Episodes

  • From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli

    From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli
    Aug 19 2025
    What happens when a cybersecurity engineer walks into a fashion boutique? For Harish Chandramowli, it sparked an idea that’s now helping small fashion brands save time, money, and sanity. A chance observation in a New York store became a mission to untangle problems in inventory, communication, and operations many brands struggle with. In this episode, I speak with Harish, founder of Flair Software, about how he went from working at Bloomberg and MongoDB to building a platform that fixes the messy back-office problems fashion brands face. Harish explains why seasonal inventory is a high-stakes game, how communication breakdowns can cost thousands, and why he built his solution to integrate with Shopify instead of competing against it. Tune in now to learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We have a lot of technological advances, a lot of digital technology, and a lot of the efforts around it have been used primarily around digital products, primarily around some of the platforms and everything else, but there’s also an aspect that I’m hopeful around that really takes some of the digital technology that we have and uses it to enhance the physical products and the actual life that we have outside of our computers in real life. My guest today, Harish Chandramowli, is the founder of Flaire Software and he has some interesting solutions for the fashion industry and other kind of inventory-related pursuits. --- Harish, welcome to the program. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for joining us. Now, first of all, kind of have your feet in both worlds, whether it be kind of our technological world as well as the world of fashion, the world of some of these in-real-life types of pursuits. Tell me a bit about your story, where you started and how you came up with the idea, what you observed that led to Flaire Software. Yeah. Just taking a step back, I am not from fashion industry. It’s all pretty new to me. I did my master’s in cyber security actually in Johns Hopkins, then I worked as security engineer in a bunch of very data-related platforms like Bloomberg, MongoDB. And MongoDB was my last gig where I primarily started as cloud security engineer but moved on to like an Atlas dedicated team where you see how lot of different people use databases. And, interestingly, there are a lot of retail companies using databases very heavily. That made me more and more curious on how software is being used in retail industry and why database is like one of the biggest line expenditures. On top of that, when I was looking into ERPs, Oracle is one of the biggest player in the ERP market, which made me even more curious on what this space is. What happens around here? Why is a database company spending so much on an ERP, on like a data workflow? Yeah. This kind of made me curious but, again, it was more like I don’t think I was into fashion or any of those things. I went to this store called ONS in Soho. It’s a great store you should check out if you are ever in like downtown area in New York. What’s the store called again? ONS. Okay. Orange, Naples, San Diego. So if you go to Soho and like downtown in the fashion districts, you will notice a lot of these small, small brands which is not your typical H&Ms or Zara. Yeah. So I was there, I was actually listening to their team meetings, talking a lot with their founder. I was looking at how they are operating in the back office. The first thing that stood out to me is that fashion as a whole uses a lot of software. One aspect of it which we are all familiar with is designing the fashion, like the threading, modeling and like the cut and everything. Another easier to relate option is like e-commerce site, where you list, sell products, and then there is a big piece of back office operation which kind of brings together your design teams to your sales team, your customer service team, which is ERP. And what I really noticed is that, especially in fashion, T-shirts are looked at size and colors, whereas a female swimwear product has cup size, torso length, color, and regular sizes. That means everyone looks at product in a very different way, and, often, people spend 100k, 200k hiring software engineers to customize the product structure on how they look at their business in the back office, how they analyze is my orange color moving faster than my red color, or is this torso length moving more than the other length? And it was very expensive, and having worked at MongoDB, having seen how a schemaless database, how giving the power to user to define schema can help people, it just stood out to me that why haven’t we done that in ERP? And that’s what led to Flaire. Essentially you looked at what happens at a lot of these smaller fashion companies and ...
