Franklin Taggart is a business, career, and life coach and also a professional musician. But his full resumé gives HR managers nightmares–he’s been a sales manager, a group home counselor, a domestic violence shelter worker, a gang violence prevention coordinator, radio DJ, retail salesperson, guitar teacher, recording engineer and producer, and the list goes on. Since 1986, he’s started 21 businesses. Since 2010, he’s coached over 600 people as they’ve navigated their decision to take their dreams more seriously.
Today, Franklin helps people turn their creative dreams into reality, much like he did for himself while facing some of life’s greatest challenges. His story covers a lot of ground, but amidst illness and many of life’s other disruptions, he’s continued to grow his business and help those that need him most. We’re honored to have him on today’s episode of Creator Stories to share his inspiring journey and what’s led him to where he is today!
Visit Franklin’s blog for more information: https://franklintaggart.com
Social links:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/franklintaggartcoaching
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/franklin-taggart-coaching/
Jessmyn:
Welcome to Interact’s Creator Stories Podcast. Interact is the easiest way to convert curious people into loyal and happy customers by using a lead generating quiz. On Creator Stories, we get to hear the entrepreneur’s journey. This is a podcast about how those creators took their knowledge and experiences to carve out a place in the world, owned what they know is special about themselves, and turned it into a successful company. Today, we get to meet Franklin Taggart, a business consultant and the producer and host of Your Own Best Company, which is a podcast for people who love to work alone.
He’s also a coach for people who are looking to create their own creative dreams. All right. Let’s get started.
Hi guys, and welcome back to Interact’s Creator Stories Podcast. As usual, I am so excited to be here with you. I’m your host, Jessmyn Solana. And with me today, I have the wonderful Franklin Taggart. Franklin, thank you so much for joining us on our show.
Franklin Taggart:
Oh Jessmyn, I am so delighted to be a part of it.
Jessmyn:
And it’s so funny because before we had scheduled this recording, I was like, I don’t know if I’ve had a man on here yet. So welcome as one of our first ones. We have had them. I just haven’t interviewed one myself.
Franklin Taggart:
I’ve been to a lot of The Quiz Collective meetings, and have been the only guy there.
Jessmyn:
Really?
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah.
Jessmyn:
Really.
Franklin Taggart:
But it’s all right. I don’t mind.
Jessmyn:
I love it. I love it. You’re special. That’s why. So everybody got sort of your more formal bio, and kind of now in your own words, I would love for you to kind of jump into it. You have done quite a bit. So maybe first start off with what your current business is, who your customers are, and then we can jump into the beginning of it all and tell us how you got started.
Franklin Taggart:
Oh, very good. Well, my current business is kind of a mix of several things that I really enjoy doing. At the top of the list is coaching. I love working with people. Most of the folks that I work with are over 40, and they’ve reached a point in their career where they’re very deeply dissatisfied, and they need a change, and most of them have been carrying a creative dream for a very long time, and they want to get that dream off the ground, and I help them do that.
The second part of what I do is a lot of consulting. I love figuring things out, and that’s how I found Interact quizzes, as a matter of fact. It’s like I found the quiz software when I was looking for an option for a lead magnet that wasn’t some kind of a giveaway or a PDF or something like that. I found the quizzes and I thought, wow, this is cool. So I just dove right in and figured out how to use them.
So I’ve been helping people with projects like that for a long time. So, a lot of the projects that I help people with are really high impact marketing campaigns, things that they need to have a high level of creativity on quickly. Those are the ones where I really shine. And then the other area where I work with people is kind of in a hybrid model of helping them learn how to do things for themselves, and part of that is doing things with them rather than for them.
So that’s another part of what I do.
Jessmyn:
Okay. I love that. I kind of like that mentality of sort of… God. What is it, the saying, where it’s like I’ll teach you how to fish.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah.
Jessmyn:
I don’t remember it, but you guys know what I mean.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah. Give a man a fish and he’ll be fed for a day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll be fed for life.
