The Celebration

This week’s episode is a replay of a working session with creatives, entrepreneurs, side hustlers and folks from the non-profit community discussing strategies to maximize their success. We talked about using social media and Facebook ads to build a targeted audience, connecting with their supporters online, and sustaining an income while following their passion.

From starting a podcast to building a following on Instagram to publicizing your art using social media, this episode covers it all. I am so grateful to these participants for stepping into their vulnerability and passions in our conversation, and allowing me to share it with you.

This week I’m joined by Janna Hall, a Richmond, VA native and CEO of Leap Innovative Group, a digital marketing and brand development agency. Janna began her career in digital marketing when she relocated to New York City in 2011, working at agencies and large non-profits. In February 2016, Janna decided to bring her experience to her hometown by starting her own company to provide strategy development, execution, and copywriting services to local and national brands.

Janna’s passion for entrepreneurship inspired her to launch Funemployed, a brand, community and movement that provides resources to educate & connect dreamers who are monetizing their passion and working to do what they love full-time. With her platform, Janna mentors local youth while teaching them employable skills and plants seeds of entrepreneurship.

On this episode, we discuss her journey from what appeared to be “living her best life” in New York to actually having the courage to put her real dreams into action with her own company. We also talk about what it takes to get to the ultimate state of self-awareness to determine the kind of life you want to live, and how to take steps to achieve exactly that. Above all, Janna believes that success should be measured not by societal standards and pressure, but by our willingness to take the leap and cultivate the life of our wildest dreams.

On this week’s episode, we talk about creativity! Each and every single one of us are creatives, and we are continually expressing ourselves in unique and wonderful ways. We discuss the relationship between creativity and vulnerability, and how getting lost in the process of creating is often more important than the product. There are so many different ways to express your creativity aside from traditional “art”, from showing people how you love to setting up your spreadsheets.

The second half of this episode is a replay from a Live and Online: Expression Session. You will hear the poetry people created during the freewrite session using the prompt “We Are All Creatives”.

The world needs your gifts! How are you showing up creatively in your life?

This week, I am joined by Antoinette Chanel, a powerful storyteller, educator, and podcaster. With a unique background that includes over a decade of work in higher education, marketing, and public relations, Antoinette is can translate, map out, and put in motion tangible plans to help you and your organization reach its goals.

She is the founder of the podcast, the Midday Reset (@themiddayreset), which she created to offer something uplifting and relatable to people with mental illness, specifically anxiety. She is also an educator and public speaker and is currently developing a workshop series to empower dark-skinned women and girls to redefine beauty for themselves.

On this episode, Antoinette shares where she found confidence in herself, and how they has led her to empowering other dark-skinned women and girls through her latest children’s book, A Book for Black Girls and her upcoming workshop series. We also discuss some tangible advice both inside and outside of the doctor’s office for people facing anxiety and depression.

This week, I’m joined by Sarah “with an h” Ogdie, a social worker and lettering artist based out of downtown LA. She prides herself on being authentic, bold, interdependent, and deeply invested in modeling intersectional, queer, millennial, feminine leadership.

In January, Sarah left her job as Program Director (and former Interim Executive Director) of Community Tampa Bay after 8 years. Last year, she launched The Authentic Type as a way to get closer to one of her dreams of running a revolutionary woman-owned business, creating word-based art using typography and modern calligraphy to speak her values to the world.

Over the course of 14 years, Sarah served as a counselor, advisor and co-director during more than 30 residential sessions of the ANYTOWN® program. Over 5,000 youth have participated in dozens of interactive, school-based youth leadership conferences Sarah has led. She has previously been a certified 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens facilitator, a national Life Entrepreneurship trainer, and a Courageous Conversations about Race Affiliate Practitioner. She is also an avid meal prepper, a very slow runner, a book enthusiast, and an amateur video game player.

On this episode, Sarah talks about the relationship between affirmation, accountability, apologies, and allyship. We share stories of our own friendship, filled with lots of laughter and including the many (sometimes embarrassing) previous versions of ourselves we’ve experienced. Lastly, Sarah shares her story of going from a reluctant manager to someone who is passionate about removing barriers and helping others be their best, and how failure has led her to embrace being scared and doing things anyway.

