Kate Henry [00:00:08]:

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to honing in. I’m Dr. Kate Henry. Today I’m talking to Taylor Elyse Morrison, who’s a portfolio careerist and PhD student who believes people build identity through action and interaction. She creates the tools and experiences to make that possible. Current highlights include co founder of Women Facilitating, founder of Multical, which I think I need to start using just as a side note, and author of Inner Workout. Taylor draws on her coaching, mindfulness, and academic training to help people in organizations build momentum toward what they really want. Thanks so much for talking to me today, Taylor. We’re going to cover so much and I can’t wait to hear more from you.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:01:43]:

I’m thrilled to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this all day, so thank you for having me.

 

Kate Henry [00:01:48]:

I want to start us with a question I love to ask folks. It’s a personal fascination of mine, which is how we think about the concept of projects. So I’m curious if a project like Capital P project is a helpful framework for you, or is there another word or phrase that you use when you think about the work that you do, either professionally, creatively, personally, or something else?

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:02:16]:

I’ll say yes and. But let me start with the yes part of it. So, yes, I do resonate with the term projects, mostly because business has felt constrictive to me. There’s a whole identity journey that I’ve been on where my primary identity that I was trying to build was that of a business owner. And some of the things that I do are certainly projects, but the end goal of them is not to make money or to scale. And not that a business has to scale, but a business does have to make money to be, by definition, a business. And so projects is. It feels expansive to me to say, oh yeah, I have all of these things on my plate that I’m putting out there.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:03:05]:

Some are a fun podcast that I’m doing, or I have an event series that I do with a friend that are just fun projects that I do that have no other expectation than to bring me joy, bring me closer to someone that I care about, and connect other people. There is a project management course of Franklin Covey’s that I sometimes facilitate, and you can get project management certified, and they use the definition from that certifying body but they talk about how projects have to have a beginning and an end in order to be a project. That was also very freeing for me to be like, oh, if a project ends, that’s the point. Like a project can’t go on indefinitely and be a project. So that was healing for the part of me that felt like I was supposed to find one thing and do it forever or find a specific set of things and do it forever. The and part of things is I also really love the idea of experimenting. And a lot of my projects are experiments where I’m testing something, I believe that I can learn something from it. And I commit to doing an action or trying to answer a question through a body of work for a certain amount of time.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:04:21]:

And I really appreciate that as well.

 

Kate Henry [00:04:23]:

I like so much and I feel like this is a new way folks have talked about projects on the podcast is thinking about through this experiment or a test that you do. And I love the language as well around projects having that beginning and end. You use this phrase around like that feeling like healing for you. Is that because you had in the past experience with a project or something that felt, I don’t know, overwhelming, or there really wasn’t a beginning or an end, or it felt like, well, if I start this project, I guess it’s just part of who I am and I have to do it forever. I’m curious a bit about that experience because I love the concept of feeling healed through the work or the project.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:05:12]:

Multiple of what you said just resonated with me. I had an internalized belief and probably a lot of people have this, like when you’re a kid, people ask you what you want to be when you grow up. That is already, in my opinion, problematic for a lot of reasons. Like a 4 year old is not choosing their career path. An 18 year old is also very likely not choosing their career path. There’s just so much life that has to be lived before you figure out what it is that you might want to do in the world. And that question assumes that you’re going to do one thing. So even though the idea of like you pick up a trade or you do something and then you work there for 40 years and you get a pension, that idea has faded significantly and just for a lot of reasons is not realistic to aspire to.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:06:04]:

But what I held onto was still this idea that there was supposed to be one thing that would persist in my career forever. And even after I accepted the idea that I’m not just a one thing person, I still Felt like my projects were supposed to persist, like the consistency that I was meant to bring. If I couldn’t be consistent and just limiting myself to one job title, then I quote, should. And that’s such a word that if a client brings it up, I’m always curious about that. But the feeling that I had and the belief that I had was that I should then be consistent in doing a variety of things for as long as possible. And it feels healing to say, actually, no, I’m here to do a lot of things. Like some are here for a good time, not a long time. And I don’t always control what.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:06:58]:

Which ideas feel like they should persist or want to persist in the world or the world is receiving them the way that I would like to. And that’s the part that feels healing to not punish myself with some other type of consistency because I’m not consistent in the way that I’m, quote, supposed to be.

