How I landed two Business Insider features

Some of you have asked me about this, so today I want to share how I scored my Business Insider features. It was indeed a sticky situation in that I had to combat the stickiest, most critical of stakeholders - myself.

We talk a lot about how to work with others, but often the biggest obstacle is ourselves.

So I hope this lands in your inbox at just the right time, so you are inspired to take action from it.

My Take

This year I left Amazon to start the Leadership Lab, a leadership development training and career coaching business.

Three months later I had my first Business Insider feature on career advice before you quit.

Fast forward a few more months, and I had another article on corporate communication and email best practices.

How did this happen?!

Long before I decided to leave Amazon, I did a very hard thing. I wrote my first LinkedIn post. It was about pivoting into L&D and how career paths were not linear. It took me one year to write that post.

When I made the shift into L&D, I thought I should share my story to show that it’s okay to do something different than you planned, different from what the ‘typical’ path looked like. Enter internal voices: But who would want to hear from me? Was it self-serving to share my story? I have better things to do. So I sat on the post.

Internally, people invited me to career panels. They wanted to know how I carved out this job for myself, how I knew what the next step was, the career development mechanisms people should do to stay close to what drives them. People took interest in this unconventional path.

So a year after I pivoted into L&D, I wrote the LinkedIn post. To my shock and surprise, people liked it. Like more than my network and my mom. And so I set a goal to post ‘more often’ (that is not a SMART goal). Eventually I posted every month. And people chimed in and commented and liked and all the good engagement stuff. That encouraged me to post more.

When I left Amazon, so many of my friends and coworkers were in similar boats - unsure if they wanted to stay, what to do next, if there was any greener grass. I drafted a post on the things I considered before quitting - finances, stock, benefits. Engagement was through the roof.

Then I got an email from a Business Insider writer. “We saw your post and want to interview you for an article.”

A similar thing happened for the second article. I started posting on TikTok with not very much engagement (I had never opened TikTok before I started Leadership Lab). Then I posted a video on not using “Hey” in the greeting of a work email. It went bananas - apparently people have a lot of thoughts on this (which furthers my point on why not to use “Hey”…). Someone at Business Insider saw it in their feed and contacted me.

MORAL: PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE.

Small steps build momentum. One post leads to a comment, a connection, a conversation, and suddenly, an opportunity you couldn’t have planned for.

So…press mute on those internal voices.

If you’re sitting on a draft, hit post.

If you’ve been meaning to message someone, reach out.

If you have an idea, tell someone.

Future you will thank you.