Welcome to the artisan podcast where we dive into the intricacies of  Developing Talent, Building Culture, and Inspiring Creativity.  The artisan podcast is brought to you by Artisan Creative, a recruitment and talent development firm with a focus on digital, creative and marketing over 30 years of experience helping teams grow across multiple verticals. My guest today is Charles Brewer. He's an artificial intelligence product and design leader who has worked in technology in media for over two decades. Today, he's helping organizations learn and use AI, but in fact, throughout his career, he's been guiding organizations through technology's biggest turning point. To connect with Charlie, please reach out to connect@artisancreative.com or visit Charliebrewer.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshbrewer/  

Tracy Marlowe | Chief Executive Officer | Creative Noggin Agency You can find Tracy on Linkedin Together we talk about building culture, branding and hiring on the artisan podcast. Tracy Marlowe believes in the power of women. Early in her career, Tracy worked in offices where women were often considered “less than” for juggling their careers with family matters. In 2008, with a new infant at home, she began building Creative Noggin, a fully remote advertising agency. Her mission was to empower smart, passionate women to do work that they enjoyed while balancing their home life with the support of a family-first work environment.   Tracy firmly believes that a woman's potential knows no boundaries. Women are often underestimated yet research shows that women in business consistently outperform their male counterparts. Tracy has seen that creating a culture that nurtures women benefits her organization and clients as well as the world at large because women are pivotal, influential and touch so many around them.   Tracy has over 25 years’ of expertise in marketing small and global brands, alike.  Her agency, Creative Noggin, has grown from just over $100,000 in sales the first year to upwards of seven million dollars in revenue. The agency is living proof that a flexible, human-centered workplace is not just good for employees, but also good for business.      

Dr Lola Gershfeld is the founder of EmC Leaders, a training and consulting company focused on working with managers to master the art of relationships. She's also the author of The Emotional Connection, The EmC Strategy, as well as The Connected Culture, How the Art of Relationships Leads to Positive Results. Check out Dr. Lola's Youtube,  Blog as well as Podcast for additional info -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lola: I started in the business world very young. My husband and I built three electronic manufacturing companies and so I always took the role of a leader. I served as an HR manager, and a CFO, and then,  because I was building teams and I was, really feeling confident about myself.  Then I was asked to serve on this private company board, and, I couldn't believe what I was actually experiencing. And, I remember, I think the moment for me was like sitting and watching these board members attacking each other.  And, you know, the CEO was sitting next to me and I turned to him and I said, why do they do this at every board meeting? And, he said, quietly, I think it's because they care about each other. And, and I thought to myself, what? That, that doesn't make sense. That's so silly to express care about each other like that.  But, what I really found is that they got really stuck in this pattern, the dance that they would do every board meeting. And it was really awful because, one person would shut down, the other person would attack, and then we would just go circles and circles. We would have eight-hour board meetings with no progress and imagine how exhausting that is. The funny thing is all of these people who were on the board were very smart and very intelligent and had scientific degrees and they could solve technical problems. And that was really fascinating for me how is it possible they could solve such difficult problems, but they could not talk to each other.   So, as you can imagine, I started to really look for a solution because I didn't enjoy this experience.  And, I went to the bookstore, I got these books, you know, Good to Great, Primal Leadership, Speed of Trust, all of these books were on my desk.  I was diving into them and studying them, trying to figure it out. And every time I would come to the board meeting, I would teach maybe communication skills or set some rules or boundaries, but nothing actually worked. And so I decided to go back to school and find the answer because it was really fascinating to me. And I not only saw these disruptions in the boardroom, but I saw it as an HR manager, you know, people would come to me and sit in the office and I would empathize and I would try to understand them. And guess what? A few weeks later, the same pattern comes back again. So I really wanted to understand what was happening and how is it possible. So I went back to school. I got my master's, my doctorate, but the aha moment came when my husband invited me to this workshop, couple's workshop called Hold Me Tight. It was created by Dr. Sue Johnson, and she's the developer of the emotionally focused therapy. Okay. I'm, I'm sitting there in this couple's workshop and I'm watching this instructor talk about attachment signs and about patterns, how these couples get into and get lost in this pattern and takes over their relationship and they just become stuck in this conflict over and over again. And I'm thinking to myself, wait a second, we have exactly the same pattern in the boardroom. Workplace conflicts are all about attachment. Workplace relationships are all about emotional disconnection.  And I cannot tell you, Katty, I, I was on fire at that time. I flew to New York. I took, you know, the externship with Susan Johnson. And from then on, I was just immersing myself in all of the science, all of the knowledge about attachment. And I was actually bringing it to the boardroom to work with boards and teams. And miraculously, things started

