Episode 133: Building a Business After a Job Loss — with David Shriner-Cahn

After 28 years as a highly skilled employee, David Shriner-Cahn was told that his job was over. In spite of the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny. That was in 2006.

Today, David is a thriving entrepreneur, podcaster and speaker. He guides high achieving professionals who yearn to impact the world with their knowledge and creativity by becoming successful consultants or coaches, following long careers as employees. He also hosts two podcasts: Smashing the Plateau, which focuses on how to overcome roadblocks and generate long-term business success, and Going Solo, which explores how to reinvent yourself as an entrepreneur after a late-career job loss.

During this episode, you will hear David talk about:

• His career journey from engineer to executive to entrepreneur
• His own experience with job loss — and how he coped and moved forward from it
• How he learned about business development and marketing to be a more successful entrepreneur
• The origins of his two podcasts, Smashing The Plateau and Going Solo
• What he’s learned about success in self-employment, from his personal experience and the entrepreneurs he’s interviewed and coached

Listen to David’s podcasts at Smashing the Plateau and Going Solo.

Connect with David on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Subscribe to the FREE Beyond 6 Seconds newsletter for all the latest news and updates about my podcast!

The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Hello, and welcome to the Beyond 6 Seconds podcast. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel. And on today’s episode, I’m really excited to be speaking with my guest David Shriner-Cahn. After 28 years as a highly skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. In spite of the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny.

That was in 2006. Today, David is a thriving entrepreneur, podcaster, and speaker. He has guided, he is guiding high achieving professionals who yearn to impact the world with their knowledge and creativity by becoming successful consultants or coaches following long careers as employees. David, welcome to the podcast.

David Shriner-Cahn: Thanks so much, Carolyn I’m so glad you invited me to be here today.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, yeah. I’m excited to have you here. And I know we’ve recently I was on an episode of your show. That’ll be coming out in the future. So I’m really happy to have this opportunity to talk with you again.

David Shriner-Cahn: Thank you.

Carolyn Kiel: So you know, I’d love to learn more about your career path because I understand that you started off like in a corporate career as I think you’re training also is as an engineer. Is that correct?

David Shriner-Cahn: That is correct. Yeah, it was. I have a master’s in chemical engineering from Cornell. I worked as an engineer in two different jobs. Both of them for for engineering consulting companies. The first one I was designing chemical plants and a second one, I was working on energy related projects.

It was a company that had about, I don’t know, 150 or so engineers working on a lot of government funded projects. And yeah, and that job ended also because I was told my job was over. And the story there was since it was government funded, the there was a change in administration, went from democratic to Republican and it was Reagan and he cut the budget for a lot of the kinds of projects that my company was working on.

And so about half the staff got laid off. And then I I was a little blindsided by that and uh a little disillusioned about corporate life. And there were also, there were things that I saw going on for especially in the technical field. I saw a lot of engineers that were in their fifties that were getting laid off.

It was, it was pretty prevalent in the eighties and I was like this just happened to me. I’m in my twenties. Do I really want to stay in this field and be susceptible to this again in another 30 years when it might have a much more dramatic impact financially on not only me, but those I may be supporting?

And you know, at the time I was married, no kids. So I did a lot of soul searching, did some market research, and I ended up going into the not-for-profit sector. And I was in executive roles the entire time that I was in that field, which was a little over 20 years. So I got a lot of management and leadership sort of on the job training as well as I I’m a lifelong learner.

So I would take take advantage of every opportunity I could find to learn how to do what I needed to do better. You know, and then as, as it, as the case is now, there are a lot of either low cost or free opportunities to learn new, new techniques, new strategies, new skills. So I was always doing that and I kind of reached the point you know, after being in the field for, for a couple of decades and being in the same, I was in the same job also for you know, at the point when I left, it was 18 years, which is a long time for one organization.

And I was, I came in in a number two position. The organization had grown, so my responsibilities grew, my compensation grew. So it was definitely not boring. I was learning, I was growing, but I couldn’t go to a number one position because it was an education organization and I didn’t have those credentials.

You actually needed that to be the CEO. So for me to grow in my career, I had two choices. One would be to, if I wanted to stay in the not-for-profit sector, go to another organization you know, either similar size or bigger in a number one position. And those, those positions did exist and it was possible to do that.

