 All right, I'm excited to be with Heather Lakatos. She is a helper in my current ABC program. And we did an interview, what I call helper interview, but a couple of months ago, and we wanted to close the loop and share with you any updates since then. So Heather, welcome. And as always, I wanna have you start with your intro. Okay, great. Thank you, George, I appreciate it. So my name is Heather Lakatos and I'm a career breakthrough specialist. And I work with professionals whose work just isn't working for them anymore. And so I take them through a nine-step process where we really dig out what's really not working. And then once we figure that out, help them put a plan in place to go and get what they really want to do so that they're really juiced up by their career. Yeah, that's awesome, awesome. And in our ABC calls, you have been practicing your intro. So don't worry, folks, if your intro is not as smooth as that one, we will get you there. I had a lot of bad ones, don't worry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's fantastic now. Okay, so a couple of things I think would be interesting for the audience to hear updates on. One is your content creation efforts, especially because you are finding traction on a platform that most people haven't paid as much attention to, at least in my circles, Twitter. So we'll talk about that, x.com, whatever you wanna call it these days. And then I also wanna talk to you about your joyful productivity because I know you've been updating that and getting clearer about your business hours versus your kind of consulting hours or your business development hours versus your coaching hours and things like that. And yeah, and then I'm sure there are other updates along the way that I'll ask you about. But let's start with your content creation. Last time we talked, you weren't this clear and streamlined about your process for creating content and putting it out there and tracking it. But now you have, you kind of developed that cycle. So tell us about that. Yeah, I am super happy and super proud of that. But before I kind of get into that, I have to admit I burned out. So what I did in March, when I really started posting content, I just posted daily on Twitter and I posted daily on LinkedIn. Got through 20 days of LinkedIn, got through about 28 days of Twitter because I figured one sentence I could handle that. But then I just totally burned out because I didn't really have a good sustainable process in place. And so after kind of that little meltdown, it took me a couple months to really dig out what it is that was the right kind of process and cadence for me. And so, as George heard in many Q and A call, kind of asking this, that and the other about content creation, I finally got a system setup that works for me. And the great thing about kind of all the support that I got was experimenting, trying, kind of challenging every now and then to get a good little gentle nudge where I needed it. But so now the way I create content is I, as I read and consume and come up with ideas, I've got a place to put those. I personally put those at Obsidian, but I know other people like Notion and kind of other databases. And I think George, you used to do this, right? Yeah, Obsidian, tell us just a bit about this. Probably a lot of people haven't heard of it. Yeah, why do you love it? So I like Obsidian. What Obsidian is, it's a markdown file that sits locally on your system versus in the cloud. I wanna kind of train myself to have, like when I'm a certain environment to kind of get kicked into the mood, because I really do believe in kind of like physical anchors and physical, kind of physical kind of props, if you will. And so by having Obsidian just in my, on my computer, that kind of helps to kind of build that content muscle, I guess, if you will. It's like, if you've got a home gym, right? For example, people who really wanna work out, it's really easier to kind of get to that habit there, you know, when you pass by the home gym versus if you didn't have a home gym, right? So that's kind of my rationale for that. That's a really good point because I have already developed a habit of, you know, when I have an idea, and this is in years in the making, I have an idea, pull out the phone, write it into do list. It's already becomes a habit. You're talking about anchoring that when I have a content idea, well, that's also a natural thing. Oh, well, where do I put ideas? I pull out the phone, open the do list, and I put it in there. And so the same thing is, you know, we each need to have a system where we can get into that habit more easily of at least tracking your content ideas. So I like that first of all, that you are like capturing the ideas that come to you, right, like at random times, and you're putting it into your system. Most people, many people watching this probably don't even have a system like that. So I encourage all of you watching this. Create some, again, you can see, you can hear there are already two different systems here. It doesn't matter which one you use, as long as you use it, as long as it's really much, it's natural for you to use. So I wanted to kind of pause there and emphasize that. Okay, so once you got it in obsidian, now what? So once I got it in obsidian, I've got time every morning is kind of part of my morning routine once I get up and kind of get, you know, everyone fed and that kind of stuff. Having a good half an hour to an hour of going through kind of my content ideas and