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst

    Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst
    Aug 5 2025
    We have more options than ever in modern life, but is that really a good thing? Digital technologies that claim to make our lives easier, like restaurant ratings and dating apps, are all around us, but they usually end up making us feel even more stressed. In this episode,I speak with Emily Pabst, the founder of Remake the Rules and a decision-making coach. Emily discusses how our lives are being shaped by "choice tech" and how to regain control. We look at the mental traps that undermine our thinking, how having too many options can lead to anxiety, and how to prevent decision fatigue. Emily explains how small business owners, corporate executives, and regular people can simplify their decisions, live more clearly, and reconsider their relationship with technology. --- Listen to the podcast here: Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In today’s world, we just have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of choices to make them from. I often make the reference to doing a Google search for something like a therapist, something that a lot of people will look for at some point in their lives, and if you ever look for a therapist, you’ll see a Google search and you may see the people who do, say, the type of therapy you’re looking for, work with the type of people, whether it’s individual, couples, family, stuff like that, whether it’s specific to addiction counseling versus just kind of trying to get a leg up on life, but it’s really hard to know what you really want because you’re going to meet the therapist and you’re going to find out more about the person and whether or not you vibe, and I think that paradigm applies to a lot of other places in life, especially in our technical world where you just have so many choices and so much information and you’re like how do I sort through it all and how do I avoid getting decision fatigue? My guest today is Emily Pabst, and she is the founder of Remake the Rules, a decision-making coaching service. --- Emily, welcome to the program. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining from the other side of town here in Denver. And first, to I guess orient, tell us a little bit about Remake the Rules, because I think the idea may be a little bit new to some people out there listening about someone to coach you to make decisions other than whatever, probably the four or five family members they all have giving them advice. My background is in information science and data analysis, actually, and, throughout these last few decades, what I’ve really noticed both in my professional and then also in my personal life is that the overwhelming addition to what I call choice tech tools to our lives, so those are going to be tools that are digital information tools that impact how we think, how we feel, and, most importantly, how we make decisions. That the addition of those tools, while they promise a lot, a lot of additional knowledge, a lot of additional tools, they often do not deliver and they often do the exact opposite. They create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, a lot of overwhelm. And so I essentially help people live and thrive well within this sort of overwhelming information environment that we’ve created for ourselves. So, give us an example of a choice tech tool that did overpromise, underdeliver, and essentially make things more frustrating. Sure. I think the number one for many, many people, it’s going to be online dating. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen so many videos and essays about how 90 some percent of people involved in it are frustrated with the online dating world, that there’s like this idea that there’s maybe 5 or 10 percent of people that are really thriving in it, and then the other 95, 90 percent are just fed up. Yeah. I mean, the frustration is absolutely real, and sort of the stance that I take on these information tools, regardless of if it’s online dating, I tend to focus on sort of high stakes environments. So, in many cases, a choice tech tool like online dating has now fully taken over how folks make decisions in regards to who they choose to meet and spend time with and potentially become a partner, a life partner, so this is a very high stakes choice that we are now inviting these technology tools into to be a major part of, but it can be a lot of different things. Small business ownership involves a ton of tools very similar to this that are intended to help you thrive in your business and often are confusing and overwhelming, and same with leading large organizations. Those are sort of the three realms where I work with people most frequently because they are both so inundated with these tools while also really needing the outcomes to be positive and to work productively for them. So, you talk about online dating, of course, being high ...
