Connected and Confident: Karen Wickre’s Networking Guide for Independent Professionals

Connected and Confident: Karen Wickre’s Networking Guide for Independent Professionals

Nigel Rawlins: Welcome to another episode of Wisepreneurs where I explore the journeys and insights of remarkable professionals shaping their fields. My guest, Karen Wickre returns to the podcast after 50 episodes. She's a well-respected communicator, freelance editor and networking expert with a wealth of experience in the tech industry as a journalist, and she ended up working for major organizations like Twitter and Google in their early years. She joins us to share her unique perspective and wisdom on cultivating, meaningful connections, excelling in freelance work and pursuing personal and professional growth. Karen discusses the importance of authentic networking, the unique opportunities and challenges of freelancing, and practical suggestions for maintaining your confidence and professionalism in a changing digital landscape.

Welcome, Karen, to the 57th episode of the Wisepreneurs podcast, you were guest number seven.

Karen Wickre: Wow.

Nigel Rawlins: Karen can you tell us where you're from and something about yourself?

Karen Wickre: Yes Nigel, I'm glad to be here again. I'm Karen Wickre. I'm in San Francisco, which is today unusually hot for the city. We're often blessed with marine air and fog. And so it tends to not be ever as, as hot here as it does California, but sure enough, climate change also comes to us.

And so we're having a hot spell, but anyway, it's a lovely day here. I've lived in San Francisco this year, it'll be 40 years and 39 of those years I've worked in the tech industry. And so I'm feeling These days, especially as things plunge ahead into a new world of AI, which I know we'll talk about, I feel like I'm watching a large panorama, a kind of long horizon of landscape of so many changes that have happened in really not even 40 years, I'd say 30 years, perhaps.

But anyway I'm feeling like I've seen it all. And I have seen a lot.

Nigel Rawlins: Fantastic. I love San Francisco. I've managed to visit there twice. Has it changed much in the 40 years? Would you say?

Karen Wickre: Oh, yes, quite a bit because when I moved here, it was a well known tourist destination for sure, but it was a labor town. It was a working town in many ways. Very strong unions and a lot of port activity, for example and that sort of thing. And the big companies here then were banks.

Financial firms some lumber, even strangely enough lumber, especially from up north of here and kind of food importers, that sort of thing very few of those are headquartered here anymore. Now there are still, Chevron is still our big gas company that's here. We have still a quite large utility here, but in terms of the economy, it is much more driven by tech than it used to be including a lot of tech companies in the city, but certainly in the region.

So yes, it has changed a lot in that time.

Nigel Rawlins: What I've noticed is I've heard things about Google having lots of employees there, and obviously a lot of the tech companies that's driven up rents and, that's changed the nature of things. How's that affecting do you think?

Karen Wickre: It's not so recent. I would say the big tech companies were big 10 years ago, 15 years ago was when they got big. Apple, much, much older, as much longer arc. But I think that second generation that included Google, Facebook in particular had many thousands of employees.

Not all of them worked by headquarters, and if they were younger, they tended, if they were based here, they tended to want to be in the city. So it is true that the demand for housing at San Francisco has not had enough housing for many years did drive up rents for sure. As, as often happens in an area that's in demand.

I'm not defending the lack of housing by any means. It's ridiculous that no one thought about this earlier. But that's one reason among many, San Francisco has been a destination for many people from different fields for a long time but definitely having an employee base that wants to be in the city and a shortage of, rentable apartments and places where there's no rent control.

So the landlords try to get what they can get.

Nigel Rawlins: Problem in Australia, There's just not enough rental properties and people are getting a little bit angry about bringing in migrants when, there's not enough properties for Australians. And,

Karen Wickre: Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: I was hearing one very famous American news commentator who's gone out from Fox and he was saying you should look after your own country people first, make sure they're well off so they can have children. And be happy so they can have children. You don't have to bring in all these other people because it's really, in Australia it's pretty tough now to find anywhere. And rents have gone up to ridiculous amounts. My wife and I are very lucky. We own our own property. And we're both retired, you could say, even though

Karen Wickre: Semi, semi retired,

Nigel Rawlins: retired. Yeah. And I will talk to you about that as well. Since COVID we've seen a lot more remote work.

So we were just talking about rentals being very expensive. Obviously with technology today, you can work hybrid or work remote. And in terms of networking, are you seeing how that's working out in the tech world?

Karen Wickre: Yes, I think if there was any positive that came out of COVID, and I realize that's an odd thing to even think about zoom came along, obviously, but other platforms, too. So we're now much more used to the idea of video conversations. And it, maybe in a way, it's easier now because it's not required in every instance of work the way it was for quite a long time.

What's wonderful about that is that we see that it's easier to connect with people than regardless of time zone, and I know we're managing to do that here today and tomorrow in our two time zones, but the idea that you can have a personal conversation, a private conversation a confidential with somebody over video or even just audio or dare I say phone it is much more a familiar concept now than the idea that we have to be in person to have a connection.

I think the quality is so good. The technology is so good that we We can, I'm not saying it should be 100 percent virtual but it's much easier to connect with people. And the reason for not is not about we can't get together in person. So that actually, I think has been a big help.

