Pivots, Reinvention, and Growth with Anne Pope

Endings and beginnings...In this last episode of Season 2 of the podcast, Dori sits down, in Brooklyn, with Anne Pope — in her new home in Portugal — to discuss the intricate art of reinvention. Together, they explore what it means to pivot—intentionally and unexpectedly—and the practices that make growth and transformation possible. Happy New Year to all. Whatever's to come in 2025, we have each other. If you've taken anything from this season of the show, I hope it's in the very precious and distinct value community has on our individual and collective lives.

Some Takeaways:

• Redefining Identity: The hardest part of any pivot is letting go of an old identity to embrace a new one. Anne and Dori discuss the emotional and psychological challenges of this process.
• The Role of Curiosity: Professional reinvention thrives on flexibility and curiosity. Staying open to learning and exploration can turn uncertainties into opportunities.
• Coaching as a Tool: Anne shares how coaching helped her uncover new perspectives and develop skills that supported her personal and professional evolution.
• Growth as a Practice: Reinvention isn’t a one-time event—it’s a consistent effort. Personal growth requires discipline, mindfulness, and a willingness to try again.

Why You Should Listen:

This episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating a significant change in life or career. Anne and Dori share actionable insights and candid reflections, offering listeners a roadmap for turning life's twists and turns into opportunities for transformation.

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Follow Life Changing with Dori Fern on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review to help us reach more listeners on their reinvention journeys.

What do YOU Think?
What has been the hardest part of your pivots in life or career? Share your thoughts with Dori on Instagram @dorifern.

Curious About Coaching?
Meet with Dori, for free! Get a taste of her coaching style and find out how working together can help you navigate your own pivots and transitions and move more freely toward your goals. Set up time for a call at https://dorifern.com

Connect with me!
Instagram: @dorifern
LinkedIn: Dori Fern
Email me: lifechangingwithdorifern@gmail.com

Visit https://dorifern.com for more about Dori's coaching services and to sign up for a complimentary call.

Transcript

Dori Fern  0:00  
Welcome to Life Changing with Dori Fern, a podcast about who we are, where we're going and what connects us. It's a show for people in progress at any stage. In some ways, the most challenging part of pivoting was having to redefine this question of well, if I'm not in this world, who am I? Then,

hi everyone. Seasons Greetings from Brooklyn.

This will be the last episode of season two of life changing with me. Dori Fern, for now, I will be back. I have some ideas to connect this podcast more directly with other parts of my career, for one, my coaching and other stuff, and I really want to find a more sustainable way to produce this thing in less time with better results. You can always tell when these seasons are coming to a close, because there's more and more time that elapses between episodes. But anyway, the good news is I can see growth once I figure out the steps to make it happen. One thing that's been consuming my time related to said other stuff, I'm in the process of launching an intergenerational women's community. Yes, the idea for this sparked from an intense conversation I had with a young woman I met at a local cafe just before Labor Day. She had turned 32 days before we got into an intense four hour conversation about getting older transitions, and about halfway through, I got that same spidey sense I had when I decided to quit my job and take a sabbatical three years ago, that this was Something I needed to do that I would do. So I'm starting with a series of small dinners. My pilot event happened earlier this month at my home. It went great, truly, but as it's supposed to do, it did bring up questions I need to answer. For one, I don't think I can or that I should keep having them at my small apartment. It makes it way more complicated to plan if I'm the one who needs to do the cooking. I know this, but I can't

quite let go of that part. It's like, Am I doing this more to fill my desire to cook for people? And is that okay, or is it to serve a larger community need? And if it's the latter, what exactly is that need? There's plenty of data about the value of intergenerational relationships, and virtually every woman I've mentioned this to loves this idea, wants to be part of it. But what would keep people connected? Do they need to stay connected? I have some thoughts, but I'm, I'm I'm trying not to get too far ahead of where I'm at right now, working on just doing shit without overthinking all the details about this, about other things. I wish I do this, you know, and I've been meeting a lot of high functioning doers lately, which I don't think is an accident. Maybe I'm just paying attention, and they've always been there, likely, and I'm trying to pay attention to how they operate. So anyway, that's where I'm at. I hope you are all well in this crazy time, in this crazy world, if you have any thoughts or ideas about this women's group or the podcast or anything really, reach out, send a voice note on the pod website, or just find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or or by email. For Christ's sakes, I'm very easy to find.

