Overwhelmed by Change? The MOVING Method™ Will Get You Unstuck: Entrepreneurs Club Podcast Episode 2

Jevata Crawford Bosket is the founder of Project MOVE, a boutique firm that helps people downsize, relocate and move. She calls herself a move manager, a social scientist, and a person who likes to have fun. On episode two of The Entrepreneurs’ Club Podcast, recorded at Venture X in Bethlehem, she talked with Carter McKinney about her new book, Moving In Place: More Than Boxes, and the framework inside it.

She is clear about one thing up front: this is not a book about how to pack a box. For that, she says, do a Google search. It is about understanding why you are in one place and want to go to another.

Showing up fully

McKinney opened with the idea of showing up fully. Crawford Bosket calls it both a soft skill and a hard one, and admits she realized she was not doing it herself.

Writing the book gave her the language for it. She used to say entrepreneurship was the hardest self-help experience you could go through. Now she thinks writing a book is a close second, because it forces you to give your own story words. Many entrepreneurs, she notes, struggle to explain what they do beyond “I help people.”

Her advice for people moving from a job into their own business is to become the go-to expert in their field first. If you are excellent at the work, she says, you can grow into ancillary skills like social media later. She also recommends a values assessment. Hers come down to three words: authenticity, clarity and honesty.

“Showing up fully to me at this moment means that I am comfortable in who I am and the products and services that I offer, that I express them with confidence.”

Throw It Out Thursday

Throw It Out Thursday started as her answer to the pressure to post constantly. A friend who works in social media told her to pick one day and do one thing. It became a weekly post about decluttering in small steps, with 52 chances a year to make progress.

One week she tackled her sock drawers. She loves fun socks and had two big drawers of them, even though she wears one pair a day and does laundry about once a week. She cut down to one drawer. The same thing happened with lotion, journals and her bathroom cabinets. Whatever you love, she says, you probably have too many of.

Her fix is what she calls bumpers, like the ones on bumper cars. Decide that a cabinet is the only place cups go, and when it is full, something has to leave before something new comes in.

Building The MOVING Method™

Crawford Bosket keeps journals, and she brought one from September 2022 with the first notes for The MOVING Method™. She tells aspiring authors to write their ideas down in any rough form, even as a social media post, because you have to tell the story to yourself before you can tell it to anyone else.

The framework grew out of a childhood word game where each letter of your name stands for something. She leaned on a circle of people with different roles: some gave feedback on cover images, and one friend who is strong with frameworks told her each letter could stand alone and carry three words. M became motivation, mindset and making space. I became involvement, intuition and insight.

She also used AI for grammar and brainstorming, with a warning to keep your own voice. Research pointed her to Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and courage, which helped her see that writing a book was its own act of bravery. Her research on what people search for about moving showed that toolkits and resources ranked first, so the book includes them. A composite character named Nia, which means purpose in Swahili, runs through the chapters instead of separate case studies.

“It’s very easy to say you’re going to do something. Bravery is actually doing it.”

What Project MOVE does

Project MOVE began after she was let go from a job. Friends told her she could do this work, though she did not know the industry existed. Today the firm helps clients who are downsizing, relocating, clearing an estate, moving in together or apart, or reclaiming their space after a divorce or a death. It does not own trucks. It handles the planning, liquidation and decisions around a move.

She describes her superpower as project management: taking some of the emotion out so clients can make decisions. She knows the merge-and-move well, since her husband moved into the house she already lived in. She sees the book as a way to scale herself, saying an entrepreneur cannot only make money when physically working.

“What started as a favor to a friend turned out to be something that I love and that I’m really, really good at.”

The Queen of Kwanzaa

During the pandemic in 2020, Crawford Bosket hosted a seven-day virtual Kwanzaa celebration and assumed it would be a one-time event. People kept asking for more. After she recorded the ABCs of Kwanzaa on her cell phone in her living room, the group grew from about 100 to about 2,000 members.

If Mariah Carey can be the Queen of Christmas, she decided, she could be the Queen of Kwanzaa. She has since recorded three Kwanzaa songs and created a single Kwanzaa candle. That candle appears on the cover of her book as a grounding ritual, next to a box marked open first, a plant and a warm blanket. Her favorite word is Kujichagulia, which she connects to being true to yourself and having your own voice.