Creative on Purpose Live - Kylie Slavick

live, and we can confirm that we are indeed live. Welcome everyone to Creative on Purpose Live, insightful conversations with inspiring difference makers to help you live your legacy and endeavors that matter. I'm your host, Scott Perry, Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose. If you're ready to fly higher in the difference only you can make, visit creativeonpurpose.com and sign up for our newsletter. Get insight and inspiration for better living and making a bigger difference delivered to your inbox 3 times a week. And join the Difference Maker Mindset Challenge. Let's meet today's guest, Kylie Slavik. Welcome to the broadcast. Please tell our viewers who you are, what you're up to these days, and where can people go to learn more about you and the difference you're making?

Well, first, thank you, Scott, for having me on today. I really appreciate it. And yeah, I am a brand storyteller, a copywriter. I work on a lot of launches in the transformational and spiritual spaces. I'm part of an agency called Conscious Marketer, and yeah, we, we just represent some of the top brands in the transformational space. If you were to want to find out more about that, you could always go to kyleeslapik.com, and I believe it is spelled out across the bottom of the screen.

It is indeed. Well, just a little bit of, uh, transparency here. I met Kylie through two of the programs that she does through Conscious Marketer, the, both with Richard Taubinger. The first through Sounds True, one of my favorite publishing houses, is called The Power of Conscious Marketing. And then most recently in a program called the Conscious Launch Accelerator, which we used to launch the Live Your Legacy program earlier this year, getting ready to enroll the second session now. I'm a big fan of Kylie and the work that she does. Um, learned a lot, not just about her storytelling expertise, but also just about marketing in general, avatar development, things like that. But Kylie, we always kind of start off with, um, my guess is little 9-year-old Kylie did not dream about being a, a social media marketer or a storyteller. Uh, and so I just wonder if you would maybe give us a little taste of the backstory. How did you arrive at what you're doing, the difference that you're making right now?

Yeah, that's great. Actually, it's funny that you say 9 because when I was about that age, I didn't know anything about business or marketing, obviously, but My mom always tells me this story that when we were in the car, even just for 15 minutes, I would bring 3 books. So I wanted to always be immersed in stories. I was afraid I would like finish a book and not have another one in the car. So there was that. However, there was also a period where I was so— I was like a protester in high school. I was always protesting everything like with signs and stuff and thought it was fun and cool. And I thought it was a good way to change the world. And, you know, not knocking it, but it wasn't for me after a little minute. And I— but I did have a bad taste in my mouth over business in general because I was protesting a lot of the unhealthy, negative, destructive practices of a lot of, like, larger corporations. And so I never thought of business as being a good thing. I always thought it was a bad thing inherently. And so actually I got a degree in English, in literature. I loved studying that, wanted to continue down that pathway. So I always had this thread with words, which makes a copywriter and a storyteller, but I never would've thought I would put it together with marketing. So I could tell this story a million different ways, but one of the pivot points for me was when I had a job It was my first job in, in this industry. I had a couple of jobs before I ever went off on my own, and I got paid to learn, which was really cool. And I had this job for a guy named Max Simon, and he's the son of Dr. David Simon, who is the, the silent partner of the Chopra Empire. So I call it Empire. It's an empire. It's a business, a brand, whatever. And so he was connected to a lot of high-level spiritual people or really successful entrepreneurs. My job was actually to interview them and turn those interviews into content. So one day I had the great fortune of interviewing Mark Victor Hansen, and I know I'll never forget it for the rest of my life. I was talking to Mark about his impact and what he had accomplished, and obviously Chicken Soup for the Soul is wildly successful, and he's done so many other things. And Mark told me, you know, when I asked him where did he want to go from here, Mark said, I want to— you know, I've sold half a billion books, I want to sell a billion, and I want to end world hunger. And he acted like it was such an easy thing to do, like it's no big deal, I'm gonna just end world hunger. And I was like, this guy's— this guy's either totally crazy or just like a complete spiritual trailblazer. I don't know what it is, but it really changed my life because he was so self-assured. And it was the first time I thought, you know, business could be a force for good on this planet. I never knew. I would like— thought the opposite. So I got very excited about that and started kind of just putting together pieces of what I was good at, which was writing and telling stories and translating it into marketing, because my belief is that marketing is just communication. So I always tell people, don't even think of yourself as a marketer. Most of our clients don't want to anyways. So I just try to give them permission to let that go and just to think of themselves as being of service, communicating. And Richard and I of Conscious Marketer CEO, we just try to teach that. Like, how do you talk to people? How do you speak to them? What do they need to hear to get excited and inspired? And so it goes on and on from there.

