You already know it's the creative space. Do you consider yourself a creator? Yes. What
do you create? I create poetry. I help other people create, so I guess I create the creation of people's businesses and I also write essays, so I was very excited the other day. My goal. Yeah. I actually earned 3 cents on medium, which was hilarious. I didn't expect that much, but I think anytime you actually make something or yeah. Do something or bring something from the realm of ideas into the world of the art tangible world that makes you a creator.
So I think in a way everybody is because everyone's life is their performance art. So everyone's a creator in my
book. I like that. You've got a pretty varied group of creations. Would you mind walking me through how they came together? Sure.
I guess I'll start with poetry. I've always been a huge reader. My whole life. I'm not a writer though. I have kept journals, but I think was always afraid to really. Speak a hundred percent my truth in my journals, because then they could, they were discoverable that's so something that I'm actually trying to get over now. So I've always had a very strong urge to create, but my creativity I found was less imagining things and imaginary world, and I have a very applied creativity.
So I'm a really good problem-solver and associative thinker and just coming up with creative solutions. But I like things to be framed. The constraints of real life. I started trying to write creatively with a capital C fairly recently about a year ago. And it's really hard. It's really hard the gap between what I want to be able to accomplish and what I can is huge. And it's really hard to keep a beginner's mind. So that's poetry. Business-wise I was a money manager.
I ran my own firm for 25 years. And before that another money management started for five. So I was a kind of money management entrepreneur. And I took some time off after, but now I'm helping mostly women who are either Tinder businesses or have a small businesses that they're wrestling with some aspect, or also just people worrying about wanting to think through things like finance and future and careers and that sort of thing. So it's a kind of the creativity.
Holding space kind of creativity, so different. It's not my own, but it's midwifing other people's
creativity. Talk to me about the, sort of the change in approach between your own direct creative work. And then this, what is often thought of as less creative work working on people's businesses? It's not.
Yeah. So it requires a big mind shift because I have this kind of weird gift. Okay. Which is that I love talking about business. I've been analyzed thousands of companies, but what I really love is that businesses are really, I think, alive and dynamic complex systems. And I have this sort of knack when talking to somebody about what they want. Do with their business or what they want to create.
I can see it's almost like the business shows me where they can be and why the person is the person that it's selected to become real. And I say that in the way. Writers will talk about ideas, lots of things, existing in the realm of ideas and potential. And you get tapped on the shoulder. And if you don't follow through that idea, we'll go and find somebody else because it wants to be made real.
And I feel businesses are the same thing, doing it for other people, especially if you're a little type a codependent and you want to go in there and do it. For people and that's a mistake, right? Because that's not very empowering and it's there business and their vision. So the creativity is in sometimes being very direct. Sometimes it's an holding the mirror and tilting it at various angles so that they can see the wider things.
So the art becomes almost capturing the negative space so that they can see the contrast between what is and what is possible and giving a lot of support around that. Could you dig in a little bit around that? Yeah, I think we can all have a lot of programming about how things should be. So I'll give an example in the institutional money management business, and there's a standard way that people think you ought to look, you ought to dress. You ought to talk.
And back in 1995 and a lot of women, or a lot of people of color in the business, I was willing to be very different. And I think that actually we have this fear of being judged. And we feel that we can only be successful by looking and being an acting like everybody else. And I think sometimes showing the mirror to someone about, all right, you're really clear about the kind of interior design you want to do and may be is everything that you're doing. Broadcasting that city.
It's consistent with that vision and that desire. So it can be a lot of dissonance. And so part of just showing the dissonance, the mixed messages being put out there, which muddies the signal, and then your people can't find you. Or if there's dissonance, like you think this is how you want to do, but really some part of you deeply disagrees and is resisting it. And it's sabotage. And maybe you should be listening to that part or bringing it on board.
So those are the kinds of things that by working the mirrors, my gift is I can see what can be, I can see that. And sometimes it's much bigger than the person is thinking, and sometimes I can also see what's just not jiving. And so there's something when it's not jiving, there's something off either. You don't really want to do it, or you haven't really honed in on what it is. And so that's the kind of thing. Call tilting the mirror at various angles so we can see the whole picture.
