Embracing Change: How To Flux with April Rinne

Summary

The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers
Episode: Embracing Change: How To Flux with April Rinne
Release Date: May 19, 2025

Joanna Penn, esteemed thriller author and creative entrepreneur, delves into the intricate realms of writing craft and the creative business in episode 809 of The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers. Titled "Embracing Change: How To Flux with April Rinne," this episode explores the dynamic nature of change in both personal life and the authorial journey, featuring a compelling conversation with futurist and best-selling author April Rinne.

---

1. Navigating Amazon KDP's Royalty Changes ([00:00] – [20:39])

Joanna begins the episode with a candid discussion about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)'s recent announcement regarding alterations in royalty rates and printing costs. Starting June 10, 2025, KDP reduced the royalty rate for print books priced below $9.99 USD from 60% to 50%, primarily affecting novellas and short nonfiction works. Additionally, KDP introduced lowered color printing costs for certain markets, subtly highlighting benefits for authors of children's books, comics, and graphic novels.

Joanna shares her personal reaction:

“I think they did a terrible job of this email which has resulted in a lot of drama on author social media.” ([05:30])

She emphasizes the importance of authors taking control of their careers amidst these changes, advocating for developing direct-to-reader platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce to mitigate dependency on KDP.

“Empower yourself, do your research, get on, take action if you are mad about it.” ([10:15])

2. Draft2Digital’s Pre-Launch Checklist ([20:39] – [24:19])

Highlighting a resource from Draft2Digital, Joanna reviews their comprehensive pre-launch checklist designed to guide authors through the intricate steps of a successful book launch. Key stages include:

• 6-12 Months Out: Defining clear goals (e.g., profit, visibility, acquiring reviews).
• 3-6 Months Out: Researching and securing promotional opportunities such as book blogs, podcasts, and reviewer partnerships.
• Additional Tasks: Ordering print proofs, designing promotional graphics, and detailed planning.

Joanna underscores the significance of aligning launch activities with specific objectives to maximize effectiveness.

“Your goal will define a whole load of other stuff.” ([18:50])

3. The Rise of AI Narration in Audiobooks ([24:19] – [36:43])

Joanna discusses the burgeoning integration of AI in audiobook production, spotlighting Audible's collaboration with AI voice technologies like 11 Labs. She shares personal experiences with AI-narrated works, such as her mother's books in the Penny Appleton series, and hints at her upcoming project, Death Valley, featuring her own voice clone.

Quoting Audible’s CEO:

“Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks.” ([30:25])

Joanna advocates for a balanced approach, blending AI and human narration to enhance accessibility without sacrificing the personal touch.

“It's a mix depending on the situation.” ([34:10])

4. US Copyright Office’s Fair Use Report on AI ([36:43] – [43:22])

The episode delves into the US Copyright Office's recent report on the fair use of AI in content creation. The guidance suggests that while some AI uses are transformative and thus fair, others—especially those involving commercial exploitation of copyrighted works—exceed fair use boundaries.

Joanna interprets the report as a call for enhanced licensing agreements and collective licensing solutions, emphasizing that generative AI will continue to evolve despite legal challenges.

“The genie is not going back in the bottle. The clock cannot be rewound.” ([39:50])

5. Upcoming Webinar and Community Engagement ([43:22] – [62:29])

Joanna announces her forthcoming webinar, "Being an AI Assisted Artisan Author," scheduled for June, aimed at AI-positive and curious authors. The session will cover ethical AI usage, copyright considerations, and practical applications of AI tools in writing and business strategy.

She also shares personal updates, including her latest projects and book signings, fostering a sense of community and ongoing engagement with her audience.

---

Interview with April Rinne: Embracing Change and Building a Portfolio Career ([24:19] – [62:29])

a. April Rinne’s Journey and Motivation for Flux ([24:19] – [28:49])

April Rinne introduces herself as a futurist, professional speaker, lawyer, and best-selling author of Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. She traces her inspiration for the book to a personal tragedy at age 20, when she lost both parents in a car crash while abroad. This life-altering event ignited her passion for understanding and navigating change and uncertainty.

“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.” ([25:15])

b. Understanding Different Types of Flux and Change ([28:49] – [37:41])

April elaborates on the various dimensions of change, distinguishing between abrupt, life-altering events and gradual, pervasive shifts like those induced by technological advancements. She emphasizes the human tendency to resist change unless it is immediately necessary, such as during a crisis.

“Humans are great at adaptation when it's a life or death situation, but we're not that good at opting into changes we know would be beneficial.” ([32:50])

She introduces the concept of a "flux mindset," advocating for proactive engagement with change rather than reactive management. This mindset involves embracing uncertainty and leveraging personal agency to navigate the ever-evolving landscape.