Jessmyn:
Right. Yes. Exactly. I love that. I love that. That’s awesome. So take us back to the beginning. How did you get started in all of this?
Franklin Taggart:
Oh, it’s such a weird long strange trip. I have no idea where to begin with this. I’m old. Let’s put it that way. I’m old. I grew up in the time when the Brady Bunch was on for the first time, and the Brady Bunch was this group of kids that, every time that they turned around, they were getting discovered for some kind of music career or acting career or something like that. I honestly thought that that was how life worked.
So all of the TV shows that I watched kind of put this fantasy in my mind that I could be a musician or a star of some kind. I kind of followed that dream for a long time. I’ve had a frequently interrupted music career since a long time ago. That’s been my main thread throughout my whole teenage and adult life is music. During many of those interruption periods, I had to find ways to make a living. So I started to take jobs that were in strange fields that I wasn’t educated in. Like I was in social services for about seven years, and I was in a gang intervention program as the Director of the Gang Intervention Program for a few years. Then I worked at a crisis center.
So I got all of this weird mixture of experience. And during that time, I met a guy who was a business consultant, and he became a good friend of mine, and ultimately we started to have some business partnerships together. But he introduced me to the world of business consulting on a corporate level, and I found that I really liked it, and I found that I had a knack for it.
Now, I had graduated with a degree in music and business, so there was some business back there, but I had never really put it to work in my music career yet. So I did the business consulting thing for a couple of years, and that allowed me to actually start to take my music career a little bit more seriously. So I started doing music almost on a full time basis, and then on a full time basis for about 10 years.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
In the midst of that, I started to have tendonitis in both of my arms. I think I remember… I can’t remember if it was your podcast or another that I listened to recently where you had talked to a woman who had been a musician and she’d had some kind of an injury.
Jessmyn:
I don’t think so.
Franklin Taggart:
Was that your podcast? It must have been somebody else’s. But that was my story too. It was like I couldn’t play guitar for longer than a few minutes without it becoming excruciatingly painful. And then a couple of years later, I got sick and my music career, I thought, was over at that point. I thought it was done. And so, I was just kind of scrambling to find things that I could do for money. In the midst of all of that, I was hospitalized several times and really had to find my feet.
A couple of things that were going on in that time, this was when digital business started to really take off, and the internet was still fairly new on a big scale, Facebook wasn’t even around yet. I remember I kind of started on AOL and on Myspace. Those were kind of the two areas where my digital stuff started. And I started to experiment with digital businesses. The one that I started really in earnest with was blogging. Blogging was something that I did throughout that whole time that I was not doing well physically, I could write blogs.
At one point, I had 17 different blogs going on at the same time that were on different topics that were interesting to me, and a couple of them did really, really well. And it was also during that time that I tried my first podcast, and that was around 2009, 2010. I also, during that time, put out some of the first online courses on home recording and on guitar, beginning guitar.
Those are still floating around out there in the world somewhere. I don’t know. But so, I found that there was an option that was really cool. About the same time, there were people in my life who wanted to make a transition from kind of a corporate or an organization based career into a more creative individual career path, and they asked me for help. And I didn’t even know that what I was doing was coaching at the time. That dawned on me a little bit later.
But the opportunities just kept showing up. People kept asking me, “What do I need to do in order to start booking myself for musical gigs,” or, “What do I need to do to start getting art shows, or to start getting my art placed in galleries and stuff like that?” And I’m the kind of guy who likes to figure things out, so I just started figuring stuff out with people. Ultimately, I discovered that that was coaching. And the light really went off, I had just had major surgery. Now, this was 12 years ago, I had major surgery on the lung that was really having some problems.
