The 4 of us on the Women's entrance (We) team are thrilled to announce:

Our first newsletter, Vitamin We, is born today! 👶🎊

We believe that everyone has a story worth telling. 

That’s why we've put together Vitamin We as our love letters to you, where you can expect to receive a weekly platter🥗 of organic, vibrant, REAL human stories from fellow creative souls, curated by the We team.

Our goal is to celebrate the full range of human emotions and experiences with stories that inspire, comfort, and empower. I’m your editor, Ponny, and I’m excited to be bringing you stories every week that’ll warm your heart, motivate you to keep going, and make you feel less alone in your life + creative journey!

This #1 newsletter is a PREMIERE version, exclusive to those who have been with us since the beginning of time! You are receiving this email because you've either submitted a story to us, or previously offered us your email on our Heymint page to stay connected. We are grateful for your trust and we don’t take that lightly; At any time if you decide not to hear from us via email anymore, it's easy to unsubscribe via the footer.

Let's start our convo with finding our voice. Yes, it's vital to amplify the voices of feminine creatives so that we are heard. But first — How do we find our authentic voice? Let’s unearth some clues together!

We are human beings, not human doings.

Just like Exhale is as important as Inhale, we all carry BOTH masculine & feminine energies within us, regardless of gender!

Masculine energy makes us strong, confident, focused and independent. It supports us to operate in the outer world. When we have too much of it, we might find it hard to stop working (hello workaholics!) and let go of control.

Feminine energy allows us to be creative, intuitive, feel deeply and in flow with life. It helps us love and connect with each other, and with nature. When we have too much of it, we might struggle to make decisions and get things done in time.

In the future, this is where we'll dive deeper into each feminine quality, so that we can grow to be more integrated, well-balanced & at peace with who we are, one step at a time!

I was finishing up my career as a graphic designer when I landed an internship with an important design magazine in Colombia. It was a dream come true, as they worked with creatives, including artists and illustrators. In Colombia art and illustration are careers with very few opportunities, in fact most of the time people look for additional work to make ends meet. This is why I was very surprised when I saw that they collaborated with illustrators almost every week!

As my internship was coming to an end, I was offered the chance to design images for an article. Although I had done it twice before, I had used collages because collage was a "safe" way out as I wasn’t that bad at it, but I had this nagging feeling that I should try something more daring, especially since it might be my last chance to make an impression in the magazine. So, I proposed to illustrate, the art director accepted it but advised me not to complicate things too much due to the lack of time and budget.

I was ecstatic, yet at the same time, I was looking for a place to hide. There was no turning back now. Although I wanted to face the challenge, life threw a wrench in my plans, as it always does lol. I received an invitation to go on a trip with friends, and it was a special opportunity since I hadn't seen them due to the pandemic. I had to make a decision, and in typical “Kelly's style”, I said yes to both.

Surprisingly, the trip with my friends helped me to ……

Backstory: How many books do you own (physical + digital), and have completed reading? How often do you convert those inspirations into action, with consistency?

Let me confess: I have 380+ books & ebooks, < 50% completed, and only a guesstimate of 5% have been integrated into my everyday life for more than 3 days 🫠

The existence of this section - besides capturing and sharing inspirations & wisdom from great books that you might find helpful too - is to make myself publicly accountable to level up those % by the end of 2023! Will you join me, fellow learning junkies?

Idea #1 Three confluent forces: According to Todd, to find your voice and cause your work to resound in a culture where primarily the loudest get heard, we’ll need to have clarity on:

1. What you care about (Identity) - Exercises: 50 Notables & Writing Your Manifesto (P.67)

2. What your audience cares about (Vision) - Find your Intended Audience (IA), not a generic demographic but one individual who perfectly epitomizes the reason you’re creating the work (P.105)

3. The context into which you introduce it - What ideas are having momentum already (Timing)? (P.136)

Idea #2 Aspiration gap: ”The difference between the work that you want to create and the work that you're capable of creating at the moment, and it's the daily struggle of budding artists, writers, entrepreneurs, managers, anyone who desires to be unique and brilliant.” (P.42)
_{(Doesn’t this gap feel so familiar for all of us as recovering perfectionists?!)}

» We must be willing to endure a period of “incompetence” (which is btw a fluid concept, since we keep giving ourselves moving targets to chase🥕) in order to see progress in closing the gap.

Idea #3 See your contribution as a movie, not a photo: If you believe that you have been given something unique to contribute to the world, then you have the accompanying responsibility to help it gain as much of the right audience as you can.

How? One of them is to measure progress so we can repeat what WORKS. However, things are always progressing, regressing, and trending in one way or another. The only way to truly capture strategies that are effective (P. 196) is to note the trend lines (movies), not to attempt to capture metrics at some pre-appointed point in time (photos).