Taking Control of Your Author Career and Launch Strategies

How can you embrace the process of change in life and author business, especially in an era of AI? How can you take control of what's possible and be more comfortable with uncertainty? How can you develop a career portfolio that future proofs you in changing times? April Rinne shares her insights into how we can flux.

In the intro, KDP royalty changes and printing costs; The Pre-Launch Checklist [Draft2Digital]; Audible opens AI narration to some traditional publishers [Publishing Perspectives]; US Copyright Office Fair Use;

Plus, join me for a live webinar on The AI-Assisted Artisan Author; Signing Death Valley at BookVault; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition; Egypt with Luke Richardson on Books and Travel.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

April Rinne is a futurist, professional speaker, lawyer, and the international bestselling author of Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• The human dimension of change
• The “flux mindset” — how individuals relate to and show up for change
• Changes we choose vs. those we don't control
• Immediate changes vs. slower societal shifts
• The benefits of being proactive with change
• Uncertainty that comes with AI and technology developments
• The concept of the portfolio career — more resources from April here.

You can find April at AprilRinne.com or FluxMindset.com.

Transcript of Interview with April Rinne

Joanna: April Rinne is a futurist, professional speaker, lawyer, and the international bestselling author of Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. So welcome to the show, April.

April: Thank you so much, Jo. I'm delighted to be here.

Joanna: I'm so excited to talk about this, but first up, just—

Tell us a bit more about you and why you decided to write a book on this topic when you were already reaching so many people with your message.

April: It's quite interesting because I think a lot of people today do know me as a futurist, trained as a lawyer, business strategy, all of that. We can have that conversation around the need I was seeing in the business world around, frankly, just how bad humans are at change and uncertainty and the unknown.

Just to be clear, this predates the pandemic by a long shot. So I actually started germinating the book, I would say, in about 2014. It was like a long time in coming, and the thesis continued to grow and deepen. Obviously, when the pandemic hit, people are like, “Oh, flux. Yes, world is in flux. I don't know what to do.”

So since 2020, there's been a real zeitgeist around it, but for me, it goes much, much, much deeper and much further back in history. So one piece is, just in the business world, in the work I was doing, how fraught people's relationship with change is.

Also, my entire career has been global. So I would work in different cultures, with different kinds of organizations, in different settings. I noticed this is a very universal issue as well. It's not as though one place or one people is better at change or worse at change.

All humans are really good at some kinds of changes and really not so good at others.

So there was a cultural component. I really love getting into the cultures of change and what we can learn from one another, and the fact that everyone has something to contribute to this conversation, and everyone has something to learn. So there was that piece as well.

Then really, the real genesis—and I realize I'm getting pretty personal pretty fast, and we've just started this conversation, but I do want to kind of put it all out there. For many years, I didn't share much of my personal story, not that I didn't want to talk about it.

I was always an open book about it personally, but you have those filters between who am I professionally and who am I personally, and what parts of me do I show to what people, and all of that.

The fact is that my real interest in what do you do when you don't know what to do, and what do you do when your entire world is thrown in flux, is deeply, deeply personal.

So if I think, like, how did I get into writing a book? This goes back more than 25 years.

My first really big experience with change and uncertainty happened when I was 20, and I was at university, and I got the phone call that no one ever wants to get or expects to get, which was that both of my parents had died in a car crash.

Imagine? Like, there's my world totally flipped upside down. I was actually overseas. I was in the UK, and I got this phone call.

Everything changed and everything was uncertain. My family, my sense of self, my support system, my ideas about my career.

20 is a very interesting age. I was old enough to know how to care for myself, day to day at university and whatnot, but really had no clue what my greater connection was to the world, if you will.

So I put all of that out there because had you asked me when I was 20, would I write a book about change and uncertainty? I would have said, of course not. I just need to survive.

It wasn't something that I was conscious of at the time, but it was absolutely where this journey began and where the process to ultimately write this book, and the research I did, and the perspective I have started.