kind of figuring out what I want to write for the day. It's still kind of loosey-goosey. That's something I want to tighten up next year to kind of have more of that dedicated kind of calendaring, if you will. But that's kind of how it's evolving for me. And I seem to write better in the morning, like as far as deep kind of thought work versus the evening where if I haven't done a tweet in the day, you know, I might just tweet again. I've done that a couple of times. It's kind of a pass. But that's kind of how it's affirming it for me. So just having that kind of time to really think through. And I kind of do the, you know, capture, you know, consolidate, create a kind of category. Yeah, I kind of categorize and create kind of together. Okay, sure. So I scream my ideas and then kind of, you know, evolve a couple of them and then pick the one I'm going to post for the day. Because some take, and you probably see this in your writing, George, some take a while to kind of really tease out what is it you really think about something? And I'm finding that in my writing too. Now, so you were going back to the daily thing then? Yeah, so I have been tweeting daily since September 6th. And the reason why I'm doing that is I'm trying to build up that muscle of showing up. And I know your first year and a half, you post a daily for, you know, daily. And you just, you made yourself go ahead. Monday through Friday, yeah. Oh, okay, sorry. I heard wrong. So are you doing seven days a week? I'm doing seven days a week. Wow, amazing. Okay. But, you know, the tweets, you know, some of them really are one sentence. And what I'm finding is because I'm tracking everything in a spreadsheet now. So part of my process is once I tweet, I put it in a Google Doc. So I kind of have a permanent record of it with the link. And I also put it back in one of the Twitter in the tracking spreadsheet that you have in authentic content flow. And so I'm able to go through and see, you know, weekly I go through and check my metrics and see which things do well and kind of resonate, which things are kind of, you know, horrible flops. If I can't really think of a good idea, I'll go through some of the flops and see if I can't make them better. And for the ones that are doing really, really well, those are the ones that I really need to develop into stage two content that's kind of part of the workflow that yet has to be established. Yeah, so this is impressive. I mean, daily showing up for something, I don't care if it's a sentence or whatever. It's just the fact of your muscle adopting that. And so as of this recording right now, we are, that means you're almost, let's see, September, October, you're almost three months into daily posting. Yeah, almost three months into daily posting. Incredible. And what's different this time from the last time that you burned out? So what's different this time is I just picked one platform. I'm just focusing on Twitter. So that's one thing. I have that narrow focus to kind of build that muscle. And the second thing is kind of having that whole system in place, you know, as far as tracking to see what content works well, what can I try and recycle? So that if I feel, if I press for time or I feel like I just can't get something pushed over the line, I can go back and pick up something that was good and maybe tweak it and repost it or and test is this really stage two content or things that were duds the first time. If I still kind of feel attached and then can I make them better and see if I can undud them, I guess, to make up a term. It's interesting that you try to undud things. I mean, because I typically, when an idea is a dud, I'd make a video or make a post and it falls flat. I pretty much move on. I was like, okay, there's many other things. Have you had any luck or success in undudding an idea? Yeah, actually I have. And I think that kind of gets into your whole philosophy about the first couple years really finding your voice because I'm trying to still figure out, I'm working on my framework. That's one thing that's kind of, I'm trying to get pushed over the line through the end of the year. But as far as the things that my audience likes to hear from me, I'm still kind of exploring that. There's things that I want to talk about that resonate with the audience. There's things that I want to talk about that don't resonate with the audience. And then I did a poll where kind of asked them, what do you want to hear about? They want to hear about risk management and career. I'm like, oh, I never thought about that. So it's interesting kind of figuring out what it is that you kind of have that resonance with your audience with and what might be wanting to come through you. Yeah, no, that's really great that you, well, I think just even knowing what's a dud is already kind of a big deal. Most people don't because they just post, I mean, you're tracking it. You post it, you track it in the content spreadsheet. Those of you watching don't know. I teach about this in the authentic content flow course. Has the teachings about the tracking and the content spreadsheet and stuff. Anyway, you're tracking it so that you can see what is working really well, what is a dud. And then, okay, so tell me, let's talk more about the undudding process for you. Like what do you, let's say you find a content that's like, oh yeah, didn't work so well. Now let's say it's the morning and you wanted to do it again. What do you do about that? So if I'm inspired and that's really what