Change Work Life

Reflection, experimentation and knowing when to move on - with Jeremy Cline of Change Work Life

• Jeremy Cline • Episode 227

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#227: After more than seven years and over 200 episodes, this is the final episode of Change Work Life, at least for now. Jeremy reflects on why he started the podcast, what it became, and how he came to the decision to bring it to a close.

What you’ll learn

  • [01:02] The reflection exercise Jeremy used at the start of the year and why it had such an impact.
  • [02:14] Why Jeremy originally started the podcast and the business idea behind it.
  • [03:15] Why building a commercially successful podcast is far harder than most people realise.
  • [04:30] How the podcast became an unexpected networking and relationship-building tool.
  • [05:35] Why interviewing guests helped Jeremy realise coaching was a good fit for him.
  • [06:45] The difficulty of knowing what impact your work is really having on people.
  • [08:00] Why the podcast no longer felt aligned with Jeremy’s coaching and business direction.
  • [09:20] How Jeremy realised he loved the conversations but not the machinery around them.
  • [10:48] How using AI and voice mode created structured space for honest reflection.
  • [12:15] Why reflection often confirms things you already know deep down.
  • [13:05] The idea of “testing a hypothesis” and knowing when an experiment has run its course.
  • [14:30] Why worthwhile projects don’t necessarily need to last forever.
  • [16:15] Why giving yourself permission to reflect honestly can be so valuable.
  • [17:05] What Jeremy is taking away from more than seven years of Change Work Life.

Resources mentioned in this episode
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For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/reflection-experimentation-and-knowing-when-to-move-on/

Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

I'm Jeremy Cline and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the show where we're all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach - you can find out more about that at changeworklife.com/coaching - and this is the last episode, or at least it's the last episode for now. I'm not ruling out coming back to it in the future. I've trailed this in the past few episodes and I wanted to use this episode to explain how I'd come to this decision. Because this isn't really an episode about podcasting. This is an episode about reflection, about decision making, about when you realise that something has possibly run its course and it's time to move on. I also wanted to share with you a reflection exercise I did at the start of this year, which I found really, really valuable. And yes, it was a new year thing, but you can do it anytime, whether at the start of the year or mid year or whatever. So I'll go into details of that in a little bit. What I'll say now is that as I was reflecting on my activities, when I got to the podcast bit, I kind of realised that I'd already taken the decision that I was going to finish the podcast. It wasn't a sudden decision, but a clarification really, of what felt right at the time. But before we get into that, let's have a look at why it was I started the podcast in the first place. It's been seven years since I first started, and it's fair to say that my thinking has evolved quite a lot over the time. But when I first started, I had in mind that this was going to be a business, something commercially viable, something which I could monetize. I was heavily influenced by a book called Unscripted by MJ DeMarco, which brought to the front of my mind the idea that I'd quite like to start a business, but that the trouble then was, well, what sort of a business? I had all sorts of different ideas but needed somewhere to start. That was when I did my first round of coaching and having seen other podcasters who could make a living from their podcast, I thought, okay, well, why don't I give that a go now it's fair to say that I seriously underestimated what it takes to, well, get a podcast going and then turn it into something which of itself is commercially viable. The model I had in my head was, oh, a few tens of thousands of downloads a week, and that's something that I'll be able to monetize. Turns out when you're starting from a zero base with no followers and no one knows who you are, getting 10 downloads is actually quite an achievement. Also, if truth be told, I probably started out a little bit fuzzy about what it is that I wanted to offer in the podcast. I was in a place at the time when I was thinking quite seriously about career change. And so it seemed logical to me to speak to other career change and also to other people about what career change could look like. So coaches and the like, I kind of assumed that there'd be demand for that, but didn't really have any data to back it up, other than me thinking, well, I can't be the only one. But something which I think is going to be a recurring theme here is that experimentation is okay, and actually that's really the place to start. In hindsight, I was really testing a few things. Could I create a podcast? Would people listen to it? Ultimately, was it something that could become my thing, the way I earned my income? Some of those questions I've answered, but as I've gone on, the questions have really changed and the underlying hypothesis is a little bit different. And it's fair to say the podcast did not become a business. I learned how to put a podcast together. I learned how to get guests, I learned how to interview them. I learned how to hire some people who could help me out with editing, editing and transcripts and the like. I didn't really learn how to scale the audience and to monetize it, but by that stage, the value to me was coming from elsewhere. I hadn't realised that, probably more than anything else, having a podcast can be a great networking tool. I've met and had conversations with over 200 people, the majority of whom I'd never met before. I'd never had a conversation with them, but because I had the platform, I was able to reach out to people and say, would you like to come on and have a conversation? And over time, as I became more established, people started to reach out to me and that networking has opened up opportunities. The most impactful of those came when I interviewed Leanne and Al Elliot back in episode 178. As a result of that conversation and me staying in touch with them, Al became basically a mentor to me for a while. If you go back to episode 200, he and I chat through how that came about and what it was that he really helped me with. And that's kind of been life changing. It was conversations that I had with Al that led me up to start one of my business lines and I learned a huge amount about myself and there's been others as well. Rob Dix, who is a property investment guru, he's someone that I followed for years, long before I started the podcast. I was really keen to interview him and as a result of having the podcast, I was able to do that not once, but three times, three really great conversations. And now I'd say that Rob's a friend of mine. And it's not just been the networking, it's been the learning as well. The whole point of the podcast is to learn from the experience and knowledge of others. And goodness me, I've learned a huge amount on all manner of different subjects. And it was doing the podcast that helped me realise that coaching was a good thing for me. Turns out I'm curious and I like asking questions, and those are pretty good characteristics for a coach as well as for a podcast host. It took me a while and some additional coaching to get to that place, but it's definitely where the seeds were sown. And whilst my coaching practise has somewhat moved on from career coaching, the podcast definitely helped with getting a couple of clients. One in particular mentioned to me that she'd listened to a couple of episodes of my podcast and it was through listening to those that realised that she realised that I was actually quite a good fit for her. So I guess all this is saying that whilst I had an idea that the value of the podcast was going to go in one direction, in fact the value came from completely different directions to that. So why stop? What changed? And again, this is something which came about really quite gradually and there's really a couple of main themes here. The first is that the way my business evolved meant that it kind of diverged from the main theme of the podcast. When I started the coaching journey, I was focused much more on career coaching, but as things have gone on, it's kind of gone away more into professionals, professional services. I've now got my peer mentoring group up and running. There's definitely still crossover. The podcast is still a useful resource. I still find myself referring coaching clients to episodes where there's something that they've mentioned and I know I've got an episode which could particularly help them, but it just doesn't align in quite the same way anymore. The podcast doesn't, as such, feel like a piece of my business. The second reason was that I was finding I increasingly only really loved part of it. The bit I love about podcasting is the conversations. And I've had some absolutely amazing conversations on the podcast. But podcasting is more than just the conversations. There's a machine around them, there's organising the interview, sourcing guests, getting episodes edited, show notes, transcripts, posting social media, all of that stuff and all of that bit I just don't love. And for a long time, the conversations were enough to keep me going. Whenever in the past I'd thought about quitting, it was always a combination of the networking opportunities and the quality of the conversations that had brought me back, that had encouraged me to keep going. So I guess the question really became, how did I know that it was time to bring it to a close? And there were all sorts of questions here to ask myself. Did the value I was getting outweigh the frustrations I felt with all of the other stuff that went alongside the conversations? What doors might I be closing if I didn't carry on? Was I waiting for some other definition of success to be fulfilled? And if so, what was that definition? Was it download numbers