Creating Your Dream Career: Uncover & Apply Your Creative Strengths

1. Introduction: Developing these core skills has changed my life. It makes me think of the Drake song, Started from the Bottom. Having that foundation of skills gives me the freedom to move where I want to move, with my passion and my purpose as my guiding compass. I'm Holley Kholi-Murchison. I create content, learning experiences, and products that help creators, entrepreneurs, and multi-hyphenates. It more clearly articulate who they are, the value they want to bring, and bring their ideas to life. I do this work because ever since I was a young person, I was able to see the way stories and ideas both shaped and transformed my life. I think one of the best skill sets that you can possess is to be able to communicate, to be able to engage well in relationships, and to be able to both conceptualize and execute ideas. In this class, you are going to learn how to take inventory of your skills, your strengths, and your desires, and create an action plan that brings you closer to your vision for your dream creative career. What we do is just one small fraction of who we are and how we show up in the worlds. These skills help you thrive as a human first, and then they give you the space to apply them in all of the different facets of your life. Thank you so much for taking my class. Let's get it popping. 2. It All Matters: As we dig into this class together, I know a lot of you may be thinking, I'm going to learn how to articulate my unique strengths. But that's actually just one piece of the larger puzzle because it all matters. In order to build your dream career that's shaped around your vision for the future, or your passions, or your purpose, you've got to be able to interrogate the entire robust broad picture of who you are. We're going to talk about your weaknesses, your growing edges, those "aha" moments that have helped shape your path, your quarks. All of those pieces are the core of who you are. They not only help inform what future skills and strengths you want to develop, but they help highlight what you bring to the table and what table you actually want to be participating in. It's so important to do this work because, think about it like you're building a house. Imagine trying to put the roof on first. This is the foundation work, this is your core infrastructure. Going through these exercises and doing this work really sets the tone for where you're going next. We've got to take inventory of past, present, future to know how we're showing up now, to know how we can show up better in the future. Now, this can be pretty vulnerable emotionally taxing work especially if you have been taught to believe that confidence and being able to share your strengths is arrogant. But I want to point out one key differentiator. Confidence suggests a certainty, a strong belief, and your capability to do something whereas arrogance suggests an air of superiority that you are better than because of your ability to. Confidence is the one that we want to lean into and through this process, we'll be able to see just how good it feels to be able to boldly speak your truth and honor your strengths. When we think more plainly about confidence and being able to articulate our strengths, our strengths don't just stand alone. They are the validation of the battles we fought and won, the challenges we've risen above. They're the core meat of our stories. When we think about our passions, our values, our beliefs, our backgrounds and interests, our strengths and our skills are the proof that we are living the lives that we say we set out to live. Across the different lessons, you're going to do exercises that help you find patterns from your past to unearth some of your strengths and skills. You're going to acknowledge what's present and take a deep look at what you're doing now that's working for you, skills that you want to be applying more of. Then we're going to envision your future so that you can paint a picture of what your dream creative career looks like for you and source some ideas around what are some of the opportunities that you want to be creating and attracting for yourself. Then when we close out, you're going to create an action plan that helps you identify steps you need to take to get closer to that vision and you're going to create a special video that helps you clearly articulate what that vision is and what your strengths are. In the next lesson, we're going to start taking inventory and we're going to start with the past. Now, I know a lot of folks suggest you should leave the past in the past but there are a lot of good juicy gems that we're going to mine for there that will help inform present and future. 3. Exploring Your Past: In this lesson, we are going to start the Inventory process, and I know I said we're going to talk a little bit about past, present, future. If you're wondering if we're going to start with the past, you've guessed it, we are. We're starting there because I know oftentimes, people can say leave the past where it is. But when we really take the time to take inventory and interrogate where we've been, it really can help, and form, and shape who we are, where we're headed, pivots and patterns along the way. We're going to answer a few self inquiry questions that'll help chart the path forward. If you check out the resources, you'll see a template in there with these questions, so I'm going to answer the questions myself and lead you through the exercises. If you have any questions at all, just drop them in the discussions and I'll meet you there so we can continue the conversation. The first question we're going to explore is, how has where you're from influenced who you are? I'll break that down a little bit for myself. I grew up in Harlem, New York, and I'm the middle child of five. That's in the most basic format where I'm from. How that shaped who I am, is there's a lot of layers into that upbringing and the household that I was raised in. Growing up in New York City, in Harlem, to be exact, if you don't speak up for yourself, others will, and you may not like the narrative that they shape about you. Early on, I really learned the power of voice and how to