“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?” ([35:10])

c. The Portfolio Career: Future-Proofing in the Age of AI ([49:34] – [56:55])

April introduces the idea of a "portfolio career," contrasting it with the traditional linear career ladder. A portfolio career encompasses a diverse array of skills and roles, enabling individuals to adapt and thrive amidst constant change.

“The portfolio is something you create. It's uniquely yours. It's something you have agency over.” ([54:30])

She illustrates how non-traditional skills, such as parenting or managing grief, contribute to a robust career portfolio by fostering invaluable human capabilities like empathy, conflict resolution, and resilience. April underscores that a well-curated portfolio allows for greater flexibility and control, especially in uncertain times.

“Parenting skills are super skills for time management, conflict negotiation, empathy... invaluable in the workplace.” ([52:45])

d. Practical Steps to Building a Portfolio Career ([56:55] – [61:36])

Addressing the practicalities, April advises authors and professionals to:

1. Identify and Catalog Diverse Skills: Recognize and document both traditional and unconventional skills.
2. Develop a Portfolio Narrative: Craft a cohesive story that connects various skills and experiences, showcasing versatility and adaptability.
3. Leverage Skills for Diverse Opportunities: Utilize the portfolio to explore varied roles within organizations or entrepreneurial ventures.

She emphasizes the importance of storytelling in presenting a portfolio, ensuring that potential employers or collaborators understand the value of a multifaceted career.

“When you tell your narrative, it allows others to see you as a multifaceted individual with diverse capabilities.” ([60:15])

e. Embracing Uncertainty and Reshaping Personal Agency ([37:41] – [43:22])

April discusses the psychological aspects of dealing with uncertainty, advocating for comfort in the "messy middle" of change. She encourages embracing the unknown as a space for transformation and innovation, rather than fearing it.

“The new insights happen in that space of not knowing. That's where transformation occurs.” ([38:30])

She also touches on the ethical use of AI, stressing that human creativity and connection remain irreplaceable by technology. April calls for a balanced approach, where AI serves as a tool to enhance rather than replace human capabilities.

“The more technology bombards our lives, the more valuable humanity—the human touch—becomes.” ([43:10])

---

Conclusion and Takeaways

This episode of The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers offers a profound exploration of embracing change through the lens of April Rinne's expertise. Key takeaways include:

• Proactive Engagement with Change: Adopting a flux mindset empowers authors and professionals to navigate uncertainty with resilience and creativity.

• Building a Portfolio Career: Diversifying skills and crafting a cohesive career narrative equips individuals to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, particularly in the age of AI.

• Ethical Integration of Technology: Balancing AI tools with human ingenuity preserves the unique value of personal connection and creativity in the authorial journey.

Joanna and April's insightful dialogue serves as a valuable guide for writers seeking to future-proof their careers and embrace the inevitable flux of the modern world.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Joanna Penn on KDP Changes:
  “I think they did a terrible job of this email which has resulted in a lot of drama on author social media.” ([05:30])

• Joanna Penn on Empowerment:
  “Empower yourself, do your research, get on, take action if you are mad about it.” ([10:15])

• April Rinni on Personal Motivation:
  “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.” ([25:15])

• April Rinni on Human Adaptation:
  “Humans are great at adaptation when it's a life or death situation, but we're not that good at opting into changes we know would be beneficial.” ([32:50])

• April Rinni on Portfolio Careers:
  “The portfolio is something you create. It's uniquely yours. It's something you have agency over.” ([54:30])

• April Rinni on Ethical AI Use:
  “The more technology bombards our lives, the more valuable humanity—the human touch—becomes.” ([43:10])

---

This episode not only addresses immediate changes affecting authors but also equips them with the mindset and strategies necessary to thrive amidst ongoing and future uncertainties.

Transcript

[Joanna Penn]

Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots [e-mail] and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives, I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 809 of the podcast and it is Saturday 17th May 2025. As I record this in today's show, I talk to April Rinni about her book Flux. We talk about how you can embrace the process of change in life and author business, how you can take control of what's possible to take control of and be more comfortable with uncertainty and thoughts on how to develop a career portfolio that future proofs you age of AI. So it's a really interesting conversation and it is coming up in the interview section in Writing and Publishing Things. Well, the big news this week is the email from Amazon KDP with the scary title of changes to KDP royalty rates and printing costs. And I think they did a terrible job of this email which has resulted in a lot of drama on author social media. So if you publish through KDP and you have books that are effective, you will have got an email. Basically if you have print books priced under $9.99 US dollars, mainly novellas or short nonfiction. If you haven't got the email then your books probably aren't even affected. But here is an for the first time since starting print operations almost two decades ago, starting June 10, 2025, we're changing the royalty rate for books priced below certain list prices less than $9.99 US DOL equivalent in other currencies from 60% to 50%. These books represent a unique challenge given increasing operational costs and this change will allow us to continue offering these books while avoiding an impact to other titles. Separately, as part of our annual printing cost review, we're reducing colour printing costs for paperbacks in some markets to help authors adopt colour printing. So they really they buried the positive thing where which is costs are coming down if you do colour. So children's books and comic authors and there's lots of people who are going to be really happy with that email but they, they led with this reduction changes in royalty rates. But it's a very tiny group of products and they changed the essentially the royalty rate on things like KU every single month and there isn't this outcry. So yeah, I've been kind of Surprised at how much drama there's been over this. But I logged into kdp. So I got the email, I logged into KDP and was able to download a list of my affected books and which stores need to be changed or just to tell me that this is changing. So Tomb of Relics, which is a novella, will be affected on every single store and Catacomb is actually only affected on Amazon de the German store. So I'm going to change that price for Catacomb because obviously it's just the exchange rate and it's not a super long book, but it's still a book book. Tomb of Relics is a novella. I'm just going to le leave that price as is and accept the change. So yeah, I mean I still get 50% royalty. Many traditional publishing contracts are 10% or 20%. So this is still very good. Or of course you can put your prices up if you want to. Now this represents completely normal business practice as far as I can see. And there wasn't such an outcry when ingramspark changed their terms, so we had to make the discounting higher, which I think had a much bigger impact. I will still make more money from print on Amazon than I do on ingramspark in general. But here's the thing, if you're angry about this or think it's unfair or I've seen some people saying, oh, this is Amazon trying to make more profits and price gouging for the shareholders and stuff, I'm like, seriously, there's some much bigger levers they can pull to do that. But yes, do your research. What are your options if you're super, super mad about this or just the lack of control? And I think that's probably more what it is. And that's partly what I'm talking about with April in the interview. Things are out of your control. You get unhappy about stuff, so take control. This might be the catalyst for authors who specialize in shorter books to finally build the Shopify store or Woocommerce or whatever. Obviously it doesn't have to be Shopify, but the direct to Reader store that you've been thinking about for ages. Maybe this is the catalyst. We are indie authors. We are in charge of our author careers. We have all the tools available now to run our own bookstore to make our own Amazon. So empower yourself, do your research, get on, take action if you are mad about it. Also, yeah, just to say the second half of the email, reducing print costs on colour books. So all regular and large trim size paperbacks printed in Standard colour and purchased from Amazon.com are reduced. And then all the other stores, regular and large trim paperbacks printed in premium colour and purchased on the British and European stores. So yes, children's book authors, non fiction books with colour like recipe books, crafting books, comics, graphic novels. I presume you're all happy with the change. Okay, that is my rant over for today. Also, Draft 2 Digital have released a really useful article, the pre launch checklist. And it goes into a whole load of tasks you might need to do at different stages of your book launch. Now there is a lot on the list, so remember you don't have to do all of them, but it might help you pick and choose the things that will get you to success. And of course the first task, six to 12 months out, which I really like is different. Define your goals. For example, do you want number one, profit? Do you want visibility? Do you want new readers? Do you want reviews? Do you want to hit a list? Do you want to reward your biggest fans? There are so many goals for a launch and the your goal will define a whole load of other stuff. So for example, if you just want reviews, then often putting your book for free and then promoting a free book because the more people who read it, the more reviews you get. The number of reviews is, is directly proportional to the number of people who've read your book, basically. Whereas if you want to make profit, then you have a different decision to make. For example, you might have a higher price on launch. Whereas if you want to reward your existing readers, you might launch with a lower price for the