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S2E13: Astrology, Psychic Abilities & Branding with Jessica Lanyadoo
191 Plays1 year ago
This is a really fun one.
Jessica Lanyadoo is a renowned Humanistic Astrologer, Psychic Medium, tarot reader, and Animal Communicator. She's developed a huge following and fan base - and she was a really wonderful Content People guest.
Jessica and Meredith talk about:
Jessica's career path in astrology, how she discovered her psychic abilities, what it was like to carve out a career path - and a business - in such a unique space, and what it means to show up authentically online.
A bit about Jessica:
Jessica started her private practice in San Francisco in 1994 and has met with thousands of people across the globe for one-on-one, couples, and business consultations. She's the host of the top-ranking astrology and advice show, Ghost of a Podcast, and she was the co-host of TLC’s digital show Stargazing. Her first book, Astrology For Real Relationships, published by Penguin Random House, came out in 2020.
Did you like hanging out with us?
Sign up for the Content People newsletter here: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Jessica:
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessica_lanyadoo/?hl=en
On TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jessicalanyadoo?lang=en
Her Website: https://www.lovelanyadoo.com/about
Her Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JessicaLanyadoo
Read Her Book: Astrology for Real Relationships https://www.amazon.com/Astrology-Real-Relationships-Understanding-Along/dp/1984856243
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Transcript
Introduction to Meredith Farley and Content People
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi and welcome to Content People! I'm your host Meredith Farley. I'm a former chief product officer turned chief operating officer turned CEO and founder. My agency is called Medbury. At Medbury we work with founders, execs, and companies who want to tell their stories and grow. But Content People is not about me or Medbury, it's about the creative leaders and professionals that we interview every week.
00:00:28
Speaker
We'll delve into their journeys, unpack their insights, and ask them for practical advice. If you like it, please rate and subscribe. Let's get started. All right, and we're good.
Jessica Lignato's Professional Introduction
00:00:39
Speaker
Jessica, thank you so much for joining Content People. I'm a fan and so excited to talk to you. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.
00:00:48
Speaker
So I really love following you. For folks who aren't as familiar, could you explain a little bit about who you are and what you do? Sure. I am Jessica Lignato, and I am an astrologer. I'm a psychic medium. I'm an animal communicator, writer, podcaster. You know how it is when we create content. There's so many platforms. There's so many ways. But I have
00:01:12
Speaker
dedicated the last 30 years of my life to various forms of woo and making it accessible and practical for people at all stages of life and kind of dealing with all manner of concerns.
Explaining Humanistic Astrology
00:01:28
Speaker
I know you describe yourself as a humanistic astrologer and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what that means and why that label is important to you.
00:01:39
Speaker
Most people don't really realize that there are many different kinds of astrology and there are many different kinds of astrologers.
00:01:48
Speaker
For me, being a humanistic astrologer is really important because not only does it reflect my values, but it reflects how I use the tool of astrology because I don't regard astrology as a belief system. I regard it as a tool to be used when it works and when it doesn't work, I drop that tool and I pick up another one just with anything else. But humanistic astrology is first and foremost human centered, which means
00:02:14
Speaker
It is pragmatic. It is in some ways quite similar to psychological astrology, which is a big branch of astrology, but it is not completely netted in Western psychology, whereas psychological astrology is. What humanistic astrology does is it centers the human experience in our use of astrology, which is why if you've listened to any of the readings I've given, you can hear how I bend the tool of astrology to
00:02:43
Speaker
understand and support and yeah, I'll just say understand and support the human I'm working with.
Astrology and Harm Reduction
00:02:50
Speaker
So humanist astrology comes from harm reductionist background, which people, not everyone might know what that term is, but harm reduction is like a concept of if you're dealing with somebody and they're using meth and it's like ruining their lives and then they stop using meth and they start smoking weed all day, every day. That's amazing. We want harm reduction. We don't want perfection.
00:03:13
Speaker
I don't know if that's a good metaphor, but I threw it out there. So having a harm reductionist perspective or a humanistic perspective empowers me to share astrology with people from where they're at instead of trying to force any kind of ideology or belief system or behaviors onto any person.
Consent and Free Will in Astrology
00:03:34
Speaker
That's a very brief breakdown, but does it make sense? Yes. It's super interesting. I really love your podcast, Ghost of a Podcast. And I really enjoy the episodes where you come do a reading for someone. I'm always thinking, Jessica is so good at checking in with the person to see like, how does that land? How does that make you feel? And I can maybe see that's a manifestation of that humanistic lens.
00:04:02
Speaker
Yes, it is. One other thing I'll add is that humanistic astrology posits that the astrologer is not like somebody to be put on high. Humanistic astrology doesn't require laying down all your questions and just listening and doing what I say.
