How You’re Limiting Your Creativity and Business Growth without Knowing It

INTRO: After generating over a million dollars in sales and selling one of her businesses with a single email, your host, Kathryn Thompson, takes an unconventional approach to marketing and sales. So if you're ready to tap into a more powerful way to be seen, heard, and a sought after entrepreneur in your industry, without having to spend endless hours marketing your business and chasing clients, you're in the right place. Be The Sought After Entrepreneur Podcast is here to help you ditch the cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to marketing and use your unique energy to innovate. effortlessly attract the most aligned clients. When you do this, you can spend less time marketing your business and more time doing your soul work and enjoying the richness of your life. Welcome to Be The Sought After Entrepreneur Podcast. And here's your host, Kathryn Thompson.
Hey, hey, super stoked that you're tuning into this week's episode. I cannot wait to dive into today's topic [00:01:00] because I want to build a little bit off of last week's episode where I shared with you a really potent question that a client of mine asked me, and that was, what is my blind spot or blind spots?

Kathryn Thompson: You've been working with me for a while now. Is there anything that you're spotting that might be a blind spot to me that I'm not able to observe because I'm too close to what it is I'm doing and whatnot. And I shared with you on that episode why I thought. These types of questions are really potent.

And if you haven't listened to it, I highly suggest that you go do that. But just in short, one of the biggest reasons why I think these types of questions are really powerful, especially when you're working with a mentor or coach or consultant or a healer or whatever it might be, whoever you're seeking advice from, why this is important is because one, they're going to reflect back to you obviously what you might not be able to see.

But the more curious we get with where we're at, what we believe, what we believe to be true, the way in which we're doing things, when we start to get curious about that [00:02:00] and start to ask these types of questions like, what's my blind spot? Or is the way I'm doing this the way that it needs to be done? Or is there a different way to do it?

Becomes a really potent and powerful question or questions because this, in my opinion, is the thing that is behind The greatest inventions we've seen. Inventors coming up with these amazing, unique ways of doing things. And if you were in the online space at any capacity and you are a coach, or you found yourself, uh, it really hard to call yourself a coach because you're like, I want to be a thought leader, a bit of a change maker.

And I don't really fit sort of the coach label, but I'm labeling myself as a coach because. It's makes sense to people and they kind of understand it and whatnot, but you want to be a catalyst, then you're going to want to keep listening to this episode because I'm going to share with you a really powerful story that reflects one of the blind spots that I was experiencing until I really started to kind of unpack it.

Now, if you've been following me for a [00:03:00] while, you may have heard it. On my podcast at some point, how 2023 2024, I felt this sort of deep calling to start to do more creative work and tap more into my creativity. But in order to do that, I needed to start getting really curious in my own way about what that actually meant for me, which uncovered a really powerful blind spot that I didn't realize I had, but now I see so clearly.

And I also see very clearly in a lot of the people that I work with. And the reason being is, is because most people that I work with are change makers, thought leaders. They're here to really create an impact and change the way in which we do things. And they want to bring new innovative and creative ideas to market and to the spaces and industries that they're in for the better.

Good of All, so to speak. And so oftentimes when that is our mission and that is what we're driven and wanting to do, this is the blind spot that can [00:04:00] appear for us because we often are masters of our craft. Because in order to be able to innovate a space or change a space or change an industry, we have to have some level of mastery, in my opinion, in order to be able to observe and discern what actually needs changing.

For example, In the marketing space, I want to change the way we market and sell. I want to change the way we do business in a lot of ways, but I want to do that by helping change makers, thought leaders, change the way that they do things in their industry for the better, right? I'm here to create a global impact on that level.

And in a bigger mission than that, I want people to do work that they love, that they're driven and fulfilled by, that is purposeful in a lot of ways, that's not just here to make big money and feed the capitalism and, you know, consumerism industry that we see so prevalently right now in the world. Most marketing and sales, right?

Selling us things we [00:05:00] maybe don't actually need or selling us products and services that are actually a detriment to society, a detriment to the economy, detriment to nature, our health, you name it, I could go down a whole rabbit hole in that, but that's not what this episode is about. I wanted to share a really powerful story with you because, like I said, I'm on this sort of path right now to deepen my creativity, to deepen my expression, because, like I said, it's a big part of my mission is to help others own and hone their creative expression in a lot of ways.

And so in order to be able to do that, and to continue to do that, I need to evolve that. And so that's where my focus has been in 2023, and now into 2024. And part of that is getting really curious about the way that I do things. And like I said, me getting curious and asking myself these questions, unveiled a really powerful [00:06:00] blind spot that I didn't even realize I had.

But like I said, that I'm seeing in a lot of my clients who come to me now because they have this sort of similar blind spot. And that is the role of the expert. And I'm going to unpack this a bit, but I want to back up and share a story with you. So if you've been following me for a while, Perhaps you knew or know that I've dabbled in pottery.

So I've been doing pottery on and off since I was young. My mom put me in it, I don't know, I might've been like 12 or 13 at the first time I took a pottery class. And then I stepped away from it. And then when I moved away after university, I entered a pottery class. I remember doing this beautiful session in this woman's, this potter's basement and her studio.

