Introduction to Aging with Purpose

Speaker 1 0:07

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host psychotherapist, coach and empowerment expert, Beverly Glazer.

Beverley Glazer 0:36

What if the key to thriving in business and life is all about who you know, and what if you don't know too many people? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazzer, a transformational coach and catalyst empowering women to rewrite the rules, reclaim their voice and create the life they were meant to live, and you can find me on reinventimpossiblecom. Janice Porter is all about relationships. She's a relationship marketing strategist, a LinkedIn specialist and podcaster who transformed her teaching career into building a business through the power of connections. If you've been struggling with transitions in your life and your career, keep listening, because these strategies are going to excite you. Hi, janice, welcome Great to see you today.

Janice Porter 1:29

Thanks, Beverley, it's my pleasure to be here.

From Teaching to New Career Paths

Beverley Glazer 1:33

I'm excited to talk to you. Well, it's really interesting because you went from teaching. You loved children. Teaching was what you did. Teaching was what you loved. What age group did you teach when you started teaching?

Janice Porter 1:48

I started as a primary grade teacher grade one, grade two, grade three and towards the end of my teaching career, which was about 14 years, I was in the what we call the intermediate grades four, five, six, Okay, so you always loved children.

Beverley Glazer 2:04

Yes, four, five, six, okay. So you always loved children because I still do.

Janice Porter 2:08

I love teaching and I was always. I always knew I was going to be a teacher.

Beverley Glazer 2:14

Well, you're still teaching, but teaching on a different level Exactly. You know completely different, and we're all children at heart anyway.

Janice Porter 2:24

Well, for me. For me it was like like I loved teaching but I didn't like the bureaucracy of the public school system, and that's what I think in the end got me. And I had an opportunity to take a break, trying to get pregnant. It was having issues and whatever and then when it was time to go back, I did, I did have my second daughter and go back to the opportunity to go back to teaching, and I just couldn't quite get there. So that's when things started to change for me, Right?

Beverley Glazer 3:00

Yeah, right, but you had many changes. You started really as being a young teacher, and you love children. You had the idea of the picket fence. You lived that life as a young girl and you got married and your picket fence fell apart too. That's right. That's right, yeah. And did you continue teaching or did you change then? Like what went on?

Janice Porter 3:29

No, I went back. Well, I didn't right away. I went, I did a different job for a year and then I went back to teaching and I cause that's where I could, you know, make money and that's where I was. And also at this point I had a very young child and I needed to make, you know, to be able to support myself. So I went back to teaching and that's when I taught most of my career there, about another eight, nine years, and then that's when it was enough already. You know, right, right.

Beverley Glazer 3:59

But your husband was a teacher as well.

Janice Porter 4:02

My second husband was a teacher. He was a career teacher, he loved teaching and coaching. And, yeah, he was he. He could turn a blind eye to the, you know, the bureaucracy and just put his head down and teach. I, on the other hand, couldn't, so it was different.

Beverley Glazer 4:21

So how did you make that transition? Because teaching adults and teaching children two different things. I know.

Janice Porter 4:27

And and to be honest, I didn't know what I was going to do. And when I was on leave, a friend of mine said to me hey, they're looking for someone to do some contract training at the telephone company. Are you interested? And I said I don't know, sure, I'll be open to a conversation. And uh, uh, and she said to me well, well, give me your resume and I'll take it in. And I went resume, I'm a teacher, what do I know about resume anyway? So that was sort of the beginning of the of the changeover, and I ended up being a contract trainer for many, many years and growing and learning, one, how to teach adults and two, how to teach or train on telephone equipment, voicemail equipment, how to program telephone equipment, I mean it became a whole other thing but I could do it on my terms because I was a contractor all that time. So that was my next career.

Discovering the Power of LinkedIn

Beverley Glazer 5:34

No, no, no, that's true, it was on your own terms, but here it's kind of totally different from marketing and networking, and where did you realize how important those relationships were?

Janice Porter 5:47

Well, for me, relationships were always important. However, my contract gig I could see the writing on the wall. Things were changing in the corporation, times were changing and eventually I was let go, and this was the early 2000s and I didn't get a gold watch, I didn't get a pension, I didn't get any of that from being there all that time. But I knew that that was the risk I took. But now I had to figure things out for myself and I tried to continue what I was doing at the telephone company on my own, and I didn't know anything about marketing, I didn't know anything about anything to do with small business, because all I did was show up and they'd send me to train somewhere.

Janice Porter 6:34

So I got really involved in the local chamber of commerce and met a lot of people, asked a lot of questions, tried to sort of find something that that I don't know I could do, I suppose.

Janice Porter 6:51

But I met a young entrepreneur who had a business doing professional organizing and she was selling licenses for her already organized business and I'm a Virgo so I love being organized and that appealed to me. So I learned a lot from her and I bought her first license and I went through the chamber started to meet a lot of people and now I could teach again because I was able to do presentations to the business owners, lunch and learn things like that around being organized and so forth, and that started that little business going. And I did that for two or three years. And then I got serious about how do I run my own business and I didn't qualify for a government funded program that a lot of people were able to take, but I was able to take a short one and learn a little bit about the basics of your own business. But I pretty much learned as I went and made lots of mistakes and, yeah, got into different things, network marketing being one of them and then I found LinkedIn and that sort of changed everything.

Beverley Glazer 8:12

What did LinkedIn do for you?

Janice Porter 8:14

Well, for me, what happened was, you know, social media was pretty new in the early 2000s and I kind of dabbled in.

Janice Porter 8:22

I didn't like Facebook, it really didn't appeal to me. And then I joined LinkedIn early on, but I didn't know what it was and I kind of left it be. And then somebody I went for a walk with a friend one day and I asked her she knew about LinkedIn and she said yes, you need to talk to this guy, it's brilliant and he'll show you all about it. And this young man actually sat down and gave me the basics on LinkedIn and this started to go around in my mind that, oh, my goodness, I like this. This is a straightforward business type platform that I started sharing information about with my friends, and then I realized that this was something I could dig my teeth into and actually teach, and so it brought me around to being a teacher again in my own way, and that's what I loved about it it was straightforward, it was easy to teach for me, and that's how it started, and that was around 2011. So it's gone. It's sort of evolved since then.

Beverley Glazer 9:33

Sure, how can somebody who's never done this, who knows about CVs and you know resumes and they're ready to get out there old school, what would you tell them about now reaching out online, linkedin, social media, creating connections there? What would you tell them?

Janice Porter 9:46

Well, I would tell them, regarding particularly LinkedIn, that it's still an untapped market for networking in so many ways. There's over a billion people on LinkedIn now and growing all the time. However, there's only probably about what did they say? 300 million that actually use it. Right, so it's an untapped market. So it was. You mentioned resumes and things like that.

Janice Porter 10:21

So originally it was a job seeking type platform, but today it's what we call the business platform for networking and for you know, the business social media platform the only one, really and so it has its own flavor, it has its own way of being, and there are things that one needs to know to be effective on LinkedIn. But it's more than what it was. It's now a place to strategically reach out to people that maybe you want to meet or want to meet their people, that they know, and there's ways to do it effectively that most people don't even do. It's also a place to be visible and show your authority through your content. It's a lot, you know, but just like what do they say? Eat an elephant, one bite at a time. You just start to learn how to do it and do it effectively, rather than just throwing mud at the wall, which most people do.

Beverley Glazer 11:25

Yeah, no, what I'm hearing is for somebody that doesn't understand it.

Janice Porter 11:30

Just go in and take a look and watch, and before you even do anything, yeah, and if you're smart, you'll get someone to help you who knows what they're doing Exactly, so you're not wasting your time and doing it wrong.

Beverley Glazer 11:42

Exactly and not fear it. And the only way to not fear it is press that button Exactly and then you start to understand. Also, there's so much information that you could read online, but reading is not the same as doing.

Janice Porter 11:55

Well, and not everybody learns that way right, you're right, some people are better at doing and some people need the visual and so forth. So for sure.

Beverley Glazer 12:04

Exactly. And so social media and connections. How do you end up keeping those connections? Because you know, on social media what happens is people meet you, people greet you and off, they go into cyberspace and you never hear from them again. Right, and what do you do about that?

Janice Porter 12:20

And I think that actually that statement is true of in-person networking as well, because you've got to find your people, you've got to find who do you really connect with, and then staying connected is the hardest part and it takes work, it really does, and maybe you have a rhythm around it, maybe you don't know what to do, but really communication can be in so many ways. I had a situation the other day where not a situation, but for me I act a lot on my promptings, meaning that somebody comes to my mind or comes on my heart. That means I need to reach out to them, and I did something the other day. This happened. There's a woman that I've known for a while. She's a realtor. She had actually done some work for us a few years ago. She had reached out in a marketing way a month or so ago, a couple months ago, and I meant to reach out then and it got lost in the shuffle and that day she was on my heart. So I picked up the phone. Isn't that strange? Nobody ever picks up the phone.

Janice Porter 13:30

I picked up the phone and called her and, because she's a realtor, I thought she'd answered the phone right Realtors usually do and she did. And the very first thing that I said to her was, after, you know, saying hi was do you have a minute now, or or should you know? Should I call back, cause you always want to respect people's time, of course. She says I have 10 minutes, I'm in the car, great. So we chatted and we ended up booking a call for this next week to follow up on something that we talked about.