I love that. One of the things that I brought into the workshops that I did with you and Richard was a background with Seth Godin and the marketing seminar where I overcame my distaste of marketing. By framing it as telling true stories to people that need you to show up in their life so that their lives can be transformed and enhanced by your work. And that really melded nicely with this whole idea of conscious marketer. And so I would love for you to just— I mean, you mentioned how inspired you were by the vision of your, you know, one of your early employers, and that seems to be a piece of the maybe what it means to be a conscious marketer or be the head of a conscious business. How does, how does the consciousness play into the way you and Richard approach what you're doing?

Sure. And in some ways the word conscious can be very overused, and I think people don't even really know what it means anymore. So especially in marketing, there's so many people that say that. But I think for me personally and I can't speak for Richard, but for me personally, I believe it's this idea that you're actually empowering the person who is looking at, reading, feeling out your stories, your content, your education, your tips, your strategies, and they're not feeling pushed or coerced into making a decision. They're actually, they feel like you're laying everything out. You're sharing everything, you're telling everything that they need to know, and then you're not really applying pressure. You're just allowing them to make a decision that's best for them. And I had somebody on a call yesterday for our group program that you mentioned, and she was saying, I've been watching you guys for 3 years and then I finally decided to dive in. I didn't even know who she was, but there's just so many people out there that are kind of taking a look and seeing, can I really trust these people? Are they really honest? Are they who they say they are? And so it's allowing people to kind of go through their own process process of coming to a choice, whether that choice is no or yes, doesn't matter. Has to be— has to carry equal weight because it, because it really allows them to be in the empowered position and, and not me as the marketer. Of course I'm in an empowered position as a marketer because I'm just speaking my truth, but I'm not trying to have a power-over dynamic with the people who are listening to what I'm saying.

Mm-hmm. Well, and you mentioned empowerment, and that seems to be a really important piece of, um, the, the process. One of the things that I really witnessed you and Richard doing in the workshop is helping people see and step into their power to connect with the right people and get their message, you know, heard and enroll people who will invest in the journey that, that these conscious marketers, these conscious business owners want to take them on. And I'm also wondering about the— I love that you referenced the story back to being 9 years old, because in some ways, I think one of the things that we do in the Live Your Legacy program is when we are trying to, like, reconnect people with what their purpose might be and what are the skills and talents, the things that, the hard skills and the soft skills that are just basic human skills, real skills. When you think back to childhood, oftentimes it's just a matter of reconnecting with the things that used to really light you up as a kid. And you mentioned reading was really important to you. Story was really important to you. And somehow, even though I know you did several different things along the way. Now story is, you're, you're still the 9-year-old girl in the backseat with her 3 books, looking, looking to connect through story. And I just, I, you know, this whole idea of consciousness and connection, communication, collaboration, these are all just basic human impulses, needs, and necessities. So. In your journey to, you know, become, to, to be, you know, successful as a conscious marketer, I'm imagining that there were also some missteps, mistakes, or failures, or things that felt that way. Maybe at the time, maybe they were opportunities in disguise. And a lot of the folks that are tuning in are like you, trying to emerge into whatever it is that they feel they should be, or what destiny feels they should be becoming. What— I just wonder if you'd share one of those moments, um, of what appeared to be a mistake, a failure, or a misstep that you flipped into an opportunity, or at least a learning experience that would help inspire other people to keep navigating through the challenges.

