I’ve learned how to tap dance around all the mental traps that most people who look like me tend to fall for. I always seek the beauty in things and still have this wonderful curiosity and excitement when meeting new people. Everyone has a different emotional thermostat which has been regulated by how they were raised, and developed by the traumas they may or may not have experienced.
I’ve been training for years and years to develop practical empathy as people don’t know what I know, and I don’t know what they know and I am comfortable with that. I am constantly asking questions:
- What do they know?
- What do they need?
- What happened to them that led them to believe that in this moment they are being reasonable?
I think that if we can ask ourselves these question enough times, then not only will it help us make change, it will also help us to contently live with the world as it is. We can’t change the whole world, so if we try to understand it as it is, then it will be easier to decode it and figure out a way to make it better. Contact me via e-mail to arrange a meeting in confidentiality.
When you label me, you deny me!
We are so obsessed by what was and I think that it’s something to be said if you are living and learning. You have to deal with cross generational realities even though we’re in different stages of life. Just because I am a person of faith it doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of doubt. And because you may be a person of doubt, it doesn't mean you don’t have moments of faith. It takes faith to sit down on a chair, I don’t know anybody who checks a chair to see whether it will bear their weight before sitting down. You cannot exist without faith!
“Once you label me you negate me. - Søren Kierkegaard ”
Once we learn to label and we teach what that label means, now we’re trying to live up to being in that label. You have a gift and don’t lock it up inside just to please a small group of people. Keep speaking until somebody listens, keep singing until somebody claps and keep painting until somebody stares.
Looking ahead
Back in the days, James Brown sang “I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door I'll Get It Myself).” I advise you take his words to heart and never beg anybody for anything - go out and create it for yourself. Your future is not dependent on what you lost, it is going to be decided on what you have left. If you spend all your time doing the inventory on what you lost, you will never count up what you have left and what you have left is enough to build something greater than where you are.
I know that you have all the rich experiences that come through atrocities you survived. You are stronger, you are wiser, you’ve proven things to yourself that you wouldn't have learned any other way. You can overcome everything that has happened to you and this gives you confidence to know that if you went through all of this, then you can walk through that door with confidence. Start looking ahead as no-one drives forward looking through the rear view mirror. Contact me via e-mail to arrange a personal meeting.
““When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear.” - Tao Te Ching”
Your DNA does not change
via The Guardian
We all have the same DNA sequence as when we were born, what makes each of us unique is the interplay between our DNA and environment. My experiences have taught me that it’s not, '“Can you go with me, it’s can you grow with me?” It’s only when we have shared philosophies, the seasons will change our reality. Unfortunately, many of us keep trying to hold onto our last season without discovering the beauty of the season we are in now. Eternal youth is not real, there is nothing wrong with being 40, especially if you explore 40 and re-pivot into the beauty of being 40. And if you are still in doubt, just ask an 80 year old.
Stages and ages have repercussions on how we get along. We are constantly in motion, we are constantly evolving and are constantly becoming, so we should not look back at the transition with envy. I think getting older is something that should be celebrated and getting old is a gift. Sometimes we forget that, and as time goes on is inevitable, it’s not going to stop for us. I think we can either embrace the process or not and personally, I don’t want to miss the beauty of grey hair and love through wrinkled eyes.
Communication can unite us
We all have something to offer but we don’t always have the ability to release it and if it doesn't get out then it may eat you up on the inside. Nobody can live life and not gather experience, and out of those experiences come conclusions and to share those conclusions is to create growth. I have been told throughout my life that the more you give away the more you will receive, this is also the fundamental value of most religions.
Nowadays we have the ability to go into silos of our choice and interact with people who think like us, dress like us and feel like us. You can get your news delivered to you in your flavour or colour, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think the only problem is when you think that your news is absolute and because we have 24 hours news cycles, and we also have technology that collects our behavioural data and via algorithms directly associates you with your interests. This in turn starts pushing information to you that further supports whatever you were searching for. And this provides a false reality, a reality where you think the world thinks like you.
“Music is the most powerful form of communication in the world. It brings us all together. Even religion separates us, but a hit record unites us across religious beliefs, race, politics. - Sean Combs ”
As we become more tribalistic, we also become more animalistic! Think about how many things have been created to divide us and how few things that has been created to unite us. I think we have to keep speaking to each other, even if we have different opinions, and stop living behind the walls of the labels we put on ourselves.
