In this episode of Inspirational People, I interview long-time friend Denise Renee. In 2010, I attended one of her events, and in 2017 she attended my Path of the Freelancer book launch event. In between those events and since 2017, we've stayed connected over social media as we've both pursued our entrepreneurial paths.

After seeing how awesome she has responded to the entrepreneur community in the midst of the Coronavirus, I invited her to interview to share her insights and inspiration on how to respond and adapt when life gets hard and you don't know what to do next.

Listen to what she has to share below.

FREE WEBINAR For Entrepreneurs

• As a business owner are you wondering how to navigate this Coronavirus crisis?
• Are you wondering if you can continue to survive as the world shuts down? Can your company even survive?
• Can you be the leader your family, team, and community needs during this unexpected pandemic?
• Are you wondering if you can take care of your staff through this situation?
• And ultimately, how do you transform your organization to adapt to what has happened and will continue to unfold over the following months?

If you are at all concerned about your small business, this FREE webinar is for you. We'll walk through what you need to do today to regroup in the midst of the Coronavirus storm, and how to effectively move forward through the uncertainty that lies ahead.

In addition to unpausing my paused blogging efforts (at least I got three months!) to provide helpful resources to face the Coronavirus, I'm also continuing the inspirational people interviews as an additional way to provide insights and inspiration during this time of crisis.

The Coronavirus crisis has unexpectedly brought me out of my 2020 blogging hibernation, and I've been focused on creating helpful content to educate and inspire others traversing this season of uncertainty. While the situation has resulted in a great deal of negative and scary news, I've got an exciting announcement to share. 

My latest article about this pandemic has been published in Relevant Magazine. Woohoo! In this article, I share about the early Christians and how they responded to the pandemics in ancient Rome. It's these early Christian examples we can be grateful for and inspired by.

Click here to read the article: Taking Inspiration and Gratitude From the Early Christians in Pandemic Rome

Additional Coronavirus Resources

• Read my comprehensive survival guide to the Coronavirus crisis here.
• Click here to learn more about my free webinar for how freelancers can navigate the pandemic.

Last Updated 3/28/2020

As mentioned in my last post about my webinar for freelancers (now available on-demand), I've unpaused my 2020 writing break here on the blog to provide you with insights for navigating this Coronavirus crisis. I'm sharing helpful quality links on Facebook here, and fun stuff on the light-hearted side of the crisis here.

In this guide, I share what gives me hope regardless of what happens. As much as I'd like to say things will get better and we'll get through this, there are no guarantees that that will happen. In fact, the evidence indicates that for some of us who get to the other side, we're going to individually and collectively be left with emotional, financial, and physical scars.

This article is broken down into the following three main sections.

• This Coronavirus Crisis Could Be Way Worse & Last Longer Than You Expect
• The Vital Hope We Need For Navigating This Coronavirus Crisis
• Your Comprehensive Guide To Surviving The Coronavirus Crisis

Before I share my hope and the comprehensive practical guide, I'm leaning hard into sharing the reality of the crisis situation we find ourselves within. Without the weight of what's happening now (and in the upcoming weeks and months ahead), you may discount what else I have to share.

Let's begin with the important and unpleasant bad news.

The world is in crisis. Freelancers are caught in the storm. To help give us all freelancers a fighting chance, I've created a free webinar on how to navigate the Coronavirus crisis.

Much of the content comes from my book, Path of the Freelancer: An Actionable Guide To Flourishing in Freelancing. For this webinar, I'm repositioning, reordering, and augmenting the content to make it more relevant to this pandemic.

In this webinar, I answer the following freelancer questions as it relates to this crisis.

• Should you freelancer right now?
• What decisions do I need to make now, so I can focus on acting while minimizing distractions?
• How do I go into a wise form of survival mode to give myself the best posture for success?
• How do I navigate my financial situation so I can be best equipped to move forward?
• How do I, as a freelancer, leverage this opportunity to build a phenomenal freelancing long-term career?

  Click to learn more about this webinar for freelancers

  19March2020

  Jason Montoya

  Freelancing

“If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.” ― Banksy

I can hardly believe it, but I’ve been blogging since January 2014 (My first published post was on Crab Mentality). That’s six years of blogging while freelancing full-time and also publishing my first two books (for freelancers and small business owners).

In 2018, I finished a total article count of 400, and this blog post makes it 461. Since I began blogging, I’ve posted as seldom as once per month and as often as every weekday. This year, I’ve averaged about one new post per week (although they were not as evenly distributed as that average implies). 

I've written a great deal over these past six years, and now it's time to take a temporary step back. In 2020, I’m taking a break from writing and side projects and will abstain from sustaining any publishing cadence.

When this year concludes, it'll have been six years since we began this new journey (post Noodlehead Marketing) and it's included freelancing, a new church home, buying our first house, transitioning from home school to public, increasing our kid count to five, paying off our minivan, and launching numerous side projects (like IDEMA and The Island Story). 

My wife has also stepped out relaunching her website, launching a podcast, and publishing a conversation journal (on top of having a young baby girl to care for).

This year's greatest milestones for us included finishing our student loans ($155k), and for me, publishing my second book for small business owners (The Jump). 

Surrounding these two great achievements are numerous iterative shifts and adjustments to mold our life (time, money, & attention) into our desired vision (slowly and surely).

I'm grateful for the amount of progress (and with God's heavy lifting through it all) we've made in the last six years, and its an inspiring example of how much we truly can accomplish in a short period of time after starting over from scratch (even with debt slowing us down).

But, with this extended amount of effort to steward and build upon what God has graciously provided, it's been a tiresome journey to rebuild our new life. And, I've likely made it more difficult I’m some ways (by publishing books and maintaining this blog along the way) while making it easier in others (building awareness and credibility for my consulting work). 

More details to come, but my plan in 2020 is to slow down on these side ventures and rest in this extra margin throughout next year. It'll be a year of reflection, release, and rejuvenation for the exciting things on our horizon in 2021 and beyond.

But, before I jump to what’s ahead (in the upcoming final blog post for the year), let’s check back in on the goals I began with at the start of 2019.

"Great ideas need landing gear just as much as wings." - Artie Ruderman

To promote my second book for small business owners (The Jump: From Chaos To Clarity For Your Striving Small Business), I've conducted multiple podcast interviews over the past few months. 

The latest comes from the Pro Business Channel with Rich Casanova (co-founder) and Artie Ruderman (business development consultant). This will be my second appearance on the show, with the first happening in early 2016 with Craig Williams.

If you're not familiar with the Pro Business Channel, their focus is on creating content from conversations. They produce numerous shows as part of their network and also offer solutions for organizations to produce their own podcasts.

"When you are not all in, you're holding back." - Jason Scott Montoya

In this episode, we dive into the book's framework including IDEMA, the four pillars of an effective business strategy and whether or not you should continue your business or shut it down. Click the play button below to begin listening to the interview.

In her concise must-read book, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How To Thrive In Complexity (affiliate link), Jennifer Garvey Berger explores five human quirks that help us through life, but in complexity cause more problems and lead us down problematic pathways that amplify our complicated situations. 

In this monster article, I'm going to explore the book content and these introduced concepts while also listing multiple resources to help you understand, apply, and share them with others.

Let's start by quickly surveying the five quirks that easily become mental traps.