Nigel Rawlins: I find it amazing. I have podcast guests from many different countries. And we had a glitch with my calendar which I've now fixed now and it works, which is really good. And that. works out the time zones for us because I have no idea about 20 different time zones

Karen Wickre: None of us do.

Nigel Rawlins: America's got several and even Canada's got three or four.

I struggle with that, but now, we've got the technology that will do that. So in terms of I'll be honest, I've been running a marketing services company for 20 years. I rarely see any of my clients. Occasionally I'll have a zoom meeting with them. But most of the time it's email.

So in terms of networking, how should you try and connect it? And I might even think about you, how many connections have you got? So it'd be a full time job keeping connected, wouldn't it?

Karen Wickre: Only if I were to go down a list every day and try and hit everybody, which I don't do. I don't recommend that. In terms of I'd make a distinction here between people we already know for whom it's probably easier to arrange a video call. And I'd be, more personable about it.

I will say that one nice thing about video is that we've gotten used to perhaps a pet in the background or a baby or the mailman comes or things happen that they're a little bit social lubricants for people, which I think is quite nice. It's not just it's hard to have a strictly business only, agenda limited, conversation, even if that's the goal of the call. It's nice to have a little bit of surrounding around that, as we're seeing here. So I would say it's easier to have, arrange, request, arrange, and have video chats with people you already know. You don't have to know them well, they don't have to be your friends, but if you've been introduced, I think the polite thing is to say, would you be open to a video call?

And interestingly for friends of mine who work in hybrid roles for companies full time, sometimes they will say, do you mind if it's just audio? Because I can't take another video call because they're doing it back to back all day. I'm not doing that. I hope you're not doing that. And yeah, it's understandable.

For people you don't know, I wouldn't assume that's the initial contact. Email is always a good, I'd be an imperative, I think, default. For the introduction, for the, here's what I'm looking for, here's my question. You can just set that up in email, which doesn't demand a synchronous exchange, right?

That gives somebody an idea of how they want, I'm too busy for two weeks and then I have time for this. It just is easier for someone you don't know or just being introduced to. But for others, and for catching up, and for re establishing contact with people you already know, I think to say, do you mind if it's video, is a polite thing, and many people will say, no, that'd be fine.

Yeah,

Nigel Rawlins: I've just realised that I do make a lot of connections to people I find interesting on LinkedIn and sometimes they want to connect with me. And then sometimes they want to get onto a video with me straight away. And I'm going, Oh, are they trying to sell me something? that's a bit of a concern and it puts me off. Whereas I would like to talk to them, but not on a sales call.

Karen Wickre: Yeah, exactly.

Nigel Rawlins: but it's

Karen Wickre: Exactly.

Yeah. And not with, when you when you don't know someone I find on LinkedIn, it has many benefits and I'm a fan of it. But one thing is when people are essentially cold calling you, cold contacting you and they do want to sell you some service or another, and it is easy enough and I've always had good luck with this, simply saying no, not interested, or ignoring them.

And that's the end of it. Occasionally, I will say, because some of them are really cold calls, someone will, it's happened more than once, someone will say, could I based on your profile, could we talk to you about your software development team? And I write back and I say, no, you haven't looked at my profile.

The word software is not in it. The word development is not in it. I'm a solo, consultant in editorial. It has nothing to do with software development. So please read, I occasionally will say this, just read the profiles more carefully.

Nigel Rawlins: And that's the interesting thing. This is all about communication. And you go back to being a journalist, a tech journalist, believe it or not, one of the early ones, and female at that stage too. And then going, you've worked for Google, you've worked for Twitter, but now the communication is video.

And Yeah. Yes.

Karen Wickre: Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: that. but we have our pictures and we see into people's houses. And as you mentioned before, there's all sorts of things going on in their house. The doorbell might ring. Hopefully no one's going to clump past out my, outside my door in a moment because my wife's grandchild's here.

So hopefully, I think I've warned him to be quiet.

Karen Wickre: Yeah. happen. Things happen in life.

Nigel Rawlins: So in terms of this, how do you think we talk to people on our video communications has changed? Because I get to see into a lot of places because I've done more than 50 podcast interviews now.

And even though it's audio, I still get to see their backgrounds and some of them are quite interesting.

Some of them are just, wow, you're in a cupboard.

Karen Wickre: Yeah. And some, I imagine, they picked a designed background. So you're not seeing in, right? Yeah. Yeah. Which I see that more with people at work wherever they work. The, they're at home maybe, but they've got whatever they've got in the background to hide the the personal, but you and I are beyond caring, I would say.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh we don't show the video anyway. It's

purely audio,

which is really good. Okay.

You're not so happy with Twitter anymore?

Karen Wickre: No, sadly. So I should say, I quit working there. I left Twitter the company in 2016. That was after almost five years there. And a tumultuous time then, but nothing like the last year plus has been. Almost two years, isn't it? This fall, maybe. So I feel I loved Twitter as imperfect as the product was.