It was lovely. And then a beautiful studio has opened up where I live. And I've been doing it on and off since 2021. And I took a break here for a bit and now I've gone back. A friend of mine actually reached out to me who I've done pottery with, one of my besties. And she was like, do you want to take the botanical class, hand building class?

I'm [00:07:00] like, sign me up, anything botanical. I've sort of gone down like the mushroom and fungi path. Most people are making flowers and I've just spent a ton of my time making fungi and, uh, Mushrooms. And I'll show and share my pieces on social media as they come to fruition, but we're, I'm in the early stages.

We've had two classes now. I have my third one on Monday and we're going to start to sort of put some pieces together. So it's going to be really fun. I have a point to this story. So I started this pottery class two weeks ago and I picked my friend up and we drive to the sessions. And on the way home, I was reminiscing about my time in the Philippines.

And. If you haven't known or didn't know, I went to the Philippines as part of my master's research in 2012. It's crazy, it's been over a decade, and I went there, and I was in a very remote area conducting my research. I did a visual ethnography, which means, I used photography and the written and spoken word to [00:08:00] do my research, so I wrote a book or self published a book called Life Near The Bloss, and it's a compilation of imagery and my own written story from my perspective, and then I obviously did my thesis.

and submitted that and all that jazz. But when I went to the Philippines as part of my research, I had no freaking idea what I was getting myself into. And I was reminiscing with her about all of this because she was talking to me about like cranberry pickers, I think, uh, she had read somewhere that there's tons of spiders when you're picking cranberries, but you can make some decent money if you want to do it, yada yada.

Anyways, it brought up a lot of memories for me because The spiders that I encountered while I was in the Philippines were massive in comparison to what we, or what I see, where I live in Canada, which are these tiny little spiders. And in the summer, sometimes they get to be [00:09:00] bigger. It's funny because I've met people from all over the world, and I met this amazing woman at a conference, or Retreat and she's from Australia.

And the first thing I said to her was like, how are the spiders there and how are the snakes? And she's like, it's so funny. Anytime I meet like a Canadian or something like that, they'll often ask me that, like, what's your fa fascination with spiders? And I'm like, I don't have a fascination with it. I just, for me, it's really hard to.

imagine living in a place where these spiders can be the size of your freaking hand, and they can also be in your house. Because like I said, the spiders that are in my world are tiny, like they're quarter size at most, potentially we might get bigger ones than that. But that's like at the end of summer when we've had some good heat and I don't have to live with them like being in my house.

But I have a point to my story, I promise. And so we were reminiscing about like the spiders and my trip to the Philippines and all these sorts of things. And In all honesty, the [00:10:00] Philippines was never on my radar when it came time to submitting for my thesis. I was working at the public library. I was going to do my master's research on organizational culture and communication, and it was going to be a good master's research.

Don't get me wrong, but I had a really amazing thesis, uh, director, let's just call him, who was all about sort of the visual arts, um, communicating, using multi visual types of things, and really getting creative with your thesis. And I remember him saying something to me back then that was like, If there's going to be a time you take a risk, now is the time you take the risk.

And I was like, why? And he said, because in your masters, it's, there's not as much like weight or pressure, so to speak, than when you were doing your PhD, let's just say. Now, it's not that he wasn't telling me that if you ever did your PhD, don't take a risk or anything like that. But it was like, if now is the time to take a risk, now is the time to take the risk.[00:11:00] 

And I had this hit drop in. Well, I was sitting on my coach on a Saturday. I'll never forget it. I was sitting on my coach, and I was dabbling in photography at the time, and I was really enjoying photography. And I was following a lot of like National Geographic people, people doing like documentaries, and I was really intrigued by it.

And so I sort of went down this like rabbit hole. Hole and started to research a bunch of people that took people on adventures, whether it's like to Africa, the Philippines, you name it. And I started to reach out to a bunch of these people just saying like, Hey, you know, I'm super interested in the projects that you're doing.

I'm super interested in telling and creating impact and telling story and putting, you know, story as a way to change how we view things, do things, that sort of thing. And I'm dabbling in photography and what is, you know, what would something like this kind of look like? And maybe at the time, not even really.

I was going to do my master's research on this, but at the time thinking, you know, this would be a really fun thing to [00:12:00] do. Similar to how I got the hit to go build houses in India with Habitat for Humanity. I was like, this sounds really fun, I'm giving back, I'm working alongside. the people, like I'm immersed in culture in a lot of ways.

Yes, granted I wasn't living in the village per se with them, uh, but I was building alongside of them, which I loved. So I've done these sorts of things, um, already. And so I was kind of looking into this and then I got this hit that I was like, huh, I wonder if I could do something like this. for my research.

And I remember sending off and crafting this beautiful email to the director, the thesis director, and being like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. What are your thoughts? And his response, no word of a lie, was basically, sounds very National Geographic. And I was like, oh, cool. And then it was, if there's any time to take a risk, now is the time to take that creative liberty and that creative risk.

He's like, yeah. do you have a plan for what you want to do? And I was [00:13:00] like, I have no plan. This is just an idea. And this would have been about eight months, I think, before I was graduating. So it would have been in the fall of 2011. And I went to the Philippines in 2012, in February of 2012. So when I sent him that, I think he was like, at the time, because he's told me this after, that was a bit of a, like a pipe dream.