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman

    Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman
    Jul 29 2025
    Most of us focus on the obvious when it comes to wellness, what we eat, how we move, and how much we rest. But there’s another daily habit that could quietly be affecting our health: the water we drink. We often think about diet, exercise, and even sleep when it comes to our health, but how often do we think about our water? In this episode, I talk with Cydian Kaufman, water quality expert CEO of Pure Water Northwest, about what’s really in your tap water and how it could be affecting your energy, skin, and long-term health. Cydian explains the difference between “legal” and “healthy” water standards and shares practical tips on improving your water at home, from reverse osmosis systems to dealing with PFAS and other hidden contaminants. Know what you drink. Tune in now. --- Listen to the podcast here: Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Growing up on Long Island, my family, we always used some form of a water filter. It was always –– it was before Brita but there was a predecessor to it, now a lot of people use Brita, or we would use bottled water. However, living in Denver, we recently had a project where we reconstructed our water pipelines to get the lead out of the water. Since then, I’ve actually drank all my water out of the tap here in Denver, Colorado. Whether that’s the right decision or not, I am not sure, so I’m going to introduce to you my guest, Cydian Kauffman, who is one of the owners of Pure Northwest Water, to tell me about water as well as whether or not I’m making the right decision with this current situation. --- Cydian, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate being here. It’s Pure Water Northwest, by the way, just so you know. I love talking about water. I’d be happy to jump right in and talk about Denver specifically, if you like, however you want to approach it. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. All I do remember is that a few years ago, they reconstructed the pipelines here in Denver and they said the project was to get the lead out of the water and that, since then, I’ve, at least, in my head, felt like just drinking the water out of the tap was perfectly fine. It might be. What zip code are you in? What, if you don’t mind saying that? Oh, wow. Yeah, we’re getting fine-tuned here. I’m in 80205. Right. Let’s get specific. So, you’re on the Denver Water Board, water quality –– Yeah, but I’m not elected to any water position here. I just –– Yeah, I know. I mean, you’re on the main water in Denver, Colorado, Yeah, I assume. I mean, I’m only like a mile and a half east of downtown. All right, so if you look up, and most people in the country can do this, you can actually go look up water quality reports for whatever water quality you’re on, and there’s two ways to go about this. One is to just literally look up the water quality report for your municipality, which I’ve got right in front of me, two seconds of doing a Google search, I got the Denver Water Quality Report. Yeah, that’s going to bring you to a page with a bunch of lists of what they do and how they do it and, eventually, you’re going to get to exact contaminants that they test for and their results. If you don’t want to just take their word for it, though, you can go to a website called the EWG, the Environmental Working Group, then go to their tap water database, type in your zip code and find your municipality that way, and then you can kind of compare those two. Now, unfortunately for most people, this is going to be more annoying than good experience because there’s so much confusion in these lists, like what does it mean to have eight parts per billion of bromodichloromethane, which happens to be in Denver water. If you talk to someone like myself, we will know right away, bromodichloromethane, it’s a chlorine byproduct. It happens when you put chlorine in the water and it’s one of the total trihalomethanes, which is basically a category of chlorine byproduct that can be in the water. At really, really high amounts, you can have cancer from that. At the amounts that tend to be in municipalities, you would have to be very susceptible in order to get cancer from the amount of bromodichloromethane that happens to be in most municipalities. Some municipalities, though, have it at extremely high amounts. So, the particular water that you’re dealing with, it’s so much about your susceptibility to it and it’s so much about the amount that’s in the water, and it does require some expertise to interpret it and understand it, but doing that is definitely worthwhile. There’s a lot of solutions to get you there too. You mentioned certain chemicals, and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for anyone listening to follow bromodimethyl –– I’m probably –– ...
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    46 mins
  • How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen

    How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen
    Jul 22 2025
    You’ve got the skills, the service, maybe even a killer website, but how do you actually get people to notice? In a world flooded with content and AI-generated everything, standing out feels harder than ever. So, what do you do? In this episode of Action Antidote, we’re joined by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at Market Surge, to break it all down. From finding your true audience to navigating tech overwhelm (hello, AI everything), Reed shares practical tips on marketing smarter, not louder. He also drops insights on how to stay human in your message, even as the internet gets noisier by the minute. If you’re running a business, building a brand, or just trying to get traction in a crowded world, this one's for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting a business noticed, and this conversation may even get into this broader concept of getting noticed in general, because anyone that starts a business, your product could be amazing but you would need to actually get that product noticed. But, increasingly, in the traditional job market, we’re also seeing people need to find a way to get noticed, in the sense of every single job you apply for online now has 700 or whatever resumes, all kind of pointing in and it’s just a pretty crowded world out there in general with the internet having kind of connected everything with everything, everyone with everyone, and we’ll talk a little bit about whether or not AI tools have the potential