“SHE BREAKS THE MOLD”
Janet Whalen’s podcast and career coaching is helping women succeed
Janet Whalen wears many hats.
Entrepreneur. Career coach. Blogger. Marketer. Mom.
Now, Whalen, 49, has taken on yet another role — podcaster.
Whalen is the force behind “She Breaks the Mold,” a podcast about women who push boundaries in their corporate, entrepreneurial or not-for-profit jobs. Whalen, who edits and records the podcast from her dining room table in Westdale, just kicked off her second season. She’s also the founder of Be Ambitious For Her career coaching, which focuses on helping mid-career or selfemployed women achieve their professional goals.
“I absolutely love it,” said Whalen. “It’s my favourite job I’ve ever had.”
Like many women, Whalen’s path to becoming a career coach and podcaster was circuitous.
A Mississauga native, Whalen first came to Hamilton for postsecondary education and ended up falling in love with the city. She began working in public relations and marketing, but took several years off after the births of her two sons.
Her next project was a family photography business, which Whalen ran successfully for almost six years. But when her husband began a startup business, Whalen came on board as a freelancer, doing SEO writing and website writing. In 2016, she took a job at Hamilton’s Innovation Factory.
It was her experiences at Innovation Factory, which helps startups commercialize their ideas, that alerted Whalen to the need to help women advance in their careers.
“I was kind of surprised when I went back into a full-time work environment. I thought, ‘Wow, we are not any farther along than we were in 2000,’” she said. “Many of the women I was meeting were still having trouble standing up for themselves, still having trouble using their voice with any kind of power and authority, or still feeling like they had to defer to men.”
Whalen left Innovation Factory to launch her own business. She went back to school to learn how to be a career coach, then launched “Be Ambitious For Her” (named to encourage women to help mentor and encourage others in their fields).
Her podcast dovetailed from her work as a career coach. After she left Innovation Factory, she started having lots of meetings in coffee shops with women who had heard about her plans. A few of those meetings turned into formal interviews that she typed up and posted on her Be Ambitious For Her blog.
“It occurred to me once when I was actually typing up that blog post, that this might make a really good podcast, and that it would maybe feel like I was inviting everyone into these coffee shop conversations that I was having with these awesome, inspiring women,” she said.
As an introvert who was “terrified” of listening to the sound of her own voice, Whalen said the prospect was daunting.
“I thought, ‘I need to do something that scares me if I’m asking them to do something that scares them,’” she said.
She took a course in podcasting at Camp Tech in Toronto, bought some recording equipment and started making phone calls. She began with interviews with women she knew, then gradually expanded to include women from across Canada and the U.S. Her goal was to speak to women working in traditionally maledominated fields, or doing work to lift up other women.
Today, she says, people are approaching her and asking if they can be on her show.
“The people I’m meeting are so generous, so inspiring, and so interested in promoting other women. They’re just there to help lift up everyone else, and it’s just a really good feeling.”
For the second season of “She Breaks the Mold,” Whalen has decided to do fewer long-form interviews with other women, and instead include more solo shows featuring her own handson advice and encouragement. She plans to tackle topics like having a “money mindset” — figuring out what you’re worth, and how to negotiate to get to that level — and how women can become more comfortable speaking up in the workplace.
“The first season was sort of an ‘if you can see it, you can be it’ inspiration model; this season will be ‘now you saw it — do you want to do it, and what kind of support do you need?’”
Whalen also plans to launch a YouTube channel to help promote her business and podcast on different channels. And she hopes to launch online courses to help women play a bigger role in their businesses.
Whalen says that many women need to be taught these skills because they are told from a young age to follow the rules and not push boundaries.
“We’re socialized to be nurturers, not providers — and supporters, not leaders,” she said. “When we step outside of those socially accepted norms, we don’t like it. We have to learn to be OK with being respected, and maybe not liked. At work, it’s more important to be respected than to be liked.”
Encouraging other women is vitally important, she says, because without women’s voices in entrepreneurial or leadership roles, society is missing out.
“Bottom line: I want to help all women see our contributions as not only valuable, but necessary,” Whalen said. “We face unconscious bias every day, some of us more than others, and it doesn’t feel good — but the more we set examples of leadership, the more we step outside our comfort zones, the more we’ll grow and the sooner we’ll replace old, tired societal expectations with new, empowering ones.”