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Play for Profit Podcast
🎙️ Play for Profit is the podcast for neurodiverse entrepreneurs, creatives, and multi-passionate misfits who are done with the hustle-and-grind blueprint. Hosted by Najela Carter, a creative business coach and school psychologist, this show helps you build a business that feels like play—without burning out or boxing yourself in. Whether you're dreaming up your next big idea or redefining success on your own terms, you'll find tools, mindset shifts, and playful strategies to profit from your passions your way.
✨ It’s time to ditch the rules, follow your curiosity, and build a business that actually feels good.
Play for Profit Podcast
Strategic Goal Setting With Sara Lobkovich
What if the very things that make you feel like a "square peg" in traditional settings are actually your superpowers? In this illuminating conversation, we explore how being multi-passionate isn't a flaw to overcome but a strength to leverage.
Our guest, Sara Lobkovich, a self-described "OKR activist," reveals how traditional goal-setting methods can perpetuate bias while objective metrics create more equitable environments. She shares a powerful revelation from her career: when she implemented truly measurable goals, previously overlooked team members – particularly young Black and Brown women – emerged as undeniable top performers. This discovery transformed her approach to work and ignited her mission to champion data-informed evaluation.
For multi-passionate individuals constantly questioning "what's wrong with me?" this episode offers liberation. Our guest shares her journey through various careers – from lawyer to creative strategist to entrepreneur – and how she learned to honor her intrinsic motivations rather than external expectations. Her practical strategies for creating psychological safety in challenging environments will resonate with anyone who's felt pressured to mask their natural thinking patterns.
The conversation takes fascinating turns through goal-setting methodology, navigating depression as a neurodivergent professional, and even motorcycle racing – demonstrating how diverse interests can harmoniously coexist in one remarkable life. You'll learn how to create self-set goals that align with your values, build communities that validate your experience, and embrace your multi-passionate nature as the gift it truly is.
Whether you're struggling to find your place in traditional structures or seeking to create more equitable systems, this episode offers both validation and practical wisdom for charting your unique path forward.
Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started in this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am a strategist, which is a weird thing to be for a living, but it's what I'm best at. My brain is wired for strategy, so I've tried to do other types of jobs and just I think we can challenge our brains. But there is a point where if we're given a certain set of skills, it makes sense to use them. So being a strategist for a living means I have to get creative about making a living. I was a lawyer, I worked in technology, I was a writer. I worked in a couple different fields. I became a lawyer.
Speaker 2:I've tried all sorts of different ways to make a living and what fits me best is coaching, coaching and teaching the things that I love. To lawyer, I've tried all sorts of different ways to make a living and what fits me best is coaching, coaching and teaching the things that I love to do. So right now I'm self-employed. I work for myself in a consultancy called Red Current Collective where I help people set clear goals, stay super focused on their goals and then build workplaces and cultures where everyone gets a chance to learn, grow and achieve meaningful results. So in the coaching strategy coaching, but then with a really big focus on goal setting and achievement.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's awesome. So I was looking over your profile and you had mentioned about the goal setting methodology and how that's not always equitable, so can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure, I self-describe as an OKR activist. Okrs are a specific form of goal setting. It stands for objectives and key results. Okrs are used in a lot in business. It's not something that we run into much outside of business, and the awareness of OKRs really started with a book called Measure what Matters that came out in 2018, really focused on high-tech startup environments. Okrs have been implemented in organizations lots globally. Goal-setting practices are implemented in organizations everywhere. Everywhere has some kind of goal-setting practice. But what I saw when I was working as an employee and then as I became a consultant in the space is, even when organizations have goal practices set, though, everyone can rattle off the acronym SMART goals, and almost all of our goal practices revolve around SMART goals, which are supposed to be measurable, or key results, which are supposed to be measurable.