to change that. But here to talk about just what you need to do to get your business noticed, I would like to invite my guest, Reed Hansen, the chief growth officer of MarketSurge and owner. --- Thank you. I’m really glad to be here. Oh, thank you for coming on. And so, I’m envisioning a situation a lot of people have where, okay, you’ve developed a product or a service, let’s just say someone just decides to go freelance because they got laid off or their job didn’t really work out well, it wasn’t what they wanted to do and someone just has a skill, say, you’re even like a graphic designer or something like that and this is a great skill set for a freelance option. So, if someone’s doing something along those lines, what do they need to be thinking about as far as, “Okay, I have this great skill set but now I need to get customers. Now, I need to get people to buy it,” essentially? Yeah, no, that’s a great question, and I think really the essential question is you’re going into business for yourself. Obviously, you will have a certain set of skills from previous experience and attributes and talents but you want to be super hyper-focused on the needs of the customers you want to work with. And that is tricky because you want to understand both where are they located? Where are they found? Where is their attention focused on? And we talk about social media platforms. Is your audience more of a Facebook audience or more of a Discord or Reddit audience? And you need to understand those things and put yourself in the shoe, because you are not your customer. You don’t just instinctively have all the same interests and likes as your customer. You have to understand where they are and that’s the first thing. Where are they? And then you want to think about what do they need, what do they value. Some roles might be a little easier, like if you are an expert plumber, you kind of know what is needed and what they need, but if you come in as a creative, you have a wide, broad range of things that you need to tailor your offering. An example, the plumber, right? I mean, your customer is a homeowner who had some sort of plumbing problem happen to their home. That’s just great, like 100 percent clear example. I think it’s well established what those kinds of needs are, but I think a lot of us get into businesses that could work across a wide variety of different use cases and we need to decide which of those use cases we want to work on. It’s like you don’t start by saying, like, “I really like to blog and, therefore, I’m gonna sell blogs,” or, “I’m going to sell writing.” That’s just not enough. You have to make it more tailored and actually understand a group or a cluster of customers to take that to market. And what goes into the understanding of the customers? Because a lot of people have traditionally talked about customers as in, okay, your customers tend to be upper middle class, age 35 to 50 something like that, right? But that’s not really a deep understanding of someone. I think what you’re talking about is understanding the customer’s needs, their pain points, what they’re going through when they’re going to see your service, and why they’re going to want to buy your...
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    42 mins
  • Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman

    Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman
    Jul 18 2025
    Ever feel like you're putting your message out there and... nothing? No response, no engagement, just silence. In today’s world of nonstop content and ever-changing algorithms, just showing up isn’t enough. You have to show up the right way. On this episode of Action Antidote, we're joined by Joshua Altman, Chief Marketing Officer at Beltway Media, to talk about what it really takes to get your message to land. With a background in journalism and social media strategy, Joshua knows how attention works and how to earn it. He shares why a message often needs more than one shot to stick, how to find the signal in all the digital noise, and why staying human is your greatest advantage in a crowded space. If you’re tired of guessing what works and ready to start communicating with clarity and impact, this episode is your cheat code. --- Listen to the podcast here: Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting your message out and about all the different ways that we have available to get our messages out and even how this landscape is changing quite a bit. I’m sure you’ve all heard a little bit about AI and the hype around where AI might be taking some things, but there are plenty of other progressions and other trends taking place. To stay updated on that and to give us some information about all the different platforms, all the different methods, all the different places we can go and also the ways we can craft our messages to our audience, I would like to bring on my guest today, Joshua Altman, who is the chief marketing officer of beltway.media, a company that provides fractional services to small- to medium-sized businesses. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me so. So, yeah, let’s start out by talking about your story. Has marketing, getting crafting messages, getting messages out, has that always been part of your path? In a way. I did not start in corporate or in marketing or anything along those lines. I went to journalism school and started as a journalist, and then went from being a congressional news producer and reporter to being a corporate communications person. I left my job, I was with The Hill newspaper for about five years and I left that to what I thought would be freelance reporting and producing. I was a cameraman, I was an editor, I was a producer, so very hands-on technical side of things in addition to the reporting, doing the interviews, the research. All the things people associate with print reporting, I was doing that plus video. That’s what I went to college for. I did my masters while I was a reporter. I was all in DC. I did that in something called communications, culture and technology and I thought I’d spend my career as a journalist. That wasn’t what ultimately happened. I left my job as a journalist, thinking, like I said, I’d be freelance, and then I kind of just fell into the corporate work, which is kind of what I’ve been doing since. So what made you leave your job? What was the –– was there an event that made you leave it? A certain realization? No. I mean, in terms of an event or a realization, I’ve been there just, like I said, for five years. I was kind of looking to grow