We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Megan Kierstead a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Megan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

As the textbook embodiment of the word “precocious”, I was a kid who always wanted to be exploring and learning something new. My parents supported and encouraged this, no matter how esoteric and weird I went.

Here’s a small sampling to give you an idea:

-I read the Hot Zone and became obsessed with Ebola and filoviruses. My mother took me to Blockbuster to rent Outbreak and didn’t object when I left our public library with a pile of infectious disease books.
-When we had to build a model of a landform in the 4th grade, I didn’t think it was good enough to just portray a generic river. I insisted that it be a specific river, namely, the Hoosac river in my hometown, which means my father had to obtain topographical maps and help me construct a chicken wire/concrete monstrosity that weighed more than I did.
-I was at the perfect boyband age when the Backstreet Boys hit their peak, and I went full screaming teenybopper. I built a website and started collecting rare remixes and B-sides, eventually leading to a small entrepreneurial venture creating custom mix-tapes to sell on Ebay.

While I’m positive my parents were occasionally baffled by the intensity of my interests, they never discouraged me from any of them. This means I grew up knowing what it was like to follow my passion and be curious about anything and everything. I never felt pressured to spend time doing something I hated. My exploration was valued for its own sake, and there’s no better gift to have as a business owner.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I professionally studied human behavior as a product strategist and UX researcher for over a decade, helping top tech companies and startup founders make products that solve real problems, for real people. My work got me invited to prestigious conferences and even led me to teach human behavior research at University of California-Berkeley. I’m literally the expert that experts hire to teach them how to work with human behavior in the real world.

Now, rather than building products, I’m helping creative innovators build personal and organizational resilience, which the Harvard Business Review cites as one of the most crucial skills for leaders in the 21st century. Think of it like bespoke tailoring, but for your ecosystem of life and work.

That means, when I work with someone, we look at everything that impacts their happiness and success: habits, sleep, time & energy management, hobbies…we do it all.

I help leaders…
-Create sustainable motivation sans burn out and crazy deadlines.
-De-shame all the “shoulds” they have around productivity, consistency, and discipline, so that they can create habits that work for their unique context and brain.
-Identify keystone behaviors that will make other habits easier to change AND give you clear, measurable indicators that change is happening.
-Take back the power of unstructured time as creative fuel.
-Build a strong foundation of sleep, movement, stress management, and eating to support your brain being at its very best.

I have particularly deep expertise in working with folks with wonky dopamine, especially ADHD, so my work also incorporates deep nervous system knowledge and cutting edge cognitive science tools.

My clients call me their Yoda, but I have much better hair.

So many people try to brute force change, and we know from the research that it’s not particularly effective to “just do it.” At its core, my work is about teaching people to think from a human-centered perspective: I teach people to create change by understanding WHY we do the things we do and working with those reasons, rather than fighting against them.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Chef Dan Barber’s Ted Talk, “How I fell in love with a fish”, (2010) changed the entire trajectory of my career and life. He tells the story of a perfect piece of fish, and where it came from.

I don’t want to spoil it, since it’s worth the 20 minutes to watch it for yourself, but it opened up my mind to how important it is to understand and work with the intricacy of interconnected systems. A perfect fish doesn’t get that way because it’s given the correct food. A perfect fish becomes the perfect fish because of its place in a interconnected web of organisms and biological processes that support it becoming the perfect fish.

That perspective infuses my entire approach to business, coaching, and design.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I was laid off from my startup job in early 2020, right as COVID was shutting everything down. Rather than letting it get me down, I decided I’d make it the Best Thing Ever, and use the opportunity to make a career pivot (though I had no idea what was next).

I suspected that I wanted to start a business, but I had no idea what I wanted to do, and once I knew what I wanted to do, that it would take time to start making money.

I had no savings. I was single, with no family or partner to fall back on. I knew that starting a business was difficult enough, even without serious financial pressure, so I gave myself the gift of time by doing product strategy and UX research consulting work part-time to pay the bills.

My agreement with myself was this: I’d do the consulting work until I had two consecutive months of enough revenue in my business to support myself. Then I’d wind the part-time work down and go 100% into my business.

I wasn’t living a life of luxury, but the part-time work gave me enough resources to pay start-up costs and keep my head above water in those early months. I was able to go 100% in my business much more quickly than expected (after ~4 months), and I attribute it to my willingness to take pressure off myself to succeed right away.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://megankierstead.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megkierstead/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/megan.kierstead
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megankierstead/