And the second path, which was you know, there’s always the fork in the road and I, I tend to take the one that’s less traveled. So the less traveled one was to become a consultant. And in my case I, the, there were signs that that there was going to be some duplication because of some, some changes in in the organization that were not in my position, but there were, they were signs that there would be some duplication and redundancy of of what I was doing.

And so I w I wasn’t blindsided that my job ended. I was surprised the actual day it happened. And even though I sort of suspected it for honestly, for like a year before it happened, the day that it happened, I was still quite shocked. And it’s interesting, you know, I talk a lot about this now, because this is an area that I now focus on the, the trauma of job loss.

And it’s interesting that even when you expect it, it’s still traumatic. And I was actually, I was surprised at how traumatic it was given the fact that I had put in plans, at least in my mind about what my next step was going to be. I had didn’t have any clients yet, but I had an idea about how I would do it.

And so it wasn’t like I had to, I was starting from scratch, but still the abruptness and the fact that I didn’t control the decision was, was actually quite traumatic. And so You know, so anyway, I did become a consultant. I was initially a not-for-profit management consultant. That was what I been doing for all those years.

I was really good at it and I did get business fairly early on through my network. And and, and that was my primary focus for the first few years. I started doing some business networking, cause I’d never done marketing and sales before. I was like, totally clueless about it, which is quite common with people that are pretty steeped in a particular discipline.

They decided they want to go off on their own and be self-employed as a consultant. So I had to figure out this whole thing about how do I, how do I actually do business development? What is it? And So I started doing some business networking and some of the people I was networking with started asking me if I would help them with their businesses.

And at first I was like, I just know the not-for-profit sector. What do I know about running a small business? And I discovered that actually knew an awful lot about it because running. Running an organization, managing a team dealing with operations, trying to keep your clients happy, whether they’re clients that you’re serving as a nonprofit or clients that you’re serving as a privately held business, you still have to keep, you still have to deliver on your promise.

That’s basically what clients expect. So I started picking up some private business clients and and that ended up becoming the the lion’s share of my business over time. And the longer that I was in my own business, the more I got asked to help people who had pretty much pursued the same path that I had pursued, which is a long career as an employee.

In my case, it was 28 years. And then something happens either by design or by circumstance. And your next step is I’m done with this being an employee thing. I want to call the shots. I want to be self-employed and that self-employment can take a lot of shapes, but but, but there are some major shifts that you have to deal with and, and you, even if you’re doing what I did initially, which is to serve the same kinds of organizations, deal with the same kinds of problems, deal with the same people, there are major shifts you need to make in, in, in a lot of the things that you’re doing day-to-day and a lot of the way that you actually run your professional life. So that’s, that’s kind of what I now spend most of my time focusing on with clients.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. So, yeah, as you were saying it, you know, going out as an entrepreneur, it’s really when it’s just you, you’re in charge of everything and most people in their careers are focused on maybe one or two areas. So it, it sounds like when you were in nonprofit management, were you mainly like operations or finance?

David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, I was finance and operations. So so I knew enough accounting to be dangerous. I was really good at business processes. Thank you to the engineering background. And I was good at managing people. So, so yeah, so those skills, I was really good at the marketing and sales, as I said I had to learn that I, you know, I have an engineering background.

I’ve always, technology has also always been part of my job, whether it was as an engineer or even when I was in the nonprofit sector, I usually had some kind of technology portfolio as well. And, you know, the early days of computers, but basically the, I was the IT department, as things got to be more complex, we hired staff to do that, but I would manage the staff because it, it, it also fell within finance and operations and B I also understood what they were doing. Yeah.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. So it’s you already have that, that really a pretty solid background. It’s just, as you said, really trying to learn the whole business development and marketing and sales area. How did you wind up learning that once you were out on your own?

David Shriner-Cahn: I watched what other people did. I would again, I would take advantage of learning opportunities. So, you know, some stuff is free. Yeah. Some I would pay for. I’m also a big reader. So for me, one easy way to learn is to buy books.

So yes, I’m always buying business books and I, I find that’s a pretty easy way and low cost way to learn things. There’s You know now, Oh, another way that I’ve actually learned quite a bit is like you, I host a podcast and so I’ve, I’ve interviewed, I dunno, probably five, 600 people on my shows and with every episode where I have a conversation with somebody who is an expert in a particular discipline, I do learn things.

Carolyn Kiel: That is a really great way to learn and also to network and meet a lot of new people that you may not normally meet. Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. So you said you actually host now two podcasts, right? You’ve got Smashing the Plateau, which I think was your first one that’s been going on for several years.

