Hi there, I’m Brie! I’m a product marketing consultant and portfolio career coach. I write about business, technology, and culture and our changing relationship with work. Follow along for more musings about the future of work!
Earlier this week, I kicked off recording the second season of the podcast. I had the honor of interviewing indie filmmaker Shaina Feinberg about her short film Why I Almost Quit My Career For My Kids.
The conversation has lingered with me in the way meaningful exchanges do.
If you haven't seen it yet, the short opens with Shaina grappling with the tension of juggling her filmmaking career and motherhood—a crisis that has her seriously considering abandoning her career altogether. In search of wisdom, she turns to Joan Darling, a legendary octogenarian director living in retirement in Maine.
The on screen bond between Shaina and Joan is disarming to watch—a beautifully electric connection that's funny and tender in equal measure, transcending the typical boundaries we draw around professional mentorship.
Here’s Shaina. And Joan. (aren’t they so stinking adorable?!!!)
I must have watched the film a dozen times by now, and yet I still reach for the Kleenex with every viewing. This might sound strange coming from someone who isn't a parent, but what undoes me isn't necessarily the parenting storyline—it's witnessing the alchemy between two powerful, deeply soulful women from different generations who hold space for each other's vulnerability while maintaining their own childlike sense of play and wonder.
Why do I bring this up?
Because this interview, from my perspective at least, reflects the kind of professional relationship dynamic that makes the portfolio career community so special.
As you watch Shaina and Joan together on screen, it offers an alternative example of what a meaningful professional relationship turned friendship can look like. Joan doesn't just offer Shaina advice or critique her work. She sees Shaina's potential with such clarity that it becomes impossible for Shaina to ignore it herself. And Shaina, in turn, gives Joan something equally valuable back: to reflect on her own life and legacy.
This is exactly how I believe the portfolio career community operates: we loan each other our vision of what's possible until we can carry that vision within ourselves.
When someone is stuck in the middle of a career transition, questioning everything they thought they knew about their path, others step in to hold that vision steady. We don't compete for limited opportunities because we understand that one person's success actually creates more possibilities for everyone else.
There's something almost sacred about this mutual recognition—this willingness to see each other not just as we are, but as we're becoming. We operate as a community of mutual aid, weaving webs that catch each other when we're falling and encouraging that same childlike sense of wonder and exploration that makes Joan and Shaina's relationship so magnetic.
It's a transductive experience, as Joan describes it—energy transforming from one state to another, doubt becoming possibility.
Season Two of The Portfolio Career Lab
So yes, I’m being a little coy here, but consider this a preview of where season two of the show is headed.
This season will be about seeing our work as an art form. About choosing to be vulnerable in the comfort of communities of care. About what it takes to keep going when you want to quit, and the people who hold you and lift you up in those impossible moments. And finally, it’s about what it means to choose the quality of the experience of your one wild and precious life over the container you thought you had to fit it into.
I'm excited for the conversations already underway and the ones still to come. I think this season will unlock something spiritual for all of us!
And, just in case you need to hear it today, as Joan so aptly says, “What matters is the quality of your experience. Fuck the container.”
Building with you,
Brie
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“Loaning each other the vision of what’s possible until we can carry it ourselves” reminds me deeply of this piece - I recommend! It’s profound what the right friend or colleague can do for your vision of yourself. https://open.substack.com/pub/velvetnoise/p/some-parts-of-you-only-emerge-for
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