Why Vulnerability Can Help You Create with Brit Morin
When’s the last time you expressed vulnerability through your creativity? For Brit Morin, my guest on this week’s episode, it’s part of her every day life. Brit founded her lifestyle and online learning platform, Brit + Co, to help women connect with and express their creative spirit. With an engaged community of 125+ million women and over 200,000 online class enrollments, Brit + Co is the leading destination for learning and discovery among female millennials. She launched her business at the age of 25, and learned how to balance motherhood alongside her career as a creative entrepreneur.
In this episode, Brit discusses how to empower and equip your employees by letting go of control, and how she brings her authentic self into her brand. She shares the power of believing in yourself and your creativity, even in the face of criticism. Trying new, creative things feels vulnerable and scary, because we’re afraid to fail. Brit shows us that, while we may fail and everything won’t be perfect, we can learn how to be resilient and keep creating anyway.
Featured Moment
Majo: Is there a larger vision or North Star that keeps you going, even when your motivation is down?
Brit: The number one vision is that most women don’t believe in themselves. And most women are afraid and overwhelmed. We think mainly about women who are in their twenties-early forties. It’s this pivotal time in life, you’re making a lot of important decisions. You’re getting married, you’re changing careers, you’re having children, you’re buying houses. And often, women are so overwhelmed and so afraid to make a leap to do anything new or different, they don’t even think to spend time on theirselves, to keep trying things and growing. They get to this place in their thirties, where maybe they got married, they had their kids, they have their job, but they’re still not happy. I’ve seen it now so many times, where they’ll take that chance on themselves, they’ll either change careers, change something about their life, decide to learn something new that sparks them up like nothing else has before, and their life changes. And I’ve been stopped in airports in Durango, CO, of all places, where women cry because they see me and know me from Brit & Co, and tell me some story about how they’ve changed their life because of something we did, and that’s why I keep going.
Show Notes
• How Brit saw her inner creativity evolve through childhood and adolescence.
• Why she decided to leave her job at Google to launch Brit + Co at 25.
• What it was like for Brit meeting her husband at 19.
• Brit’s highs and lows with Brit + Co.
• What is was like to have to lay off members of her team after Facebook algorithm changes.
• Having a decentralized team means Brit + Co hasn’t taken a hit during quarantine.
• Letting go of control and finding balance as an entrepreneur.
• Brit’s ‘North Star’ when her motivation is low.
• How creativity can equate to courage.
• Ways that Brit pushed through some of her own insecurities.
• The private/public divide and how Brit decides where the boundaries are.
• Dealing with criticism and juggling motherhood and career.
• How Brit has managed to lessen some of the demand that she puts on herself.
• What Brit is reclaiming for herself in her journey of personal growth.
References
Teach Me Something New with Brit Morin
Featured Black Female Voice
You may remember Aminatou from our HEROINE episode “Road to Independence” where we talk about becoming more creatively independent and growing in leadership.
Aminatou is a fierce boss lady and digital powerhouse. She’s been named in Forbes 30 Under 30 in Tech and listed as Women to Watch by KQED Arts.
Here’s a quick update about what Aminatou is up to now:
She’s releasing a new book on July 14th with her friend Ann Friedman called Big Friendship
Releasing new episodes on her podcast, Call Your Girlfriend
You can find more about Aminatou’s work on Call Your Girlfriend and on Instagram @aminatou.
One Last Thing
If you preorder my book, Break the Good Girl Myth, before July 28th at goodgirlmyth.com, you will receive a bonus training (~$300 value) to help you design your creative purpose.
In the training, you'll learn:
➕ The one intention you must clarify to get clear about your creative purpose
➕ How to more easily bring shape to your creative purpose by choosing one of the four creator paths
➕ A powerful process for choosing a direction if you have a lot of interests and passions
➕ How to turn your creative dream plan into an actionable, creative dream plan