Episode 11 – Kathryn Morland [Adventure Racer]

Today we are chatting with Adventure Racer, Kathryn Morland, who competed in the recent World’s Toughest Race which was featured on Amazon Prime video.

Worlds Toughest Race Trailer

I met Kathryn through the local running group. I have the watched her journey from being a local runner and then watched her move through to orienteering, mountain biking and then adventure racing.

She found her love for adventure and the outdoors by accident and then continued to push the boundaries of what her mind and body could do.

Team Kathryn

By day she runs her Town Planning business and in her free time, she focuses on anything to do with the outdoors. After I found out that she was doing the race, I waited intently to watch it on Amazon.

The race itself was based in Fiji and it is a 670km plus event where 50 odd teams of 4 race against each other against the clock.  There is open water paddling, stand up paddle boarding, mountain bikes, thunderstorms, cliffs,  waterfalls and plenty of mud. Throw that in the mix with checkpoints to reach, time deadlines to meet and then getting along with your teammates and you get a recipe for a TV show.

The Mexicans & The Aussie

Kathryn shares her experiences on how she got to be a competitor in the race. She also shares with me some intimate details of where she has come from. She touches on some of her past and how far she has come. Very few people would know her story and more of this information can be unpacked, but the message is a positive one. She is one amazing lady. She is testament to the fact  that when you set your mind to something that is worthwhile, it can be done.  She has had many challenges in her life and at different points in it, the end result could well have been very different.

Her message is one of hope and positivity. She made a decision to change her life and started off with small steps. This is her message. Change doesn’t need to be big. It just needs a decision and then the small steps that come from it will create the change. Once small steps have been achieved these leads to bigger ones.

We love her story and we love the way she leads her life. Now what does all this have to do with living a digital life you may ask? Well, the reason the show exists is because it is a streaming series on Amazon.

And the reason I knew Kathryn was competing was because of social media

And now, she gets to share her story on a Podcast.

Until Episode 12,  Live Work Digital….Peace.

Luki

It’s time to Adult again!

It has come to the time that I need to start to become an Adult again. Well it has been a month since I have finished my last assignment and closing my University degree which I started 3 years ago. It really hasn’t hit me that I was able to finish it within the 3 years since I set my goal to study. As a major bucket list item, I spent a lot of mental energy in getting it done through the past few years. During my travels I have managed to complete it whilst at the same time living the Uber experience as a driver. I have spent the past few weeks unfocused on many things.

https://unsplash.com/s/photos/graduation

During 2020, I spent a lot of mental energy on focused on the small things and like everyone, just tried to get through every single day as best I could. In reality, this has been my life the past 10 years, so in many ways it has been not much difference in that respect. Every day my energy  is spent on getting through another day. For 10 years I have fought so hard to get through every day and build my life from scratch again. Throughout all of this, I have seen my kids grow up to be young men. I am very proud of them and I have a sense of optimism for them, despite everything that has gone on.

Looking back at the back end of the year, the second major lockdown of Melbourne really took it out of me. My last couple of subjects took some doing as I struggled to focus on the assignments and keep up with the required tasks. Somehow I got through it and I will now graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Digital and Social Media  from Curtin University. What a mind blast! It still hasn’t hit home yet. Once I attend the ceremony and walk on the stage to get that piece of paper, it will only become real then. It is of course easier for me to get the document delivered to me, but I want the whole Shebang graduation experience. With Co-Vid and all things that are surrounding it there are no defined dates for this to happen soon. There is also the logistical hurdle being in Melbourne and getting to Perth to attend it. I have however registered for my graduation to happen in Singapore as they have a campus there, so this suits me fine. Of course, the date is yet to be confirmed also.  I have waited 30 years for this, and I will do it in style.

https://pixabay.com/photos/legs-street-alone-challenge-loner-1031653/

What some people don’t realise is that my wife actually lives in Singapore, and we have not been together since early March when I surprised her for her birthday with a quick visit. I got back as the world was crashing around us and Australia went into lockdown after the Formula 1 Grand Prix.  It sure hasn’t been easy on both of us.  I have survived daily by not focusing too much on it for too long and now I have finished my studying, I have had some extra time to reflect on the situation. She has endured so much through the year being isolated from me and her family in Indonesia. I have my kids here so to a certain extent; and this has helped me get through it so far, but I feel guilty for still being here in Australia whist she is there on her own.  

There is a constant feeling of fear in my mind and I haven’t quite pinpointed the reason for it. Maybe it is a combination of many things. I am not so much scared for my kids as I am of what lays ahead for me in the future. I have been living through a sense of failure now for nearly a decade now. So much so that surviving each day was no different to any other day since I went through my divorce.

I have had so much to do with my kids and no matter how I look at it, I have had this sense of fear that I have failed them. Every time I dwell on it, it upsets me. I know this is not the case, but my failings are my own and this impacts on my point of view. This Christmas has been a tough one as I am normally with my wife travelling in Australia or elsewhere. I have spent a lot of time just being with myself and trying to chill. I have also been driving more on the roads again as the city has come out of lockdown. This has kept me busy and things are nearly back to normal on that front, but I am finding it more fatiguing than I remembered it to be. My future however does belong  in the digital space.  My instinct and intuition are that I will continue with this blog and podcast as I move forward. I also have been working on an e-commerce project the past 6 months and am working through the testing and soft launch phase of this. I haven’t spent as much time on this as I should have in recent weeks, but I am guided by my energy levels at the moment. Part of the getting back on the horse is writing this blogpost and getting the momentum back in my goals for the next 12 months.

E-Commerce – Its a thing. Are you in or out?
https://barssupplements.com/

So here I am. I still have lots to share and write about, but it is a start. I have some podcast episodes to launch in the coming week or so and I need to get the feelers out on the job market (maybe). The cynical me is thinking about who would want to hire a 51-year-old graduate. I am now at the point where my previous work experience maybe doesn’t get me in the door to similar roles. Having said that, I don’t actually want to do the roles I used to do. It defeats the purpose of doing my degree and forging a career in the digital world. My instincts continue to tell me that this is my path and I need to make sure I continue down it. There is a business side and a creative side of me that is ready to show to the world and it is time to come in from the long run.

Stay tuned world – Live Work Digital

Luki

Episode 7 – Elliot Jaffe [Writer]

Hi all. Welcome to episode 7. For this episode we feature Elliot, a young University graduate who is finding his place in the world after graduating from his Bachelor of International Business Degree from the University of Auckland. On a chance conversation with a random rider in the car through lockdown, I met Chelsea. We got to talking and she mentioned her partner was working with blogs.  Through this connection, I connected with Elliot and this is how we ended up talking about his experiences in this new digital age and how he navigated to this point in his life.

After completing his degree in 2016, Elliot continued on and also completed his Masters with honours. The world was at his feet and it would seem that he had it all planned out. As many young people do in this age, he decided to take a bit of a break to travel. After a stint in England playing a bit of cricket and a detour to Japan, he decided to settle in and plan out what the next move to be.

The plan was not to necessarily move to Australia, but Chelsea managed to get a job at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and their destiny was set in motion. Elliot managed to get a couple of Sales roles and it would seem that this was to be his future path. Deep down however he knew that this was not the path he really wanted. In fact, he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with himself.

Like many others, when the country went into lockdown, he suddenly found that the work dried up and was suddenly out of work. He then made a decision that the sales area was not something he wanted to go into and accidentally fell into writing. 

He decided to develop a blog to document the stories of small business owners living through the pandemic. He wasn’t sure how to go about it in the beginning. He just did his research and made a start. He learnt how to build a website, utilise Zoom and then also taught himself how to touch type to transcribe the interviews he does.

He also didn’t have much of a network, but he just went to work contacting small business owners randomly to see if they wanted to get involved in his project. Some said no, but most were open to a conversation and he went on from there. His Sales experience started to kick in and he just went to work connecting, chatting and then interviewing. Check out his work with our very own Lisa Listama of the Live Work Digital fame!

Small Business World Blog

His story is one of positivity. His blog continues to grow  with the stories of hope and determination from business owners doing it tough. The message is clear,  local small businesses are struggling but they continue to fight and remain hopeful for the future.

He made a decision to follow another path and in the middle of it he found his passion. We love the fact that he is able to connect with random business owners who want to share their journeys.

What is clear is that no matter what stage of life or career you are at, the opportunity is there for anyone to be able to change course. Elliot is an amazing example for this generation of new leaders connecting and building relationships through this digital age we live in. There is still some uncertainty for the immediate future, but what is clear is that we can all find despair in these tough times, but we can also find hope and optimism as well.