and do something a little different than what I had been doing. I had great experiences where I was, was just looking to do more, again, as a reporter. I ended up doing something entirely different. So, when you were on the path of being a reporter, it seems like you had your hand in a lot of the areas of content creation or what we would call content creation now,. You talked about filming the video, video editing, doing everything. Was there certain aspects of it that started to intrigue you more, because you talk now quite a bit about how our messages are crafted, how are we actually reaching an audience? So in addition to doing video with The Hill newspaper, I also did a lot of their social media, not for my whole time there but for about the last 18 months or so, I was doing their social media as well. So, what I did a lot of was pooling things and making it fit how we wanted to communicate that story. So, sometimes, it was a longer three- to five-minute piece, sometimes it was just a sound bite. Sometimes, we have an interactive map. Sometimes, it was, primarily a social post. One thing we did a lot of there were vote counts, who’s going to vote for or against this bill that’s coming up. And a lot of that was literally on the website, it was a list. How can we make that list more engaging? That was a lot of things on social media, that was regular updates through different channels. At that point, it was Twitter, Twitter posts, Twitter accounts so if it was an energy bill, we had special ones for energy. How can we profile things? If this person’s ...
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    51 mins
  • Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter

    Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter
    Jul 8 2025
    Are you living life on autopilot, checking all the boxes but still feeling stuck? Ever wonder if the path that feels safe is actually keeping you small? What if the real key to freedom and fulfillment is creativity, not just in art, but in how you live, decide, and grow? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we're joined by Pia Liechter, founder of Kollectiv Studio and author of Welcome to the Creative Club. Pia opens up about how divorce, burnout, and losing her job became the turning point that helped her reconnect with her creative power. She takes us through her journey, including a bold ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and shares what it means to truly direct your own life instead of following someone else’s script. Pia reminds us that you don’t need permission to rewrite your story. Even small “firsts” can be powerful steps toward a life that feels more like your own. Listen in and discover how to tap into your creativity, take meaningful risks, and explore a version of life that’s built on your terms, not someone else’s. --- Listen to the podcast here: Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about something that can often get ignored in the modern world, and that is creativity, creative pursuits, and creative suits can take on so many different forms but can often fall into this bucket of things that the modern day cult of productivity, if you want to call it that, can really ignore as like, okay, it wasn’t really productive for you to spend a Thursday afternoon drawing a picture or something like that. My guest today has her own story around creativity. Pia Leichter is the founder of the Kollektiv Studio. --- Welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. It’s so nice to be here. Yeah, it’s nice to have you here. And let’s start with your story, because you recently published a book covering your story around kind of discovering your creativity. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s called Welcome to the Creative Club and it smashes the myth that creativity is reserved for the chosen few and invites everyone to access and apply creativity to the design of their lives, and I do share stories about how I lost and found my creative power and also really exploring what creativity means in moving into a much more expansive definition, because, often, what stops us from being creative is the belief or idea that I’m not the creative type. I want to debunk that one, because if you’re human, you’re an artist at play. So, this sounds like a story that a lot of people have, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone around my age say something along the lines of, “I’m just not a creative person, it just happens.” So let’s start with the specifics of your story. So you said you lost and found your creative abilities of some sort. Well, power, really, because, first, it starts with shifting my own experience or definition of creativity, which happened through different moments or pivots or sticky junctures in my life. For me, growing up with an artist father on the Lower East Side Manhattan, abstract, my dad is an abstract painter, creativity was just something we did. It was just a natural part of life. He’d be painting, I’d be writing stories as a little kid or poems or whatnot. And creativity, later on, I moved into the realm of commercial creativity. I worked in creative studios and age brand agencies for the majority of my career, well over –– 15 years, until I left to start my own business. And so creativity was still very much something I did. When life threw me through the windshield of the car I was driving that needed to get fixed, changed, traded in through a series of events that, say, the divorce, unhealthy rebound relationship, and then getting fired from my six-figure cushy creative partner and creative director role, I kind of sat looking at the shards of what my life was in that moment and decided to, instead of stressing and staying and trying to figure out what to do next, I decided to check off a bucket list desire and go on the Trans-Siberian Express, which I’ve always dreamed about. Felt like every –– I had lost everything, felt like I was lost, so I decided to change it up. And it was while I was on the train, hurtling through Siberia, looking around me, looking at the Russian man who drank too much vodka who was punching the steel wall and looking at the socks hanging and the smell of sauerkraut and looking at the scenery and kind of sitting back and reflecting on, I had the epiphany that, “Oh, I’m creatively directing my life. I creatively directed this scene. I brought myself here.” I could have chosen a variety of different things, but I chose to put myself on a train across China, Mongolia, and Russia and switch the scenery, switch the...