I always, I loved it for a long time. It was a wonderful publishing platform because it was real time because it was open and essentially not just asynchronous in terms of time, but asymmetrical in terms of who you follow and who follows you, right? It didn't have to have mutuality. And, so that meant, we could follow politicians and celebrities and whatnot.

But also, some people really shined at Twitter. Interesting conversations, comedians trying out material. And then the value of real time in the case of a suddenly emerging event. Whether it's a natural disaster, whether it's a protest or a riot or just unexpected news basically.

There's nothing like old Twitter. And I loved it for all those reasons. I loved the clever people that were on it. I loved just lots of things about it, but I don't love it anymore and I feel that the new owner has ruined a lot of things about it. It, what's ironic to me is Twitter was always widely misunderstood and because it went public.

In the same time frame as Facebook. Wall Street and pundits and analysts were always comparing the two services and they really are not at all the same service. Unfortunately, people didn't understand that to Twitter's detriment. And so there is not another service like Twitter was. Nothing has come in to replace it.

I don't think anything will. Other things approximate, parts of its features but a lot of the people that I followed on Twitter have gone and so I look at it. I would say I, I, what I did in my case, I did not want the new company taking over my handle, which I had for 15 years. I had 16 or 17 000 followers. Not that they were all looking at what I said. I understand that. But anyway, I had, it felt like a home. So I pinned at the top of my Twitter feed, I think sometime last year, I'm not here anymore. Here are all the places where I have accounts. You can find me there. So I do look at Twitter occasionally just to see kind of what's the zeitgeist, but there's less of it.

There's certainly individual people that are at accounts that I look for there. And then I look to see, are they, have they gone somewhere else? And some have and some haven't. I, in the world of real time, in the world of journalism, It's hard to replace Twitter because at least it still has that quality.

Probably he would drive everybody away if if it didn't have that aspect anymore. If there was some kind of time delay or something, then it would be like all the others.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, I'm still getting my head around the changes. What I think was interesting was how many people he got rid of and it still runs. And I think that's an interesting lesson from a business is, Oh, do you need that many people, even though it's sad that a lot of people lost their jobs.

Karen Wickre: Yes. It does still function, I would say, though, on the money making side. There's no sales team to speak of anymore. There's Lindy iaccarino, and good luck to her. But there were actually people selling, not just individual ads, but a lot of ongoing activations and accounts. And by the way, there was a whole trust and safety team that is gone.

And so there's no reliable quality control. And in the vacuum of respected and known advertisers, they're now a lot more unsavory advertisers. It's interesting now, you cannot unfollow or complain about an ad unless you're paying eight dollars a month.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, and that's

Karen Wickre: So,

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah,

whereas in Australia, 8 a month is like 14 or 15 or even more. That's one of the issues that I have. It's so expensive to get that blue tick and, I've got subscriptions to a number of places and it just gets to a point where I've got too many subscriptions and regular payments.

Karen Wickre: Yeah. Same. Same.

Nigel Rawlins: yeah, my, my big issue is I do follow a lot of people because I'm very interested in authors and people who are experts in a particular area, but finding them is very difficult

Karen Wickre: I agree.

Nigel Rawlins: There is a program, I think it's called Blackmagic or something, that you can pay for and then you can follow so many people and it'll show if they've got something and you can track them.

But in the old days, you used to have all these other programs that you could actually follow particular people in your lists.

Karen Wickre: Yeah, yes, that's right.

I looked the other night after the presidential debate just to see, and there certainly were some political pundits and opinionators right away. But I could also find that elsewhere, and it just wasn't as compelling because I know the numbers have dropped.

Karen Wickre: And the fact of the idea that if you simply pay, you're verified, takes away, as imperfect as the old Twitter verification system was, and believe me, it was imperfect. The idea that anybody can pay to be, quote, verified is, it just goes against, it makes it a lot less useful.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes it's, there's a trust factor in there, but whether they're trustworthy. Somebody told me the other day, just to avoid Twitter until the presidential elections over, he said, there's just going to be so much stuff flying around. But I mentioned

Karen Wickre: I think that's right.

Nigel Rawlins: I mentioned that, My politics has changed a little bit since I've been looking at Twitter because I'm beginning to see things and I'm going, Oh, I used to think that, and now I'm seeing this.

And I think what it does, it can expose issues. And then, maybe because I'm older anyway but it shows up people doing something. Now you've got to be very careful because if you're only getting a snippet, you're probably not getting the whole context. But it can draw attention to things that we thought were right.

For example, COVID. Should we have been locked down during COVID? I now believe we shouldn't have, but we didn't know at the time, so we were all frightened, and so we were happy, and take the injections, and now we're seeing a lot of stuff coming through. It wasn't safe for you, and people are dying, and you're going, oh. It really forces you to evaluate a bit more. Now, not everyone does. They just believe it.

Karen Wickre: If you're thoughtful about it and you look at the sources behind whatever the posts are I agree that can, you can learn a lot.

Nigel Rawlins: And that's how I use it. Let's go back to LinkedIn, which is probably a big home for you now, isn't it?