Speaker 2:It's really rare for there to actually be objective, data-informed goals that people are evaluated on, and so it's like I said, for me it's activism. When we don't have objective criteria, then different people are evaluated differently subjectively, then different people are evaluated differently subjectively and not everyone has the same access to success. So when I started working with objectively measurable goal setting, I saw right away I'm going to say something that might get me in trouble, but what I saw right away when I started to implement practices around measurable goal setting is that the young, bold, amazing Black and Brown people, especially women on my team became inarguably the top performers. The results being driven were off the charts. The results being driven were off the charts and they were the mediocre white people who had benefited from subjective evaluation in the past. Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it, and to this day, that's why people ask me why did you go so deep in goal setting? How did you become such a nerd about this stuff? And it's I'm sorry, but once you see that, I just it became a mission.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting that you say that, because I'm on our school's equity team and we talked about grading and how there's bias built into that.
Speaker 1:So I think it's very interesting being that I'm a school psychologist and then you're a strategist that there's so many organizations that base performance on something so subjective, especially when, like you said, the people that are benefiting from that I might get in trouble for this too, but are like skating by because they it's who they know yeah, versus the actual performance. And can you tell me a little bit more about the difference between, like, objective goal setting and subjective goal setting? I know it's interesting that you say the smart goals, because we, every district that I've worked in, they all make their IEP goals on SMART goals, and on paper it sounds nice, but when you go to implement it it gets disjointed and kids don't benefit from that. Yeah, if you could tell me the difference between.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So a lot of times when people implement SMART goals, the M in SMART is measurable. And so what we see a lot in SMART goal setting, what I see a lot in SMART goal setting is people make goals that have a number in it. It might be we're going to I'm trying to think on the fly of an example. Let's say I'm working with a pharmacist. We're going to create a goal, a SMART goal, around unpacking seven boxes a day and restocking. That's measurable, it's got a number in it. But unpacking seven boxes a day is talking about activity. It's talking about something that needs to get done. Again, to come back to equity, not everyone has the same physical ability to unpack seven boxes a day, so there's some inequity just based on that activity-focused goal, but also so that's one type of SMART goal that gets used, and I'm going to talk about truly objectively measurable goals in a minute.
Speaker 2:The other thing that tends to happen a lot is that people will estimate percent complete. So they'll write a goal about completing something. We're going to complete the launch of the new curriculum at 100%, but then the assessment of percent complete is subjective. What do you think? How much do you think we've done? Are we at about 30%, about 40%? Again, totally subjective, so there's no way to audit that, there's no way to say what's the actual truth. Where are we really?
Speaker 2:So both of those types of goals can be the right type of goal for certain things, but the type of goal that I feel really passionately about is key results and the way that I work with people to create key results are objectively measurable.
Speaker 2:So instead of talking about what we're going to do or instead of estimating how complete we are on something, we'll write a key result and say, all right, what's really most important is that we get people through our checkout 10% faster. That's objectively measurable. It's objectively quantifiable. We can look at the data and say are we getting people through 3% faster or 10% slower? So it gives us, instead of opinion or instead of those kind of other subjective forms of goals, when we write those objective, really truly objectively measurable goals, what it does is it gives us data. Doesn't mean that's good or bad, doesn't mean it's right or wrong, but it gives us data and information that we can then assess, to make decisions based on. So it's again super nerdy and we have to be in order to create key results that create healthy environments. We have to think about goals differently because we have to be safe to fail, a logical safety to set those kinds of goals and then work toward them and know that we're safe to fail, because we have to try before we can succeed.
Speaker 2:So again, all different kinds test for different types of situations and settings and environments, but that's the kind that I see the least of in organizations and in how most people in organizations set goals, because we're afraid if we put that number out there and we don't achieve it there's going to be some bad consequence, right, but that's how we get the highest performance.