And a friend of mine came by who was the hospital chaplain. He wanted to see how I was doing. It was his job to see how I was doing. And I said, “I’m doing okay.” I’m on all kinds of narcotics here, how bad can I be? And we ended up talking for the next close to three hours about his music career. And at the end of that conversation, I was just wired for sound. Now, here I was. I was on some kind of a drip that pushed the button and I thought I was just going to nod off and go to sleep.
I couldn’t sleep. I was up until probably 6 or 6:30 the next morning, and it dawned on me that night that this was something that I really could do, and it’s something that I could charge for, and it’s something that I loved on the same level that I loved music. So, that’s the kind of long short version of it.
Jessmyn:
I love that long short.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah.
Jessmyn:
That’s amazing though. It’s really interesting. I always love seeing the sort of, I guess you could call it like pathways that don’t seem like it makes sense, but it totally makes sense because even thinking back to some of the work that you did before you even got back into music, social work, and all that stuff, in a sense, you were kind of doing some sort of coaching.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah. As I look back on it-
Jessmyn:
And working with people.
Franklin Taggart:
That goes all the way back to like junior high school.
Jessmyn:
Right. Right. And it’s funny because I was just thinking about this yesterday, how I never thought I was going to end up in business myself. But for some reason, this memory came up for me that we were reading Tuck Everlasting. Do you know that book?
Franklin Taggart:
Oh yeah. I love that book.
Jessmyn:
And I think I was in fourth grade or fifth grade, and we had to write like, oh, how would you make a flyer advertising the magic water, I don’t even remember what it was called, that gives you immortality or whatever. And for some reason, this came up as a memory yesterday that I enjoyed that project so much, and I remember getting a really good grade on it and putting so much work into it. And when you think back all the way, you’re like, oh wow, I was actually… This is something that I think I was meant to do. You just don’t know it until you finally find it and it clicks for you.
Franklin Taggart:
Well, the thing that I forgot to mention is that I had businesses all along the way. I started my first business before I graduated from college, and I’ve had little businesses stacked up my whole life, so that’s always been just a thread. But I don’t ever think about myself as a business person. It’s just something I always did.
Jessmyn:
Right. It just happened. It was a part of me. Oh no. I love that. I love that so much. Do you feel like… I guess you’re in this really sort of traumatic situation, right, and you’re having surgery. Did you kind of… How did you work through that to where you realized you really loved something, but did you have some sort of reservations about it, or were you like, okay, I’m going to jump into this?
Franklin Taggart:
Both. And I still have probably a monthly visitor that says, “Are you crazy?”
Jessmyn:
I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
Who are you to do this and imposter whatever you want to call it, still shows up every now and then. But I’ve come to recognize it just as a part of a bigger cycle, and I don’t let it stop me from doing things. But the thing that’s really interesting about looking back on when I started, it took me a long time to get comfortable calling myself a coach. It took a really long time. I called myself every other thing that I could think of. I’m a mentor. I’m a guide. I’m some kind of shaman. I don’t know.
Jessmyn:
I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
I called myself a lot of things before coach actually felt right. And then all of a sudden at one point, it’s like I realized I’ve been doing this for several years now, and it fits. Now I feel good in that. That pair of shoes feels really good now, where before it just didn’t feel like a good fit. I was doing coaching all along, and I was getting training wherever I could, and finding different ways to learn, and learning as I went, but that sense of who are you to be doing this would continue to come back.
Jessmyn:
Right. Right. And that’s super hard. Was that something that you feel like you constantly went through, and that’s why you kept sort of trying to tweak what you called yourself, your title, or do you kind of feel that it just didn’t feel right, and once in a while, the imposter syndrome would come back?
Franklin Taggart:
Well, it would come. Like I said, it would come around frequently enough that it was a familiar visitor. It usually corresponded with it was the first of the month and rent was due, and here I was trying to go out and shake the trees and find clients and stuff like that. It’s like who are you to be doing this. It’s like, you’re so not successful. How can you be a coach?
Jessmyn:
How could it be?