 

Kate Henry [00:07:18]:

That framework that you just talked about there and the expansiveness that I felt when I heard you talk about that, makes so much sense to then be built with the scaffolding of like, okay, we’ll start a project, we’ll complete a project, we’ll have this experience, and then we can shift and have this other experience and develop a collection of experiences and perhaps quality output through that. This is such an excellent transition to the next thing I want to talk about, which is when I was prepping for our conversation and reading through what you’ve done before, I thought, oh my goodness, you are so incredibly busy. Capital B U S Y. And then I wanted to learn a little bit about what a portfolio careerist is because I had never heard that phrase before. And when I read that section on your website, which I’ll link to in the show notes, it made more sense to me why you had so many titles and jobs listed that you were doing. Could you break it down for us and tell us what is a portfolio career? What attracted you to that? What do you like about it? What’s your experience been with it? Because I assuming many folks like me have never heard of this before.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:08:31]:

Yeah, I’m happy to answer this. So I can’t remember exactly where I first heard the term portfolio career. I just remember hearing it and being like, oh, that’s like me. And it comes from this Charles handy work that he’s done that’s linked in my article about portfolio careers. But the idea is that just like I was talking about before, rather than having this latter path where it’s like straight and up Amelia, who edits this podcast, will sometimes talk about this as like a very phallic way to approach careers and business. A portfolio says like what if I can have multiple things and be making money in multiple ways simultaneously? So there are all different types of portfolio career configurations. When I look at the start of my career, I had the pretty typical have a full time job and then have some side projects that I’m making money from. Then eventually I got to a place where I left my full time job.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:09:39]:

I was working part time at a large small business. I say that because when you look at how the government, at least in America defines small business, it’s quite broad. So this is like a multimillion dollar small business which is much bigger than my little small business that I run now. So I was doing that part time about 20 hours a week while I was growing my own business. And then from that I got burned out and ended up building another business from that. And now my portfolio career looks like working about 20 hours a week for a startup. I co own an organization called Women Facilitating. I just unexpectedly launched this business called Multical and then I do contract work in consulting and facilitation with a couple of large businesses that do leadership development essentially.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:10:37]:

I’m sure there are other things that are probably missing. I have my own small coaching practice, but you can hear it’s like these different forms of making money for my portfolio career. I tend to leverage specific skills like I’m really good at building, I’m decently good at like writing, strategy, facilitation, coaching. So I’m tend to be taking those skills. I almost think of them as like building blocks and then putting them into different environments. For some other people it’s like I am a doctor or I am an academic with expertise in a specific area and I am a professor and maybe I consult for a business who is like building something around this area and I’m the subject matter expert for them. Maybe I also have a knowledge product for this. Some people are only leveraging like their one expertise, but they’re making money in different ways and that’s a portfolio career as well.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:11:36]:

So hopefully that that made sense as to what a portfolio career is. And it’s just how my brain works. So I am quite a neurodivergent person in a couple ways. And one of the ways I started to realize my neurodivergence was to just realize like I cannot work when I only have one thing happening. It’s actually counterproductive for me.

 

Kate Henry [00:12:03]:

When you were Talking about this, it also made me think about like security and job security in a good way. Like I’ve done work in the past where I’ve had like a contract here and there. Oh, I hope this contract gets renewed. Like, am I like where there can really feel like some insecurity around like this one client hoping that they renew or something, you know, like, and the idea of like overlapping careers that perhaps you’re like, okay, this is like a longer contract that I’m working with these people for a year or two years or whatever. Or like this is a business that I’ve created that will continue to run or something. Like for some reason for me I’m like, that feels nice that even if one thing kind of pauses or you decide not to do it, that you still have income coming in from other locations as well. Instead of all my eggs are in this one basket and if I get laid off, I’m like, screwed. I don’t know if that’s like a pessimistic view of a portfolio career, but what do you think?