Will Greenblatt shares key public speaking techniques to transform your interview, pitch, or presentation.   Find out more by following Will on LinkedIn ----------------------------- I'm so excited to welcome Will Greenblatt to this call today. He is the co-founder of the Outloud Speaker School, an agency of actors who teach public speaking and communication skills to entrepreneurs, executives, and to candidates. He has repeatedly spoken at Google, Wayfair, and Boston Dynamics, to just name a few, and has provided coaching to over 4, 500 individuals virtually worldwide.  His clients have won numerous pitch competitions and raised capital by honing in and raising their skills in publc speaking and pitching. He's here to talk to us about how we can do that in an interview process, how we can do that when we're pitching new clients or pitching new projects.  And brings all of that with the experience that he has gained as an actor. He started acting when was seven years old. He speaks five languages including Mandarin Chinese and learning Urdu in the process. So with that, so excited to introduce Will and take our conversation to the next level. Katty: I met Will a number of years ago. I'm part of an organization called EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization, and Will came in to teach us all facilitators how to be better public speakers, how to facilitate meetings better, and how to really hone our presentation skills. Will: Yeah, it's really nice and I love what you've been doing all the stuff I get on Linkedin you know following you because we haven't actually spoken in so long, but the power of the personal branding, the telling your story, getting your message out there makes me feel like I've kept up with you in a way. Katty:. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yes. The power of social media and how we show up and how we represent ourselves on it is powerful.  Let's just jump in and talk about it. I know you speak with executives, with corporate teams and talk about how to represent themselves, how to present themselves, how to, be a strong public speaker as well as for pitch competitions and how to promote themselves that way. So obviously the audience that we're speaking to here today are the creatives and the talent that we work with who on a regular basis have to pitch. They have to pitch their portfolio, they have to really pitch their creative thinking when they're presenting clients with ideas and where they're presenting options. So I really wanted to jump into that. I know your acting background has been a huge force in kind of what you've developed, but why don't we start from the beginning and bring us to where we are currently today from your career trajectory?  Will: Yeah, the good thing is I just told this story on a stage as part of a public speaking competition two nights ago or three nights ago. So I have a handy, short, and condensed version. One of the biggest tips I always have with people is to tell your story with less, fewer words, right? So many people want to throw everything about what they're thinking, whether for it's a pitch or a presentation or just telling a story, they give too much detail. So I'm going to try to do, take my own advice and give the shortened version.  When I was seven years old, I started acting in film and TV.  My family were actors, so I fell into the business kind of through them. And I acted all the way through my childhood, through teenage years, through high school, and I thought, okay, I'm going to go to theatre school. I went to National Theatre School of Canada. I thought I'm going to get my conservatory training, and I'm just going to go to Hollywood, and that's going to be my life.  And my brother passed away when I was 17, and it threw my life off course, I was like really grief-stricken and I didn't know what to do with myself. And so when I went to theater school after that happened, I just wasn't in a good place mentally and I realized I didn't want to be an ac

Ric Krause  | LinkedIn Katty: Ric, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the artisan podcast. Looking at your resume, the through line that I see through everything is really the impact of the narrative.  Where did this passion come from for you? How did you get started in this?  Ric: Actually, in college, I was a music major. I was a composition major, and so even before I got to writing, I was working with form, and my composition teacher said, you could paint a room red and with one white dot, and that's okay, but you better defend that white dot, and that goes to the structure underneath creative,  and it was such a great exercise to get as free as you could, then pin it into a structural foundation.  And then in music, there's all sorts of rules for harmony, ease, melody, tonality. And so the concept is built into the structure immediately.  And that helped me with everything I did. So when I segued into writing, and I had written a play  and that got me represented, and then I started pitching and started to sell TV stuff and film stuff,  all of those, all the ability to think conceptually and grounded into structure came into play. And at the same time, we are synaptically hardwired to engage with story. So if you can really use that to your advantage and get people to engage quickly and wonder what happens next, however, that translates into your messaging,  people are wired to be taken by the lapel and led forward,  and it's what you're utilizing with good storytelling. Katty: You're going to invite people into that story with good storytelling. Ric: Yeah, I would say more than invite them, you grab them. Really good storytelling and audiences on the edge of their seat, leaning forward toward you.  One, someone is leaning in. And within brand messaging, it's really within, I think, less than three seconds,  you've got them.  If they're already tuning you out, how do you make up for that difference when they're already leaning back out of your messaging? How are you going to pull them back in? That's tough. Once you've got them, of course, you have to extend their engagement all the way to the end, which in a lot of CTA, but you have to grab them in, whether you're telling a thriller or a 30 second spot.  Katty: Okay, so what's the How? How does a copywriter who's starting in their career path right now make that shift of saying, okay, just writing copy for the sake of writing copy is different than what Ric is talking about right now? Ric: Yeah I, think that you have to always consider the one question that is the through line of all narrative, whatever that narrative is, and that question is "what happens next?" What happens next? What happens next? There are many tools that you can use to get there.  A reversal reversal expectation; A plot twist.  You set someone up to believe one thing and then it changes.  Use an interesting hero or antagonist, use a cliffhanger, use backstory. We're doing this because this happened before.  You can use all those tools and you're setting people up to track your message with the synaptic pathways that are already there for receiving narrative. It's taking advantage of something we're already disposed to engage with.  Katty: How do you do that in like a 30-second spot though?  Ric: This is where the agencies are often really good at the 30-second spot. My question is what would go beyond that? You have to engage really quickly with, I think, both the right type of hero, heroine and the right type of world-building.  And world-building means that we're always trying to make our audience feel something.  It's not a dry exercise. We want them to feel they are the real heroes of the story. They're the stars of the story. And we have to deal with how we want them to feel while using our product. If you're an Alfa Romeo buyer, you're a sexy soul and if you're a Jeep buyer, you're a rugged individual, right? They're different. Brands have different feels to them. So