Curious, especially with sort of the two disparate audiences. How do you go about building up an audience for yourself now? Or is that a goal? I think should be the first place.
There's a lot of people I think I can help. There's a lot of things. I wish my 30 year old self and had I known that it would have allowed me to be more effective and I've been very successful, but to be able to enjoy that stuff. And not have that hungry ghost of somehow it's not good enough. Right.
So there's a lot about the world that I didn't really appreciate that I learned over 30 years that I can help, especially young women, because I meet a lot of amazing women and I'll hear stories where kind of like me. I thought it was their social anxiety or their whatever. And meanwhile, something happened in a public company meeting and they got aggressed, but to planning themselves cause they don't, they didn't read the power play. So they thought, oh, it's them being shy or socially anxious.
And really somebody just fucked with them. And there are ways to handle. Or if you have a system that's going to either shut down, like to recognize that, to be able to work with your body, to be able not to have that reaction, to be able to really AC with going on and be able to be so grounded in your own body, that you can react to it in a grounded centered way.
So in order to do that, to help as many people as I can, because I have to let people know that I exist and what I do and put out the signal. So in that sense, I need to. And audience. And if I do that correctly, people will find me. Yeah. How are you going about that now? I'm still struggling with putting out the correct signal because I find sometimes that I read things about women and money. Finance of women in business and it can imply, oh, there are huge gender differences.
And mind you, there's a lot of social conditioning that there is some wiring, but really we are not broken. Not women, not us as individual humans. We just forget that part of being human is having shitty aspects of ourselves or having shitty days or shitty feelings and that there is nothing wrong with it. And being in this sort of perfectionistic pursuit, right. Of like, oh, if I do that, then I'll be happy.
If I do that, then I won't be broken and nobody's broken, but we just don't believe that. So that kind of messaging, I call it, the broken wing messaging is preying on people's fears and anxieties is not okay, but I want to also be able to address like things that might be real struggles, but do it in a way that's just like you have a plumbing problem. It's not that you have a character flaw. So I haven't quite mastered.
But otherwise what I've done is I joined ship 30 for 30, which is how we met and just in order to learn and put myself out there and learn how to write online writing, and also just to create the habit really. And now I started to experiment a little with medium, and then we'll probably expand to Facebook and Instagram. Well to just get the word out, but the way I want to get the word out is by sharing stories and making as much available in a way that can be useful to people right off the bat.
And that's the part that I'm really struggling with right now is how to show up in a way that's most useful. And that's, I'm finding it really hard to fake. How they do it, no matter how hard I try 250 words, it's a little bit of a challenge to do that, but concentrated nuggets, I guess I haven't figured out how to do a concentrated nugget and not have it be a platitude.
I mean, I think it's all about context at the end of the day. And so as you cut away that context, it might be valuable, but you might not find it valuable out of context and you have to do. In the algorithm that it's to feed it to people at the right time. You mentioned that you do some coaching. Do you monetize your creation? Any of that? Other
than the 3 cents I earned on medium, the world of poetry is not known for, for painting, paying writers really well. And especially if you're a shitty poet, which I definitely am. So I was really happy though. I got a piece of a smaller ratio poem, and it got published by digital publication. It was my first submission. So I was very lucky that way. And yeah, that made me feel like, all right, I got to keep doing this.
And subsequently it's just been a lot of headbanging and tears, but part of it. Thing about trying to really express what is deeply true and doing it in a way where I think you're casting a bit of a spell on the reader, so that by the end of the poem, it's the same way with the atomic essay, right? There's a takeaway, there's a gift for the reader, right? Does it transformation? And in order to do that, it has to be very water.
The way, any kind of writing needs to be well, there's too much rattling around it. It won't be as effective, but it's really hard to get that stilled expression of what you're trying to say. And sometimes you don't know what you're trying to say until you try to say it badly a thousand times, and then you realize what it's really about, but it's a process I'm learning to enjoy the process. That is the wisdom of age. I think.