Juggling many plates
via The Guardian
A few years ago, one of my good friends in Brooklyn switched me onto Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book, “Supernatural”. Being supernatural means overcoming challenges and conditions in your outdoor environment that most people would not be able to accomplish. Supernatural also clarifies the state of being in which you are able to change your body by thought alone to say it another way it means being greater than your body. Many people want to think positively but they are feeling negative, they want to live their dreams and have an exciting future but they feel unworthy. And this means that their body and mind are in opposition. We have to recondition the body in order to create a new mind. How many people do you know who have memorised suffering? I think what they are really saying is no matter what happens, no person, no thing or experience can move them from that state.
The combination of how you are thinking and how you are feeling is called the state of being. We have three brains that allows us to go from thinking to doing, to being. The first brain is called neocortex and allows us to decide on the action to focus our concentration to invent to speculate to have intention or attention. The second brain called the limbic brain which makes a chemical that is called a feeling or an emotion. The third brain is called the cerebellum and it’s responsible for you beginning to develop what’s called implicit memories or non-declarative memories where you have done something so many times that you no longer have to consciously think about it.
Most people wait for crisis, or trauma, or disease, or loss, or diagnosis to really want to change. They wait to the point where ego is brought to such a low level that they cannot go on 'business as usual’ any longer. That’s when we begin to look at how we’re thinking, or what emotions we are living by. My message is: Why wait? We can learn to change in a state of pain and suffering, which tends to be the human model, or we can learn to change in a state of joy and inspiration. Contact me via e-mail if you are interested in change as every time you learn something new, your brain physically changes.
Will you be the passenger or the driver in your life journey?
Do you believe that the way you think has an effect on your life? According to neuroscience, your brain is organised to reflect everything you’ve known in your life, your brain is a record of your personal environment and an artefact of your past. The big question: Does your environment control your thinking or does your thinking control your environment?
We could say that you were thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions that create the same experiences and emotions, but secretly you expect something to change in your life. Now as the environment turns on different circuits in your brain you will begin to think equal to your personal environment. As you see the same people and go to the same places at the same time, it’s the external environment that’s turning on the different circuits in your brain, causing you to think equal to everything you know. And as long as you think equal to everything that is familiar or known to you, you will keep creating more of the same.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. - Albert Einstein”
To change is to think greater than your environment and every great person in history know this. They all had a vision, they all had an idea - they couldn’t see it, they couldn’t smell, taste or feel it but it was alive in their minds. It was so alive in their mind that they began to live as if that reality was actually happening now. So can you believe in a future that you can’t see or experience with your senses yet? But you have thought about it enough times in your mind that your brain is literally changed to look like the event has already happened? Neuroscience says it’s possible. Contact me via e-mail to arrange a personal meeting.
The 3 day social media blackout
“A system can never defend the people it was not supposed to protect.”
How can each of you be so certain you are right?
The Blind Men and the Elephant - A poem by John G. Saxe
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it.
The first blind man reached out and touched the side of the huge animal. "An elephant is smooth and solid like a wall!" he declared. "It must be very powerful." The second blind man put his hand on the elephant's limber trunk. "An elephant is like a giant snake," he announced. The third blind man felt the elephant's pointed tusk. "I was right," he decided. "This creature is as sharp and deadly as a spear." The fourth blind man touched one of the elephant's four legs. "What we have here," he said, "is an extremely large cow." The fifth blind man felt the elephant's giant ear. "I believe an elephant is like a huge fan or maybe a magic carpet that can fly over mountains and treetops," he said. The sixth blind man gave a tug on the elephant's coarse tail. "Why, this is nothing more than a piece of old rope. Dangerous, indeed," he scoffed.
There are quite a few lessons learned from the story of the blind men and the elephant. The elephant is a very large animal and each man touched only one part, it’s only when you put the parts together that you will see the truth. The “elephant” represents many different things in life that we can’t see, so if we don’t remember these limitations, we can get into trouble with ourselves and others. The parable is about a range of truths and mistakes. It’s also about the need for communication and the need for respect for different perspectives and shows the effects of observation and bias. I think we should embrace the diversity of the individual as part of the unity of the collective.