Rickie is a seasoned Creative Director & Design Director who successfully leads 360-degree campaigns for high-profile clients and turns big-picture ideas into compelling multi-platform campaigns.  Together we talk about experiential design and what it takes to be an artisan in this field. Find Rickie here: IG @littlecountryfox |  Linkedin | rickieashman.com Katty Rickie, so excited to have you here on the Artisan Podcast. I know we've known each other through Artisan for a long time, but this is the first time you and I are actually sitting down to have a chat.   Rickie Yeah, I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.     Katty How did you get started as a creative? And when did you know that being a creative was a passion for you?  Rickie I was always a doodler and a daydreamer, according to my teachers, and I got special permission when I was in middle school to doodle because the teacher saw that my grades were good. In fact, I was at the top of my class in middle school, so they knew that it wasn't impeding my learning abilities. But, their one rule was that I had to doodle in a separate notebook and not in my class notes or in my textbook, which I was fond of doodling in. And flash forward to the beginning of my career I missed out on the opportunity to go to art school. It was something that I had wanted to do, but I grew up in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina hit towards the tail end of my high school year. So, I think my parents were thinking practically when they guided me into going to business school for college. So, when I graduated, I think I ended up moving into a creative career through sheer force of will. On my first job, I began to teach myself Photoshop through my early interest in art where I was learning how to color-correct photography and illustrations. And then, in my first job, our designer left the company and there was a hole to fill, and I volunteered to take it on and thus began my early career as a designer. Katty So that's pretty amazing that your teachers recognized the importance of doodling and didn't curtail that but actually gave you permission, if you will, to be able to do that. Rickie Yeah,  I think so. And I think, what also has really helped throughout my career is the ability to tell a story. And starting off as a wannabe illustrator, as a kid where I would draw out stories and plot lines in a linear comic book-like format, has always stuck with me. I had a brief stint getting into creative writing in high school as well. So working on more of the advertising front, where oftentimes a lot of what we do is storytelling in a sense for both the client and the consumer to get the buy in. I think that's also helped ground me and my approach. So doodling led to a good overall process for creative thinking. And I think it's a great mental exercise particularly, when you're having writer's block, shall we say, sometimes it's good to just, do something with your hands while your mind is working away. While I doodle less these days, sometimes I find myself scribbling. In my work notes. Katty Love that. Yeah, I'm reading this book right now. Actually, not that far into it, but even in the first few chapters, it's called Your Brain on Art it talks a lot about just the connection of art and just, even the doodling piece of it, but the importance of just allowing your brain to travel and be able to do that. It helps with writer's block. It helps with anything, really any kind of block but just that physical process, just what it does, the chemicals in your brain,  pretty amazing.  So you moved from your love of illustration and you built on that and your love of design and you built on that. How did you get into experiential design? And how would you describe experiential design versus traditional creative work?  Rickie Yeah, I think  Again, really through happenstance when I began my career, I was working brand side. So I handled everything from print to digital to occa

Executive coach and team development expert: Jamie Douraghy  jdouraghy com. LinkedIn profile:     Hello Everyone.  I'm excited to welcome Jamie to this podcast and introduce you to him. You may wonder why we have the same last name… It's because we're married! I was looking to create this series of podcasts on company culture and realized that, right here,is someone who has expertise in helping companies and leadership teams build culture using the strengths of the team And I thought… Hey, Jamie, would you come and talk to me about building company culture? So here we are!  Jamie, glad to have you here. Finally, after 30 years of marriage, our first podcast together! Jamie: Yes, we've been negotiating this moment for quite some time now.  Katty: Exactly, So what I wanted to dive in with you in this….With everything that has changed in the past few years with COVID and the Great Resignation and this whole movement with hybrid and remote and so on and so forth. We talk about how companies go about in terms of building culture, and learn about their teams. And I know that one of the frameworks that you use is StrengthsFinders. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that and the importance of knowing what strengths people BRING, and what it is that they NEED on a particular team. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background and how you've come to this point.   Jamie: Absolutely. My, journey into this world of understanding why, how, and what people need to do to work better together began about 11/ 12 years ago, when I went through the proverbial discovery of your WHY, and then the HOW and WHAT became easier. What I appreciate about CliftonStrengths is that it focuses on HOW we do what we do, when we know our WHY, which is intrinsic and very personal, our WHAT can become much more dynamic. And then many individuals can get lost in how they're doing what they're doing when they're not clear on that. And CliftonStrengths, as you take the assessment, you look at your 34 complete talents and the top five become your strengths. Those are the ones to initially focus on. When I'm working with companies is focus on the talents of 6 through 10, because that's where we are learning that the true potential lies and the greatest potential to be unlocked are, is in the talents that are not necessarily our strengths. Katty: So you mean the first five of those 10 is something that naturally occurs. It's the six through 10 that the potential and the opportunities lie within. Jamie: Exactly. For example, Context is my number two (strength). I don't have to think about watching a documentary or what I'm going to learn from a specific book. I just pick it up, or I just do it.    My number six or seven is Maximizer, where I need to take good things and I want to make them great. I have to put a little bit more intentionality and a little bit more thought into it. It's not an automatic process. Katty: So really a growth opportunity even for every individual. Jamie: Definitely. Our greatest growth, for me, lies within the six through ten.  Katty: How would you say…from a team dynamics standpoint,  I know you've shared in the past that GallupStrengths or CliftonStrengths is not a hiring tool, but more of a development tool.  Can you share a little bit more about that and how hiring managers as a whole can utilize tools like CliftonStrengths to be able to develop their core team, and their people? Jamie: These tools show how good a person may be on paper,  or as a result of algorithms and science that have been put out there. Where the greatest growth happens is when they are doing the work.  And when I know how I can do some things better than others, then I can team up with the right people that are, if not, better at certain areas and partner up with them.  And for me, that's where team dynamics become more important than growing just one individual.  It's really how you grow the entire team, and what are the indiv

https://www.joyful.co/   |  Linkedin Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency that designs and activates company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. ---------------------------- Welcome to this next episode of the artisan podcast. My name is Katty Douraghy. I'm the president of Artisan Creative and your host for the artisan podcast. Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, the co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency. They design and activate company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. In this profound shift that we've had lately in the world of work, the rise of stress and burnout across leaders and employees and finding this need for best-in-class companies to re-recruit their talent and welcome them to a better future. Joyful saw this opportunity to focus their unique skill sets on this vital lever of growth, which is culture. And that is what has brought us here to this conversation to talk about company culture employee retention, and bringing more joy to work. So with that, please welcome Allen and so happy to have you. Let's welcome Allen Hardin to the podcast.  Allen and I are both part of an organization called EO, The Entrepreneurs Organization, and I was fortunate enough to visit his offices a few weeks back I just loved what I saw there. I saw all the joy that was there with everything that they have created for clients and that’s what has brought us to this conversation. Katty I was really curious about the genesis of Joyful and your background, Alan, and have an opportunity for us to just really connect and chat. Allen: Thank you so much for having me. Katty. I really appreciate the opportunity.   Katty: I think with everything that's happened through COVID, with everybody being remote and now people being hybrid and some people not even knowing yet what their company culture and or their org is going to be like. Whether they're gonna bring everybody back or not or stay hybrid thing, it's just a really important topic to talk about, you know? Build and maintain culture through this. Craziness. This new work place that we're in. Allen:  So there's a number of milestone moments that have happened over the last few years that everybody reset or refocused on it, but it's continuing to change as well. So that's the important thing to recognize is that you're never quite done working on your company culture. It's something that always needs a little bit of attention. Katty: Absolutely. Tell me a little bit about you and kind of how you started in the space and what kind of was the impetus to start Joyful? Allen: Yeah, absolutely. My background really stems from live event production. So in the early years of our company, that's what we really focused on. We originally started in 2015. And we're producing big events for ourselves, public events, ticketed events in the Portland area, but also producing big events for clients. And one of our colleagues has said in the past that any live event any live experience is inherently a cultural experience. And I think that that is what really helped us focus and refocus on the path that we're on now. Focusing on company culture.   Live events in that world require a number of different mindsets if you will. And I like to say that you have to be one part visionary, right, really seeing the big picture and being optimistic of what could be and creating this emotive thing that really makes people feel something at an event or an experience that they have. But you also have to be very pragmatic, but you have to be able to execute those things on the ground and deliver on that promise because people will know, in