So. What's your north star metric. How do you know you're on the right path?
I think for me, it's a body feeling. It means that what I am doing is congruent. I'm not at war with myself in the same that I'm creating. So that's successful. That's that would be the sort of qualitative definition that there is an integrity to the creation in terms of metrics. Obviously the trend is your. Right. So just, are you doing that? But I think also, and I'm going to come back to this because I think sometimes we can get caught up in actions, tasks.
We focused on the firetruck of actions to get us the desired result, but the result may not really solve the problem, that discomfort that we're feeling. So I would say there's a sort of standard metrics to do that, but for me, like I created the rumor, but I didn't do it to make money per se. Obviously I wouldn't make a living, but it wasn't driven by that.
I had a point to prove that you could have a sort of non wall street culture, one that was based on collaboration, be successful, put up good numbers. So that would be the metric for that thing. So I think for everything has its own metric.
What's your current
goal as a creator. What I'd love to do is to spend more time doing the deep thinking and deep exploration. So call it the kind of pre-writing part of writing to spend more time with that, because that's the part that I run away from. And then coming after that, if I do that, and then I tried to express it, then getting the expression, the exploration, you know, that the beginning of the storytelling.
Tight, but I feel like that I know I can do, or I know how to get help to do that well or to progress. But that part of sitting down with yourself and really thinking is the part that, uh, I'm not doing enough of. And that's a part I'm obviously running away from, which means I should be running toward it. We should all be firemen when it comes to our own discomfort, run towards the fire. So I want
to double down on that. What part of this process makes you most uncomfortable right now?
I wish I knew. And that's what like doing ship 30 has made me realize is that Dickie talks a lot about developing the habit and the sacred hour. And, you know, that's how you build a habit and the consistency. I think it's more than that. I think it's really being willing to go to dark places. And I think some of that is you just need to give it a lot of time. It's not something that gets done in 20 minutes. You need to clear it up.
Stuff to really get at what you're really thinking about, what really disturbs you about something. It's like, when somebody, when you ask somebody a question and they say, oh, they're fine. And then you ask more specifically, like you doubling down and then on the third answer, they give you the real answer. And I would give you the real answer. If I knew it, the real answer. I haven't done it, which is why I need to do it.
So ask me in a couple of months, because there's no point doing this, if it's just going to be shallow bullshit. So the growth is going to come. And if I wrestle with, okay, why didn't I not know all these things 30 years ago? What did I learn in the last 30 years? Why is it so hard to be truly okay. With my imperfect self? Why can't I love myself. With the same level of imperfection, right? Those are all like the big kind of questions I'd like to tackle.
And I think in trying to figure that out, that's where I think I can come up with things that maybe it could be helpful to others. So those are the things that I would want to explore. I think those are the things I want to run away from why I, not my chore, but, um, know you
could send a tweet back to your
start. What would it be? It would be something along the lines of. You are intrinsically worthy. I think that's it. I could add some other things, but essentially it's, there's that sense that the real estate that you stand on the planet and that you're three is not having an existential dilemma about that. There being a piece of shit of an Oak. It just funnels life, energy and. It's Oak thing. It's full expression of oakiness and we all have that.
And so I think that sense of the intrinsic worthiness is what I mean by that. And when I say we're not broken, that's also what I mean, like that fractal within us, that plugged in to the life force that animates you. Is complete. It is not broken and it is worthy by definition. Our existence validates us. Ah, there you go. That's our very existence. So
we've got your intrinsically worthy and our very existence validates us. I think you could fit both of those in a single
tweet because we exist. We are intrinsically worthy of our existence. There you go. That's the center.
Is there any last note to leave our listeners with
today? I think I would just be iterate that feeling shitty is a hundred percent part of the human experience and that as it's being imperfect and flawed, and that you should talk to yourself as kindly as you would. Deeply beloved person in your life. That's what I aspire to. It's really hard. It's really hard. But if you can do that, then I think all of you can show up in this existence and do all the beautiful things that you're meant to do.
In addition to all the shitty things you're going to do, because it's not in spite of it's almost because of that.