Speaker 1:Right and I think to your point when you said that it needs to be safe to fail. That is an equity issue. Like you had mentioned, a lot of our Black and Brown workers. We work really hard, not to say that nobody else does. But there's this pervasive, I guess, mindset of you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. And if your goals are subjective, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, yeah, I really like that idea. And since we're talking about multi-passionate individuals, so how can you set these goals for ourselves and make sure that we're getting our projects done?
Speaker 2:Make sure that we're getting our projects done. I love that you asked that question because I probably got as deep in the space as I did because of my multi-passionate name. The kinds of goals that my leaders thought were the kind of like they would enunciate a goal, it was always in the organizations I was working with. The big goal was always to increase revenue 10% year over year. And I was like why, with what? What does that do for us? And decades in corporate America with the goal of increasing revenue 10% left my multi-passionate self very understimulated. And so that was it.
Speaker 2:I started creating my own goal and didn't tell anyone about it. Like every, I'd sit down, I'd write my goals, I'd tap into and this is the hardest part is I would tap in to what really matters to me. In to what really matters to me, what do I care about? What do I want my life to look like? What do where do I? If everything were to go amazingly? Where would I want to be in two years? And then what might it take for me to get there? So I think the hardest part is tapping in to our intrinsic motivation when so many of us are so conditioned to try to satisfy external criteria, or to win with the boss or to win with the teacher. It's really a revolutionary thing to say okay here's what's expected of me.
Speaker 2:I can look at what's expected of me and then say what do I really care about? And then create the goals that you really care about and then the ones that align to what other people expect of you. Those are the ones you put in your review, like those are the ones.
Speaker 2:Those are the ones you tell other people about. But one of the goals that changed my life was I was working in a creative agency. I was doing, I was a strategist, so my job was to develop and make pitches and pitch clients and I'd pitch and I was on the road, I was on the plane, I was, you know, sometimes I didn't even know where I was it was a lot of flying.
Speaker 2:I think I had one year where I did 26 pitches and we could win in the room. The clients were thrilled with love, clients are ready to write the check. But then we could lose in procurement like we could lose in the paperwork. We could lose in procurement like we could lose in the paperwork. So having winning as a goal was like it got really discouraging. I looked at it and I was like you know what? Maybe something that's important to me is not wasting human labor. So what if I make a new goal for myself that every slide I build is a framework I can reuse. No more single purpose slides, no more slides just for a specific client or situation. 100% of everything is a framework. That was the measurable goal that I wrote, where I was like, oh my gosh, this changed my life, like to this day.
Speaker 2:I work differently, and that was self-motivated. So when you are multi-passionate, those external expectations are only going to charge you up a certain percentage and the rest of your battery comes from you, nurturing your intrinsic motivation, and no one else needs to know about those goals, unless you want to tell them about it. Learning is the best fuel our brains can have, and so creating measurable goals for yourself that you care about, giving yourself permission to try and even fail, to try and even fail, that's learning and that's what our multi-passionate brains just crave.
Speaker 1:It's that steady stream of learning. Since you touched on your career, tell me about the arc of your career. How did you get from corporate to working for yourself?
Speaker 2:That's a funny question. So I actually co-founded my first company when I was still in high school with a couple of my teachers. It was awesome. I learned a ton.
Speaker 2:This is funny to say like I never wanted to be an entrepreneur and I still don't really think of myself associated with that word, but I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit, which is another way to say I'm a status quo challenger and a troublemaker. If I tried a few different careers on for size, I really loved practicing law because of the intellectual challenge, but I really didn't love practicing law being a business. That was a values issue for me. As far as a career like that was probably one of my better fit phases in my career, I couldn't find reconcile the values element that moved me into, through a couple of wacky steps into creative strategy and again, I loved working in creative strategy. That was. I still have the awards from those days sitting behind me Like I'm.