wants to be worked on that day, then I'll sit and see if I can't reword something or maybe add to it, talk about it from a different point of view. Just to look at that particular thought in a different way. If it's still a dud, it's probably always gonna be a dud and that's okay. Yeah, it's really interesting that you do this because the things that we feel passionate to talk about that the audience doesn't yet get, they probably will get it if we keep talking about it and especially if we keep experimenting with different ways to talk about it. There's one topic has like many different doors into that topic and it's like a few doors might be exactly what the audience wants versus all the other doors, the audience doesn't get it. I mean, actually this is true with, I would say with my joyful productivity stuff. I mean, I talked about it for years before I felt like, oh, there's some traction here and after it was something around five or six years before someone decided to buy something for me about joyful productivity, it was a long time. No, no, I'm sorry. It was from 2009 that started talking about it all the way until 2018 before I sold something on Joe Fitzgerald. So it was about 10 years, okay, which I'm more stubborn. Yeah, I'm more stubborn than most people but I was, I could not talk, I could not not talk about it. I couldn't not talk about it because it was something I cared about so much but I kept trying different ways until I found, oh wait, this way seems to work. Oh, that way seems to work. Let me keep honing that and so I love it. I love that you are continuing to undud things. I think that's really important though. I mean, as a creator, if you think about kind of tapping into what is it you're here to talk about and to do, I think it's really important. If you feel that strongly, if you feel it in you that strongly, I think it's really important to just continue gently putting it out there like you did for 10 years. I mean, that's a great testament to kind of the power of source, right? You knew it needed to come out. You weren't sure exactly how but you kept at it, you undudded it eventually and now look at it. It's a great way to live, right? Yeah, and 10 years is a drop in the hat compared to the lifetime of our soul. So it's okay, it's worth it. And of course, along the way, I was also talking about other things that did get more traction and was able to build a clientele but I kept trying this too. But anyway, back to your process. You've got the morning. So one thing I also wanted to hone in on, you said, whatever inspires me for the day. Now, so I totally support that. People often think, oh, George is all about structure and following your calendar. So it's not about inspiration. It's like, no, no, no, no. Well, I mean, you're exactly the, it's kind of the walking case studies is you have a structure of showing up in the morning for it. So first, what if you don't feel like it one morning? Then I will sit and look at my obsidian and I might talk to my obsidian. Sometimes I'll actually talk things out because I find if I'm having a hard time writing, if I engage a different modality like speaking, then things kind of come out that way. And then I can just put it like through an otter or something like that and get it transcribed. If that doesn't work, then that's when I go into the spreadsheet and see, okay, what can I try and retweet? Okay, see, this is so again, it's similar idea like you're undudding your energy. It's like, ooh, I know I wanna do this. I'm not feeling inspired, but what are different doorways into generating flow, generating creativity. And I love that. I mean, that's exactly what it is. Like you show up for your structure and then you try to follow your inspiration within the structure, which is what I always tell people to do. Like, for example, I structure, I schedule my Friday Facebook lives. And then when I show up, I have a topic, but I go mostly by inspiration at that point rather than following some kind of script. And so, okay, this is great. So you show up, you follow your inspiration or you find a way into the inspiration. You put it out there, you track it and tell us about what it's been since then. I know this, for example, that you are getting more likes on your tweets consistently than most tweeters who don't have a huge audience yet. And so, I hope that feels really good. I mean, because you're getting more likes. I have, technically, I have something like 40 times the audience size that you do on Twitter. I have 4,000 followers. You have something like 100 at this point, but you're getting way more likes on your tweets than I am. And so, I think that matters more, obviously, because you're actually meeting people where they're at. My Twitter strategy is much more casual. I just basically use it for note-taking, so I don't care about it. But tell us about the results or whatever you experienced since, I mean, it's only been less than 90 days, but tell us about that. Yeah, so my best performing tweet was actually a quote with some kind of commentary on trauma, and it got 700 impressions. And I don't know how many of y'all actually got it. So that was my biggest tweet, that it was a quote. My next best tweet was kind of a, actually a repurposed LinkedIn article that I kind of repurposed for Twitter. It was a more than 280 characters, a little bit longer form. It was your own article that you basically turned into a tweet, yeah. And I got 650 impressions on that. And so that's the one that I