There's so many, but the one that I remember the most, because this is probably the most embarrassing, was my friend Mike Hill. He has actually has a Facebook group called I think it's, it's Conscious Marketer or something. It used to be Internet Marketing Super Friends. It's probably the biggest marketing Facebook group, and he's just been around forever. So he rarely, rarely promotes anybody inside his group, but he got this like just intuition one day that he was supposed to help me. And so I was promoting this webinar, and he, he promoted it in his group. This is like when I was at ground zero. All I had was a lot of information, but I didn't have a business really. I was leaving jobs and things of that nature, and I was kind of venturing out on my own. And so I decided to launch this course. It was actually about launching because I had been overseeing and managing launches for quite a while. And so I was doing this course about launching, and a big thread was about the storytelling aspect of it. So it was like, hey, you might find all of these different ways of launching, but if you don't have the right story, it's not gonna work. And I decided to do this webinar. I'd never given a webinar. And this is great. Mike, I think I had 500 people on my email list, 'cause it was just people coming to my website and opting in, and I didn't try to, I've never tried really to build my website email list. And so I had a really small email list and then he sent me maybe 500 opt-ins from one post in his Facebook group, which is pretty phenomenal. And all of a sudden I have all his people on this webinar and I'm like, I gotta do a good job because he really, you know, he never promotes anyone. And there's all these like OG marketers in there and they're all really smart and they're all multimillion dollar companies. And so I do the webinar, it doesn't convert. And he called me after and he's like, Kylie, you just gave a webinar about the importance of storytelling, but you didn't tell any stories. And I was like, oh my God, you're right. So I did that webinar 5 times during that launch period, 'cause I was trying to get better at it and different people could come at different times. And I just kept repeating it and repeating it and repeating it. Started adding stories, it got better. I did kind of like save the launch. I think I got 35 or 40 people into that program. It was $997 program, my first time trying to do it. But it was just sometimes I think the learning is, and this probably applies to every one of us, the learning is really about when we're so close to something, we can never see it. So I was thinking, you know, people will understand through examples why story is so important, and I'm just going to tell them that way, and I'm not going to say anything else. And it, it was like a big epic fail. It was awesome. I'm so glad it happened. I mean, not for him, because I'm sure it was, you know, not great for him. However, he really didn't care.

I love that. Um, it's, it's amazing how how someone like you is able to see so clearly what is hanging somebody else up or the mistake that someone else is making. And then, but when it's time to, to see how we're getting in our own way, we almost never can do that. That's why it's so important to do this kind of work in community or in partnership. You mentioned vision a little while ago, being inspired by someone else's vision. You mentioned vision in what you were just sharing. I'm just curious, does Kylie Slavik have a vision of the world that she is co-creating through Conscious Marketer or the work that you're just doing out in the world?

Absolutely. And honestly, sometimes my vision is just to be a good human, you know, quote unquote good, because none of us are purely good, I suppose, but just to interact in my daily life in a way that matters. You know, sometimes it's like as simple as that, but on a professional level, I do truly believe that the stories that are kind of messing us up as humans are these like old stories that don't serve anymore. And I always say like the story, the humanity storyline has been hijacked and let's like hijack it back. And I, when I started to run ads 10 years ago or so, or maybe longer, One of the things I noticed was that a good story in an ad could impact people in pretty much every country. It was like the same response. And also that it could reach millions and millions of people without spending that much money. It was never my money anyways, but not spending other people's money that much. We were reaching millions of people, especially back then. You know, it was only a matter of like $1,000 to reach millions of people. These days, probably quite a bit more than that, but I just realized, like, never before in history have we had that opportunity. With, like, broadcast radio and newspapers and magazines, it was kind of one voice being represented, and there's always an agenda with that. And so I started to think about the power of advertising because it's, it's something that is so widespread that is very deeply embedded in our, in our unconscious subconscious mind. And so I thought, what if we could use the power of advertising, inject it with positive empowering stories and start circulating that? And I, and I found out it only takes 5% of human consciousness to change to, it's like that Hundrus Monkey Theory. That's, that's the actual number. So I, at that time when I heard it, I did the calculations. I found out it's 380 million people. And I thought, that's really not that many, because I had already reached millions of people with ads. So I thought, all you have to do is turn an ad on, you know, and spend a certain amount of money, you can change everything. So really, that's why we work so hard at what we do do, so that we can empower people that have good intentions for the Earth, for the planet, for humanity, for the culture, to step forward and really have their voice be heard. And hopefully that'll level out the playing field. I did hear one time that you should have a vision that you could never accomplish in your lifetime so that after you die, people are continuing to work towards it. And I kind of think that's what my vision is like because I don't actually anticipate being able to accomplish all of that in my lifetime. So I'm also trying to spread that vision so other people pick up on it too, as well. Mm.