Speaker 2:I love the people I work with, I love the work I did, but the creative agency lifestyle I just I couldn't see myself doing it for the rest of my life and it was when I was in creative agencies that I started messing around with this interest in goal setting. So by the time I left creative agencies, there was demand for that focus on goal setting and, specifically, objectives and key results. So I left creative agencies and I don't remember exactly the year, but like 2018-ish and went into consulting and I've been a consultant ever since. So I worked as a consultant for other firms for a couple of years and then just decided, when I got passionate about coaching and building my coaching skill set, that was when I made the switch to doing my own thing. I wanted to be able to. There was something about moving into coaching that it felt important for me to be able to have exclusive decision making about who I work with, and so that was when I moved into my own business.
Speaker 1:How would you say being multi-passionate like? How would you say that felt in a corporate setting, where did your co-workers recognize that you were multi-passionate did?
Speaker 2:yeah, I've been the weirdo everywhere. I just a funny. I just interviewed someone earlier today and she said something about being weird and her friend or one of her former acquaintances said I never thought of you as weird, I thought of you as quirky. And she's like that's another way of saying weird, that's the politically correct way. Yeah it, yeah, I was.
Speaker 2:I think I felt more like a square peg in my career than other people perceived me as. I was always a decent achiever in my career, like I did well externally. But I'm also I'm neurodivergent, so my wiring is different and for me that the you get a certain amount good at something and then it's stable and then you do that for you keep building or you keep doing that. It's just not how my wiring works. My I run on curiosity and learning and am endlessly curious and if I'm not able to exercise my curiosity, I get, I wither, my performance suffers, I get frustrated, I feel hemmed in by the environment. Yeah, so for me it just like. I feel like it took me a long time to let go of what's wrong with me that my career doesn't look the way other people's do, right, but I got really lucky.
Speaker 2:I actually saw an amazing career counselor. I still love you, janet. She is the term scanner to describe me. This is before I knew I was neurodivergent, but she looked at my history and said you're a scanner, you have lots of interests, neurodivergent. But she looked at my history and said well, you're a scanner, you have lots of interests. And she said you're multi-passionate. And there was just something like I just got goosebumps saying that, but having that be recognized as a thing getting to have this conversation.
Speaker 2:That just was a big turning point that I could see, it's not about what's wrong with me, that I don't fit into a typical career. It's about how do I make a work life that works.
Speaker 1:There's really a level of like intentionality of what am I going to do that fits for me and, like you said, having that multi-passionate label of oh, I'm not, there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just as how I'm wired as well, whether you're neurodivergent or just have multiple interests. There was one thing on your profile that you talked about as far as unmasking and mask, when you're in those environments where you it's, you stay focused on this one thing and this one task. That's not your natural inclination or you're not wired that way. It can be depressing, at least for my end. I see a lot of it would be burnout. That's why I quit jobs. I try to do what they tell me to do and I can't do anything else within my job. We don't have to go too in-depth if you're not comfortable, but just that depressing, that heaviness, that kind of weighs on you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, I'm happy to talk about it. It's one of my. One of the benefits of my neurodivergence is that I don't feel shame about this stuff and that's a lot of therapy also. But no, I think depressed feelings and depression happens to a lot of us and I'd say I probably have a pretty carefully balanced ecosystem when it comes to my mental health and I'm lucky. I've got great care, I've got wonderful support, an incredible spouse who the reason we work is because supportive of each other in this way. But that carefully balanced ecosystem is upset when I'm in an environment that I can't make sense of or when I'm especially for me.
Speaker 2:I'm really sensitive to incoherence. If I'm working somewhere and the leader leaders saying something and doing something else, yes I, it's. I can't function, it's debilitating for me because I can't figure it out like if that's what they're doing, what am I supposed to?
Speaker 1:do. Yeah, like you're spending so much of your energy trying to figure out what this person wants from you when you're going into some place and you're I'm here to do my job. This is how my job works. If someone throws a wrench in it and you're like you can't figure out why they're throwing the wrench at it, you know you're like I'm not doing anything wrong, but I'm not, apparently not doing what you want me to do. But then you're not telling me what you want me to do, You're just expecting me to know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, it's why I do what I do today, because I believe leaders are responsible for communicating clear expectations. Yes, not at the level they think is clear, but at the level we think is clear, the people they're setting expectations for. And it's a tall bar to hold leaders to. But the work I do today does that. It makes it. I don't want to say easy, but it is simple.
