Over the 24 years that Keka DasGupta spent in the marketing and PR industry, she noticed something to be true: brands don’t have low self-esteem.
“Everything around brands has to be always about the brand itself,” Keka said on the Leading With Nice Interview Series podcast. “So imagine Coca-Cola, always steeped in red, always the shape of the bottle. McDonald’s with the golden arches. Brands are always about themselves.”
So Keka looked at the principles behind branding and realized they can also be practiced by individuals to improve their overall wellbeing.
“Knowing yourself, knowing what you stand for, understanding your values, really staying within what makes you you and really appreciating that and sharing it with the world: if we apply those to our mental health and wellness strategies, the results can be transformative,” she said.
Today, Keka is a professional speaker, presenting her ideas at TEDx events and beyond, and the founder of The Art of Life-ing, a platform that allows her to run gratitude workshops across North America for both students and corporate audiences.
“We tend to think that we’re the really dull light bulb … but we shine at 1,000 watts,” Keka said. “We just don’t see ourselves, so we don’t see that. It’s just really important for me to help people see the magic inside of them. And I love that conversation when we can do that together.”
Pretty inspiring stuff, right? Check out the episode below to hear more from Keka about how to recognize your own personal value so you can live with more positivity, esteem and purpose.
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The three basic needs that we have. Every single human being on Earth is, do you see me? Do you hear me? And do I matter when you’re showing gratitude to someone else and say when you did this for me or just by being who you are, you’ve left this in impact on me. There’s unequivocal proof to somebody that they matter.
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Good day and welcome to the Leading With Nice Interview Series podcast. My name is Mathieu Yuill, and we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty and get results. Now, it’s not often on my journey that I come across somebody who is saying kind of some similar things and teaching some similar thoughts. So I was really excited when my sister actually told me about Keka DasGupta. And oddly enough, we went to high school together. Keka and I didn’t know each other that well, which is just so funny that two people from the same little community in Scarborough grew up to have some very similar thoughts about leadership.
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So I am super excited to have a conversation with her and dig more into what she does specifically. So, Keka, welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much for having me, Matt. I’m so excited to be here before we get going.
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Can you just give us a little bit of context around what you do and what you speak about and what your main driving message is?
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Yes. Absolutely. So I have founded a personal development platform called The Art of lifeing. So if you think of adulting, for example, growing up, this is all about doing life on purpose and on your own terms. And my background and the story of how I came to be here is that I used to work in marketing, public relations and branding. I’ve done that for 24 years. And one of the things that I noticed is that while we tend to suffer from selfesteem issues, research now shows us that 85% of the world’s population is suffering from low self esteem, which is a staggering invisible pandemic that we’re dealing with alongside the covid 19 pandemic brands, on the other hand, are rooted in their own power.
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Everything around brands has to be always about the brand itself. So imagine Coca Cola, always steeped in red, always the shape of the bottle. Mcdonald’s with the Golden Arches. Brands are always about themselves. And we accept that as people. If I ask you, Mathieu, have you ever met a brand with low self esteem? The question is unequivocally. No. Right.
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Right.
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So there seems to be a double standard here. And for what I started to look at was if we take the principles behind branding, which is all about knowing yourself, knowing what you stand for, understanding your values, really staying within what makes you you and really appreciating that and sharing it with the world. If we apply those to our mental health and wellness strategies, the results can be transformative because we can find the power inside of ourselves to not only support us, but the people around us.
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And so that’s where this work came from. And today I do workshops with entrepreneurs, business leaders, C suites, just really focusing in on the employee workplace. And I also work in the education community with teachers, parents, students all about how we can step into our own power so we can give the best of ourselves both to us and all the people around us as well.
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So one of the main messages, when I go to your website and watching some of your videos online was around gratitude. And I was really curious because gratitude is one of our six qualities of the nice leader, gratitude, empathy, trust, honesty, generosity and service. Kind of round out the top six. And so I’m just curious, what is the difference between practicing gratitude for yourself and practicing it for others? And if you can contextualize this in a workplace environment, that would be, I think, most helpful for listeners.