first week and then put it up later. So that very first task, what are your goals for your launch? Is so important because then it will drive everything else you do. It says three to six months out. Research promotional opportunities like book blogs, podcasts, reviewers, newsletter swaps. And this is a good tip as well. Three to six months out, I get so many pitch. I get a lot of pitches every single day from authors and pr, a lot of traditional media pr. Now, traditional publishers, who are actually the worst, I think at pitching for podcasts, they just send like a press release. It's just ridiculous. It's like, here's another book, okay, that means nothing to me, but people will say, oh, I'm pitching my book, it comes out next week. And I'm like, well, that doesn't help, does it? Most podcasts and media, traditional media, book many months in advance. This show is already scheduled out to November, so six months in advance. So it's really important to do your research about the podcasts and blogs and media that you want to pitch and do that three to six months in advance. And then of course there's lots more detail in the articles about things like ordering print proofs, designing promo graphics, planning more detail. So yes, that is Draft two digital, the pre launch checklist links in the show notes. So in AI things well, it's been a few months since KDP started rolling out the wider use of AVV Audible Virtual voice, which you will see on your KDP dashboard if your books are eligible. I just did my mum's Penny Appleton books with a voice I actually really like. An Eng British English voice I really like. The first in that series is Love Second Time around and it is a sort of mature retirement romance if you fancy listening. Sweet romance. By the way, the books are in KU as well. And that rollout came hot on the heels of Spotify allowing 11 Labs AI narration into Spotify and obviously through Findaway voices or in audio as it's going to be called soon. Different stores now. This is the next wave. Audible opens AI narration to some traditional publishers, as reported by Publishing Perspectives. It says selected publishers are working with an early release of Audible's AI Voiced audiobook production with translation and accents to follow, pointedly marketed towards publishers who in the age of automated voicing and audiobook production, have a potential to surge their audiobook availabilities in a more affordable way than in the past. The company CEO says. Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks with the vision of offering customers every book in every language alongside our continued investments in premium original content. So I think this is the real point here. It's every book in every language alongside premium original content. And that's certainly how I'm doing it. So I just mentioned there my mum's Penny Appleton books. They make very little money, we do very little marketing, but I was never going to pay for Human Narration for those books. But we've now put up all of her five books with audio versions, so we'll see. But that to me is really good for accessibility, let alone anything else. But that's one example for my I've mentioned Death Valley is using my voice clone, which will be out on Spotify and other places in June and you'll be able to get it from my store as well. But then for premium original content, for example, me human me narrating things I will be narrating next week, in fact, successful self publishing the 4th edition and I will continue Human narrating my non fiction and memoir and probably my short stories as well. So I think you can have a mix again with AI. It's not all or nothing, it's a mix depending on the situation. In other things, the US Copyright Office released their report on fair use. Now again, I've seen people saying oh well this is it, this is the end of generative AI. Now it's all going away. But no, not going away. First of all, this is only guidance, this is only the US And I think they sit very clearly on the fence by the end saying sometimes it's not fair use and sometimes it is. I'll link in the show notes, but it'[e-mail] AI there's all their reports coming out there. They've said various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. So some of these things are transformative, which means they can be used. But it says the extent to which they are fair, however will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose and with what controls on the outputs, all of which can affect the market. They do say one specific thing, making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries. But it also says for those uses that may not qualify as fair, practical solutions are critical. Licensing agreements for AI training are fast emerging. Licensing markets should continue to develop. And yes, so basically and then also saying extended collective licensing should be considered. So how I read this and it is a very long report you can always remember you can always download a PDF and use Google NotebookLM to help you query it and find useful bits in it. And what NotebookLM does if you haven't use it is it only uses that source and it brings up quotes from the source so you know that it is actually using the right thing. But yeah, how I've read this is essentially yes, we need more licensing. I've signed up to some of the licensing things, not that anything has happened on that. I imagine that most of the companies are going to wait for some of these legal agreements to be decided. But of course there's lots of court cases. Even if all of them are end in a settlement and payouts, this will not end generative AI or everything that's happening. And do you think it will stop the Chinese models like Deepseek for example, so they are only a few months behind the us. So once again as I talk about with April, the Genie is not going back in the bottle. The clock cannot be rewound. And as you know I love these tools and use them every day for all kinds of things. And I think what's really interesting here is I've always said like never ever prompt with anyone else's name, with a designer's name, with a brand name, with I don't even think you should prompt with a style, although people contest that. But basically use the tools for things that are