These Entrepreneurs Are Making Space For Creating While Prioritizing Mental Health
During my time in quarantine, I've noticed that it's been a bit on the difficult side of the spectrum to develop consistent content when all I hear is "coronavirus this" and "COVID-19 that" all over the news and in the blogs.
As a journalist and creative, I've had tons of conversations with my fellow creative friends and realized that the pandemic is pushing us out of our comfort zone to think outside of the box for content aside from popular Tik Tok challenges and #QuarantineBae hashtag followings.
While some of us may be struggling and holding onto our creativity by our edges, some are taking this opportunity of time and space by the reins.
The Art of Ebb and Flow
Others are taking life day-by-day and allowing their ideas and inspiration to blossom naturally. "I've really allowed my creativity to ebb and flow naturally. I think the goal should be to prioritize balance and to lean into your own timing, without allowing the pressure to produce constantly consume you," Imani Ellis, founder of CultureCon and the Creative Collective NYC, shares with xoNecole. With the stay-at-home orders here in New York City, Ellis has been able to take full advantage by kickstarting a new program for The CCNYC. "I'm really proud of the Creative Curriculum virtual workshop series we launched recently. It allows creatives from our community to teach tangible skills from the comfort of their couch and it's been inspiring to see that we're still staying connected, especially during such daunting times."
YouTube Is Your Bestie
Actress and fellow creative Andrea Lewis turns to technology and app recommendations to keep her creative skills sharpen and on-point during quarantine. "Idillionaire App is one of my favorites for reminding me to be grateful and giving you positivity updates everyday. But I always recommend using Skillshare and YouTube to learn anything you want!" shares the filmmaker, Degrassi alumna and Toronto-born entertainer. "Especially in this time, when most people are looking to make some changes to either their careers or themselves, both of these sites can give you the best quick education that you need. I go to YouTube for everything."
Andrea also encourages creatives to not succumb to the pressure of joining other social media platforms if they aren't in your niche lane. "I encouraged most of my friends to stick to the work that they've already been working on. Further develop the scripts you've already started writing, edit the videos that you've been sitting on, just sit and daydream about the type of work you want to create right now but don't feel pressure to release it tomorrow. Maintain the audience that you already have, because just like you, they aren't going anywhere so don't feel the pressures of needing to hustle while being in the middle of a PANDEMIC!"
Keep Your Juices Flowing
For a lot of us, as the days roll by, they begin to blend together more times than none. Keeping organized and being on top of your daily tasks is an integral part of remaining sane and staying on top of your creative game. When it comes to allowing your creative juices to flow, award-winning millennial tech speaker, consultant and artist Alex Wolf has the perfect remedy. "Some of my favorite things to do to keep my creative juices flowing are listening to Ari Lennox, opening up all my Pinterest boards on my desktop computer (versus my laptop), go online window shopping, text my random ideas to my group chats," shares the Creative Business School founder.
During the stay-at-home order circling the nation, Wolf has even successfully developed a new program for her online platform. "[During this time,] I think I'm most proud of the audience calculator we made for my online education platform, Creative Business School," she shares. "The calculator is 100% free and for creators who are starting to realize trying to get a million followers just to make pennies from AdShare is not enough. You pop five answers in and it shows you how much extra money you could be making if you converted only 1% of your audience by selling your own product. I haven't met a creative that takes it and isn't shocked about what's possible for them."
Have a Good Balance
Alex Wolf has been on top of her creative game, but what about the rest of us who may feel pressure to overwork ourselves because we're not keeping up with the other accomplishments and dope things we see on Instagram? "To avoid overworking, on Sundays when I set up my week, I always give myself days I set aside for work and days I set aside for relaxing, you have to have a good balance," says social media influencer and YouTuber Tyla-Lauren Gilmore. She also shares her tips and tricks to avoiding laziness and keeping your work ethic strong. "To avoid underworking I'm constantly on Pinterest and YouTube looking for inspiration to keep me motivated to create."
Take a Pause
I don't know about you ladies, but this pandemic is a time to practice stillness and being OK with resting instead of creating at every single second of the day. On-air talent and podcast host of Black Girl Podcast Gia Peppers says, "All in all, this is a traumatic time. Give yourself grace to take a moment to be, instead of always having to do. I've used a lot of this time [so far] to check in with myself. I've been doing a lot of meditating, praying, and reconfiguring parts of myself I may have ignored during busier seasons in my life."
During this time, the VH1's Black Girl Beautyhost shares that she has been giving herself time and navigating how and what she wants to create. "I want to make sure I'm not rushing the dream God has for me, and for any creatives who feel the same, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having a creative process that develops from the inside out. Take the pause you need to, if you need it. Your future self will thank you. Pausing is an absolute privilege that I am aware that I have."
Recenter and Take a Moment
Kéla Walker has been in quarantine under stay-at-home orders like the rest of us, but has a different outlook on the idea of being forced to create content under pressure. "I don't think it's forcing creatives to create more content so much as it's forcing us back to our roots, back to the basics [and] remember why we became creatives," the seven-time Emmy-nominated media maven enlightens xoNecole, "Allowing us to tap into that creative center to produce and leverage our skills, and now do more with less. It's also pushed me to create more content to help and encourage others."
When it comes to her own content development, Walker says it's all about recentering. "My mind has been all over the place since being at home for this extended period of time. One minute I'm working on something and then the next I feel like something else deserves my attention. It's like I'm being pulled in multiple directions, going nowhere fast. That's when I have to just take a moment to pause and recenter."
Featured image via @tylauren/Instagram
Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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2024 Grammy Awards Recap: Victoria Monét And SZA Are Big Winners + More
The 2024 Grammys was a magical night due to the Black girl magic that took over. Our favorite artists, from SZA to Victoria Monét, took home more than one Grammy, showing us two things: Black women run the world, and R&B ain't dead. Victoria was nominated for seven awards and won three: Best R&B Album, Best New Artist, and Best Engineered Album: Non-Classical. This comes on the heels of her massively successful album, Jaguar II, which included the anthem "On My Mama," and after being turned down to perform at the 2023 VMAs. These are the singer/ songwriter's first Grammys, making her a shining example of there's something greater on the other side.
During her acceptance speech for Best New Artist, she had this to say. "I just want to say to everybody who has a dream, I want you to look at this as an example. I moved to L.A. in 2009, and I like to liken myself to a plant who was planted, and you can look at the music industry as soil. And you can look at it as dirty, or it can be looked at as a source of nutrients and water. And my roots have been growing underneath the ground unseen for so long. And I feel like today I’m sprouting finally above ground.”
Our girl SZA also snagged three Grammys thanks to her chart-topping SOS album. The R&B darling won Best R&B Song for "Snooze," Best Progressive R&B Album, and Best Pop Duo/ Group for "Ghost In The Machine" featuring Phoebe Bridgers. SZA held back tears as she gave her acceptance speech for Best R&B Song. After thanking her parents and Top Dawg (her label), she said, "I just.. I'm sorry. I'm just really overwhelmed. You don't really understand. I came really, really far, and I can't believe this is happening, and it feels very fake."
Singer and actress Coco Jones also won her first Grammy. The Bel-airactress won the prestigious award for Best R&B Performance for her soulful hit "ICU."
Coco Jones wins first Grammy
Photo by Kayla Oaddams/WireImage
Below are a list of other big winners of the night:
Tyla wins Best African Music Performance for "Water."
Samara Joy wins Best Jazz Performance for "Tight."
Michelle Obama wins Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording for The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times
Alicia Keys wins Best Immersive Audio Album for The Diary of Alicia Keys
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Feature image by Kayla Oaddams/WireImage, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy