Welcome to the Life, then Business podcast with Brianna Siobhan. In this introductory episode, I share the origin story of this podcast, why I tossed out the podcasting playbook in favor of a grand experiment, and what to expect. (I'll give you a hint... it could be anything, even a bit of the unexpected.)
Welcome to the Life, then Business podcast with Brianna Siobhan. In this introductory episode, I share the origin story of this podcast, why I tossed out the podcasting playbook in favor of a grand experiment, and what to expect. (I'll give you a hint... it could be anything, even a bit of the unexpected.)
Hi, my name is Brianna Siobhan . Well, actually, Brianna Siobhan Q Murphy, it's a mouthful. Brianna is my first b my middle name and I use both of them. Some people know me as Brianna, some people know me Siobhan , and there are a select few who even call me Brianna Siobhan . Now I've used the different names in different contexts in my life and I decided, since this podcast is a little bit about everything in all different areas of my life, I would just use them both. So here I am introducing myself. My name is Brianna Siobhan .
Brianna Siobhan:I'm going to tell you the story of how this podcast came to be. Over the last couple of years, people have been telling me I should start a podcast. It mostly came up in the context of business. I've been a business owner for over 20 years. I work with a lot of business owners. Most of my clients are small business owners and I mastermind with many other business owners as well. So it came up mostly in the context of business. People telling me I should start a podcast about how to be successful in business, about how to set goals and achieve them, how to manage business finances, about business taxes because I'm a tax strategist and so forth. But then it started coming up in other areas too. I would be talking with another mom of a boy and we'd be talking about how much I love being a mom of a boy and how much I've learned in being a boy mom and how I feel like it's such an important honor and responsibility to be a boy mom. And, lo and behold, we came up in this conversation. She's like you know, you should start a podcast. You should talk about parenting.
Brianna Siobhan:It came up in the context of marriage. Talking about marriage, I was talking with some friends not long ago about my marriage, or 20 years in and going stronger than ever. She's like you know, you just started a podcast Talk about how to make a successful marriage, and it kept coming up. It came up in conversations about having more pleasure and joy in life, about designing my life to be what I want. It came up in talking about manifesting and bringing magic into life and so forth and so on. It came up in so many different contexts.
Brianna Siobhan:I thought, okay, maybe I should start a podcast. There's just one problem I had never actually listened to a podcast. I wasn't even really sure what it was, to be frank, and at this point I think I've listened to maybe two podcast episodes in my life all in the last three months or so, so I actually know very little about the world of podcasting. So when I decided, okay, I'm going to do this, I started researching. And I started researching, like, what makes the most successful podcasts? And I read about how it's important to pick a niche and it's important to clarify who your avatar is, who you're speaking to and what the purpose of your podcast is and what business it's attached to, what offer you're driving people to, how to monetize your podcast and how it's important to be consistent in your podcast. Consistent in the format, like is this a podcast where you talk? Is this a podcast where you interview people, and so forth. I talked about being consistent in how frequently you publish. Do you publish once a week? Do you publish once a month? Do you publish twice a month, and so forth and so on.
Brianna Siobhan:And the more I read and learned about the world of podcasting, the more stuck I became when they told me to pick a niche. It felt too limiting, it felt boring. I thought, of course, the niche I should start in a small business. That's what I've been doing in my career for so long. It's something I know inside and out, I'm so good at it just felt boring. I'm already doing that every day in my business. Why would I wanna do more of that on my own time in a podcast? No, thank you.
Brianna Siobhan:Then I started thinking about well, okay, I'll come back to the topic, let's figure out the rest of it. What's the cadence, what's the consistency? And again I thought I just felt limited, like no, I don't wanna commit to doing once a week. There may be weeks when I've got three different things I wanna talk about and I'm gonna do three episodes. There may be a month when I'm gone backpacking all month and I'm not gonna do any. My life varies a lot, and so I felt too confined by that. So I kept getting stuck. I kept getting stuck in what should the topic be? What should the format be? What's my niche? How do I connect it to a business? How do I monetize it? On and on and on, analysis, paralysis. For two years.
Brianna Siobhan:Then, a couple of weeks ago, I had this thought what if I throw all the rules out the window? What if I ignore everything I've read? What if it doesn't matter that I don't know anything about podcasting Because I've never listened to any podcasts. What if I talk about whatever's on my mind that day that I'm in the mood for that? I've been moved to talk about that? I heard myself saying to someone else and it strikes me gosh, this would be a great podcast episode. So I sit down and record it. What if I talk about whatever that topic is, for whatever length I'm inspired to speak? What if I talk about these topics with no strategy, no intended outcome, no monetization, no expectations, nothing to sell, just completely wide open? What if I just create a platform to share my thinking on all of the different topics that come up in my life, because I think it might be valuable? Some other folks out there? And when I had that thought, I felt freedom. I could feel the expansiveness, I could feel the freedom of it and it sounded like fun and I thought that I wanna do that. That sounds like fun. So that's what this is. It's a grand experiment.
