What I Learned About Building Top Brands and High-Level Careers After Interviewing Two Dozen Top Creatives

One of the greatest joys we can feel as creatives is to form connection with others.

On a professional and personal level, the most energy and inspiration that I receive is through engaging with a wide circle of other creatives, from many different disciplines.

Wanting to foster this sense of connection is one of the reasons why I started the Sound Stories podcast back in January of this year. Not only is hosting a podcast a great way to meet and learn from new people, it’s also a great way of helping them get their teachings out to those who need the lessons most.

Now, almost a year later, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with dozens of creatives - from video producers, to marketing experts, to social media influencers and more. Along the way, they’ve imbued listeners with practical tips and tricks that they have gathered throughout their own careers, in order to help our audience become better storytellers.

Here is a list of the top takeaways, which I hope will help inspire your creative journey as well.

1. Maintaining Your Creativity Needs to Be Taken Seriously

It’s a fallacy to believe that once you achieve a certain level of mastery over your craft, that creativity will just naturally flow out of you. Instead, creativity requires its own maintenance and careful nurturing.

On the podcast, guest after guest has shared their journey to ‘stay sharp.’ One guest, Micah Baro, Creative Director at Allison+Partners said that the best advice he ever received was to take time out to ‘sharpen his axe,’ as in, to make nurturing his creative spirit a priority. (Note: Micah appears on Sound Stories episode #17 - Finding the Hidden Story).

For various individuals, this practice meant different things - from embarking on continuing education, attending conferences and networking sessions - to simply disconnecting from technology so they could find their way back to themselves again.

While motivation and inspiration may seem like an obvious priority, it’s still surprising just how universal this need to stay inspired is, no matter what line of creative work you’re in.

The key takeaway here?

No matter what you do to stay creative, you need to do it.

Make it a priority to invest in yourself, whether the investment is in time or requires a financial commitment, you need to do it.

After all, the only person who can do that work is you. You can’t outsource motivation, passion or interest, and no one can make you want something that you don’t care about.

2. Elevating Your End Results Requires Teamwork

A lot of the people who we’ve talked to rarely create or undertake important work in isolation.

Although it’s true that many creative jobs require you to zone in, and block out other things (or even people!), some of the most gratifying projects that people work on are collaborative.

Most creatives aren’t simply creating for themselves: they have an audience to consider and usually, the best production comes out of being part of a team and having like-minded people working towards the same goal.

It’s really hard to be a creative alone, and what makes a team really gel is when each member has a sense of what they’re there to achieve. Often times, it takes having a dialogue or reaching into understanding the ‘why.’ Why are we doing this? Is it adding value to other people. Is it positive, is it uplifting and helping someone?

If people can follow a vision and there’s a clear one, then you’ve got people who will go through the choppy waters with you and be there in the good times. Solid teams understand that there’s something greater at stake than any one individual’s pride. That’s what’s great about having purpose and working within a group of people who are gifted in different ways.

3. Vulnerability is One of the Most Powerful Vessels Through Which We Connect with One Another

It always amazes me how, when an interview subject feels comfortable enough to open up and expose a vulnerable thought or feeling, the episode content becomes much richer. Behind the scenes of the show, we call them our ‘Oprah’ moments. There’s a sense of magic in the air.

What this boils down to is that when someone is willing to admit to the hard times, as well as the successes, we suddenly feel a deeper connection to that person. They become more relatable and credible, simply by being genuine, and as creatives, we all benefit from forming strong connections.

For instance, in Sound Stories episode #10 ‘On Being a Freelance Illustrator,’ Private Illustrator, Antony Hare discusses how he experienced professional loneliness, and because of that struggle, he has now placed a greater focus on building his network of kindred spirits.

Listening to him immediately gave me a sense of why people need each other. Plus, his vulnerability immediately made the production team lean in to listen and support.

Although there are certainly some of us out there who feel like isolation is best, most of us are hardwired to need a form of connection to other human beings, as well as share our true selves.

4. Align Your Creative Goals with a Target Emotional Response

In Sound Stories Episode #21 - Exploring Emotional Design - Erika Lutz, Creative Director at Lumosity, shared the careful process of crafting your work so that it elicits an emotional response.

Her reflections were an awesome reminder of the importance of being deliberate and intentional in the way we create. By considering how we want someone else to feel and respond, it gives our work greater longevity and impact.

In order to create this way, you really have to flex your ability to feel empathy, to step into someone else’s shoes.

Erika’s attention to detail and her concentration on creating an experience, as she described Lumosity’s ‘Playing Koi’ game, often pops into my mind when I’m out feeding my own koi fish. Having played both the digital game, as well as fed my own live fish, I know that she and her design team tapped into something visceral and real. The end product is able to evoke emotion and the physicality and nature of the senses being used.

In essence, the main takeaway here is that our creations become incredibly effective when we employ empathy and commit to creating an emotional response.

5. Empower Your Audience, and You Will Earn Their Loyalty

Authenticity, how to create it, and live and work in it, is a central theme that keeps recurring throughout the show. Brands know that it’s important, and each one is trying to find their own unique way of making it come to life.

When Brain+Trust Partners Founder, Scott Monty, joined us on Sound Stories episode #16 - Why Your Brand is Not the Hero - he dove deep into the power of influencer marketing, specifically how Ford leveraged the tactic with its ‘Ford Fiesta Movement.’

Listening to Scott discuss how Ford entrusted influencers to provide their real and honest (public) feedback on the experience of driving the Ford Fiesta as their vehicle for six months, made me reflect on the brand’s bravery and commitment to being authentic. The influencers they selected had been given freedom and liberty to share their experiences, via posting videos straight to the company’s website.

By empowering their audience, Ford revealed a deep sense of confidence in their product, and promoted a transparency that can be very difficult to achieve. You have to be very confident in your value proposition, and the design of your product, to feel safe with making such a bold move.

Listening to this case study, including how they selected the influencers, was eye-opening and revealed the inner workings of a marketing tactic that only continues to gain momentum as the social media space explodes.

Bonus lesson: Starting a Podcast Can be a Great Way to Stay Creatively Inspired

I already consider myself to be very open minded, but by embarking on the process of hosting this podcast, I’ve enjoyed exploring new territories.

Talking to all of these different people with different viewpoints and, well, different ‘everything,’ in some cases, has demonstrated to me that being able to relate to one another can be incredibly interesting.

Even with the various parameters and standards that we have to guide our show production, conversing with individuals who otherwise wouldn’t enter my circle has been encouraging and unifying. We’re all trying to work towards creating an audience experience, where the listener gains understanding and receives encouragement from others, all with the hope that it helps them improve as a person, an artist, a business owner, a creative - or whatever else they may be.

By hosting a show, it’s helped me to continue to do what I like to do, which is learn a little bit about a lot of things. I’m not an expert, but to be able to enter into their world, even for 30 minutes, is a privilege.

Hosting a podcast is a great way to learn that everyone you sit next to could be a mentor, in one way or another, and almost everything we do is an offshoot or iteration of another creation. It allows for a diversity of voices and thought, which fosters even greater creativity. And I can’t imagine anything better than that.

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the co-founder and Chief Brand Officer of Voices.com and the host of Sound Stories, an inspirational podcast for storytellers who want to improve their lives at work and at play.

Keywords: #Branding #Storytelling #Creativity #Inspiration #Motivation #Collaboration

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