Speaker 2:I can work with a leader for 90 minutes or two hours and they can walk out with something that they can give to their people, and their people are like, oh my gosh, this is so clear For the first time. I understand. Yeah, so it just yeah, my system is just really sensitive to stuff like that. So when I am in a place that doesn't fit or I'm in a setting that I can't make sense of or puzzle my way through, then I internalize it. So then the what's wrong with me voice. And now I know when the what's wrong with me voice kicks up to question it or to have a little chat with it before believing that voice is right.
Speaker 2:But I think that's been the biggest thing for me, in addition to great treatment and wonderful support is just learning that when that what's wrong with me voice kicks up, I can have a conversation with it and ask it to take a seat if that doesn't help me, and that has played a really big role in my learning how to live as someone who does experience depression.
Speaker 1:Same here. I definitely have to. I know when I was working with my therapist, it was that reframe. You have to go through these steps of questions. Is that really true that it's you, or is it the environment that you're working in and going through that was so freeing? Because no, it's not me. I did everything that I knew to do, and if they didn't communicate that they wanted something different, that's not on me. Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think the other you mentioned masking and unmasking. The other thing I find and it's a lot of people who are in your world multi-passionate. In my world there are folks who are struggling with some of the things that I struggled with at work. But I think the more we unmask and find places it's hard to say safe, but the more we find places where it's within acceptable tolerance in terms of safety to do that, the more we find our people and the less we think what's wrong with me, because we're surrounded by other people that make sense Right and that we can feed off of the positive energy, constructive energy with. So that's the other piece of it. I think it's just really important as the more I tell the truth, the better I am.
Speaker 2:Yes, and but it does take the privilege and courage to unmask.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:To be able to do that.
Speaker 1:And you say there's something you said about when you feel safe and you could unmask to the level that you feel comfortable with, that allows other people to feel comfortable doing the same. I definitely agree that and it's hard because not every place puts safety at the priority. Psychological safety it's interesting when I'm working in schools honestly doing but yeah, there's a level of like psychological safety that's just not inherently built into our culture and our schools, our corporate environment.
Speaker 1:And so how do you, how can somebody create their own kind of psychological safety, like you said, within the paradigms or the framework of what we have to work with?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. I think this is when I can't talk about other people I can talk about, like, how do I create psychological safety when I'm not necessarily in control of my environment? So, personally, I think it, for me it partly was that radical act of starting to tune in to what matters to me. I was born female and so I've been conditioned my whole life to care what other people think to be pleasing, to put other people first, to not have needs because other people's needs are more important. I am actively on a daily basis doing the work to connect to what I want and need, because that was conditioned out of me, and so I think for me, with my path, part of creating psychological safety for myself is that tuning in to me, rejecting the conditioning, finding ways to tune into myself. But then another again. This is like the day of getting ourselves in trouble. But another piece of the puzzle for me was changing who I am listening to and in community with. So I, years ago, before Twitter was what it is now got fed up with something I can't remember what it was and I unfollowed everyone in my feed who wasn't feminist and I'll just say feminist who wasn't like outwardly supportive of women, Really core, not superficial feminism, but activist feminist. And that meant that I unfollowed a significant certain demographics got unfollowed and other demographics became the ones that I was surrounded by. And the shift in my psychological, psychological safety and well-being by putting myself in what I'm exposed to being people who are activistly supportive of women, being human, that rewired my brain for what to expect and what standards to hold. So after a few years, that of being deliberately in a digital space but then my physical space was quite that way also it did. It changed my expectations. And so now when I run into stuff that isn't that, I'm like, oh honey, we don't do that anymore, we stop. No, we don't do that anymore. And so a different voice kicks up when I see anti-feminism or when I see sexism, when I see racism. Because of what I, because of the community that I chose to be surrounded by, Instead of thinking, instead of letting that get to me, my brain now says they're wrong, that's just not right and it doesn't have to hurt me, it doesn't have to get to me.