Like, yeah, I'm just going to like, you know, I'm support you in your vision, which is a really beautiful thing from a mentor that might be thinking all of the things that come with international research, come with going to a remote area, you name it, that I was completely unaware of. So my thesis director was what I would consider an expert.

He had done research all over the world. He was well versed in conducting research and getting approval for research. He had lived. Not only in Canada, but he grew up in Europe, so he had lived and traveled and experienced the world in many [00:14:00] facets, and he had been doing research for a very, very, very long time in academia, and he knew what it entailed.

you know, to do it. But he never shared that with me, but he was an expert. So he would have had his preconceived idea or notion of what was possible and what was possible based on his lens and based on the way he looked at and viewed what it was I was proposing. Now, he didn't shut me down. He basically was like, this is a cool idea.

I want you to like, pull out a bit of the threads here and see if this is doable. Here's some things to consider, right? So first of all, you've got to make a local in country contact and you've got to kind of sort out what that could look like and whether or not it's even possible. And so I hit the ground running.

I started to kind of reach out, like I said, to some of these people. A lot of the people who did these projects were charging. an exorbitant amount of money [00:15:00] to go with them for like a week. We're talking 20, 30k, 40k. And I knew at that time I wasn't going to be able to get funding, right? Like that it was such a short period of time in order for me to get in country, do the research, do the research in the time frame that I needed to do it in order to do my thesis, yada, yada, all the things, right?

So it wasn't just like this creative project and idea. There's also like a looming deadline of. The Summer of 2012. So I was reaching out to a bunch of people and doing Google searches, and I stumbled across an American who was living in the Philippines as a, and he was a photographer. He's married to a Filipino, and he was doing photography, and he was working predominantly with the indigenous people, the Agta, and so I reached out to him, I asked him, like, what it would entail if he took me around, and we did a photo project, and we also, I did research and all those sorts of things.

He came back with a much more reasonable quote. Um, and so I started to kind of go down that path, but the area [00:16:00] that he suggested required some additional like approval, let's just say. There was a ton of approval that had to happen. Again, I wasn't aware of it. And, and so he pointed me to this university in Teguigal, which, um, well, it wasn't in Teguigal, I flew into there, but then it was south of there.

And he pointed me to this institution. So I started to do a bit of research, and I found that there was another American doing research there, but based out of a university in the Netherlands. So I reached out to her, I asked her, and her response to me was, it's easier if you just get on a plane and come here.

And I remember thinking in that moment, huh, I have no idea if this is possible. I have no idea if I even have approval to do this. And she's suggesting I just book a flight and get on a plane and go to the Philippines and Go talk to her. So I did that. And I remember talking to my thesis director, my [00:17:00] thesis advisor.

He became my thesis advisor. I remember saying to him, like, this is what's going on. They're allowing me to stay at the university there. They've got a house for me to stay in. I'm going there to kind of talk to this woman and to see like whether or not I can kind of get into that, like, really remote region, right?

There was only two ways to get in there. A very small, like, six seater plane, basically, and a boat that I think would take 13 or 14 hours, and it was not advisable for a foreigner, me, to take that boat because it was treacherous, and the flight getting into that region also had to bring in people that lived there, and so Every time that I was booking, um, to get on that flight, I would get bumped off it often, right?

And that's a whole other story that I'll share a little bit here. Anyways, long story short is, I book my flight, I get in, I land in country, they send somebody to pick me up, they drive me to this house in, like, the middle of the jungle, basically. [00:18:00] And, Long story short is, what unraveled from there was lots of different obstacles, challenges, you name it.

And what my thesis advisor equipped me to do when I left was to pick a plan B and a plan C, right? Just in case when you get in country, things don't work out the way that you expected. And I thought to myself, Yeah, cool. I'll have a plan B and C. And I can't even remember, honestly, what those plan B's and C's were.

I think one was, like, street food, you know, if I was to travel around and, like, do, like, a cultural food thing, street food in these countries, or the other one might have been, like, a backpacker, uh, thing. I can't even honestly remember because I think I was so, my heart was so set on this plan A idea That in my heart, I didn't believe anything could go wrong.

That's how naive I was to what [00:19:00] would then eventually unfold in a lot of different ways. Now, My experience turned out gloriously. However, back to the whole front of the story here, as I'm sitting in the car with my friend and we're talking about the Philippines and the massive spiders the size of my hand and getting there, and I'll tell more of the story here, but I remember saying, if I knew what I knew, if I knew what I know now, would I go back and re experience that?

And it would be a challenge because I know what I know. And so I'm sharing this with you because oftentimes when we are ingrained, conditioned, when we're experts in our own right, and we're so used to doing things automatically, we can get blinders on, blinders to the idea that nothing else is possible.

So, for example, it takes a really long time to grow your business. Business is really [00:20:00] hard and I'm not saying that it's not, but these are messages that get ingrained into us and then we carry that belief with us. And then when we carry those beliefs with us, that's the perspective we're viewing everything through.

And when you think about the role of the expert, If you're so ingrained and mastered at your craft, it can be really hard sometimes to see outside of the box that you're, this invisible box that you're living in because you've got this expert mindset, which to me gets to be a little bit fixed. This is the way I do it.