This all brings me back to today's episode, which appropriately is about pivots, also appropriate for the season. Closer, I'm interviewing Anne Pope, my Season Two co producer and editor. Anne came to me indirectly because of food writer Nicole Taylor, who I interviewed in the first episode of season two,

Unknown Speaker  4:22  
full circle indeed. Let's get into it. Anne Pope,

Unknown Speaker  4:29  
what do the people need to know about you in order to really know you?

Anne Pope  4:36  
Wow. What a question. I think I've been a person who has been able to professionally reinvent myself numerous times, and that has led me to be part of a lot of different environments and communities, and now I'm in the middle of a really big reinvention that is not just professional, it's my whole life moving to a new country.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
It. So I guess what that says about me is that I have a certain flexibility and a certain curiosity and a certain like just fucking make it work

Unknown Speaker  5:11  
to me, and that is kind of central to who I am.

Dori Fern  5:18  
How has that been a benefit and a curse 

Anne Pope  5:22  
on the positive side, I think it speaks to my curiosity and my willingness to try new things and apply myself to get better at them. That does leave a certain doubt at times about, well, what if I had just stuck with the original thing? Where would I be with it? 

Dori Fern  5:37  
Now, what's an example of that 

Anne Pope  5:40  
when I moved from my hometown of Berkeley, California to New York City, my goal was to be a drummer, a professional drummer, within a fairly short period of time, I sort of changed course. And if I had to point to one incident, I did a gig in Staten Island, and they insisted that we play all three sets, even though the place was pretty empty when we went to get on the ferry to go back to Manhattan, we were so tired that we didn't notice when it docked on the other side. So we actually rode back and forth to Staten Island twice, probably got home as it was getting light, and for 12 hours of my life, I think I got paid like $50 or something. And I thought, There has got to be a better way to make

Unknown Speaker  6:24  
this. 

Dori Fern  6:25  
And thus began a pivot, or a reinvention. 

Anne Pope  6:29  
The beginning of a pivot, I'd say, yes, yeah. 

Dori Fern  6:32  
So you leave performing and you took a pivot that was quite the opposite of performing in becoming an audio engineer, there aren't many more solitary pursuits than that, unless you know, how do you understand it? 

Anne Pope  6:47  
Well, I wouldn't call it solitary. Actually, it was very insular in the sense that you would spend long periods of time with small groups of people working intensely on something together. But I had a really, mostly a really good experience working in the world of recording studios and music recording I became sort of an itinerant assistant engineer, which was pretty challenging, because I had to learn the setups and all the different places that I worked. But the cool part of it was that it was a musically really eclectic situation, because a lot of recording studios, especially at that time, were really focused on one genre of music. So I worked at a hip hop studio and got exposed to that whole scene. I worked at another studio where we did a lot of live jazz recordings, and that was something I really, really loved. It was a difficult time financially. I mean, I had no money,

Unknown Speaker  7:40  
but it was fun. 

Dori Fern  7:42  
Is it okay to ask how old you are? 

Anne Pope  7:44  
Sure I was born in 1960 so I am currently 64 years old. 

Dori Fern  7:48  
Okay, so you are not making much money. You're doing really interesting work with really interesting people.

Unknown Speaker  7:58  
What changes then in the trajectory of your life and career, 

Anne Pope  8:04  
I remember reading an article about the Philip Glass ensemble because they were a really pioneering group in terms of using electronics and classical music in a certain way in this minimalist music world. And I thought

Unknown Speaker  8:17  
that'd be cool to work with him someday, and I did that too. I worked as his chief engineer for about a year and a half, and I got to work on a lot of his recording sessions, and I got to record and produce some artists that he was mentoring our studio, which was called Looking Glass, was one of the first studios in town to have this thing called Pro Tools, which was just to use the geekiest term possible, a non linear, digital recording computer based system, blah, blah, blah. Nobody was using that at the time. Everybody was using reel to reel tape machines, which we also had, I just had this feeling, this is going to change things a lot. I'm going to be obsolete soon. 