00:04:18
Speaker
not at all. And there are branches of astrology that are much more that way. There are rules and if you have this in your chart, this is what this means in a very kind of strict way. Whereas I feel that as a humanistic astrologer with the level of expertise I have, I am able to be very accurate with people without compromising their free will
00:04:38
Speaker
and their agency, which is part of why I'm checking in with people, is to make sure that they're consenting in the dynamic that's happening and also that it actually works for them. Because if it's not human-centered, what is the literal point is my take.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yes. Well, question that I had, which you're answering is I was thinking one thing I appreciate about your content is that you really urge listeners and fans to honor their own wisdom and instincts.
Trusting Yourself Over Systems
00:05:06
Speaker
And sometimes you're urging people to be careful about relying too much on outside systems, including astrology or astrologers. And whenever I listen to your podcast, I always think I'm in the hands of someone with a very clear moral code who cares a lot about
00:05:22
Speaker
not, you're not trying to get anyone to cede their authority to you. And so I was going to ask, do you have rules for yourself in so far as what you'll say or not say in a reading? Yeah. And thank you. I really appreciate that. I have very strict moral comments around this kind of stuff. And also I'll just pull back before I properly answer your question to say that we are living in this time
00:05:46
Speaker
of con-spirituality. We are living in a time in the rise of misinformation and disinformation, and the internet has so much to do with that, right? There's no way to vet a source, really, when it comes to something like astrology. And there are people who are like in what I call Wulan, spiritual Wulan, who are giving
00:06:06
Speaker
all kinds of advice that they do not have any business of giving and also really asking people to abandon common sense and abandon oftentimes loved ones and abandon self-care for these spiritual ideals that
00:06:26
Speaker
are just, they're very dangerous. And so for me, I've always been really driven towards telling people to trust in themselves first and foremost. And in fact, many years ago now, it must be at least 12 years ago now, I had this rash of people coming into my office for consultations, and they were all part of this cult. And the way they had found out about me is the cult leader said, do not get a reading with Jessica Lignato.
00:06:51
Speaker
Like this cult leader, apparently one person had gotten reading with me and I had advised them to leave the group and then the cult leader, not so upset about it, told their followers and then a bunch of their followers came for reading. So it was like one of the great, one of my great accomplishments. I feel like it was, I felt very proud of that.
Boundaries in Astrology Readings
00:07:08
Speaker
But back to your question, I,
00:07:11
Speaker
So I'm a medical astrologer and in my private practice as a consulting astrologer, I have medical astrology is a massive part of what I do. However, on my podcast, I do it very sparingly. I'm very careful about that. And that is because of how easy it would be for people to misuse that information and use it to harm themselves or others without even knowing that's what they were doing. That's one of the things that I do. I do not
00:07:41
Speaker
When I'm reading a birth chart, I will not predict death. That's another thing I won't do. But people ask me a lot of questions, right? That's my job. People ask me questions. And my belief is that my job is in part to help them to ask the right question. Because if you come in and ask me, will I get back with my ex? I will not answer that question.
00:08:07
Speaker
I will instead say, why do you want to get back with your ex? Why did you break up with your ex? Was it a healthy relationship with your ex? First, we're going to have a conversation to identify a person's agency and to help them to ask the right question because a lot of time the answer is nothing to do with whether or not the person will come back and everything to do with
00:08:28
Speaker
how the person who's asking that question is holding on too tight or trying to live in the past or any variety of
The Art of Asking the Right Questions
00:08:36
Speaker
things. It's very rarely really about will that person come back. There's so much to dig into there from the cult thing. I don't want to forget about that. It's making me think, I wonder
00:08:49
Speaker
Do you think in general, folks are walking around asking themselves the wrong questions? Do you feel like in general, if everyone asked more of this type of questions, they might
00:09:00
Speaker
Think about their own lives in a more productive way. Is there any wisdom you have to share around that? Absolutely. I 100% do. Yes. I think there's so many ways I could apply this, but one of the parts of growing up, growing into the adults that you are or are going to be, which of course we're growing up until we die, right? And the thing is that we can learn and learn and learn. But if we do not apply what we've learned, we don't have wisdom.
00:09:29
Speaker
And when we are in our 20s, no matter how naturally wise we are, it's hard to have actual wisdom because you haven't had enough lived experiences yet. So I think people of all ages have a hard time asking the right question. A lot of people who are super into astrology are younger and astrology can help to form the question or it can help to dumb down the question. When you think about
00:09:55
Speaker
your major life crisis right now. You might be thinking about it in a way that is meaningfully influenced and colored by your trauma, by your insecurities, by your past experiences. And that might limit the way that you frame the question for yourself. And so being able to sort through your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences, your projections to get to the right question
00:10:21
Speaker
is really important because if you ask the wrong question, it doesn't matter if you get the answer. You're not going to be satisfied. How many times have we done that? You ask a question, you get the answer, and you don't feel any better. It's because it was the wrong question. You asked the right question. Even if you don't have the answer, you have a greater sense of satisfaction and integration in my experience.
00:10:45
Speaker
That's really interesting about how coaching folks to ask the right questions is such a big part of actually being helpful to them. I know you've mentioned you're an astrologer, but you're also a psychic medium and an animal communicator. I'm really curious to know how did you discover those gifts and abilities and how do they all, I'd imagine that at times they all blend together a little bit, but maybe not. I'd just be interested to hear about it.
Discovering Psychic and Medium Abilities
00:11:13
Speaker
So I started studying astrology in a very light way when I was 12, but I started formally studying with a teacher when I was in my late teens and I've just dedicated my life to astrology from there. Now,
00:11:31
Speaker
I started my private practice at around 20 years old. So I started really young and it was a very teeny tiny private practice. But it wasn't until about 10 years into my private practice where at that point I did have a lot of clients. I was working as a full-time astrologer by that point. And this was what?
00:11:51
Speaker
10 years after 1995. So you can do the math. I was at 2005. Sorry, my brain. So it was 2005. I was full time with clients and as an astrologer and people started asking me to be psychic or talk to dead people. And I was like, I can't do that.
00:12:07
Speaker
But I was young and I had poor boundaries. And so I said, I can't do that. But if you want me to try to do that on your dime, I can. And I did that again because I had poor boundaries. But it ended up working out because I would be accurate. And every time I was accurate, I was like,
00:12:25
Speaker
No, it's a coincidence. It doesn't mean anything until eventually it got to the point where I was like, I guess I am talking to dead people. And then I started to try to understand it more and work with it more. And I was able to understand, I guess I do have some psychic ability. And then within like a three year period of my early thirties,
00:12:46
Speaker
similar, I started having experiences where I could understand animals. And it wasn't like my cat was meowing and I could decode what it meant. That's not how animals communicate. But I was able to communicate with my cats and I was like, oh, wow. And so I started trying it with cats and dogs out in the world and it was working. And I was like, this is not what I thought life was. This is cool. And it took me about maybe
00:13:11
Speaker
seven or eight years of doing work in my private practice, psychic work, mediumship work, and animal communication work before I started to really
00:13:25
Speaker
kind of promote myself in that way. Wow. I have a lot of questions. I think it's so interesting that you were, I'll give it a shot and you weren't really trusting of your abilities, but everyone's. So whatever you said was just totally right. As time has gone on, have you felt more clarity and ownership of?
00:13:42
Speaker
your abilities in that area? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'm close to 50 now, so I've had some time since then. I had this really unique situation because I was meeting with clients as an astrologer, right? So they already trusted me as an astrologer. They were already open. Not everybody who comes to me is open, but a lot of these people were open enough to have this kind of conversation with me. And
00:14:08
Speaker
I had this unique position because somebody would say, you know, I have a lost loved one and I would tap in and it'd be like, Oh, okay. So they're really tall and they have dark hair and they talk loud or whatever. And they'd be like, Oh my God, that's my Nana. And I'd have this immediate feedback. So it wasn't theoretical. A lot of people when they start experiencing a sense of, Oh, I'm psychic or something like that.
00:14:30
Speaker
they pick up on things about the people in their lives, which can be very invasive. I am not a peeping Tom. I do not want to know anything about anyone unless it is like a client situation. I remember in the early years of me talking to dead people, I had a particular client and he had come in and there was this family member. It was a father figure who had passed away and we had connected with him and it was
00:14:54
Speaker
Really a meaningful experience for this guy and we ended up at a party together in San Francisco coincidentally like a couple months later and The client my client was there with his child and
Communicating with the Deceased
00:15:08
Speaker
his lost loved one came in hard He wanted me to talk to them. He wanted connection because this child was his like
00:15:16
Speaker
relative basically. And it was this really important turning point for me where I basically went to the bathroom and really I just went to be in this really confusing moment I was in where I had this dead person who really wanted a connection and I had a
00:15:32
Speaker
I had to make a decision about whether or not I was going to give myself the gift of private time, whether or not I was going to insert this dead person's desires on this living person who's just trying to have nice time at a small party. There was all these things and so I made the decision and I was like, this is not the time.
