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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/ chinwaglive.substack.com

  1. Sep 23

    wearing a business suit

    fall equinox hit and we both spiraled, just in opposite directions. gabby spent the day ready to blow up her whole business, quit things, start over, and marisa spent it wondering why she felt so calm and what she must have forgotten (why did she call herself over prepared when she was just… prepared?). that turned into the real question for anyone working for themselves: how do you tell the difference between your gut and your anxiety when anxiety is basically your baseline? gabby comes with the line of the week, straight from her substack: imposter syndrome is anxiety wearing a business suit and pretending to be self-awareness. she also shares the three questions she ran every spiraling thought through. first, does it get louder and more aggressive the longer you sit with it, or does it just quietly chirp? second, is it telling you to escape, or pointing you toward something? third, when you finally decide, do you get instant relief? we get into why "just trust your gut" is annoying advice, why she talked it out with voice-to-text instead of journaling, and what it's like to realize three years in that nobody's going to tell you what to do anymore and you have to decide what's worth your time and energy. marisa gets a text from a friend she hadn't heard from since april, five minutes before we hit record, about how vital connection is (the woo always woos in). she also shares what her ten-day content sprint is teaching her about hitting record before you know what you're going to say. plus: gabby names her imposter syndrome brad (sorry to any brads listening), and we pull a card so accurate it nearly got thrown at the computer: clarity isn't perfection, it's presence. less than three weeks till IMEX, come hug us. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live. card deck mentioned: https://bepresentllc.com/shop/p/card-deck This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    wearing a business suit

  2. Sep 15

    baked into your rate

    true chinwag style — no topic prep, gabby half-losing her voice, and neither of them entirely sure they were recording until they were. the question they can't shake: how do you monetize your energy? like actually get paid to just exist and breathe — to walk into a room, read it, and diagnose the human layer when that's the thing you'd do for free anyway. marisa's been put on projects strictly for who she is: floated in on vibes, put herself at the front of the line for a role that wasn't even a job description, and upsold anyway because staying quietly in the box was never an option. gabby cracks it open — the essence of marisa is already baked into her rate. you don't line-item your presence, it comes with the package. from there it's the rate stuff: the "if saying your number out loud doesn't make you a little uncomfortable it's not high enough" post, the mentor rule about losing twenty percent of your pitches on price, and gabby's pushback that there's a hard line but also room to concede when the non-monetary value is real. plus the "return on experience" organizers can't seem to put a line item on, the twenty-dollar-an-hour support staff no experienced person will touch, the super-connector who text-blasted marisa twelve intros on a sacred friday and handed her a full anxiety spiral (no, the VA cannot do it — that's not how she connects), and the quiet turn at the end: maybe you don't monetize your energy at all. maybe you just exist and be, put things out into the universe, and let it look different with every person who walks up. it always comes back to kyle. card pull to close: my focus creates the future i want to lead. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    baked into your rate

  3. Sep 10

    science the woo woo

    gabby took dayquil, went down a youtube rabbit hole, and came back with a thesis: the woo-woo is real, but you can train it. this whole one is her "sciencing the woo-woo" — the reticular activating system, aka your brain's spam filter, and why manifestation actually works. it's not sending vibes into the universe and waiting for a check to show up (rip, failed student of The Secret) — it's that when you can picture what you want, your brain starts filtering the right opportunities and collaborators in, and the dopamine you release keeps you motivated to go do the thing. you can't survive on vibes alone. marisa brings the human proof with a green dress, an arsenal kit, and a stranger named karen at publix — a completely non-transactional exchange that lands the whole point about not forcing connection. we get into mirror neurons and who you let into your orbit, gabby confessing she's a "professional pessimist" whose assume-the-worst armor meant good s**t never actually happened, the anna connection that refused to happen when forced and then landed serendipitously two weeks later (what's the rush?), and marisa's orbit theory of people finding each other at exactly the right time. plus the fine line between icky intuition and plain old fear (a whole future episode), why we mislabel our own emotions, and an ai card pull that closed it a little too perfectly: "i am not behind on building alignment." the universe meets you at your level of delulu — so science it, then do the work. catch us speaking at IMEX — head to chinwag.live for all the info. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at http://chinwag.live. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    science the woo woo

  4. Sep 9

    live what you teach

    gabby comes back from nine days in LA — four BTS concerts, two toddlers, and a phone she left in the seatback pocket on day one, which delta eventually mailed back from dallas fort worth but not before five accidental days of a digital detox. and here's the thing: she didn't flip a car over. she was calm, present, actually there for the shows — the kind of thing she swears would've gotten her institutionalized back at her old corporate job. meanwhile marisa's on the other side watching emails and whatsapps pile up, resisting the urge to say "we gotta respond to this," and both of them clock that they took their foot off the gas on chinwag for ten straight days and the world didn't end. it just pushed things. from there we get into the niching conversation liz latham from club beachy reopened — her reframe that niching isn't narrowing your focus, it's finding one thing people know you for so they can recommend you, and the rest happens as a result. gabby wrestles with it hard: "i take the creep out of your scope" gets her remembered, but she doesn't want to be the scope creep girl, she wants to be the human dynamics person — anyone who works with people who has issues with people, full stop, stop asking her for a narrower audience. marisa pushes back that for multidimensional people who actually connect, the box depends on who's in the room. then the real turn: your positioning isn't a job description, it's the way you actually exist. marisa's is presence — and gabby's whole point is that marisa doesn't just teach it, she lives it, which is exactly why gabby stayed calm without her phone. plus: why remote teams got shoved into virtual during you-know-what and nobody ever thought to ask "what's the best way to communicate with you," gabby's expo expo and nashville talks, and a card pull — "my focus is sacred and worth protecting" — that landed a little too on the nose given how the episode started. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly, more info on our IMEX appearance at http://chinwag.live. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    live what you teach