www.theotheeros.com LinkedIn | Instagram | X   Eros Marcello a software engineer/ developer and architect specializing in human interfacing artificial intelligence, with a special focus on conversational AI systems, voice assistance, chat bots and ambient computing.   Eros has been doing this since 2015 and even though today for the rest of us laymen in the industry we're hearing about AI everywhere, for Eros this has been something he's been passionately working in for quite a few years.    Super excited to have him here to talk to us about artificial intelligence and help demystify some of the terminology that you all may be hearing out there.    I'm so excited to welcome Eros Marcello to this conversation to learn a little bit more about AI. He is so fully well versed in it and has been working in AI at since 2015, when it was just not even a glimmer in my eyes so I'm so glad that to have somebody here who's an expert in that space.   Eros glad to have you here I would love to just jump into the conversation with you. For many of us this this buzz that we're hearing everywhere sounds new, as if it's just suddenly come to fruition. But that is clearly not the case, as it's been around for a long time, and you've been involved in it for a long time.     Can you take us to as a creative, as an artist, as an architect, as an engineer take us through your genesis and how did you get involved and how did you get started. Let's just start at the beginning.   Eros:  The beginning could be charted back sequentially working in large format facilities, as surprise surprise the music industry, which you know was the initial interest and was on the decline. You'd have this kind of alternate audio projects, sound design projects that would come into these the last remaining, especially on the East and West, Northeast and So-cal areas, the last era of large format analog-based facilities with large recording consoles and hardware and tape machines.  I got to experience that, which was a great primer for AI for many reasons, we'll get more into that later. So what happened was that you'd have voiceover coming in for telephony systems, and they would record these sterile, high-fidelity captures of voice that would become the UI sound banks, or used for speech synthesis engines for call centers. That was the exposure to what was to come with voice tech folks in that space, the call center world, that really started shifting my gears into what AI machine learning was and how I may fit into it. Fast forward, I got into digital signal processing and analog emulation, so making high caliber tools for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase , Mac and PC for sound production and music production. specifically analog circuitry emulation and magnetic tape emulation “in the box” as it's called that gave me my design and engineering acumen. Come 2015/2016, Samsung came along and said you’ve done voice-over,  know NLP, machine learning, and AI, because I studied it and acquired the theoretical knowledge and had an understanding of the fundamentals.  I didn't know where I fit yet, and then they're like so you know about, plus you’re into voice, plus you have design background with the software that you worked on.  I worked on the first touchscreen recording console called the Raven MTX for a company called Slate Digital. So I accidentally created the trifecta that was required to create what they wanted to do which was Bigxby which was Samsung's iteration of the series for the Galaxy S8 and they wanted me to design the persona… and that as they say is history. Samsung Research America, became my playground they moved me up from LA to the Bay Area and that was it.  It hasn't really stopped since it's been a meteoric ascension upward. They didn't even know what to call it back then, they called it a UX writing position, but UX writers don't generate large textual datasets and annotate data and then batch and live test neural networks. Because that's what I w

Rachel Cooke | Lead Above Noise | Modern Mentor Podcast   Katty: Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Rachel Cooke to our session here today and talking about the employee experience and why it is so impactful for both engagement as well as retention in our companies. Welcome, Rachel. So happy to have you here. I’m excited to talk to you about this incredibly impactful journey that our employees go through and that we go through as business owners and as managers of our teams. Katty: I had the pleasure of hearing and meeting Rachel at the Association of Talent Development Conference in San Diego. We've been talking about having her on here so that we can talk about the WHY of this amazing initiative, as well as the road trip that Rachel refers to when she talks about the employee experience. Why don't we start there? Let's talk about this journey, this road trip that we're on. Rachel: That's awesome. You have such a good memory, Katty. I do love a good metaphor when I talk about these things. I use the road trip metaphor, you could pick many, but I think sometimes, something like the employee experience can feel kind of cloudy and ethereal and nobody quite knows how to wrap their hands around it. And so, I like to say that the employee experience is a journey and I think about it as a road trip and it has these three core elements. To take a successful road trip, you need a destination; you need to understand where you are going, you need a road map; you need some turn-by-turn directions, and then hopefully you've got some fuel in the tank, and if you're lucky, some snacks and a playlist, but something to sort of fuel you or give momentum to your journey. That's how I like to think about it. Katty: I love that. Can we start at the beginning of that employee experience? We're in the recruitment space here at Artisan Creative and I sometimes get the impression that the employee experience for some companies starts after the onboarding. But we see the employee experience, the candidate experience if you will, even before being hired. You know how the interviews are conducted, how they're being responded to during that whole application process. So maybe it's the pre-journey of the journey, right, the conversation, and that state. Can you talk a little bit about that? Rachel: Yeah, I see your pre-candidate experience and I would say it goes back even further than that which is the experience that your existing employees are having within your organization, such that they are going to be ambassadors of and successful recruiters of that talent to whom you want to deliver that amazing candidate experience. I do think it is always ongoing and continuous. I think fundamentally for me, what stands out about the employee experience and where a lot of well-intentioned companies are getting it wrong, is that I think companies tend to think about the work that we're doing and then the employee experience,  that we think about later when we have free time. Which spoiler, we never have free time. I believe that a real powerful employee experience fuels rather than follows the work. I think employee experience is not about free food, foosball tables, and sort of fancy cocktail parties. It begins with how we enable our employees to deliver the work that we have hired them to do. I think that resonates even in the interview process. Even in the recruitment process, I see organizations posting roles and then running these potential candidates through the wringer with really complex application processes. You've got applicant tracking systems, you've got recruiters that have this as #17 on the priority list and people are interviewing with 27 different people and then waiting months and months and frankly, in a buyers' market, which we may not be in right now but we will be in again it's an off-putting experience for somebody to have. For me, the fundamental first question is what can we be doing as organizations to streamline and s

