PODCAST · business
Curate the Future
by Sumayya Essack
Curate the Future is for multi-passionate high achievers to get clarity on your dreams, get unstuck, and design and launch your new career or business. If you're a purpose-driven, creative soul ready to reinvent, but need to push past perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and self-doubt, this is for you.I'm Sumayya Essack, an educator and coach who helps creative, high achieving women to design their career changes and businesses and get the confidence and strategy to launch. I'll share the paradigm shifts, actions, frameworks, and tools to forge your path and tackle the mindset blocks so you can start your fulfilling new chapter.In addition to solo episodes, I interview women who have made their own reinventions and started businesses, to give listeners an intimate and real-world view at navigating the journey.
Episodes
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Give Space Between the Question and Answer
Feeling frustrated that you're not coming up with any answers to the big career change questions? When it feels like trying to squeeze water from a stone, here's the antidote.
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The Decision Informs the Path, the Path Informs the Decision
Career change clarity often feels like two steps forward, one step back. When you're excited about an idea and then you find out it will take more than you expected to get there, it can feel like sliding way backwards. But you're actually still going forward.
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Let Go of Forcing What Isn't Working, with Kaitlyn Casso
When Kaitlyn Casso worked in marketing, she found a passion for photography when she took that on as part of her role. Later, after spending a year looking for a new marketing job to no avail, she felt she was trying to force a career to work that she no longer wanted. She decided to take a…
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Let it Be Easy
Have you ever set arbitrarily ambitious goals for yourself, then felt like a failure when you didn't meet them? High achievers tend to make things really hard for themselves, and be tough on themselves for not measuring up to their own standards. Why is that?! We've become suspicious of things...
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Say Yes Then Figure it Out, With Vanessa Awong
In her 30s, Vanessa Awong decided she'd had enough in her finance career and decided to become a doctor while also starting a family. "Let's just say yes and figure out the rest as we go," she told herself, and that started her new path. With four years of commuting out of town, it wasn't an easy...
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Leaps and Lily Pad Hopping
"How do I get from here to there?" is the million dollar career change question. Sometimes you can get there in one big leap, but lots of career changes happen by strategically hopping between a series of lily pads. Here's how to know if you can make a shift in 1 move or if you need to lily pad...
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Move Forward Calmly, With Alejandra Molina
Alejandra Molina is co-founding a language learning app, currently focusing on medical Spanish during the pandemic. She doesn't have a tech background, but believes in figuring things out with a willingness to learn, to find inspiring mentors, to see value in all of your previous experience, to…
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Overthinking and Underthinking
Overthinking is a thing, but so is underthinking. We dwell on some career change questions to the point of overthinking, and we skip over the useful questions by underthinking. If you find yourself drawing a blank, here's how to know which it is and what to do instead.
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Listen to the Sparks, With Claire Simeone
Claire Simeone is a marine veterinarian and 2018 TED Fellow who started her own conservation-focused company, Sea Change Health. She has carved her own way through her field by following subtle clues. In our chat she describes how she learned to listen to those sparks: by separating her self…
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Behavioral Economics Explains Why Career Change is Hard
As a coach I tend to hear similar themes in the fears and objections potential career changers have. We can take those thoughts as signals that we are weak and inferior, but they're often actually just behavioral economics at play. Here are 5 ways the difficulties of career change can be…
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Rejection is Part of the Process, With Thalia Patrinos
Thalia Patrinos found that being a teacher just wasn't for her. She knew she loved writing, and after a chunk of time feeling frustrated and confused about what was next, she pursued a science writing degree and today works at NASA. Thalia's message as a career changer and creative writer is that...
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Ask Yourself The Right Questions
Career change prompts a lot of lofty questions about what to do with our lives. As a coach, I find people are more blocked than helped with questions like that because they have no "right" answer and they make us freeze with existential angst (enter: indecision, inaction, general freaking out)....
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You Can Change Careers More Than Once, With Teresa Carey
Teresa Carey was a sea captain for years, and while she still owns a related business, she decided eventually to make a shift. She talked to other people about their careers and became a science journalist. One of the most frustrating challenges for career changers is getting new employers to…
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What it Looks Like When You're Ready for a Career Change
How do you know if you're ready to take the plunge and pursue a career change when there is, in fact, no such thing as being 100% ready? Those who pull it off have a few things in common in how they approach it. If these resonate with you, you might be more ready than you think. And if you're not...
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"Let's Just See if I Can Do It", With Natalie Wong
Natalie Wong quit her job as a software engineer when her health started to suffer. After being a stay at home mother for many years, she thought, "Let's see if I can start my own business." And so she did. At Pepsoap she makes natural soap by hand. She created the business out of a drive to just...
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The One Question to Ask
Sometimes, there's nothing left to think about, talk about, or analyze. When we're stuck, it can come down to this one question.