This is how I do it. There's no other way. And I can't see on any different angle, other possibilities, which end up becoming our blind spots. And this is something that I started to unravel. Because I do write a certain way. I do communicate a certain way. I do view marketing to some [00:21:00] degree in a certain way.

Although I am trying to innovate the way in which we do marketing and sales, and that is what Spellbound and How I Work My Clients is really all about. But there's still more work to do. to do and more innovative things I could be doing in a lot of ways if I allow myself to open up and have what we call at the beginner mindset, which is the mindset I went into my master's research with in the Philippines.

Because if I knew what I know now, would I have done it? Would I have, would I have creatively risked that for getting my master's degree? Nothing went according to plan. And when I say that, I mean that honestly, nothing went according to plan, but everything worked out beautifully. I want to repeat that.

Nothing went according to plan, but everything worked out beautifully. And I'm going to tell you bits of this story here. So when I landed in the Philippines, I landed in this airport and [00:22:00] it literally wasn't really an airport. It was like an outdoor beach. Bunker or shelter basically. And they, there was no like carousel.

It wasn't like a modern airport that you would see and they carried the bags out and they just put them on these benches. And so I remember grabbing my bag and I remember walking out and this guy had this sign with like my name on it. And I get in the back of this pickup truck and he's driving along and we stopped for lunch somewhere.

And I remember getting out and like having no money and needing to like go find a bank machine. And I remember pulling up to the school. And he brought me to the office where administrators were and researchers were and stuff like that and introduced me and there was another guy with me and introduced us to everybody and he's like, okay, I'm going to bring you to your house.

And the guy that was with me was staying totally somewhere else and I was staying in this house like I say, and like I say, in the middle of the jungle. I mean, there were other, other houses around, but this was, I would say fairly secluded to some degree, and I remember driving [00:23:00] along this sort of like gravel road, and it's like we're bumping along there, and I'm looking around and we're getting more and more secluded, like with less people, less houses, less movement, that sort of thing, and we turn left down this, road, and I'm using air quotes as I'm saying this because we turn left down this like grass pathway and he starts to kind of drive down it.

And he says, if there's anything that I can share with you of wisdom is never leave the house without your headlamp. And I said, Oh, like at night and stuff. And he goes, no, like ever, like never leave your house. Without your headlamp, because if something happens where you get sidetracked or you don't make it back here in time, or you need to get back here at night and you don't have your headlamp, like there's no lights, right?

There's no lights around here. It's not like street lamps or anything like that. It's like pitch dark. And I said, okay. And then he said, because he said. There's lots of things that crawl around out here like frogs and [00:24:00] snakes and you name it, but he goes, but we've had a lot of cobras out here recently.

Last year, there was like an infestation of it. And he goes, the worst thing is, is that if you're walking along a path and you step on a cobra, that's when the venom is the worst because you've stepped on it. Now it's like biting you. And I remember thinking to myself. What have I gotten myself into? Right?

Because I was like, uh, oh, a cobra infestation. And I'm like, okay. And then I have to think about these like practical things that I would never know, Or I take for granted, right? I can leave my house, come home at night and I've got street lights and lights on in my house and all the things. And I'm like, okay, good to know, good to know, never leave without my headlamp.

Um, and I never did. I always had my headlamp. I roll up into this house, And there's this beautiful girl from the Netherlands who was staying there, and she had been there for a couple months. She had been there since, I think, November, and this was [00:25:00] February. And I met her, and all was grand, and she was like, you know, if there's anything I can help you with, let me know.

Like, if you need to go get groceries, that sort of thing. I know somebody who can come get us, like a tuk tuk or whatever, because, you know, Obviously the grocery store is in town and quite a ways away from here. And she's like, I'm going later if you want to come with me. And I was like, cool. And then she's like, by the way, do you have a bug net?

And I was like, yeah, my mom got me one for Christmas. Like I'm totally all set. And I remember putting it up and she walked into my room and she looked at it and she's like. That's not gonna work. And I said, well, what do you mean? And it was this like beautiful bug net, but it was this a smaller bug net that sort of like wrapped around your body.

And she's like, yeah, we need to go to town and definitely get you a bug night tonight, or you're not gonna sleep. And I thought to myself. Really? Because when you walked in, the house didn't look like there was a lot of bugs around, let's just say. And so I'm like, okay, I trust you. I'm gonna go get this bug net that like, wraps around your bed.

And meanwhile, she's showing me hers [00:26:00] that literally like, went around her bed. And when I'm talking about bed, I'm talking about like, a wooden, handmade wooden frame with like, a foamy mattress. So like, not a actual bed. Bed mattress that we would be used to, but like foam. And she had her bug net literally wrapped and tucked all around her mattress and everything.

And I was like, okay. So she brought me to town, we got groceries, we got this bug net, I set it up, all these sorts of things and. We Made Supper and All Was Grand. And then I'm going to bed, she goes to bed in her room, I'm going to bed in my room, and I am a bit jet lagged, so I'm on my computer because I downloaded a bunch of shows, because there's no Wi Fi, nothing like that, right?

So like, no Netflix, no nothing, and I remember on my computer, wrapped around my bug net, and I had the light on, because I was like, I'm just gonna wrap myself around the bug net, Watch a movie for a bit and then I'll shut my light off. And I remember hearing, like, scratching at, like, the screen window, Um, [00:27:00] All of a sudden these bugs are like literally coming under my door and we're talking like big fuzzy flying bugs of some sort.

