Episode 180: Opening Doors to Authenticity, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship

Welcome back to a fresh episode of the FemNation podcast. In this episode, your host, Whitedove Gannon (me!), reinvites you to a transformative audio journey that explores business, motivation, strategy, and a lot more through the lens of authenticity and creativity. After a year-long hiatus, I'm back with renewed energy and a revised vision for FemNation that aims to connect, motivate, and inspire.

Touching upon the drastic changes in the online entrepreneurship space over the past year, I dish some thought-provoking insights on the transformations I've witnessed. By challenging preconceived notions and breaking the conventional rules, I emphasizes the importance of straddling creativity and business acumen to carve your path in the digital world.

Aware of the pressures of keeping up with the game, I share a bit of my journey to self-discovery and encourage others to resonate with your unique self, how I gave myself the freedom to let go of restraints and hiked the path less trodden - painting. Throughout the episode, I stress the importance of embracing your passions and using them as stepping stones to reignite your entrepreneurial journey.

This episode serves as an eye-opener to the opportunities that lie ahead for everyone willing to embrace themselves fully. This episode will guide you to find your rhythm amidst the chaos, declutter your strategy, and bring back your long-lost peace.

Listen to this episode of FemNation to rekindle your passion, unwind from the fast-paced world, and step back into the game with an evolved perspective.

Connect with Whitedove

Instagram @whitedove_gannon

Facebook @whitedovegannon

Pinterest: @whitedovegannon

Website whitedove-gannon.com

Free Stuff: coachlaunchtoolkit.com

Podcast Transcript:

Hey, FEMnation, welcome back. It has been quite a year, and I will go ahead and out myself and say it's been a year since I recorded an episode for this podcast, but I'll get into that with you. I'll share that with you. I will open the door and share those things with you. I'm white of Gannon, your biz ff and your favorite online mentor. And I welcome you to the Femination podcast. I want you to notice something right off the bat. If you look at the description of the podcast on, the channels that you're on or, let's see here. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I want to give you a little glimpse of what the femination podcast is segwaying into. Yes, it still has the same premise of entrepreneurship, but it's a little bit more of, generalized, ah, term of endearment as far as building out for everyone that comes along, including sharing bits and pieces of my journey that I just don't share anywhere else. What I'm working on, what I'm creating, encouraging you on what you're working on, what you're creating, building revenue streams, generating opportunities for us, leaning into the ultimate creative world because so much has changed since, one, I started this podcast years ago, and two, since the last episode. But first, let me give you a little example of what I foresee for the Femination podcast. It is a transformative audio journey, blending the worlds of business, motivation, inspiration, and strategy. That's what Femination podcast is. So some topics, some episodes will be based on strategy, some based on entrepreneurship and business, some based on creativity, some on motivation, some on inspiration, some guests. I do plan to bring guests in this time around, this season of feminine, but more importantly, I want to welcome you, welcome you if you're new, welcome you if you're back. I look forward to getting to know who you are, listening to these podcast episodes. You can reach out and share with me on any of my social media spaces, questions or comments that come up. I'm, an open book. I'm happy to share, I'm happy to explain, I'm happy to encourage, if I know. So let's be engaged more than just simply on this podcast. Let's be engaged even more out there. Now, I want to share just a little tiny bit in this episode of kind of the transformation that happened over the course of the last year, since my last solo episodes, and then prior to that is when I was doing a whole series on women in entrepreneurship, and I do suggest you go back and listen to some of those. If you have not scroll them, pick one that resonates with you based on the topic, and listen to her story, listen to her journey, and find yourself in it. Find the parallels, because there are parallels out there. But I want to take just this moment to share with you a little bit of what I've seen transform for myself and this online entrepreneurship space. Over the course of the last year, a lot has moved, a lot has changed. And what I see the most common is that the rules have been blown up. There really are no rules now. There are necessities. There are things that we have to do. We have to create programs or offers, we have to launch them, we have to market them, we have to, describe them. We have to know the transformation we're going to take people through. We have to, put the components together. If we don't have teams putting them together for us, we have to wear all the hats. Sometimes those are still necessary and prudent for this online entrepreneurship journey. But what's different is the communication, the connection, the buyer audience, the social media audiences themselves. trends there have changed. Social media consumption has changed. how people relate to people or brands has changed. large influencers are no longer the status quo. It is actually much more the norm to find somebody that is maybe a, ah, small to mid influencer, or maybe they don't even identify as an influencer, maybe someone that just is constantly or consistent with content showing up as a creator, not just creating TikTok dances or reels for Instagram. That is the brand itself of establishing who we are. And people buy into us. The person, they don't buy into the transformation necessarily, they buy into our version of the transformation because they trust us, they learn to trust us. And the number one way they'd learn to trust us at this point is through the social media content. So essentially, we are all creators at this point. We are all a brand at this point, and there is not a whole lot we can do to change that. We cannot adjust that trend ourself. But the beautiful part of this is that we have freedom inside of how people are consuming content and the connections that they desire in this space. We can't control the algorithm, we can't game the algorithm. We can try to keep up with what the algorithm is doing. If we're privy to find out what it is or hope that someone's strategy of what the algorithm is doing is the most up to date and accurate one. Or we can abandon that chase and just do the thing. Create the transformation, create the little tiny mini course, create the big course, create the coaching package, create whatever. Create art, a physical product, it doesn't matter. We can create whatever at this point and just share it passionately. Because our passion is what ignites passion in others. And we crave that ignition of passion. Very much so. Now. We are so knowledge informed and so online specific, and yet so disconnected. At this point, we have zero idea of what real, true connection is. For the most part. I won't say entirely, but for the most part. But we crave realness in the online space. When we find someone and we read their content that they wrote from their heart, we see it. Whoa. Maybe we don't understand it, maybe we don't quite relate to it, but we see the realness of that person and not the negativity. The negativity can actually go out. With 2023, that can just be gone. I'm so sick and tired of the negativity because I don't even have to try to find negativity. There's plenty of that in the online space. So instead of pointing out what's wrong with this world, instead of pointing out the negativity in this world, we can be a beacon of hope. We can be that connection that's, authentic and real. We can be that inspiration, that motivation, without even trying to call ourselves an inspirational writer or inspirational speaker, or motivational writer, or motivational speaker. It doesn't even matter that titles and labels don't exist anymore. We have the freedom of being able to just show up uniquely as ourselves. And that is the differentiator. That is the only thing that sets us apart. If we get too stuck trying to follow someone else's process or method, then we will not show up as ourselves completely. and then our audience will not fully see us and relate to us. Now I understand. I'm going to back that up just for a hot second. I understand that there is a need to learn how by utilizing someone else's strategy. 100%. Absolutely. Yes. But I want you to go into someone else's strategy or someone else's way of saying it needs to be done with eyes wide open and be able to say, you know what? I tried it. I gave it my best. It is not my thing. I'm inspired by it. I think it looks really cool when someone else does it. Not my jam. And that's okay. Keep seeking until you find your jam. Keep seeking until you find what resonates for you. Keep being the creator, regardless of niche. I blew the doors wide open on everything I was doing last year. Why? Because I just got to the end of the year and said, you know what? Just going to paint. And I confused myself for a minute because I was like, what? If you can't do that, you're not an artist online, you're not known to be an artist online. But internally, in my gut, I didn't care because I was so tired of trying to do what I even logically was trying to fit into a box of necessary steps to take. I was denying myself a creative element, a release of a, possibility of creating something beautiful by stuffing my own self in a square box. When I teach not to do it, I even teach not to do it. And I did it. I was so stuffed with where I was that, there are certain things of last year, of how I built programs that I will never do it again because I don't want to, because they tied me down. I did it, I fulfilled it. I created, I built, I coached, I did all those things. I built and built. I launched, launched and launched. I followed my own process over and over and over. Had a tremendously successful year. But something was missing. I was drowning in my own process without taking a break, without taking a breather, without saying, hold on, where is coloring outside of the lines? And who's to say that I can't do that? So I did, started painting, wrote a book, built creative, cool things from the book, made some content around the book, put some really cool songs to some of my sped up paintings, had nothing to do with anything but just awesome music that inspired me in the moment and me painting tip. And it gave me an opportunity to just stop. This world spins, guys, and I know that you're shaking your head yes, you know, this world spins so fast. What we lack is time, because everything wants a piece of our time. What we lack is peace, peacefulness, just being, being in the moment, being still being present, being happy. Those things are hard to find because it means we have to strip away a lot of things in order to get to that point. We have to undo 30 previous 30 years of conditioning that we must be productive. You have to do this thing, you have to generate revenue. You put the time into this creation. It has to make something for you. You spent the time investing, learning how to do this thing, and you need to make that way work. How about you be able to say, yes, thank you. No, thank you. This. Thank you. That isn't going to work. How about being able to have the freedom to use the past few years and the learning that you have done in this space in the last few years as a smorgasbord of, opportunity to pick from? This worked. This felt good. This felt natural. This felt like me. Here's me. Here's where I am. I felt seen and heard when I was doing this or that. I fell in love with this process or this piece of this process. Go back to it. Take a moment to take stock in some of those things and find what they were. What have we forgotten about? Because this world is instant consumption anymore. What is it that we've left in the dust? That was beautiful and good? What project were we working on that we got 60% through and we forgot about it. And it was amazing, but we just lost the momentum at the moment. Which one was that? Look at it, find it, journal about it, talk about it, write about it, share about it. Most importantly, be human, be you. Because everyone in this online space now understands the online space. Now, we may navigate it a little clunky, we may barely show up in it, but we all understand it now. It's not new. It's not a brand new concept, it's not a new opportunity. The opportunities still exist, yes, with a tremendous amount of freedom to be you, to do it your way, to find what works for you. So follow the people that resonate with you. Find the people that speak your language in the moment. Learn from those mentors, learn from the people that have been there and have something to say about it. Not in a bad way, not in a negative way, but in a realistic way. Align yourself with those that give you the freedom to be you, to be beautifully, uniquely, amazingly you. No one else can. And that is your zone of genius. This year is all about kicking the niche to the curb. I don't care what the niche is, and I frankly don't care what people think I'm supposed to be in. If it resonates, great. If it doesn't, that's okay, too. I always, always bless and release all thoughts in my own mind about what, how, when, where, because I can come up with a number of those. What I need to do is find peace, be peaceful, move forward. If that means writing motivational quotes from my whispers book onto beautiful copies of my painting or images that my daughter has taken, great. I'm going to make that content. If it means diving back into the podcast that I let go dormant for a year because I just busied myself with busy thinking I was going to shift it or pivot it, but just get back into it exactly where it was and just let it be. Show the pivot in real time if there's going to be one. Okay, I'll do it. Because that is ease, that's peaceful, and that gives me an opportunity to sleep much more sound at night without trying to fit everything into a perfect little strategy. There's no peace in that. Don't trouble yourself with it. All right, guys, I'm going to wrap it up for today. I will keep these on the shorter side unless I get a little rantsy and just get hot on a topic of some sort. But I promise you, this is our time together and it is worth its weight and gold to me that you are listening. Connect with me in the online space. And until next time, next week, keep moving forward.