And then more recently you started Going Solo, your, your other one. So yeah. Tell us a little more about both of your podcasts and why you got into the world of podcasting.

David Shriner-Cahn: So I got into podcasting w it was actually a pivot on a text-based blog that we were doing. Like one of the things that I’ve always, always watch is, okay, who’s doing something that I think I may want to, I may want to learn from? And also I can adopt some of the same techniques. So as a consultant, one of the things I saw was that other consultants were, were more prominent because they were producing content. And I thought, okay I guess I should try doing this.

And in a, when I first started doing it, which was around 2012, the most common way was a blog. And so I started a blog did that for a couple of years. And one of the ways that we actually generated a lot of traction with the blog, which I didn’t realize when I started it, was creating a schedule.

So having a process, creating a schedule so from day one, like the first week that we’d launched the blog, we had two posts and then every week thereafter we had two posts and at some point maybe it was like a year in, we increased the frequency to five posts a week. And the way we did it was by tapping into my network and asking people in my network, if they wanted to be featured, all they had to do is answer five questions.

Right. So a lot of people said, yes, we had like a framework of the five questions that we would we would tailor in some unique way to each guest so that they, it wasn’t just a cookie cutter of always the same five questions, but it was really geared to who, who the the respondent was. And we did a survey of the audience, and the audience, the feedback we got was we want greater depth. These are great. We want greater depth. And so we decided to and had a small team that was helping me with this whole process. Because I knew nothing about content creation when I started this, like with all these things you, you need to have some somebody helping you in, in different ways. And for me, one of the ways it’s easiest for me is having some kind of team that’s, that’s responsible for some combination of strategy and execution. And so we decided to to try doing audio interviews, which is a podcast, and it turned out that you know, I was a little anxious at first because I had never done anything like this before.

I had no idea how it would come out. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to the first episode. And I would probably cringe if I listened to it now, but, but I did start and it turned out I liked it. And then I got to meet all these great people from all over the world. And the, the thing that I didn’t expect from it was, I got people that had big audiences to say yes to an invitation, to be on my show really early on. It’s like, I, I remember I was talking to somebody recently. I had people like Gary Vaynerchuk who had a huge following within the first six months.

Carolyn Kiel: Cool.

David Shriner-Cahn: And, and, you know, I had other people that had certainly tens of thousands of followers, some of them, hundreds of thousands, some of them millions, who were perfectly willing to get to devote an hour, to be a guest on my show, which is pretty, you know, honestly I’m humbled by it, just thinking about it.

And it’s pretty awesome. So you know, obviously we had to come up with a theme and a topic for the first show and at that point the major focus of my work was implementation. You know, it’s kind of relates to my background and finance operations management. One of the challenges that I saw that, that the leaders of small organizations were, whether they were in the privately held business sector or the not-for-profit sector. One of the biggest challenges they had was just following through on their ideas. You know, ideas are a dime a dozen, implementation is priceless and and I’m really good at implementation. So I would come up with, with structures that would work for the, for the CEOs to be able to implement their new ideas. And the focus of Smashing the Plateau is when, when you’re an entrepreneur and your aspirations are long-term success, what does it take to get beyond the roadblocks that we all encounter, especially the ones that are unexpected, and persevere with these ideas so that we can generate the longterm success? So it was a very general theme initially again, mostly focused on, on implementation. And after hosting the show for about I guess it was about five years, I started spending some time reflecting on who had been my guests, who was in the audience, who was in my network.

And reality was that the vast majority of those people were self-employed they were I call them solopreneurs, but the reality is nobody’s solo. I have yet to meet somebody who runs a business who doesn’t have at least somebody to prepare their tax returns for them. Right. That person is part of your team.

And if you start to dig, every solopreneur has people that they rely on for their business to run. So anyway, When I looked at who these people were, they were mostly solopreneurs. A lot of them like me had had a corporate career first whatever sector they were in, but they were an employee for a long time.

And then they became self-employed. The most common, I would say most common track is to become a consultant or coach because it’s a fairly easy transition. You stay in the same discipline and then you serve the same kinds of the same audience, same kinds of clients, same kinds of problems. And the thing that you have to learn is how to run a business.

And you have to learn, you have to re you know, you have to overcome the th the reality that all of a sudden, you’re it, you’re the chief cook and bottle washer. You’re responsible for everything. As you said earlier, when you’re in an organization, there’s the corporate structure that provides all these things, and you are responsible for one narrow niche in that structure. As a small business owner, you’re responsible for everything.