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:13:03]:

I don’t think it’s pessimistic at all. I think more and more people are realizing that it might make sense the same way the large corporations that used to be funding people in their full time jobs have redundancies and backup plans for what if this happens? You should probably have that for your career. And as you were saying that like my family had a really, really tough time during the recession of like 2008 to whenever it theoretically ended. So part of this is probably me just being like, yeah, I want to make sure that I’m protected. I don’t feel like that’s the truest place of where this comes from. Like I, I just like to do multiple things and I see how they feed each other and how it challenges and stretches my brain if I don’t feel like I’m learning or being challenged. It’s so hard for me to stay engaged in something. But yeah, the money aspect is definitely helpful.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:14:01]:

As like I said, someone who has experienced hard times with money and probably some inherent part of me is like, let’s do whatever we can to not be there again.

 

Kate Henry [00:14:11]:

Yeah. Could you tell me about Multical? I know I could just ask you this directly, but like, that is something that I’m really fascinated with. The work that you’re doing and perhaps other work that you’ve done will come up naturally in our conversation today. But could you tell us a bit about Multical?

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:14:35]:

Yeah, I think what’s fun in talking about Multical is just that it’s like a really good insight into how my brain works and when I’m doing things because again, it’s pretty obvious I do a lot of things. So I’ll have people be like, Taylor, how can I do the things that I want to do? It’s really aligned to the process that I end up talking people through. So essentially what happened is I started working at this startup Fabric and I got a calendar with them and they’re looking at that calendar and saying, hey Taylor, we’re going to throw time on your calendar for an internal meeting. And I’m like, oh shoot, I have a coaching client at that time. I have something else happening at that time. But they couldn’t see that. And so I run into this problem in the past. Originally I just said, okay, I’m going to resubscribe to what is now a competitor.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:15:30]:

Then a couple weeks later, in another community that I’m in, someone was describing the same problem that I’m having and saying like, do you know of something for portfolio careerist or fractionals or multi hyphenates? And I realized the other companies, even though they were serving that audience, weren’t really using that language. And it might be, I’m like, what if it was just simple as like having a really, really similar product? It’s not innovative at all, but just feeling like it talks to you. So essentially I’m bearing the lead here. But Multical is calendar management tool for people who don’t fit into one calendar. Whether that’s because you have a portfolio career, whether that is because you have like really robust personal calendar and stuff happening professionally. But if it feels like you’re constantly having to copy stuff between calendars, Multical might work for you. What it does is it syncs between Google Outlook and Apple iCloud calendars. The difference between syncing and sharing is when you just share your calendars, you can see everything.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:16:38]:

But then you again, when someone wants to just throw time on your calendar, they’re only seeing whatever calendar they have access to. So when you sync it copies over, you can choose if it just says busy or what you have it say. For me at the startup, it just says external so they know that it’s something happening outside of them. And then it also has booking links just like Calendly. And one of my favorites is the portfolio view where you can see all of your calendars in one place and then you can add update the calendar events in general from one place instead of having to switch between calendars. So that is Multicalendar in a nutshell. And it has been a lot of just like, oh yeah, other people are having this problem. I had worked on a mobile app in the past for another company.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:17:26]:

That’s a whole other story. This has been easier in a lot of ways. I also will say, like, Generative AI is very controversial. It is very good at writing code. And even as I talked to my developer friends, they were like, yeah, it’s good at writing code. We use it for writing code internally. And so what I was able to do is to vibe code. Their term is the initial version of it.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:17:52]:

I was prompting it to like be very mindful of security, use open source tools so I’m not stealing other people’s intellectual property. And then I have a friend who’s a security engineer and I had her come in and audit it. And then my husband is a designer and a front end developer so I had him build the Multical marketing website. And so things were able to happen maybe a lot quicker than they would have happened otherwise. Cause almost like within a weekend I was using the tool for myself and then I was testing it with people and then I was putting it out there. So I think I had the idea on January 30th and then I think on March 30th, sometime around there was when I actually put it out to the broader public.