ethical. And I guess a lot of the discussion is around original sin as such of the training data, which is what these legal cases are on. But that that won't affect where we are going with this. So yes, anyway, with all these things going on, I am going to do a webinar on being an AI assisted artisan author, which is my approach to AI. I don't generate a market as such. I use it for lots and lots of different things in my life now and well as my author business. The emphasis is on assisted. So yes, if you would like to know how to be an AI assisted artisan author, come along and join me in June. There will be two sessions, one on Saturday 7th of June and one on Saturday 21st of June. So hopefully you can attend live 11am US Eastern 4pm UK. It will be the same base material delivered twice, although of course it will vary depending on the people who come along live because I'll change my examples and all that kind of thing. You need a ticket to attend live, but even if you can't attend live, you can get the replay if you have have a ticket. I won't be selling it separately because these things literally change every week. I may run webinars later in the year or something. But you will get the recording, you'll get my prompt library. I'm going to create like a prompt library as well as the slides. So you can find [e-mail] live. And I'll be going through lots of things around attitudes to AI, ethical usage, copyright, legalities, what it can and can't do and how to prompt jump to how to work with the tools. Then I will be going specifically into ChatGPT for fiction and non fiction, deep research, brainstorming, outlining, structuring, plotting, planning, characters, world building, book titles, notebook LM for world Bible, creating different kinds of content from your existing book. So a lot of marketing stuff, image generation, author business strategy and in fact I'm I was thinking today I'm going to start with the strategy stuff because this is so useful I feel like most people who haven't used the AI tools think they are very granular so that they you ask it for something, something really small. Whereas the biggest use case I now find are sort of helping me think about my business strategy, my author brand, how I can streamline, how I can. It's super, super useful for these much bigger, bigger questions. So that's probably where I'll start and then I'll get into the granular stuff. I'll also talk about what's coming next, the rise of agents, generative AI search and more. More. So there are a limited number of tickets. It went out to patrons last week and they have grabbed a load of them so you can get [e-mail] live. This session is for AI positive or AI curious authors. I will briefly touch on copyright and ethics, but 99% of the session will be on how to use the various tools for every aspect of writing, craft and the authority business. If you have any questions about it, you check out the sales [e-mail] live. You can email me joannathecreativepen.com if you have any questions. So in personal news, I was at the Book Vault Factory in Peterborough this week signing all the gorgeous Death Valley hardbacks. They are really lovely. The photos on Instagram FPEN author if you want to see. Thank you for backing the Kickstarter if you joined me and all the books are in in the post probably this week and the paperbacks and the large print are being printed and sent out so within the next few weeks fulfillment will be done. The ebook and audiobook went out several weeks ago, like three weeks ago now. So if you don't have what you bought, just email me or message me on Kickstarter. I am already thinking about my next campaign. I will do the Gothic Cathedral project, but it won't be possible this year given how much work it's going to take. But I do want to do my short story anthology. I'm currently working on a story story about free diving in the Poor Nights islands of New Zealand. Now I first went there 25 years ago and I still remember that first day out on the boat. So I've been writing about that. It was like another life. And in fact it was. It was the day. It was the day I met my first husband who was the boat skipper and also a dive instructor. So there you go. I was 25, fell in love with the boat skipper. So that was indeed another life. The story will be about free diving and I'VE never actually done free diving, but I used to scuba and watch the free divers. So yeah, I'm really interested in finishing that story. It feels like a story I've been trying to write for a long time and now I'm ready to write it. So that will be exclusive to the collection along with a couple of others. So yes, the short story collection will be my next Kickstarter. I guess it will probably be the end of the summer, but we shall see. Also last week on my books and travel podcast, thriller author Luke Richardson and I geek out about Egypt. Now I went to Egypt, I think it was 2004 and Luke went like 2020 or something. So there was a big difference in our trips. But we both love it and the country inspired some of our stories, a lot of the ancient Egyptian stuff. So check that out on books and Travel podcast wherever you're listening to the this also successful self publishing the 4th edition is back from Kristen, my editor. So I will be finishing the edits and will start narrating the audiobook and [e-mail] SSP4. It will be in paperback, ebook, audiobook and coming first week of June to my store and then mid June everywhere else in all formats. And it is significantly different to the last edition. So even if you read the last edition you might find this useful. I actually found writing it useful. I discovered a few things that I didn't know myself. So that was interesting. Right? Thanks for all your emails and comments and photos this week. Ragwagon said about Abby's interview. She said oh my. I love using the EM dash. I hope I won't be accused of using AI. That was around if you didn't listen to Abby. I told her that there was this TikTok TikTok thing about oh if there's an EM dash in the writing it must be AI. Which which I just find still find hilarious that people don't understand enough about punctuation to know that writers use it. And also on Pia's interview ET Creative said. Also on YouTube. Love this episode.