And I remember thinking to myself again, like, what have I gotten into? I was like, I'm not going to sleep for three months because I was there for three months. I'm like, I'm not going to sleep for three months. And if it's bad here, which is technically like in a town, what's it going to be like in like the full.

Wild. Like, we're talking remote, wild, you know, rainforest, basically. And so I'm like, okay, well, maybe I need to shut my lights off and just go to bed. So I take a towel and I put it along the bottom of the door, because these bugs are crawling under the door, and I'm thinking to myself, like, I'm not going to sleep if Fricking wink.

If, if I'm just gonna hear all these bugs kind of moving around and whatnot. We're talking cockroaches, we're talking fuzzy, furry flying things. It was hilarious 'cause there was a Belgium girl that had ended up coming outta the field at one point, and her and I were doing more like anthropology [00:28:00] people stuff, and the other people were doing sort of biology.

So they were used to like bugs and they thought bugs were so intriguing and all that stuff. Me and this Belgium girl literally jumped up on the. picnic table table that was in the house and we jumped up on it because this massive bug came crawling and then they're all laughing, the biologists, because the thing flies.

So he's, they're like, uh, you're not going to get away from this. This thing flies. Anyway, so I'm thinking to myself, Oh wow, again, what did I get into? Granted too, there was like spiders. I'm not killing the size of my hand. Like one on the back of the toilet. There was probably, the bathroom was full of them.

Like at any point there would be five. I'm talking massive spiders, like. Size of my hand, big brown, not like little Daddy Long Legs. I'm talking big brown spiders, right? And again, somebody who literally has never really experienced that. I've traveled, you know, I've been to India, been to Thailand, all those sorts of things, and I, I had never ever ever ever ever [00:29:00] experienced anything like that.

So yes, the first night, the second night, the third night was, they were not great nights because of all of the adjustment that I needed to sort of make with the space and where I was and all the things. Layer that with still not having approval to go into the field and looking at this deadline of like, I am only here for three months.

I need to do at least eight weeks of research for my research to be like legit and to be able to submit my thesis. I remember meeting with the girl who was going into the field. She's like, you can kind of, you can come into the field with me if you want, but we need to get these approvals. I'll speed the story up a little bit.

I went into the office the one day on the campus, and I loosely say campus, into this office, and I sat there from 7am to Probably about 6 p. m. and I walked home and then I got this message being [00:30:00] like, you know, the director is here and he wants to talk to you. But yet I had been sitting in that office all day waiting for him.

Then I went and met with the girl. We had to go to this other town to get approval. They turned the approval down. They were like, there's just no way. So I was not able to actually research the Agta, but I was allowed to go to the region and research the region because there was. Ilocanos there as well, so I just wasn't allowed to do my research on the agta.

Okay, that's obstacle number one. That's fine. Totally kosher. We book our flights to get into the field. They get canceled twice, so I'm into RA in a hotel and they're telling me it's canceled. But the woman at the school who booked the flight for me was never told that it was canceled. So she's trying to get me on another flight.

So I didn't get into the field for, I was bumped twice off the flight. And then you go and wait at the airport because it's not a commercial flight. So you go and wait. So I had my translator with me, all of these things I had to [00:31:00] do in country, find a translator, find a guide, right? None of this was set for me before I went.

And none of this was something that I even was. aware I needed to do, right? I didn't know what I didn't know. I was coming from this place of very much a beginner mindset. And when you come from the beginner mindset, it often, what often happens is, is anything is possible because we don't know what isn't possible yet.

Where we're coming from the expert mindset, we're so fixed on what we believe to be true about what's possible. And so we've got this fixed way of doing it, this fixed way of, this is how it has to be. And we can't think beyond that. But when you're approaching it from a beginner's mindset, you don't know what you don't know.

You don't know that it's going to take 80 hoops just to get into the field, right? My flights were bummed. Then when I got into the field, it didn't mean I was guaranteed to be able to do research in that area. Area, right? So meanwhile, I'm paying to go to the Philippines. I'm paying to stay at this school.

I'm paying [00:32:00] to fly in, pay for my, you know, translator to go to these places to get approval. I had to get approval from, um, the economic. place there because it was a protected region and still is a protected region, and then I had to get approval from the mayor. And then you have to find a place to stay.

It's not like you're landing in a city where you can book a hotel room. There aren't any hotel rooms. Like when I flew up to this, I say in my book, like no word of a lie, the runway was nestled between the ocean and the rainforest. And there was no room for error, like absolutely no room on that flight.

Because you're literally landing, coming in over the water and landing on this like, tiny strip that was like, had potholes and you name it. You literally landed on a grass patch, or pulled the plane up to a grass patch, and then you get out. And there's nobody there to like, drag your bags or whatever, you just pick your bag up, and then there's no taxis or Ubers or Lyfts, right?[00:33:00] 

You had to arrange all of that. So I landed in that area with my translator at the time, and like, having a little, like a, Not even a smartphone, right? We're talking like an old punch phone where I'm like calling the mayor's brother to come and get me. And then he sends somebody to get me to then bring me to this house in the, like the mayor's house, but the mayor had been assassinated.

