Our guest today, Kathleen Kelly Janus, helps us explore social entrepreneurship by sharing how she found opportunities for social entrepreneurship throughout her career as a lawyer to starting a nonprofit to teaching social entrepreneurship at Stanford.

She’s the author of Social Startup Success, a must read book if you are interested in building a nonprofit or business for social good.

She draws on her experiences from starting her own social enterprise, Spark, a nonprofit that engages Millennials on gender equality issues.

Kathleen also interviewed 200 other high-performing social entrepreneurs to capture the best practices for social entrepreneurship.

Lot of amazing lessons baked into our conversation including:

How to integrate social causes you already support into your current job.
Why involvement in social causes helps boost employee loyalty.
How to sell your bosses on getting involved in social causes.
Why you want to maximize both your skills and your passion to achieve your optimal happiness in life.

Life Skills That Matter In This Episode

Reframe your mindset
Tell your story
Build your community

How Kathleen Works and Thinks

Wake up time: Usually around 7:00am, but currently around 3:00am as she’s launching her book.
Core work activities + habits: 1) Clearing out her inbox. 2) Self-care through yoga and meditation. 3) Mentoring to both help people earlier in their journey and to learn from them.
Definition of success: Making the world better in the ways that she can and showing her children they should do the same.
90-day goal: Sell as many books as she can.

Inspirational Quotes

“Anyone who goes into this professional life thinking that it’s gonna be a clear path is delusional. That doesn’t exist anymore.”

“The evidence shows that if you get your employees involved in social causes, that will make them more loyal and more likely to stay at the company.”