[April Rinni]

Thank you.

[Joanna Penn]

And thank you for being my inspiration. One day I might find the courage to write. I know two languages, Romanian and English. For now I'm just a blocked creator who enjoys your podcasts and books. Oh good. From Eugenia and well I appreciate that. And I think the courage to write is really interesting because I think writing, you can write all you like. No one is ever going to see it. So I think it's not the courage to write because you can write whatever you like. The courage to publish I think is perhaps a step up. But yeah, I find this quite interesting. I mean, it may be that you don't want to face yourself on the blank page, but I really encourage you to do that. I find writing I've actually been doing a lot of journaling this week in my Luke Term notebook. I love Luke terms. So yeah, anyway, please do write and you can find the courage to publish later. Okay, Please leave a comment on the podcast show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel. Message me on X at the Creative Pen or email me. Send me pictures of where you're listening. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation so today's show is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's free, fast and easy self publishing platform favoured by independent authors all over the world. KWL was built by authors for authors and their mission is to help you reach digital readers wherever they are, however they want to read or listen. Audiobooks are one of the fastest growing segments in publishing and Kobo makes it easy for indie authors to get in on the action with their user friendly platform. You can upload your audiobook files, set your price and reach listeners around the world. And yes, Kobo accepts AI narrated audiobooks and they also have audio specific promotions you can access if you publish audio direct on kwl. Plus you keep control of your rights and royalties. Don't miss out on the audiobook revolution. Join Kobo writing [e-mail] KWL and that landing page has links to my books as well on Kobo and start sharing your stories and your knowledge in a whole new way. And talking of Kobo Writing Life, I am on their live YouTube channel coming up this week. In fact I will be on there so I'll share the link next week after we've done that, but I will be doing that with Tara from Kobo so that should be fine. This type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my [e-mail] TheCreativePen thanks to the four new patrons who've joined in the last week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community you get access to all the backlist videos and audio covering writing, craft and author business as well as tutorials and demos on AI technology tools. Last week I did an article on expanded audiobook revenue options with an overview of all the ways you can make money with audiobooks, as well as some of my results, like how much money I made on YouTube from audiobooks versus some of the other platforms, which was interesting. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. You get access to everything, all the backlist content, Q&As and office hours. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join [e-mail] TheCreativePen right, let's get into the interview.

[April Rinni]

April Rinni is a futurist, professional speaker, lawyer, and the international best selling author of Flux 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. So welcome to the show 8 for.

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

I'm so excited to talk about this. But first up, just tell us a bit more about you and why you.

[Joanna Penn]

Decided to write a book on this.

[April Rinni]

Topic when you were already reaching so.

[Joanna Penn]

Many people with your message.

[April Rinni]

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. And 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. And, and 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 people are like, oh, flux, yes, world is in flux. I don't know what to do. And 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. And 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. And I noticed this is a very universal issue as well. It' though one place or one people is better at change or worse at change. We are all, all humans are really good at some kinds of changes and really not so good at others. And so there was a cultural component. And 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. But then really the real genesis. And I realize I'm getting pretty personal, pretty fun, and we've just started this conversation, but I, I do want to kind of put it all out there. And for many years I didn't, 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. And 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. And so if I think, like, how did I get into writing a book? This goes back more than 25 years. And my really big, my first like really big experience with change and uncertainty happened when I was 20 and I was at university and I, 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. And you know, imagine like there's my world totally flipped upside down and I was actually overseas, I was in the UK when I got this phone call. And so like, 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, like, like 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 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, and 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, piece is really deeply important to me as well. And I love the ways in which flux can reach a range of people in a range of different situations.

I love that and I think this is so important. Like, as writers, there'll be people listening who write non fiction and bringing this personal aspect into non fiction is so important. Like ChatGPT can write a book on change, but no one can write your book on change and flux. And then your personal experience, I mean, obviously, obviously terrible and awful situation, but you have grown from that and help people every day. But I did want to ask specifically here because the. The word flux and you talk about, we need to learn how to flux.

[Joanna Penn]

In a world influx. And you use it kind of as.

[April Rinni]

A verb as well. But 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. So what are the different kinds of flux and change? And how can we learn how to flux?

Yes. I love this, Jo. This is wonderful. And 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 were 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? And 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 like, how are we relating to this? And so 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? And so that's a really good segue to this question as well. And 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. I mean, 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 and 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 how much we adapted and grew and what we knew. And I always have to give the caveat of yes, because our backs were against the wall and, and we were forced to change. It was a global health crisis. We had no choice. Of course we changed. But guess what? After the immediate emergency and aftermath, did we regress in some of those habits? Did we kind of forget what we'd learned? You bet. So humans are great at change or great at adaptation when it's a life or death situation. But we're not that good at opting in to 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, you know, like this. And 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. And yet guess what? In times of. And I'm not going to call it peace, I'm not going to 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 you know, flux focuses on. The pain comes when we don't do it and we wait for that train crash to happen happen and then we're like oh no. And not just more painful and more fraught, but we actually have fewer choices and so very big picture. I just kind of want to put this framing out there because it relates not just to, you know, day to day change. I know we'll talk a little bit about AI. It was all kinds of changes, right? But this idea that, and I realize I'm speaking in kind of generalizations and so, so I apologize for that, 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 that the world we thought 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. And 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. And you kind of have to have this conversation and say, none of this was ever promised to us. And 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. And yet at the very same time, there are a lot of things we were taught, led to believe we don't control that we actually do. And 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 you, help make you. You better adept, more, more aware and more ready for the changes that come our way. And I think that's what we really need to focus on because so social media has done a wonderful job of kind of outsourcing our beliefs around, like, 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 you'll. Your problems will be solved. And 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. Is 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 do tend, we tend to love or enjoy the changes we can choose. So changes we opt into. And that can be a new relationship, a new role, a new book to write, a new restaurant to try. You name it. And 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, that haircut, but you picked it. Right? And 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. And I think we see that again, with career choices, we see that. With new technologies, we see that with all kinds of disruption and 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?