 

Kate Henry [00:18:40]:

I am very excited about Multical and I want to try it out. I use Outlook for work and I don’t like the calendar. Whenever I have to use anything in the calendar, people have to schedule in with me there. I’m like, no, no, this isn’t actually my calendar home. I have this other calendar home that I want us to be in, so I’m going to be checking that one out. I’d love, now that we’ve heard a bit about all the different kind of work that you’re doing to dive a little bit deeper and think about the ways that you do your work. I’m always curious how folks like yourself, who are writers and educators and developers and designers, tailor their offerings for different audiences. So for example, you’re doing work with individuals, small groups, strangers on the Internet, readers of your book, users of your app.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:32]:

And for some of that work, you’re engaging with individuals or you’re working with folks, you know, like at the startup that you work with, I imagine it’s small group meetings, things like that. But I also suspect that you’re imagining more general audiences who are going to engage with the work you create. So like for example, with Multical or with apps that you’ve developed or books. This is kind of an open question, but I’m personally curious. What’s it like to manage multiple projects with various audiences who have different needs? Like how does your brain like that? Is that hard? Do you have a system? Like, part of the reason I’m excited about this question is because my PhD is in rhetoric and I’m interested in the ways that discourse circulates and how we change the way we talk about things for different audiences and circulate that. So that’s my nerdy impetus for this question.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:20:28]:

I’m trying not to fully nerd out on this podcast, but as my dissertation topic, I’m using a conceptual framework built around the social identity theory of leadership and frame analysis and talking about all of those different things specifically around when you get language to describe an identity and looking at when people get the language of generalist, how do they view the person who gives them that language and how does that inform how they look at their career? I would have done portfolio careerist, but there’s not as much in the literature about that term. So generalist was easier. All of that to say. I nerd out about very, very similar things to you. So as I was looking at this question and then just sitting with you as I heard you say it again, a couple of things came up. The first thing is that this is probably one of the hardest parts. Like in the startup that I’m working with alone, I have so many different types of stakeholders and I can feel my brain having to switch and say like who is it that I am communicating with? Whose problems am I considering? Whose problems am I solving? Who might I be creating problems for that I need to address and like brainstorm around together? That is constantly happening just in that one role in my portfolio career, let alone zooming out. So I think that’s one of the first things is just to be really clear who I’m talking about and who I’m talking to in whatever aspect of work that I’m doing.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:22:01]:

This is something that probably over the past couple of years has started to shift for me is realizing that specificity is really, really good for portfolio careers. So I can be doing so many different things, but I’m really clear about who this aspect of my portfolio career is for. So like women facilitating is for women and non binary folks who facilitate. That is who I’m talking to alongside my co founders there. That’s who we’re building for. Very, very specific Multical tool that is very specific for These people. My coaching that I do is very specific for like mid career women who look really successful on paper but internally are like, are we successful? Because it’s not feeling that way. So that specificity and being able to turn my brain and my attention and my care to that specific person has been really helpful.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:22:59]:

The other thing when you were talking about like the scales of how I’m working with people, something that has been helpful and that’s why I like the different modalities that I work with is because my one on one or my small group experiences then inform the things that I’m doing for the masses. Sounds like I’m reaching a lot more people than I actually am, but like larger groups of people. I also think that if you’re going to have a portfolio career, it is incredibly helpful to leave behind archives. So Inner Workout was a body of work that I worked on for five years and I still get paid sometimes to do keynotes and to do different things around those topics. Even though I don’t lead with being the self care person or talking about self care anymore. I have over a hundred podcast episodes that you can listen to. I have the book, I have these different tools and resources that people can access even when I have moved beyond the work. So that’s really helpful for me as well is to know that like I’m leaving something behind where when I am bored or no longer challenged by that or life just takes me elsewhere, people can be still served over here.

 

Kate Henry [00:24:17]:

Oh, I love the way that you are focusing here on like the stakeholders with whom you are working, like the problems that are being solved that are being created that are then being solved and like the specificity of the portfolio career. I feel like this is going to be such a great. Like I think there’s going to be people who listen to this episode and are like curious about a portfolio career and then by the end of it are like, okay, I’m doing it, I’m going to make the jump and I’m going to like start to do this. Because the specificity of doing the work and being able to like really hone in and engage with particular audiences to meet their needs or like think about like what are the problems I’m solving with this project or this client. Like that does sound very satisfying. I’m like vicariously satisfied hearing you talk about this.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:25:05]:

It is. And even just like having terminology to say I do multiple things, that was one of the biggest barriers for me is like people are going to think I’m flaky. People are going to think I’m whatever. But now people just expect that. Like I did not expect to launch Multical this year. It truly, like I said, came out of a place of need. But then when I talked about it, people were like, oh that’s so cool. And of course you would randomly come out with something like it’s just what people expect.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:25:35]:

And that has been another thing that’s super freeing is now that I have the language, people are not expecting me to operate in like nine to five mode.