have pinned right now. And so, my followers have grown. I'm up to like 110 followers, I think. And so I'm getting, right now, I'm getting consistently about for what I consider to be good performing tweets, about 200 impressions. And my duds are kind of like more in the hundreds now. And I'll tell you something. I mean, this is the weirdest thing. I mean, not weird. I mean, audience size doesn't matter as much as we think. I have 4,000 plus followers on Twitter. And I don't usually get as many impressions as you do on your tweets. So this is what matters. What matters is that your tweets are thoughtful, they are making an impact. And so tell us more, like, have you made any connections from all this content? Obviously it's helping with your future content, sort of like stage two, stage three, which we can talk about if you want to. But yeah, any connections you've made has resolved. Yeah, so, you know, I've got in within, I guess my followers, one, I started following one creator who was like posting like a tweet an hour for like a week, crazy guy. And I thought, well, this is really kind of interesting story. So I, you know, tweeted him a couple of times now and that kind of stuff. And he had talked about related story about starting a podcast. I thought, well, that's interesting. So, you know, for his followers, like a couple of weeks later, he asked, hey, can I get 10 people to kind of look at this, you know, document for me? I'm thinking about launching a course. I'm like, sure, sign me up. So I get, you know, I was being an engineer, I gave him brutal feedback and he's like, wow, that is so great. What can I do to help you? I'm like, remember how I told you, I wanted to start that podcast, let's talk. He gave me like 40 minutes of his time, we recorded it, gave me kind of all the ins and outs of what he's learned. You know, this guy has been podcasting since like the 2000s. So like almost 20 years. So I mean, it's just, it was just such a wealth of information. I'm just so grateful for just kind of reaching out and helping, you know, and I didn't expect anything back. I didn't ask him for anything, he just, he offered, I'm like, hey, I'd love to know, you know, type thing. And I was thinking, yeah, maybe a 10 minute conversation. It was great. I've also, there's another person who's got, I think 10,000 followers who followed me out of the blue. I guess he really liked one of my quote, my quote tweet. And so, you know, I've been kind of commenting on his tweets. And so, so I'm slowly kind of, you know, getting to meet different people that way through just kind of audiences. You know, but the biggest one was definitely the podcaster and I'm so excited about that. And are people also coming to your website through Twitter? Yeah, I'm getting traffic through my website. You know, not consistently yet, but I am on my website metrics. I'm getting traffic, which is why I need to get going on stage two content. So it's a little bit stickier, right? Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And you're starting, you're just starting to make offers. You'd be posting content consistently for months now and you're now beginning to make offers. We talked about it earlier in the Q and A column, but you will be offering people some of your time for free. Is that right? Tell us about that. So what I'm offering, I guess for Twitter is just to have kind of a clarity call with people who are, you know, feeling stuck in their career to see if, you know, just to kind of give them kind of initial read on what I think their problem might be and then to see if we might be a good fit to work together. Yeah. And then if they feel like they want to go deeper, then they obviously can. If not, you know, my hope is that they lead, at least with some action items to go take away with. That's great. Yeah, and that's a great way to serve your audience. And of course, obviously get some potential clients. And so... And do a little bit of market research too at the same time. Yes, absolutely. Which is really, I mean, it's the most, actually for your business-wise, that's the most valuable thing as you listen to the language and the biggest concerns and in yearnings from your people. Okay, so next up, of course, is stage two content. Tell us about your plans for that or what is your interest in doing that? So, you know, I guess after I kind of have my little meltdown and stuff like that, I kind of saw myself getting back on the wagon with stage one, it never really clicked how important stage two was for me. You know, as far as having that on your website, kind of having that body of knowledge, if you will. So having been, you know, posting consistently for almost three months now and getting traffic to my website, it kind of, oh, that's why he talks about that. I get it now. So my plans for that are to take my best performing tweets and also some of my best performing LinkedIn posts. Cause even though I haven't posted on LinkedIn, some of my LinkedIn posts have gotten like 2,000 impressions and stuff like that and a lot of likes. So those are stories that, you know, would be great to be turned into potentially stage two content as well. My plans for that are to kind of develop those, repurpose some things as LinkedIn carousels. You maybe have longer tweet threads or longer tweets and then have something on my blog so that, you know, once people get to my website, you know, my blog, then there'll be something there for them to kind of root through, if you will. Yeah, and just