Day 3: Your Role of a Lifetime Truth

The thing I couldn’t help coming back to until about a year ago was writing.

I have always loved writing and have spent over a decade in inner turmoil about how I want to write and want to share what I write but what if I am not good enough and I don’t have anything new to say and what if no one reads what I write and blah, blah, blah.

Thankfully, almost exactly a year ago, I put that inner chatter to rest. FOREVER.

It took me working with a spiritual teacher + consolidating everything I knew about living a happy, fulfilling life to get there. But I am here now and writing is going to happen. No questions.

BUT – it has to be writing I want to do – not on someone else’s terms. AND, at a deeper level, I know that I don’t want writing to be the ONLY thing I do.

The thing I deeply care about – for which writing has always been an awesome tool – is to live well. To go in directions I am being called to – even if they don’t make sense to anyone else. To be who I truly am, even if no one else gets me. To fulfill my soul’s desires. To live a life that in the end, I look back and say, wow. That was incredible and if I have to go back and change something, there wouldn’t be a thing I’d want to change because each experience taught me something valuable and made me the person I was meant to be. To live life on my own terms and have no regrets.

Until a year ago, not writing and sharing what I learned would have been my biggest regret.

Now, staying small seems like what I would regret.

The big question for me is, how do I play big on my own terms – retaining the freedom and the life I’ve created but without trading time for money – which is what I currently do.

I always come back to audio production. I’ve loved it ever since I learned not to be afraid of it. There’s nothing better to me than getting a few copy points from a client and getting to work my magic. Crafting the perfect script, voicing it just right…the emotions and the emphases…then adding the music and finding the PERFECT sound effects. Jeebus! Goosebumps!
But now I worry about AI. Why would you pay me to deliver what AI can do, FREE, in minutes. Additionally, that sort of audio belongs to a dying media- radio and I’m at a loss as to how to spin it. (Also, I fucking HATE podcasts and audiobooks)

It’s funny how one person’s hell can be another’s heaven. Analyzing abstract data through the lens of systems thinking to explain the behavior of the social ecosystem and how it will evolve over time massages my brain in ways that nothing else can. I can feel the electricity firing inside my brain like a euphoric massage. I’d happily barricade myself for days around 6 monitors to articulate a method of measuring the world and explaining its evolution. A competent analyst has over 110 techniques at their disposal to decompose all kinds of phenomena, but the differentiator is being able to do it in a way that is reproducible and explainable to general audiences so that we can engage entities with strategic dialogue about the most pressing decisions facing their business and how our proposed analysis will lead to a better outcome. The difference I’m meant to help people make is to fundamentally reinvent how analytical insights are generated and scaled across their organization to co-create the industry’s future.

Yesterday from 6am to 8pm I created a model that explains the evolution of a certain market in 70 countries by scoring hundreds of variables such as market sizes, growth rates, the regulatory climate, the level of mobile connectivity in a given country, how people spend their time, etc. into a 1-page presentation guiding an emerging brand on how to allocate resources across those 70 countries for best performance and I don’t regret a second of it.

oh boy, this one is for me! Lately I’ve been praised by my sales and marketing efforts because people ( my ideal audience – founders and startups ) start noticing me, yeah!!! BUT here’s the kicker, as I’m being introduced as “she’s my marketing coach” at the networking event by my client, I actually introduce myself as a health coach and I’m putting together a program to optimice your health for founders.
This scenario has repeated itself too many times to ignore it, and day 3 has paint the picture so clear that it pains me. And I wonder, am I walking the talk? I only want to have one program and one program only, but can’t help to doubt now if I’m leaving money on the table. Actually, am I going in the right direction?

Gee Dre, thank you, Merry Christmas to me in November :)))

• This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by Andrea Cristancho.

I missed this yesterday, so I’m going to keep this one short (because my response to today’s post was LOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG)!

I have always processed the world through writing.

And I have always loved deep conversations that dive into the nuance of a situation and don’t just skate along the surface.

And I love celebrating the fuck out of other people.

I get to do all of that now. And I love every minute!

Man Dre, have I thought about this topic a fucking lot. And over the years I have tried so many businesses. I have learned what I like and don’t like in them.

