Brand Week 4: What I Have Learned About Myself

The past six months I’ve had an uptick of people curious about how I’ve been able to go out on my own and brand myself. For the month of September, I’ll be launching weekly newsletters all about my brand process and story.  

Here are all the the posts week after week:

• Week 1: My entrepreneur journey which led me to my brand. Why would I want one and what are the elements of a brand? 
• Week 2: Who is Amy J. Wilson? What is my mission, vision, values, purpose? 
• Week 3: My journey towards my look and feel of the brand; What was my inspiration?
• Week 4 (THIS WEEK): Three things I’ve learned about myself during this process

I hope you’re able to keep coming back here. Also, if you’d like to get updates on all my insights and stories, please follow me on Substack or on Medium. 

We’ve come to the end of my four-part journey about my brand. It has been a wonderful time for me to reflect on the past five years and to see how much I’ve grown, what I’ve accomplished, and dream about what I hope for my future self. In this piece I share three things I’ve learned about myself, pulling in a few past learnings that are helpful re-memberings that I’m on the right track.  

1: Confidence

I threw the crumpled up pieces of paper into the fire, letting them light up and the ashes float away as if it was singing a song to the universe to grant me my wish. Moments earlier, I wrote on those strips of paper the things I wanted to let go that I’ve been clenching to these past several months. The phrases I scrawled on the page were “self doubt” “not feeling good enough” and “waffling indecision”. These were the blockers that had been keeping me away from putting myself out there. I had fears of both success and failure, and for as far as I could see I was taking the road less traveled, the hard road that led me to where I am now. Anything worth doing is likely to be hard.

This renewal ritual is something that I participated in a Renew and Reclaim Retreat I attended at the end of August with like minded humans. This ritual allowed me to purge negative thoughts from my mind that had been growing during the navel gazing I’ve been doing over the summer. And I’m amazed by how quickly those feelings of self doubt and not being good enough, or crippling indecision seep back into my subconscious. It’s a lifelong practice of mine of redirecting those thoughts into feelings that I am more than capable, I can do hard things and make decisions that will set me on the path to my own success.

For now I’m riding the wave of new, humble confidence. As I write this post, the song Confidence in Me from The Sound of Music popped into my head, when the lead character played by Julie Andrews wonders about her decisions and place in the world:

…What will this day be like? What will my future be? I wonder. It could be so exciting to be out in the world, to be free. My heart should be wildly rejoicing. Oh, what's the matter with me?

So let them bring on all their problems. I'll do better than my best. I have confidence they'll put me to the test. But I'll make them see, I have confidence in me

Somehow I will impress them. I will be firm, but kind...With each step I am more certain everything will turn out fine. I have confidence the world can all be mine. They'll have to agree that I have confidence in me.

Listening to the song and reading the lyrics you see that Maria is talking through her inner dialogue and resolving in having confidence in who she is and I’m able to take on what comes her way. I very much relate to this inner dialogue and then coming out on the other side better and ready to take on what’s on the other side. This process has brought clarity, direction, and trust in the future like I hadn’t seen before. 

 2: Letting Go

The next thing that this journey has taught me is that I must keep creating great art, and I absolutely have to let go of the outcome. 

A decade ago I attended the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Kennedy Center), and one of the readings was The Circle by Michael Kaiser and Brett Egan, the former president of the Kennedy Center and the head of the DeVos Institute, respectively. 

“I have spent too large a portion of my twenty-eight-year arts management career working for and counseling troubled arts organizations,” says Kaiser. “Organizations that, for one of many reasons, failed to build the support bases they needed to thrive.” Kaiser found that healthy arts organizations have a hidden, internal engine that powers consistent success that consists of four points:

1. Develop great art: These organizations are clear about their missions and develop programming that embodies these missions. That programming is anything but predictable: it is exciting, dynamic, and surprising. 
2. Market the program broadly to create a family: But good programming is not enough to sustain a business, it must be marketed in various ways among a large number of people, which he calls “the family.” 
3. Grow the family: After you’ve built an ecosystem family of your audience, volunteers, board, and donors, your job is to keep this family “happy, growing, and engaged.” 
4. Revenue grows: If marketing is strong, the organization will enjoy a high level of earned and contributed income. This income then feeds back into creating superb art that is exciting, dynamic and surprising. 

