The School of Moxie Podcast
Brought to you by Sensible Woo... The business analogies you love are now in podcast form! We take popular television series and movies and use them as the lens through which we talk about building better businesses.
Listen, entrepreneurship should feel fun and exciting, but when you're stuck in a rut then you know it's time to bring in a fun strategy. Analogous problem solving through entertainment sounds like just the ticket.
This podcast is organized into seasons based on the show title or theme. Trying something that might be outside your normal comfort zone of television programming (or any media consumption, for that matter) is a healthy thing… Especially when it’s guided with a group that’s doing the same activity. Whether or not you feel like you’ve been struggling to connect with other people, being connected to the zeitgeist in some way is a critical component to feeling like you belong in this world. And you do.
Something that’s really important about this podcast is that I want to change the way we talk about business through this medium. You will never hear about a freebie or a launch from one of my guests on this show. The goal here is for them to model for you, and to practice for themselves, how to be 100% human have a truly authentic conversation.
My guests’ information will always be in the show notes and you will have total freedom of choice to go check them out, sign up email lists, follow them on social media, or whatever it is they provide as ways to connect with you. You’re officially in the drivers seat… I can’t wait to go on this ride with you!
The School of Moxie Podcast
Intermission: Season 2 Updates + Take the Leap
Hey School of Moxie fam! I've got a season intermission episode for you with updates on where we're at with season 2, featuring Ted Lasso as the TV binge-a-thon with a ton of leadership lessons. I'm also sharing a podcast episode swap with my friends Ashlan and Victoria at Take the Leap. For all of you who ask me lots of questions about how I built a business weaving my intuitive guidance gifts with coaching... this episode has it all for you!
0:00 Season 2 Update: Ted Lasso is on the way...
8:27 Ad spots: Feminist Podcast Collective
16:36 Introduction to Take the Leap episode swap...
17:20 Take the Leap Podcast Guest Episode
1:40:06 Conclusion + End Credits
Links:
Links to resources, transcript, show notes, and show information are found on the podcast homepage.
Episode sponsors:
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Guest information
Mary is the CEO and founder of Sensible Woo. A librarian by trade, who established herself in the entertainment industry as the digital archivist for a major animation production studio, she has consulted for not only entertainment companies, but also marketing agencies, tech start-ups, and non-profit fundraising organizations. For the last eight years, she’s been a business coach championing the focus on systems and data management as a solid foundation for sustainable businesses that scale. You can travel with Mary as she records guests in studios through her weekly emails, YouTube, Instagram, and Threads.
Show Credits
- Host, Wri
I’m Mary Williams, your host and the founder of Sensible Woo. School of Moxie the podcast where we watch TV shows and movies and talk about the entrepreneurship lessons embedded in the stories. The episode archive is found here.
You can find this show wherever you listen to podcasts and all of the links to resources, guest information, and anything else we might reference in an episode are in the show notes.
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Until next week, be sensible, be woo, and most of all, be you. 🤗
Hey School of Moxie Podcast fam! Popping in here to give you a little intermission snack between seasons 1 and 2. Keep listening for a real peek into what happens when life throws you curve balls and how I’ve used it to set up season 2 in a big way.
Y’all, I have missed you! I have updates for you on season 2 production for our Ted Lasson season and I’m sharing a recent interview I had with Ashlan and Victoria over on Take the Leap. Those are the big items that are up for discussion in today’s podcast drop. I’ll have time stamps in the show notes, so if you want to skip ahead to the interview, you can do that… or just stick with me here to get a real, honest update about what it’s like to adjust podcast production on a seasonal show like mine.
From the date that I’m publishing this episode, season 1 for School of Moxie only wrapped about four months ago, but it feels like four years. I know I’m not the only one. It feels like life has been life’ing really hard since the fourth quarter of 2023… I think some of you would like to argue with me that it’s been life’ing a lot longer than that. But no matter what, we can all agree that the first quarter of 2024 was a lot, to say the least.
So, it’s no surprise that this podcast is a seasonal show. I love producing contained themes rather than an ongoing discussion that drops weekly. Most of this is because for myself and my guests, we utilize a television show (and in the future we will also incorporate movies into the mix), which means everyone needs to watch the show and then digest the business lessons we get from the themes in the show.
As a creator, I know that it’s one thing to hold a vision in your mind but an entirely different thing to execute that vision in real time. Add into the mix guests, who are real people with their own real lives, which includes coordinating availability, not to mention the pre-production to make it possible for guests to show up successfully… and you have a lot of moving parts. I ended season 1 pretty darn tired, which was partly a function of the actual production for season 1, but also because I had a bunch of curve balls land in my lap as I was rounding the bases to home plate… Yes, I realize that is a baseball analogy and Ted Lasso for season 2 is all about soccer, as we say in the State… football if you’re anywhere else in the world.
You would never have known anything was happening off the mic, but I was managing a lot of family needs and a lot of health issues that finally came to a head after the new year. So, I took a good break over the holidays and well into January thinking, “Mmm that should be enough.” Well, it wasn’t enough. We had an ice storm in the Pacific Northwest in January and I turned into an unpaid construction manager for a project that shouldn’t be that complicated and yet… we’re still not done with repairs. The health things? Those finally came out in February with some improvements in one area… but some really concerning results in another area. And I’ve only just now finished the last of a series of treatments that should help me function a lot better moving forward. It turns out that feeling fatigued wasn’t just about me being hard on myself for not being as productive an individual as I would have liked… but it was an actual chronic condition and I’ve simply had to accept the fact that the human side of me has needed medical care, recovery, and rest.