Desmond Lomax is a Senior Consultant, Master Facilitator, and Implementation Leader in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion work at the Arbinger Institute. Find Desmond on Linkedin Arbinger books: Anatomy of Peace | The Outward Mindset | Leadership and Self-Deception What I especially appreciated was how you were able to take this topic that is top of mind and many people out there are talking about it, but you were able to humanize it and you were able to allow the audience to be able to connect from a human to human level. That obviously is so important in every environment, every circle that we’re in.  For our conversation, I wanted to bring that into the workplace, specifically hiring and integrating new people into the mix. But before we get into that, I'd love to just know how you get involved in this line of work. Desmond: I started in the prison system. I was a therapist for the prison system and it was my first introduction to marginalized people struggling to make it in society, outside of my personal experiences. I can't think of too many things more difficult than coming out of a prison system and returning as a citizen of the society and not feeling that you have the capacity or the resources to be able to do that successfully. So I went from a therapist to a manager, to a state director where I was in charge of all the programming outside of the prison in the state of Utah. From there, I started teaching courses in Forensic Social Work at the University of Utah. I'm a Licensed Clinical Therapist, so it all came together. I started doing many podcasts and videos about the things I've learned, and then my son passed away. I lost a child, he was a freshman in college. He committed suicide. I found myself in this unique position where I was like okay, Dezzy, you’ve been through some stuff now, you know what it's like to lose a child to something horrific. What can you do differently in society to create a greater sense of inclusion and belonging? I think that's what motivates me. My son seemed isolated and alone, even though we talked every day. We had a lot of communication and people cared about him, but there just wasn't a sense of belonging for him. I wanted to do something about that. I just took all of this background and my knowledge and as I was working with Arbinger, I joined their design team, and we created the curriculum called Outward Inclusion and I spent the last few years sharing the message of what it looks like in your organization and in your space where we can, 1)  see the humanity of another person, and then 2) understand our impact on that humanity. As simple as that sounds, there are things that we all have that interfere with our ability to do those two basic things. I've been working all over this country, all over internationally, just doing the work, being motivated by the loss I've experienced and the knowledge that I've gained. Katty: Thank you for sharing that and heartfelt condolences. I don't know how long ago that was, but it's always fresh in the heart of anyone who's lost someone. Thank you for sharing that with us. I appreciate that you took something so devastating and you were able to turn it around and then bring positive impact to others from it. Desmond: Yes, I hope so. What I've learned is that loss is energy. It's bonafide energy and either you do something with it, or it does something with you. I would like to say there are all these other options, but either that is the same energy that is just really hard. I've seen both of them in my life so I'm not trying to say I'm on one side or the other. But loss is a lot of energy that you need to transform into something or else that loss will transform you. That's what I've learned and that's what I'm trying to do. Katty: Thank you for doing that and thank you for including us in that conversation. Let's go back to the two-pointers that you mentioned. The first one was seeing the humanity in each other and the second on

Suzan Oslin https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzan-oslin/ concreteoasis.city   Suzan is an independent XR creator with a focus on persistent, geo-spatially located AR. She uses immersive technology to build aspirational futures that reflect her own wonder and awe for the beauty of life–at the same time revealing ugly truths that endanger our very existence. Using her mastery of experience design, she crafts interactions intended to engender empathy and motivate positive action.    Katty Where are you? It's beautiful where you're sitting.   Suzan I’m at the AR House here in Los Angeles, and it's a co-working, co-living space run by Aidan Wolf and Lucas Rizzotto. Every month, they bring in ten new artists, where we live and collaborate together for four weeks. And it's in a beautiful house in the hills of Hollywood. We have a pool and a sauna and we invite people in from the public to be a part of the community and it's just a really amazing place for artists and creators to be inspired, build relationships, and build cool stuff.   Katty What a beautiful idea for collaboration. All AR projects?   Suzan Not necessarily but it's pretty much AR/VR as far as I know. Some artists come in and they're not necessarily developers, they're designers or illustrators, but they're pretty passionate about the AR/VR space, and they'll work usually with one of the devs to build stuff.   Katty Okay, let's step backwards just in case there are some people in the audience who may not be familiar with AR/VR. Can you just give us a quick little rundown of augmented reality/ virtual reality and then we'll start with how you got started in this.   Suzan There's sometimes a lot of confusion about that. Virtual reality is when you're completely immersed within a digital or virtual world, and that's usually through a headset, and there's no relationship to the outside world at all. You're completely in a created and fabricated world.  Augmented reality is when you are in the real world and your real world is being augmented by digital or virtual objects. So it's a layer over top of the real world, and usually that's done with your phone, or augmented reality glasses. There used to be a distinction of mixed reality. Mixed reality and augmented reality are kind of coming together into one thing and people talk less about mixed reality. I think it pretty much put it all together with augmented reality.   Katty And how does that play into where your career started from, which is in the UX space and what was the trajectory for you and the transition for you from traditional UX into what you're doing now?   Suzan Well, my career actually didn't start in UX. So when you and I met, my UX career was starting. I actually have a background in visual effects and animation and I've worked in the film industry for a number of years, so the 3D world is not a stranger to me. I had been doing UX for about 12 years.    I don't think I wrote a single line of code in that whole time and my background is very much in technical art. To be honest, I was getting a little bit bored with user experience design and wasn't challenged in the way that technology really challenges you. I was in a space where I was looking for my next evolution of my career. That's when I started to see, around 2018, and I started to see a lot of posts on LinkedIn and whatnot about augmented reality and virtual reality. It was more virtual reality at that time. To me, it seems like a no brainer to kind of go back to my roots, but also bring with me, my user experience design and hope to make an impact in terms of a new technology and bring in those concepts of user experience design. So often when a new technology is being created, a lot of the applications and experiences are created by the developers. And I know it makes sense because they're the ones figuring out the technology. So those are the ones that get built first and so I really wanted to have a presence of user experience in this bur

