5 Things I learnt listening to Cassie Roma's Saturday Sessions

Two questions;

1) Who is Cassie Roma?

2) And what did I learn at her five Saturday Live Sessions?

The first question you think would be easy, "Who is Cassie Roma?", however if I am completely honest I never knew of Cassie until more recently. I had seen her pop up at a couple of brand launches and seen her on some ads promoting the New Zealand Apprentice, but outside of that, it was relatively limited (sorry Cassie no offence :-).

But as I continued to follow Cassie's journey across a couple of social platforms (LinkedIn and Instagram) I quickly gravitated towards her style of communication and the value coming through her content. Before I knew it, I was leaning in wanting to learn more, and learn more I did!

So that leads to the second question, "What did I learn at her five Saturday Live Sessions?" .

The short answer is A LOT!

The slightly longer answer is telling "your stories" matter, learning to be creative is not confined to just artist and musicians, developing a personal brand doesn't mean giving up your privacy, community is about safety and good boundaries and creating content should be about creative value for others.

Telling stories, creating, building a personal brand, community and content is something we have been doing for centuries, and social media has just enhanced more of us to share it at a larger scale. SURE some content and people are crap and fake, but it's not like that didn't exist prior to social media right?

My point is, we all have stories to tell, be it good, bad, ugly or all of the above. We all have ways of being creative in our own right and we certainly have the permission to build ourselves through developing a personal brand we can be proud of, all while being part of communities that have shared values and a real sense of safety.

THE CHALLENGE as Cassie highlights is we let other people's ideas and opinion's frame our inability to take action. AND she is right! Just think HOW many times have we talked ourselves out of doing something that might be worthwhile to us? I know I have done that countless times.

One of the key things I learnt from Cassie's live sessions is, what we think and feel matters! Let me repeat that, WHAT WE THINK AND FEEL MATTERS!

Our stories matter, our personal brands matter and what we create matter. Even if others don't see it that way.

WHY? Because those things make up who we are and it enables us to be better versions of ourselves, and when we are able to explore those avenues without the dreaded statement of "what if", what we unlock is self-awareness.

Understanding our stories and how we tell them connects us to communities and it's how we are able to create with better value to serves ourselves and others. In other words what we contribute to our families, communities, work and society should add value, not because society says we should, BUT because we value ourselves first.

So, outside of learning that we matter, What else did I learn?

Well here are 5 more things I learnt.

#1 Just Start!

There's this great saying I heard years ago that goes "You don't need to be great to start, but you do need to start to be great". Now I don't know who said it, but it has stuck with me ever since, and in Cassie's #Creative session she rightly said, "just start" and I think this easily applies to almost everything. You can always adapt, adjust and let go of things that might not work, but you can't do any of that if you don't start.

# 2 Remove the chatter in our heads

Who doesn't have chatter going in their heads? Again this is natural and as many scientist and psychologist state, this so called "chatter" is in fact our internal "fight or flight" mode kicking into gear. The mode where we had to figure out whether a Sabretooth Tiger was going to eat us or not. The problem today is we no longer have Sabretooth Tigers running around, so therefore we've evolved to manifesting our own "Sabretooth Tigers", and often they are masked as ourselves and other peoples opinions.

# 3 We can learn from our experiences using stories

Most people have heard of the classic saying "learn from your mistakes", BUT learning from your experiences and using stories to extract your hidden values is equally as powerful!

How Cassie extracts these hidden values is by using an exercise of creating "Chapter Titles" for key periods in your life such as 'Childhood, Early 20's and your Professional Career'. By creating chapter titles this can lead to creating a story, and within that story are hidden clues as to things that we truly value in life and in ourselves.

# 4 It's OKAY to Change!

Another saying I heard but can't pinpoint its origins are "Change is the only constant in life". However as we get older we have this tendency to accept certain aspects of our lives that we cannot shake off or we settle on, whether that be our professional work, "I'm just a sales person or accountant". Or experiences that occurred years ago "I failed at Math's therefore I'm not a numbers guy".

Cassie discusses that in order for us to be okay with changing, we need to become the change and this is where telling your story becomes important, as Cassie says "Share WHO your WERE and WHO your are TODAY". By sharing your past, and how you've changed or going to change allows you to shred any framework that might be holding you back from change.

#5 Perspective is a Super Lens when it comes to creating

I'm a big believer in "perspectives" and having the ability to understand someone else's perspective is a real enabler for true engagement. When it comes to creating, perspective is no different. As Cassie points out, creating through the lens of others give you the power of being super curious, and that curiosity allows you to add real value into what you create. It also allows you to break any current framework you might have before creating, or as Cassie describes it, "getting rid of the bias".

So in true learning style, learning is only as powerful as the person willing to utilise it and put it into action.

HOW am I doing this exactly?

If you have been brave enough to read this far you've just experienced me putting my learning into action. This whole LinkedIn article was a challenge for me, I enjoy posting on the general feed, but have only created an article a few times on LinkedIn, and then stopped because of the "chatter in my head" or trying to create the perfect article, or thinking it doesn't align with the company narrative or my personal brand.

BUT here I am today being "Okay with change" because as I learnt through Cassie's Saturday Live Sessions, you can be yourself and still add value across the various dimensions that you serve whether that be work, your community and your family. This article in many ways represents those hidden values that I bring to each of those aspects of my life.

Thank you, and until the next article take care and stay safe.

Michael Basagre