Not just what I can contribute to the book, but the kinds of people and situations and changes that I can really relate to and hold space for and guide conversations around, that part.

Yes, the business part is important, the leadership, all of that. This personal piece is really deeply important to me as well. I love the ways in which Flux can reach a range of people and a range of different situations.

Joanna: I love that, and I think this is so important. As writers, there'll be people listening who write nonfiction, and bringing this personal aspect into nonfiction is so important.

ChatGPT can write a book on change, but no one can write YOUR book on change and flux.

Then your personal experience, I mean, obviously terrible and awful situation, but you have grown from that and help people every day. I did want to ask specifically here, because the word “flux”, and you talk about, we need to learn how to flux in a world in flux, and you use it kind of as a verb as well.

Your parents, that situation that happened, that was like an immediate, you have to change, you have to adapt right now. Whereas I feel like what a lot of people feel at the moment in the world is almost like a slow train crash. These changes that we see coming and that are happening, but they're not that immediate phone call.

What are the different kinds of flux and change, and how can we learn how to flux?

April: Yes, I love this, Jo. This is wonderful.

Also, just as a big picture—not caveat, but framing—I realize that my story, I mean, it's tragic, it's a bit extreme, it's mine. I wouldn't talk about it if I didn't really welcome having conversations about it.

What I have found, and just as a little context going back to what we're talking about earlier, is that while I had that trepidation about, like, “What will people think of me if I share this? I'm supposed to be the business person,” whatever.

Guess what? So I say this for fiction and nonfiction writers, the moment I shared that story, it was like the doors blew off. People were like, that's what we want to talk about. Because, guess what? That's what affects our ability to show up at work and in business.

It's not about what do we do, it's how are we relating to this? It's fascinating, because for me, from that point forward, it's all been about the human dimension of change.

Not the change management process or framework or checklist, but like, how are we showing up for this?

So that's a really good segue to this question as well. I mean, I have to say, honestly, there are more filters on change and ways that we can parse through the different kinds of change and so forth, than even this conversation will allow for.

It gets broad and deep really fast, but let me share a couple different ways we might see change, a couple things I found extremely helpful for most people. So you are absolutely right that I hear from people pretty much every day, “I love change. It's amazing.” “I hate change. It's horrible.” You know, all of this.

I have heard from a lot of people in recent years around—you know, look at the pandemic. Look at how much we changed, look at how much we adapted and grew and what we knew.

I always have to give the caveat of, yes, because our backs were against the wall and we were forced to change. It was a global health crisis. We had no choice. Of course, we changed.

Guess what? After the immediate emergency and aftermath, did we regress in some of those habits? Did we kind of forget what we learned? You bet.

Humans are great at change or great at adaptation when it's a life or death situation.

We're not that good at opting into changes, even ones we know would be good for us, because we have this preference for stasis. We have this preference for like, well, if I'm still alive, things should be okay. I don't want to create difficulty for myself. I don't want to do the work. I don't want to make myself uncomfortable.

Yet, guess what? In times of—and I'm not going to call it peace, I'm not going to call it stasis—but as you described — 

When we can see change out on the horizon, we know things are coming, and we still have the opportunity to make a choice as to whether and how we show up for it better.

That is the best time of all to do the work that my research and Flux focuses on. The pain comes when we don't do it, and we wait for that train crash to happen, and then we're like, oh no. It's not just more painful and more fraught, but we actually have fewer choices.

So very big picture, I just kind of want to put this framing out there because it relates not just to day-to-day change. I know we'll talk a little bit about AI. It's all kinds of changes, right?

This idea that—and I realize I'm speaking in generalizations, and so I apologize for that, I'll give kind of a caveat—but just observations and patterns I see around the world, across demographics, it's not unique to one person or one place, but there is this sense that for a lot of people, if we followed the rules and did x, y and z, that the world would look in a certain way.