Yeah. Well, I would definitely agree with that. One of the things that we do at Creative On Purpose is help people craft their vision, and we encourage them to do something so big, bold, and audacious that it can't be achieved in their lifetime, because that's what inspires other people to get involved and to continue the work beyond. And I always think of the Martin Luther King speech, you know, where he talks about his vision of the world. Uh, you know, where there's racial harmony and equality. And he says in the midst of that, I may not get there with you. He realizes that what he's— what he is co-creating, what he is moving towards is something, um, that won't happen in his lifetime. And that's one of the reasons why I think so many people were inspired to continue the work after his, you know, tragic murder. So I love— I love that. And I love that What I'm hearing in the way that you're crafting your vision is, you know, we have, I think, I believe that story is how we make sense of the world. And you can, you can choose your future by just changing your story. And, you know, we're, but we also love our stories. We cling to our old stories, even when they don't serve our health and happiness. But one of the ways that we can change is by creating and living into a better story, one that does promote our health and happiness. And I know that you have a lot of expertise in storytelling, not just in marketing, but in your experience as a slam poet and other things. Are there any tips that you would give our viewers just around if they want to start baking a little more story into even if it's just sharing their ideas on social media or their blog posts or in their ad copy? Are there any tips that you would be willing to share?

Well, I think just to speak into what you said about not wanting to let go of the story, I think we have to look at the fact that we are unfortunately still driven by the reptilian part of the brain as a culture, even though we don't need to anymore. We haven't evolved beyond it. And I actually think that storytelling is a part of guiding us to move beyond it and moving to the sort of higher functioning parts of the actual brain. So neuroscience of story is something I've studied a lot. And that was the first thing that kind of caught my attention of, of what you said. In terms of tips, I think, yeah, just like get out there and tell stories. There's, there's a concept or a phrase, I suppose, called water cool— like the water cooler story. And it's this idea that let's say we're in an office building and everybody on a Monday congregates around the office, around the water cooler, and they all start telling stories of what they did over the weekend. And I really like that because that's how they connect. That's how they understand each other. And it reminds me that we're all natural storytellers. It's what we do when we get together. For some reason, when we go online with it, people trip up. They're like, it's gotta sound this way, it's got to be that way. And my belief is you already know how to tell a story, so just do that. And for those who want a little more strategy than that, although I think the first thing I said is probably the most important thing I could say, There's also this idea of looking at where your audience, where your client, potential clients, potential customers, whatever it is, looking at where they're at, like where they're truly, truly at in their life and looking at where they want to be and kind of finding that journey from A to B. Where are they at? Where do they want to be? What are those obstacles? What are those challenges? Why are they not where they want to be? Like all of that. Is something that we want to kind of look at. And a lot of people ask me, you know, if, if the story is about that, if the story is about them and they're the hero of the story, because people say that in marketing storytelling trainings, then how can it be about me? How could I tell my story? And I believe if we really think about them and where they're at and where they want to go, then we're also, if we plug in our personal details, where we are excuse me, making it about them because we are telling their story through our own lens. So that's another thing that you can kind of start to think about, like where are they, where do they want to be, why are they not there, have they tried before to be there, and all of that.

