Unconventional Life – Podcast, Blog, Live Events

Category: Wellness

EP:195 How to Become an Incredible Leader, with Keara Mascareñaz

As a leader, there are many different ways you can create change within your team. “Change can be made at the structural level by redesigning the way teams are organized, at the team level by refining the way collaboration happens or at the individual level by evolving personal habits and practices.”

Often leaders try to redesign the way teams are organized by delegating tasks and creating to-do lists. Asana is a great resource but before meaningful teamwork can happen, some attention needs to be given to creating a foundation of trust through positive work habits.

Our world is becoming more and more online and there is a need to shift to a more responsive and humane way of interacting as a team so people feel like they belong to something greater than just tasks on a to-do list.

This week on the unconventional life podcast is Keara Mascareñaz. Keara is the author of The New Team Habits: A Guide To The New School Rules. (Soon to be released!) Keara helps schools and districts build and scale a culture of innovation through leadership development, team habits, and human-centered organizational design.

In this episode, Keara shares three habits from her book that build a foundation for positive, lasting changes among your team.

Increases presence and equal talk time in meetings

“Meetings are a powerful place to change the way you engage and work with each other. By shifting the way you start your meetings, you can change the tone, engagement, and ultimately culture of your meetings and your team.”

Some sample check-in questions for the beginning of the meeting;
Where are you on a scale of one to five
what’s occupying your mind?
What are you worried about this week
what was your childhood nickname?
when did you get in the most trouble right?
what’s a mistake you made and what did you learn from it?

They can range from really short and fun to very deep and serious. Keara believes that if teams can consistently start meeting this way, check-ins can really enhance the level of trust and create strong bonds between people.

Talk about mistakes. Model vulnerability so that the team learns and grows together

“If you want to create a culture of learning and develop a growth mindset with your team members, you need to nurture an environment in which individuals are safe to share both learnings and failures.”

Keara shares that the first step to creating a culture of safety is being willing to make yourself vulnerable to others. It is important for the leader or role of authority to admit their own mistakes as a way to signal to others that they are also learning and that mistakes are not bad, but simply opportunities for improvement.

“Learning expands to include;
✔️Curiosity
✔️Questions
✔️Mistakes
✔️Feedback
✔️Reflection
✔️Discussion”

Kick-off work
Increase clarity on purpose and roles so that the team is more agile in adjusting our plans to meet the collective purpose.

“A team’s mission is like its north star, it’s the direction everybody will march even if there isn’t
a guarantee the team will reach it: Vasco de Gama circumnavigating the globe, Lewis and Clark
reaching the Pacific, or Elon Musk colonizing Mars. A mission is useless if its members don’t
understand why it’s important or what their role is on it.”

Kicking off a project requires each individual to have clear expectations of their role and purpose so each team member is rowing the boat in the same direction.

If you loved these 3 tips on how to step up your team leadership and improve your team dynamics then check out the book,The New Team Habits: A Guide To The New School Rules The book is packed with detailed explanations of each habit, a workbook with reflective exercises for your to guide your team through, reflections and other great articles and TED talks that exploring team dynamics, its definitely a recommended read!

GIVEAWAY!

The New Team Habits book + a Swag bag full of extra surprises 😉

Get in touch

On Twitter #teamhabits or Kieramas

Or on the New Team Habits website

November 4, 2019
Ep:194 From Pain to Purpose, with founder of the Inner Glow Circle, Katie Depaola
Katie DePaola is an entrepreneur, author, and founder of Inner Glow Circle. She built her business from her bathtub, taking the company from a self-funded startup to a million-dollar business. The road to 1 million wasn’t exactly smooth… exactly 100 days after opening her business, Katie’s brother died from an accidental overdose and she had a diagnosis of Lyme Disease.

Between business meetings, she cried, punched her pillow and made deals with God. She knew giving up was not an option.

The trials in her life that could easily have caused her to shrink away, or give up on dreams, but instead she chose to grow and continue to glow even though times were dark and difficult.

Katie turned her greatest challenges into her greatest opportunities. She’s rebranding resilience, showing women how to use their challenges as a platform to better the lives of others and build profitable businesses.

“I worked hard to save my business, but in the end, my business saved me,” Katie says. Her business was the giant gift she gave herself but hadn’t even realized.