Karen Wickre: I have been on LinkedIn many years and I have to say it has, I think it benefited from COVID and it benefited from the loss or the the changes at Twitter as well.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah. One of the things I have, going back to Twitter, and then also the same issue with LinkedIn, is posting. One of the things I struggle with Twitter is people are just posting stuff, it's just post, post, post, and it's not necessarily useful, it's just an opinion or it's almost automatic in some places.

I'm finding it the same on LinkedIn and there's obviously little templates for putting your posts together, make a hook and then make it this and then make them click. So you scroll down and make them stay there. And I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, Oh, that's pretty boring or it's not relevant.

And that's the other big danger is that there's a massive information just flowing all the time. That again, you

Karen Wickre: everywhere. From every source. Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: And then you've also got people on Twitter and on LinkedIn selling, and I've interviewed quite a few people and they've taught me a lot about LinkedIn that I didn't know.

There's people selling courses and we're getting more and more people putting stuff out, and if everyone's putting six or seven things out a day, where do do you look? So what do you think's happening?

Karen Wickre: That's too much. I do think LinkedIn, as I say, benefited partly from COVID in that it was another way to connect with people when everybody was not going to offices and maybe looking for jobs and maybe relocating and all that. That sort of normal professional range of things. But they do have, I don't know if you know this they have a large editorial team at LinkedIn, about 60 people.

They have podcasts. They write their own. post material about a variety of things, and they boost peoples that are, they tend to be, professional focus. It's not about everything in the world. It's and to their credit, I would say they've stuck with that, which may make it seem more boring, but they're not everything to everyone.

But it is a de facto kind of directory of people it, who, who are in. a sort of professional world, I would say. I know for me, when someone says to me, do you know so and I immediately go to look LinkedIn, see who they are, how I'm connected, that sort of thing. That's probably not true in every place in the world, but it is true, I think in a fair portion of what we would call white collar jobs, professional jobs.

So it does have that value. But yes, that also means I think more people are on there to sell or to connect. I've always, for a long time, I've had I have a, just a whole queue of people I've never responded to who say, you have an interesting profile. I think we should connect. Like, why? What, yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: No, I'm seeing it too. I've got three sitting in there at the moment and they're all developers from a certain country and I'm going, oh, they're gonna ask me if I want some web work done or SEO work done. And I'm thinking, yeah, I've got, I subcontract I, I use freelancers myself and, I really have to trust them and not have to run them through.

I've got to spend several hundred dollars before I really know if they're any good, and so I really don't want to respond to some of them. I have, and then I get that email, and I'm going, oh no, so now I'm getting that list, and that's going to be annoying. So it'd be nice if they had a little button, oh no, they do.

You can say, I don't know this

Karen Wickre: They do. Yes, you could, and you could say, I don't know, and you could also say, ignore the message. Depending on where you are.

Yeah.

It was interesting that's where I find most of my guests on LinkedIn. So when I connect with them, I explain that I have read their book, or I've read several articles, or one of their articles I found really good, and explain which article it was. Or in the case of a philosopher, I think she lives in Holland.

Nigel Rawlins: The Netherlands. I don't know what we call it anymore. It used to be Holland, wasn't it, when we were kids. And she runs Love and Philosophy, It's a podcast, It's brilliant. And she's quite brilliant. So I've connected with her, and I wanted to talk to her, but I'm not game yet to have her on the podcast, Cause she's. really deep into the philosophy and I, I can get my head around some of these subjects, but I really need to reflect and think and read. I've read your book. I've read your book twice now. and I think that's how I reached out.

No, I've got the Kindle version and I bought the physical one and I can't find where I put the physical one. I've got too many books now. But I will always buy the books, or I'll have read their articles or would listen to their podcasts.

Karen Wickre: Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: Anyway, one of my guests was Hazel Edwards, who wrote a picture story book 40 years ago called There's a Hippopotamus Eating Cake on My Roof.

And a friend of mine introduced me to her, so I interviewed her on the podcast and she's written over 220 books. And she's still going. So I went up to a, an event in Melbourne where she was presenting her new book, which she called Authorpreneurship. And one lady came up to me and said, Oh, I was a guest on your podcast.

And I didn't recognize her at all.

Karen Wickre: Oh, wow.

Nigel Rawlins: that's the danger is you can see the face,

but in, in reality, it's somebody else, but she told me a really interesting thing about LinkedIn. There's a little bell on the profile. And if you press that bell, it'll always tell you in your feed, whether they've written something.

And I didn't know that I didn't see it.

Karen Wickre: Oh, I didn't know that either. Yeah. I didn't, I did not know that either. Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: So that'll come up in your notifications. So the ones I really want to follow now I can, but I'm going to have a big notification list. I'm keen to anyone I've interviewed to go in and if they put something up, support them, which is, you know, how you get some traction.

Karen Wickre: Yeah.

So It, I have to say this about, I have to say this about LinkedIn. They, because. They do have a following. I've been a quite, I don't know what it is, half a billion people around the world, something like that. And a few years ago, I think before my book came out, I think I was working on my book, someone from LinkedIn editorial reached out to me and they'd seen an article I'd written.