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Treating Life Like a Staircase, With La Toya States
When she got out of the Air Force, La Toya States went through a divorce and period of homelessness while she tried to find her way. She's a writer and a poet at heart, and today she's a writer and editor at the Marine Corps with creative endeavors on the side while she pursues her doctorate. La...
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When You're Struggling to Find Passion and Purpose
As people start to demand more from their careers, a lot of us are searching for passion and purpose which are, for most people, frustratingly elusive. I don't think they're bad things to want, but we sometimes need to shift how we think of them. If you're struggling to find passion and purpose,...
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Maybe It Doesn't Have to Be So Difficult, With Georgia Barnett
Georgia Barnett pursued her plan to become a biotech researcher, only to find she didn't like it. During her time off to figure things out, she mostly went in circles, trying to find a new path in science so that her previous efforts wouldn't be wasted. She says it all felt so hard because she…
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The Pattern that Runs Your Life
Our thoughts, emotions, actions, and results are more closely connected than we often realize. When we see how they fit together, it's clear how much of life starts in our minds and how much can change if we take charge of our thoughts. This episode follows the recent one on cognitive distortions...
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Shedding the Shoulds, With Jing Jin
Jing Jin was a computer scientist at Apple who had the itch to explore the world of startups. She started - and let go of - her own company, and is now at another startup. She talks about the identify shifts that come with pushing ourselves to try new things, dropping the "shoulds" that keep so...
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Thoughts Are Not Facts
Career change or starting a business are not easy, but the human mind makes things harder by filling our thoughts with cognitive distortions. Just because we think something doesn't make it true, and we don't question enough what we're thinking. So today I'm showing how common thoughts most…
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Believe You Can Learn, with Mel Butcher
Engineering is not usually a field thought of as a second career chapter, right? Mel Butcher went back to school to become an engineer after earning her first degree in language and working in government. Imposter syndrome and misogynistic views of women in STEM were some of the hurdles she...
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New Year, New Possibilities
The new year - especially this one - is a time of reflection and looking back at where we've come from and where we're going. Here are some thoughts on being mindful of where you put your attention, and focusing on your excitement about future possibilities.
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Say Yes to Everything, With Nicole Papaioannou Lugara
Sometimes the path unfolds through a series of saying "yes" without always knowing where it will lead. Nicole Papaioannou Lugara was working as an adjunct English instructor when she took a new job as an instructional designer. Now she's a freelancer - something she thought she'd never do - with…
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An Inside Look at Social Entrepreneurship, with Rachel Kois
Rachel Kois is the founder of SimpleSwitch.org, an online store selling products from companies making a positive social or environmental impact. In our chat Rachel shares the ups and downs of getting a social impact business going in 2020, suggestions for getting a mentor, and a reminder that...
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3 Things Keeping You From Admitting What You Want
If you feel like you're on the cusp of making a decision about your next professional direction, but still not...quite...there...you might be in the group of people who actually do know what they want but have a hard time admitting it. Three sneaky things might be going on. This is the third part...
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Winning is in the Doing, with Zee Cohen-Sanchez
How would it feel to work your tail off, only to find that in the end...it still wasn't enough? As a political fundraiser for female candidates, Zee Cohen-Sanchez has worked on headline-big congressional wins. She has also redefined failure - even when the outcome isn't what we'd hoped for…
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Clarity for Multipassionates with Too Many Ideas
Being a multipassionate person feels like a blessing and a curse, right!? It's great to see lots of possibilities for yourself, but it can also be frustrating to make a decision when you're spinning in circles, wanting to do everything and finding it hard to choose. Everything seems like an…
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Aligning Business, Passion, and Impact, with Virginia Mendez
For Virginia Mendez, what started as a side project to write a children's book, while working in corporate, led to starting TheFeministShop.com, an e-comm business based on her passion for feminism. She shares how the idea has grown into something bigger than she would have predicted at the…
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When You Have No Idea What You Want
For many people, career changes start in a place where you know you want something different, but you have no idea what it is. It's a hard place to be (been there!) and we want to get out of there quickly. But resisting it makes it worse, so here are some ideas for how to approach it without...
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Making Intuitive Decisions, with Wendy Leung
Wendy Leung went from graphic designer to project manager to now acupuncturist and holistic health practitioner. She shares how following her intuition helped her recognize the right path when she was searching for something new, and guidance for how to reconnect with our intuition when we feel...
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There's No Such Thing as "Ready"
So often, we're waiting until we feel more "ready" to pursue our career change goals. Sometimes that does make sense, but very often it's a sneaky way of protecting ourselves from moving forward in spite of fear and uncertainty. Life hardly ever hands us a "right time." You've just got to do the...