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Yes. Absolutely. Okay. So when we think of gratitude in terms of us practice itself, many of us have heard of writing in a Journal, for example, thinking about when you wake up in the morning or when you go to sleep, the three things that you’re most grateful for. But that practice. And so much research has shown that the brain chemistry, like there’s brain science behind the fact that when you practice gratitude, it changes the way we think about ourselves, the way we see our world. It increases our positivity, all of that.
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But it stays within us. And one of the biggest things that I advocate for when you share gratitude, when you pay that forward to somebody else, it’s like you double the positive impact. And so if I said to you today, if I give you $100,000, Mathieu, just by me giving it to you, the value of this is going to turn into $200,000. Who’s going to walk away from that? And this is rooted in science that shows that our brain chemistry changes in this way. And so when it comes to gratitude itself, when we share it with somebody else, there is this unexpected side effect that sort of doubles the impact.
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And that happens because when we show gratitude to someone else, we show them the impact that they have had on us. And at the end of the day, Mathieu, we all want to feel like we matter, right? The three basic needs that we have, every single human being on Earth is, do you see me? Do you hear me? And do I matter? And when you’re showing gratitude to someone else and say, when you did this for me or just by being who you are, you’ve left this impact on me.
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There’s unequivocal proof to somebody that they matter. So now let’s take this into the workforce, a lot of people in the past. And I think things are changing now. I think leaders are really starting to understand more the dynamics of gratitude, the brain science behind it. But it used to be considered like a soft quality, something that was nice to have, but not a must have. For some reason, life seemed for so long to be something that was optional. And yet it’s changing today because research shows us in the workplace.
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When you have a gratitude centered leadership style, when your culture is focused on recognition and gratitude, you find that employees are more engaged. You’ll find that employees are actually more productive. And in this world today, where in Canada’s marketplace, for example, or even in the US, we can see a huge talent shortage. Right. People there’s bidding wars for talent today out in the recruitment world. Well, retention increases when you have a gratitude focused workforce. So all of the pain points that so many companies are facing when it comes to their workforce, gratitude is this currency.
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That’s a foundation that changes positively, all of the challenges that many people are having today. And it’s the kind of thing, Mathieu. I find that for leaders, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. After that, it becomes so apparent and so obvious. It’s like, how did I not recognize this before? And it’s the kind of thing that when you put this into your workplace, it can really be transformative because people feel the intrinsic motivation inside of themselves to do better. And in fact, one more thing in this world today, we live in this information and technology world today where innovation, risk taking are so important.
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We’ve seen from various studies that when people in the workforce have a culture of gratitude, it actually helps employees make better risk taking decisions. And it helps the innovation within a company. So when you look at all of that, it’s really hard to disregard the impact of gratitude in the workforce.
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So my next question was around, how do you measure gratitude? Because I agree with you. One of the problems we faced at leading with nice. When we first started talking to companies about this is like, this is great. But how does it make us money?
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Yes.
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And I did a master’s in leadership and management, and it was all around answering that question, how do you make money by being a nice leader? And you mentioned some of the key points, like attendance like sick days go down like 30%, which there’s a study out of the University of West Virginia that show, like a 30% decrease in employees. Taking sick days can typically be translated into a 6% gross profit increase. It talked about the average employee in today’s world will stay 3.1 years versus 2.5 years.
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So you just push out that need to retrain to rehire all the costs that are included with that I find important is that it’s not like you will stop employees from taking sick days. You’ll stop employees from leaving and changing jobs but it will definitely encourage them to stay longer.
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Yes. Absolutely.
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So leading to that, do you find it difficult to clarify with leaders in organizations that emotional intelligence, like practicing gratitude is actually a good business practice to the bottom line, because surely it must be more than just showing stats and figures because they have access to that as well.
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Yes. Absolutely. Well, I think that it’s all about perspective, and I think that it is about where we look and how we look at things and how we measure. So today the tide is changing. I think a lot like we were talking about a lot of leaders. Once they see this, they don’t unsee it, they recognize it. And so the movement is changing in this way. But when I’m in a boardroom and I’m talking to the C suites, there’s a few things that I’ll look at and I’ll talk about.