That was called Build a Mighty Network for Life, or something like that. And they said, could you essentially rewrite that for us? I'd written it for another publication. And I knew this wasn't a paid job at all, but that was fine. I was able to rewrite it. I posted it. They, they promoted it.

And within three days, this was just a post, right? For three days, that thing had a hundred thousand views. And so that's the power of LinkedIn when there's a juggernaut going, or when you have a following. I didn't have that big of following. So it was really their promotion that, that did that. But I would say on a smaller scale, something more interesting recently a friend of mine, I've done a couple of LinkedIn Live Sessions, because that's become a part of LinkedIn now is to have these kind of webinars that are live, right?

And conversations. It's essentially a zoom call but it's called LinkedIn live and it's through LinkedIn. And so one of the hosts I was on with, it was a Q and A. She said, you should post something every week on linkedIn and I thought I, I'm not really writing anything long form.

And she said it it would be good , and she goaded me into it with the hashtag Wickre Wednesday. And so I have been following that. And so I have been posting not, a few paragraphs yesterday was one paragraph and, people do respond.

There's a bit of a readership there and people say, oh, I like what you're posting. So it, again, I guess it goes to the power of LinkedIn.

Nigel Rawlins: you mentioned about you introduced somebody to somebody and you didn't hear back how it went. And it's a little bit about etiquette, Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

I've read that one.

Karen Wickre: Yeah, that's right.

Nigel Rawlins: I did read you one about the hot weather.

Karen Wickre: Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: So how long's that been going on? Wickre Wednesdays.

Karen Wickre: Oh, maybe six weeks, not very long. But I'm going to try. I'm going to try and keep it up.

Nigel Rawlins: It's good to hear your reflections on things, because it's your point of view. If I was to do mine, golly, what have I read that particular week? I've got so sick and tired of reading. I mostly read non fiction.

Karen Wickre: No, me too. But sometimes it's just what happened to you or what's your reflection on a small experience you had.

Nigel Rawlins: Yep. Yeah. Now I probably should put some of those things in because something happens every day. One of the interesting things nowadays, and I've probably mentioned on the podcast, I rarely leave the home apart from going for a walk or going to the supermarket. Now I live in a small country town. Most of my life is online, doing online training which I learn stuff, or reading books. My wife goes out into the world a lot more than I, I do. I rarely go to Melbourne anymore. And if I do, I take a bus and a train because I really don't want to drive anywhere. But I rarely go anywhere nowadays, so my life is the social media feeds that I'm getting in. My podcast interviews, which, I can have two or three a week, actually which is really amazing. And to connect with people in Sweden Spain Belgium I am talking to the most amazing people in the Czech Republic. Three now

Karen Wickre: Oh, wow.

Nigel Rawlins: I have never met such an intelligent group of people who are really doing big things in the world.

And they've come through a communist era and it has done something to them. It's made

Karen Wickre: I bet.

Nigel Rawlins: sharp, intelligent, insightful is that the right word? Insightful. And they're writing

interesting books.

So I'm pretty excited to talk

to another one,

coming up.

Soon, who talks all about knowledge management and personal knowledge management. And I find it difficult to find, sometimes I find it difficult to find people to talk about some of the topics I want to talk about. And that's the danger of me reading so much. Even though I've run a marketing company, I rarely read about marketing or business because I find them boring books.

There's a lot just telling,

Karen Wickre: Often. Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: Do this.

Karen Wickre: Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: And the ones who are teaching you, some of the ones, there's people who are telling you how to write posts. What happens if a thousand people write the same type of framework?

And I'm going, oh, flick. I don't want to

Karen Wickre: I know. Yeah. They won't. They won't. A thousand people will read that. They won't follow the advice and do it. Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: So that's what I'm finding. So what do you think the best practice is for being on LinkedIn? To get a following, you obviously have to post regularly.

Karen Wickre: Yes. Yes. But not everybody is there for following. That's true. Yes, it's the same on any platform. Frequency helps you, go wider. More people see what you do. If it's regular and it's interesting in whatever way, it's clever in whatever way people will notice. But it's a long, it's a long game.

whatever whatever the platform is. The days of, ginning up your numbers to get more followers is that's ancient times now. So I think for most people, the important thing about LinkedIn they may get interesting ideas, read something that they hadn't thought about and learn from it and that sort of thing.

And that, or they may post and have something to say. All of that is fine. I think what's important for people who are there. is to be sure that their profiles are fairly current and descriptive. And it's not just about getting a job. It's also about remembering that because it is a lookup directory for so many, people are looking for speakers, subject matter experts, board members volunteers you People who could write commentary about something.

It's much more than just for your job. And I remind people of this who have been at a kind of stable job for a long time. And they think, they have very little on their LinkedIn. But I say, but you could be, on a panel or at a workshop or conference or something like that. And it's, and by the way, no job is too stable anymore.

And you want to, I would say at least quarterly update your chronology, and even if you're in the same job, but maybe you have a new title, maybe you have done a new project, maybe you've got some new volunteer work or certification or something like that, but that open block at the top, this sort of blank field that's about you, that's always really important.