 

Kate Henry [00:25:45]:

Yeah. Hearing you say that makes me think about how there may be like additional accessibility that is provided through a portfolio career. Like I sometimes joke that I would be like a very good personal assistant for a celebrity, which I think I would be, but I most certainly would not want to be available 24 7, which is I think what would be required for that role. But I have liked in the past when I’ve had like you know, 10 hour a week contract with, you know, client or something like that, that I can do that work when I want, where I want, if I want to do certain things like in the evening or if I want to like, you know, like running my own business, the different work I do, I can take off certain time or I can like have a bit more control over my calendar than I would have if I did have like a 9 to 5 or traditional thing like that. Or even if I did have a place where I had to be on campus for work. It’s not like a 40 hours a week thing that I would need to do. So I’m curious, like would that align with your experience or what you would think a portfolio career would be and that it would provide accessibility for different ways to do work, like ways to control your schedule or where you may do that or I don’t know. I’m curious what comes to your mind when I bring that up as a topic.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:27:02]:

That’s one of my favorite pieces of having a portfolio career and that’s something that I’ve been exploring more. This working with a startup is the first time that I’ve had so much time on my calendar from like one entity in a long time, like in five years maybe. And so that has been interesting to say. Okay, before it used to be not entirely open calendar, but maybe I knew I was going to be doing 8 or 16 hours of facilitation or that I’d be having X number of coaching clients and then the rest I could kind of fill in. Now I have this baseline and everything else is filling around that and it gets back to just like seasonality. This is a season where this makes a lot of sense for me. I love the work that the startup is doing. I’m enjoying the aspect of working in a team where I’m not like one of the founders.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:27:57]:

It’s kind of nice to be just a worker bee in some ways. But yeah, it’s clarifying to me the parts of my portfolio career that feel really precious and the parts that I want to protect when I’ve done journaling about like, what feels really good and luxurious to me, having slow mornings. And it’s actually because I’m a morning person. So I love to be up, take my dog for a long walk, move my body in some other type of way, have something delicious for breakfast, inevitably get some type of inspiration and work on something. But to feel like I can have all of that time is something I’m realizing, oh, that’s important to me. Having the whole day free is less important to me than having the morning free. And now I can start to optimize for that more. It’s been really helpful even just like mental health wise, when I’ve had times where mental health has been more difficult for me, the flexibility of a portfolio career, knowing that like, I can show up for the places that are the highest leverage time for money and pull back from the places that are less so gets back to what you were saying.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:29:10]:

Just like knowing that there are multiple ways that I can make money when I maybe don’t have the energetic capacity to do all of the things that I could do.

 

Kate Henry [00:29:21]:

I love that you get to have slow mornings. Are you still able to have the slow mornings right now with the way that like in this season of work,

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:29:29]:

not as many as I used to, but still more, definitely more than the average person. And so the reason that this was top of mind for me is because I still mostly get to set my schedule and just realizing, oh, okay, I should change how I schedule stuff so I can continue to have more slow mornings. Like, it’s mostly a thing that is up to me and I just had to remember that that is what is valuable to me. Not just I could do anything at any time, which is also really cool, but for me it’s the mornings.

 

Kate Henry [00:30:03]:

Yeah, you could do anything at any time. And part of that anything can be a walk with your dog and a leisurely breakfast. You know, I love that for you Foreign, we’ve been talking about what keeps you really busy with work and you’re also a PhD student and I want to talk about that, you already, you gave me a little teaser into the work that you do, but you have some pretty cool degrees. You have a degree in human and Organizational development. You have a master’s in Business Administration, which both of those things make total sense to me with knowing the work that you do. And you’re also pursuing a doctorate of Philosophy in change leadership, which was a term again I didn’t know I had to do a little research on for today. Could you tell us what change leadership is and why you are interested in it and why you decided to do the PhD in it? Because you have a stacked CV, you’ve done a lot, you’re a successful business owner. So like what prompted you to pursue the PhD in this and what’s it like doing that while you have the portfolio career?