Dori Fern  9:06  
How old are you at this point? 

Anne Pope  9:08  
I was like, 34 I think, what do you think made you decide? I mean, I get the money part, but what did you think about? Well, maybe I could learn this new technology and stay here? Or what was going on in your mind about, you know, we make these choices in life all the time. Do we stick with something

Unknown Speaker  9:31  
versus pivot? And I guess, how were you thinking of that? 

Anne Pope  9:37  
At that point, I was starting to think about wanting to have some security in my life, what I wanted my life to look like. And as I started to learn more about the people that I had looked to as sort of role models for my career, I thought that if I did the kind of work this person is doing, that that meant that I could afford to buy an apartment in New York City.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Or I could afford to take a vacation once a year, those kinds of basic financial things. And then you learn that actually, that person is like, they're married to someone who's a high earner, right? Like, Oh, I thought this person was earning this amount of money that would allow them to have this life, and it's a more complicated, bigger picture than that. I was not married to a person who was a high earner, so I started to realize that the way I had been mapping out my life was based on an incomplete picture. Do you know what I mean? 

Dori Fern  10:36  
Yeah, I do really know what you mean, and I've talked about it before, how in my career, early on, the media was just filled with people who had parents who could help them pay their rent, or it's always been an industry that attracts the privileged because the jobs have not historically paid a lot, and the people who could get the primo jobs are the people who had someone to foot the bill for their lifestyle. They're subsidized. Yeah, on the other hand, I've also seen how some of those people did not come from that privilege,

Unknown Speaker  11:23  
and were really scrappy and just figured it out. 

Anne Pope  11:29  
Yeah, I definitely saw examples of that too. I think the bottom line about probably most creative industries is that your success is determined by how long you can just stay in it. For some people, they're able to stay in it and still live a fairly comfortable lifestyle because they have this backup from somewhere, like you were saying, 

Dori Fern  11:48  
or have the tolerance for pain for longer. 

Anne Pope  11:51  
Yeah, that's, that's the scrappy thing. 

Dori Fern  11:52  
Everybody has, the path that they have. And these are, these are calculations you make in a life, you know, how do you separate yourself from where you've been and what you chose and find a measure of acceptance for that, while still holding yourself accountable for the goals in front of you?

Anne Pope  12:13  
In some ways, the most challenging part of pivoting from that was having to redefine this question of, well, if I'm not in this world, who am I? Then, right, like, where's the value in what you're doing? 

Dori Fern  12:28  
How do you see your value

Unknown Speaker  12:31  
when you're expressly seeking literal monetary value

Unknown Speaker  12:39  
in a new path?

Unknown Speaker  12:41  
How does your personal value then come to light

Anne Pope  12:45  
at that time, I pivoted to work in film and TV. The film business was in a huge transition at that moment, so my timing was very, very lucky. I had no business working in this world of film. I knew nothing about it, but I did know about the digital technology, and I was able to help people who were used to cutting film with razor blades on a flatbed editor move into working with computers. I was able to support them. And so within, like a year, I'm a member of the motion picture editors guild, the union for post production, sound people for film and TV. I was like a freelancer in the Union for quite a long time, and then at a certain point I took a staff job at the Criterion Collection. The actual work I ended up doing I didn't enjoy at all, like the film restoration. It was extremely painstaking, but also, like, boring. I was at criterion for maybe was it two years. So I got laid off, and at that point I really wanted to do something just completely different. I was like, I'm done with the entertainment business and the media business. And I had gotten really interested in the world of sustainability and environmentalism, long story short was I ended up creating this community organization in my neighborhood in Brooklyn called Sustainable flatbush, and I ran that for about six, seven years in total. 