Selling is a profession
Last night I stated to a friend that great sales people don’t sound lake sales people. He said, “what do you mean?” I explained: “This is because great sales people have learned that the most effective way to communicate with people is to sound natural.” It’s a fact that if you are not selling then you are not in business. And I think everyone in sales agrees with the fact that people buy from people they know, like and trust.
Usually when we think of a salesperson as a person with commission breath, a person who is out for themselves, who’s pushy and always trying to close us. When we want to buy something or want help, who do we talk to? We talk to people who have some expertise in the area and who we enjoy talking with about that topic. This is something I was really lucky to learn very early in my career. The majority of salespersons learn this in the middle of their careers and then it’s a tough transition to unlearn and re-learn.
If you are able to have natural, organic conversations with people about what they care about and the challenges they are facing, then you have hit the sweet spot of selling. Too many salespersons think that it’s our insights and messaging that’s our gift, but this stuff puts us in the “sales rep zone”. When you are in that zone, then you are a commodity - What is it? How does it work? How is it different? What’s the price? - And if you are being treated like this, then it’s because you sound like a salesperson. Contact me via e-mail to arrange a sales training workshop for your organisation.
Smart kids are not always cool
I was born and raised in London, my parents came from Jamaica and I have been living in Copenhagen since 1997, so I’m always fluctuating between those worlds. I come from the inner city and have seen so much misguided entrepreneurial spirit on the streets. I have met bright, smart hustlers, entrepreneurs who don’t realise their essential product is risk. They have to deal with employees, profit and loss, some of them are extremely sharp and would thrive in the corporate world, but in reality they are not going anywhere because they don’t have the right frame of reference. Inner city kids don’t have access to capital, they have not experienced any world other than their own, they feel isolated and not engaged in the broader community. And from these humble beginnings is why a sub-culture develops.
Anything that is not marketed is not going to be purchased!
You can never become a great communicator if you only understand your own material and not make it relevant to your audience. Connecting is the art of the game. Communication is about connecting with other people and in order to do that you have to listen, learn and understand that your preferences, culture, ideas and concepts are not the only ones on the planet. And if you are going to be effective at meeting more people, you have to be broad enough to at least embrace the notion of how they hear what you are saying. There’s a huge difference between what you intend to communicate and what’s being heard. You have to become bilingual and learn the language of the hearer. Contact me via e-mail for guidance on the survival techniques required to sustain the things you love.
In the face of rejection
Illustration by Dawn Kim
Have you ever been told that you are not good enough or that you are not the right fit for our organisation? Whether the rejection we experience is large or small, one thing remains constant - it always hurts, and it usually hurts more than we expect it to. Facing rejection requires courage to stay focused on the bigger picture as most rejections, whether romantic, professional, and even social, are due to “fit” and circumstance.
It’s easy to stop when the world slaps you hard in the face and says, we don’t want you. It’s not what they say about you that limits you the most, its that you may believe it and start saying it to yourself. Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford University commencement speech, "Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
I am a person with more than one gift, I am a person with more than one talent and I am a person with more than one pursuit. There is more in you than your job, there’s more in you than what you do and it’s your duty to yourself to discover your potential and explore all of these possibilities. I encourage you to explore yourself, I encourage you to explore your world and articulate this to your audience.
Such is the nature of human experience
When you have that big important WHY, that thing that gives you the reason to wake up with enthusiasm. The reason why you want to succeed, why you want to win. The why that tells your subconscious mind the direction you should take if you want to evolve and grow. I have found out what my responsibility is in this world. It’s my responsibility to take what I’ve been given and turn it into something that is was not when it was originally handed to me.
This process is not hard if you are creative, innovative and persistent. In order to master something use these skills and the results will be miraculous. It requires an investment and commitment, especially nowadays when we are in the digital age where everything is controlled by a button. The best things in life requires process and if you run away from the process you will alienate the promise. What I mean is that in order to get to the promise, you have to go through the process. And in the process of going through all that the person who get the most is the person who has shaped the process.
We are living in interesting times
c/o Heineken
The European Super League was a proposed annual club football competition to be contested by twenty European football clubs. It was planned as a breakaway competition to replace the UEFA Champions League. The announcement of the Super League received almost universal opposition from fans, players, managers, politicians, as well as footballs governing bodies (FIFA and UEFA). Much of the criticism against the European Super League focused on elitism and lack of competitiveness and the backlash against the announcement of the league's formation led to all six of the English clubs (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham) announcing their intention to withdraw within 3 days after being officially announced. Over the last seven days we have witnessed that some of the wealthiest men in the world are totally out of touch with their end users.