Franklin Taggart:
So those kinds of voices were going off all the time, and I think the thing that ultimately proved true was that I just recognized it as kind of a habit of thinking. It was like my thinking, I don’t know about yours, Jessmyn, but my thinking kind of works in cycles where there are patterns that it goes through. And that was just one of the patterns that would show up at certain times.
Jessmyn:
Right.
Franklin Taggart:
When I just started to look at it that way, yeah, the thoughts still happen, but I have some choice about whether I take them seriously or not.
Jessmyn:
I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
And I’m not going to let my thinking stop me from doing what I want to do. That was the big lesson for me.
Jessmyn:
I love that so much because I think imposter syndrome happens for everybody.
Franklin Taggart:
Everyone.
Jessmyn:
It’s just a matter of what do you do when it happens. For me, I realized what my trigger was. It was when I started getting a flood of projects that everyone was like, “You’d be great for this,” and, “You would be great for this,” and, “You would be great for this.” When you first get it, you’re like, yeah, I would be great for this. And then you start doing it and you go, I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea.
Franklin Taggart:
Not so great after all.
Jessmyn:
Yeah. You’re not that great after all. This was going to be my next question, just sort of like how do you sort of stop yourself from thinking that way and kind of keep going? For me, I just always sort of take a second and I started basically, okay, what can I do that’s taking each project one step at a time so that I don’t feel overwhelmed, because the overwhelm is where imposter syndrome comes out for me, but I guess it comes out differently for everybody. So how do you do yours?
Franklin Taggart:
I have several things that I’ve learned along the way that have helped. One of them is just simply doing whatever it is that’s in front of me. I’m going through it right now because I just got a copyrighting job that’s a little bit above my pay grade, and it’s like going off the diving board for the first time, and it feels really awkward, and it feels really scary, and it feels really out of my league. But I want to do it.
So the desire, in my case, outweighs the fear. Right? So the fear’s going to continue to happen, and I still have this voice going in my head saying, “You should have never said yes to this.” And the truth of the matter is is that voice is just a voice. It’s not anything more than my own thinking. But the desire is greater, and I follow the desire. That’s the biggest thing.
The second thing that I’ve learned is that I can’t change my thinking. Changing my thinking is just more thinking.
Jessmyn:
Too much.
Franklin Taggart:
It makes me even more overwhelmed, right? It’s like the thing that I’m overwhelmed by is the amount of thinking that I’m doing in the moment. I’m overwhelmed with thought. And so, the thing that I’m really grateful for is I ran across a couple of books a few years back that are about an understanding that people call the inside out understanding. And one of the books was the Inside Out Revolution by Michael Neill, and the other one was Clarity by Jamie Smart.
And I read both of those books, and I thought, dang, I wish I would have learned this when I was 15 years old because this really is revolutionary. What’s really funny is that all it is is just a shift in understanding, and that is that my thinking is not being caused by my circumstances. My experience is being caused by my thinking.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
And just that realization, all of a sudden, gave me the freedom to say, “Oh, my experience in this moment right now is being only caused by the thinking that’s going on, and not by the situation itself.” And there’s something. I can’t put my finger on what really happens when that realization happens. But all of a sudden, it’s like my thinking starts to just slow down and I start to have a broader perception, or a broader view, a greater sense of awareness in the moment, and that gives me the freedom then to choose, rather than to be a slave of my overwhelm. Right?
Jessmyn:
I don’t know why-
Franklin Taggart:
Isn’t that cool? Yeah.
Jessmyn:
Yeah. I love that so much, and I love the words that you used, that you now have the freedom to choose.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah.
Jessmyn:
So powerful.
Franklin Taggart:
It’s made a huge, huge difference for me.
Jessmyn:
I like that a lot because I think when we talk about sort of mental health and self-care, the common ones that you hear are really journaling, meditating, walking, which are all of course really great things. But sometimes for a lot of people, it could just be sort of let me shift the way that I think about the world. And that also might be what clicks for me. So my fiance, for example, he recently started getting into journaling, but it was the hardest thing for him.