or numbers of episodes or what? And I guess one of the things this comes down to is that you never really know whether a decision is going to be the right one. And I guess an important framing here was that doing nothing but carrying on was a decision in itself. Carrying on with the status quo and keeping doing what you're doing. It feels like a decision postponed, but it's more like a series of ongoing micro decisions. So it's a decision that you're going to carry on and then you're going to carry on, and then you're going to carry on. What I needed to do was examine whether it made sense to carry on, acknowledging that that was quite a good decision in of itself and that it was finely balanced in terms of the options I had available to me. Neither was necessarily the right or wrong answer. On the one hand, I had learnt a lot from seven years doing the podcast. I had learnt the value of it. How much more was I going to learn? How much more was I going to benefit? But then, on the other hand, there's this fear of missing out, that the next guest could provide this amazing opportunity that I hadn't been presented with before. I guess I had to decide that I had discovered enough through the process and that my time could be better spent exploring opportunities elsewhere. So let's talk a little bit about the process, about the reflective exercise I did, which kind of really helped bring everything to a head. The two people who really get credit for this are Pat Flynn, who hosts A podcast called Smart Passive Income and Michael Hyatt, who's a reasonably well known US based entrepreneur, Michael Hyatt used to run a programme at the start of every year called Your Best Year Ever and Pat Flynn had been part of that programme for a couple of years. The programme no longer exists, but in a podcast episode at the start of this year, Pat walked through Basically what the exercises consisted of and what the exercise encourages you to do is to look across seven different categories of your life. So these are emotional, intellectual, physical, relational, business, hobbies and financial. Figure out what are the things that you would like in each of that categories, but then whittle it down to three specific goals for the year. One goal from three different categories. So what I did was take the transcript of the episode from Pat Flynn where he went into a bit more detail. I uploaded it to Claude and asked it to take me step by step through the exercise and I was absolutely blown away by the results. One of the things I found particularly helpful was using the dictate mode just to brain dump when I'm typing. I'll find that I self edit, I go back, I correct, I start to think about how I want to phrase things. What I've learned with AI is that switching to dictate mode and just speaking, letting yourself just flow, it doesn't have to be particularly coherent. It gets a load of stuff out of your head which you probably weren't expecting and the AI can then make sense of it. The AI didn't give me the answers because I'd asked it not to, but it asked questions in line with the framework I'd given it and reflected back what I was saying. Now, obviously this was way more than just should I continue with the podcast? It had been two years since I left my job and I hadn't really done this level, this depth of reflection in that time. So it really was frankly long overdue. I wish I'd done it way before that. It brought up all manner of different things, but what's probably most important is that it did give me those three goals in three different categories. One of them related to the business, but the other ones, well, one of them was more about physical goals. And it's as a result of doing this exercise that I've actually joined a gym and haven't just joined the gym, but I've actually been going pretty regularly. And the other is that I've kind of allowed myself, I've given myself permission to do other things which I find fulfilling and which just nourish me in different ways. So, for example, there's a local summer music school which happens for a week in August, which, whilst I was in business building mode, I kind of ruled myself out from going to. But this exercise actually helped me to give myself permission to take that week off and do something which I'm pretty sure I'm going to genuinely enjoy. So as I mentioned at the start, when I got to the point where I was thinking about do I continue or not the podcast, I was already pretty much there. I'd already pretty much made the decision that I was going to bring it to a close, but saying out loud to myself the reasons for doing that really helped clarify that it was a good decision. I wasn't going to say it was the right decision because as I've already said, I don't know whether or not it's a right decision, but it was a good decision to make. So do I have mixed feelings about bringing the podcast to an end? Yes, of course I do. I've been working on it for the past seven years. It's been a big part of my life. I don't know what future opportunities I might be closing down, but I do think that it has run its course. When you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. And by stopping the podcast, I am going to have some of my time back. And even though it didn't shape out the way that I originally thought it might, it has been incredibly valuable for me. I've mentioned the networking already, but to add to that, if I hadn't had a podcast, I probably wouldn't have been eligible to join the smart passive income community that I've been a member of for something like the past five years. As a direct result of that membership, I'm now part of two mastermind groups where we meet regularly to help each other out on our respective businesses, which has been immensely valuable for me. So I guess what I'm saying is that I can appreciate what I've done. I can appreciate what having a podcast has done for me and be comfortable with stopping it. Even without the certainty about what would happen if I carried on, or without the certainty as to what's going to happen next for me. I'm continuing to work on and evolve my own business. Might I be called to do a podcast or something adjacent to that in the future? Yeah, definitely possible. At least now I know what are the bits of it that I really enjoy and really thrive on, and what are the bits that maybe I'd get someone else to do. So I think I'll leave you with two thoughts which I've taken from this. The first is that reflection is really, really valuable. I wish I'd done the Your Best Year Ever exercise earlier, and I'm really glad I did it when I did because it has resulted me doing a few things differently, and I'm really glad that I'm doing that. The second thing is going back to what we discussed in the last episode with Jillian Riley about giving yourself permission. It's easy to get trapped into not making a decision because of you feel like you've not got perfect information. In the case of the podcast, I don't know what the result's going to be of stopping it. But that's okay. I can give myself permission to do something even when I'm uncertain as to what the outcome of that might be. And it kind of all links back to what regular listeners will know is one of my favourite values, and that's curiosity. Rather than worrying about an outcome, you can be curious about what the outcome might be, rather than I'm worried about whether or not this is going to be the right decision. It then becomes I wonder what the result's going to be of doing this. Last of all, I would like to say thank you. One of the idiosyncrasies of podcasting is that I almost certainly don't know who you are or where you are or what your circumstances are, but I'm really grateful for the fact that you've taken the time to listen to this episode. And maybe this isn't the first episode you've listened to. Maybe you've listened to lots of them, in which case I'm really grateful. And you know what? Maybe it's worth you staying subscribed to the show, because who knows, I might have something dropping at a later date. I just don't know. A podcast I listened to called Answer Me this stopped for ages and ages and ages, but for some reason I stayed subscribed and now they've started up again and I'm actually really glad they're back. So I don't make any promises, but who knows? So thank you for being part of this stage in my journey through life and I can't wait to see you whenever our paths next cross. Cheers. Bye.