Yeah, that's great. And it's interesting. So you really mentioned their choice and control and you also mentioned AI. So we're going to have to talk about that because 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.

[Joanna Penn]

For most people, they feel like there.

[April Rinni]

Is no choice and there is no control, that these technologies are doing things that impinge, let's say, or, you know, feel like they're coming for something that we thought was sacred and human only. And this is difficult.

[Joanna Penn]

Right.

[April Rinni]

But 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?

Yes, I love this. And it's get lost. They're actually, I'm already coming up on like at least three of the eight we could. Could talk about here. Some of it around humanity, some around technology. There's like all sorts of. Really, 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. But that, as I mentioned and alluded to earlier, it's less about traditional change management and like, give me my checklist. And the implication of change management is that if something changes, I will work, I will put it into my framework, these six steps or checklists, whatever. And at the end, the implication is that the change will be quote, unquote, managed, done, finished, we can move on. And you look around and you go, is it. Is that really how change works? And pretty much everyone today is like, no, of course not. And so we're looking at what's the missing piece? And 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, better at it. And so again, back to some of the changes. There will be all kinds of changes, actually. More and more and more changes. And 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. Past. There's always been change. There's always been a lot of it. You can go back, you know, as far back in human history, there's always been change, but the awareness of how much is changing is off the charts. And 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. Pass. But 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 back balance between those things that we do and don't control. And so AI, just as one example, what I think is really rattling people about A.I. yes, obviously, in a community of authors, just the A.I. itself is very daunting and very threatening. But more fundamentally, it's the uncertainty that AI represents, and it's the uncertainty if we just don't know, we. 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. And so having the conversation around what is it about AI that feels so threatening for a lot of people, it's just the uncertainty. And 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. And I think that too. It's kind of this risk of complacency. Right. It's not that AI is going to take someone's job 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. Right. But 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. And 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. That 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. And 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. Because I do think you mentioned it already in the world of AI, where AI can write, they can write books just like that. The irony may be counterintuitive, but the beauty also is that the more bombarded our lives are by technology of all of kinds, kinds, the more valuable humanity, the human touch, the human script, the human authorship, the more valuable that becomes. So the more boilerplate the AI, the more distinctive, the more valuable the individual human touch. So I just want to put that out there as well.

[Joanna Penn]

Yeah.

[April Rinni]

And I talk about double down on being human. And 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. And it. I think that's what I try and talk about, but I want to come back to something you were talking there about the sort of the fact that it exists, you know, the AI exists or whatever change is going on. And 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'm. 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.

[Joanna Penn]

It will all go.

[April Rinni]

And I almost feel like this is. I don't know that Feels like the most concerning attitude that we can go back. So I guess my bigger question is, can people ever. Can things ever go back? And how do you help organizations and individuals who are sort of hitting this brick wall to accept and move on?

Yeah, 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. And that is simply. You're right unsurprising in that things are. Aren't going back. There's never been a point at which we just go back to some sort of stasis. That was before. There are the pendulum swings for sure, right. 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. Right. 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. Put it. It can. 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. To an extreme, we're like, oops, let's. 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 don't. You shouldn't know how to get from point A to point B just of your own reconnaissance, right? And 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, right? So there's a lot of the combining of both, which is you can have a change but not forget what came before it. But 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 hear it, 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 changing is 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 because it's a brick wall and because I know that ultimately they're going to have to change. And 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 change, point of pain. But what I 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. And so I'm able, you know, 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. Change. And 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 because at some point that will come back to kind of not haunt you, but, well, point you sometimes that will come back to bite you even worse than, than you thought. And so I know 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. And I know where the benefit and the value of flux work can happen. And 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.

No, that's, that's actually very helpful, more than you know. But I do want to come to another thing that you talk about, which is the idea of the portfolio career. And again, as old business Models are.