Janice Porter 13:58

But if you can do that in rhythm, if you can speak to somebody, maybe you have a conversation for the first time offline, like you've had a couple of messages on LinkedIn and the object is always the objective is always to take them offline to a phone call or a Zoom call or in-person meeting and then from there, if you think it's going further one.

Janice Porter 14:23

You want to follow up always, whether that's with a text, email, a phone call or heaven forbid, as I love to do send a card and because I love that tangible touch that people get and they remember longer, and then put them into your follow-up calendar or mark a day then, two months from now or a month from now, to follow up and talk to them again. You have to keep people in that flow to stay connected. Maybe something comes up that you think of that person, they might be interested in it. You send it to them. Something of value just staying on top of it's, in top of mind with them is big and very helpful would you have any advice as what a follow-up calendar even is?

Beverley Glazer 15:14

I know there's all kinds of platforms that do that, but if you're're new at this, you can be clueless.

Janice Porter 15:21

Well, and first you have to decide do I want to go old school or new school? Right, you know, old school, having a calendar or an actual physical calendar on your desk. You just put that person, you do it. Maybe you have a time each week for follow-up that's a good idea, actually Friday's follow-up day, and maybe Friday morning you assign yourself a couple of hours to do that follow-up. So whoever is in that next follow-up week, you would have them already listed on your calendar with their phone number or their email or whatever you're going to do. And then, if you're more new school, then it's.

Overcoming Fear of Rejection

Janice Porter 15:58

Do I want a CRM, a customer relationship manager program, or do I just use a spreadsheet? I tend to use my calendar, my online calendar, where, if I've talked to you, I'll move it forward a couple of weeks to touch base with you again in my follow-up time period. But everyone's different time period, but everyone's different. Some people want the sophistication either of Sales Navigator, which is the more sophisticated sales producing portion of LinkedIn, maybe they have there's so many CRMs, from Salesforce, which is one of the big ones, to some of the smaller ones that are less sophisticated. I've tried them all. I can't seem to get into a rhythm of them myself, to be honest. So for me, I do it with my calendar but and sometimes a spreadsheet. Especially if I've gone to meet a lot of people in a group, then I want them on a spreadsheet so I can make sure I connect with them accordingly. I hope that helps.

Beverley Glazer 17:01

Oh, I'm sure it will. And let me also ask you, though you just picked up a phone to this realtor expecting this person to pick up, but maybe not.

Janice Porter 17:11

I didn't expect her to, but I was surprised that she did. But that's good, okay, sorry.

Beverley Glazer 17:16

Yeah, well, no, no, no, Because what happens also is there is a fear, a fear of reaching out. Now, this person was somewhat of a stranger, but really what you're saying is you made a mistake here with the way you reached out to me and maybe I can help you. You know, you didn't actually have to say that, but if she came into salesy and you can offer a suggestion, you can feel that somebody is going to be offended and how do you?

Janice Porter 17:46

By picking up the phone.

Beverley Glazer 17:49

You mean by calling them, by picking her up, then saying you know, I thought of you and there's a reason. It wasn't because of her sale, it was really because of your sale. It wasn't because of her sale, it was really because of your sale. And so, how you know, how can somebody who really has the same intent that you had but is not as experienced, how can they overcome their fear of rejection right there?

Janice Porter 18:12

Well, that's a really good question. First of all, that fear of rejection. You have to build that thick skin over time because really those are two things I learned a long time ago. One is um is um, don't take it personally. And two, don't be um. Well, it's almost the same thing, like don't be um, uh, affected by the outcome. Don't expect, you know, and then get disappointed you can't. It's like okay.

Janice Porter 18:55

So if the purpose of the call is just a follow-up or if you have what you're saying, I think what you're saying is do you have an ulterior motive? Okay, all right. So in this case, this is a good example, because I did have an ulterior motive. I meant two things. One, she'd had some health issues. Her husband had some health issues. I was genuinely concerned and I had sent a card or two over a period of time. But I was looking in that conversation If it didn't happen, it didn't happen and I would have done it another time.

Janice Porter 19:32

But I was looking for an opening and she actually gave it to me, because I said something about have you been I'm sensing you haven't been working a lot over the last year or so with the health issues. She said no, actually I haven't, and I jokingly said, hey, you should come join my team with my card company. I said you'd be so good at it, you wouldn't have to go out of the house to do it. And she said, speaking of that, I do want to talk to you about starting that up again. So she kind of I was. That's how it came about. So we had this piece to the conversation. I said, well, I'd love to show you what's new. Let's do it on a call next week. We didn't do it right then and there, and because I wanted to respect the time that you know, she picked up the phone and she was driving somewhere and that was it.