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:31:20]:

It has always been interesting to me to pursue a PhD. It also has felt intention with the breadth of what I like to do and then knowing I have to get so, so, so, so specific about something. I think part of this just being honest was ego. I had a book come out in 2023. Someone else had a book come out about self care. She’s about 10 years older than me. She was an MD psychiatrist. And I was like, she’s just getting a different level of respect than me because she has more letters after her name.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:31:55]:

And not to say she does not deserve the level of respect that she gets at all, but just realizing, oh, I kind of want to be respected for my thoughts and ideas. So that was what originally sparked this initiation of it. But I had been, it had been in the back of my mind for a while, probably every, at least once a quarter, once every two quarters I was looking at PhD programs. So that was really the impetus for me actually applying. Then the second piece was I knew that I wanted an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary program because even though yes, it is super important to have a level of rigor and specificity, I also wanted to feel like I was in a program that would allow me to pull from different places and not just pretend that like our area of academia was the only thing that existed. So I am really grateful to be in this program because it is change leadership, but it sits within a school of education. And even though I do so much professional development for people, I do not have formal education training. So I have gone through facilitator training and help now help train other facilitators.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:33:14]:

But I thought learning some of those fundamentals might be really, really useful and it has proven to be so onto what my degree itself is, the program is change leadership. My concentration is community leadership. And choosing a leadership program felt nice just because it relates to kind of both my MBA and my undergraduate degree. Also selfishly, like, leadership applies everywhere. So learning about leadership is just good things to know, especially as I personally believe, and it’s not a unique belief, but that the ability to work with people is only going to become more important. And with the rise of machines and all of these things, I think we just crave being in community and having people who can help facilitate the experience of being in community. So the change element felt really important because the rate of change has just increased so much. It’s always.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:34:17]:

I remember probably a decade ago I was working at Allstate and the executives had some like powerhouse futurist speaker come in and he said, the rate of change that you’re experiencing now is the slowest that change will ever be. And that was a decade ago. That was before us going through a pandemic. And all of a sudden all these things are normal in terms of like working from home and how we communicate that weren’t normal before. And then you just keep having these technological shifts. And so studying specifically how to work with people through change felt important. And then I love the community aspect of it because I, I mean, for so many reasons, I, I personally believe in the power of community and what happens when we learn and experiment and laugh and play in community. And again, there’s like a locality to it.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:35:12]:

Not just specifically locality is being in the same place, but like we share an identity or maybe it is because we’re neighbors that I think people are craving. So that’s why I chose the program. And in terms of how it’s been, it is a program that is designed to be done part time. It is designed for scholar practitioners. So some of my colleagues maybe eventually will want to teach a class, but they’re not really trying to become professors and get tenured. I mean, and that, not that that’s easy anymore either, but they’re, they’re not trying to go down that path. So that’s really helpful. And yeah, it’s just like that’s why I live by my calendar, because I have to know exactly what’s happening and when, and trying to feed multiple birds with one scone.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:36:03]:

And so if I’m doing a project for a class, can I have it help me scratch another itch in another part of my professional life, which is actually very much encouraged. So there’s been things where I’m like, oh, I’M thinking through this. For one of the projects that I’m working on now, I have to write a paper on how I’m making this decision or how I’m thinking through this. And it works out really well because I probably have given a lot more depth of thought to that issue in another part of my career. And then also, then I’m doing this thing in learning in my Ph.D. that

 

Kate Henry [00:36:37]:

sounds like it’s really applicable. Like, I say that because as someone who has two master’s degrees and a PhD and spent 10 years straight in grad school, grad school really taught me how to perform my intelligence and create output that I exchanged. Like, there was real exchange value for it. And I often can critique it for how I think it encouraged workaholism for me and, like, really, like, being in my brain in a way that made my thinking meant to be competitive, which, like, I’ve been kind of unlearning that in the six years since the PhD. And I say this because when you were talking about the work that you’re doing in the PhD for change leadership, like, I’m thinking of change leadership, I’m like, yes, it’s in my brain. I logically understand this. And then thinking about it through this community lens, like, really brought it down to my heart as well. Like, it feels like this.

 

Kate Henry [00:37:37]:

Not just like a intellectualizing, but like a seeing how this exists in real life for real people, not just as like a thought exercise or something like that. So there’s not really a question here. There’s more just like a. Like, I’m feeling really excited about the work that you’re doing in the PhD. Could you tell me a little bit more about this? Like, how this community framework for something like change leadership, like, what is that?