Daniel Sieberg Co-Founder, Chief Content Officer: GoodTrust Director, Innovation Marketing, Moody's Author: The Digital Diet (2011); Digital Legacy (2020, w/ Rikard Steiber) https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielsieberg/ ------------------     Katty Welcome to the artisan podcast as we welcome Daniel Seiberg as our next guest. Daniel is the Co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Good Trust and the Director of Innovation Marketing at Moody’s. But above all, Daniel is a storyteller. Throughout his career he has told stories of brands and stories of people as a journalist, as an author, as an entrepreneur. He has traveled to over 70 countries and has worked in marketing, communications, product, and partnerships at many well known companies including Google as well as many news outlets. I’m so excited to have Daniel here so that we can talk about storytelling and how that impacts interviewing and how we can show up as our authentic selves, not only to an interview but any role that we start. So, with that, let’s welcome Daniel.   Daniel Hi, Katty. It’s wonderful to be with you and dwell in possibilities as the sign over your shoulder reads and talk about storytelling. Probably one of my favorite subjects.   Katty Yeah, thank you. I was fascinated when we had met a few weeks ago just to talk about the concept of storytelling and wanted to bring that to the audience here. Obviously, the audience who listens here are all storytellers… whether they're visual storytellers, or writers, or marketers. But this concept of storytelling is so important, and as we are recording this, the gardeners have come. So for the audience, just giving you a little warning if you're hearing noise, it’s out of my control.   Daniel This is all part of our story right now.    Katty This is the story of working from home.    Daniel Yes, exactly.   Katty It is what it is.    Daniel Yep, life in 2022.    Katty Yep, we will speak loudly to overcome that. So, Daniel, how did you get started on this path? Let’s go there first.   Daniel Yeah, absolutely and I will keep my origin story relatively tight. I would just say that my father spent his career as an engineering electronics technician working with oceanographers who went to the North Pole to study climate change. So I was exposed to the “how does anything work” kinds of questions from an early age. My family believes in service and my sister is a nurse practitioner. So that's a little bit of my orientation in the world.    And then coupled with that, my maternal grandmother died of complications from Alzheimer's and I can distinctly remember what it was like to see her at her 75th birthday party, and as an awkward 14-year-old walk up to her with a present and for her to say, “Oh, this is lovely, dear, thank you, and who are you?” And for the two of us to sort of die in front of each other in that moment. So what struck me is the value of our stories and how we pass them on. How we convey them. They're sort of the storytelling or how we do that. There’s the tools that we use to tell those stories, there's the subject matter, that people, and everything wrapped up in what it means to tell a story and of course to listen,  to receive,  or to watch. So that, I think, is what ultimately pushed me into a career of being a journalist. In my case, it was science and technology. I did a master's degree in journalism with a focus of technology at The University of British Columbia…. a long time ago.    The arc of my career went through working at CNN, covering those subjects including space and environment, and on to CBS News, and ABC and then I pivoted away from being a practicing journalist, if you will, to focusing on technology and I would say helping others use technology to tell stories. So I spent several years at Google and helped to create a couple of teams in service of empowering newsrooms to use technology to tell stories in new ways with data through different tools, training journalists, helpin

Dr. Heidi Hanna is a best-selling author of 7 books, is an authority on stress mastery and brain-based health and performance. https://heidihanna.com/ https://heidihanna.com/stress-toolkit/ https://www.linkedin.com/learning/managing-stress-for-positive-change -------------------------------- Very nice to have you here. And you and I have worked together several times through the Entrepreneurs Organization and I was on your podcast for stress mastery. I would just really love to have a conversation about stress and specifically as it pertains to creativity since the audience that we are speaking to is primarily on the creative side, both writers as well as designers and marketers.  Let's talk about stress. But let’s before that talk about how did you fall into this field? Heidi: Well, I'll give you the shorter version of the story. So we don't take up all of our time. But I really struggled with stress from an early age, so much so that I ended up fainting and losing consciousness and went to a lot of different doctors. This is around the age of 11 to 12 years old, went to a bunch of doctors, they couldn't figure out what was going on. I was diagnosed with a lot of different confusing things.  But ultimately, at the end of the day, they said it's probably just stress. And so that word meant a lot to me at a very early age and I couldn't understand it. Of course, my parents did the best they could to try to teach me how to cope with that. But it's just something we're not really taught. We're not really taught what stress is or how to cope effectively with it. I think we're talking about it more now. But it still seems like it's this big, bad beast that's out there that we're fighting against. Instead of the way I like to look at it ,it's a relationship we have with the circumstances of our lives, based on our demand versus capacity.  And so it can be physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, or social. Creative people certainly have a lot of unique challenges in the stress space, which I know we'll talk a little bit more about. And a lot of us who are creative are also highly sensitive to stress. So we can get moved by stress in either direction, positively or negatively. And I think that that was me even though I didn't see myself as a creative person as a child. I was very influenced by the emotion and the energy around me. And so stress became really kind of debilitating in some ways and led me down this path to understand it. So I studied nutrition, exercise, physiology, psychology, neuroscience, everything to kind of come to a better understanding of what's actually happening when we say that we're feeling stressed. Katty: What is actually happening? Heidi: I do think that the first thing again, to keep in mind is that it's a relationship that each of us has, and so it's very much based on a perception of this gap between demand and capacity. So if we believe that we have the resources that we need to cope with those demands, then we have a very different stress reaction pattern that's more like acute stress.  So if there's actually an emergency and we have to do something, we have the production of adrenaline. We have that kind of fight or flight feeling, but that's for a short period of time. That's only if something's about 30 minutes or less. If we experienced more chronic stress or we don't think that we have the resources to deal with what's being asked of us, then it moves into more of a chronic state, primarily fueled by cortisol, which is a more long-term survival hormone. And this is where we start seeing immune function go down, brain function go down, memory attention and we see the more toxic side of the stress reaction pattern which estimates are that stress like that is responsible for about 75 to 90% of medical visits.  So we know that stress has this toxic side. But I would also remind us all that if we didn't care about something, we wouldn't feel stressed. So stress can also be an indication of