00:15:53
Speaker
And I gave the dead person a boundary and I did not tell the living person about what happened because it wasn't appropriate. He hadn't come to me for a reading and I wasn't going to be invasive in his life. And that for me solidified something around how I navigate my psychic and mediumship abilities, where I don't drop them in people's lap unawares, you know what I mean? And I think that's...
00:16:18
Speaker
really important because as much as a lot of people have said to me, people start to become friends with me, I don't think you can tell me anything about myself I really want to know. No, you don't. No, you absolutely don't. You don't. And also, if I'm like a walking, talking Oracle, then I'm not a person and then I don't have a real relationship with the people around me. And that's not really useful for me either. But boundaries are really a huge part of my work and a huge part of what I'm passionate about. And they're really necessary for the work that I do.
00:16:49
Speaker
That is so interesting. Thank you for sharing that. I'm curious when you're talking, did you ever feel afraid? Did you ever feel like, oh, some bad's going to happen to me if I don't execute this energy's will?
00:17:03
Speaker
That's interesting. I have felt afraid, but not for that reason, no. I have been definitely experienced harm from dead people. It's not like I think all dead people are good. You die an asshole, you're a dead asshole. That's just not to be poetic about it, but that is really it. And I have had frightening experiences of many different stripes.
00:17:27
Speaker
The worst that a dead person can do to me is stick around when I don't want them there and make me feel terrible. They can't actually harm me beyond that. And I don't, that expression, don't negotiate with terrorists. Like you're not, if somebody is, think of it less, to make it sound less like spooky, think of it as if you have a friend who won't ever leave until you, I don't know,
00:17:55
Speaker
bake them a cake, then you're never going to want to hang out with them because you're going to be constantly baking cakes. What's to say next time we'll be a cake and a cup of ice tea? It's like, where does it end? So for me, it ends immediately. If somebody doesn't respect my boundary, that's really important information for me to have. And I have never had a dead person harm me for that reason. Most of the time when I've experienced harm from dead people, it's for very different reasons. Yeah.
00:18:32
Speaker
Now that I think about it as just teaching kids boundaries, which I never thought about before. Exactly. I think that when people think about what I do, maybe less the astrology, more the psychic and the mediumship stuff, it sounds really frightening. And that makes sense because think of every movie you've seen and every TV show you've seen with psychics and dead people. They're horror movies. They're scary movies.
00:18:51
Speaker
That's really interesting. It's like the, if you give a moose a muffin. Yeah.
Beliefs About Life After Death
00:18:57
Speaker
Maybe they're sci-fi, but there's always like a violence to it.
00:19:02
Speaker
But there's really no violence to talking to dead people in my experience and I've talked to people who died in very violent ways, but They are not the violence something happened to them or something they did to themselves was a violence but my and everybody has their own spiritual values and I don't want to get in the way of that but my personal experience is that I
00:19:25
Speaker
The body dies, we die, of course we die, but also we're not, it's not over. It just changes in a really meaningful way. Death in a way is a misnomer. It's not exactly true that we die because I talk to a lot of dead people who give me a lot of really accurate information and they don't seem that dead to me. So it's this body dies, this life ends, but life itself does not end. We do not end.
00:19:53
Speaker
not at least with the physical death in my experience. It seems like you're, I don't know if it feels happy to you at all, but like you are walking around with a lot of information and experiences that are unique. Is there
00:20:07
Speaker
It sounds like you're exceptional at boundaries, which I admire and hoped in.
Managing Psychic Sensitivities
00:20:12
Speaker
I'm always working on boundaries. Is there anything else like self care wise that's like really important or helpful to you or just interpersonal practices? I'm glad it sounds like I'm good at boundaries because I feel like I'm never good enough because I think boundaries are one of those things. Like I'm constantly working on them as well. I will say there are a lot of things
00:20:33
Speaker
Being psychic and being a medium on a functional practical level, it's like having a gluten allergy and a dairy allergy and you can't deal with dander and it's like having a lot of allergies to things that everyone else is fine with. I am really sensitive to things that other people do not perceive and that don't bother other people.
00:20:55
Speaker
And so there are many things that I need to do. Like if somebody has a million food allergies and a bunch of friends are getting together for dinner, that person with the food allergies has got to call the restaurant, make sure there's one thing on the menu that they can eat has to be you have to do all these things to make sure that you're okay. And it's similar. It's, it's like the best way I can describe. It's like the easiest example I can find to describe how it's similar. And in particular, since COVID, because there was a time when
00:21:25
Speaker
So many people were dying all at once, all over the world in terrifying ways alone. And as a medium, that was something I never thought I'd experienced and I hope to never experience again. And it was really rough. Yeah, it was a really rough experience. So I have a lot of things that I do just for like my baseline.