On this week’s episode, I celebrate the 3 Year Anniversary of the Live and Online: Expression Session. To mark this milestone, I’m taking us back to the first ever Expression Session episode, featuring Wally B.

If you’re a regular listener, I’m guessing you’ve heard Wally and his nonprofit Heard Em Say mentioned many times. This is the interview I did with him back in July 2016.

Wally B. is an ordained minister, spoken word artist, and the Founder and Executive Director of the Heard Em Say Youth Arts Collective. “Heard ‘Em Say” was created in May 2007 to identify,
cultivate and empower youth in activism and advocacy through artistic education and
expression. His team has competed for years at Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival..

Hosting the Live and Online: Expression Session over these past 3 years has been such an amazing and wonderful journey. I am grateful to the many different artists, creatives, features, and people who have participated and created with me during each month’s Expression Session.

I hope you’ll be able to join us this Sunday and celebrate our 3 Year Anniversary. The Live and Online: Expression is this Sunday, July 28th from 12 PM - 2 PM PT.

This week, I’m joined by Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez, a poet, speaker, and performance coach from Jacksonville, Florida. He has toured as far as Abu Dhabi and nearly every major city in the United States and Europe, performing, teaching and coaching poetry.

Matthew is the author of 3032, and is currently fundraising to provide 3,032 copies of his book to incarcerated youth in the Greater Los Angeles area and beyond. A teaching artist for nearly ten years, Matthew has spent the last four years working in youth detention centers across LA County. He believes allowing young people to see themselves reflected in art will empower them with the knowledge that they also have a story to tell.

A powerful performer as well, he has opened for artists such as Wu-Tang and has performed for platforms like BuzzFeed and NPR. Matthew is also a three time Southern Fried poetry slam champion and an award-winning poetry coach. Cuban’s favorite activity is making people feel great, including through poetry.

On this episode, Matthew shares how he started writing poetry and what inspires his work, as well as what it’s like teaching poetry with young people and campaigning to get their art funded. We talk about the relationship between creativity and vulnerability, how to practice self-love from secondary trauma, and what it’s like to live as an empath. Enjoy our hugging, laughing, and “singing”, in addition to three of Matthew’s incredible poems.

This week, I’m joined by Farzana, a friend and colleague of mine who, at the time of the interview, was conducting a research project about driving in Los Angeles. This is a unique episode, because Farzana mainly interviews me about the topic at hand. We talk about liminality (or the in-between places), the stresses of and issues with transportation and infrastructure in L.A., and my own journey from not only Wisconsin to Los Angeles, but from relying on my car to giving it up entirely.

Farzana is a community-based researcher who is interested in social harmony and rupture, reactions to heterogeneity, discourses of mass panic, and conflict resolution. Her most recent project is an ethnography of Los Angeles drivers, and through this she is learning about the quirks that characterize the lives of Los Angeles residents, the ways in which their relationships with driving define how they interact with the world, and their responses to anomalies that they encounter on and off the road.

On this week’s episode, we explore ways through which we can celebrate failure. When we are taking risks, envisioning, creating change, and putting ourselves out there, creating a healthy relationship with failure is really important. When we try something new or strive to live our best life, we are inevitably setting ourselves up to experience moments where we stumble or fall short, and the mindset we have in those moments will influence how we move forward.

This week’s episode is a workshop that walks us through how we can create a healthy relationship with failure. Together, we break down what we have been taught failure means, and then create our own fresh definition.

Celebrate Failure is Day 5 of a 7-day workshop series that I have created.

If you’d like to participate in workshops like this one and receive the full 7-day series, you can become an Inner-Power Member.

To learn more, head to tomearl.me/innerpower.

Next week marks the 3-year anniversary of the Live and Online: Expression Session. Each month, we have been honored to have internationally recognized poets and spoken word artists join us as features.

To celebrate, this week’s episode is a compilation of poetry shared by some of our pasts features. I really enjoyed putting this episode together for you and reminiscing on the powerful poetry that our past contributors have shared.

If you are looking for your poetry and spoken word fix, this episode is for you.

The Live and Online: Expression Session is a monthly writing workshop that brings together writers, creatives, and poets from around the world. The experience culminates with a performance by a featured artist.

If you’re interested in connecting with a diverse community of writers, creatives, and poets, join us for our next session this Sunday, June 30th. Dates and details can be found at tomearl.com/events.