Whether that's with your career, whether that's technology, whether that's relationships, happiness, satisfaction, whatever.

A lot of people are waking up and looking around and saying, the world that I was raised to believe I would inhabit looks very different than the world as it is today, and I don't like that.

I'm angry about that. That's not fair.

You kind of have to have this conversation and say none of this was ever promised to us. Yes, there are all kinds of things that we were led to believe we control, that we actually don't. No single human controls, no single event controls.

Yet, at the very same time, there were a lot of things we were led to believe we don't control that we actually do.

A lot of this gets into personal agency. It gets into what are those practices and skills, and I call them superpowers, that you do have control over that can help make you better adept, more aware and more ready for the changes that come our way.

I think that's what we really need to focus on because social media has done a wonderful job of kind of outsourcing our beliefs around our responsibility for how we cope with change. It's more like, “just go install this app and it'll take care of change for you.” What? It doesn't, right?

Or, “Just go buy this thing. Watch this, and your problems will be solved.” We're really talking about doing the work and getting into it. I realize I'm going on a little bit here, but I do want to kind of drill down on one of the big ones, and maybe this is where we can pull the thread a little bit more.

Back to the whole like, what changes do we love and what changes do we hate, and how do we look at this better? One of the biggest, easiest filters you can think about is on the whole, though —

Humans tend to love or enjoy the changes we choose, the changes we opt into.

That can be a new relationship, a new role, a new book to write, a new restaurant, to try, you name it.

The changes we struggle with are the ones we don't control, the ones we didn't see coming.

Here's where it gets interesting. It doesn't mean that the changes we choose work out. I always use the example of like that haircut you got a few years ago, right? You picked it, right?

Yet we see those changes differently, and we appreciate them because we had a say in creating them. So I think that's one place we could just start. You start pulling on that.

I think we see that again with career choices. We see that with new technologies. We see that with all kinds of disruption. For people to just pay attention to like, is there a pattern in how they feel around the changes that they do and don't control?

Joanna: Yes, that's great. It's interesting, so you really mentioned there, choice and control. You also mentioned AI, so we're going to have to talk about that.

This is one of the biggest things in the author community, and I'm sure you're seeing this in the work community, the business community, is —

For most people with AI, they feel like there is no choice and there is no control. That these technologies are doing things that impinge, let's say, or feel like they're coming for something that we thought was sacred and human only.

This is difficult, right?

One of the things that I loved in the book is you say, “We can radically reshape our relationship to uncertainty,” and that you have this chapter on getting lost rather than knowing exactly what's going to happen. So maybe you could speak to that because—

We cannot necessarily choose, and we cannot control, so how do we reshape this?

April: So I love this. I'm already coming up on at least three of the eight we could talk about here. Some of it around humanity, some around technology. This question, how you framed it, is just really rich and robust. So thank you for that.

So the book, and in particular the introduction, this concept of a flux mindset that I really am trying to open a new series of conversations around how we show up for change, how we relate to change, how we obviously manage change, and what we do about it.

As I mentioned and alluded to earlier, it's less about traditional change management and like, “give me my checklist.” The implication of change management is that if something changes, I will put it into my framework, these six steps or checklists, whatever.

At the end, the implication is that the change will be quote, unquote, “managed, done, finished, we can move on.” You look around and you go, is that really how change works? Pretty much everyone today is like, no, of course not.

So we're looking at, what's the missing piece? The missing piece is this human dimension. It is this relationship to change. So acknowledging that how you show up for change, how you feel about it, how you see it, how you see what you are and aren't in control of, really matters, and we can all get better at it.

So again, back to some of the changes. There will be all kinds of changes, actually more and more and more changes. I know this will make some people listening in not so happy, but there are more changes that we don't control ahead, not fewer.

There are more sources of uncertainty, not fewer.