He was like, “It doesn’t feel natural to me. I don’t really know what I’m writing. I don’t know what to write.” And he would always complain, “It’s only a quarter of the page and I don’t feel like I got anything done.” For me, journaling, I could journal for pages. So, I’m just like I don’t know what to tell you.
Franklin Taggart:
Well.
Jessmyn:
But I think it’s always just a matter of finding what works for you, and if it is that, that’s what you should continue with.
Franklin Taggart:
For me, writing is a very deep process, and it’s not easy to access. And so for me, speaking is something that I can do for days. I can talk to you until your ears fall off. But when it comes to writing, it takes me… I used to fail tests because I couldn’t write fast enough.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
And so, journaling for me is very similar to what he’s experiencing, where it’s like, yeah, it takes a long time to get very little result. That always made me laugh because when I was blogging, I was just writing. My blogs would be like two paragraphs long, but it took me a better part of a morning to write those two paragraphs.
Jessmyn:
Right. Yeah.
Franklin Taggart:
So I think that everybody has their own communication strengths. It’s usually in one of a few areas. You can be a strong writer, and writing may be the easiest way for you to gather your thoughts and to organize them and to express them. Some people are just great at using imagery, right? And then there are other folks like me who can talk about anything at any time at the drop of a hat, and it’s the easiest way for us to make sense.
And then there’s a group of folks that they communicate through doing. They show you something. They put something together. They make something. Right? We all have communication strengths, right, and the ones that we have tend to be writing, speaking, imagery, and then there’s some folks who communicate through doing. Like they make things. They fix things. They do things. They understand how things work. That’s the way that they communicate best. So it’s kind of a… In that case, it’s probably not a language based communication as much as it is kind of a production based communication, right?
Jessmyn:
Right.
Franklin Taggart:
So one of the things that I help people with in their marketing is to leverage those communication strengths.
Jessmyn:
Oh, I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
It works beautifully, and it kind of takes a lot of the pressure off when it’s like everybody’s telling you that you need to be on TikTok and you hate making videos. It’s like all of a sudden, you can say, “Well, screw TikTok. I’m a blogger.” And it’s okay to let yourself have your own limitations and work with your strengths rather than trying to work in areas that aren’t so much.
Jessmyn:
I love that a lot because I think it’s so easy to get caught up, one, in social media in general. There are some people out there who say you have to be on all of them. Every single one, which in itself is exhausting, in my opinion at least. And then, there are some people out there who say, “Well, you need to focus on this and that.” If you focus on, say, for example, Instagram, it needs to look exactly like this.
While I think there are sort of methods and tried and true tips, what you’re saying makes so much sense to me because it feels natural, and that will show up in what you’re doing.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah. You’re not trying to fit into a weird hole, right?
Jessmyn:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of the sort of TikTok style videos of people, and you can see that they are uncomfortable, or it looks uncomfortable, if that makes sense. I don’t know how to really explain it with words.
Franklin Taggart:
But you can tell, right?
Jessmyn:
Yeah.
Franklin Taggart:
You can tell.
Jessmyn:
Besides that. And so, as sort of somebody who even critiques quizzes, helps people with quizzes, in that sense, people can tell when it’s not you speaking, or they can tell when it doesn’t feel authentic. And I always tell people that’s the most important part. You’re going to have a business and services that thousands, hundreds, of other people are going to also have. It’s a matter of who you are that they will be sort of attracted to you and your personality, and that’s what will attract them to your business.
Franklin Taggart:
The one thing that I tell people about social media is to go ahead and reserve your account and your brand account on every social media platform. Don’t let somebody else get it. And if you want to use it, great. If you don’t, don’t.
Jessmyn:
That’s incredible advice. I never even thought of that.