speak up for myself, and also alternatively within that, I learned the power of communal voice and collective contribution. Growing up playing basketball, I got to learn all of my peers, likes, dislikes, quirks, and I got to know the people within my neighborhood, and we really rallied around each other always. But there's a third piece around how where I'm from has influenced who I am, and that's how I spent my time as a young person. Sports was one part of it, and I had developed a leadership voice through being a captain of my basketball team, but academics were another piece, and not just conventional academics like in school, I was on debate team and chess team, so I had my little nerd jot combo going, but also where I spent my time outside of school. Every day after school, I remember going to the library, spent time reading books, getting lost in language and communication. My very first job was the senior computer page at the library, and my job was to teach people in the community who signed up for a computer appointments how to use the computer effectively. Very early on, my gift and my joy that comes from teaching was activated when I was about 11 years old, and that carried me through the rest of my career. There are a lot of different parts of my upbringing of course, but the things that rang true are my desire to serve and be within community, my desire to empower through teaching, and my desire to own my voice, and leave my mark, and teach other people how to do that as well. As you're answering this question for yourself, if you're feeling a little stuck, first, pause and just take as much time as you need on this, but also keep pushing and asking the why. Like where did I grow up? What were some of my hobbies? What were some of my interests? Why did I like those things? Do those things show up in what I'm currently doing? You might have a little light bulb moment pop off when you're like, "Right. When I was six years old, I did this. I still love that as a team," and that brings me a lot of joy and all the different facets of my life now, both personally and professionally. We've talked a little bit about your background and how that shaped who you are. Now, I want to connect that to question 2. I want you to explore and ask yourself, how did you get here? I really want you to go all the way back into your history to think through where are all the spaces and places where you have cultivating your experience and your expertise. Here's a really important point to keep in mind here, where we hone our strengths and skills isn't always necessarily in the workplace. We cultivate our strengths and skills from the time we come out of the womb, so your lived experience is really what informs all of that expertise. I knew in my high school and college years that I loved communication and storytelling. I loved serving people. I loved the idea of communities coming together, and so I started to figure out how can I make that thread a career pattern for myself. I studied television and radio, and studying television and radio led me to managing musicians and artists in helping them shape their careers so that they can thrive doing the work that they loved. From hosting radio and managing artists, I moved into a different space where I was like, "You know what? I'm managing artists and we're traveling around the country, but I feel like there's a little bit more here." I remember there was a moment when my oldest niece got tested and we found out that she had a learning disability. I was like "Stop the processes, how can I apply this same work, this cultivating the gifts and talents of artists in the world, and apply it to young people?" I made a full pivot and decided I'm going to start working with youth in schools. That journey, we start to see that this path is not linear. We move bumps in the road. There are experiences that drive our decision-making process, and so I ended up working with young people in after-school programs, teaching at the K through 12 level. Then I said, "You know what? How can I merge this education piece back with this art's piece that I love?" So I started a concert tour and for about four years, my friends and I were on the road and we would produce concerts at underserved schools across the country themed around getting students excited about leveraging Higher learning. I thought about the skill set that it requires to both plan a concert with the team and also to speak from a stage, and then at the same time, I had friends who were trying to move throughout their careers and figure out how to get bonuses and raises, and start new businesses. The biggest hurdle they had was around communication, so I was like all right, I'm going to go back into working with adults and teach public speaking. Interestingly enough, as a full circle moment, the very first workshop that I taught around public speaking was through Skillshare, and that was in 2012. I just followed that path and I kept teaching public speaking workshops with this idea that if people can understand how to have command of language, then they can navigate any things that come up for them at work and outside of work. But more importantly, they can grow into more whole, full beings that can be their most authentic selves in and out of the workplace. That's like part of the journey, that from like high school to present brings you to now. But I want you to think about for yourself, how did you get here? Really take the time out to think about jobs you've held, people you've helped, skills you've honed along the way, and you'll see in the templates again in the resources, just write out your answers and create a map for the way. Now, the third question is more like a challenge for this lesson, but I want you to find the patterns in your past. You're going to look at what you've written down for Question 1 and Question 2, and find what's similar across the different points. I know for me, in particular, the thing that stands out the most across all of the experiences that have brought me to this moment are communication. Heart centered communication has been the foundation of everything I've done. It's probably the reason why I've gotten most of the jobs that I've gotten. It's