Flow Flex Scale
The Flow Flex Scale Podcast: The Solopreneur Operating System is your field guide for building a sustainable, adaptable, and impactful solo business. Hosted by author and coach Jennifer Britton, this podcast features thoughtful conversations with solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, experts, and change-makers who are designing meaningful businesses and lives in the evolving world of work.
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Each episode delivers field-tested insights, practical tools, and real-world strategies to help you create more flow in your business foundations, build flexibility in your productivity and systems, and scale your one-person business with clarity, focus, and intention.
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Whether you're launching, growing, pivoting, or reinventing — you'll find inspiration, actionable ideas, and consistent steps you can put to work right away. Because daily steps plus consistent action equals momentum.
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Explore the Flow Flex Scale method across three pillars: Flow with Purpose, Flex with Agility, and Scale your Impact.
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For coaches, consultants, creators, and service-based entrepreneurs who are ready to grow a sustainable business — one aligned action at a time.
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Quick Link to Podcast Website
FlowFlexScalePodcast: https://www.flowflexscalepodcast.com/
Quick Link to Substack
FlowFlexScale Substack: https://flowflexscale.substack.com/
Flow Flex Scale
EP14: Surfing Your Edge: Life Experiments, Fear, and Building a Business That Fits with Kristine Goad
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Pick up the new book FlowFlexScale: Amazon Link
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What happens when you realize the life or career you’ve been trying to fit into simply doesn’t fit you?
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In this episode of the Flow Flex Scale Podcast, Jennifer Britton welcomes Kristine Goad, the “Surfing Your Edge” coach, for a conversation about entrepreneurship, fear, self-discovery, and finding a way of working that fits who you are.
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Kristine shares her winding path toward solopreneurship, exploring interests in science, advocacy, and writing before recognizing that no traditional job description could hold all the things she wanted to bring together. At 29, a cross-country bike trip helped her “fall in love” with herself. But returning home brought an unexpected challenge: how to integrate that expanded sense of self into everyday life.
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Along the way, they explore the importance of working with your natural rhythms, choosing persistence over consistency, and supporting neurodivergent and visionary entrepreneurs. Kristine shares how she helps clients hold onto their bigger vision while identifying small, practical next steps that move them forward.
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At the heart of this conversation is an invitation to stop waiting until fear disappears or the entire path becomes clear.
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In This Episode
- Christine’s winding path from science and advocacy to writing and entrepreneurship
- How a cross-country bike trip at 29 helped Christine reconnect with herself
- Recognizing that no traditional career box was going to fit
- Using life experiments to explore new possibilities and expand comfort zones
- Why persistence may matter more than consistency
- Working with natural rhythms rather than forcing a rigid approach
- Supporting neurodivergent and visionary entrepreneurs
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***Guest Links & Resources***
Substack: https://kristine.substack.com
Website: https://kristinegoad.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kristinegoad
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KristineGoad
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinegoad
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Free gift:
Surf Your Edge: From Fear to Freedom
This complete chapter from Confident You: The Raw Conversations traces two adventures, twenty years apart, and explores fear, identity, and why the real work of a life-changing experience begins after you come home.
Claim your gift: https://tinyurl.com/SYEgift
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***Host Links & Resources***
Quick Link to Podcast Websites
FlowFlexScale Book: Amazon Link
FlowFlexScale Podcast Website: https://flowflexscalepodcast.com
FlowFlexScale Resources: https://flowflexscale.com
FlowFlexScale Substack: https://flowflexscale.substack.com/
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Let's Connect
Jennifer Calendar
Follow, rate, and review FlowFlexScale Podcast!
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Follow Jennifer Britton
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferjbritton/
This is the FlowFlex Scale Podcast, your field guide to the Solopreneur Operating System with author and coach Jennifer Britton. Daily steps plus consistent action equals momentum. That's Jennifer's mantra, and it starts right here, right now, with you. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back, everyone. I'm Jennifer Britton, the author of Flow Flex Scale, and I'm really excited today to welcome Christine Goad to the podcast. Thank you, Christine, for joining us today. How are you doing? I'm so honored to be here. Really excited. Well, I'm really excited too. And I just want to spend a minute to introduce Christine. Christine Goade is the surfing your edge coach. She invites people to make friends with fear so they can be bigger, bolder, and more blank, which I'm filling in with audacious today, so that they are living the life they were meant for. So welcome to you, Christine. I'm so excited. Let's let's hear a little bit about your backstory to entrepreneurship because this, you know, this whole podcast is really about not only entrepreneurship but solopreneurship. And I know that you work actually with a lot of other entrepreneurs as well. So I'm gonna let you sort of take us into the lane that you want to be taken into. Tell us about your journey to entrepreneurship. How did you get started?
SPEAKER_02Oh my goodness. I was one of those smart girls who everybody said back in the 80s, you know, if you were smart, you should become a doctor or go into science. So that's where people seemed to be pushing me. And um, I had no interest in medicine. So, but I had wide-ranging interests in science and um wanted to be a biologist and then didn't like doing dissection. And they said two people are going to be a biologist, the animals are just gonna get bigger and bigger, and I'm like, fine. So I moved on. But basically, I couldn't decide between a research science career, an advocacy career, a writing career. I have a master's in professional writing, but I got that just at the time that the first round of journalism news, you know, newspapers were shutting down. And um, it was just was not a good time to be coming out and trying to get into journalism. So excuse me, I experimented for many, many years with different kinds of jobs. And I kept hoping that eventually I would find the one that would let me bring all of myself to it, all of my interests, instead of these very narrowly defined, this is what you do, don't step outside that box.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02Um, I even went on a cross-country bikes bike trip when I was 29, hoping that if I got quiet enough somewhere in 3,000 miles on a bike, I would hear the universe whisper, this is the thing for you. Oh my goodness. Wow. Yeah, a lot of miles, right? It was a lot of miles. And the unfortunate thing was I did not hear the whisper.
SPEAKER_01So I was curious. So you didn't hear the whisper. What became clear for you during that trip? I'm sure there must have been something that got really clear.
SPEAKER_02That I I fell in love with myself on that bike trip. I was more myself than I had ever been, more able to say what I thought, more just grounded, just happy no matter where I was. And I had a horrible time bringing that person into the real world, into the real world after the ride was over. It was a 48-day experiment, experience. So coming back to the real world was very challenging. And I got super depressed because I didn't know what to do with myself when I got home. And anyway, I my my journeys continued through various jobs. And around, I would say around 2005, 2007-ish, I started realizing there wasn't a box where I was going to be able to bring it all. And if I was going to make a life that let me be fully myself, I'd have to create it for myself. And it took 10 years of procrastination and learning and just spinning in circles, thinking I wasn't ready before I finally started my first, my, the first iteration of my business in 2015. Wow.
SPEAKER_01Amazing. So first iteration to now, that's 10, 11 years.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I'll use that same question. What's gotten clearer in the last 11 years for you as an alternative?
SPEAKER_02What's gotten clearer is that there is a niche for me, right? There is there are people who benefit from working with me.
SPEAKER_01Love it. Well, well, let's let's go there. So who do you love to work with? Who finds value in sitting down with you under this now umbrella of surfing your edge? Because I'm really intrigued by that. To share a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, surfing your edge for me is really about okay, by the time you're 40 or 50, you have been whatever the world needs you to be. For whoever is standing in front of you, you are that person for them. And you are really good at role switching and you start to lose yourself. I've met with people who were going through a, you know, a divorce in their 40s and were spending, you know, two weeks out of the month. They didn't have their child with them and they had no spouse and they were living alone. They didn't know what they wanted to eat. They didn't have friends, they didn't know, they didn't know they didn't know who they were. And you don't have to be going through a divorce to realize you don't know who you are. Yeah, but a lot of us don't really, we start allowing the world to label us and we don't know who we are. So, and when you start, and we also don't have time, we don't take the time. We're busy, busy people, and it's self-indulgent to dig into that. Who am I? What do I want? And also, I've had clients who were like, I don't want more because that would make me look like I'm not grateful for what I have, and what I have is really good.
SPEAKER_01So there's a lot of mindset work that I do. A huge amount. You you just named like a number of mindset pieces, which is so important in whatever we call success, but flourishing, right?
SPEAKER_02Like in order to flourish, mindset is we have to have, we have to give ourselves permission and we have to be able to put ourselves first on some level in order to take the time to to figure out who we are. And once you start figuring out who you are and what you want, that's when all of those voices that you've been accumulating your whole life start kicking in and saying, No, it's too late for you. Um, you should have done that 20 years ago, or you know, that's for somebody else, that's not for you. You stay in this lane, right? So there's lots of mindset work that comes up once you start figuring out who you are. And then the next piece we do, I won't say it because you don't like we can't say the word. Yes, it's the bigger, bolder blank framework. Um in the last piece of the framework, we start doing life experiments, right? And and a lot of I live through life experiments, but I'm realized I've realized that a lot of people don't, even people that are close to me that I've known my whole life that I thought were living this way, do not design experiments to push their comfort zone.
SPEAKER_01And that's so give us an example because you know, I think we hear that language of design an experiment. And I think for some people they're like, What do you mean? Like, what is an experiment? So, what would be an example of an experiment listeners could try out?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I can tell you an example of my biggest. I mean, the cross-country bike trip was my first real I was a novice, cyclist, I didn't own a bike, I weighed 213 pounds, I had asthma. So signing up for that was just kind of ridiculous.
SPEAKER_01That was like one, you know, pushing through one thing at a time at a time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. But after that, the one, the biggest example of this is the surfing your edge experience, which I created in 2018 as a commemoration of the 20, the it was the 20th anniversary of the cross-country bike trip. And I wanted to do something big and scary, but I didn't have three months to go cross-country on a bike. So I created the surfing your edge experience, which was my way of I've been afraid of open water my whole life. And um, even though I was a strong swimmer, if you put me somewhere where there wasn't an edge to swim to, you know, a bottom, something to grab onto. Right, exactly. I was just, I would panic. I had been doing um sprint distance triathlons since 1999, and I still hadn't gotten over my fear of open water. So in 2018, I decided to commemorate the big ride by taking women to learn to surf in Panama. I figured if I could surf, that would be me really facing that fear of open water. It was not pretty. No, but you went and you took a group with you as well. I took a group. Yeah, and that was the other thing. The other thing I had to overcome was the idea that you could be a leader and still be scared. You could lead from a place of insecurity and vulnerability. And so just creating the thing, putting it out there, realizing too that the 20 years between the bike ride and the creation of that program had all been leading me toward that program. When I got off the big ride and didn't know how to operate in the world, I needed support. I needed somebody to help me see who I really was, where I fit. And I couldn't find that support. And the surfing your edge experiment experience is my answer. It's like, this is what I needed 20 years ago. This is how you help people do something meaningful and then integrate what they learn from it into their real life and actually start living the life they want. So that was my that's been my biggest experiment. But this summer I've also started uh last let's see, in September, I decided I was didn't want to lose my balance as I aged. So I bought tap shoes.
SPEAKER_01Oh, amazing. And I know you're always dancing. So is that your tapping away?
SPEAKER_02Yes. I started tap dancing with an adult tap class. I also decided to try rowing this year. So I learned to skull and I've been skulling since June. I just, if it scares me, if I'm not good at it, let's go do it.
SPEAKER_01Let's try it. And so, what have you learned about yourself as an entrepreneur in doing these experiments? Because again, it's like it's the doorway into learning. I imagine what else has it been a doorway into?
SPEAKER_02It has been a yeah, uh, what I love about me is that I'm willing to try things. The challenge I've had is that I'm missing your scale piece because I like to try new things and try new things and try new things rather than re than iterate. And I've iterated the surfing your edge experience, and it's gotten it's like a well-oiled machine and it's beautiful.
SPEAKER_01You got it. And and now you do it obviously not in Panama, but you do it at in home. Like when what format is it right now in 2026? It's still in Panama.
SPEAKER_02It's still in Panama.
SPEAKER_01Still in Panama.
SPEAKER_02Panama is amazing and beautiful, and it is. It's been rated the number one place for expats like four four years in a row.
SPEAKER_01I can imagine. I was there in 2003. Yeah. A long time ago. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's a beautiful country. We still go there, but it's taken 10 years of me trying different things, different ways to think, talk about who I work with, different ways of talking about what I do, different ways of talking about why it's important, and trying different ways of working with people to finally start to get to a place where it's all kind of gelling, where I finally have that foundation piece. I didn't take the time to build the foundation.
SPEAKER_01Most of us didn't, right? Which is why I wrote FlowFlex Scale so that we can think about the flow, right? Like, how are you naturally wired? How does that help you do what you uniquely do, right? The surfinger edge is unique to you because of who you've been and who you are.
SPEAKER_02And I think that the thing for me, the one of the biggest challenges is I love learning. And I love, I mean, I can see why different systems and processes work. So I've learned them all and I've tried them all, but that doesn't mean they're all right for me. That doesn't mean they're all right for my business. So I think the ultimate thing I'm learning this year, as things are starting to dovetail, as this program fits with that program, fits with that program. Um I'm starting to learn that I have to create. It goes back to the, to the if I'm gonna live as fully myself, I have to create what works for me. And so there's been a constant, a continual unfolding of what feels good to me, what rhythms feel good to me, what do I want in my business? What do I want my business to look like? And really letting that be okay and having to say no to other voices who are like, no, you can't do it that way.
SPEAKER_01There are a lot of voices out there trying to tell me, and I'm hearing there are a lot of voices out there and inside as well, saying, Hey, you can't. So I want to zoom into I want to zoom into a word that you used a few minutes ago, which was rhythm. Like, I and you can bring in the voices as well. But like as an entrepreneur, what have you noticed about the power of rhythm in your work and in your sustainability, right? Because to be a business beyond five years is powerful. Here you are, 10 years into this component of your business, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. For me, I am not a consistent person. I get bored. I also just forget, like, I will make a beautiful plan and then completely forget that I made it and find it like six weeks, six months later. It's like, oh, right, I was gonna do that. So for me, it's not about consistency, it's more about persistence. It's the coming back, the remembering and coming back, the remembering and coming back, and allowing myself to do the little um side adventures that I need to do.
SPEAKER_01The quests, the side quests.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, if I didn't do those, I think I would be a very unhappy person. So I have to let myself, I have to recognize that this is my brain, this is how it works. Yeah, and it seems to be, I don't know why. I tend to attract a lot of no neurodivergent clients. I don't talk about that in any way, and yet they find me.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Wow, and what what do they enjoy about the work that you do together? Because I think this is a really, it's a very specific support type. And so what have you heard that they enjoy with the surfing your edge experience? How does it support someone who is neurodivergent?
SPEAKER_02They like that I don't prescribe, right? I don't tell you what to do. I help you find what works for you. And then I hold space for you to explore that and keep it safe. And if your vision is too big, this is another one. A lot of my a lot of my clients are visionaries, but the when they start to feel into that vision, it just feels heavy and scary and they tend to collapse. So what I do really well is hold the vision for you and give you one or two, we decide together, like what are the next one or two steps that are so small, you can't not do them. And we go and do those, and then we we continue continuously move. But yeah, I I help you hold it so that you don't have to be buried under the weight.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, and there's a lot of weight, there's a lot of things to be focusing on. And so one thing we're doing even here in this podcast is our we're making our podcast episode shorter. So we're coming up at the 15-minute mark. I think what we're gonna do, you and I, is we're gonna put a pause on this, do a bit of a reflect on what we've talked about so far, because when we come back to the next episode, I want to dive into this notion of mindset. So if you think about our first 15 minutes, Christine, what are the two or three messages you want to communicate around your work, your focus for entrepreneurs?
SPEAKER_02I would say that what matters to you matters, that you matter, and that figuring out what feels right for you, is worthy of your time. And also I haven't said that this yet. I just want to say I think that our purpose on this planet is to be fully ourselves, nobody else can do it, right? So I think that whatever avenue you choose, whether it's your profession or starting a business or whatever you do, I think it's all about being the most you can be and letting that have value.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Celebrating it. And you know, and flow flex scale, catalyst one, the first starting point is looking at your unique DNA, right? It's we are all unique, the way we want to build a business, who we are, what we get excited about, how we want to work. That's that is what makes I think this journey as an entrepreneur so exciting. Yeah. So we're gonna come back in a few minutes. Well, for you as a listener, you're gonna come back to our next episode. Christine and I are gonna continue this conversation and we're gonna talk a little bit more about mindset. And I do want to get into the doorway of fear because I think, you know, fear can stop people in the tracks. So we are gonna come back. And listeners, we'd love to hear what you are interested in. Just because we're wrapping up this week's episode, where can people find you, Christine, if they want to continue the conversation?
SPEAKER_02I am at Christinegode.com. You can also find me at surfingyouredge.life. I write the wishing you wonder substack. And actually, I'm sorry, I just remembered. Do you have a podcast too? Two weeks ago, I launched my own podcast. It's the surfing your edge podcast.
SPEAKER_01So listen in, like, subscribe, just as you do here at FlowFlux Skill Podcast. You know, podcasting is a whole journey on and of itself, but we want to be found, and we can only do that through your support. So thanks for joining us for today's episode. Christine and I are going to be back next week and we're gonna continue this conversation. So stay tuned, and we hope to see you then. Take care.