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We know, for example, with children who are growing up, that arts and music has a really big impact on them. Right? In fact, when you have an engineer, for example, or someone who’s a doctor or a scientist, if they’ve had music or arts in their life when they were growing up, the impact of that is reflected in the work that they do today, even though that might have nothing to do with what they do. But that’s something that we can’t measure. But we acknowledge right. If I said to you, what can you tell me measurably, how does art impact our life?
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Let’s think about opera or the ballet or Van Gogh or any of the sort of arenas there that we would consider in the artistic real. How does that improve me as a worker? There isn’t a way to say it, but we acknowledge it in the same way in the medical field. For example, when we do trials and case studies, we have the placebo effect. Let’s say, how do we measure the impact of placebos? I want to have a specific measurement and tell me why that works or doesn’t work.
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We don’t have that. But we know the placebo effect works. And so in the same way today, if leaders start to look at the research out there, that’s all based on brain based science, they’re going to be able to start to see that it’s not just about measuring gratitude in itself as the metric. I’m going to put this in. And I want to measure how much gratitude is actually helping our workforce, but rather, we have to measure outcomes. And this is one of the big things in marketing.
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People have always said to me, how do I measure the impact of my marketing? The advertising world is valued at $1.4 trillion a year. But if you say, how do I specifically measure this creative ad? How did that actually work? We don’t know how it did it, but we know that the statistics show and support its impact. And so gratitude, empathy kindness, all of these things work in the same way. So when I’m in a boardroom and I talk about this, when I start to focus on is let’s look at the outcomes.
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So there’s so many case studies that show the benefit of increased productivity, increased engagement, increased retention. So we start to look at those and say, let’s look at the outcomes, not the outputs. In the marketing world, people would say, okay, I’ve put out an ad or I’ve done a Press release or I’ve done the branding and the logo. Tada, people say, Where’s the value in that you can’t measure the actual output, but you can measure the business outcome. So when I’m working with leaders, I’ll say, okay, let’s put in we have these case studies.
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There’s a whole slew of evidence that shows if you look at the outcomes in your business, when you put these strategies in place, it can make a massive difference. And so if I said to you today, I’ve got a software program that if you use this today, it will increase engagement and productivity from your employees by 21%. Would you be interested in that? Yes, because it’s a tangible thing. All I have to do is input it and then that’s it 20%, 21%. Sign me up. But we don’t tend to think and jump at the chance of bringing gratitude, kindness and empathy into our workforce because we tend to be looking at the measurement from an output perspective.
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We really have to change that measurement to an outcome perspective. And as soon as we do that, you’re going to see the business outcomes. And then it’s unequivocal. You can’t sort of shake your head away from that. And you’re talking about emotional intelligence, Mathieu. And I think one of the key things that I think businesses need to recognize. And I’ve learned this from being in the advertising industry for 24 years is that scientific studies across the board has shown the advertising industry when it comes to decision making Sciences, that 95% of our decision making, generally speaking, 95% of our decision making is emotionally based.
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And then we save 5% of our decision making for that rational thought. Except that rational thought is reserved to rationalize our emotional decisionmaking. And so you’ll see, the most effective, most powerful ads in the world are not throwing facts at you. It is purely emotional. And car companies, for example, have tried this in different ways. They’ve done one where it’s like here’s all the safety measures and here’s all of our features, and here’s the pricing. Then they’ll do something that is emotional with some pricing. And then they’ve done those A B test.
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And the purely emotional ads always exponentially far outweigh in performance for sales, the actual sales of a car because it’s emotionally connected. And so if business leaders can start to understand that decision making that we have at a very intrinsic level, then it’s really clear how important emotional intelligence is in our workforce when everyday decisions, not only for our customers, but our employees as well, are based on emotion, how can we strengthen our emotional immunity and not just our physical health and wellness? There’s this entire part of us that influences everything we do.
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And until we acknowledge that we’re not going to be able to take advantage of its power.