And I've, I have said this to many people, if you want a hint that you might be looking for a job, or if you want to say Up there, I'm open, I'm pursuing new opportunities, or I'm passionate about subject X. That could signify to people, even if you're not formally and officially looking for a job.

There are lots of ways to do it. It's that open field where you don't want to repeat your job chronology that we see below anyway. You want to have something there. In all the different things I've done, like this is the driving force, this is the passion, this is the thing that I'm really interested in, and now I'm looking at, something adjacent to it and asking questions about this, that, or the other thing.

It gives people a sense of, oh they're interesting they're current they're going in a new direction that I hadn't thought about. Something like that.

Nigel Rawlins: Maybe we should start talking about AI because I use it. It's been out now two or three years and I'd like to find out if you're using it. But with LinkedIn, I often buy some prompts to use for images, because I'm not very good at prompting, but I noticed there was a huge amount of ones you could use for LinkedIn.

You can have a LinkedIn social media manager, which will tell you what to do, and then a whole range of prompts that'll write all of these instructions for you. And I'm thinking, the thing I'm hearing is, we should write with our own voice, but if you use AI, it's going to be fairly mechanical.

And I would suggest, probably an awful lot of posts on LinkedIn are now AI driven. I write, I've got to put one out today, a little article on my podcast guest who's going out, but I use AI to help me draft it, but then I've got to spend about two hours cleaning up to say what I really want it to say.

What's your experience with AI so far?

Karen Wickre: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: far?

Karen Wickre: I have to say, I'm probably using it less than you. I, I'm reading all about it. I've subscribed to way too many AI newsletters to even keep up with. So I'm paying attention to the companies and what the capabilities are. And there are some valuable uses for sure, you're suggesting, around outlining something, something, a first draft of something.

Fantastic, I think. All of those things can be useful, especially if someone is. Just in a bottle about what to say or trying to summarize, some long, like a transcript or something like that. Fantastic. But I'm a long time editor, so I would never just let go whatever the machine spits out.

Never. And so I would always then say, okay. I get the gist, or I see that the important thing is at the top and then the second most important, so on, but then I'm gonna rewrite it just as you're saying

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, golly. Without doing that you can I got it to look at the transcript of our last talk and describe you, and it called, this is a word that drives me nuts when I see, seasoned editor. I'm thinking, I keep thinking salt and pepper.

Karen Wickre: That's funny. So I like seasoned. I like seasoned because it's not saying old

Nigel Rawlins: yes I know,

Karen Wickre: Seasoned. Seasoned is one. Veteran is another. Veteran is another one you might use.

Nigel Rawlins: One of the other uses of AI is how to do something, how to connect something, how to solve a technical issue. So it does all that as well.

How, what's the best way or what's a program that will be better to use than this. Or I had to check my calendar the other day when we had trouble, I said, because I made several bookings through the same calendar that you used and we had problems with. So I had to use AI to double check the times and check with the people.

Was this calendar working properly? And it was. And then I contacted the company that SavvyCal, which I'm now using. I said, look Karen found this, what's going on? And they told me how to fix that. that's, But AI also helps me figure out things like that. So the benefit is instead of the old way of, say, doing a Google search and then looking through and figuring out, you say to AI, can you just tell me what the time zone is there if it's here in Australia?

Bang, you get an answer. Or, can you turn this into lowercase, or can you format this for me, or tell me how to format this on WordDoc, or something like that. I think it's a handy little tool.

Karen Wickre: And not so little. And already not so little. Just in terms of the size of the, of how much has popped up in the last year. It's just astonishing. It's the biggest sort of tech change I've seen in all my years. Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: I think it's getting better and better, but I think the way to look at it is it is a prediction machine. And that's the sort of thing you're going to get, it predicts what you're after. So if you put a simple prompt in, you're going to get a fairly simple response that

Karen Wickre: Right,

Nigel Rawlins: okay, but it is where we have to learn.

Where good communicators have to learn to prompt it in such a way that you get a better output or a more useful output, not just an output. So I think that's going to be very interesting. All right. What I'd like to go on to is because we're older and we're more mature and we don't always know how to describe ourselves.

And I have a problem. Like I say, look, I work with over fifties, but really. Most of my clients are over sixty, but I do have a whole lot of younger female clients. I generally work with women.

So what I want to talk about is because we're older, how do you structure your day? How do you structure your week? How much time do you spend working?

Karen Wickre: It really depends for me on who's in need and who's paying, right? Both things. And so I've had busy times where there are deadlines. I do a lot of writing and editing. So sometimes there are deadlines for, a company's announcement or a kind of opinion commentary that somebody now is going to pitch to certain news outlets or something like that.

That's what drives the busyness. But most of my time is not filled with deadlines because I don't have a lot of clients at any one time who need something, typically. So really the day is more I'm always up early. I'm an old workhorse in that way. So I'm always looking at my email and seeing what's come in overnight and reading some of the thousand newsletters that I get.

Plus the socials. In the morning I'm always doing that. But like right now I'm helping a journalist I'm doing research for him on a book he's writing. So the pace is slower. But there are times that, there's a particular thing he's writing about that I need to look into for now, because that's going to be useful to him as he's writing, as opposed to things that I know are coming up.