  5. Aug 28

    everyone is their mirror

    marisa's fresh off connect marketplace and her brain is already six weeks out on imex — because chinwag is going live and in person, officially, in partnership with spl productions (hellospl.com). no ego, no one-or-the-other: they show off their av using our content, we show off our content using their tools. but the episode really opens up when gabby brings something that's been nagging her — a line from a book she loves on imposter syndrome, that the people most qualified to do a thing talk about how qualified they are the least, and the people who aren't are the loudest about it. doth protest too much. every time she says "this is my superpower" she has to shake the ick off, and she can't figure out why some people can say "i'm good at this" and it lands, and others say it and you feel the exact opposite. marisa's reframe is the whole episode: the ick isn't about them, it's a mirror. if someone over-explaining how great they are gives you the ick, look at what you're judging in yourself — everyone is their mirror. you don't have to say it, you embody it: the "podcast host" shirt that made people ask what's your podcast, the "best present is to be present" sticker that starts the conversation without claiming a thing, leah shouting them out without ever being told, katie tagging gabby for conflict resolution off one phone call. say it only when it's genuine and you can back it up — and ask who you're really trying to convince, you or yourself. plus: what's the rush, why a building notch counts as much as a completed one, and why the sales cycles are longer than you want but that doesn't mean they're not working. red card of the day: i trust my process and pace with new tools. big thanks to spl productions for the partnership and the show-floor audio setup — go find them at hellospl.com. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    everyone is their mirror

  6. Aug 17

    magic words

    marisa's off at ASAE, so this one's a pre-record — and it turns into a full nerd-out on the tiny book that took marisa three years to actually finish: phil jones's exactly what to say. gabby, naturally, has already read ten books on influence this year and inhaled the audio version while cleaning her deck. the wild part? marisa reads the opening line out loud — people work harder to avoid a loss than to chase a gain — and gabby loses it, because she'd posted about loss aversion on linkedin literally one hour before. get out of my head. from there they get into the actual magic words: "imagine this" as once-upon-a-time-for-adults (the thing marisa accidentally used on gabby a few episodes back, which gabby then stole for her whole nashville workshop intro), "before you make up your mind" and why gabby's nerves keep turning her follow-up into a lost sale, the icky "i'm guessing you haven't gotten around to it" one they both side-eye, and marisa's warmer spin on "are you open minded" — giving people the autonomy to say no and actually meaning it. plus: loss aversion as the secret engine behind scope creep, why most of this only works out loud and not in a DM, and marisa tagging phil jones and getting a repost because the man built a marketing strategy right into his book. no card needed today — the book was the card — but gabby pulls one anyway: my intention sharpens my impact. shout outs to michelle, crystal (switching to spotify just to comment), rich, and phil. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live marisa's card deck: phil's book: kyle's episode - set the hook early This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    magic words

  7. Aug 10

    stupid little box

    grandpa kyle's words are officially living rent-free in gabby's head. after ten days apart — marisa back from two family reunions and her planning commission academy (zoning, not events, though "planning is planning," honestly) — gabby comes in wound up about the niching gospel she keeps getting force-fed while prepping for the ichi job search council. niche down. pick one thing. speak to one audience. and she's over it. because kyle already told her the move: sell people the thing they know they want, do it stupidly well, and let that open the door to the thing they don't know they need. so why does everyone insist she cram herself into one lane — jack of all trades, master of none? no, that's not true. marisa counters the "so who do you even help?" trap with her imagine-this move — picture the startup founder whose remote team keeps their cameras off and loses everything in slack — and gabby literally stops mid-thought: "I was fully invested listening to you." that's the whole point. you're not niching, you're telling a story people can see themselves in. they get into valentina blowing up off salary-transparency posts, the cousin who's decided marisa is "the ai girl," why reunions should honestly have lanyards and mocktails and curated intros (marisa was in green while everyone else wore red white and blue — not in the group chat), and gabby finally deciding to post the BTS piece, arsenal-jersey energy and all, because she's not a person who fits in a stupid little box. nobody's hiring your niche. they're hiring your brain — and your personality. we're not selling the pens. card pull lands it: your energy is enough when it's focused... but not restricted. personal brand vs. personal product is next week's whole thing. soft skills, hard truths. new episodes weekly at chinwag.live This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    stupid little box

  8. Aug 4

    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 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinwaglive.substack.com

    no shame in going back
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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/ chinwaglive.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    chinwag.
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    32
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © chinwag.
  • Show Website
    chinwag

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