And, and at the very beginning, you probably have to do pretty much, almost everything yourself. So looking at that, I th I saw, you know, they’re there actually could be a much narrower niche that that we can serve in, in the content that we’re creating. And I started doing some actually sent out a survey by email, which would got an enormous response.

And I discovered not only had many people in my network followed that path of corporate first, then, then self-employed but unbeknownst to me, many of those people and, and people I’d known for a long time, actually the trigger was they got fired and, but they didn’t talk about it. Yeah. So, and so I started having one-on-one discussions with a lot of these people, and I realized that there was a, a gap in in the, at least the discussion around what the problem is and what some of the solutions are. And the gap that I was discovering is for the, the those early stage entrepreneurs, what isn’t talked about is the emotional trauma that you go through and how you address that. Because it’s, it’s not like you go from one job to another, your income drops to zero when you’re unemployed, but it goes back up to a hundred percent the day you start your new job.

When you start a business, it can take a long time until you actually ramp up and you make as much money as you made when you were an employee. You can actually make a lot more money as an entrepreneur, many don’t, but you can. So you yeah, th there’s a lot of emotional turmoil that you have to deal with.

And so one of the things that I have focused on with Going Solo is what is that emotional turmoil, what are the different stages to it? How do you address it? What happens if you ignore things like, like trauma and grief? You have, you’ve actually, you know, when you’ve lost a job, you have lost something and there are stages of grief that in some ways are similar to when you lose a loved one and to ignore that is I, I think it actually makes it much harder to be successful in your new business. So those are the, some of the things that we focus on in Going Solo, which we, we still don’t really talk about all that much on Smashing the Plateau. Smashing the Plateau is, is still geared more for the, the business owner that has been at it for at least a few years, and there they have achieved some kind of sustainability in their business.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, and I think it’s so powerful to focus on that, that period of time, that grieving process from after you lose a job, even, and as you said before, even if it’s something that you expected, or maybe you’re in a job that, you know, maybe you’re even, you’re in a job that you hate, even then, if something happens, it’s still like that, that shock and that trauma.

And it takes some time to process through and, and make that sort of transition from I’m. I’m an employee who I go to a place or I kind of sign in and I do my structured job to, you know, okay, well now I can pretty much, you know, do what I want, but now I have to figure out, you know, as you say, no one’s really on their own, but at the very first beginning, like, well, you feel like you’re really on your own.

Now you now it’s on you to figure everything out. So yeah, I’m interested to learn more about you know what you’ve learned from the people that you’ve interviewed on Going Solo. Like, are there any kind of common themes that you’ve seen with the people that you’ve talked to in terms of how they kind of process the, the emotion and the transition around a job loss?

David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. Well, one of the things is it’s really valuable to be able to spend some time reflecting before you start doing, and it’s so hard, especially for people that are in their fifties or sixties, when they have fixed expenses to support their lifestyle. And even if you have, you know, if you’ve built up a reserve of savings or assets that you can tap into, if you’re not bringing, if you’re bringing in less income than your monthly expenses, even if you give yourself quote, unquote permission to do that for a number of months or even a year or more.

It is emotionally still hard to do, because I think we’re programmed that our income should always be higher than our expenses. Right. So if you, if you give yourself, it’s essentially like I’ve had some guests who have called it a sabbatical, right? If you think about like the term sabbatical. And even if you think about the concept of the Sabbath, right.

Humans all over the world have a seven day week. It’s one of the things we all agree on. Right. Interesting. Why do we do that and why? And, and in embedded in that concept, is that one day is supposed to be different than the other days. And it is a day of if you think about it from whether you’re religious or not, the origins of it, I think are there’s some self-reflection that goes on.

So the same thing I’ve heard from a lot of my guests is it’s really important to spend some time doing some self-reflection. And if you if you have the financial wherewithal to do it and not bring in income, that’s great. There, there are other ways to do it as well. So a couple of strategies that I, that guests have talked about is you could take an interim job a project job as a consultant where, you know, it’s going to end, you could take some kind of interim work that may not pay you what you want or what you think you deserve, but decide that I’m committed to do this for X number of months while I do some self reflection to sort of figure out a longer term strategy. So give yourself some breathing room. So yes project work is a way to do it. Contract work. I had a guest on an upcoming episode we just recorded.

