 per month in backing, we will improve our sound quality, audio mixing, and production.
  • When we reach $500, we we will begin preparing seasons 2 & 3.
  • Check out our Patreon page for more details.

Join me in my podcast (and my mission) to share deeper, wiser, and more profound stories of women at work.

Support the podcast here.

In my own experience of being pregnant while working at a Y-combinator backed startup: it isn’t easy. But like so many things in life, it’s worth it. In fact, many parts of it challenged my bones, my soul, and my stamina unlike anything else I’d experienced — like most things in life that are hard, it was also unbelievably worth it.

The podcast is a way to bring women to the table to have a conversation about what it means to be a woman in leadership and in work, all while raising families.

If you are like me and enjoy contemplating the absurdity of growing a human inside a human, if you don’t mind the stress of figuring out just exactly how a business will survive, and if you don’t mind the chatter of voices that wonder constantly how, exactly, you’ll pull this off — then you can laugh, cry, and wince along side me as I take you inside the stories of women working on great endeavors.

How Do You Stay Healthy In A World Pressing Us To Be Hyper-Connected?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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There are secret spaces inside of any city.

In Brooklyn, the underground subway is noisy, chaotic, and dirty. I wear gloves to avoid germs, and I try not to touch anything if I can try. Loud advertisements are ripped and edited almost immediately after they are posted; teenagers often color in the eyeballs with red sharpies and write crude notes in thought bubbles over health care advertisements.

But underground, where the subways rush by, where papers fly up, it gets noisy for a few minutes. A few minutes of deafening noise, of a rushing train that’s not stopping, a time when any conversations pause, and people wait.

As I’m walking from one end of the subway platform to the other, the passing train makes me smile — because I begin to sing. I’m learning how to sing (I just had my second private lesson), and in the subway, I can practice, for just a few minutes, without anyone hearing me.

Sometimes I scream into the subway abyss, just because I can.

Last week, I got to talk with Rob Lawrence, who recently launched the Inspirational Creatives podcast, and he asked me questions in a way that I hadn’t heard before.

Every so often there’s a question, an interviewer, a person that noodles further into my brain. Gets me thinking, talking, curious. As a writer, it’s challenging to express myself in speech in the same way that I’m accustomed to on paper; I get nervous, at times, that I won’t say it quite right. That I won’t get to dig into the deeper ideas.

Yet this one went deeper on several subjects. In this episode, I talk to Rob about the ideas of loneliness and being alone, and how they relate to the craft and the business of creativity.

How do you stay healthy in a world that’s pressing us to be hyper-connected?

I was lucky to chat about ideas that mean a lot to me — here are a few excerpts:

Of all the interviews I’ve done, there are still two that stand out in my mind — this one and the one with Srini Rao for the Unmistakeable Creative. Something about what Rob and Srini have done with their story structure and teasing ideas out have, well, captured ideas in a way that I think they deserve to be captured.

Inspirational Creatives —Episode 21.

I’m grateful to be able to share this with you. Listen to the full podcast here. Enjoy, and if you have time, check out some of his additional interviews on how to reduce overwhelm, or dealing with the competing pressures of doing social media, blogging, and business all at once.

When your ego starts yelling at you… remember this:

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Ever have those voices in your head, while you’re working or trying something new?

That ego. The voice that tells you, whispers softly, cruelly inside of your mind: “You aren’t good enough. This wasn’t very good. Why did you bother? You’re not in shape enough. You should go to yoga class, but it’s not going to help.”

We all have variations of these voices, this chamber orchestra that tells us what we’ve done wrong and harps on our inadequacies. Our inclination is to yell back at it, right? “Shut up! You might think.” And” God, I need to get better at controlling these voices.” We work harder to perfect our minds, to erase those voices, to quash them.

But there’s another way to think about it… what’s the light side of our ego? What’s the benefit? [tweetable hashtag=”@skooloflife @sarahkpeck”]Just as our light sides all have a shadow; our shadows sides might also have some light.[/tweetable]

Perhaps we don’t need to be so cruel to our ego. Perhaps our ego did what it needed to do—it got us started. It got us in the door. It brought us somewhere, and we grew. That pesky little voice spurred something, and while it wasn’t always kind, it brought us here.

Last week I had the honor of digging into these questions and conversations with Srini Rao as a guest on his podcast, The Unmistakeable Creative. This is a different interview than many I’ve done before—and whether it was the nine hours of yoga I did in advance, the glass of wine I had, or the fact that it was late at night, somehow we started digging into stories in a way that I haven’t shared before.

We talk about swimming, fear, why being miserable might actually be okay, and what it takes to make things happen.

I’m delighted to share it with you.

Take a listen over on The Unmistakeable Creative podcast.