Dori Fern  14:17  
What made you decide to start that my partner at the time, who I'm still with today, when I said that I had been laid off, she said, You should do this thing that you care about, figure out a way to turn it into something. She said, I think you should start a blog. And I said, What's a blog?

Unknown Speaker  14:38  
I had all these different interests in this general topic of sustainability or environmentalism, and I also cared very, very much about this neighborhood that I was newly moved to. The beginning was about just trying to create some little projects, whether it was recycling education at the big annual street fair in the neighborhood.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
Or like asking the question, why are there no community gardens in this neighborhood? Why is there no communal space? Why are there no bike lanes? 

Dori Fern  15:07  
So what was your goal in doing this organization from a community standpoint,

Anne Pope  15:13  
this thing is wanting to find out who else shared these interests, to demonstrate that people who care about these things are everywhere, and we just need to find each other and create some outlets for our energy and our ideas. And how is it received by the community? You know, mostly really well, I made some amazing friends, people that I'm still close with. I learned so much about the city, about myself? Oh, God. I mean, it was, it was a huge, huge education for me. 

Dori Fern  15:47  
What did you learn about yourself?

Anne Pope  15:50  
The importance of listening to people, and the importance of not marching into a space and thinking that you're the one who knows what it should be, 

Dori Fern  15:58  
right? Yep, 

Anne Pope  16:00  
that was a real period of learning for me that has been so applicable to everything I've done since that's something I'm really proud of. 

Dori Fern  16:09  
And so what happens with that group?

Unknown Speaker  16:13  
One of the biggest learning things for me was that I had a bit of a starry eyed view of the nonprofit and educational worlds being more pure than the entertainment business,

Unknown Speaker  16:27  
and I kind of learned that wasn't true. What do you mean by that? Well, I had a very altruistic side to myself that I was looking for a way to express. I kind of assumed that the nonprofit world would be a better home for that.

Unknown Speaker  16:45  
I learned that a lot of that same negativity that I had found in the entertainment world existed there too. What would you say it was grounded in there versus entertainment,

Unknown Speaker  17:02  
I would say that it's all grounded in a sort of a scarcity mind,

Unknown Speaker  17:08  
like there are X amount of resources to be distributed amongst X amount of organizations, or musicians or filmmakers or whatever it is, that idea that everybody's fighting for a small pool of something.

Dori Fern  17:26  
Let's talk about how you and my previous guest food writer, Nicole Taylor, how that connection brought you to me. How did you and Nicole meet each other? We met when Nicole was working at Brooklyn food coalition. What do you remember about meeting Nicole? 

Anne Pope  17:47  
I always liked that. She was just very no nonsense. 

Dori Fern  17:51  
That is Nicole. 

Anne Pope  17:52  
She felt to me, like very much her own person. You know,

Unknown Speaker  17:56  
we didn't work together too extensively with Brooklyn food coalition, but she was someone that I just always kept an eye on after that, because she was always doing interesting things. 

Dori Fern  18:05  
You were a producer on Nicole's podcast. 

Anne Pope  18:10  
Yes, it was another pivot where I started to realize, okay, this nonprofit world, I'm not sure it's for me, and at that point I had really started to feel like I have some things I'd like to say. Again, I was very fortunate timing wise, because this was around the moment when a lot of attention was starting to be focused on podcasting, right? And Nicole, of course, already had a podcast 

Dori Fern  18:36  
Hot Grease,

Anne Pope  18:37  
 so I knew she was doing that because she was no longer a Brooklyn food coalition. At that point, I remember telling her, I want to get into this. And she was saying, Well, I want to do something a little bit different with my podcast, because so far, it's always been live interviews. She wanted to create something that was a bit more produced.

Unknown Speaker  18:56  
And I was like, that's what I wanted. It was a chance to develop this storytelling part of my skill set, which I did not have, and also, like the whole technical part of it, was not her thing, and she knew that

Unknown Speaker  19:09  
I felt like that was a very symbiotic collaboration.

Dori Fern  19:16  
One of the women who came to the pilot dinner event for my intergenerational women's community. Is someone I've known in passing in our neighborhood since our kids went to preschool together.