But you know, my business operating name is Sensible Woo… and as I was dealing with all the sensible things in life the woo-woo side was giving me an “I Told You So” lecture because the Universe always has magical timing and I have been truly, honestly forced to slow the fuck down and just chill the fuck out. Are you feeling that, too? Because the people I’ve continued to coach through all of these delays in my own production have been reiterating a very similar dialogue and I’m here to tell you on the podcast today that you are not alone and that this seems to be a very collective pattern among many. Not everyone, because nothing is absolute, but a lot of us have had a similar story on delays. So, if you’re one of the delayed bunch, congratulations! You’re right on time!
Being forced to wait out the period that I thought was to serve as my pre-production and scripting time, turned out to be pure magic. But just because it’s magic doesn’t mean it’s comfortable or easy. Here’s what I know for season 2 so far…
- Ted Lasso is still the show we’re watching and talking about.
- Yes, Ted Lasso is a business story with a ton of leadership lessons.
- The guest line up is much smaller this season and I’ll be announcing them in the next couple of months with a season trailer.
- We are still recording in person in studios this year, so you can keep up with that as I show behind-the-scenes snippets on my Instagram account and the link for that is in the show notes.
- But because of my own travel limitations this year, I’m limiting my studio recordings… so that means a couple voices may be invited to contribute through their home studios.
- And… I have a few surprises up my sleeve, which I’m not going to leak in this intermission episode. What would be the fun in that??
What you will be hearing is a discussion on the death of absolutism. Originally I saw it as a discussion on dismantling of dude bro marketing practices and toxic masculinity in entrepreneurship, but then I saw the femme business community step right up to bat in season 1 (yes, we’re sticking the baseball analogy for this episode!) and I realized that the common problem between both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity in business practices is the abusive way in which both methodologies attempt to sever their audiences from nuanced approaches. Absolutism is what keeps these paradigms alive… and Ted Lasso is a show that doesn’t allow absolutism to exist in the story arcs for any of the characters.
I see so many entrepreneurs struggling with absolutism right now and it’s showing up in ways that prevent leaders from growing and expanding their businesses. The slippery slope is that this isn’t even a gendered thing. Whether you identify with masculinity or femininity is beside the point… the self-inflicted segregation, which is prompted through an emotional buy-in to the toxic methods of the previous cycle in online businesses is where absolutism shows up. And because this is kind of complicated… because it’s highly nuanced, not easily dismissed into category A or category B, we’ll need a season of discussions to talk about it. Ted Lasso is going to hold a beautiful space for us in the very near future.
Alright. That’s all I’ve got for you on season 2 preview updates… before we get into the episode I’m sharing from Ashlan and Victoria at Take the Leap, I wanted to give a shout out to a podcast network that I’ve been a part of… we’re the Feminist Podcasters Collective and I wanted to introduce a few of them to you in today’s intermission episode. Here’s a business lesson… while you CAN skip ahead with the time stamps in the show notes and jump to the podcast interview from Take the Leap, I suggest that you calm your nervous system and take a moment to really listen to these women introducing their podcasts to you. It’s a staggering statistic that just 29% of podcasters identify as female and by taking the time to listen to these ad spots, you’re changing the way you also operate in the world.
This is not just because I’m a nutty fan for all things television, including commercials. Yes, I purposely pay for the commercial tiers on all of my streaming services because I actually want to see the commercials. As a business owner, part of your systems needs to be around emotional groundedness… as we like to say at Sensible Woo, you are your best system. When you train your business brain to skip over content like a podcaster’s ad spot, you inadvertently train your brain to skip over important details that can help your business build stronger strategies down the line. Don’t believe me? Well, my entire business has been built on this detrimental habit. People have paid me lots of money over the years to help them rewire their systems in their businesses, which always starts with the individual self… and doing things like learning how to listen carefully to the world around you. Especially learning how to listen and really hear a woman’s voice and the words coming out her mouth.
So with that… meet some of the podcasters from the Feminist Podcasters Collective right now…
Thank you to my sisterhood of creators at the Feminist Podcasters Collective! Now… let’s get into the episode from the Take the Leap podcast. You’ll recognize Ashlan from season 1 of the School of Moxie podcast. She helped us open our entire season with gaming insights that set the stage from video game to television series with The Last of Us. Ashlan cohosts this podcast with Victoria and we had a really great time talking about content production, incorporating your intuitive side in business, and pretty much just getting shit done. Because that’s how you build anything in this world.. By taking action.
[Visit https://www.taketheleap-today.com/ for transcripts of the guest episode.]
Thank you so much for tuning in today for our intermission between seasons 1 and 2 on the School of Moxie podcast! I’ll back soon with a trailer and fresh episodes for season 2, when we dive into Ted Lasso with our season 2 guest line up. In the meantime, I highly encourage you to to check out season 1 with The Last of Us. You can watch the show and listen to the discussions. Links to all the show materials are in the show notes for this episode. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on the podcast app of your choice and I always appreciate it when you leave a 5 start review – it really helps other people find this podcast and that ongoing support is truly what helps me bring more cool stuff to your headphones. You can also subscribe for email updates with me at sensiblewoo.com/subscribe… and don’t forget to stay in touch by following me on Instagram and YouTube. Until next time… remember to be sensible, be woo, and always be you.