00:21:47
Speaker
being all right in my own skin. And to your point of it being heavy, it is heavy, not heavy because I'm scared of death, or dead people, which a lot of people think it's heavy because of that. It's just heavy because ignorance is bliss. Like I have a lot of data. So it's a little hard to disassociate from certain realities that a lot of people just as a way to survive and get through life do disassociate from. Yeah.
00:22:16
Speaker
Appreciate you. Thank you so much for sharing. So it sounds like when you were 20 is when you like first most seriously started to get into astrology and
00:22:28
Speaker
did you know that was the career that you wanted to pursue?
Journey to Becoming an Astrologer
00:22:32
Speaker
Or were you like, I'm trying this for a bit. I'm curious about how intentional it was. So I'm from Montreal, Quebec. And in Montreal, we have a different school system than anywhere else. Maybe they have this in France. I don't know. But high school goes grade seven till 11. And then there's this two year government funded college program called C-SHEP. And I went to an alternative C-SHEP, the only one in the province that I'm aware of.
00:22:55
Speaker
In this alternative seizure, we got to take these really unique courses. And so in the main college, there was a psychologist and a psychology teacher, and he taught Jungian psychology. And in the alternative college, he taught an introduction to astrology from a Jungian perspective. And in that semester where I took that class, because I'd already been really interested in astrology, and I don't know what, 17, 18 at that time,
00:23:24
Speaker
I was like, this is what I'm going to do with my life. I'm sure of it. And again, this is the early 1990s. This is pre-internet times. There's no Googling. There was no memes. There was no blogs. It was just books and humans. That was the only way to learn astrology. And so all I did was eat, drink, sleep, astrology. And then the second semester, he taught the intermediate course for astrology from a Jungian perspective.
00:23:47
Speaker
And I was just like, okay, I'm moving to San Francisco. That's it. I'm moving to San Francisco. And the reason why San Francisco is because at the time it was the only place in North America where you could even consider meeting other astrologers. And it was like the hippies were there, right? This was before the first tech booms.
00:24:07
Speaker
So it was a place where I knew I could meet other astrologers and build a career. And as a teenager, I didn't know anything. I'm also queer and I came out somewhere in the middle of all this. And I packed this big suitcase full of men's slacks, pinstriped, just for specificity, men's slacks and astrology books. And I just took a one-way ticket to San Francisco. It sounds very dramatic, but it was possible back then. And I
00:24:33
Speaker
moved here when I was 19 in 1994 and I was just like, okay, I'm going to make my way. I'm going to find my way as an astrologer. And I started meeting with clients not long after that. And it was like one client every several months. And I would spend five hours prepping for every client. I found groups of astrologers. They were all significantly older than me because these, the astrologers were all boomers, right? They used to be hippies and that,
00:25:00
Speaker
older. So I made community with these people and then went on my own journey with self-guided study. And again, I just want to reiterate, self-guided study pre-internet meant no pre-Google. It required
00:25:17
Speaker
just like a lot of reading. Let's study. And I was a nerd and super down for it. It's a super interesting story. And also, I'm so jealous of a course of astrology from a Jungian perspective. I love Jung. That sounds amazing. It was amazing. It was such a great and I hadn't read any Jung at the time and I was very excited.
00:25:38
Speaker
by this astrology that I was learning. And I had such a great teacher. His name was Mike Boyle. I don't know where he is these days. It was a long time ago, but I really, I gained so much from those classes and it laid the foundation for what became my life's work. It sounds like you did have some community and some mentorship and so far as folks who are older who could be like, all right, this is how you do it. But
00:26:03
Speaker
You are very digital and online. You have a successful podcast. You have a big online following. And I'd imagine there wasn't a blueprint of this is how one is an astrologer online. So how did you find your way as a content creator and an astrologer?
Balancing Content Creation and Professional Life
00:26:24
Speaker
I wouldn't say that anyone was
00:26:27
Speaker
modeling the career in the way that I did. I knew what I wanted to do when I was young, which is I wanted to help people. And so I built this consulting career. And then eventually somebody invented Yelp. And then I was like, I guess I got to get online. But that was the beginning. I was on Friendster. I was on MySpace. And I'm assuming you know what those things are. Do you know what those things are? Yeah, I am. I'm 30. That's a great question. And I'm not sure how to answer it simply because
00:26:55
Speaker
I'm so dedicated to the work I do. I love the work I do. Do I love posting on social media? No, sir, I do not. I have in moments, I have at times really loved it. And what I did was I learned from younger people. I would have millennial friends and I'd be like, what is?