Our guest today is Finnian Kelly. Finnian has 12 years of entrepreneurship experience. He’s started 7 companies and has had 3 successful exits, 2 acquisitions, 2 failures, and 2 he’s still busy with and running. He has won multiple awards for being an impact-driven leader. He’s here today to talk to us about the power of intentionality and what it means to go inwards and really feel your way through your intentions as you plan your career, your next step, your job, or your next freelance opportunity. Enjoy.   You can find Finnian Kelly at: financiallyhappy.com @TheFinnianKelly  FinnianKelly.com linkedin.com/in/thefinniankelly/ ---------------------------- Finnian: So I like to think of all freelancers, really, they're all entrepreneurs. Every entrepreneur in some regard started as a freelancer, like, let's face it, we were all offering something. And then we managed to realize that perhaps our skill sets were great at bringing other people involved into the vision, and then we grew into something bigger.  So even just having that mindset that there's potentially something more available to you, is part of the intentionality process. When I think about intentionality, I define it as it's all about defining how you want to feel, and then taking deliberate action towards it. That combination of vision plus action.  Now freelancers were intentional to make the decision to become a freelancer. There was a reason you were like, I want to feel free. I want to feel like I have a choice. I want to feel liberated from not having to work in a corporate day job. So there was a vision. And then they took some action. They went well, “I'm going to stop putting myself up for some services or some jobs. I'm going to promote myself a little bit. I've had to like quit my day job and move into this realm.”  Now then what happens is sometimes what worked for us then is what holds us back. So we're getting into this place. And now to keep that vision going, we start focusing on “I've got to do this, I've got to do that.” And we forget about the bigger vision. What's the next vision from that? And we can get stuck into the minutiae and feeling like well, I've got to get this next job to be able to pay for these needs and we feel constricted so the freelancer suddenly becomes constricted from the life that they've created for themselves.  So we need to step back and go back to that moment that you did when you decided to move from the corporate world perhaps it was corporate world or another small business into a freelancer. You had a vision and this needs to be a continuous process and go “Alright, where I'm at right now… Yes, it was my original vision. But is this still my vision? Or is this something more? Perhaps I'm not working with the clients that I really want to be working with. Perhaps I'm I don't have as much freedom as I thought I'm actually working nonstop, and I'm always just catching my tail.”  So getting connected to that big picture would be really, really wonderful, and I talk about that it's not just a vision of materialistic objects, it's all about feelings. Get connected to those feelings. That's the fundamental thing of intentionality is how do you want to feel?  And with the new year coming up, it's a great time whenever this is shared, it's going to be in the new year. And having that awareness of stepping back and going, “Okay, I'm where I'm at right now. What is it that I really want to be feeling? Perhaps I want to feel more inspiration with my work, perhaps I want to feel more proud. Perhaps I want to feel more fulfilled.” And get connected to those feelings and then start going, “Okay, I want those feelings, what are some potential pathways that I need to take in order to get there and that will help me line up the action that I need to take throughout that year.” So that's where I'd be starting. Katty: I've heard you say intentionality and really focusing on the end part, the inner journey of that versus be