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That is so great. And one of the things that makes, you know, why doesn’t everybody just do emotional selling, then the key is it’s like, what is the messaging you’re going to use to derive the emotions that will encourage somebody to click or buy that product? And that’s just FYI. That’s the hard part. Everybody around discerning this, but not just that. This is actually something that’s really important for you to understand for your internal team. But this is something that you can use as an approach to your customers, both in the way you do guest relations or customer service, as well as marketing, advertising and more and more.
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We’re seeing those departments being spearheaded by the same person, so one person will have their guest relations and marketing under them because they recognize it’s one in the same because of the skills that Kayak has been talking about. Another thing that I found really interesting that, yes, there’s lots of behavioral science, but the brain science that I find fascinating that people need to be aware of is we don’t know what it is about that thing that makes a business outcome happen. What we do know to show this is this one study where they had two friends and one friend was on this machine that gave them a very light shock, and they had an fMRI, which is a functional MRI machine.
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So it shows a live view of the brain instead of just a snapshot. And when they get the shock, their brain would go off and they show the parts of the brain where that’s responding to the shock. Now they disconnected that young woman, they connected her friend to it. And as her friend was getting shocked, the friend who had just been shocked, her brain would fire the same way. It would be almost like she was experiencing that as well. And that is empathy in your brain.
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What they would do, then is they hooked up a stranger to that person getting the same shock. And that person was getting the signals in their brain that they were being shocked. But the two girls were not responding because they didn’t have empathy for that person. And I thought that was so important because what they discovered is the reason they have empathy is because they didn’t consider that person as part of themselves, not themselves, as like, this is me, but their whole self. And what that says about what you’re talking about gratitude in the workplace and doubling it is it takes effort.
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You can’t just be like, oh, I’m a nice person. And say thank you. You actually have to care. Like you actually have to do it.
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This is not a fake. It until you make it, you actually have to believe it.
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It’s a lot of what you’re speaking about. I don’t want listeners to be like, okay, cool. I can get some training and do this. And the same way I learned how to use an Excel spreadsheet, I’m going to learn how to be grateful. No, like you actually have to do it. There’s a great I’m going to plug your website real quick on artofliffing. A-R-T-O-F-L-I-F-E-I-N-G. Com. You have this great resource, the 30 day gratitude sharing challenge. If this is resonating with you what we’re talking about, go download it right now.
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It will be so helpful. Now I have two questions kind of wrap up our conversation. There’s a group of people that listen to this that when I get emails or they tweet at me or they know me in real life, this group of people are the ones that are thinking about launching something new for themselves, either as an entrepreneur, a career change or making the next step in their career, looking for a new place that will take a chance on them. And as you’re an entrepreneur yourself and probably more so as a mother of two, you’re used to taking these leaps of faith and then inevitable disappointments and setbacks.
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So how do you harness those step backs and taken all the gratitude and empathy and life and skills? We’ve talked to you to continue to move forward.
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Yes. Oh, Mathieu, this is such a great question, because so often we tend to think of success as that straight line, and we know that it’s very squiggly and it goes up and down and still I think we often think, okay, I’m going from point A to point B. This is what I want to do. This is my vision. And this is where I want to go. And I can certainly say with the art of lifeing journey that I’ve been on, it has been many squiggly lines all over the place.
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And the biggest thing that I can say in my experience has been what is your intrinsic motivation to do? The things that you want to do? Why are you doing them is so important. I’m such a big fan of Simon Sinek and the power of why and understanding your why. But I’ll give you just two examples because there were two phases in my entrepreneurial journey that each stemmed from a different reason. So I was working full time at the ad agency at DDB when I became pregnant with my first son, and I loved my job at the agency.
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It was so much fun. It didn’t feel like work, but we had very long hours and we were building the business. So it would be like we’d be working all day and then in the evening, we’d order dinner, everybody would sit together, we’d have dinner together, and then we would keep working. And sometimes we’d work till midnight or 01:00 in the morning, and my mum would be like, what kind of company is this? And I would say, I’m having a blast. This is so much fun.
