Welcome to the Sword of Sure Podcast. Where doubt looms, fear whispers, and the only way forward is through. I'm Samar Carbo and if you've ever felt like you're just sort of sure about what you're doing, you're not alone. This is where we face the uncertainty, Push past the hesitation and keep going anyway way. So take a breath, step in, and let's move forward together.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Sort of Shore Podcast for the third time this week. I'm Samar Carbo and welcome to the last of my birthday podcast episodes for this year, 2025. By the time this comes out, it will have been my birthday yesterday, so it's not too late to get those five star reviews in. I will still appreciate them as a birthday gift. But for today's episode we are talking with CA Catherine Puser, a lifetime fundraiser and all around expert when it comes to non profit work. It was so exciting to get to sit down with her. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's have a listen.

Hi, I'm Katherine Puzer. I'm a career fundraiser and non profit leader and I host the podcast Asking for Good where we discuss how to launch nonprofit I saw even as early as high school that it's individuals doing collective action that changes the world. We all have this potential to change the world. We just have to organize ourselves properly to do it. And I found that the nonprofit sector was the place where mission driven people, world changers where they were. So I wanted to be a part of the nonprofit sector since well before college. There was a congressperson ages ago that said we can't all go to Calcutta, which I think is a great way to phrase it. It's really easy to get overwhelmed by the intractable and wicked problems of the world, but you can have a huge impact by showing up on a Wednesday afternoon and packing lunches for the elderly, or going to your local humane society and taking the dogs literally just on a walk. That can be your service to the community. So getting into the sector and volunteering in some way is a great way to start exploring the sector. I also suggest that people make a financial contribution to a nonprofit that matters to them. It's not about the amount, it's about doing something that's personally meaningful to you. The other way to get involved in the nonprofit sector is to start looking. If you're considering a sector switch, look at the skills in the jobs that are currently posted. Nonprofits are a third of our economy and they serve areas that the Market demand does not take care of. So there's still a ton of skills that are relative to business and governmental work that are used in the nonprofit sector, for example, communications or strategic leadership and programmatic evaluation, program creation. So there's plenty of room in the nonprofit sector and plenty of skills that are used. It's just maybe getting over that hump that people need to realize your skills from the private sector or from the governmental sector are applicable in the nonprofit sector. I'm a career fundraiser. So many people say they fell into fundraising, but I saw that fundraising was this place in the nonprofit sector where you have the chance to match the donor's wish for the world and the nonprofit's ability to make it happen. So if you're concerned about climate change, you can try to go it alone, but really where you're going to have the biggest impact is if you join forces with other people who care and fund the projects and the work that, you know, can really move the needle.

I would say you are in a very small subsection of society as a career fundraiser, because there's the politics and religion that no one's supposed to talk about, but it's so bad in social circles that no one even talks about the fact that we don't talk about money. So can you talk a little bit.

About how.

Sort of the cognitive dissonance or even the imposter syndrome itself, of asking for money and large sums of it.

Right. Well, you know, fundraising is an art and a science, they say, and there are specific formulas and pieces that you're thinking about as you are creating a connection with a potential funder. But I'll step back a little bit and just talk about the brass tacks of creating a proposal for maybe more than your own net worth, certainly more than your annual salary, and kind of what it can feel like in that moment, the person who hasn't come to terms with their own financial world and financial footing is going to have a harder time being a fundraiser because they're going to get distracted by the money of it, as opposed to the gift that you're creating to change the world. So my first piece of advice, if you're interested in going into fundraising, is to get a grip on your own financial situation. I'm not saying you need to make your first $5 million before you come into fundraising. I'm saying just know how to manage your own life so that you can come into conversations with generous people, not having the noise that goes along with financial insecurity going on in the back of your head. A couple of other things that I think about when I think about getting over the hump and becoming a fundraiser are that you are not asking for yourself. So kind of reframing the work to make yourself, you're in the position of being the catalyst or the matchmaker to make the great stuff that can happen at the nonprofit from the funder happen. And so many donors are delighted and joyful when they make the gift, because this nonprofit is giving them the chance to do something that they couldn't do on their own. And all they have to do is provide the money or the assets. When imposter syndrome comes into play, there's the money element, and then there's also the mission orientation. I'll say I've worked for organizations where I'm talking to people who have volunteered for 40 or 50 years longer than I've been alive, and I'm saying, oh, we have this great cause. Why don't you support it? And they already support it in their volunteerism in so many ways. And so making sure that you come to that conversation, not trying to sell, but more so trying to align their worldview and their wishes for their assets with what can be done through the nonprofit. There are certainly mathematical formulas where people might look at publicly available assets and say, oh, this person may be able to do a certain percentage of that, but in my experience, those really don't work and aren't really that useful. Instead, I like to think about the idea of being interested and interesting. So really listening to the donor, being interested in what they care about, understanding how your mission fits into the rest of their world, and being interesting in the idea of having a compelling story to tell and a compelling vision for where the mission can go. And that keeps the conversation going with the donor. And as you're having that conversation, you're beginning to understand, where does this charity or this mission fit into their priorities and of the philanthropic giving they do, do they like to make gifts annually, or do they like to make their gifts through their will or trust? So just understanding, what's their style of philanthropy? And then the other formula that I think about a lot is making a good ask. And when you're making a good ask, it includes these three elements every time. The timing of the gift, the amount of the gift, and the purpose or project of the gift. And when you do that, and you have those three clear elements, if the potential supporter declines the offer and says they're not interested, you can come back and say, is it the timing? Is it the amount? Is it the project, and then you're continuing the conversation as opposed to making it a binary choice that is so wonderfully put together.