00:27:14
Speaker
Instagram, what am I supposed to do with this? I just ask people, I don't, when I think about the thing that I am very intentional about, which is my website, I rebuilt my website a few years ago and I was just really clear with the designer I worked with is that I want 0% of an astrology website.
00:27:33
Speaker
I don't like astrology websites. They do not resonate with me. I want this to feel like me and I'm a maximalist. I like busyness, but it has to be organized because I'm really pragmatic. And I modeled it off of actually clothing fashion websites that have like very organized things that they're selling, but it's like there's these flashes of color in
00:27:53
Speaker
Uh more grid shaped environments. I don't know if you've actually seen my website, but oh, yeah Yeah, i've been on it for sure. Thank you very much. And yeah, so I just feel like the
00:28:04
Speaker
One of the joys of being self-employed, one of the joys of being an astrologer instead of a therapist, because I could of course have become a therapist and chose not to, is that I don't have to do it any way other than my way. And the joy of having come up at a time way before astrology was considered a career, right? Now it is, but that's very new, is that there was no way that I had to do it. And as a queer person,
00:28:32
Speaker
Ditto. It's like you get to invent your own path. And for me, that really works because when I don't focus on what am I supposed to do? And instead I focus on what do I feel called to do? What do I think is going to be helpful here? What do I think will be cute? Like I have a gifty page. I don't need a gifty page. I'm an astrologer, but I fricking love gifs.
00:28:54
Speaker
So I got a Giphy page and I have a bunch of gifts on it, you know? I mean, like I just do things that I think are fun and, and that feel, I don't know, like an extension of me because there are so many ways that it is not appropriate for me to bring my personality and my personal values or my personal opinions to the work I do. It's just not appropriate at all. But when it comes to aesthetics, I get to when it comes to.
00:29:18
Speaker
Talking on the podcast, I can share my values and my politics. But when I'm doing consultations with people, that's not when that's appropriate. And most of my career has been about consultations as opposed to the podcast. That's a newer kind of embodiment of my career. And I'm still figuring out
00:29:34
Speaker
I think all content creators are constantly trying to figure this out. How do I want to show up in social media and online spaces? What do I think is a constructive use of these spaces for me as a person with a career, but also as a person in the world? I'm constantly struggling with it, and in particular right now, I'm really
00:29:53
Speaker
I'm really exploring it and not quite sure what I think my answers are for who I am and what I'm doing right now. It's not natural. It's just not natural to be a content creator seven days a week, 365, but these companies make so much money off of our constant engagement. And we take on this individualized pressure to constantly create when there's no way to stay in alignment and constantly create without burning yourself out sooner or later, right?
00:30:22
Speaker
That's really helpful and interesting. We didn't talk about this at the start, but I worked in marketing for a really long time. But what my business does, which is less than a year old, is I do where I help founders, entrepreneurs, coaches, execs with their LinkedIn presence and their LinkedIn branding and newsletters. What you're saying is really resonating with me and
00:30:46
Speaker
I think so on one hand, I'm like, yeah, it is a problem. My business is designed to help take that pressure off of people. But let me back up a sec. You said something I thought was so interesting, which is you said, instead of thinking, what should I do when trying to figure out what should your website look like? For example, you think what would be helpful? What feels fun? What do you think looks cute right now? And I think that is such a useful and good energy shift when trying to make these decisions because at the end of the day, you're like,
00:31:14
Speaker
teal or light blue is not going to be that big a deal. But it can kill you and people can really start pulling everybody and freaking out about it and losing sleep over it and changing their mind five times. And I do think though some folks are just naturally a little better at
00:31:37
Speaker
Finding that self-expression than others, you have such a nice defined aesthetic. Awesome glasses, awesome hair, cool shirt, it's a very colorful website. And it all is cohesive, but I don't have the impression that you were like, I need to make sure that my lapel style also maps to the aesthetic of the nineties that my site might be. I think other folks don't have it. For me, for example, for other people, I can do it really easily. But for myself, if I were to try and be like, what is even my aesthetic?
00:32:07
Speaker
I have a really hard time with it. And so one question I had for you was how, I would have guessed from how you've shown up online that it does come naturally to you. Would you say that's true or are you like, no, this was pulling teeth? No, in terms of like my aesthetic, it is very natural to me.