In this episode, Katie shares;
- Her journey to 7 figures and why giving up wasn’t an option
- Why solo-preneurship didn’t work for her and what she did to build a legacy
- How traversing a non-linear and imperfect path is actually perfect!
- Why marketing is the breath of the business
- How to keep people engaged in a subscription service
- What an Unconventional Life means
Free month membership to the members-only community “Inner Glow Circle Mastermind“. This includes live training calls, life-changing exercises, and breakthrough tools.

Inner Glow Circle teaches women to work for themselves, not by themselves. With her growing team, she trains thousands of women across the world on how to find their purpose, live it and get paid.

Want to find your GLOW? Take this free quiz!
October 28, 2019
“Ep:193 Want to Be Successful? Quit Hustling” With Mindvalley’s Co-Founder Kristina Mänd Lakhiani”
America glorifies the #hustle. We’ve got an entire city that never sleeps. We don’t take our paid vacations; we work over the holidays; we eat at our desks.

While the #hustle is real, the question we’re all dying to know is, it is effective?

Kristina Mänd Lakhiani, the co-founder of Mindvalley, a wellness education platform that serves 2.5 Million active users a month, says, without hesitation, no.

“We have this fantasy that hustling is the thing that brings you success,” Mänd Lakhiani says. “So what a lot of entrepreneurs do from not knowing better is they put themselves in the hamster’s wheel.”

Chances are if you’ve been on the hamster wheel, you’ve also wanted to get off the hamster wheel-like, immediately.

That’s because the hamster wheel is exhausting.

Everyone—no matter how much momentum they’re starting with—eventually burns out on the hamster wheel. And then, says the Harvard Business Review, becomes a more cynical person. #relatable

So if hustling doesn’t work, what does?

“[Entrepreneurship] requires some space to do nothing, to think nothing, to catch that elusive inspiration,” Mänd-Lakhiani says. “If you think of business as a creative process, then you realize you cannot be in a rush, you have to have space.”

Okay, but wait.

How do you create spaciousness in your life when you’re literally busy #allthetime?

For starters, you can start delegating things to others.

Hustlers tend to want to do everything there is to do, all by themselves. In theory, this seems like a good idea—after all, you’re saving money and maximizing the amount of control you have at every level of operation—but it keeps you from having the space you need to thrive as a creative.

“I’m very good at cleaning my house,” Mänd-Lakhiani says, “But I would never do that because [if I hire someone else to do it] I’ll have much more time in my day.”

Ask yourself, can someone else do this task? If the answer is yes, let them, if you have the option to.

When we see entrepreneurship as a creative process, spaciousness becomes integral to that process rather than threatening to that process. It flips the value-system of #hustling on its head so that “busyness” is no longer something to strive for and spaciousness is no longer something to be guilty for.

So what are you waiting for? Own your inner creative and choose to make some space for yourself today.
- 3:02 Mänd-Lakhiani on her “absolutely magical” experience of motherhood
- 9:55 Why entrepreneurship is actually a creative process
- 16:06 The art of delegating
- 17:12 How Mind Valley developed into the company it is today
- 25:13 Why you should never judge yourself for the thoughts and feelings you’re having
- 28:08 What your judgments about other people have to say about you
- 31:08 Mänd-Lakhiani’s favorite resources for self-development
*Article was written by Raya Schroeder
October 21, 2019
Ep: 189 Have you Discovered your Truth? with Poet, Janne Robinson