[Joanna Penn]

Changing and even old ways of marketing, for example, book marketing has changed.

[April Rinni]

So how can we as authors and writers embrace, embrace this idea of the portfolio career and sort of protect ourselves, I guess.

Yes, and I love so this one and I love that it's authors. There's always, there's in my experience already a more natural congruence to someone who's been just like going for climbing the career ladder. There's a different conversation and authors often tend. Obviously there are some authors that that's all they've ever done. But for most authors in my experience, experience, they have a broader palette that they're drawing from. They have a deep, rich, diverse, professional and personal history. So yes, this 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 are, you know, expand, I think a bit, a bit further beyond. But this is really about how do you design and own a career that is fit for a future of work in flux? And 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 just for the record, some people like portfolio career as a tagline. Other people like this idea of a career portfolio 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. And so it's interesting because I've been working on this for a while. It's not a brand new concept. It predicts 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. And 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. 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. And yet you look around and you go, is this ladder working? And I want to be really careful to say the latter metaphor, the latter shape, there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's not bad, it works. But it works for fewer and fewer people and it's becoming a smaller and smaller piece of a much bigger pie. Because the fact is, today there has never been more ways to work, to earn income, to contribute to society than there are now. And so the latter is just one. But there are a jillion other ways that you can have and create a successful, rewarding career. And the portfolio is really this new shape to accommodate these other ways of working. And 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. And 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. And 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 and there's a form for it, right? And 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. And the fact is that your resume, your cv, only contains a fraction of who you are and what you can do, and sometimes not even the most interesting parts. And 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 skilled 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? Like, I cannot figure that out. Because the kinds of skills you learn when parenting are the kinds of skills that are invaluable in, in the workplace that employers miss out on completely if they don't know this about you. And so that's a really good Example, 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. And so I think often authors are drawing constantly from a well of different experiences, perspectives, research, you name it. Many authors also do more than only write. And 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. And when we do, it's kind of like a trapdoor opens up and all of a sudden you just see this new universe 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 wrote 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, find to be helpful and help you thrive in times of uncertainty. Because if you've been on a ladder your whole life and for whatever reason change comes and you like 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, over. And so even if career change happens, you have much more agency and control over those next steps.

That's so interesting and we're almost out of time, but I just quickly on that like a clarifying question. So most people, when they think about portfolio careers, it's like, well, April is a author, speaker, consultant, you know the words that mean other jobs. But 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.

So lots, there are lots of ways and each person is unique. But what I want to do right now is then people do a few. I want, I'm like, I want you to read these two articles and listen to this interview because this could be an entire hour long conversation.

We can do that in the show notes.

So yeah, perfect. Because I do want to keep, keep this relatively brief. But it, 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, that this is what I do. And 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 office 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 and 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, 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. It's, 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. Right. I think capture, 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 as well 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 better, you're a of lot 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, they're 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? And there's a, 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 a 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 why. What is on your portfolio, in your portfolio that's not on your resume, how did you come to those skills, etc. And I say this because you can't expect other people to know that about you unless you share it. And when you share it, though, you have the opportunity, the age, agency, to put that narrative in the light that makes sense to you. And where this comes up the most is people who have had many different jobs, which 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, right? We're not going to hire them because they look disconnected. Another. Same exact person. Another. 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, and then that opened this door that I didn't expect. And so at that point, you know, and you see how that story kind of cascades and flows. But I just want to put that out there because it's an important piece of the puzzle. And when you tell people that they actually get to tell their own story, that usually makes people feel pretty encouraged as well.

Brilliant. So where can people find you and your book? Online?

Yeah. 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. And that's aprilrenny.com so April, like the month. R I double N E comm. And then for all things Flux, you can go to fluxmindset.com and 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.

Well, thanks so much for your time, April.

[Joanna Penn]

That was great.

[April Rinni]

Absolutely my pleasure. And thank you all for being here.

[Joanna Penn]

So I hope you found the interview with April interesting and that you can reflect on what changes might be coming that you're resisting and what might reduce pain by accepting uncertainty and change. What can you take control of and what can you let go of to make space for new opportunity? Let me know what you think of today's episode. Please leave a comment on the podcast show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel. Comment on X at the Creative Pen or email me joannathecreativepen. And remember, you can always send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next week I'm talking to author and game designer Dave Morris about crafting story worlds, creative control and leveraging AI tools. And if you'd like to join me for my AI Assisted Artisan Author webinar in June, the links are at the creative pen.com forward/love. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show [e-mail] podcast and you can get your free Author [e-mail] Blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook @jfpenauthor. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.