people don't know stage two content. What is that? Just go to Google, search three stages of content creation. There should be my article or video about it and you can learn all about the three stages so you can better understand that. And then of course that feeds into stage three at some point and not to this in the future. Any thoughts about that? No. One step at a time, one stage at a time, that's good. Yeah, because one thing that has really taught me is to be mindful about what you do, be mindful how you expend your energy to kind of get something in place before jumping to the next thing. Because I think as business owners, you know, we're kind of prone to the, oh, that's neat. Oh, let me try that. Oh, that's cool. And then you just kind of get too spread out. So for me, I think I'm more sustainable. My whole, one of my goals next year is sustainability. One of my goals is to get something down first, a little bit more systematized if you will and comfortable as a habit and then move to the next platform. So I'd like to move back to LinkedIn next once I feel good with that. Probably won't be every day like Twitter. And then kind of add in podcasting after that. So that's kind of how I see things in rolling or rolling. Stage three content classes at some point, you may be group classes to start with but that's maybe late next year at the earliest. That's great. I love your dedication to growth that can last. That can actually still be balanced, I guess, with everything else that you're doing. So that is excellent. Excellent. Anything else you want to share with the audience as we wrap up? Let's see. So one thing that I would encourage everyone to do is to really work on procedures or hat manuals. That's something that I think you've got a couple articles on as well, George. Yeah, hat manual. Yeah, if you go to my YouTube channel and search my YouTube channel for hat manual, there is a primer there, yeah. Yeah. For me, that's been kind of a game changer. Really thinking through how do I do things? Where do I file things? You're just kind of the little, they seem like little stupid little decisions but that's one less thing that your brain has to think about. So that frees up real estate in your brain so that you can kind of execute your work the way that you need to. And just for everyone's trying to say, what did they say? Hat manual, hat as in wearing a hat, manual as in, you know, and it's basically the idea that as business owners, as well creators, we are wearing multiple hats throughout our day. Okay, now I'm the blogging hat. Okay, now I'm in the client preparation hat. Now I'm whatever. And so it's like for each of these hats that we wear, do we have some kind of a checklist or process guide for ourselves that we're putting together that we're continuing to hone over time? And Heather has become the queen of hat manuals in our ABC community, our member community because she's led several sessions on that. And yeah, it's so important for me as well. I mean, the more complicated my business grows, the more crucial it becomes. But it's like even from the beginning, it's like, all right, why do I have to reinvent the wheel every time I do this process? And it's like your hat manual, it could simply be a very short checklist, but how long are your hat manuals usually? Like how involved are they? Half a page, if you printed out. Half a page, that's it. Yeah, it doesn't happen yet. Okay, so you're, I'm sorry, I interrupted you when you were saying you were developing these hat manuals. No, that's great. I just, that's something I can't really stress enough that I wanna make sure that people, as they kind of start playing their 2024 role into their plans. Yeah, that's awesome. And what we can look forward to you is, I know you're going to be updating your framework even more cause you career is one part of it, right? Cause you also work with people's emotional health, right? Or the connection of emotional and physical health. And then you work with money mindset type stuff. And so like these three areas, career, health and money, you're going to be creating a kind of a framework to connect these together. And that'll be exciting to see that as it develops. Do you want to share any, just in 30 seconds, is there an offer that you wanna share with our audience or how can they work with you kind of thing? Okay. So a lot of my recent clients have, I guess have been working through values and vision. I used to do strategic planning when I was a corporate. And so several of my recent clients were like, hey, you know, I wanna plan out my next five years and kind of go out on my own. So that's something for your community, George, if they're interested in kind of setting that up, that's something I can work people through. That's awesome. Awesome. One of the progress or celebrations we didn't talk about is your video presence has improved. I mean, definitely since we started working together until now, there's been improvements in multiple ways. And one of them is the fact that you've got your background and your lighting really excellent now, way better than mine. Look at my lighting is terrible with the too much. I still have to work on my new home and how the lighting is, but good job on that. Thank you. I'm a good teacher. Yeah, yeah. No, thank you. So yeah, look below this video for links to connecting with Heather, checking out her Twitter and her website and things like that. So thank you so much, Heather. Thank you, George. I appreciate it. Thanks.