Janne Robinson is the CEO of ‘This is for the women’, a line of poetry products and apparel. Janne is a feminist poet, a life coach, an activist and a motivational speaker who shares slabs of her heart for a living.
With popular poems such as “ This is for the women who don’t give a fuck’, “I will never be a well-behaved woman” and “There’s cobwebs on her vagina”, the world is being exposed to a whole new level of raw and unfiltered truth. These topics may seem controversial, and Janne has fought off her fair share of kickback. However, what she holds strongly to is sharing her vulnerability and truth, no matter what. She doesn’t tiptoe around trying to please anyone and breaks through societal “shoulds” and conventional norms while encouraging people to ‘build their own box’.
Janne gives a voice to experiences that many women and people have, but don’t always have permission to share or have the ability to articulate. In this episode, Janne shares how she “walks tall” in her truth and how you can too.
“I think that our truth is medicine because it allows other people to have permission to understand themselves and to access different pieces of themselves.” – Janne Robinson
Janne’s journey to truth started back in 2014 when she got pregnant and decided to have an abortion. As she was laying in bed and healing the words started to pour out of her.
She wrote about the opinions of the doctor, telling her she shouldn’t get an abortion to the conversations she had with the potential spirit within. That day, as Janne processed her emotions, she found that it was the first time her words had depth and really took on a greater meaning.
The article “Aborting Shame: One Woman’s Experience Within Abortion” was born and soon after was published to the 17 million readers on Elephant Journal.
The decision to share the article stemmed from her not finding any information explaining a woman’s emotional process with her choice to have an abortion and how the world needed to hear stories like hers. So many people are shameful regarding their choice to have an abortion and its talked about in hushed whispers and the stigma doesn’t need to exist anymore.
She received 500 messages, emails, and comments from women all over the world. One of them read “I was 16. My father dropped me off at the clinic and told me not to tell anyone—including my mother. You’re the first person I am telling.”
Hearing the impact she made from so many women lead her face to face with her “why” she does what she does— and she has been empowering women to take back their narrative ever since.
If you have stuff inside of you that you haven’t given a voice to but you want to share, keep reading because Janne shares insights about truth and how to access it.
Your truth is medicine
Janne is a believer that emotional and physical heaviness, disease, illness, depression, and anxiety comes from when we’re not living in our truth.
What that means on a deeper level is that when you’re doing things that you don’t love, they exhaust you, you feel resentful towards them and you get tired. They’re not true to who you are what you do and they weigh you down.
When you don’t live from your truth you are denying a part of yourself that wants to be seen and expressed. How often do you say yes or maybe to something when really you want to say no? Maybe you want to be polite or you’re shy but when you are not living your truth it manifests as negative emotions in your life, like anger and guilt.
A recommended book is “You can heal your life” by Louise Hay. This book takes a look at how emotions directly result and manifest as a physical disease when we don’t look at them or talk about them and how you can heal yourself by making choices in your life that empowers you to step out of things that don’t fit anymore.
“Truth is medicine and sharing that truth is so healing and liberating” which is why Janne’s main mission of empowering women to take back their narrative is woven into everything she does and creates.
All artists need someone to believe in them
“I think all artists need someone to believe in them, see them, and say yes. Ultimately you decide that your art belongs and your art belongs simply if it gives you joy, but to have someone cheer you on in the infancy stages is massive.”
Our parents and friends are like not always the best cheerleaders because they teach us and want us to walk a path that has made them feel safe. Don’t be afraid to find mentors that are walking on, or have walked on a similar path and receive advice and guidance from them.
Connect to the natural world
Humans need to connect to the natural world. We become sick because we do not spend enough time in nature. “we need nature as much as we need ourselves.”
The earth is nourishing and grounding and rooting for us connecting us back to many generations to the truth of who we are and what we are made up of. We have seven generations inside of us and how we walk on this planet influences the next seven generations of our family, which is why doing this work of speaking your truth is so important because it breaks cycles, seven generations backward and forwards.
“Our Earth really needs us. Our Earth is not just asking, she is crying for advocacy, and it is fairly hard to care about the earth when you do not feel taken care of. So I think that it is our duty to create the space to come beyond your work to become in alignment to then be able to go, ‘how do I want to create impact and change? How do we protect our mother?
Because, without her, There’s nothing.”
Be Brave
A lot of courage is needed to step outside of the conventional mold. As Abraham Hicks says, there’s not a lot of people on the leading edge, and it can be quite lonely out there, Sometimes you won’t have anybody else in your life living in courage.
That’s especially hard if you are wanting to branch out and do your own thing. You might not have those courage cheerleaders, but go find them because we need people brave enough to become exactly who they are, and do their work.
It doesn’t matter if a hundred people are doing it, or nobody’s doing it. It’s what calls us and when you follow that you heal yourself, which heals this world.
“Believe differently, you get to choose your story. You and every human being are worthy of love, and any story that you want.”
Check out Janne’s Poem ‘I am a woman of distinction’ feature video, which is also directed by Janne.
If you want to connect deeper with Janne you can check out her website or follow her on Instagram for her latest poetry and inspiration.