Speaker 2:I did bystander intervention, training and that was another thing that really, in terms of changing my ability to create my own psychological safety. Bystander intervention training made me make decisions in advance about how I would handle certain situations and then practice so that the freeze didn't take over, and so that was another thing. Bystander intervention training really helped me. Training really helped me figure out how to stay present and decide what's safe for me in any given situation. It's about multi-passionate, but that's those two things. And then, just like I said, creating my own goals self-set, self-motivated goals, because those things remind me whatever's happening externally and with external expectations, I can sit down and say how am I doing by the goals that really matter to me?
Speaker 1:That's wonderful.
Speaker 2:I got all fired up.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what it is, being multi-passionate and it's so interesting that you're pulling different things from different fields. I think that's one of the things I just love about being multi-passionate. Is you using, for instance, bystander training? If you're not going out and looking for the opportunities, then you never would have made these connections to get to where you were.
Speaker 1:I think in society, when they're like oh you tell you to specialize and you get down a certain path and you're like I can't go any further down this specialization path without some level of money or privilege or capacity. You have a couple of brands and some books, and so can you tell me, I guess, what you want to start with. Are you going to talk about your?
Speaker 2:book. That's what I was just thinking about with the self-set goals. Yeah, I have a book coming out this fall. It's called you Are a Strategist. It's an invitation to people to connect with their inner strategist, to do a lot of what we've talked about today, so to self-set the vision, mission, purpose and goals around what is possible. It applies it's written for people who are in organizations who want to influence change, but it applies equally as well to the kinds of decisions about life that we've talked about. So that comes out in the fall Information.
Speaker 2:You can stay tuned with everything that's going on with me at findrcco. That's a shortcut link that gets you to my main page. I also have a subscription program that's starting, called Lock your Inner Strategist, where I've been teaching objectives and key results for a long time and the feedback I always get is I want more one-on-one feedback, like I want more interaction with you. So the only way I could figure out how to do that scalably is with a membership. So we've got that starting up, which I'm super excited about because it's like the people who opt in to that are the most fascinating multi-. Pass.
Speaker 2:It's us, it's like the most amazing people who opt into that. So that's going. And then I can't believe we've made it this far without talking about my other passion, which is motorcycle racing.
Speaker 1:I was waiting for it, but we were having such a good conversation.
Speaker 2:So that's the other part of my life. We're actively seeking sponsorship and opportunities. We've got a really cool program that we're trying to put together for next season to help. We're all our team. We're OCW Motorsports. We operate here in the US in road racing in the Pacific Northwest and then also on the national yeah. So we're putting together. We're always focused on enabling people who wouldn't otherwise have a chance to participate, but we've got a pretty cool big program. I can't talk about coming together for next year and always looking for support to help us make that happen. So more information about that is at cwmotocom.
Speaker 1:That's cool, that's so fun. But yeah, is there anything else that I didn't ask you about? I know we got to the motorcycles but then we got.
Speaker 2:No, this has been super fun. I'm really excited. I'm just really excited to have another place for being multi-passionate to be normalized, for folks to connect and hear stories, because I just think it's so healing when you're someone who grows up with a brain that's like this and you spend so much time thinking what's wrong with me. It's just so awesome to get to have a conversation like this and for people to be able to hear a conversation and think, well, there's nothing wrong with me. It's just so awesome to get to have a conversation like this and for people to be able to hear a conversation and think there's nothing wrong with me.
Speaker 2:Look there are lots of people who have varied interests. Yeah, I just really was excited when I saw your topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. I'm glad we were able to have a good conversation.