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    49 mins
  • How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski

    How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski
    Jul 1 2025
    Are your dreams just ideas floating in your mind or are you ready to turn them into action? Most of us have big goals, but the real challenge is execution. How do you stay focused, avoid burnout, and actually get things done, especially when life gets messy or plans fall apart? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we’re joined by Joshua Kalinowski, former professional athlete, business leader, and the founder of Kalinowski Enterprises. Joshua shares what it really takes to “dream big and execute bigger”, his personal mantra that goes beyond motivation and into sustainable strategy. From building systems that support success to understanding your own rhythms and energy, Joshua talks about making smart, intentional moves even when life doesn’t go as planned. He opens up about losing his identity after baseball and how that led him to build not just businesses, but people from within. You’ll also hear how his “PILL” framework (Painful, Intentional, Lazy, and Loving) can transform your daily habits into lasting personal wins. Whether you're chasing growth in business, relationships, health, or simply looking to reclaim your time and energy, this conversation is a must-listen.Tune in now to learn how to build a life where your actions match your ambitions. --- Listen to the podcast here: How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This year, on this podcast, we’ve been covering a lot about practical tools in which to help you get going. There’s always a period of time to dream, to plan, to figure out what you want is, but, at some point, you have to actually, as my last episode we discussed, take action, and taking action requires some practical tools. So, to talk a little bit more about some of these practical tools that you can use in order to dream big but execute bigger, I would like to invite onto the show Joshua Kalinowski, the president and visionary for Kalinowski Enterprises, which involves a lot of things so we’re going to cover that all in the episode. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. My man, appreciate it. Man, it is so good to be here. Thanks for the intro. Oh, yeah, wonderful. And let’s start right with this whole dream big, execute bigger. That’s kind of your motto. It is, yes. Well, it really came, it’s just kind of, for me, it’s more of like just reminding me constantly that as much as I dream, I’ve got to take action on it so I’ve got to take action and execute on things at an even larger scale because, as we know, it takes so much more to actually get fulfillment out of that. It takes so much more to actually have these things that accomplishes so much harder so it’s just another like a mantra for me to remind myself that if I’m going to dream big, I’ve got to execute at an even bigger stage. So, yeah, so that execute bigger part of it, and I think this is something that, obviously, we talk a lot about people who just talk up a storm and talk is cheap, anyone can say, “One day, I’m gonna write a book,” “One day, I’m gonna do the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim,” as we kind of discussed before –– Good example, I love it. Yeah, so one day we’re going to do that, but most people acknowledge that you have to do something, but this whole execute bigger, do you encounter a lot of people who dream big but then execute, but their execution is not as big as it needs to be in order to make that dream a reality? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, you mentioned earlier, I’m the CEO and president of Kalinowski Enterprises and so I get to see a lot of entrepreneurs, and we hire a lot of people within our company so we go anywhere from real estate all the way to roofing and everything in between there. And so, yeah, you see so many people that say, “Hey, listen, I wanna be successful in this industry. I think I’m gonna be really good in this industry,” and you start to ask them, “Why do you think you’re gonna be good? Why is this industry something that’s attractive to you?” and they try to tell you a lot of like the reasons why in their mind that they’re going to be successful at it, but we see, oftentimes, those aren’t going to be the motivating factors. There’s going to be things, like it’s going to be eventually hard. You’re going to have to figure out, not everything about this industry is glamorous, and, in order to be successful, what are you willing to do in order to succeed? And like you were talking about, usually, what ends up happening is people are dreaming so large that they don’t even know how to start. So, how does someone dream big and execute bigger without burning themselves out? Well, you’re the expert in that, right? We should probably be talking more to you about this stuff. What I would say just complimentary to, you and I have a lot in common on literally ...