Well, and one of the things that, that I've really noticed from just following you on social media since we first connected is you, you weave— I mean, you tell some great stories just in your basic Facebook post, but they often involve a vulnerability that I think most of us are allergic to. We think that when we're on social media, we have to paint the, the perfect picture of the person that really is confident and certain about what they're doing. Um, and I think we tend to concentrate too much on like features and benefits of what we're offering, where what I see in your posts and the stories that you tell is you're connecting through some sort of vulnerability or sharing a, you know, a mistake or misstep, but also how you got from where you are to where you want to be and how you overcame those challenges. And I think that's really, you know, inspire— inspires others to take a step in to learn more about, you know, what it is that you do or what's on offer, but also just inspires them to be half a shade braver in stepping into their own potential and possibility. So I don't know if there's an intentionality there or if it's just instinct and intuition, but any thoughts on applying vulnerability to the storytelling that we're doing online?

Absolutely. I think that there's a mistake that vulnerability is like this raw, open overshare. And you'll never see me do that. Like, I always tell people when I'm training them, this is actually not a mistake that most men make, but a lot of women do it. And I'm not trying to be all like gender stratified here, but it's just what I've seen over the years. And it's not because they want to do it, it's because they think they have to do it. They hear like, tell stories, be real, be vulnerable. And I always tell them, I say, listen, you save that story for your therapist, for your best friends, you know, that's appropriate place for it. But I think what we're really looking at accomplishing in this situation is showing our human side. So if we have success, if we have wins, if we have results, if we have strategies that we want to share with people, nobody actually cares about them unless they can see how we— how do we get there, you know? How did we get there? They want to know how did we get there. And if there's no flaws in the story, there's really actually just no story. Even with like the most powerful characters in film, um, like Braveheart, you know, he was William Wallace. He was like this just like burly guy who could kill me with one hand, you know. He still had weaknesses and he still had things he needed to overcome. He was arrogant, he was stubborn, he didn't want to do what he was meant to do, all these things. And then through the actual story itself, he became who he was meant to be. And that's the story that everybody resonates with because that's how our brains are— what, like, that's literally what our brains are wired to resonate with. So that's why I do that story over and over and over and over again, because it's ingrained in me and it's ingrained in other people. And I've tried to just speak inspirationally from a place of success, and it just falls flat. People don't want to hear it.

Yeah, well, I, I appreciate that, and I, I love what you were saying earlier too about just, you know, we are creatures that, um, you know, your brand is, uh, with Richard is Conscious Marketer, and, um, more than 80% of our lives is lived unconsciously or subconsciously. We are oftentimes just living things out of, um, routine or habit or, um, default default programming, um, in reaction to the stimulus around us, driven, as you said, by the lizard brain. But we can, um, through storytelling and through other things, bring consciousness into the, the conversation and then find a healthier way to navigate our way through things. And story really does that super powerfully. As we're coming to the end of our half hour together, Kylie, there's one question that I end every conversation with, and that is You've already shared a lot of wisdom about making a difference and about how people can use story to do marketing better, but also to make the change that they seek to make. If there was just one final encouragement that you would leave listeners with who, like you, want to continue to fly higher and the difference only they can make, what is one last tip, quote, maxim, or exercise that you would share with them?

Absolutely. Well, I would just say your greatest asset in achieving everything you want to achieve is going to be your story. There's no way around it. And so even if you're scared, even if you think you don't have a story, all of these things, nobody wants to hear it, it has to be intense and crazy and wild, it doesn't have to be. So just find that one way that you can express your humanity and start to express it, and, and you will see a difference, I believe.

Yeah, I love that. It goes really well with your advice to just, just tell stories. We're natural-born storytellers, each and every one of us. So I love that. Well, Kylie, thank you so much. And we want to thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Kylie and I really appreciate you lending us some of your valuable time and attention. We hope today's broadcast motivates you to take a bolder step into possibility, living your legacy. You can learn more about Kylie and the difference that she's making down there at Kylie Slavik and it's always great to see you, of course, at Creative on Purpose as well. If you're listening on iTunes, please consider leaving a 5-star review. And now take the insight and inspiration from this conversation and fly higher in the difference only you can make. Kylie Slavik, thank you so much for sharing your insight and inspiration with us today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.