That's not something that anyone controls. We don't know if there's more change today than in the past. There's always been change. There's always been a lot of it. You can as far back in human history, there's always been change, but the awareness of how much is changing is off the charts.

That's not really how human brains are designed to digest all of that. So the fact is, there's going to be more and more and more things in the outside world that we can't control, we can't predict, we don't get to decide whether or not they come to pass.

The more that happens, the more we have to be aware and harness and leverage all of the ways that we do control how we respond, and what we do, and how we feel, and how we think, and who we reach out to, and all of that. All of those things are 100% in our control.

We've never needed to harness those skills more than today, and it helps kind of reshape the relative balance between those things that we do and don't control.

So AI, just as one example, what I think is really rattling people about AI—yes, obviously, in a community of authors, just the AI itself is very daunting and very threatening—but —

More fundamentally, it's the uncertainty that AI represents. It's the uncertainty of we just don't know.

There are aspects of it that could be amazing for authors.

There are aspects that could be extremely dangerous and foreboding for authors. It's all of these things at once.

So having the conversation around, what is it about AI that feels so threatening? For a lot of people, it's just the uncertainty.

So, there you have to say —

Okay, if I can't control the fact that AI exists, what can I control in terms of how I relate to it, and what I stand for, and what I do, and what I advocate for, and how I use it, or how I don't?

Those are all choices we make. So there's nothing that's a foregone conclusion here, unless we decide to do nothing.

I think that too, it's kind of this risk of complacency. It's not that that AI is going to take someone's job. It's that someone who understands how AI works and can work effectively with it might take some of what you do, kind of thing.

I do think, and the other piece to this, there's this sense of getting lost, and just really what that superpower is about is getting comfortable in that space of not knowing. The goal of getting lost isn't to stay lost forever. It's to be comfortable in that in between, in that messy middle that's neither here nor there.

We know things are changing, but we don't yet know what comes next. That the people who do that well are the ones that understand that that messy middle in that space of not knowing is actually the point of transformation.

That's where the new insights happen. That's where the new models come about. That's the place we need to be good at being, because if we just try to race through it, we never get to the new that's truly better.

So there's that piece, and then there's also—I just want to make a quick shout out to another superpower, which is “be all the more human.”

I do think, you mentioned it already, in the world of AI, where AI can write books just like that, the irony, the maybe counterintuitive, but the beauty also is that the more bombarded our lives are by technology of all kinds, the more valuable humanity, the human touch, the human script, the human authorship, the more valuable that becomes.

The more boiler plate the AI, the more distinctive, the more valuable the individual human touch.

So I just want to put that out there as well.

Joanna: Yes, and I talk about double down on being human.

At the end of the day, it's not our ability to produce thousands of words, like producing words is not the point, it's the connection with another person that is the important thing. I think that's what I try to talk about.

I want to come back to something, you were talking there about the sort of the fact that it exists, you know, that AI exists, or whatever change is going on.

I wondered, you see so many organizations and so many people who are dealing with different kinds of change, and one of the aspects I struggle with in the community are the people who just say, “Look, this will go away. We will go back to how things were. The OpenAI court case with the New York Times will be resolved, and they'll just cancel all this stuff. It will all go.”

I almost feel like this is the most concerning attitude, that we can go back. So I guess my bigger question is, can things ever go back?

How do you help organizations and individuals who are hitting this brick wall and are unable to accept change and move on?

April: Well, I'm afraid that my answer here is probably going to be on the one hand, unsurprising, and on the other hand, maybe a little dissatisfying. That is simply, you're right. Unsurprising in that things aren't going back. There's never been a point at which we just go back to some sort of stasis that was before.

The pendulum swings, for sure. So you can go from one extreme to another. We've had lots of swinging back and forth, even in recent years, on many metrics. So it's not like it goes back, but it's not like the course of change is inevitable in one direction. I think that's the way to put it.

It will zig and zag and go upwards and downwards and sideways and all of that, but it doesn't really go back.