September 23, 2019
Ep: 184 Confessions of an Artist, With Singer/Songwriter, Pip the Pansy

In today’s world, some would argue your presence on social media is essential. The content you share should represent who you are and what you stand for and can be a gateway to great opportunities. For some, it can be really easy to become consumed by the idea of these opportunities and becoming a famous influencer. Who wouldn’t want complimentary trips around the world, access to luxury villas, and free product sponsorships, right?

But the question we fail to ask is, what is the energetic cost of this lifestyle? Many Instagram influencers are beginning to speak out about how what they post on Instagram isn’t always an accurate representation of what is actually happening in their lives. As a viewer, you are shown manicured highlight reels and you start to compare your life with the staged influencers’ life and this is so dangerous for our mental health.

A recent article by Psychology Today discusses the “Social Comparison Theory” This theory states that “individuals determine their own social and personal worth based on how they stack up against others they perceive as somehow faring better or worse. As a result, humans are constantly evaluating themselves and others across a variety of domains, such as attractiveness, wealth, intelligence, and success.”

It is basic human nature to compare yourself to others and in some cases, it could be a positive way to foster self- motivation but the birth of social media has taken the comparison to a whole new level. “Some research shows that people who regularly compare themselves to others often experience negative feelings of deep dissatisfaction, guilt, and remorse, and engage in destructive behaviors, like lying and disordered eating.”

This week on the Unconventional Life Show is Pip The Pansy. Recently Pip was on tour and had a rough show with less than hoped for attendance, instead of posting how great the show she posted a story called “confessions” highlighting more embarrassing behind the scenes things that happened to her, as an independent artist. I just decided to let people know that it’s not always glamorous. And I expected that some people would relate. But I did not anticipate the amount of response’s that I got.”

Comments and other people’s personal artist confessions started overflowing into her inbox. The “confessions” are now an Instagram Highlight on Pips Instagram page when people can anonymously share their personal behind the scenes story as a thriving artist.

Some anonymous confessions state “Recently went into debt to put up my own art. Toughest experience of my life, but I grew.” and “Sometimes I turn the volume down on Spotify and play my own music on repeat to get my numbers up” Post like these remind artists that they are not alone and that everyone goes through the similar struggles. Pip states “I have such a love-hate relationship with social media. And that was the first time that I truly loved it because it felt like all of us we’re connecting over the fact that we do really pitiful things to make it look like it’s working.”

Lucky for us, Pip shares some advice that she uses to keep it real and authentic with the rise of fame and social media.

Focus on “who you are, rather than what you are”

You might be an artist or an athlete but that identity is not the box you have to stay in. You can be anything you want to be and feel anything you want to feel. For example, you might think that a person with a career as a performer is outgoing and the life of the party but “who” they really are is shy and introverted. So “constantly feeding the who instead of what is a way that you can remain fulfilled in your life.

Don’t be afraid to be honest.

Be open with people about where you are at because it turns out, a lot of people could be also feeling that way. By simply communicating how you feel, you are building a community that can support one another.

Create just to create!

If anyone listening is looking to be an artist, you should work out that muscle and create as much unfiltered content as you can. Pip advises all artists to pay extra attention to the things you create that you don’t like or doesn’t feel truthful or genuine after some time goes by. “Art pieces that are really soulful, truthful, and genuine will be timeless for you and your audience. “

Don’t compare yourself to others

Comparison puts a damper on your inspiration and creativity, you are unlikely to create a when you feel a sense of dissatisfaction within yourself. If you do find yourself caught up in the comparison game then talk about it with the people around you. Having friends and community around us to keep reminding us how far we have come and how much we have improved is essential when we have our self-love blinders on.

“Artists excavate truth out of mystery” when you’re able to do this successfully, it will resonate with other people and that is really fulfilling. And it doesn’t matter how many people are in front of my stage, and it doesn’t matter what number is next to my Spotify streams, All that matters is that I’m trying my hardest to dig through mystery and figure out what truth is in there that needs to be said at the moment.”

Pip is an incredibly immersed artist, musician, and performer. She uses her dreamy flute melodies, explosive synth hooks, and colorful spirit to completely capture her audiences from around the world. Pip’s newest album Love Legends, Part 1 was released early this year and draws inspiration from Greek mythology and bringing the ancient back to life.

Want more of Pip the Pansy? check out her website or Instagram

August 26, 2019