And so his brother and wife and family was living there. And so we ended up in this house and that's not even me being in the field, right? I had to get approval from, um, the economic development area people. And then I also had to get approval from the mayor. And then I had to take an hour and a half. I call it, they call it a kliglig, a kliglig ride, which should have been 30 minutes if you were riding a motorbike or less than 30 minutes, but it took an hour and a half to get to this river, which you then have to cross with a non boat, a floating device, [00:34:00] and then you have to walk another 20 minutes to this school.

And then when you get to the school, it's like you also have to get a permission by the teachers. And then every barangay that you go into, you have to get approval by the barangay captain. And. Like, I'm telling you all of this because there were so many, like, hoops and different obstacles and things I had to overcome.

Not to mention I'm in a foreign country, not to mention nobody in the field spoke English. My translator spoke English, but most people spoke Ilocano or Agta. And Agta is like many, many dialects of, they make, it's their own language, right? And so, Again, I come back to this. If I knew what I knew then, would I have done it and taken the risk?

Probably not. Because if that was laid out to me of what the path was going to look like, I would have been like, My brain would have started to go, I don't think that that's possible. What if I don't get this done in time? All of the doubt would creep in, but I was so not conditioned to [00:35:00] foreign research.

I'd never done a master's before. I traveled. Things have always sort of worked out when I travel. When I say work out, I mean nothing ever really goes as expected, but it always turns out beautifully. And that, to me, is the approach of the beginner's mindset, right? And so, it, beginner's mindset is not my coin term.

There's somebody that came up with that term, and again, I'm terrible. I love movies, I love music, and people will be like, Oh yeah, it's that actor that's in that movie. And I'm like, I have no idea. I just remember I loved the movie. There's somebody in psychology, I believe, or sociology that has coined that word beginner mindset and the role of the expert in a lot of ways, which is an identity, right?

We're all walking around this planet in with our own identity and our identity and the way in which we look at the world is the way the reality is reflected back to us in a lot of ways. So when we have this expert mindset, like I was saying, and a lot of my clients have, like, We have this fixed mindset of the [00:36:00] way in which things are done and how they're done.

And we automatically just start to do them that way without questioning it. But, we also become a lot more cautious about the risks and things we want to take. Whether that's risks in business, risks in relationship, life, or creative risks that we want to take, or innovative risks. But, Nobody that has invented something like light, cars, electric cars, all of the things that have been invented, right?

Nobody has come at it from the expert mindsets only, right? Oftentimes an invention happens because we are an expert in what we do and we're expert in the subject matter, but then we approach things with this beginner mindset and start to unpack and get curious about how we can innovate and improve things.

And that to me is thought leadership and change making. If we want to change the way that we do things, if we want to change our [00:37:00] reality, We have to start approaching things with this combination of expert. Here's what I know to be true right now in my current reality, but can I come at it more with this beginner mindset?

Can I come at it more with this place of awe and wonder and curiosity and almost naivety, right? I was so naive when I landed in the Philippines. I was naive before I even left. When she told me you should just come here and we should have a conversation, that is why I she told me to get on that plane and have a conversation with her.

Because there was nothing in an email that she could have written to me that would have explained the complexity, the obstacles, the challenges, the terrain, the environment, all of it to me in an email. Like, she couldn't have said, this could happen, this might happen, this won't happen. Like, she didn't know.

Foreign research is so, it's, again, it's not a cookie cutter. There's so many things that can happen. I remember emailing my thesis advisor from Taguigarao, [00:38:00] Hotel and having a bit of reprieve to be honest. I told my friend this in the car when we were coming home from pottery. I said I locked myself in a room and literally just ordered room service and I did it because one, there was no bugs in this hotel room and so I didn't have to sleep with a bug net or anything like that.

I could sit there and just watch. Movies that I had downloaded or shows that I had downloaded and I just had room service coming I just need it as a reprieve and it was like a 48 hour sort of reprieve let's just say and I remember emailing him just saying I should dig that email up and Literally kind of reminisce about it because I remember sending him this email telling him that one My flight had got bumped and I took a picture of this and I'd shared it on Facebook years and years and years ago Like my ticket to get on that plane that literally you had to go to the airport, it wasn't a commercial flight, you sat at the airport and the plane would leave when there was a break in the runway to take off.

So, we got there I think at 8am, and we didn't [00:39:00] leave until Three or four in the afternoon. Like we sat there all day at the airport not knowing when we were gonna leave or what was, you know, whether or not a flight was even gonna leave. So it's interesting because I remember sending him that email. And I said to him, like, a flight got bombed, I hope to get in the field.

And I was just kind of navigating it with, as I could, and he responded saying I was, I got this while I was teaching a class, and I showed the class, because this is like, literally foreign research in a nutshell, like, Like you are, you are an epitome of like a foreign researcher doing like anthropological research in some way, shape or form.

Like if this, if you were like a professional at this, this is what the reality is, literally. Nothing ever goes according to plan. And I come back to the ticket. My ticket was a piece of paper that literally had like the price on it and like the date. Like I'm talking like a loose leaf paper with lines.