What I do think we find are sometimes when we go in one direction to an extreme, we're like, oops, let's not forget that some of this other stuff that we used to remember is also helpful.

Silly case in point, but the more addicted, I could say, we are to apps and technology and GPS, right? Running joke of like, just because we have GPS doesn't mean you shouldn't know how to get from point A to point B, just of your own reconnaissance.

So there's this sense of, it's a wonderful tool to have, let's not forget the human element of knowing how to orient yourself. So is that going back, going forward? It's combining both. So there's a lot of the combining of both, which is you can have a change, but not forget what came before it.

That doesn't mean simply going back to what came before, it's more of a blending and an emergence, a combination that creates new realities, new futures altogether.

The piece about what do we do when we just feel like we're hitting a brick wall, I will say—and I'm sorry to not give a better answer—there are so many people, so many organizations, struggling with flux, struggling with change. Exactly what you're describing.

I am at a point in my career, in the development of Flux, where if that is a situation that I'm dealt with, there are so many people who recognize that the world is changing, that flux is a thing, and they want to lean into it and get help, that for me, what you've just described isn't a place where I invest too much of my energy these days.

It's a brick wall, and I know that ultimately they're going to have to change. Those will be the people who are more like that train wreck, that at some point down the road, are in a much greater point of pain.

What I'm looking at are so many people, so many organizations, who do understand that things are changing.

They do have the humility to recognize that they need help, that they can improve, and they want to lean in.

So, for me, that that lower hanging fruit of where there's heat and energy, and we might not have figured it all out, and we might have some rough edges that we need to work on, but we're here and we're willing to try. That's a far better place to start a conversation around flux.

I know it sounds a bit harsh, but for me, if people aren't ready to do the work, I'm not someone who can necessarily make them ready. What I do know is that everyone, in some capacity, whether it's personal, professional, organizational, societal, is going to run into that kind of change.

I don't know exactly what it is, but it's going to happen, that is that wake up call where they say I can't just keep pretending that this isn't changing, or that this isn't an issue, or that if I just do nothing, it will go away.

At some point that will come back to kind of, not haunt you, but—well, haunt you sometimes—that will come back to bite you even worse than you thought. So it pains my heart a little bit to say that, but I do have to put it out there because I've seen that pattern play out too many times.

I know where the benefit and the value of flux work can happen. I also know that if people aren't ready or open to even the idea of improving their relationship to change or that there's anything wrong with what they're currently doing, that that's the work they need to do before my work can be really that impactful.

Joanna: That's actually very helpful. More than you know!

I do want to come to another thing that you talk about, which is the idea of the portfolio career. Again, as old business models are changing, and even old ways of marketing—for example, book marketing has changed.

How can we, as authors and writers, embrace this idea of the portfolio career and protect ourselves?

April: So this one, and I love that it's authors. In my experience, there's already a more natural congruence to someone who's been just like going for climbing the career ladder. There's a different conversation.

Obviously, there are some authors that that's all they've ever done, but for most authors, in my experience, they have a broader palette that they're drawing from. They have a deep, rich, diverse, professional and personal history.

So very briefly, let me just describe the superpower itself. It's unique amongst the eight because it's the only one that focuses exclusively on kind of professional change, career change, that sort of thing. The others expand, I think, a bit further beyond.

This is really about, how do you design and own a career that is fit for a future of work in flux.

I've been working on the scene for more than 20 years, I have a portfolio career, career portfolio. We can use those terms interchangeably. Just for the record, some people like portfolio career as a tagline. Other people like this idea of a career portfolio.

We're getting at the same general gist of the shape of the career of the future. It no longer looks like a ladder you're going to climb or a path you're going to pursue in one direction, which is up.

It's something that's much more holistic, much more diverse, and much more uniquely you.

So it's interesting because I've been working on this for a while. It's not a brand new concept. It predates AI by decades, and yet what's fascinating is as AI becomes more and more present in the workplace, it's actually giving more and more fodder to this idea of the portfolio.