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But then I had my son and suddenly for me, there was no room for compromise there. And I thought, I just don’t want to be away from my son for that many hours. I still love my job, but I just don’t want to be away from him for that long. So I decided to kind of take that leap of faith and create my own business and my own marketing company because I just wanted to do things based on the values that were important to me. And being around my son was really important.
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When I had my second son, we had a full time nanny that would come and work at our house so that I could do my work during the day. But I could hang out with him for bath time. I could go to the park with them for a little bit. And it gave me that sort of ability. But I’ll tell you, when you focus in on doing the best you can do based on the values that are important to you, things can change. So for me, no matter what happened in my business, no matter when I had people that said no or I had a really big hope for something, and it didn’t come through.
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I was still fueled by the fact that I want to be the mom that stays with my kids. And I want to be that professional because I love what I do. And there was no room for compromise in either of those. So they had to Intermix and intermingle. But the story I wanted to share with you about this was the fact that sometimes the successes that come to you are not things that you can plan. When I went on maternity to leave, and then I actually ended up not coming back.
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And I started my own business. I was a director at the ad agency level, and my next move, I thought it would have been great if I could be a VP one day. That would have really helped boost my career into the next level. And I thought, oh, well, I have two beautiful kids. I’m certainly not complaining, but I was working as a freelancer. I was working with DDB, helping them on different projects. And we had this mining company that had come in and asked us to pitch some programming in Vancouver.
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And my little guy, Kirin at the time was about three months old. So you can imagine that three months old, I’m feeding him around the clock. And I was like, I’m not going away on a three day trip without him because that’s the time you bond with your kids and this sort of thing. Long story short, I ended up taking my nanny and my little baby with me. So his first flight was at three months, and we went to Vancouver, and I’m walking into this mining company that we were talking to, the board of advisers, an amazing group of people.
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But here I am. I’m in a 30 something Indian looking girl, five foot one. And I’m in a room with a group of men who are in their 50s and 60s who make million dollar deals over breakfast. And I looked nothing like them. My experience was nothing like them. And Mathieu, for a moment, just for a moment, I had the who am I to be in this room kind of complex. It’s like, oh, my God, what am I doing here? These guys know so much more about business.
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What am I doing? But then I had to reset, like, almost recalibrate my mindset because I thought, hang on a second. These guys might know everything about mining, but they don’t know PR the way I know PR. They also don’t know. The program that I’ve created for them here with the agency is going to be amazing for them. So I had to recalibrate myself into where I was most powerful and where I could deliver the most amount of value instead of comparing myself to everybody else in the room who were totally different than me.
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So I was like, no, wait a minute. I got this. I can do this. And this is going to be amazing for them. And I know it. So I went out there and I pitched my heart out, and I was authentic, and I shared everything, and I came home and I thought, okay, big win. That was awesome. So I’m working at home. So I’m doing calls. I was actually working virtually the way we did in Kovan. This is like, ten years ago, and one day my manager from the ad agency calls me, and I had just finished feeding Kieran Kayden’s, like, playing around me.
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He’s four years old. He’s playing around me. And my manager says, I’m really excited to tell you, we’ve promoted you to vice President. And if I wasn’t sitting, I would have fallen off my chair. That would have been the ultimate goal or dream or success for me at that time, career wise. But I said to her, I’m Super grateful for this opportunity. I didn’t even ask for this. So I’m really just totally taken aback by this. Thank you so much. But I can’t take this job because literally, I have a three month old in my lap and a four year old here, and so I can’t do this.
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And to my under shock and amazement, like the leadership at that time were still beyond their time for the industry and what they did. But they said, kick ups. That’s the value that you bring to the table when you’re doing this work for us, and we want to recognize that. So nothing has to change the way that we’re working. You can keep doing what you’re doing the way you are. But we want to recognize you with this promotion. And honestly, Mathieu, I didn’t believe it until they gave me their branded business cards that actually had my name with vice President written on it.