And he also has, his job was terminated and he ended up through his network, he ended up getting asked to be a contract worker on on one project at a time. So first it was, you know, initially it was like one project. And so he, you know, he needed to work in, he needed income. So he took it. And then when that was done, there was another opportunity to do another contract piece of work.

And he took that. And one of the things that he realized when he was in this period of doing the contract work was he actually really liked the, the whole, the kind of work that consultants do. And he discovered that by somebody else feeding him the work, he didn’t have to do any marketing or sales, but he was giving up a significant portion of the, of the fee to the to the, the company that was subcontracting to him. And so he realized what he needed to learn how to do his marketing and sales so he had a pipeline, and then he could charge a much higher fee. And so he ended up spending some time learning marketing, and sales, started to build a pipeline and and then ended up charging a higher fee and being quite happy.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I mean, that’s it, again, sales and marketing is a, is a big, big thing. And it’s just something that a lot of people really need to learn when they’re out on their own. Wow.

David Shriner-Cahn:  Yeah. If you have no sales, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is really critical. Yeah. So in, among the people that you interview on Going Solo, Is it everybody’s, have you found it’s everybody’s desire, at least in whether it’s a sort of a thought in the back of their head or a strong drive, like, do all of your guests sort of in the back of their head, want to say, like, I would like to be out of my own someday at some point, or are there guests who like, literally, like they’re, you know, they lose their job, they’re just sort of out and they’re like, well, what do I do? Let me try to figure out how to start a business.

David Shriner-Cahn: So of the people who have, who have been terminated and their next step is to start a business that I find they fall into two categories. First category is they may be shocked that they that they got fired, but they were tired of being an employee, they’re tired of the corporate life.

And they really want to, they want the control that comes with being self-employed. And so they’re just determined to figure out how to make it work no matter what. Second category, there are people that think, okay, well, I’d re I would like to get another job, but it’s just not happening. And so if I’m going to be able to pay my bills, I’m going to have to be a consultant. For them, it is way harder. And they probably don’t make as much money ever as they were making when they were employed. Self-employment isn’t for everybody. You know, there’s this myth of, of freedom that comes with being self-employed and I would say. There’s there’s freedom that you get to control the structure that you live by.

But unless you’re really structured, it’s really hard to be successful. It’s the structure is what helps propel you forward. If you’re self-employed you get to create the structure, you get to decide, you know, what, what hours am I going to work? But but not working is not an option. Not working is, is not going to bring you money.

Being an entrepreneur is way harder than being an employee. It’s not for the faint of heart. You know, many people don’t have the focus, discipline and perseverance that it takes to be an entrepreneur. So what I’ve seen of the people that, that do make the shift from employment to entrepreneurship, they really need to go all in to be successful.

I had another guest early on Lorianne Vaughan-Speaks, who talks about this on the episode that she was 60 years old when she got laid off. She didn’t, she, you know, she, she worked for somebody who was an author and speaker who she thought was never going to retire and, and lo and behold, She did.

And, and yeah, Lorianne was, was out on a you know, she had to figure out what to do next. She was looking for a job and trying to get clients in her own business simultaneously. She tried it for a few months. It was really hard to do both. And she started getting more traction in her business than she did trying to get a job.

And so she gave up looking for a job and went all in on the business and like really went all in. And she did very well in her business and actually made a lot more money than she had made as an employee, much faster than a lot of people. But again, she was all in. It’s like, you really have to commit to it. It’s not, it’s not easy.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, I’m thinking of one of your episodes that I listened to recently, and I, I can’t recall exactly which guest it was, but you talk about this concept of chicken entrepreneurship, which I think is, is interesting because a lot of the advice that I sometimes hear people give is that, you know, it’s helpful to kind of start working on your business while you have another income stream, whether that’s a, another full-time corporate job or a, whatever it is so that you’re kind of ready when it starts, but. I think to your point, unless you’re all in, it doesn’t really start to happen for you.

David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. And by the way, I have had guests on that have started a business on the side and some of them do ramp their business up while they’re working full-time and get the business to be robust enough that the transition isn’t so hard. I actually had a client years ago who started he was in the trades, which is, which is different than, than when you’re selling your knowledge. But he was in the trades and he was working on the side and it got to the point where he was making more money working on the side than he was making in his job.

And he quit his job. And for him, I think that transition was not so hard. And he already had the income. But for most people most people don’t do it that way. And for most people they don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do both simultaneously.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, definitely. Even in some cases, if you’re going from one corporate job and you’re trying to job search and, and get another job, the, the sort of general wisdom is that you shouldn’t, shouldn’t voluntarily leave a job unless you have a job to go to.

