chinwag

Gabby and Marisa
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soft skills, hard truths. gabby and marisa having a good chinwag. [chin-wag] / ˈtʃɪnˌwæg /: to have a friendly conversation more info: http://chinwag.live/

  1. 3d ago

    no shame in going back

    Here you go — tuned so the "no shame" thread carries through, since that's the title now: gabby comes in hot with a networking call that broke her brain — shout out to hayden, met through an ATD meeting she "had no business going to, but whatever, getting in rooms." hayden went out on his own right out of school, freelanced for six-plus years, then went back to corporate on purpose — and because corporate never got ingrained as his identity in the first place, the job is just the job. "if i leave this job, i'm not losing a piece of myself. i'm losing a paycheck." the line that reframes the whole episode: there's no shame in going back to corporate after you've worked for yourself, as long as it's healthy for you and you don't let the numbers become your whole life. marisa and gabby sit in that, because every solopreneur they know treats going back as a failure — and here's a guy who did it backwards and loves it. then it gets honest. marisa's been getting tagged in job posts by people she knows, sending her resume through the "in," and getting ghosted anyway (data farming, not hiring). gabby runs the should-i-do-corporate loop once or twice a quarter. and the caveat neither of them can fully solve: when the work has become your authentic self, how do you detach enough to fit a mold without losing the thing that makes you you? the dream answer is a retainer or fractional role built around what you already do — but "who makes roles for people nowadays?" plus: a mid-year purge opener (fifteen soccer jerseys marisa hasn't worn since 2020, a memory box unopened in a decade, a cvent swag journal getting repurposed for road-trip entries with her nephew), a kyle callback on money buying the baseline not the happiness, and a card pull that lands the plane — "every time i return to the present, i reclaim my power." because sometimes the pull back to corporate is just living too much in the future. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

  2. Jul 28

    set the hook early

    grandpa kyle finally makes it onto the pod — and immediately turns it into a masterclass. kyle morris built and sold a business before thirty, then went dormant for three years figuring out who he was without it, and came back with thirty years of pattern recognition on how to build things people don't know they want yet. the trick? you don't sell them the thing they don't understand. you sell them what they already know they want, do it well, and set the hook from the beginning. we get into the case study as loss leader (free, but there's a contract on the other side), the actual pricing math kyle keeps in his back pocket — your burn number, a realistic goal, find the median, divide it down by 52 weeks and 40 hours, and never move the rate down, only up — and why networking isn't standing in a bar telling people how cool you are. it's investing in people and letting the law of reciprocity do the rest. gabby runs her carousel pitch on the human layer that fractures under org change, kyle marries it up with a tech play, and suddenly there's a one-two punch. plus: the $1,700 chicago bar tab that bought fifty people's attention, why being "differently authentic" to different people isn't fake, and marisa getting kyle catastrophically lost under a chicago train track. red card of the day: clarity is my superpower, not speed. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

  3. Jul 23

    motivation is personal

    marisa went to a PMI Nashville roundtable on a random tuesday night — not an events thing, not her industry — and came out of it texting gabby photos of slides at 3am. the topic was motivation. the takeaway was that four people sitting in the same front row were motivated by four completely different things, and nobody would have known that if the instructor hadn't asked. so we spent this one pulling that thread. why other industries are hungry to learn the people stuff while events assumes it already has it handled. leading without formal authority, which is every project manager and every event person alive. how "what motivates you" gets you the socially approved answer — family, faith, friends, all the f words — and "tell me something that motivates you" gets you an actual human being. gabby's volunteer years at the healthcare foundation, where every idea hit a wall until she stopped pitching what made her look good to her boss and started asking what mattered to them. then it turned into a marketing conversation, because of course it did. the woman who stopped posting "here's what i can do for your company," started posting about pay transparency, and is now at 10k followers with work coming to her instead of the other way around. why nobody shares or saves a sales post. why "i'm an expert" stopped landing the second AI made everyone sound like one, and showing beats claiming now in a way it didn't five years ago. plus: marisa's honest account of talking into an AI note taker until the thing in her head made sense, gabby's rule that it can brainstorm but never copy-paste, and a card pull that landed a little too on the nose. we close on why every evening networking event is a loud club with karaoke and no quiet corner to actually talk to anyone — you cannot debrief a long day while flo rida is performing on stage — and what chinwag wants to build instead. the messy middle. comment on this one, we want to hear it. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