You've clearly thought a lot about this.

I guess I wonder.

It makes me think, have you always been this good or did you.

No, you have to be curious every day and you have to give yourself room to reflect. And I think that's another key element of imposter syndrome and conquering it. You know, 70% of people experience imposter syndrome, so if you haven't yet, you've got better than a coin flip chance that it's coming your way. So having time to reflect on the work you do and not just beat yourself up for something that goes wrong, but really say, okay, you know, what happened here? What can I learn from it? Even things that go great in that moment. What can I learn from it, though? So, you know, debriefing with yourself and reflecting with yourself to start to put your puzzle pieces in place.

So then, can you take me back to a time when you felt imposter syndrome in your story?

A recent example is in the past few years, I applied to a role that I saw advertised, and then the recruiter reached out to me and I just thought, this looks like a really awesome job, but I'm not qualified, and who else do I know that could take it? The recruiter contacted me and said, we actually think you're a really strong candidate for this role. And spoiler alert, I didn't end up getting the job, but the process made me face my imposter syndrome. So I had been pretty complacent in the work that I had been doing. And the process of interviewing and submitting the resume, the COVID letter, the candidate profile, made me stop and think about the gifts that I had closed and the work that I had done in a new way. And that was a big hurdle for me to go over in addressing imposter syndrome because I had downplayed a lot of the work that I had done until it got to this point where I was having to reframe it and think about it in an executive level for this new role. So, you know, the. Even our failures can teach us quite a bit and can help us face imposter syndrome.

You didn't get that job, but was it a hit to your confidence after that, or was it just so much better because you experienced sort of a deliverance from the imposter syndrome you were feeling in that moment?

It was ultimately a very positive experience. It helped me see that I was ready for A role at that level. And I made it through from, you know, 50 candidates to 12 candidates to six candidates. So I was in the top group, which gave me confidence. And again, it helped me back to that reflection idea. It made me stop and think about the work that I had done. And especially in fundraising or in the nonprofit space where things are moving so quickly and you can just have such a, such terrible failures. It's really easy to write those off and just be like, I'm ready to close that chapter and put it behind me. I don't even want to think about it again. But really, if you can unpack it and think through, what did you bring to that situation when there was utter chaos? Were you the person that everyone could count on for the cool head that matters? And so there are other examples where it's like, when the plan didn't go as planned, what did you bring to the table? How did you make lemonade out of the lemons? And that's the. Those are the pieces when you're interviewing for a job that if you can explain that, you become a stronger candidate as opposed to someone who only talks about things that go well every time, all the time, without fail.

Do you have any advice for someone who's out there right now, who's just in the throes of imposter syndrome?

It's really easy when you're in the throes of imposter syndrome to let yourself just latch on to the automatic negative thoughts is what the literature calls it, and just find yourself in a loop of the same self bashing and that kind of thing. So really, if you can slow it down, run your own race, find where you are being unnecessarily critical and re, reframe, re reword how you're speaking to yourself. It will change your whole outlook.

Lovely.

And is there anything that we didn't get to that you wanted to say on the podcast?

Yeah, I just want to share with everyone that Drs. Lisa Orbe Austin and her husband, Dr. Richard Orbay Austin, do great work in imposter syndrome. And you should check out their resources. They've got books for your career, books for your kids. So I have learned so much from them and want to share that with everyone too.

Lovely.

And I'll have to find links and put that in the show notes and share that out with everyone. Thank you so much, Katie. It has been a dream. Pleasure having you on the podcast.

Great. Well, thank you for the opportunity to talk about the nonprofit sector and my career and imposter syndrome and it's been a pleasure to share what I know, and I'm still learning. So I hope that I can continue to learn from your future guests as well.

All right, I look forward to it. Katie, you have a great rest of your day.

You too. Take care. Bye. Bye.

I want to thank Kathryn Pusser once again for being on the show. It was such a pleasure to have a conversation with a true nonprofit expert. Now, as we're heading out of the show, I want to highlight one really big thing that I think applies to everything that's done. Whether we're talking about nonprofit work, whether we're talking about sales, whether we're talking about business ownership, entrepreneurship, the whole thing. I want to talk about Catherine's formula for her offers. Make the proper ask, most important thing, tell a compelling story. What is in it for them? That is the simplest way I can describe telling a compelling story. And then your ask has to include timing, the amount of money and then the project. Or in this broader sense, it could be the product. And then if there's no sale or if they reject the offer, in this instance, you look at, was it the bad time? Is it the price, or was it the product? This is so powerful for people out there who are trying to make it, who are trying to make sales. Every single one of us can take this out into the world. If you're experiencing imposter syndrome, obviously there was some great advice in there, but this is a framework, a script that you can take with you out there and, and use it as a template to improve every single one of your interactions, whether it be sales or otherwise. So I didn't want that to pass by without us acknowledging it. Powerful, powerful stuff from Kathryn Puser. If the conversation today helped you in any way or ignited anything in you, I encourage you to share it with a friend or an enemy. And if you have a story to share yourself, email me at sort of shearpod gmail.com I'd be more than happy to hear from you. Well, that's it for me and my birthday week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don't Forget to leave 5 star review on your way out later days.