the reason why I've been able to connect deeply with people in the ways that I've had. It's the reason I've been able to build trust very quickly, that ability to communicate. The second one that stands out the most is education and learning experiences. So no matter what role that I've played, whether it was the project management firm or being a crew member at Trader Joe's, my ability to teach quickly, and find lessons and things to help people move forward has been prevalent all across the board. Those are just two. I can find at least 10 patterns, and I'm pretty sure you can too. Just take a look at what you've written down so far, and see what are the patterns and the similarities that come across your lived experience. You're doing a fantastic job, you've done a lot of hard, emotional upheaval, and we're going to take everything that we've mined from your patterns of the past, and we're going to apply it to our next lesson where we're going to continue the inventory process by acknowledging what's present. I'll see you there. 4. Acknowledging What's Present: We've already explored our patterns of the past. In this exercise, we are going to acknowledge what's present, so we can really focus in on what's coming up for you now in terms of what you desire in your creative career, and get crystal clear about the path that you are trying to chart forward. We're going to do the inventory process again, I've got a series of questions for you to answer. I'm going to model some of those answers with anecdotal responses to what my experience is right now. Again, if you check the resources section, there is a template there that you can follow along with with these questions. The first question we're going to explore together is, where are you in your journey right now? I want you to think about that both personally and professionally. I'll take myself, for example, personally having been home for several months and adapting to this lifestyle of working from home, I'm in a space where I really enjoy spending time with my family. Though I miss traveling and being on the road, it's helped me see a new side of life that lets me know that I can indeed do my work from anywhere. I really like the freedom and the luxury of being able to do it from home and have the flexibility to enjoy my wife and my dogs. Now where that plays him professionally for me is, I'm in a season where I want to be able to spend dedicated time out of the country if I am traveling, and also be able to expand my work without having to do so much one-to-one work. I've done a lot of coaching, a lot of one-on-one training, and I'm thinking really intentionally now about how I can take my work and reach many people at once without having to expend the energy of one on one, hour to hour at a time and trading time for money in a sense. What I'm doing about that now as I think about that in my present tense is exploring new avenues for my career where I can do more of that. I am starting a grad school research program. I am forging longer partnerships with corporations that I'm working with, so really looking at 6 month to 12 month contracts versus like one-off engagements to really spend long intentional time in these relationships. At home, I'm getting to really cultivate more time with my wife. Whether that's creating date night opportunities together, whether that's completely renovating our home and creating DIY projects there. In this present moment, informed by things that I really enjoyed in the past and seeing how my past career played out, I'm thinking about how I can reshape my career in a way that offers me more harmony and balance in my home life. As you're thinking about this question for yourself, think about how you feel when you wake up to do the things that you do every day. Are you enjoying it? Do you feel like you're really in a groove? Do you feel like the work that you're doing is in alignment with what you feel intuitively called to act on or does it feel like it's in sync with your purpose? Take inventory and think about those things. In your personal life, same, think about your relationships. How do you feel when you're showing up in those relationships? Are you in a big moment of transition? Transition is a state of being. I think oftentimes when people are factoring in their journeys, it feels uncomfortable to say, I'm not really sure what I want to do or how I want to be right now. You can write that down. Is like, this is the season that I'm in. I'm in a season of change where I'm trying to explore new things. Then as we get to the next set of questions, you'll be able to pinpoint, oh, in this season of change, I'm craving an opportunity that allows me to do this, or I want the flexibility to be able to experience this. Take that inventory with those things in mind. Here's another important distinction to factor in as you're doing this inventory work. Oftentimes when we're taking inventory of what we do on a day-to-day or the present moment that we're in, it can be easy to focus solely on our responsibilities and our priorities. I want you to factor those things and for sure, and I also want you to think within the realm of what brings you the most joy. If it's the thing that you're doing, that's not a responsibility or a priority, but it's something that you can imagine yourself spending hours and hours doing or something that you would love to get compensated to do, jot that down as well. You're going through these exercises. I want you to remember that in this class, in this moment, you are in the driver seat. Nothing is outside of the realm of possibility. We'll talk more about later is where you're headed, get it down on the page because that's really going to help and form the shape of the project you'll create, the action plan you'll make, and the story you're going to start telling about what you want out of your career next. The next question we're going to explore in this present tense version of you is more around really getting to the heart of your skills and your strengths. I want you to think and take deep inventory around this. What are the skills that you apply every day to be successful in your life and your career. I want you to think really hard about