Check out our episode with Keith Roberts, Entrepreneur | Author & Keynote Speaker | Creator of the Oak Journal.   We chat about creativity, mentorship, entrepreneurship and so much more/----more---- Katty: I'm so excited to interview a good friend, Keith Roberts, an incredible creative and the creator of The Oak Journal, for this session of the Artisan Podcast. Hello, Keith, welcome. Keith: It's an honor to be here, thanks for having me. Katty: I'd love to start the conversation, Keith about you as a creative and how you got your start and then we'll make that move into where you are today with The Oak Journal. Keith: Great. So my start, I actually went to Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California, where I got a degree in Industrial Scientific Photography with a minor in Undersea Photography, so really applicable to the real world….sarcasm there!   I think one of the many gifts that I took away that was a life changer for me with Brooks was the level of presentation and professionalism that was required. It was easy to get into Brooks Institute of Photography, it was incredibly hard to graduate. There were 58 students in my class and 12 graduated. If you got to C you failed, you had to retake the class. A second C you were expelled.  So they were really about making exceptional artists and not about just making money, which I really appreciate, and being somebody that's owned an agency for 25 years and seeing what a lot of the schools turn out now that are based on profit versus not, really instilling what the students need to have a successful career as a creative. That was enormous for me. The other thing that I took away from that was, you know, a very special relationship with the founder of the school, Ernest Brooks. I minored in Undersea Photography and I got to spend several months living on a boat diving every day with a gentleman who has, you know, an exhibit in the Smithsonian Institute for his underwater photography. We had Jean-Michel Cousteau, Jacques Cousteau’s son, dove with us for several expeditions. So the taste for once-in-a-lifetime experiences, I got at a very early age. Katty: Oh my gosh I got goosebumps. That's incredible to have that opportunity at such a young age, that just opened up the whole world for you to be able to look at everything through their eyes too. Keith: Yeah, and I would say it also set an expectation that I did not want to have an ordinary life. I remember to this day at my grandmother's trailer in rural Indiana she had a poster of the poem, The Road Less Traveled. And I always remember that last verse “Two roads diverged in a road and I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference” and that was an early opportunity to see when everybody else is sitting in a classroom or working on being an engineer, which was the safe job in the 90s you know, and my dad was an engineer, and that was the safe route to go..what was possible if you really followed your passion. Katty: Beautiful. And I know that, unfortunately, Ernest Brooks passed away recently. And you wrote a beautiful tribute about him. Can you talk a little bit about mentorship and just kind of what that meant for you to be under the tutelage of this incredible person? Keith: Absolutely, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to continue to honor Ernie. He was one of the many mentors that I've continued to work with. It was a gift and I think, realizing as a Buddhist, I believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence, but when the student is ready to teach her presents itself and I think there are so many lost opportunities when people don't realize that there's this synchronicity happening all around them.  And so, with Ernie Brooks, I remember something specifically said that the boat we lived on was “Just Love.” and he said, “The time we spend upon just love is not deducted from our lives.” And it still chokes me up to this day, and I think that's why he lived to be

Jaime Levy, Ux Strategist, Speaker and author of UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions available in 6 languages and now also on Audible You can find Jaime on LinkedIn and on jaimelevy.com   ----------------- Katty: I’ve been watching your career trajectory, and I was super excited to see that you had written a book, UX Strategy and that the audio version has just come out. So I wanted to have a conversation about you, about the book, and how you started your path. One thing that I've noticed is this trend of reinvention with you from a designer to a strategist to an author to a public speaker to a professor, and how all of that's going to come together for you. I just found that fascinating, so I'd love for you to talk about your origin story and what's steps you've taken to come here. Jaime: Let's see. Well, I guess it started even before the browser when I was creating my floppy disk magazines, and I was a graduate student at NYU, and just really interested in nonlinear storytelling.  And then trying to invent this new medium like it was just this total insane dreamer thing. And I guess because of the floppy disk I made, I actually finished it, and then I successfully brought the product to market by selling it. A floppy disk that opened into a HyperCard or Director presentation. I know for all the newbies, they're like, “What are you talking about?” Don't worry, you don't need to know this old-school stuff.  But you know it used to be really hard to make interactive presentations, but the upside of all of that was that you could be the first or you could do something that is only mediocre in design. But because it was the first it was like “yay.”  That was how I started out. I was a horrible interface designer and a horrible coder. But I just kept pounding on these floppy disks, and then, the short version of it is Billy Idol bought one, and then it got launched as a commercial endeavor and then I got my gigs at EMI records and Viacom. And it all just kept going from there you know to eventually, doing an online magazine, and then getting a creative director role and just constantly working.  I really believe that if you just keep working, and applying yourself, and learning new things, that eventually you'll connect and get whatever it is that you want. Some job, or some gig, or an opportunity. And I think that relentlessness to persevere was something that has stayed with me, and I actually need to kind of manifest it now as I'm starting the next chapter of my career.  Before UX, it was called interface design and then after interface design, then it was web design and then after web design, then we had information architecture and interaction design. And by the time I got back to LA after 9/11 and the dot com thing crashed in New York, as well as, San Francisco and LA, I came back here and it seemed at that point I needed to focus.  And I should mention early on as a result of the (floppy) disk I was asked to be a part-time professor at NYU, and I did get flown around the country and the world, to speak at conferences, and I think like when you have that success when you start out you think that's normal. And so for me, it's just been catching up with my old normal, and it's a curse and a blessing, and the blessing is obvious because you're like, oh, I just want to continue to be a public speaker, I want to continue being known or recognized for my work. But the negative consequences, it's an addiction, it's like a high that you set here and you think, Oh, I always have to be at this level of an overachiever. And so, you know, in that sense I feel like I didn't engage in my own personal life, you know because I sacrificed it for my career so much and didn't really like relax into it until my 30s when I got back to Los Angeles. Katty: Interesting. I saw you actually speak about it in one of your talks. I think was your Brazil talk about being an overachiever and wha

Seth Silver is an Executive Creative Director who is on a mission to put creativity at the center of business growth.  We chat about creativity, and the intersection of art, culture, and design.  You can find Seth at Sethsilver.io or on https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethsilver/   And a should out to The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising where both Seth and I graduated from. #artisancreative #theartisanpodcast #FIDM

Check out our conversation with Branding Copywriter, Brennan McNally about music, humor, inspiration, and cats! Branding copywriter + cat lover.  Check out Brennan's work here (and see Daphne's pictures too!) https://www.onlybrens.com/   From working with Conan O'Brien while he was in college at UCLA to touring the country multiple times and earning a living playing the bass, to being a writer and creative director at a variety of agencies, startups, and corporations. Brennan brings humor to every opportunity.   

Erica M. Hart is a documentary director, video editor, and podcast creator. She is the creator and co-host of the survivor-led podcast Gray Area Stories about the healing journeys of survivors of sexual assault. She is the director of the short documentary Gray Area, which follows her calm conversation with a man who sexually assaulted her. Erica's recent work as an editor has included shows for MTV, Nickelodeon, CMT, the PBS feature documentary How Sweet the Sound and the Disney/Parkwood Entertainment film Black is King. Erica is passionate about feminism, storytelling, and conversations between humans which serve to reduce shame and stigma. In her spare time, she volunteers to clean up the loose shards each time a glass ceiling is shattered. You can find Erica at www.ericamhart.com/