Unknown Speaker  19:33  
She remarked that when I ran into her and told her about this community I was building, she thought, oh, Dori is doing another pivot. This is how she thought of me for over two decades that we've known each other. She believes change making to be an impressive quality of mine. Me, I see my life in two phases, the years of chasing of personal and professional whiplash before 20.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
2021 when I took my sabbatical

Unknown Speaker  20:03  
and the intentional pivots I've made since then, she, on the other hand, saw one trajectory. I saw another, same life lived for me. The missing link was perspective, my narrative, my mindset around the changes I was making shifted my lived experience now is very different because I've learned to take and appreciate the small steps towards goals rather than chasing the outcomes. And this I'm observing is a key thing that tends to evolve as we age, the pivots we once made based largely on circumstances that we're chasing and a desire for a pot of hypothetical gold. Shifts as our lives get closer to their mortal end, our instincts creep into knowing, a knowing that the key to happiness lies in the freedom of staying present and moving through life more gently with self acceptance, without getting consumed by chaos and barreling through wherever we are.

Unknown Speaker  21:18  
But it still takes work for most of us to achieve this goal, as we discuss in this final chapter, Anne and I barter her audio production for my coaching services. The topic of living in Portugal, where she and her partner moved in phases from 2021 until they settled in earlier this year. I didn't ask her about it here, and I probably should have, but I didn't, because it's really doesn't come up much in our sessions either. The reason she wanted coaching was to achieve the same goals she admits she would have had wherever she lived.

Dori Fern  21:58  
We met. How long is it? Is it six months ago, 

Anne Pope  22:02  
something like that, 

Dori Fern  22:03  
I get the idea that I want help with this podcast, and I also wanted to get more hours as a coach. And so I thought, well, I could do a barter, and we are part of a very robust list serve of audio professionals called ladies, and I put out an email saying I would like to do this barter, and you responded among a handful of people who responded to me,

Unknown Speaker  22:33  
and when we talked, it came clear pretty soon that you knew Nicole, and because I had just recorded that episode, it was a no brainer that you and I were going to work together, and so we have established this relationship where you are my producer and editor. Your storytelling is so valuable to me, and I am just very touched to have your experience and your vision as part of this podcast. And so for anybody listening, what you hear

Unknown Speaker  23:08  
is this very generous partnership.

Unknown Speaker  23:12  
So thank you for that. But how did you decide that this was something you wanted to do? What made you answer that email? 

Anne Pope  23:18  
I've always been fascinated by the life coach idea, because, perhaps similar to audio producer, there's a million different definitions for what it is or is not. But how do you understand it now that we've been working together? Well, I think you have a very specific skill set and focus and set of resources that you work with. I mean, I have other friends who have sort of hung out their shingle as life coaches and are doing it differently. Sometimes it makes me think, that's great. That's perfect for you, and other times it makes me think, I'm glad you're my friend, but I will not seek this service from you. 

Dori Fern  23:52  
I'm sure some of my friends feel that way about me too.

Anne Pope  23:56  
I guess it's just all about what you need at a given moment, right? But the last year and a half or so has been another really huge pivot point for me, and I recognized that I could benefit from some perspective and from getting some new skills and being able to just feel really confident going forward with this next phase of my life, it's ended up being something really different from what I expected. What is it with me?

Dori Fern  24:28  
How would you define it? 

Anne Pope  24:30  
I feel like what I have gotten out of it is a certain skill set of how to approach my life, which is very generic sounding, but it's, I sort of hate this expression, how you show up in the world, but I don't have a better one, so I'm going to use it. You know how I feel about those cliches? We come back to them because they roll off the tongue, even though interrogate them. What they really mean. 

Dori Fern  25:00  
What does that mean to you? 

Anne Pope  25:02  
I mean it kind of becomes very literal, like when I'm in a certain situation, in this location, with this combination of people or beings and this set of inputs happening around me, like, what do I do? How do I behave? I don't want to use the word react, because part of what I'm trying to figure out is how to not just react to situations, but how to take more control over how I act.