what those skills are. It's easy to conflate what a skill is, because it doesn't necessarily have to be something that you're paid for. It's a know-how that you are applying on a regular basis to yield an intended result or an end goal. I know for myself on a day-to-day basis, the skills that I'm applying are, project management with all of the moving parts of not just my work life, but my home life, whether it's having to make dinner, take the dogs for a walk, send out packages, send strategic e-mails to clients, take calls. Those are all moving pieces that require some management. Right at the heart of that, there's a project management skill set that I'm applying. Effective communication, and not just effective communication, but collaborative communication. Am I being a team player in the communication correspondence that I'm sending out on a regular basis? Whether they're e-mail updates about projects, whether they are conversations with my partner, and our business meetings about what our agendas are for a specific quarters or a given day, that's a clear skillset. Strategy. I think in a lot of my work, I'm called on to be focused, creative, consigliere, and trusted advisor. I know that a strategic thinking an intellectual mindset is something that I'm calling forth in a lot of projects. I'm clear that, I didn't know that this was possible before, but I'm like oh, people pay you, people can pay you to think. In a lot of cases people are paying for the way I think and I envision things and that's really exciting. Another skill that I'm using every day is the ability to conceptualize and ideate things. I can take an idea from the very micro level and blow it up into macro pieces. That's a skill that I'm applying tactically everyday. There's also facilitation. I find myself teaching and developing curriculum and projects and trainings for different clients. For more communal facing opportunities like teaching on IG live, or hosting my own courses via Zoom. There's a lot of moving parts around that. Those are just some of the skills I'm applying every day. I want you to think about on a day-to-day basis, what are the skills that you are applying to be successful in your life and your career. If you're feeling stuck, I want you to think about it this way. Let's say for the next two weeks, you decided you were going to take off from your responsibilities. What stuff would go awry if you weren't present? When you take inventory of all the things or the mishaps that might pop up in your absence, that is a good indicator that that is likely a skill or a strength for you. The second thing you can explore if this is a difficult question for you is phone a friend. Just pull up, just grab your phone, and reach out to your closest friend, your closest colleague, the people who've seen you work or who are really integral parts of your life and ask them, hey, what do you think I'm really good at? How do I show up for you every day? You'd be really surprised at the types of answers that they have. Inward inventory, and phone a friend. Again, if you filling stuck on this one, just drop your question or questions in the discussion and we'll continue the conversation together there. We've covered past, we've covered present, and now in this next lesson, we're going to talk about envisioning the future that you want and how you can articulate your strengths to be able to attain that future. 5. Envisioning Your Future: So far we've talked about your past and found the patterns there. We've acknowledged what's present for you and now we are going to envision your future. What I mean by that is you are going to start to paint the picture of what your dream creative career looks like for you. I know that might feel fuzzy for some of you right now. For some of you, it may feel like it's spot on and you've got a clear picture on your mind. We're going to take inventory one last time so that you can start to be the architect of your future. This is a big one. We're going to start with a heavy lift of a question. By this time next year, what is your career look like for you? I want you to think about that. You can close your eyes, take a deep breath around it, but what is your career look like for you a year from today? It's interesting because I actually started working on this exercise for myself and I mapped out some of my ideas in here. One of the things that I wrote down was, and that was like wow that's a big one to start with, generate at least $1 million in revenue through multiple streams across my company Holley Brands. Now I was like okay, that's a clear goal. I'm living in another country for three or more months and thriving and feeling at home and joyful there. I'm writing the first draft of the next version of the Tell Me About Yourself book, which is my first book that I published, and solidifying a divinely aligned publishing partnership. I know this time I want to venture into something that feels like a more collaborative publishing partnership. I'm creating content and learning experiences and products that help historically marginalize people thrive doing work that they love and become closer to becoming versions of themselves that they are most proud of. It's fascinating to read this out loud because I wrote this down in July and literally July 11th, 2020 to July 11th, 2021 vision for my career, and that was just a couple of lines that I read. But literally just a couple of days after I wrote this, I've been in conversation with Skillshare about producing this class and I got the call that we were ready to schedule the shoot date. Right right then and there that idea of creating content that helps people grow closer to who they are and doing the work that they love already began to manifest with writing it down. A big part of this exercise is not just writing it out for writing sake, it's the idea that you can write your future. Think about that as you're thinking about what does your career look like for you one year from today? With this next question, we get to dig a little bit deeper into that big picture vision you've thought of for your career over the next year. In our first lesson, you found the patterns from your past. In our second lesson, you acknowledge