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:38:07]:

It shows up in a few different ways. So another thing I love about the program is just how many people doing different types of work. So we have lots of people who work in education. We have people who work for various levels of government. We have people who are, like me, consultants. We have people who work in various levels of, like, industry. And so that’s really cool to have people. Like, someone had never met a coach before they met me.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:38:35]:

And in my world, it’s like, so many people are coach, too many people are probably calling themselves coaches. And then I’m talking to people. I’m like, I did not know that someone’s job was to do what you do. So that has been a really cool exchange from the community piece. Some of how we talk about it is just Thinking about leadership differently. So talking about what distributed leadership looks like, those types of things. So less of a top down leader approach. But what does it look like to share or even if we are saying that there’s one leader in this instance, what is the exchange like? There’s leader member exchange theory, there’s various theories.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:39:16]:

So lots of different theories that we’re looking at. We tend to focus on some of the ones that are more communal. The other thing in terms of community is really focused on like the areas that we are trying to apply this work and what it looks like there. So for schools, people might be very specifically talking about their school or their school district. For me, I did a project for one of my businesses and thinking about, for the community of people that this business interacts with, how are these changes I’m thinking about implementing going to affect them and how can I like strategically be guiding and supporting people throughout this process, Trying to anticipate whatever needs I can, knowing that I can’t know everything. I did one project that was like looking at a neighborhood just to the north of me in Chicago, which according to recent data is the loneliest neighborhood in Chicago. And like thinking through what might be some loneliness interventions that could happen and how could we draw from the resources and the people who are already doing work to connect people in the community to address this. And then we’re, we’re talking about all of this in class.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:40:29]:

So we’re learning how other people are thinking about this leadership framework, whatever it is that we’re working with, and how they’re applying it to their communities. And I find the questions that we ask each other end up being really rich and also unexpected because they’re not so in the exact same thing that I am.

 

Kate Henry [00:40:50]:

Oh, I feel so smiley hearing you talk about this. And I’m really, it makes me feel a little bit better about academia. I mean I love, I do love academia, but like I love, I love research, I love learning. But what I love so much about what you’re talking about is like the direct connection of the theory and the praxis and like having a real positive effect on people’s material experience. It sounds like change leadership can really do that.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:41:16]:

Yeah. And it’s like the change is always happening, so how can we, how can we all be equipped for it? It does feel very, very relevant always. And we do get into political discussions which can be quite heavy. Now I’m getting teary eyed, but just thinking about how many of the people who are in my program, them or the people that they work closely with. Like we’re talking about schools and librarians and people who work in healthcare who are just seeing the horrors of what is happening in this administration. And so we were in an ethical leadership class and we’re just like everything in the news is a case study for ethical or unethical leadership. So yeah, there’s those parts too that are a little less smiley but also feel so good to have people who want to think about this in a meaningful way.

 

Kate Henry [00:42:13]:

When I was prepping for today and learning more about you, I loved seeing this language you use to describe yourself as I’ll share two cool ways you describe yourself. A person who decides she wants to do something and figures out how to make it happen. And you also call yourself a learning by doing devotee. I’m curious, as we’ve talked about the work you do, the scholarship that you’re creating and participating in, what other kinds of things do you get up to outside of that? And particularly the real question here is how do you take care of yourself while you do all of this work? Are there certain personal projects or you know, like self care practices that help to sustain you while you’re doing this work? How do you fit those in when you’re balancing so many different things? Or maybe balancing is not the right word here. But like while like again I was projecting onto you the feeling, oh, successful business owner. Because you’re doing so many things. And I’m so impressed by those. Right? So perhaps I’m also projecting right now this idea.