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Self Care is Part of Career Change
We tend to think of self-care as separate from the steps we need to take to start a business or change careers. Wellness entrepreneur Amanda Lee shows us how self-care is actually an integral part of it. On this episode we chat about how the two fit together, and how to get started without our...
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Fear & Desire Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
On the one hand, we feel excited about starting a new chapter. On the other hand, we're scared witless to go after it. Fear and excitement are two sides of the same coin, and one of them is going to win. But the good news is that you don't need to be fearless.
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Coming Back to Yourself, with Kaylie Simmone
Kaylie Simmone knows how to reinvent. She closed her first business to start her second, and even though that second one was wildly successful she reinvented again. She describes how this new chapter was like coming home to herself, but only after a long time of feeling "in between" and not…
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What it Means to Feel Stuck
We all know that feeling of being stuck, but sometimes find it hard to articulate what's really going on. Here's one way of looking at what it can mean to be stuck and how to sort through it.
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Creating Your Own Career Path, with Jackelyn Dacanay
Jackelyn Dacanay is a digital marketing and branding consultant and the founder of The Art of Fate. She has carved her path every step of the way. She shares how her freelance career came about through creating opportunities, as well as how she iterated her way to finding the right business model...
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Starting With Your "Why"
Knowing what drives you and having a clear "why" for what you're pursuing will help you get started and persevere.
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Focus on the Process, Not the Emotion - with Nagina Abdullah
Nagina Abdullah is a powerhouse who started her business on the side. She chats about her early days, including the steps she took, ways she needed to push herself, how she approached learning how to start a business, changes she had to make, and what kept her going.
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You Can Change Your Mind and Quit
We want a change, we want to quit, but we also feel overwhelmed or scared by them at the same time. Let's chat about how to look at these in a new light and how to manage the conflicting feelings we have about them that make us hesitate to leave a situation that isn't working and pursue what we...
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A Trauma-born Calling and Rediscovering Our Buried Selves, With Janine Wirth
Janine Wirth shares how she came to the decision to change paths after a successful sales career. She talks about how to identify what we want and how to know who we are when the little everyday traumas we all experience have blocked us from clarity.
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Finding Clarity Through Design Thinking
Most of us are trying to find clarity about what business or path to pursue by thinking it over endlessly (which is normal!) but it usually lands us in analysis paralysis. Here's a quick intro to using a Design Thinking approach to getting clarity.
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Shifting Identities from Corporate to Creatively Self Employed, With Rachael McBay
Rachael McBay and her family were on track to live the life they had been striving for, when unexpected events took her on a new path and eventually to starting her own web design business. Rachael shares about the major identity shift that came with transitioning from her corporate career to...
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4 Myths About Finding Your Passion and Purpose
We all want to know what are passions and purpose are, but it can all feel pretty elusive for many people. It might be that we need to think about it differently. In this episode I cover the 4 myths I see most often that keep us stuck, and the truths about it that will take the pressure off.
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Letting Go of Control to Discover Your New Chapter, with Sarah Yasukochi
On this episode we’re chatting with Sarah Yasukochi, who went from a marketing career in big corporate to starting two businesses. She shares about letting go of control to discover her next chapter at 40, and the roles of self-trust and trusting in the process.
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A New Paradigm: Creating Your Path
As more of us seek meaning and fulfillment in our work lives, we are trying to "find" our passion, our purpose, our callings. But what if the "finding" approach is tying us into existential knots because we're treating our purpose like a needle in a haystack? It's time for a new paradigm. It's…
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Ep. 0: Intro
Welcome to Curate the Future! In this quick intro, Sumayya shares the 3 things that helped her go from stuck to professionally happy, and how that has all become the basis of her coaching work today and for this podcast. After years of trying to "find" her passion and purpose, like so many…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Curate the Future is for multi-passionate high achievers to get clarity on your dreams, get unstuck, and design and launch your new career or business. If you're a purpose-driven, creative soul ready to reinvent, but need to push past perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and self-doubt, this is for you.I'm Sumayya Essack, an educator and coach who helps creative, high achieving women to design their career changes and businesses and get the confidence and strategy to launch. I'll share the paradigm shifts, actions, frameworks, and tools to forge your path and tackle the mindset blocks so you can start your fulfilling new chapter.In addition to solo episodes, I interview women who have made their own reinventions and started businesses, to give listeners an intimate and real-world view at navigating the journey.
HOSTED BY
Sumayya Essack
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Curate the Future have?
Curate the Future currently has 48 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Curate the Future about?
Curate the Future is for multi-passionate high achievers to get clarity on your dreams, get unstuck, and design and launch your new career or business. If you're a purpose-driven, creative soul ready to reinvent, but need to push past perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and self-doubt, this is for...
How often does Curate the Future release new episodes?
Curate the Future has 48 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Curate the Future?
You can listen to Curate the Future on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Curate the Future?
Curate the Future is created and hosted by Sumayya Essack.
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