Franklin Taggart:
As long as you can have your own brand out there on every platform, you’re golden because that gives you the ability to come back to it and say, “Is this something that I want to try? Well, now I don’t have to go and pay somebody $10,000 for my name.”
Jessmyn:
Or it could even be something as simple as just being present on there in the sense of maybe you share links to your blog post, and that’s all it is, even if you don’t get much traffic there. But if somebody were to Google you and those accounts came up, they will see, oh, this is tied to them, and it’s real, basically.
Franklin Taggart:
Oh yeah. And all of that can be automated so easily now. It’s like, might as well.
Jessmyn:
Right. Right.
Franklin Taggart:
The only thing it can’t automate right now is Clubhouse.
Jessmyn:
I know. I’m not even going to lie. I don’t even know what happened with Clubhouse. I was in there for I think a month, and then I kind of dropped off.
Franklin Taggart:
I think people just realized that it actually did take a lot more commitment than other social media did because you have to show up live.
Jessmyn:
Right. That’s true.
Franklin Taggart:
You can’t phone it in, right?
Jessmyn:
That is true. Something I did want to ask you that caught my attention really early that I just remembered, your customers specifically, you said 40 and up. Right?
Franklin Taggart:
Most of them, yeah.
Jessmyn:
Okay. I was going to ask, is that something that you chose and then also why?
Franklin Taggart:
I have a feeling that the reason it ended up that way was that, first of all, I feel like there is something to be said for people of a certain age really relating well to each other. And the people that tended to come to me when I first started were my own age. They were folks who had been in the career path for, some of them, 20, 25 years.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
And they’d been holding on to these dreams. I remember one guy came to me and he wanted to learn how to play the guitar since he was 13 years old. He had just retired and he had a lot of time. He says, “I want to be a guitar player.” Well, we got him to that level where he could be a guitar player. And sadly, he died not long after that. But the thing that I want to just get across to people is like if you have a creative dream that you’ve been putting on hold for any reason, you need to get it off the back burner and you need to do it now because you don’t have any guarantees.
When I was 46, I thought my life was over. My career, I thought my career for sure was over in music. There were always things that I found to do, but when you’re gone, you don’t have anything to do anymore. So the thing that I would say is if you do have a creative dream that you’ve been putting on hold, I don’t care how old you are. Take it seriously and get it off the back burner and start doing something in that direction now.
Jessmyn:
I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah. I feel a lot of urgency around it.
Jessmyn:
Right. Right. I think it’s so true because it’s kind of like I’ve always wanted to travel the world, but you get caught up. I wasn’t one of those people, my sister was. She was one of those people that as soon as she had summer break, my parents wouldn’t pay for any of it, she got her own job, paid for all her travel. She’s gone to so many different countries. And for me, that was never really my thing. I was always, oh, maybe next time, maybe next time. And now, I know I’m not that old. I’m 28, but for some reason, I can’t stop thinking about I’m in this stage of like, oh, I’m about to get married, I’m going to start a family. How hard is it to travel with small kids?
Before you know it, what if I… Who knows what will happen? Maybe my leg will break and I won’t be able to walk as well, and then I can’t travel, and if you go to Europe… And I go down this rabbit hole of, wow, I need to do this now, in a sense. It sounds a little dramatic, but pretty much I just totally understand what you’re saying where it’s like, don’t put it on the back burner. If this is something you really want to do, just get started.
Franklin Taggart:
Absolutely. That’s the thing. Even in your situation where there’s marriage and kids on the horizon, those don’t have to be limitations for the things that you really want to do. You can find ways to make it work, and I’ve seen people do it over and over and over.
Jessmyn:
I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
We have good friends that we knew in DC, and when their kids were in fifth grade and seventh grade, they took a year off and went around the world.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
And they just went to as many different countries as they could in that one year. It was a spectacular life experience for them. But they just found a way and they did it. It was an amazing story.
Jessmyn:
I love that. I love that so much.
Franklin Taggart:
Yep.