 

Kate Henry [00:43:18]:

Well, you must do self care in order to sustain yourself in the work you do. So this is a question that’s quite prescriptive as well. But I’d be curious to hear what comes up and what you’re thinking, what your answers might be to that.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:43:31]:

I mean there is a reason that I spent five years doing a self care company and a lot of that was because I would introduce and say like I’m naturally bad at self care. And so doing that work was accountability. I have a great therapist that I work with who does somatic and art therapy primarily. And so that has been great. And so many of the things that we do are things that like I might have been trained in or I theoretically know to do this, but to just have the time where we do it together. And again she asked me questions that I wouldn’t ask myself, always leading me back to my body that is super valuable for me. I also just like I enjoy work. There are some people who say they don’t Dream of labor.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:44:13]:

I do dream of labor. I like building things. I have a Capricorn stellium. Not labor in the sense that I’m, like, always training my time for money. But I’m realizing that I feel more relaxed and present when I’m doing, like, I’m in the dining room over there. We. My husband got this record stand for free on Facebook marketplace. So I’ve been stripping that so I can restain and paint that.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:44:40]:

That’s, like, really fun and relaxing for me. Doing home projects. I’m getting into herbalism, so that’s been fun. And then I’ve been doing caballero, which is a Brazilian martial art, for the past month and a half. And I’m trying to decide, like, if that’s something I’m going to commit to doing regularly and trying to get better at. So the things that I do are very much projects. Like, I have projects for my herbalism. I have projects that I do at home.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:45:08]:

I have, like, potentially the project of capoeira, which is something that at least the. The lineage that the studio is in does have a belt system and could be, like, years of practice. But that’s fun for me. And there’s also community in the. The capoeira side of things, also in the herbalism side of things. So, yeah, basically learning things, doing things with my body, and just making sure I have ways to do that that aren’t also tied to how I make a living.

 

Kate Henry [00:45:36]:

I also like projects and, like, work. Like, I like rest. Rest is great. Rest I need for my body. But, like, it is fun to have. Like, I love to have just, like, a writing project that I’m playing with the writing. Like, it might not be as active with all of my appendages, but, like, having that, like, fun little side project to be working on is really restorative. I’ll start to close us up, and I’d love to hear from you.

 

Kate Henry [00:46:00]:

What is just one thing that you’re honing in on right now?

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:46:05]:

I am honing in on a lot of curiosity. So just like when we were talking earlier about this idea of what makes someone a successful business owner, I was looking for parking in my neighborhood, and I live not too far away from Wrigley Fields, and sometimes I can just take a long time to find street parking. And I found myself sitting with that question and being, like, really curious about what’s underneath that. Yeah, I’m honing in on curiosity paired with compassion. And it’s been fun to see, like, even where the first inklings of Those explorations lead me.

 

Kate Henry [00:46:42]:

Ah, okay. Well even if you don’t write or share about that, like I’m excited that you’re doing that and you can have that experience of exploring curiosity and compassion. I noticed that immediately. I was like, please write about that so I can read. But like that can just be your experience. You don’t have to bring that to the world for me to benefit from it can just benefit you. Could you share where folks can find you and let us know if you have anything coming up. I’ll certainly link to your website which is just so fun to play on and like it’s so I’ve spent a lot of time on your website.

 

Kate Henry [00:47:17]:

It’s beautiful website and just like there’s so many goodies there. So I’ll certainly link to that. But tell us, yeah, where can we find you and do you have anything coming up we should know about? Absolutely.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:47:28]:

So yeah, my website is the best hub. I am trying to get back to writing at least a monthly newsletter. So if you go to taylorlease.com newsletter you can get signed up for that. I probably speak most frequently on the Internet on LinkedIn. If you want to check out Multical, you can go to use multical. Com. I also have some fun tools on the bottom like helping you think about how to diversify your income or how you onboard new clients or like how your capacity is tracking. So if you just want to play with those fun things, they’re not gated by email at all.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:48:01]:

And then women facilitating. If you are a woman or nonbinary person who is interested in facilitation, you can go on our website and check us out. We also have some nice articles on Substack, many of which are written by me.

 

Kate Henry [00:48:17]:

Yay. So much to keep us continuing to work with Taylor stuff. Well, I feel curious leaving our call and that feels good. I feel inspired. I feel curious. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

 

Taylor Elyse Morrison [00:48:34]:

Thank you for having me and for like really. I was sitting with these questions beforehand and it was generative for me even just to reflect on them and then even more generative to be in conversation with you. So thank you.

 

Kate Henry [00:48:47]:

Oh my gosh. My pleasure. I know that I am honing in. Honing in. Yeah, I know I’m honing in. Thanks so much for joining me. You can learn more about honing in and my work as a productivity coach on my website katehenry.com.