Brianna Siobhan:I know nothing about podcasting. I have no expectations of what will happen with this. I am giving myself complete freedom in topics, in form, in cadence, in technology. Frankly, I know nothing about technology so I apologize if my sound quality is horrible, if it changes from episode to episode because I'm using a different mic or I'm a different environment. I know nothing about editing, so I plan to have fun, I plan to share my thinking and my hope is that it's valuable to others and ultimately we'll see what happens. So that's my story and that's what birthed this podcast and what it is for me, and my hope is that there's some value here for you. I don't know what that might be, but I get a lot of feedback that my thinking is valuable for other people and that I should share it on a bigger platform. So here I am. So what do I bring to the table? Who am I anyway? So I'll share a little bit about what my experience is and what I think of as my intellectual property really my thinking and how my thinking might be unique. So my experience I have been an entrepreneur for over 20 years.
Brianna Siobhan:Experience not so successful, most of the time pretty successful. I had a marketing and sales business. I did online marketing and telephone sales. I did affiliate marketing and online sales. I trained people in that business as well. I've had a CPA firm for the last 14 years and worked with small business owners and investors, particularly real estate investors, help them with their tax strategy so they're paying the minimum legal and ethical amount of tax, keeping that money that they're earning, and they can invest it in alignment with their goals and values and build their wealth plan. I manage people in my business and have gone through a lot of different rounds of reinventing how I do business.
Brianna Siobhan:I have a 20-year successful marriage. I've been married for 20 years In fact, this year was our 20th anniversary and I feel like we're going stronger than ever. I certainly have a really deep sense of love, loving and being loved and knowing that they've got my back and I've got theirs. I'm a mom to almost 17-year-old son. He'll be 17 in just a matter of weeks, at least from my perspective. He still actually likes to hang out with me. Sometimes he's my sound editor If that part gets edited out, although it's not true but we do spend time together. We like to go backpacking together, travel, have adventures. I think he's a pretty phenomenal human. Although I think he was born with 99% of that, I think I did contribute at least 1% in parenting. I have some thoughts about parenting.
Brianna Siobhan:I've spent over 10 years facilitating personal development workshops. Right along with that, I have heavily invested in my own personal development and I'm absolutely a lifelong learner. Those are some of the areas of my life that I have experience in and I bring to the table when I share my thinking about different topics, my thinking when I think of, as my intellectual property. We all have thinking. Everybody has their own perspective. The more we develop ourselves as humans, I think, the more value that thinking has in being shared with others. I've been getting this feedback for a while now of like you should start a podcast. That's coming from people hearing my thinking going. That's valuable and other people need to hear that too. I thought about it a little bit and I thought okay, what's unique about my thinking that might be different from how other people think or share their thinking?
Brianna Siobhan:One of the things I realized is I do really deep and thorough thinking on topics. When I have experience in a topic, when a topic comes up in my life, I don't just figure out the surface level solutions and move on. I really do a deep dive into understanding it really thoroughly from a lot of different angles. That really enriches my thinking about those topics. So when I had challenges in parenting when my guy was a very little guy, I really did a lot of in-depth thinking about parenting and I can see how that's affected myself and him and our relationship. Over the last 17 years I've done really deep thinking about shame and guilt, about pleasure and joy, about marriage, about manifesting so lots of different topics that have come up in my life. If it's been a part of my life, I've generally given it some pretty deep thought and I have clear thinking that's been useful to me that I can also share with you.
Brianna Siobhan:I also have a very strong and pretty unique ability to listen and actually hear and understand what people are talking about, what's going on for them, including like listening between the lines. You know you can read between the lines. I listen between the lines when I listen to people and as a result, I have an uncanny ability to summarize and reflect back to people what they're experiencing and what they're saying in a way that creates more clarity for them. So in the long run of this podcast, I do envision and I've had a few people mention to me you really should do Q&A podcasts, like have people bring questions and answer them, because you have this ability of really understanding what they're asking and what they need and then bringing your really deep, thorough thinking to providing them some ideas of how to approach it. So maybe we'll do that.
Brianna Siobhan:I'm also incredibly optimistic. Now. I do live in reality, like I know the realities of life and I've lived through some really hard ones, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm optimistic. I really believe in humans and I believe in love and manifestation and joy and expansion and capacity for all of those things, and so I'm absolutely an optimist. I'm also an incredibly powerful manifestor. I believe in magic. I'm very analytical. I'm a CPA and I analyze numbers all the time, every day in my business, and I can crunch numbers like the best of them. Excel spreadsheets make me grin, and, in addition to be analytical, I also believe in magic and I am a powerful manifestor and have a lot of thoughts about how to do that effectively, and I look forward to sharing some of those.
Brianna Siobhan:And ultimately, I see my purpose on this planet is to empower other people to create more of what they want in their lives, and so that underlines all of my thinking and why I'm here and what I do, so that gives you maybe a little snapshot of who I am, what my experience is and how I do some of my thinking and I'll be bringing all of that to all the topics that we talk about here. If you find that you like what you're hearing and you do find value, then please subscribe to this podcast. I hear that's a thing. I don't actually know how to do that, but since you're listening to a podcast, you probably do. You probably know about more about podcasting than I do, so I hope you find value. I hope you subscribe and keep listening, and we'll see what happens with this grand experiment. So thanks for joining me.