You may not associate self-care with the hard-headed, purely rational context we often think of when talking about making decisions but that doesn’t make it any less important.
In fact, self-care is one of the things I’ve been focusing a lot more in the past 2 years and, lucky for me, I got to learn and a lot by following and talking to Nichole Elizabeth Demere about it!
Nichole is one of those people who makes online communities’ hearts beat! I had read many of her articles but never put a voice to the words until I head her podcast interview on Louis Grenier’s Everyone Hates Marketers podcast.
She is a SaaS Consultant & Customer Success Evangelist, Founder at Authentic Curation but also a moderator at Product Hunt and Growth Hackers. Previously, she spearheaded Community Growth at Zest.is and handled Growth at Inbound.org.
Besides her keen focus on content marketing and community management, Nichole is also very candid about her challenges, thoughts and values. I constantly see her kindle meaningful and helpful conversations online – especially on Twitter – with her authentic talent of asking piercing questions.
We covered a lot of ground in the hour we spent talking, jumping from one idea to another, making sense of our experiences and challenges. Here are a few of our conclusions:
- You don’t need to know everything all the time. This idea is absurd and will turn you into a FOMO-driven robot.
- Depth is sometimes the better choice over breadth. Focus helps you manage and make sense of complexity.
- When you work with startups who don’t have funding you have to be super-focused and move fast because you depend on these two abilities.
- Boundaries are very important. Working with them and learning how to set them is both and aid and the practice of better decision-making.
- Prioritizing self-care is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. People who’be been reached the burnout stage (myself included) know this all too well.
- Progressive decision-making is a great for tackling life-changing alternations. Building our ability to make increasingly better choices each time is part of its benefits.
- Break big goals into smaller objectives to eliminate the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much, too fast.
- Track your progress month by month. Look back and evaluate your results for a more objective, less biased perspective.
- Good people don’t necessarily make good decisions and that’s okay. Correlation does not imply causation.
- Try to evaluate the decision, not the person who made it.
Nichole generously shared her experience and some of the most important stages and choices that have given her peace of mind and the space she needs to grow and enjoy life.
So dig deeper and unwrap the resources she shared (books & more!):
- A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business
- When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
- Why you need an untouchable day every week
- 20 Women’s Stories on How They Learned to Set Boundaries
- Celebrating one year of sobriety — with a request to tech
- The Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine
- Indistractable: How to Master the Skill of the Century, a talk by Nir Eyal, author of Hooked
- Nir and Far podcast
So here it is, the 5th episode of the podcast, for you to enjoy on a lovely summer afternoon:
Alternatively, play the episode in your favorite apps:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Simplecast | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Player.fm
Thank you for listening!