Like it wasn't a [00:40:00] ticket. End. The plane was a six seater single engine and we had to weigh ourselves. So that was the other thing, right? Like standing in front of an airport and you get on this like human scale, basically. And I remember, I'll never forget it. We've got a heavy weight and I just remember feeling mortified in the moment and then always being at the front of the plane because I was the heaviest on the flight, uh, which is totally fine.

But I just remember thinking, wowzers, like, You know, just such an experience. But again, like I said, nothing goes according to plan. And there was a lot of different hiccups along the way. I remember going to this one barangay and we hiked there every day. Again, no cell phone, no running water, no electricity.

I can't call someone on a cell phone going, is a barangay cat going to be there today? Like, that is just not how it goes, right? And we'd walk to this barangay every day. And it's like a 30 minute hike there and a 30 minute hike back. And we're talking like, not a hike on a main road, we're talking if it rains, [00:41:00] which it did.

We were in the rainforest, like muddy, rocky terrain that's like not easy to hike. And we would hike there every day and it wasn't until I want to say like the last three or four days that I was in the field that I finally connected with this barangay captain because he was never around. Every time I hiked into that area, he was just never around, and so I could never get his approval to do research in his barangay.

Um, there was another story where I hiked, we hiked 40 kilometers in a day. I really wanted to go and get a job. and I'm talking about peanuts, right? So they grew peanuts there, like we're talking fresh peanuts. Fresh peanuts, and then you roast them, and they're absolutely phenomenal. But it was a 20k hike out and a 20k hike back, and I wasn't aware of that.

It got lost in translation. My translator told my guide that we wanted to do this, and so we were walking along, and I'm talking we're walking on like, the edges of rice fields, like there's [00:42:00] no pathway. And I remember looking at Riddell going, saying to him, which he didn't understand, but I was saying to him and Melody would translate, I said, how much further?

And he just kept saying, one more palm tree, just past that palm tree. And I took it as, it's the next palm tree, like we're almost there. No, past that palm tree was like 10 palm trees. We get up to this. basically shack on a beach where the guy lives and nobody's there. And I was like, we just hiked 20 kilometers.

And the guy's nowhere to be found. And it was a scorching hot day and we sit on the beach and we're eating our packed lunch. And all of a sudden you see this guy walking down the beach out of nowhere. I was like, I don't know where he was. And we had been there for about an hour and he was coming back to his place to get something.

He has another place up in the mountains and he was coming back to get something and he stumbled across us. And so we sat there at his place, picking peanuts, cleaning [00:43:00] peanuts, roasting them. all that jazz and then hiking 20 kilometers back. It was insane. But again, if, if I knew what I knew now, I don't know if I would have, I would do it again, or obviously that would change the experience, but there would be things that I'd be looking at differently and whatnot.

And I'm sharing this with you because as I deepen my creative expression, as I start to share more, innovate more, Do different things, step more into thought leadership in the way in which I want to change the way we do things when it comes to marketing sales. But like I said, on that deeper level of creative expression, like people just showing up as themselves, getting to be themselves and express themselves.

There's this conversation that I keep having with my clients. That's like, I know how to talk and do this and express myself and I'm really creative, but when it comes time to then market, I don't know how this is all connected. And that is part of, [00:44:00] again, somewhat of the expert mindset, but also a bit of a fixed mindset.

Cause we're told we have to do things a certain way. So there's this difference people see between Their creative expression and marketing. And it's like they can't merge that idea. And what I want to do is show you that you can. That in fact, your creative expression is the thing that's going to sell before you try to fit yourself into this marketing box that's like, if you're this person and you want to this, then buy my thing, right?

Which we see this all over. But when we can creatively express ourselves and talk in a way that is different than what everybody else is saying, and every other script that's being taught, and we're only writing based on our own creative script, whatever that looks like, we start to cut through the freaking noise.

So, I come back to the role of the expert, and also learning how to dance with that beginner mindset, that is, this sense of awe, this [00:45:00] wonder, this naivety, that like, I don't know what I don't know, and so I'm just gonna try, because I don't know. Because, again, if I had known what I was getting into, would I have tried?

I'll never know, but I went in with like a complete naive human being of what I was stepping into. And when I look at it, there were so many obstacles thrown in my way. that I gracefully danced around because I didn't know any better. I was like, well, I'm here, I'm doing it, is this normal? I don't know. And then when I got back, wrote my thesis, wrote my book, I presented it at graduation, my thesis advisor said to my brother and my husband, he said, I didn't think she was going to be able to do it, but I was never going to tell her that.

And that is a really beautiful thing as well, right? Like, we can hold our belief about what we think is possible, but that was also a really beautiful lesson for me because [00:46:00] it was like, I never want to project my doubts, my fears, what I believe is possible or not possible on my clients or anybody that I mentor.

I never want to project that because. He knew the obstacles that were, that I was probably going to face, and he knew that potentially it wasn't going to work out. He actually thought it wasn't going to work out, which is why the one suggestion he gave me was, come up with a plan B and C, you might need it.

It was just such a beautiful, he, he mentored me in such a beautiful way, and then after the fact, after I came home and did this beautiful thing, he was like, I can tell you now and I can tell your people now that I had a ton of doubt and I never thought in a million years that this was going to turn out the way that it did.