00:32:28
Speaker
It's what you said feels really right to me, but I can't help but think back to, I have a book, Astrology for Real Relationships, and in the process of trying to design the cover, I remember having this one meeting with the publisher, and they were like, they were all so kind, they were lovely people, and they were like, we do not understand your aesthetic. They were like, you're not making any sense, because it is wide, and it's a lot of things thrown at the wall at once, so I'm glad to hear that you think it looks
00:32:56
Speaker
and it looks like it's all come together because it's definitely not my intention. I just tend to go for the things I like and I tend to really like things or really not like things. But for more of the marketing perspective, the way to advertise yourself as a self-employed person is not to advertise yourself. It's instead to think of yourself as the client that you want to attract. And how's that client going to find you? Thinking about making it easy on the client
00:33:24
Speaker
to have access to you or making it easy on the consumer or whatever for me as a client to have access to you. How is a person going to try to find somebody who fills this particular niche? And thinking of it more as, I'm going to make it easy for you to find me so that once you find me, the hardest thing you have to do is figure out, do you want to work with me? Like being an obscurity, it just makes it hard for the client to find you. Why would you make that part the challenge?
00:33:48
Speaker
For me, that used to always be the way I would think of advertising. And now with social media, I think that is a little different because everybody is discoverable on social. But I will say it is the one place where I do struggle with authenticity. I think also some of it is.
00:34:07
Speaker
probably age. I think for people like me, who my business is me, it's not like I'm not selling an external product in any kind of real way. I don't know. How much do I want to do personal sharing on social media? Not so much, but I know that's really what kind of moves the needle for most people. And again, it comes back to boundaries. I really do feel that
00:34:29
Speaker
Even if something is fashionable in this moment, if it's outside of alignment with us as creators, whatever that means, creators, then it'll burn you out. And the truth is, fashions always change. You just got to be true to yourself and it will come around. I don't know if that's applyable for everyone, but that certainly is how I've organized myself.
00:34:52
Speaker
I absolutely love that. I feel like that's a sound bite right there. And I did listen to the episode you did with a young woman. She was an artist and she had accidentally stumbled into a big Instagram following. And she was like, this feels awful to me. And you mentioned something you said earlier where you were like,
00:35:11
Speaker
Um, humans weren't meant to do this. This feels weird to us because we didn't evolve to share and be seen and feel pressures in this way, which really resonated with me and I thought was really wise. And I love what you're saying, which is, I feel like always the best advice ever all the time, which is just be true to yourself and stay in alignment.
00:35:31
Speaker
That's it. That's it. And I also, I feel like I should affirm also, I'm older than a lot of people in the online spaces I'm in. And I think that's a really important thing for me to affirm. A lot of times women don't talk about our age, but I think the level of comfort I have with my own aesthetic or with my identity or the way that I present my ideas with certainty
00:35:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to be different for me in my late 40s than it would be for somebody in their late 30s or in their late 20s or anything else. And it's going to be different for somebody who's in their late 60s. But because technology and the way that it's evolved so quickly, we don't have a lot of experience with older people online because if you're 70 or 60 now, you remember when TV was like a
00:36:20
Speaker
new crazy thing, whereas we've evolved beyond TV now, right? I know people like to break us down into Gen X and Alpha and Millennial and whatever. But if we pull back from those stupid labels that sometimes are cool, but are often just like divisive and annoying, it's really about understanding how technology has impacted the various generations, how the economy has impacted various generations, how wars have impacted various generations, and understanding those things
00:36:47
Speaker
I think is really important to contextualizing our individual experience. A lot of my friends, maybe more of my friends that are my age are not chronically online the way I am. And that makes sense because we have a different relationship to technology than somebody who's a millennial or Gen Z. And I think that's a thing to acknowledge, but within that is something else, which is
00:37:13
Speaker
Do you want to be in your fifties and still obsessing on how to present yourself and your personal story online? Maybe you do. That's going to be yes for a lot of people, but it has to be no for a lot of people too. And there has to be, I think an acknowledgement of there being a season for all things, including being chronically creating and chronically online. So I don't know, like it's a conversation I'm having with myself all the time as I age and as I see technology evolve.
00:37:44
Speaker
I really love everything that you just said and what you said earlier too about how the personal stories that to your point move the needle. I feel like it's this really messed up currency. What little piece of yourself are you going to give the machine to get the machines like algorithm liking you so that you can go do the thing that you want to do?
00:38:05
Speaker
You know, the, I'm only active on LinkedIn and that's the only thing my agency does is LinkedIn. But someone was like, you really need to promote the podcast on Instagram. And I feel such resistance to even just going on because I feel like my nervous system cannot take one more platform to you. I am with you and it's not just.
00:38:25
Speaker
that these different platforms have different values and different vibes because they do. But they also have different rules. The technology, the algorithms, favor different conduct. And if I go on Instagram and I'm like a lemon or a planet because I use these fun filters, Instagram lets me do it. If I go on TikTok and try to do that, TikTok wants your face. TikTok wants your face. TikTok wants you. Just wants your face.