So what we're really getting at is, when you think about the shape of our career, historically, the metaphor of a ladder is something linear, something in one direction. Do A, then B, then C, and then somehow success is at the top or at the end. That's been really lodged in our heads.

That comes from the first industrial revolution, by the way. So it's only 250 years old. You might think that after 250 years we could use an update. Much of the workplace has moved on, but somehow we still have this metaphor of a ladder in our heads.

Yet, you look around and you go, is this ladder working? I want to be really careful to say, like the ladder metaphor, the ladder shape, there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's not bad. It works, but it works for fewer and fewer people. It's becoming a smaller and smaller piece of a much bigger pie.

The fact is, today, there has never been more ways to work, to earn income, to contribute to society, than there are now. So the ladder is just one, but like there are a jillion other ways that you can have and create a successful, rewarding career.

So the portfolio is really this new shape to accommodate these other ways of working.

I think of your portfolio as everything, absolutely everything you can do, that adds value to society.

So the point here is that it's way more than your resume, way more than your CV.

When you start looking at your career capabilities in this more holistic way—and I'll come back to that in a minute—you start to be able to connect a lot more dots, you start to be able to pursue a lot more opportunities, and you start to see your career development in a much more kind of multi-dimensional way.

Let me just share a couple examples, because when you think about what's on your resume or your CV, it's a very select, identifiable set of skills. There's a form for it, right?

What's fascinating to me is that when you think about it, and when I think about the people that I admire and who are really successful at what they do—and again, success however you want to define it—many of their most valuable skills aren't the skills I even find on their resume.

They're human capabilities. They're the things that AI can't eliminate. The fact is that your resume, your CV, only contains a fraction of who you are and what you can do. So sometimes, not even the most interesting parts.

Probably my favorite example is—and I'm guessing there will be at least a few parents that are tuning in—parenting skills. Okay, parenting skills are super skills for time management, conflict negotiation, empathy. Parenting skills help us do so much in the world, and yet we're not supposed to put them on our CV.

Like, not only that, we might get dinged for it. Why? I cannot figure that out, because the kinds of skills you learn when parenting are the kinds of skills that are invaluable in the workplace that employers miss out on completely if they don't know this about you.

So that's a really good example. It's not on a resume, but that would be at the core of your portfolio. In my case, I lost my parents young. I'm really good at holding space for grief and loss. Again, you're not going to find that on my resume, a traditional resume, but it's at the heart of my portfolio, and it fuels what I do. \

So I think authors are drawing constantly from a well of different experiences, perspectives, research, you name it.

Many authors also do more than only write. So already, as I like to say, everyone already has a portfolio. We often just don't realize it.

We haven't called it that. We haven't seen our career in that way.

When we do, it's kind of like a trap door opens up, and all of a sudden you just see this new universe of how you could pursue your career, and how you could combine those skills, and the kinds of roles you might be interested in pursuing, the kinds of things you might be interested in creating, and so on from there.

Just the final point is that, again, I've been working on career portfolios for more than 20 years, but we do find that for all of this, it's about what are the skills we need to thrive in a world in flux, and that portfolios are just naturally more inclined to be helpful and help you thrive in times of uncertainty.

If you've been on a ladder your whole life, and for whatever reason, change comes and that next rung on the ladder isn't there, it's really hard not to fall. It's really hard not to have a kind of career crisis or identity crisis.

Versus — 

A portfolio is something you create. It's something that's uniquely yours. It's something you have agency over.

So even if career change happens, you have much more agency and control over those next steps.

Joanna: That's so interesting. We're almost out of time, but just quickly on that, I have a clarifying question. So most people, when they think about portfolio careers, it's like, well, “April is an author, speaker, consultant.” You know, the words that mean other jobs. If you say something like “time management because of parenting” or “holding room for grief”—

How do we practically turn that into money coming in? Like you said, value for society?