But sometimes at some point you, you know, you just run out of bandwidth and. You know, sometimes if you’re able to, it helps to have more of that bandwidth available to either go full time or full on focus on job searching or focus on building a business, whatever your next venture is.

David Shriner-Cahn: Right. And sometimes the job is toxic, and so it sucks so much energy out of you that you can’t, you can’t present yourself in a positive light to a prospective employer because you’re just so burnt out from your job. So you need, you need some breathing space to be able to do it.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I mean, yeah, even, you know, trying to keep a positive mindset, but still, if it’s really toxic and really draining you, it, it, it shows. Like it’s really hard to hide that when you’re having a conversation with people.

So I’ve definitely noticed that. Yeah, no, it definitely helps. And it ties back to what you were saying before is to build in that time, whether it’s, you know, we call it a sabbatical or just some, some time to reflect on your experiences and really what you want to do next, so that you’re not just sort of always jumping headlong into the next thing. That may not be the best way for a lot of people to do it. You know, the people that you interview on Going Solo, who are going through like a job loss, are they all sort of like job losses, I guess either mid-career so it’s not necessarily like you lost, you experienced a job loss in your twenties when you were relatively new and then sort of later on, later in your career. Are most of your guests focused on sort of mid-career or even in the case of your, your guest who is 60 years old, sort of saying like, you know, almost close to retirement and sort of how to navigate through that?

David Shriner-Cahn: The guests tend to be mid to late career. You know, the the number of years that we work today is very different than it was when I first started, when I started working. So somebody who is 60 could be working another 20 plus years quite easily. I had another guest who was working full time.

And planning to to start a business on the side, when he stopped his full-time job, he was already starting this, the, the side stuff with content creation while he was, while he was working. And he was in his early eighties. And him and his, his niche was how do you, how do you both keep active, keep engaged and keep doing what you want to do because it contributes to your wellbeing and actually contributes to both your physical and your mental health if you’re engaged.

Yeah. So the concept of retirement, like it was I was sort of endemic to our culture in the 20th century. I think that concept is kind of out the window. I think most people either can’t afford to do it or don’t want to do it. And I think you know, self-employment also has seen a huge increase.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens as we get further and further from the initial stages of the lockdown last year, because the way people work, especially. those of us that are knowledge workers, the way we work has changed. And the, the restrictions that we assume we had to follow in order to be successful in our work, those restrictions have also gone out the window.

Right. Right. So like I know people that have gotten new jobs where they are time zones away from the jobs. And last year before March of last year, that would just be unheard of.

Carolyn Kiel: Right. Yeah, I hope a lot of those wind up staying and becoming more permanent across a lot more workplaces because I think it just the flexibility and the accessibility for a lot of people to have opportunities to work in different fields like that I think is really important.

Well, David, it’s been great talking with you. You know, how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about your podcasts or the type of work that you do?

David Shriner-Cahn: So the best place to go is our website SmashingThePlateau.com. Both podcasts are housed there. There’s some information there there’s a contact form. I’m also pretty active, especially on LinkedIn. So you can you know, contact me on LinkedIn. I’m the only David Shriner-Cahn there and probably the only David Shriner-Cahn in the world. So I’m not too hard to find if you yeah. Put my name into a Google search, a lot of stuff will pop up.

Carolyn Kiel: All right. Very good. Yeah. And I’ll put links to your website and to your LinkedIn in the show notes so that people can access that pretty easily.

David Shriner-Cahn: Right. Thank you so much, Carolyn.

Carolyn Kiel: And as we close out, is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know or anything that they can help or support you with?

David Shriner-Cahn: Well, one thing I would say is the most important thing is to take action. Too many of us dwell on our our insecurities, anxieties, and fears that prevents us from taking action. And just ask yourself if I take this step and it doesn’t work out the way I hope, what’s the worst thing that will happen? And what will I do if that happens? And if you keep asking yourself that, you will take a lot more first steps and some of those steps will lead to all kinds of new opportunities and successes that you perhaps haven’t even dreamed about.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. Great words of advice. Great things to keep in mind. Thanks so much, David, for being on my show.

David Shriner-Cahn: Thank you, Carolyn.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend. Give us a shoutout on your social media or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of our episodes on our website and sign up for our free newsletter at www.beyond6seconds.com. Until next time.