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And I said to my husband, I think I’m the world’s first freelance VP of a multinational ad agency. How does this work? And him, in all his wisdom, said to me, don’t question it, just go with it, just run with it. And so one of the things I wanted to share with our listeners is that we have goals. We set up our goals. That wasn’t even a goal for me at that time because I didn’t think it was attainable. But I was fully in the work I was doing, fully focused on the value I was delivering and why I wanted to do it.
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And that came to me. And I have to tell you, I’m proud of this. I have actually 50 marketing awards, international and national to my name, and I don’t mean this in a bragging or boasting way, but I just really feel like I’m proud of myself because that’s a lot of hard work that’s represented in those awards. But it’s all been because I’ve loved what I’ve done. I’ve never done it for the awards or accolades, but they’ve come to me. And so when you are rooted in your value and your purpose and you know what you’re going to do, the universe just responds and the successes will come to you sometimes without you even knowing.
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So if I may take two more minutes just to tell you the complete opposite way that I started the second business around Art of Life was I had done this for 24 years marketing, and I was like, there’s got to be something more. Am I going to do marketing for the rest of my life? I was getting to the point where I felt like I really needed to do something more. But I didn’t know what it was. And I had a coach once, Philip McKernan, in his wisdom, had said, in the absence of clarity, take action.
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And I think that’s a huge lesson that I took away that I think every entrepreneur needs to think about is that when you don’t know, so often we kind of have a fuzzy goal or we have directionally in that. This is my north star. This is what I want to go, but I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to take action and the art of life being started that way because I started by saying, I just need to do something more than advertising. I need to have a bigger impact.
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And I don’t know what it is. Again, I went back to the fact that I’m a mom. I love my kids. I see so much bullying and self esteem issues around young people. And I thought, I want to help my kids, and I want to help kids in this category feel better about themselves and have greater self esteem. So I thought, I’m going to do an antibullying program. And again, my question was, who am I? I’m a marketer. Who am I? I’m not a teacher. I don’t have any of this.
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But again, I stayed in my power. And I thought, Wait a minute. There’s a lot that I know that I can still give out to people. So without a lot of clarity, I took action. Anyway, I put the question out on social media, and I said, Do I have any teacher, friends or any principals who would be willing to allow me to come in and beta test a program that I have? And at the time, the program was actually all in my head. I had nothing written out, but I had a vision of where I wanted to go.
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And I was overwhelmed by the response that people had, and they ended up coming and saying, yeah, do this. And so then I created the program. I put it all out from my head onto paper. I went in and I presented, and it had an incredible impact that I didn’t believe until I actually saw it. And I thought, oh, wow. I’m onto something. So at the time, it was all focused on gratitude and antibullying. And then I was like, I need to go deeper, and I need to think deeper.
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And then the art of life. And came to me one day I was driving along a rainy road, and I was like, adulting. I want to like the way people are adulting. And I thought, I want to find happiness, and I want to find purpose. And I literally pulled my car over to the side of the road, pulled out my phone, and I wrote down the art of lighting so I wouldn’t forget it. And I thought, I don’t even know how to define this. Somebody said to me once, what do you do or like this was like, four years ago.
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And I said, Well, people think of life as a noun. I want to turn it into a verb. And she said, Dear, you’re giving me a grammar lesson and nobody cares about grammar. And I thought, okay, I know. But hold on. I didn’t quite have it. And I worked at it. And I worked at it. And I worked at it. And then I realized, Wait a minute. What I’m really trying to say is, I know branding, and I know all of these principles, and I’ve been applying them for the past three years to our mental health.
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But I’ve just never made those worded connections. And suddenly, now I had the words. So there’s an evolution that constantly happens. And I know that this is not the end for me. It’ll keep evolving. But we have to believe in ourselves. So when the setbacks happen, when you don’t think something doesn’t go your way, the key thing is to not give up on that intrinsic motivation that drive that fuels you inside, to really give back the validation it deserves. And in the absence of clarity, take action as soon as you do that the successes will come before you know it.
[00:28:19.520]
And then you can know the ups and downs are all going to be there. That’s okay. But you’re still going to grow in the end.