what's present so you mine for the different skills and strengths you have. Oftentimes when we're thinking about a dream career or a dream job, sometimes it's not in your everyday job description that you see or it's not a post just like that pops up in your inbox. I want you to think about how do you want to be applying your skills and strengths in this new vision that you've created for your career over the next year? Here's a couple ways to think about that. When I wrote down my goal of wanting to create more content and products and learning experiences for historically marginalized creators to do their best work, I was thinking okay, I really want to be using my skills of facilitating and speaking on camera, so projects like this. I thought about, I really want to be in collaboration with other companies who were interested in serving those groups. I'm like okay, there's a collaborative partnership strength that I want to be applying. I was like I want to write more. I really would like to exercise my writer muscle so I'm like okay, I'm writing another book. I know that it's going to require that skill for me and I know that that's a strength for me. I also thought about more strategically, how can I attract more projects where I'm getting paid for just high level thinking stuff? I don't want to be the one to execute the full project but I love and I'm really gifted at being able to take an idea and think big and blow it up. Thinking back to exercises 1 and exercises 2, the answers that came up there and what you learned about yourself in terms of your strengths and your skills, how do you want to apply some of those things to your career over the next year? For this third and final question for this exercise, I want you to explore what opportunities do you want to create and attract for yourself? Now think about this within the context of the career that you see yourself in over the next year. How you want to be applying your skills? I want you to think about that through a series of questions. What types of projects do you see yourself applying your skills on? What teams are you a part of? What's the dynamic like? How do these opportunities feel for you and your family? Are you excited about them? Are you enthused when you wake up in the morning and you start these endeavors and you are a part of these projects? How are you learning? How are you growing? How are you being compensated? Is it paying you what you want to be paid? Do you have the benefits that you're looking to have? Do you have a budget for learning and development? Is that what you want? Is that what you need? Is that what you desire? Think through all of those different questions, even down to where in the world are you doing this work? Do you want the freedom to be remote? Do you want to travel the world in this opportunity? I want you to take as much time as you need with this. If you need a time boundary for yourself, give yourself a time boundary. It also might help to reflect back on what you wrote down in the previous exercises to see how there are some patterns here. I want to do more of this and the opportunities that I create and attract for myself. Did I mention you're doing a fantastic job? Because you are. We're this close to the finish line for this course at least. Next up, we are going to chart your new path. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Charting a New Path: In this lesson is where we get all of the pieces of the puzzle together by charting your new path. So this part is twofold. The first part is, now that you know what your core strengths and your skills are and the opportunities that you want to create and attract for yourself, you're going to create a 60-second video articulating your strengths and what you're seeking. We'll get to that in just a second. Then the second, you are going to create an action plan. So literally thinking about this vision for your career that you have from today to next year this time, you're going to create an action plan for steps you need to take to make that happen. We're going to be very specific about that action plan being a quarter long plan. So what are you doing over the next three months to get yourself closer to that future that you're envisioning for yourself, for your dream creative career. Let's talk about the video. If you're feeling on the fence about it, not to worry, I know you've already done the majority of the work. You've written down your strengths and skills, you've outlined for yourself what opportunities you want to create and attract, what your career feels like in the next year, so recording it on video is incredibly important because one, you get that self validation piece of seeing like, oh wait, I am fantastic at these things, this is the life that I want for myself, let me speak it out loud, affirm it and own it. Two, you get to share this video and the project gallery, which means you have the accountability of your fantastic peers who are participating in this class with you, which brings me to three, the bonus within that is, imagine someone seeing your video, understanding your skills and strengths, hearing the opportunities that you are desiring and thinking, oh my gosh, I know a great person I want to connect someone with. So it's your opportunity to seize the moment by sharing with folks what you want for yourself. To be honest with you, I wasn't always fond of watching myself on video either, but I really learned the power of exercises like this because I grew up playing basketball, and in junior high I had a coach who would always make us watch game tape. So if we denied a screen that we missed or a shot that we could have better rebounded, plain as day, it was right there on the video. I love to use video as a tool for me to see myself, make note of areas where I can improve, highlight my strengths, and really just feel grounded in my own experience. I'm excited for you to dig into this next exercise. Now let's get down to the action plan. Now the point of this is so that your goals don't just live somewhere on paper and never get executed. The difference between a goal and an action, I'll take myself for an example, one of my goals is to be more consistent about creating