We wish him well for his journey ahead.

From us, until next time….Auf Widersehen [Live, Work, Digital]

Episode 5 – Trish Martin [Digital Marketing Guru]

In this week’s instalment of Live Work Digital Podcast we are chatting to Trish Martin from Chromatical. She is a Marketing Guru. Trish is a a colourful, vintage clothed, bright and bubbly soul that knows all about digital marketing.

Her vast experience in the marketing world should render her about 85 years old but she is so young and is just about to expect her first child!

I (Lisa) approached Trish to jump on our podcast for a number of reasons:

1. She knows her digital marketing shiz and us business owners/entrepreneurs/digital nomads NEED to know how to market to our vast audience.
2. I am in her Chromatical Club (listen for details) and have experienced first hand the value and knowledge she gives to us members. The ideas can be so small and so big that they will launch your business into the stratosphere.
3. I think she is a top lady and genuinely wants to help people.

I don’t know about you, but I’m baffled by social media marketing. Like, why does it matter if I have a nice Instagram feed? Why do some businesses post a lot and some not at all? How often is TOO often to post? What should I even post about?

SO MANY QUESTIONS

Trish covers all of these questions AND MORE in the podcast.

So get your fave cup of tea/coffee or wine (hello!) and get that pen and paper handy! You are going to want to write her tips and tricks down.

LISTEN NOW!

Don’t forget to jump on Trish’s social here and get ready to smile because her feed is a DELIGHT!

Trish Martin, Digital Marketing Guru

Let us know what you learned from the podcast!

Enjoy,

Lisa Sparkle 🙂

How Not to Make a Podcast [Journal #4]

Ok folks, it has taken a bit of time to update everyone with this post, “How not to make a podcast.” As we mentioned, this journey is all about learning and developing the concept as we go. With the actual subject completed at University that resulted in this project, Lisa and I are now focused on the next subject(s) of our respective degrees and our own personal lives.  It is now a balance to maintain and continue both the blog and the podcast. 

Lisa is going gangbusters with her E-Learning business so that is her priority. For me, I continue to drive as the country comes out of lockdown. It has become busier in some regards, but it is still a bit of treading water with Taxi drivers back on the road and more ride share drivers as well. Along with this, I am also working out my next move as I need to start thinking about what happens next after I complete the degree in November.

As much as we have slowed up a bit and reflect on our progress, it was also time to take stock of where to go with Live Work Digital.

These are the sort of things we are now assessing at this point of the journey:

• Should we upgrade our WordPress blog site from the free version?
• What is working with our Instagram?
• What is the impact of LinkedIn?
• Do we need to change our feel or branding? 
• Do we need to focus on branding at all?
• How do we promote our podcast further?
• Do we need to continue to reach out to people to get more content?

Currently we are about to launch our 5th episode and still have 2 more in the wings ready to be edited and already have another 2 or 3 potential as well which essentially covers our initial target of having a 10 episode season.

There is also the opportunity for Lisa and myself to use this platform also for our own businesses and opportunity by recording specific content that we could release. This is something that we have kept in mind throughout the journey.

As we move forward with our episodes, we will continue to find our brand and share our experiences. Our focus has been on ensuring the episodes continue on and we are organised with that area.

The purpose of the blog and the posts are to ensure that we are building our SEO presence and we continue to learn more about this area of digital marketing. Testing our presence through my personal browsers and the words Live Work and Digital, we seem to have a reasonable online presence,  especially when the search is on the words with no spaces. (liveworkdigital)

Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Our images that are tagged on social media appear regularly on searches. This is because we have made the effort to ensure our images are embedded with information through the Alt Text html coding sequence. (Which we learnt from Jason Borg, our SEO Guru)

Presumably the hashtags we use are also having an impact on search results. This is also another area which requires a bit of focus. We are continuing to play around with this aspect of SEO on Instagram and LinkedIn specifically. 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Also on search results for Live Work Digital, our videos on YouTube  appear. Yes, we have a Live Work Digital YouTube Channel. It’s not a big focus, but it is there. We thought that in the long term it will obviously build our ongoing presence. More to come on that one at a later date.

The whole SEO thing has got me thinking as I have been focused on the Key Words as a starting point. The question I ask myself currently is:

• Who would search for us?
• What questions would be put to Google that would lead people to us?
• What is the more important? The Blog or the Podcast?