00:38:52
Speaker
It's like you have to play by different rules for different platforms. And that means you have to concern yourself with different metrics of success or failure. And then on top of it, as women, we have our own risks because it's like the judginess is real, not just for men, from women, from everybody. You know what I mean? Like we are mean to ourselves, we are mean to each other, and other people are mean to us. It's just like a lot to deal with.
00:39:19
Speaker
At a certain point, I think we all have to ask ourselves, there are many points, like, to what ends? Like, to what end? And I think sometimes it's okay to be more obscure or to be
00:39:32
Speaker
less generative because it feeds, it creates space where we can feed our soul. And that empowers us to do the work long-term. If you can't do the work long-term, what's the damn point? You know what I mean? I don't know if you've had this thought, but sometimes when I've been in a very productive or creative mode and I've tallied up the amount of time I spent on a platform for a day and then extrapolated it. And I was like, do I want to spend two hours a day for the remainder of my life? Like,
00:40:00
Speaker
on that platform, no. One of my next questions was about like, how much content are you putting out writing and creating? Like how much time are you spending that versus working with clients?
Transition to Podcasting and Patreon
00:40:11
Speaker
I actually am not meeting with clients at this time. So basically what happened was I saw the pandemic coming. So I didn't see COVID-19, but I saw an airborne pandemic coming back in 2017. So at the time I was booking my clients a year in advance.
00:40:27
Speaker
In 2018, I stopped taking clients. So I booked up all of 2019. It was the end of 2018, I stopped taking clients. So I was booked up for all of 2019. And then I think in January of 2020, I had my last client.
00:40:44
Speaker
And then you knew what happened. Some shit went down. It was a pandemic. And at that point, I already had the podcast, but what I started to do was I started to do two episodes a week. I started to really commit more to that and I stopped meeting with clients.
00:41:01
Speaker
The reason why I stopped meeting with clients was a couple things. One was I physiologically couldn't because of all the dead people. It was really a rough year and a half with dead people and I couldn't have met with clients at that same time.
00:41:16
Speaker
But the other thing, and the reason why I'm not meeting with clients now is because of the cognitive dissonance around the fact that we're still living through a pandemic, that we are living through really exceptional times in regards to our collective conditions.
00:41:31
Speaker
And I think that we are still in a stage as a society where we're perceiving our issues as individual when what they are is we are individually experiencing broken systems that aren't sustainable. And it becomes much harder to counsel individuals through that.
00:41:50
Speaker
without being like, I want you to pay attention to this and I want you to pay attention to that. And I don't want to have that struggle with people. That's not my calling. And so at this time, I'm not meeting with clients. So if somebody listens to this podcast and they're like, I want to hire her. Oh, you cannot. The only way I do readings is on my podcast where I give them for free.
00:42:10
Speaker
So in regards to my podcast, it comes out twice a week. So I spend a fair amount of time engaging with that. And then I'm, I put out a lot of content on Patreon. I love my Patreon. And for me,
00:42:25
Speaker
It's not a struggle to figure out how to show up because my patrons tell me, I want to learn about this. Can you explain that? And there we go. We have a conversation. So it's closer to what I'm comfortable with, which is more of a counseling dynamic. It's more of an intimate dynamic and I'm really.
00:42:40
Speaker
I really do love my patients. So it's like easy for me to show up there. Also on Patreon, people are there because they've already decided they want to be there. And so there's not that thing that happens on social media where you're like, is some jamoke going to swipe, come across my post and then start being really mean or I'm not going to get spammed or anything like that. So that's nice.
00:43:00
Speaker
And then I teach and do other things. So I'm creating a lot of content, but it's not that in one-on-one counseling content. I wouldn't call that content anyways, but it's not one-on-one counseling really anymore. And I don't imagine that's going to change in the short term. Okay. Well, definitely in the show notes link to Ghost of a Podcast, which I love your Patreon, your Instagram.
Conclusion and Further Resources
00:43:24
Speaker
Is there anything else that I should include there where folks who are really interested in you could follow along? Oh, that's a great question. Now, if you want, you can read my book. If you're into astrology, it's called Astrology for Real Relationships, and it is available anywhere you buy books, probably.
00:43:40
Speaker
Maybe, hopefully. Anyway, they buy astrology books. How about that? Yeah. So there's that. We'll definitely put that in there too. And then is there anything that you wish I'd asked or that we screwed it around that you'd want to say? That's a great question. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. I feel like that's great questions. Thanks. So you're an easy person to interview. Thank you.
00:44:07
Speaker
All right, folks, I hope that you enjoyed that episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe or review us. And if you want to check out our newsletter, Content People, it is in the show notes. See you next time. Bye.