For a long while I pushed away branding and design because my last job was so toxic I didn’t want anything to do with it.

For years I have always thought about helping female entrepreneurs step into their power and run their businesses on their own terms. Kind of like you are doing with us Dre. But i struggle with all the mindset shit bc I can barely get my business started and i go back and forth. But my story is extremely close to yours where i am an excellent listener and look at things in a way no one else usually does. I can tend to pul things or have people think of things they may not have thought of. All my friends say i’m so easy to talk to. While all at the same time thinking do i have what it takes.

BUT i also really do enjoy sitting down and designing all at the same time. Especially when I don’t have much else to do and i can just zone out and design.

BUT, the biggest BUT of them all. With all the shit going on in my personal life I don’t have the mental capacity to help others and I don’t want to be around people or cram all of that into my schedule. so I am kind of stuck in this shitty middle area.

Everyone always talks about having the ONE thing, but I keep feeling like that’s not my style. So I created the ultimate branding kit that has many logo templates for people to create a brand look. But I also wanted to come up with a brand template and then create the other templates like social, email, slide dec, ebooks funnels, etc, everything but the web bc that is not really my thing all in that same brand style. This one be like they can download all the different pieces they need and don’t and get the whole brand without paying a designer. Not super unique bc they aren’t paying for that but it gets them started with a professional design.

Then have my course as my other thing, maybe in a bit.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 1 day ago by Crystal Sullivan.

I’m a clinical mental health counselor by training, education and licensure; but for nearly five years I worked as a chemical dependency counselor after having been essentially “railroaded” into that line of work by an academic advisor who told me that a chemical dependency counseling graduate certificate would “open doors” for me, and said that was something I needed because I didn’t “present well”. (Translation: I’m neurodivergent, and my advisor decided that I was too “different” to ever find work without going into a field that was so desperate for workers that the certification didn’t even require a four-year degree, let along a master’s. Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, Dr. Neuronormativism.)

That was how I started understanding the “Thing” that has kept finding me, over and over and over, that I’m here for, that I was literally born to do: Working with people who are “different” like I was (and am) “different”. The ones who are discouraged from following their dreams because they and their dreams don’t fit in the standard-sized societally-approved box. The ones who need to know that being neurodivergent, or having a chronic illness or disability, or being queer or black or brown, doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be in the margins forever. The ones who need the affirmation that just because we’re different doesn’t mean we’re broken or wrong.

Showing people with nonconforming identities how to embrace who they are and how to navigate a world that wasn’t built for us or even by us is My Thing. It’s followed me all my life – because it IS me.

The job I’m being hired to do would be to supply parents with the tools for navigating a resilient family culture when they are in need of recalibrating their purpose without the stress of guesswork or screwing up their kids, nor getting trapped in the traffic jams, roadblocks, and detours of destructive cultural patterns.

I have often thought my job was to help parents deconstruct their generational traumas, confront their assumptions about systemic patterns, and break the cycle of their wounded child tendencies and become more conscious parents. Those are part of the package, but are also a very tall order. These are the ways that I think about the problem, but I don’t believe they’re part of my job. As parents learn the tools of a resilient family culture, they will likely come to these conclusions on their own and be part of the discussion, but that isn’t my ultimate job. I kind of hope that gaining the tools I share with them will lead them to seek treatment to heal from the excess baggage we all carry around as parents.

I have been obsessed with family culture because I wanted to know how to break the cycle of dysfunction in my family and figure out how to prepare my children for a future of unknowns so they might be successful despite what happens tomorrow. I originally thought that a successful family culture hinged on my ability to model success for my kids and always be capable of showing up for them to model every behavior and characteristic I wanted to instill in them. Exhausting, amiright?? I accidentally stumbled upon the truth as my exploration into family culture unearthed the dysfunctional patterns of more than just my family. I began to see how society at large has been repeating patterns of dysfunction that are deteriorating individuals and families and breaking down our resiliency.

I want to give parents the tools they need to have confidence in their ability to be resilient in spite of the challenges we face, in spite of what the future holds, and be able to navigate those ups and downs with compassion.