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What it Means to Be a Culture Maker in Your Business and Media
On my website, the first thing you’ll see is the statement: “We are The Culture Makers”. I say this because it’s true. We have the power to create change and to create a just culture. In our interactions with each other, with friends and family, with power and authorities, online, and professionally, in our businesses…
Business Tip for Culture Makers #220: Leverage Your Line Items (Software, Apps, Digital Marketing Tools)
Culture-making Marketing is about our business practices. We can invest in our own communities by selecting apps founded by people with non-dominant identities.
Culture making = tiny acts of doing-it-differently
OPPORTUNITY: Instead of letting an unjust culture flow through our mouths and our lives, we can interrupt it — and we can make a new one.
The Fantasy of Being Holiday Fabulous
The Fantasy of Being Holiday Fabulous gets in the way of actually having fabulous holidays. So let’s retire it. [H/t Kate Harding’s LIFE ALTERING 2009 essay, The Fantasy of Being Thin]
In Our Culture, Every Woman Is a Brand
In order to get access to rights and resources, every woman in our culture has to present herself as saleable, consumable object: we must brand ourselves.
Dear Women’s Empowerment Coaches: Is Your Teacher’s Teacher a Men’s Rights Activist?
Through their books, coaching institutes, classes, and workshops, men’s rights activists have trained MANY women’s life coaches and “empowerment” leaders.
TRUTH: “You Can’t Be Friends With Someone Who Wants Your Life”
I know that when I’ve wanted someone else’s life, it made me transactional, strategic, subservient, and sometimes envious. In other words: not a safe friendship or business bet.
And I know that when friends, lovers or colleagues wanted what I had, we always ended in conflict and destruction. Always.
We Are Each Other’s Necessary Tendernesses
The best thing we ever do is lean on each other and lift each other up because we are the culture makers, and together we rise.
What Looks Like Personal Choices are Often Framed Up for Us By Society
The way we use our time is predetermined and overdetermined by our society and gender roles, and society frames our productivity as “personal choices.”
We are Not Worker Bees. We are Humans…and CREATORS.
“In fact, many full-time artist reports that they have become more creatively rounded into full-time people.” – Julia Cameron. I struggle with this exactly!
When I hear someone say "I’m not ready for a relationship" or "I’m not ready to be a good partner", for example, I think, being in a relationship is how you learn to be a partner and how you learn to love.
Relationships and marriage are people-growing machines. In relationship is always life-altering. You can’t learn to swim on land.
So of course you’re not ready for the thing you`re scared of and the thing that needs doing. Nobody is.
Even when you think you’re ready, you’re probably wrong.
When I decided to have children and got pregnant with my first child -- the magnificent Sophie Umaringa, teenage leader of rallies -- I thought I was ready.
And then, when she arrived as a cosmic privilege and burden, an eternal marvel and responsibility, a whole person with a buffet of needs and demands, and an instant and continuous attenuation of my own selfishness, I knew – and I know every day – that I was not ready.
I was and am wrenchingly unprepared.
I am not an instinctual saint equipped with The Answers but a desperately loving and flawed person who is striving to rise. Striving to be the mama this young culture-maker needs. Striving to become the kind of person and leader and learner our new world needs.
Ready is always, always, ALWAYS the wrong litmus test.
The real question is:
Are you willing to do whatever it takes to get ready?
Because we get ready by *doing* it.
not ready but willing,
Kelly Diels
#LevelUpYourLife #MotivationalSpeaker #Mindset #Creative #BuildingYourLegacy #WeAreTheCultureMakers #SlowProductivity #MeaningfulWork #SustainableBusiness #Speaker #Writer #UseYourLife #SelfDevelopment #LeadershipDevelopment
Apr 24
An epiphany from late 2018: I was scrambling to find time for a new collaboration.
Witnessing this in live action, my collaborator, PK Mutch (Petra), said to me, with been-there-done-that sympathy, "That`s what women do -- we scale horizontally."
I immediately recognized that this was why my business wasn`t working the way I wanted it to -- but I didn`t know how to fix it.
A few days later, I went out with a colleague I`d worked with a long time ago at a huge telecom. She started talking about the new `vertical` she was managing.
Suddenly it all clicked.
The telecomm as a whole had lots of services, lots of clients and lots of offers, sure; but each vertical HAD ITS OWN TEAM and its own content. It was a unit unto itself.
That`s how they got traction in each of those verticals and how the company as a whole did well. By focusing on one client and one offer.
What I had done, in my own business, was the opposite of that.
I had one team (me) but many verticals. Several different client profiles, several different offers.