  4. Jul 20

    on location: heather o’ shea - not a bad date

    Heather of O'Shea Event Consulting doesn't build registration websites — she reverse-engineers them. Start with what leadership needs to see, then backbuild the reg to capture it. Fresh off Cvent CONNECT Nashville (5,000 attendees, a mid-keynote rebrand, Lower Broadway shut down twice), Heather brings the hard truths: nobody fills out surveys anymore, so read the behavior instead — clicks, agenda customization, RFID scans. Your past data isn't a bad date to hide in a drawer; pull it before your F&B negotiation, not after. Plus why she's fluent across nine platforms but married to none: "you can make any platform do what you want — if you know what that is."

  5. Jul 20

    on location: nate dillon - twinkle in their eye

    live from cvent connect, we grab nate dillon, VP of business development at SPL, for the most honest conversation about production companies you'll hear all year. his take: the tech is the tech — almost every production company is the same. the difference is whether you see the twinkle in their eye when they talk about your event. we get into the long game of trade show BD (spoiler: the ROI is an unknown return over an unknown amount of time, and it hinges on someone remembering to follow up three years from now), why nobody should ever be forced to share an airbnb, the exhaustion of being present from morning until midnight, and what decompression actually looks like — an 85-pound lap dog (hi Teddy!), a dance party, and a boat in northern minnesota. plus bourbon. obviously bourbon.

  6. Jul 20

    on location: brandon montgomery - solutions, not sales

    Recorded live and topics totally unplanned — Marisa grabs Brandon Montgomery of Technical Elements for a hallway-style chinwag about what business relationships actually look like in the events industry. Brandon's whole philosophy: solutions, not sales. He's the guy who tells prospects, "If you have a trusted partner, keep using them — but if they ever let you down, call me." (One planner told him no one had ever said that to her before.) They get into why trust is the real currency of AV — including the time a client handed over a top-secret rebrand and Brandon's team caught the new font spelling "AL" instead of "AI" across the deck. Plus: why event people can't stop auditing digital signage and airport boarding lines, Brandon's family trip through the front gates of FIFA Fanfest, a Dave Chappelle cell phone store cameo, and the eternal question of the perfect walk-up song. Solutions selling, breadcrumbing your way into a client relationship, and why switching vendors is basically dating — it's all here.

  7. Jul 18

    secondhand fomo

    marisa went to her first cvent connect. gabby stayed home and saved up all her questions. this is the debrief. 5,000 people, zero sessions attended (no regrets), and a keynote that ended with a full company rebrand flipped live while everyone was in the room — signage, socials, balloon arches, everything. marisa recaps her week as a content creator in nashville: the podcast room that turned chinwag into an on-location show by accident, the pod cart that should be on every show floor, mocktail-forward menus, the clubhouse effect that makes 5,000 people feel like your people, and why 12.7 billion attendee interactions means events have to help us be more present, not less. plus the take that's going to ruffle feathers: every chinwag episode is a webinar — and webinar is not a dirty word. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live

  8. Jul 16

    on location: sarah stewart - little ichis everywhere

    Day zero at Cvent CONNECT, episode two on location. Marisa pops the podcast cherry of one of her besties — Sarah Stewart of MC Squared and Club Ichi — to talk intention-setting: mapping sessions before you land, showing up where your ICP is instead of leading with the pitch, and why the best "so what do you actually do?" conversations happen after the relationship starts. Plus a recap of the Club Ichi Clubhouse and the bat phone that makes a 5,000-person conference feel small.

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About

soft skills, hard truths. gabby and marisa having a good chinwag. [chin-wag] / ˈtʃɪnˌwæg /: to have a friendly conversation more info: http://chinwag.live/

Information

  • Creator
    Gabby and Marisa
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Gabby and Marisa
  • Show Website
    chinwag