April: So there are lots of ways, and each person is unique. What I want to do right now is tell people like, “I want you to read these two articles and listen to this interview,” because this could be an entire hour-long conversation.

Joanna: We can do that in the show notes.

[Here's April's Portfolio Career articles and other podcast episodes.]

April: Perfect, because I do want to keep this relatively brief. So there are different ways you can think about it. So if you have these skills, some people who are, I would say the more entrepreneurial end of things, where they're like, “I want to go build a business, this is what I do.”

So you think about that, whether it's time management, whether it's grief and loss, there are all kinds of needs in society where this could fit an actual service-based offering venture.

It also can affect the things you write about, and the features that you write, and the things that you want to get placed, and the things you want to get paid for, and all of the rest.

It also, though, expands if you're looking at roles within an organization for many people. Again, if you look at their resume, maybe they're qualified in marketing, or maybe they're qualified in finance and strategy.

Those things are super important, but what you will find sometimes is that when you have these skills, all of a sudden you start realizing, I would be really good at a job that probably lands more—and I'm just going to say one example—in HR. It's the human dimension. It's hiring and retaining people.

I mean, organizations across the board, I will say right now, not just with portfolios, but with flux more broadly, are realizing that many of their hiring processes are not fit for a world in flux because they're not capturing the people who are actually good at change.

They don't have a way to filter for someone's, what I call, fluxiness. Their ability at navigating change well.

So there are opportunities within organizations where you're like, I would have only thought of myself for a marketing job, but in fact, I might be really good over in this other department, this other function, because you've looked at yourself from that portfolio lens and realized you're a lot more qualified to do jobs that go beyond just your resume.

Now one important piece, and again, we'll put this in the show notes, I hear from people often that are like, “Well, great. I know I'm capable of more, but my resume still says I can only do X, Y and Z. How do I change that?”

There's an important connecting piece here, and it's what I call your portfolio narrative. So the fact is, you might know that you have all these skills. You might be able to draw your portfolio, cast it all out, all of that.

It is up to you to connect those dots, to tell your story as to what is on your portfolio that's not on your resume.

How did you come to those skills, etc.? I say this because you can't expect other people to know that about you unless you share it.

When you share it, though, you have the opportunity, the agency, to put that narrative in the light that makes sense to you. Where this comes up the most is people who have had many different jobs.

One narrative could say, “Oh, that person looks really distracted, scattered. They're not sure what they want to do. They've done these 10 different things. We're not going to hire them because they look disconnected.”

Another—same exact person—another scenario, though, is someone who looks at that person and is like, “Oh, my gosh. This is 10 people in one. This is amazing. No person typically has this much exposure or experience. We've got to hire them straight away.”

The difference between those two scenarios is that person's ability to tell their narrative, and that idea of, like, “I did this job because I thought I was going to really enjoy it. Turned out I didn't enjoy it, but it led me over here, where I learned this other skill. Then that opened this door that I didn't expect.”

So you see how that story kind of cascades and flows. I just want to put that out there because it's an important piece of the puzzle. When you tell people that they actually get to tell their own story, that usually makes people feel pretty encouraged as well.

Joanna: Brilliant.

Where can people find you and your book online?

April: So I have two websites. One is for all things me, like what do I do, and what's my story, and where do I come from, and that sort of thing. That's AprilRinne.com, so April, like the month, R-I-N-N-E.com.

Then for all things Flux, you can go to FluxMindset.com. There's all kinds of things there on the flux mindset, the superpowers.

I also do have a page there with lots and lots of other—not just podcast interviews, but I've done podcasts just on career portfolios, for example—but a lot of things that I've written. Articles, shorter reads, things like that that are also easy to share with others. So those are the two places to go.

Joanna: Well, thanks so much for your time, April. That was great.

April: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you all for being here.

The post Embracing Change: How To Flux with April Rinne first appeared on The Creative Penn.