Jessmyn:
So crazy. Wild. Well, I feel like we got so much good stuff. I’m feeling really empowered. But Franklin-
Franklin Taggart:
Excellent.
Jessmyn:
Thank you so much for being on here. I was about to say for having me. At the time of this recording, guys, it’s been a short week. We had a three day weekend, so I still feel like I’m catching up. But I have two questions that I close out with if you’re up to it.
Franklin Taggart:
Okay.
Jessmyn:
So second to last is I know you’ve kind of said a lot, but are there three things that most people would not know about you?
Franklin Taggart:
Well, three things that people would not know about me. One of them is that when I was in seventh grade, I took ballet lessons with the University of Wyoming football team.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah. Isn’t that a cool one? The second one is that there are a few people that know this about me, but not a lot of people who know this about me. But when I was in college, I got to play guitar with a famous jazz trumpeter named Dizzy Gillespie, who is just an absolute amazing musician and a very, very funny, funny man. And then the third thing that I think people may not know about me is that my guidance counselor never thought that I would graduate from high school.
Jessmyn:
Wow.
Franklin Taggart:
And then I went and I graduated from high school with a really low grade point average, but then I went on to college and graduated from college, and I just want that guidance counselor to roll over in his grave right now.
Jessmyn:
Those were really good ones though.
Franklin Taggart:
Cool.
Jessmyn:
I loved your three. Wow. That’s pretty funny. I will say I’ve had similar instances that we can talk about after.
Franklin Taggart:
All right. Cool.
Jessmyn:
Okay. Last question for you. What is the single piece of advice you would give to yourself at the start of it all?
Franklin Taggart:
I think I would encourage myself to be a better advocate for myself than I was.
Jessmyn:
I love that.
Franklin Taggart:
Because I just didn’t stand up for myself, and I didn’t allow myself to go for the things that I really wanted. I waited to be invited. I waited to be asked. That was a huge mistake.
Jessmyn:
I love that. What would you have done instead?
Franklin Taggart:
I would have been much more assertive. I would have asked for the things that… I would have asked for the opportunities that I wanted. Instead of being upset about not being asked to be in the band, I would have gone to that person and said, “Why wasn’t I asked to be in this band? I’m the guy you should have had. Why didn’t you ask me?” And I never had the gumption to do that kind of stuff.
Jessmyn:
I love that. I will say, my fiance always tells me, he goes, “Worst thing they’ll say is no.”
Franklin Taggart:
Yep.
Jessmyn:
What’s wrong with that?
Franklin Taggart:
Well, for some folks, rejection is one of the worst pains.
Jessmyn:
That’s true. Okay. There is that. There is that. So where can people find you online if they’re looking?
Franklin Taggart:
Everywhere.
Jessmyn:
I love it.
Franklin Taggart:
Easiest place is Franklintaggart.com. That’s my main blog, and I still use it to this day. I’m on virtually every social media platform with either @franklintaggart or Franklin Taggart Coaching. So I’m findable pretty much everywhere.
Jessmyn:
Love it. And we will link that in the show notes, if anyone’s looking, so you can find it there.
Franklin Taggart:
Yeah. And also, if you are an Interact subscriber, find me in the quiz collective.
Jessmyn:
Right. Yeah. Find us in the-
Franklin Taggart:
My favorite thing about Interact is actually the community. Yeah. It’s amazing.
Jessmyn:
It’s something new, and we’re trying to make it sort of community… I don’t even know how to explain it. We’re trying to sort of cater to not just people who are learning about quizzes, but also people who are already in there doing it, and also want to hear what’s new at Interact and what’s coming up.
Franklin Taggart:
It’s very cool.
Jessmyn:
Not me including my own plug in there, but-
Franklin Taggart:
I love it.
Jessmyn:
Well Franklin, thank you so much, and everyone, of course, thank you always for listening. You can find those links in the show notes and we’ll see you next time. Bye.