But I'm so grateful and happy for you that it did. What a beautiful experience. So that is a very long winded story that I wanted to share with you, but I felt like it was a beautiful reflection, in my opinion, of what a beginner's mindset [00:47:00] looks like when you're going into something that you have no fricking idea, you've never experienced it before.

I often think about one other example when I was running the beep test which is an endurance test and I was 15 at the time and I had no idea what it was and basically what you're doing is you're running back and forth a certain distance and you're trying to get to that distance before it beeps, right?

And the beeps get shorter and then you stop. you climb up levels based on how many times you can do that. And I had no idea what I was stepping into. So I just ran it. I just ran it. And I got a really great score. And then after I ran it the first time, I was like, I don't know if I could do that again.

Because I knew what I was getting myself into. Same time when I ran a marathon for the first time, right? I was like, I have no idea what I'm going to get into. And then I, you know, get a really great, you know, score time on my marathon. And then it's like, Ooh, now I know, I know every feeling. I know how my hips felt after.

Hoo, right? It's like you have to [00:48:00] unlearn and untrain yourself in a lot of ways. And I want to leave you with this because if you are an expert at what you do, a master at your craft, and you want to step into this, Thought Leadership Changemaker. You want to do things differently, cut through the noise and you want to stand out for what you do.

And I'm not saying like go viral and be recognized. Maybe you do want to be recognized for the work and have it published and all those sorts of things. But what I would love to invite you to do is journal, Unpack, where you've got this fixed mindset around what is possible and what isn't possible. And every story you tell yourself, ask yourself, is it true?

Start to ask yourself, just get in the habit of going, is that true? Even if it seems so true, like the sky is blue, is that true? Right. Or, you know, it takes a long time to grow a business. Is that true? Can I find an example somewhere that somebody grew their business really quickly? Or it takes a lot of effort to do [00:49:00] sales calls, right?

I don't want to do sales calls, it's too much effort. Is that true? Are there other ways you can do it? Is there another, could you hire somebody to support you? What's the effort around it, right? Or building a funnel is too complicated. Is that true? So get really curious about what is true and what isn't true and start to ask yourself that question after every thought that comes through.

Every single thought that comes through that mind of yours, ask it and get in the habit of that because that is what I'm doing to deepen my creative expression and the role of the expert and where am I playing the role of the expert and where can I start to bring in. This beginner mindset, where can I start to approach things from a blank slate in a lot of ways, this blank canvas to really uncover what is possible and how can I start to create more texture, more depth to what it is that I'm doing?

Because again, when we're in the marketing and sales [00:50:00] space, It can feel really rigid. And as a creative, and somebody wants to create change, marketing can feel really rigid. There's this way to do it. And the minute I have to start to market and sell, I feel really freaking awkward. And so I'm just going to stay over in my creative hub over here, and I'm going to write this way.

And really, it's like, how do we merge both worlds? And how can we start to look at our creative expression as being the avenue for marketing? Maybe the way we were taught to market and sell is not the right way, or maybe there's a better way now, now that we know. So, I'm going to leave you with that, because I wanted to share with you this story, my naivety, The Obstacles and Challenges, and there were so many more obstacles and challenges that I just didn't share with you, um, honestly, so many from day to day, you name it, that, that we encountered as part of this, and, It just goes to show that oftentimes things don't work out even [00:51:00] remotely the way we expected, but they turn out so beautifully in the end, and that is our ability to take the risk and the creative risk to do something that has never been done before in a lot of ways.

The university that I went to had no contacts in the Philippines. You know, most universities, when you do international research, they bridge the gap for you. The woman that I connected with that was based in the States that was going to school in the Netherlands, the Netherlands had a co creative partnership with this university in the Philippines.

So she had a pathway to that area and research had been done for years and years and years in that area from that particular university in the Netherlands. So it wasn't like she even had to make relationships. Like I had to do all of that, make the relationships in country, out of country, you name it.

in order to be able to do it. And I attribute a lot of what I achieved as part of my research, but also that experience to the [00:52:00] idea that I had a complete beginner's mindset. And it was the aha moment as I was sitting in my car on Monday night and my friend was saying, remember when you went to the Philippines and we were talking about it and talking about spiders?

And I just thought, Oh my goodness, what was different about my mindset and the way in which I approached my creativity, my craft, what I wanted to do. It was the beginner's mindset and that sense of awe and wonder and curiosity and adventure and imagination. And there was no limit to it because I didn't know any different.

And that's what I would love to invite you to start to unpack in your own world as a thought leader, change maker, somebody who wants to create massive impact with your people and really leave this world a better place than maybe it is right now and what we're experiencing. And how to do that to me is the blending, the dance between the expert, the being the master of your craft, and then also being able to approach.

life, your work, [00:53:00] relationships, with this curiosity, this adventure, this awe, this wonder, and not putting a cap or a limit on it, and not even entertaining the limit. So getting really, really good at pushing the boundaries, pushing to the edge, living on the edge of what's possible, and that to me starts with really powerful questions that you can start to ask yourself, or really powerful questions you can start to ask your mentor, and get really curious about it.

what stories your brain is telling you and what limits it's putting on you. So with that, I'm going to leave you at, but I really hope that you've enjoyed this episode. Cheers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you right back here next time. You can also find us on social media at Creatively Owned and online at creativelyowned.

com. Until next time, keep showing up as your authentic [00:54:00] self.