So I would say, I'm not even sure I track it so much by hours. It's a part of every day. typically goes to some kind of somebody else's project that I'm doing. A part of the day is, for me, having to do with mentoring and making introductions to people, because I'm called on that. And then a part of the day is hitting all the New York Times word puzzles, because there are now quite a few of them to get through every day.

I'm very religious about that. Doing other things and having a fairly new dog. I just recently adopted a new rescue dog. There's some walks involved too.

Nigel Rawlins: That's fabulous. So it's a more relaxed week. , I call myself semi retired, but I probably spend 50, 60 hours a week, but it's not just on the computer. It's also reading and trying to write and doing the podcast.

Karen Wickre: that's right.

Nigel Rawlins: We have a choice about what we do

Karen Wickre: Yes, to me, in some cases I have long standing clients as you do. And when they call, I'm gonna jump in with them because we're familiar with each other and that's part of why they have me, is because we don't have to go through a lot of preliminary to get to whatever it is they need.

And sometimes it's that, it's not really a choice then, I'm gonna help them because they've called. And then in terms of something like this book project, I actually I knew the guy who was developing his proposal for an agent. And when he told me about it, I said, If you're successful in getting a contract, I would like to help you with this book because I'm very interested in the topic.

I know a lot about the topic. I can augment, what you're looking into and he said, I would like someone who's like a thought partner. And I said, honestly, I am that person. And so that, that's how we, I just, I said, this is interesting. Somebody else's book might've come along and I would have said, and I have said, I'm not the right one for that, because there are just times that I just know. It's not going to be that interesting or maybe the setup is too complicated or something, but yes, we get to choose.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's the secret of, being a knowledge worker or somebody who uses their knowledge later in life, post work is to choose the things you want to do and develop the lifestyle you want to do, but San Francisco is a fabulous city anyway, so going for walks there is wonderful. I used to

Karen Wickre: It is.

Nigel Rawlins: Going down to what was it, the harbour down there?

That was just beautiful.

Karen Wickre: Oh, Embarcadero,

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, yes, that's just lovely. And they've got a lovely market in there. I went in there one time, they had a mushroom seller there. I couldn't believe how many

Karen Wickre: yes,

Nigel Rawlins: Is he still there?

Karen Wickre: Yes, still there.

Nigel Rawlins: I'd probably be eating a lot more mushrooms if we had a mushroom market like that. I have to travel 100 kilometres to Melbourne to get to a decent market, unfortunately, and they're all getting a lot more commercial now, and not as interesting, and prices have gone up too, so they're not as good.

But I think America is a better place for food, or good food if you want to search it out. And they deliver it too.

Karen Wickre: True. In California, at least, the good food is local. Much good food is local. And lots of places, they deliver it. That's for sure.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, no, you can get really good meat delivered., Talking about jobs yesterday, I had a phone call that was pretty vague. And I thought, Oh, I said, somebody wants a website or something. I'm thinking, do I really want to do another website? It was actually my butcher ringing me and saying that he had my delivery that I had to go and pick up.

And I thought, Oh, that was such a relief.

Karen Wickre: Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: The point I really want to make is thatwe really do need to choose the work we want. I do medical websites as well, and I do a lot of their writing for them, believe it or not, on fertility and infertility and a range of other, for some reason I'm able to write this stuff.

Don't ask me why.

Karen Wickre: That's good for

you.

Nigel Rawlins: But I also can write about horse chiropractory, chiropractic,

Karen Wickre: Yeah that's the beauty of being a writer is that you can do reading and research and barring the most technical, perhaps you, you can get the gist and come up with something that also makes sense to the non expert.

Nigel Rawlins: Mm. Oh, that's what I like to do. But I also, if I'm writing one of those technical ones, I also find a subcontractor or an editor.

Karen Wickre: Yes. Yes.

Nigel Rawlins: can put their eye through. And believe it or not, there's a lot of retired medical specialists out there who are on the freelance platforms. And so when I wrote the fertility ones, I hired a gynecologist in America to view it and just to get a different viewpoint and the specialist I was working with looked over it as well.

So that was three pairs of eyes and yeah, no, it was amazing what you can do.

Karen Wickre: Huh. Yes, it is. It is.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, is there any other topic you'd like to cover? Because we've probably been talking for about an hour already.

Karen Wickre: We, we, we have quite a bit. I'm trying to think don't know if you want to use this or not, but I'll I'll tell you two things I'm involved with here to see if you're familiar with them. One is Chip Conley's new venture, new ish venture called Modern Elder Academy.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, I've

heard

Karen Wickre: know about that?

Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: of it, yeah.

Karen Wickre: You might enjoy it and some of your clients might,

They, because they have online classes about dealing with life transition. Chip is a successful entrepreneur who made his bones here in San Francisco. But he's got the religion now of what he calls modern elders.

Essentially, people over 50 and who really, a lot of significant things happened to people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s and even 80s, but these things are not culturally acknowledged, right? You could be an empty nester. You could be going through a divorce. Your parents could be ill or gone, and you were their caretaker.

