Purpose Day with LaBrandon

LaBrandon sits down with his mother, Shirley “Mama Dates” Dates, to trace her journey from a childhood in Gadsden, Alabama to a long medical career and a recent cancer fight she is overcoming.

This intimate conversation explores Shirley’s lifelong calling to help others—her EMT training, work as a medical assistant and insurance specialist, caregiving for family and community, and how motherhood and faith shaped her sense of purpose.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now at ⁠LaBrandonDates.com⁠.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: ⁠@labrandondates

Speed is not the same as purpose.

LaBrandon opens Season 2 of the Purpose Day Podcast with a personal reflection on why slowing down might be one of the most powerful things you can do for your creativity, faith, and sense of direction.

Inspired by a Solange interview, a sermon from Dr. Anita Phillips, and Hebrews 6:12, LaBrandon explores the pressure to constantly produce, post, and perform—and what happens when we give ourselves permission to move differently. He reflects on creating from gratitude instead of pressure, learning to trust God’s timing, and recognizing that while the vehicle for our purpose may change, our deeper calling can remain the same.

If you’ve been feeling behind, creatively rushed, burned out, or uncertain about what comes next, this episode is an invitation to stop measuring your life by momentum. To read longer. Walk without your phone. Create without an audience. And trust that becoming doesn’t always have to be loud.

Because sometimes purpose isn’t asking you to move faster.

It’s asking you to slow down enough to hear it.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now at LaBrandonDates.com.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: @labrandondates

Speed is not the same as purpose.

LaBrandon opens Season 2 of the Purpose Day Podcast with a personal reflection on why slowing down might be one of the most powerful things you can do for your creativity, faith, and sense of direction.

Inspired by a Solange interview, a sermon from Dr. Anita Phillips, and Hebrews 6:12, LaBrandon explores the pressure to constantly produce, post, and perform—and what happens when we give ourselves permission to move differently. He reflects on creating from gratitude instead of pressure, learning to trust God’s timing, and recognizing that while the vehicle for our purpose may change, our deeper calling can remain the same.

If you’ve been feeling behind, creatively rushed, burned out, or uncertain about what comes next, this episode is an invitation to stop measuring your life by momentum. To read longer. Walk without your phone. Create without an audience. And trust that becoming doesn’t always have to be loud.

Because sometimes purpose isn’t asking you to move faster.

It’s asking you to slow down enough to hear it.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now at ⁠LaBrandonDates.com⁠.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: ⁠@labrandondates

Last season, we explored what purpose is.

This season, we're exploring the pace of purpose and what it feels like to live it.

Through personal conversations with inspiring guests, LaBrandon examines creativity, career pivots, faith, identity, and the everyday moments that shape a meaningful life.

Because purpose isn't just something you discover.

It's something you practice.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now. Purchase the book at www.labrandondates.com.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: @labrandondates

Last season, we explored what purpose is.

This season, we're exploring the pace of purpose and what it feels like to live it.

Through personal conversations with inspiring guests, LaBrandon examines creativity, career pivots, faith, identity, and the everyday moments that shape a meaningful life.

Because purpose isn't just something you discover.

It's something you practice.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now. Purchase the book at ⁠www.labrandondates.com⁠.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: ⁠@labrandondates

In this episode of the Purpose Day Podcast, LaBrandon takes the mic and reflects on how stepping offline and revisiting the life and work of legendary Vogue Creative Director Grace Coddington helped him rediscover joy in creating.

Grace Coddington spent nearly 30 years shaping the visual storytelling of Vogue, building iconic fashion narratives alongside Anna Wintour and redefining the role of the stylist as both artist and cultural storyteller. Through her memoir Grace and her photo archive Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue, her story reveals powerful lessons.

This episode explores how creative renewal often begins by disconnecting from digital noise and reconnecting with what first inspired you.

If you’ve been feeling creatively stuck, uninspired, or disconnected from your work, this episode offers actionable insights on creative purpose, community, pivoting, and trusting your creative instinct.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: @labrandondates

In this episode of the Purpose Day Podcast, Maya reflects on the extraordinary life and legacy of André Leon Talley — fashion icon, cultural custodian, and trailblazer.

Born in 1948 in Durham, North Carolina during Jim Crow segregation, André Leon Talley rose from a childhood shaped by Southern Black church culture and fashion magazines to become the first Black creative director of Vogue. Through elegance, intellect, and unapologetic self-expression, he transformed fashion into a powerful tool for storytelling, resistance, and cultural memory.

This episode explores how André’s purpose lived not only in couture and editorial rooms, but in his daily decision to show up fully as himself in spaces that were never designed for him. From his mentorship under Diana Vreeland to his advocacy for Black designers and his reflections in The Chiffon Trenches, André’s life reminds us that purpose often lives in what makes us different — not what makes us fit in.

Listeners are also invited to watch André Leon Talley’s Oxford Union Address to learn more about his life, work, and philosophy — and to reflect on how his story can inspire their own Purpose Day.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now.

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: @labrandondates

Purpose doesn’t always arrive as a clear answer — sometimes it unfolds through growth, curiosity, and becoming.

In this episode of the Purpose Day Podcast, Maya explores purpose through growth and self-discovery. This conversation is for anyone in transition — those who’ve evolved, pivoted, questioned their path, or felt the quiet nudge that something new is emerging.

Drawing from LaBrandon Dates’ book Purpose Day, Maya reflects on how purpose reveals itself through curiosity, mistakes, reflection, and micro-shifts over time. This episode reframes growth as sacred work and reminds listeners that clarity often comes after experience, not before it.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re behind, stuck, or missing your moment — this episode invites you to see your journey differently.

The episode also ends with the premiere of the full "Purpose Day" theme song!

Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now. Purchase the book at www.labrandondates.com. 

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: @labrandondates

On this episode of the Purpose Day Podcast, Maya explores what it means to discover purpose through spirituality. Drawing from Chapter Four of Purpose Day, she reflects on faith, intuition, divine alignment, and the quiet ways purpose often reveals itself—through prayer, obedience, community, and listening for the whisper rather than the shout.

This episode invites you to consider purpose not as something to manufacture, but as something to align with—already written, already present, waiting to be lived out.

✨ Purpose Day by LaBrandon Dates is available now. Purchase the book at www.labrandondates.com. 

📲 Follow LaBrandon on Instagram: @labrandondates

Tune in, reflect, and take one step closer to your Purpose Day.

In this episode Maya explores the chapter "Purpose Through Contribution to Society," reframing purpose as a relational gift you offer to your community rather than a solo achievement.

The conversation highlights indigenous and communal traditions, practical examples of simple acts of service, and a clear framework for identifying your contribution by asking what people naturally come to you for and where skill, value, and pride intersect.

Listeners are invited to a brief purpose practice—reflecting on meaningful compliments, moments of usefulness, and effortless giving—to notice how purpose may already be present in everyday life.

Purpose Day is out now — learn more at LaBrandonDates.com/purpose-day or order your copy now on Amazon.