[00:28:26.250]
Two things. If you’re just listening to this and not watching, Keka has her 50 awards behind her, and she’s wearing a few medals just so you know, it’s not really cheesy. She does not have any of them on display. In fact, there’s some very cool spice rack in the background or something.
[00:28:41.690]
Oh, those are actually bangles. Indian Bengals.
[00:28:44.250]
Okay. All right. It looks like spices from far away. But also, I just wanted to share this when you talked about basically, you’re saying, no, this job does not fit my lifestyle. I was talking with Austin Pomeroy, who is one of my top five favorite Pomeroys. He’s our audio editor. I asked him what’s his dream in his work. And I shared how as a young man, I envisioned like being the editor in chief of a small town newspaper or something. And he told me it was a life that enabled him to live his life and then also do work he likes.
[00:29:18.580]
At the same time, I was like, oh, that’s not a job title at all. So, Keka, you are well ahead of your time. But if you’re listening to this, that is going to be your answer when you sit down to do performance reviews. If you’re not hearing that already, you’re going to be hearing that a lot more often. Before we go. Where can people find out more about you and maybe a few resources where they might be able to get a good idea of what you’re about?
[00:29:42.590]
Yeah, absolutely. So I would invite anybody to come check out my website. As you said, it’s the Art oflifeing. Com and life thing is spelled L-I-F-E-I-N-G com. So I’ve got resources like the Gratitude Sharing challenge. I’ve got a lot of different things that you can check out there. And then I also have a YouTube channel. So I have the Art of Lighting channel. It’s Art of lifeing with Caca. If you go to YouTube and just search that, you’ll find me there. And to me, the most important part of this journey is us doing things together and learning from each other.
[00:30:11.650]
So the spirit in which I do my Art of Life and videos on YouTube is just sharing my own experiences, my own insights. And I really love to make that collaborative. So check me out on LinkedIn subscribe to my channel. Email me whatever it is, my information is all out there, but I would love to connect with people and love to hear what other people are doing. I’m such a big believer that we can all learn from each other being in the marketing world for so long, I’ve learned that there is just beautiful magic inside everybody.
[00:30:40.680]
It’s just that so often we don’t see it for ourselves at the end of the day. Honestly, Mathieu, I think that’s the biggest, most powerful thing about gratitude is that the program that I have for corporate companies and schools is called gratitude mirrors. And I picked the word mirror because when we show gratitude to somebody, what I really believe we do is we hold a mirror out to somebody to really show them how brightly they shine in this world. Because we all tend to tend to be our worst critic.
[00:31:07.150]
We tend to think that we’re the really dull light bulb that’s just not there. And then when you actually can show the mirror and say, you’re shining like my friend calls it the 1000 Watt light bulb, Lisa Ferguson talks about it that way, and I think we do. We shine at 1000 Watt, but we just don’t see ourselves, so we don’t see that. It’s just really important for me to help people see the magic inside of them. And I love that conversation when we can do that together.
[00:31:30.870]
Listen, before we go, a lot of people make this happen. It’s not just you and I show up. You just showed up. You can manage it all on your own. I have a team to help me get here in one piece. Cindy Craik that does all the booking and arranging for our guests. Naomi Grossman helps research questions and helps you get prepared for today’s show. Jamie Hunter, if you’re seeing this on social media, you saw a video or saw a Tweet or an Instagram post. He’s the guy that takes care of all of that for leading with nice Kerry Cotton.
[00:31:58.410]
While I’ve been working, I’ve been watching our Slack channel fill up where she’s taking care of clients and doing our account management. Geoff Anhorn takes care of all the video editing. Austin Pomeroy, as mentioned earlier again, might be top six Pomeroy’s. He does all the audio editing and makes it sound so great. And, of course, my wife, Allison, but mostly Keka, this would have been a very boring show if it was just me, so thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:32:25.450]
It was a pleasure. Mathieu. Thank you so much for having me for more.
[00:32:28.460]
If you want to see the transcript or more or get some links to take the stuff, visit us at leadingwithnicecom. Com. We’ll talk to you next time. Bye.