This week I’m so excited to talk to Doña Bumgarner on Podcasting, Coaching, Project Management, and Productivity as part of the Friendpreneur Series. This series highlights conversations I have with friends, who are also entrepreneurs, and we dish the behind the scenes realities of starting a business, and what it looks like in real life.
Doña Bumgarner is the powerhouse behind the “Nurtured Mama” blog, the voice of the “Nurturing Habit” podcast, and an amazing coach. Doña is a dear friend who I met through coaching. She and I share so much in common – we are both project managers, both coaches, both podcasters, and both moms to first graders. I really loved getting to talk to her about her journey and where she’s at. We also talk about her experience in my “Jump Start Your Podcast” class, which is where she got her start for her show, which is in its second season.
Why you need to listen:
There’s a lot of becoming an entrepreneur that’s about highlighting your strengths, and leaning in to what you already know and what you’re an expert at. The thing is, there’s a lot of “noise” out there that will tell you there’s a certain way to do things. A certain way to market yourself, a way to be a coach, what a coaching practice looks like, and what it means to be big or to have “made it.”
There’s so much noise, in fact, that it can be easy to second guess what you know. Or to make busy work for oneself trying to fit that mold. Even when you KNOW marketing, you KNOW how to run a project, and you are a darn good SME “subject matter expert” in many fields. The doubt or the noise or both will throw you for a loop and make you think maybe there’s a different or better way than the one you’d naturally follow.
Here’s why you need to listen to this episode
Dona’s doing a couple of things that are very different than what all that noise might want you to do. First, she’s looking at ways to layer in her project manager background with her coach training, and creating something brand new with the marriage of these two specialities.
Second, she’s actively working on creating structure in her day to mindfully do LESS with her time. You read that right. She’s using time management and prioritization to make room to do less, and to ditch the busy work. This allows her the space to breathe, to be, to spend time with family.
The project manager in me really loves this, both that she’s leveraging what she knows and is so good at (creating structure in chaos, a la project management) and creating something new with it with her more recently acquired skill set, putting a “why” behind the structure. She’s focusing on structure to leave more room for the other things that matter in her life.
In this episode, Doña Bumgarner and I talk about:
- Her journey to becoming a coach
- Her experience with having breast cancer and being a survivor
- How society places worth on women being able to “do it all,” and how judgements (internal and external) arise when doing it all is not sustainable (and it never is)
- Time Management, and how it’s generally the pursuit of getting it all done (but doesn’t need to be)
- Doña’s goal of teaching productivity so people can focus on doing less (instead of more)
- Who Doña loves to work with in coaching, and how getting unstuck makes all the difference
- Podcasting! And her approach to seasons; doing one season on grief and the next on self care
- Dona’s approach to maintaining a podcast, by doing bi-weekly episodes and setting a time limit on how much time she spends on each episode
- Healing emotional scars of the past
- The crossroads of productivity and self care
- Her 3 thoughts on jump starting your joy: look to the past for clues on where you are headed in the future, allow the shift to happen, get help if you need it to process change, and create structure to make space for the things you want to do
Resources
Nurturing Habit: Doña Bumgarner’s Podcast Website
Nurtured Mama: Doña Bumgarner’s Coaching Website and Blog
Overwhelmed by Brigitte Schulte on Amazon
Get to Work Book by Elise Blaha
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