Your children may have left, right? You may be out of a job or looking to do something different, even if you have a choice about it. In other words, it's a huge period of change all these years. So He has now established a couple of physical world places where people can go and take workshops and bond with similar people in Baja in Mexico and in Santa Fe, in New Mexico, in the US.

But I would say the online courses and his books, and he's a super productive blogger. So his material appears every day on LinkedIn and on his blog. It's the same post, but it's, it goes out widely. So it's an interesting, I went very early when he was first launching the place. so it's been five years since I've been to a formal week long workshop and that's the kind of meat of what they do.

So that's one. And more recently, I'm just keeping an eye on something. I was introduced to a friend of a friend who has a new startup here called OpenWater. Group. And it's meant to be a membership club with chapters focused on over 50.

So in this case, it's, meet people in person have an online community to connect about new business ideas, consulting life itself but more a focus of who's doing interesting entrepreneurial things and that sort of thing. We have to see if this is going to be successful, because I know it's very hard to launch something when there's not quite enough people in the community to do it, and they're trying.

In fact, I'm going to a cocktail event next week in San Francisco to talk about networking to a group of members and prospects. And so I'm happy to help them. I'm, and I'm curious to see how this sort of thing goes. But the point is there's more and more of people paying attention to over 50.

Nigel Rawlins: As I look back, 50 is so young. A lot of people get to 50 and they think they're old, and I'm thinking, no

Karen Wickre: no, I agree. I agree.

Nigel Rawlins: That's why, yeah, and I think most of the 50 year olds are going to be quite digital by now, because, you're a little bit older than me, but not a lot, but we, In our households, when we were younger, I think we had, you might have had colour TVs, but I think we had a black and white, and I can't even remember if we had a phone in the house. We spent most of the time outdoors.

Karen Wickre: Yeah, I spent, I was bookish, so I spent time indoors reading, but it was reading books. that were

Nigel Rawlins: Real

Karen Wickre: physical.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah. No, it was the same with me. I read a lot of books when I was younger. But I remember when I went to high school, I went around to one of my friends place who later became a doctor and I was stunned at how many books he had on his bookshelf. I thought, wow, I thought I read a lot.

Gee, he read 10 times what I read and maybe that's why he became a doctor. Yeah. So I think. I think the fact that there are more people over 50, 60, 70, 80 and older alive today.

Karen Wickre: And in better shape. statistically, anyway, I

think

Nigel Rawlins: and living longer.

And that's one of the reasons I bring on people to talk about longevity is, we want to keep our cognitive ability We want to be able to think and still do stuff that we find interesting, and mainly I'm aimed at professionals, is to be able to keep thinking, to be able to read, to think about what we do and maybe do something maybe earn a little bit of money from expertise.

Karen Wickre: Exactly.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah. All right.

Thanks Karen. How would you like people to connect with you

Karen Wickre: they could find me on LinkedIn. I am there. I would encourage everyone, not just for my purpose, not just for me. But, don't just use the canned LinkedIn language when you're reaching out to a stranger, right? Because that doesn't give us any incentive to say, Oh, of course we should be connected.

I'd like to know more about you. So be sure and say a reason, that has some relevance and focus for that person that you're asking. Otherwise, we can communicate without having that connection on LinkedIn. We can still do that. But anyway, LinkedIn is a way, I do have a website that is just my name, karenwickre.com

com, where there's some things I've written and about the book and that sort of thing.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, we should mention the book. It's still for sale as a Kindle version and a physical book as well. Where can they get that from?

Karen Wickre: The , the biggest, easiest place probably is our favorite global retailer, Amazon. I encourage people to find it another way. There, there are independent book sellers and at bookstores it can be ordered through bookstores too. It just depends if you have a need for instant gratification or not.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah I've got to say, I find Amazon amazing. I can have stuff delivered the next day.

Karen Wickre: yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: I'm just saying, how do they do it? And that's changed the nature of commerce because there are a couple of businesses out there who will deliver the next day.

Uh, cause Amazon's, Amazon set the standard.

So my wife bought something online the other day. It said it was delivered. She only received one package the other day, but she didn't receive the second package, so she's had. No communication. Whereas if I get something from Amazon and it's the wrong size or it's not what I want, I can take it back to the post office, which is just up the road and it's all organized and refunded.

I'm thinking, wow, we've got a lot to learn.

Karen Wickre: It's a huge, it's just a more logistics operation than we can comprehend.

Yeah, But it teaches us, you've gotta be able to think differently about business today. Before you go, I should ask you, what's the name of your dog?

So my new dog's name is Franny. I'm calling her Franny, Fran Orita as nicknames that she's already earned. She's a four and a half year old Staffordshire Terrier mix. There's a lot of those in the Bay Area, and she's very sweet and very calm and medium energy , is perfect for me.

Nigel Rawlins: That's right. She's been talking to us during the program. So I thought we'd better find out a little bit about

Karen Wickre: yes.

Nigel Rawlins: Karen, thank you very much for being my guest again, 50

episodes later.

Karen Wickre: so happy to.