The basic rules of communication says that the art of being an effective communicator is predicated in part by your ability to translate your thoughts into the language that your audience understands. I wonder whether the billionaire owners of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham have the courage to come out of their bubbles and talk to the fans, players and managers. Not showing up as the teachers but to come into the room as humble students. I think that if you want to be a great speaker, you must first learn to become a great listener.
When you lose your ability to hear eventually it will affect your ability to speak, because there is a correlation between what the ear hears and what the mouth articulates. Every great orator is a great listener and I think we have not only lost our ability to speak but also our ability to listen. Nowadays, people are pausing while they formulate their next approach to attack, and that’s not listening. If we actually take the time to listen, most of us all want the same thing - to be loved, to be appreciated, to be accepted as we are and we all want what’s best for our children. Contact me via e-mail to arrange a meeting about your customer experience, communication strategy or if you want to introduce me to the owners of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United or Tottenham.
A very wise woman
“There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear others. - Michelle Obama”
Are you investing for the future?
It’s easier not to trust people as then no one can disappoint you. The problem is that you end up living a life where you don’t trust anybody and you never end up doing the work you want to do. On top of that our culture has brainwashed us into believing that we need to fit in and we need to work in a factory and we have to buy the most popular items. Boring…
Are you driving large and complex projects independently with many stakeholders involved? Do you have experience from working within a consumer-oriented business, for example, FMCG, retail or branded consumer goods? Contact me via e-mail to arrange a meeting about identifying your strategic challenges and developing solutions to ensure well-planned execution and full implementation.
Throwback Thursday
“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another. - Napoleon Hill”
There's nothing wrong with you
The general consensus for creative people is that discipline stifles creativity, I’m not sure that is the case. I think that in reality discipline allows you to focus on what matters. And when you to focus on what matters, you get more clarity and space in your mind to be creative. You should be seeking to solve the problems of the people you seek to serve. And the only way you can solve the problems of the people you seek to serve is to know what their problems are.
I think that marketing is not the same as advertising, marketing is not about hyping lousy stuff. Marketing is about telling a true story to people who want to hear it. In my experience marketing at its best is when we make things better that are seen and understood by the target audience. I think that if there is a person, cause, organisation or brand that you care about it’s because they do good marketing. Contact me via e-mail for a non-binary meeting about your organisations marketing engagement.
Always try to change things for the better
You can use data, data and more data if you are serving people. Are you aware that every single click you make, everywhere you go is now recorded in a database? And more than that, there is software that allows the marketer to watch while you are shopping, watch you while you rage click on a button. You can get a report that tells you that 28% of the visitors pressed on this button first, we are watching everything. The direct marketer is busy moving tiny little pieces around to try to get a 3% boost, but the intuitive marketer can see how people are interacting and discover what they are seeking. We are stuck in the same circle to see which parts work and which parts don’t.
The purpose of marketing is this generous act of helping people figure out their problems and solving them. The only way to this is to keep doing it and the internet has made it cheaper, faster and easier to do than ever before. The big takeaway is just do it, get the feedback from those people - see how they behave, see how they buy, whether they buy it or whether they don’t. Listen to what they tell you, listen to the questions they ask and the objections they may have, learn from that and do it better the next time and never stop. We don’t have the power to do things to people against their will, contact me via e-mail to arrange a meeting about your organisations use of data.
Intentions mean more than actions
I believe that intentional action sometimes called design thinking saves a lot of time and energy. Part of what we do as a creative is to look at who do we seek to change and what change to we seek to make for them? And then we have to make it for those people.
Design thinking in a nutshell is encapsulated with these three questions:
Who’s it for?
What’s it for?
And how will I know if it’s working?
These questions are essential, and if you don’t ask yourself them then you’ll probably end up stumbling around in the dark looking for solutions.
If you want to learn marketing you do it by doing marketing, by taking action. Reading marketing books and an internship is all well and good, I think you would be better off to figure out how you want to make a change happen and then do it. This is because if you get good at marketing there will be a lot of people who will want you to help them.