For years, my biz strategy was to constantly invent new programs and offers --and create all new launch material to go with them. ⠀
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I was always inventing and overworking.
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As a result, I never quite got traction on ANY of my offerings, so I was always scrambling for cash AND constantly on the verge of burn out.⠀
That`s why my business wasn`t getting the momentum I was hoping for, and why I was personally exhausted. I wasn`t concentrated in ONE vertical; instead, I`d scaled horizontally across many.
And I was only one person!
So how do you stop scaling horizontally?
You create a signature piece of intellectual property that becomes the centre of your business.
A signature program is a way to do less while making more.
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I`m Kelly Diels, an expert on Culture Making, Thought Leadership and IP. I teach culture-making entrepreneurs & creators how to develop a substantial body of work that changes EVERYTHING – your life, your industry, our world.
Apr 23
Marketing, social media and deliberate self-promotion aren’t a distraction.
They’re activities that add up to a winning and significant body of work.
They`re not a distraction from ideation. They ARE your ideas.
Here are 3 counterintuitive but KEY activities for Thought Leaders to commit to for putting their ideas out into the world, developing their body of work and moving forward in their business:
1. SOCIAL MEDIA.
It`s not *just* about getting attention. Social media can be a lab for cultivating your ideas, so put snippets of ideas out on social, every day.
2. NETWORKING.
Having conversations with interesting people -- even preaching to boring ones -- provides creative stimulus and opportunities to forge creative connections and embroider your ideas.
3. WILD IDLING.
True thought leadership & meaningful bodies of work require unstructured leisure time and “wild idling.” (h/t @LianneRaymond)
ONE MORE TIME, WITH FEELING:
Self-promotion is not a distraction from your body of work.
It’s part of how you create meaningful work that matters. It`s an idea-growing practice.
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I`m Kelly Diels, an expert on Culture Making, Thought Leadership and IP. I teach culture-making entrepreneurs & creators how to develop a substantial body of work that changes EVERYTHING – your life, your industry, our world.
#BodyOfWork #MakingAnImpact #ThoughtLeader #ContentStrategy #LevelUpYourBusiness #CreativeEntrepreneur #CreativeEntrepreneurship #IntentionalBusiness #BrandingIdentity #SocialMediaForBusiness #SocialEntrepreneur #IntellectualProperty
Apr 19
Are you wrestling with Imposter Complex? This might help. #impostersyndrome #impostercomplex #thoughtleadership #creativeentrepreneur #intellectualproperty #bodyofwork #WeAreTheCultureMakers #deepwork #slowproductivity #visibility #edwardsaid #orientalism #culturalexile #yourdifferenceisyourstrength www.kellydiels.com
Apr 18
Dear Multi-Passionate Maker,⠀
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Maybe you don`t have Shiny Object Syndrome.⠀
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Maybe you`ve been studying & practicing all of these modalities because you`re developing a rich body of work, across time.⠀
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(No maybe about it.)⠀
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Multi-passionate professionals often get told that they`re "scattered" & need to focus.⠀
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They then internalize negative messages insisting that their orientation towards lifelong learning, curiosity & creativity is a barrier to success.⠀
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IT`S NOT.⠀
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It`s how we build the deep work & creative solutions needed for these urgent times.⠀
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Often, when I work with multi-passionate professionals, it`s wildly obvious to me that they`re collecting tools, synthesizing across traditions -- and making a whole new thing! -- in order to solve complex social problems.⠀
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They`ve been gathering all.the.tools.⠀
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You know what all those tools add up to? ⠀
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A practice. A way of doing things. A framework. Your unique process.⠀
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***You have a methodology.*** ⠀
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So let`s build language for it and NAME IT, specifically.⠀
Naming your method makes it tangible AND SALEABLE.⠀
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Now it now gets a lot easier to explain it to other people...⠀
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...and becomes more obvious why they might want to work with you :)⠀
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Once you name it, you substantiate it. ⠀
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****Including to yourself.****⠀
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Now YOU can see how everything you`ve trained in has led up to this, has prepared you for this work.⠀
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Because, dear Multi-passionate Maker, you`re NOT spinning your wheels or getting distracted by shiny things.⠀
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You`re growing the solutions & institutions of the future.⠀
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Let`s make sure you`ve got the language to describe them. ⠀
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love + justice,⠀⠀
Kelly⠀
#SurfaceYourMethodology #IntellectualProperty #DeepWork #BodyOfWork #SlowProductivity #ThoughtLeadership #ThoughtLeader #MeaningfulWork #WeAreTheCultureMakers
Apr 18