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    47 mins
  • Stop Living by Someone Else’s Script with Albert Bramante

    Stop Living by Someone Else’s Script with Albert Bramante
    Jun 23 2025
    Ever feel like you’re living a life that doesn’t quite feel like yours? Maybe you’re stuck in a job you don’t love, caught in routines you never really chose, or just feeling like something’s holding you back, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. A lot of that might be coming from beliefs buried deep in your subconscious, beliefs you didn’t even realize were running the show. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, I chat with Albert Bramante, psychology professor, talent agent, and author of Rise Above the Script. We dig into what it really means to live “by the script,” how to spot the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck, and why small, consistent actions (not huge leaps) are the real game changers. Albert shares insights from his own journey and the work he’s done helping people shift their mindset and build a life they actually want to live. So if you’ve been saying “someday” a little too often…maybe today’s the day to start taking that first step. --- Listen to the podcast here: Stop Living by Someone Else’s Script with Albert Bramante Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about kind of achieving your potential and achieving your potential through various different mechanisms. There’s no one set way, despite what they may have told you in school or some other traditional childhood component of your life, that there is no one set way in which you can achieve your potential. There are plenty of ways that we could all, as my guest today would say, Rise Above the Script. That’s the name of his book. My guest today, Albert Bramante, not only is an author but also a psychology professor and talent agent. --- Albert, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen, so much for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here and really happy to be part of the community here and happy to have a conversation, answer any questions and offer any insights that can be helpful. Yeah, that is wonderful. And so the core message behind this podcast is always about different ways that we can kind of achieve the life that we want, and it’s interesting that your book is titled Rise Above the Script because one of the common expressions I use is “living by the script.” When we talk about the script, I’m curious about if your understanding of the script is similar to the way mine is. Yeah, I’m not talking about the literal sense of a script, like for a play or for a movie. What I’m talking about, the script that we use as our internal mind and our internal guiding system, in a sense, so it’s what navigates our life, what navigates our purpose, and particularly our conscious and subconscious mind. And I use the metaphor of a script because the book was written for performing artists who use scripts all the time, so I used that as a metaphor to kind of help understand exactly what the message is and that is really working, rewiring our mindset, and changing our mindset and changing the approach that we live our life on a day-to-day basis. And is this rewiring of the mindset something that spans kind of almost any kind of pursuit? Because you talk about working with performing artists, we’ll encounter people who say, “I wanna level up at my job.” Maybe we’ll encounter some other people that’ll say, “I wanna leave the nine to five and I wanna build my own business,” or even someone that just wants to create a different community or some other aspect of their lives or they’re like, “I want my relationship to better. I wanna have a relationship.” All those different pursuits that we’re all having in order to level up our lives, is it similar subconscious pursuit? A hundred percent, yes, because all of that requires you to optimize your mindset and your subconscious beliefs and your conscious beliefs. And what can hold you back from any of these endeavors that you had indicated is limiting beliefs, and these limiting beliefs cannot just be conscious but they can also be subconscious, which means that they really guide the behavior on a really broad level. And so that’s why I kind of talk about the idea of rising above that so that you can transcend and change your life and create the life that you desire, create the action that you desire. Now, how would someone go about determining whether their limiting belief is conscious or subconscious? Well, I would say most likely it’s subconscious if you’re trying all the time, you feel that you can’t do anything right or you’re always struggling to get through your day or you’re starting and stopping and starting and stopping and you really don’t know exactly what is going on here. And that’s where it might be subconscious. Because I’m a psychologist, Sigmund Freud, for example, one of the iconic psychologists of our time, came up with the idea of the iceberg metaphor, which is if ...
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