Janice Porter 20:29

So if it doesn't happen, though, it doesn't happen. So you have to. You have to make the call really about them. You have to be much more focused If it happens. Listen, listen for the clues of the um mottos, or that we that we talk about with the sense the card sending company that I'm with is send out, and it's the same thing on the phone send out to give, with no expectation, don't send out to get right. So if you send a card to someone and you send it out there, they're not necessarily going to say thank you for the card, like bless my mom. She used to thank people for the thank you cards, for the thank you cards, like she was always doing that. She was never really able to say, oh, that was for me, that's really nice. She always felt she had to do something else. But most people will not comment. But you shouldn't expect that. Just let it go. You do it for the right reasons, then it's, it's going to work out right. Send out to give, not to get.

Beverley Glazer 21:42

Yes, and that would be in selling as well. Absolutely.

Janice Porter 21:46

Yes, it's. It's about looking for how you can serve really.

Beverley Glazer 21:53

Right. What do you tell an older woman who feels it's too late to even start? Janice?

Janice Porter 22:00

I know it isn't because I'm old and a lot of my energy comes from being able to help people. And I have friends who are retired and say why are you still working? Why are you still working? I said because I don't work as long hours as I used to, but I love working, because I love meeting people and I love talking to people. I have my podcast, like you do, and I get to meet so many interesting people by having that podcast. To meet so many interesting people by by having that podcast and working with younger people gives me energy and keeps me young as well. So I say no, you've got wisdom. That's the word I love to use with with older people, older women like myself. It's it's you've got wisdom to offer. And, and as long as you keep up with the times, if that makes sense, because I think that that helps, it is. It's funny.

Janice Porter 22:57

I saw a I think it was on Facebook. I saw a clip of a young guy who was 34 years old and he was a professor at a university or a guest professor, and he was, or he came to a high school to speak to these kids. So these high schoolers are gen alpha, gen alpha, okay, and um, because they're under 20, right, they're, they. They were born in the 2000s, right? So they're Gen Alpha.

Janice Porter 23:33

So he said at the beginning of his speech that he was going to speak to them. He's going to do his whole speech in their language, because they have a lot of slang language that nobody knows what they're talking about. And he started to deliver this speech and he did so in there, using their idioms and their terms, and they were killing themselves, laughing in the audience because they they connected with them and it's the same principle, right? Only in a different. I don't know if I could go that far, but, um, you know cause, I haven't really experienced that one yet, but definitely with the. You know the Gen Z, gen, x, gen, you know the millennials, that kind of thing.

Beverley Glazer 24:18

Yeah, now what you're actually saying is stay relevant, have an open mind, be curious throughout this whole thing. Thank you so much, janice. Janice Porter is a relationship marketing strategist, a LinkedIn specialist and a podcaster who transformed her teaching career into building a business through the power of connections. Here are some takeaways from this episode. Meaningful relationships matter. Start cultivating them, build a LinkedIn profile to attract the right people and stay curious. It opens you up to new possibilities.

Key Takeaways and Resources

Beverley Glazer 25:01

If you've been struggling to make a career transition or to improve your business, here's what you could do right now Connect with a potential client, customer or friend. Give without intending to receive, and be curious in all their needs. For similar episodes on transitioning your career when you're over 50, check out episode 109 and 117 of Aging with Purpose and Passion. And, if you love travel, listen to the Ageless Travel podcast and subscribe to the Travel Tuesday newsletter. The Ageless Traveler is the number one resource for active travelers 60 plus. It's hosted by Adrienne Berg, whose mission is to ensure that you never, ever stop traveling, and all these links are going to be in the show notes as well. So where can people learn more about you, janice, and about your podcast, and where can they find you?

Janice Porter 26:05

They can find me at JanicePortercom, and there they will see all the different things that that I can support them with and and more about me. Uh, they can also find me on LinkedIn at, linkedin. com slash in slash, janice Porter. So it is easy to find me on LinkedIn. And my podcast is called relationships rule and it's everywhere Uh. Apple Spotify wherever yeah, terrific, yeah. And my podcast is called Relationships Rule and it's everywhere. Apple Spotify wherever yeah, terrific.

Beverley Glazer 26:35

Yes, and if you didn't pick up those links, they're going to be in the show notes. All of them also will be on my site, which is reinventedpossiblecom. And so, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions? Are you living a life that you truly love? Get my free guide to go from stuck to unstoppable. And that where do you think It'll be? In the show notes, right below this episode as well. You can connect with me, Beverly Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group on Facebook, that's Women Over 50 Rock, and thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe, drop us a review and send it to a friend, and remember you only have one life, so live it with Purpose and Passion

Speaker 1 27:35

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossible. com and, while you're there, join our newsletter subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.