content. Now I could say my action step is to create new content, but that is completely missing the mark because there are a lot of action steps that come with that. My steps might be: create a content strategy for the next quarter, find a designer who can help me create collateral for the content that I'm going to create, talk to my partner about some themes that we can talk about across content that talk about the business as a whole and some of the things that I am working on, block out time on my calendar to write multiple days a week because I know it takes me a long time to draft captions and write blog posts, so those are four clear actions that I can be taking around a specific goal that's tied to this larger career goal for me of like, oh, I want to be creating more content over the next year, and partnering with companies who care about reaching the same audiences that I do. So as you're thinking about this list of actions for you, I want you to think about it in three categories: actions you need to take for the opportunities you're seeking to create, actions you need to take for being more vocal about your strengths, and actions you need to take for honing specific skills that you know are areas of growth for you. You can feel free to add in new categories in areas that make sense for you, but think about those core three to start. Then in the resources section, you know what's waiting for you, there's a PDF action plan template for you to start to populate some of these actions that you are going to take over the next quarter. This doesn't end up being a massive to-do list, the most important piece for this action plan is that it's time-bound. As you're thinking about the different action steps that you're mapping out, put a date for completion over the next three months. Is this something that you're going to do this week, is it something you're going to do over the next month. Even though this action plan is a quarter long action plan, it doesn't mean each action that you list has to be something that will take you three months to complete. These could be actions that are an action you can knock out in a day, an action that might take you a week to build out, or actions that build upon each other that you'll be working on over the next three months. The goal in being time-bound with this and setting deadlines for each of these goals is so that it creates more ease for you to actually execute the plan. Then you can use this template again so that once you tackle the actions that you've mapped out for this quarter, you can decide what the next quarter looks like, and just remember to give yourself a little grace. Sometimes we get over ambitious. I am very familiar with getting overambitious, and I'll set goals and actions that I may not be able to complete all in one quarter. You can carry them over, you can reset, and if at the end of the three month action plan you realize I only got half of this done, that doesn't mean you're a failure. There's a lesson to be learned there around, oh, here's how much time these things actually take me. If you're trying to alleviate getting to the end and feeling like, I didn't finish any of this, think about celebrating the wins and what you did accomplish, the lessons that came along the way, and create an action for yourself around checking in with your action plan on a weekly basis so that you can reset and reassess. I think one of the most important things to keep in mind about creating and living out your dream creative career is that, it's an iterative process. You might come into it thinking it's going to look one way, and that is going to shift and change. So in the same way that you are thinking about that, think about how that applies to your action plan, and just mark off time to take a look at it once a week. Here are the actions I laid out for this week, here's what's actually feasible for me to accomplish, this action took me twice the time that I thought it would, it's this process of continuing to iterate and hone in on the plan. Within all of this, you know that there are things you can control and there are things beyond your control. Focus on the things that you can. I know from experience as an artist with a Type A personality, that it's easy to get really bogged down in the details, and get so married to a plan that you don't want to stray from it. Try not to do that with this. This action plan is literally your guide, your working guide, your message raft that may change over time. The intention is for it to get you a step and a step, and a step closer to the dream creative career that you're trying to craft. Don't be afraid to change course a little bit, to change up actions if they're not working out for you, it is an iterative process. 7. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you have officially finished the class. Thank you so much for taking some time out to spend with me. I hope you're walking away from this class feeling much more confident and clear about your strengths and your skills, and also what your vision is for your dream creative career and actions that you can take today to start to get closer to it. Thank you again so much. I'll see you in the discussions. 8. Bonus: Holley's Video Exercise: Over the last decade in my career, my work has lived in these two really big buckets. The first as a social practice artist, where I create content products and learning experiences that help creators across disciplines and industries more confidently champion their stories and execute their bold ideas to shape more equitable futures. The second bucket is my role as more of a creative consigliere. Working in close collaboration with educational institutions and corporations to help them rethink their learning and development strategy. To use learning and development as a conduit to help their people become their very best selves and center that in the heart of the work. As I think about the next level of my career, I'm really excited to create and attract opportunities that give me the space to ideate and implement solutions for rethinking and re-imagining the world of work and school as sacred hubs that make self and communal actualization accessible and irresistible.