In addition to this, I would argue that this is the same for any organization. If an organization makes interesting “art” (e.g. products, services, and programs) [that meet customer's needs] and they market aggressively to potential customers, it will provide revenue and its able to start the cycle all over again. After you’ve hit all four of these stages, rinse and repeat. While this all sounds rather intuitive, there are many organizations that fail. It requires clarity, focus, and discipline to keep running the cycle, Kaiser says. 

To me, this provides the clarity, focus, and discipline I need to keep going. I know that if I leverage these four levers and build programs and products that work, then I’ll keep doing great work, market willing. This helps me to let go of the outcome, that if I stay disciplined, focused, and centered and use this repeatable model I’ll be successful. In other words, if I keep doing good things that help other people, the right people will find me, they will become family, and that will continue to support me and my art. (For more on The Cycle, you can take the Coursera course for it here, for free!)

3: Compassion for My Younger Self

As this work has ebbed and flowed, through the boom and bust times that is entrepreneurship, it requires me to have compassion for my younger self in different ways. 

When I’m in boom times (e.g. that my life is full of projects and clients), I have to practice telling myself that I’m trying my best and I might not get all the things done in a day, and that’s alright. It gives me a chance to practice awareness, setting boundaries, communicating those boundaries, and then enforcing them through more communication and discipline. I get to save my money up for leaner times, and have to trust that more work will come. 

The younger Amy that shows up during this time is a workaholic and will throw herself into her work 150%--her work will become her. She’ll be in a place of scarcity: she won’t treat herself to nice things, she won’t take time away to recharge her batteries, she’ll charge forward with the hustle. She is bottom on the priority list, and is a people pleaser so that people will like her, because she so desperately wants to be liked.

But then I remember that I no longer have to live that way, and I have choices on how I can handle the workload. Today Amy can say no to things, can have frank conversations with collaborators to say that she is overextended, and that she needs help. She gets vulnerable with collaborators in a healthy way, and she knows that she will be seen, witnessed and supported by the community that she has cultivated. I’m grateful now that I am able to catch that I’m sliding down into the mulch and can use my ladder behaviors to help recenter me and get me back on track. 

When I am in times of bust (e.g. when client and other work is light), I have to stay motivated and disciplined. I may have to reach out so that I don’t fall into a deeper depression or let my anxiety get the best of me. I remind myself that I am not my thoughts, I’m not my work or even the amount of work I have in the hopper or not. I have to keep staying the course, and have faith and trust that the universe is going to provide for me in abundance soon. I’m able to renew and rejuvenate--to recharge my batteries for the next project that’s happening. And, I get to work on projects that I’ve pushed to the back because of other work. 

In these times, younger Amy would be terrified of having down time and being alone. She would just include busy work so that she could have some purpose, and avoid feeling and hearing the intrusive thoughts she had in her head. She would take projects that were not the best fit for her because she didn’t know where the next project would come.

Today Amy is able to stay the course and notice the ebbs and flows of life, that “this too shall pass.” One day I may be crying and emoting realizing that I’ve been alone too long, but the next day or two later a sign from the universe will make me feel like I’m on the right path. I remember that if I follow The Cycle that I can let go and keep climbing my own ladder of achievement, and reach a new understanding or landing that can hold me and lift me up. 

This concludes my four part branding journey. Soon, I’ll announce my new website design, as well as a few things I’m currently working on, including:

• Healing for Work, a revolutionary professional development program and community rooted in scientifically-proven ways to improve your mental health and workplace well-being. It has been designed with and for people leading change in the social sector and in helping professions like teachers, healthcare workers, and HR managers.
• Ethics, Public Policy, and Technology for Practitioners: I’m a Facilitator for this Stanford course that engages professionals who are thinking through how best to use their power and influence responsibly as the technology industry navigates economic uncertainty, rolling layoffs, new breakthroughs in generative AI, continuing dilemmas around misinformation and digital media, heightened turbulence and polarization in public opinion, and a continued paralysis in national tech policy.
• Empathy Action Lab: A cooperative working with ambitious, purpose-driven leaders to transform organizations with more compassion, to tell powerful stories, and to advance collective action. We support leaders who drive transformational change by creating a shared language, taking positive action and building an ecosystem to support your approaches. 

Stay tuned for more updates!