Dori Fern  25:31  
What have you learned about that process through coaching? 

Anne Pope  25:37  
I think it has ended up being a lot more intuitive than I expected. I think I had some some vision of, I'm going to have a checklist and I'm going to do this, or I'm going to have a bunch of exercises and I'm going to do that, like all this sort of things that I brought with me from the world of work, of paid work, as opposed to personal work, about deliverables and outcomes and outputs. The other day, you actually use those two words, outcomes and outputs, and they've kind of stuck with me, because outputs are very important, like you either finish the record or you don't even from the nonprofit days, like you're you're putting on an event. How does it go? How many people show up? All those kinds of numerically definable things. I think some of the resources that you shared with me, that that when I first read through them are my life. Oh, this is so fucking woo, woo. I can't then I go back to them and I read them again, I try and absorb them in a different way, and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, I want a different outcome. What would a better outcome look like? And what tools do I have? What knowledge do I have, what experience do I have that could help me to get it

Dori Fern  26:47  
what you are describing is the difference between having a mastery approach to life versus performance, and performance being it's all about the outcome. It's all about the focus on the end.

Unknown Speaker  27:06  
And a lot of the times we look and we're trying to read all the things so that we know how to get to the end. But what we're not doing is building the tools to be focused more on the moment, be more in the present of your life. What are choices you're making now as a result of this work that you were not before,

Anne Pope  27:31  
there's an example I've been thinking of a lot lately, which was on the day after the election, I was on a text thread with some people I'm close to, and we were all very down. I'll just put it that way. But one of the people was also very angry, and that was coming out, and things that he was saying in the texts were like, This happened because of this group of people. Fuck them all. They'll all get what they deserve. And at first I was really angry at him, like, That's so fucking self indulgent. And then I just kind of stepped back and thought, well, he's hurting, and he's doing this because he's hurting. He was reacting very much the way I reacted in 2016

Unknown Speaker  28:16  
I was so angry, and I was looking for a place to put blame. So knowing where that response came from,

Dori Fern  28:25  
that mirror, yeah, 

Anne Pope  28:28  
and I was able to sort of ask myself, is it going to be constructive to confront him about this right now and say, you know, you're behaving like a butthurt teenager? And I ended up deciding not to do that,

I came away with this feeling of, I want to figure out how to try to bring empathy and kindness and something just less destructive to whatever situation I'm in. Yeah, I think I had an awareness that he just needs to vent right now, because he's hurting. We're all hurting. We don't need to hurt each other too.

Dori Fern  29:10  
Thank you for sharing that the work that we do in coaching, it's like learning an instrument. It's like learning a language. It's it's building those skills, those tools, just like there's a time when you're learning a language where you're thinking in your native language as you're processing this new language but at a certain point, hopefully, you think in that other language, It has become part of you, same with learning most things, becoming the person that we want to become in life, and showing up for ourselves, our goals, our community. It's, it's practice, you know, it's, it's just sticking with it, all right, so we are coming to the end of time, and I want to ask you the question I ask all my guests. You know what that question is. 

Going back to stories, what do you want the stories told about you when you're gone to be? 

Anne Pope

That I helped to build and support communities, that I connected people to each other. I would like people to remember me as someone who was a good friend and who tried my best to learn and become a better person always. 

Dori Fern (30:40.536)

Thank you, Anne Pope. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me to be on this side of the mic. 

Dori Fern (30:51.278)

Hey, thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, I suggest you go back and listen to episode 13 with Nicole Taylor. Episode 18 with Vickie Starr and 19 with Piotr Orloff too. They touch on similar themes of music, of community and pivots. And please right now, if you can, share this podcast with 

Dori Fern (31:48.11)

Even one person, someone who you think would dig it. So helpful. And if you're not doing so yet, follow Life Changing with Dori Fern wherever you listen so you'll know when new episodes drop. Rate, review too, it all makes this effort to bring you this podcast so worth it. Have a sparkly, happy, healthy holiday season. I will be back in 2025. Promise. Take good care.