As an extension on using Key Words in our blog posts (Which we do sparingly and try not to overdo it!) we want to focus on short statements at the beginning and at the end of the posts which relate to the Blog Post Heading. This is something I learnt on a podcast recently so hopefully this will add to our searchability. Which makes sense as these statements are potentially matching the questions that people potentially be entering on their Google Search for answers. For example, “How not to make a Podcast!”

We want our blog to be a portal of information to the concept of “Living and Working in the Digital World.”  We want to inspire people through our podcasts by listening too and having conversations with ordinary people that are living it and doing it. Maybe we can educate people along the way and encourage them to open doors.

Anyway, My next step is now to check out and analyse how our website ranks on Google and there are some free tools that we can use. I purposefully haven’t looked at these up until this point because I want to see what impact the website has based on the things we have done on the blog. (With no clear knowledge or direction apart from actioning some things that we have learnt along the way). There will of course be a whole blog topic on this area in the future.

It has got me thinking though as to how our domain name impacts on the whole thing. This is the domain name that we started with:

https://liveworkdigital.wordpress.com/

We then captured the domain liveworkdigital.com. At the moment, people can find us on here, but they will be directed to the WordPress domain name. We had to upgrade the site from the free version to the next level so that we were able to map the domain name to WordPress. 

Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

So I hope to update everyone next time on what impact this has on SEO rankings of the site.  I purchased the domain name from a separate provider not attached to WordPress. My guess is that we may need to transfer the name but who knows!

We are just making this whole thing up as we go along right?!

Then there is the question as to how we promote the Podcast! But you will all need to read the next blog post to find out our progress there. As you follow and watch us, you will inevitably see the subtle changes in what we are creating.

Until next time,

Live Work Digital……..Luki

 

Special Episode [The Story So Far]

Hi all! Yes we are only a few episodes into this journey and we are doing a special edition episode?

It’s ok, we aren’t getting ahead of ourselves. We are doing this for a few reasons:

• We thought it would be fun to share how much we are having with it and also showing you the warmth and the openness that our interviewees have been. They are all very kind with their time and have so much passion with what they are doing or creating around them.
• Secondly, we wanted to enter the Rode Cast Podcast Competition.  We can win some really cool equipment! In the process we wanted to do a mashup anyway so people can see the fun we are having with it. We also wanted to see that we are just ordinary people doing something pretty fun, mistakes and all.
• Thirdly, did I mention the competition?
• Lastly, as part of our evolution of learning new skills, putting it together and editing the content so it would flow was invaluable.  A sprinkle of everyones voice, leave in some umms and aaahs and add in some extra cringe worthy laughing clips in between the bits takes some doing.

The competition is due to close and up to this point we were about to drop Episode 4. We snuck this one in so we can get the episode locked in and submitted.

With everything going on, we currently have a bit of a backlog, but thats ok as we are fitting it all in around our normal day to day. At this moment in time there are currently 2 more episodes  to edit and write blog posts for.

We also have more people already locked in for interviews. I think we have got a pretty broad cross section of people for our whole season so far. The thing that has been  the constant for everyone is that they all had to navigate their way through the recent epidemic. No matter what industry they are in, it has been affected and they have had to shape their way through it and out of it.

Going through the  raw recordings also jogged the memory banks as to the things we learnt and even showed how we have progressed n the short time we have been doing this. A little more refined each time and the quality of the questions also are bringing some good responses and conversations.

Some of you may ask also who the dog is on our promo pic! Well since Toulouse, our CEO is a little media shy, we have used a Stunt Double for all our associated Memes, Instagram posts and story’s. If you have noticed, we also have used some of his four legged fan pups through our brand building evolution as well. We share the love with pictures of all sorts of dogs. Well mainly Frenchies as he is our CEO after all. Plus he is our boss. (Hmmm maybe we need a profile page for him?)

Anyway, slightly off topic I know, but as we said, we are sharing everything we are doing along the way.   Seriously, the podcast thing is just a cool thing to do. When I originally suggested we do one with Lisa she didn’t hesitate and said yeah that could be awesome. From there, we just kept on going with it. This Special Episode  is indeed a really happy and fun episode to showcase our journey to date.

Live Work Digital to you all. Til next time…….Peace!

Luki & Lisa