Explore Kristen Nielsen Donnelly's journey in the Educational Services Industry

I am somebody who considers myself very rooted in my family, my identity and what my mission in life is. I see myself as living outside of bounds too. I just have a strong belief that I cannot do everything on this planet alone. However, I don’t feel rooted or restrained in my professional identity. I was incredibly privileged to grow up in a family full of “cheerleaders” who are so supportive. My parents gave me both roots and wings and that’s one of our family mottos. That’s what ‘rootless’ means to me but I love to be challenged to think about it in a different way. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

I am the oldest of two in a very close-knit family. We have owned a manufacturing company in Philadelphia for about 20 years. We make dye essentially. My father was the sole owner for a really long time and my brother and I have just taken over it. We make things you use all the time but don’t know who makes it. Our goal is to make it so well you don’t have to think about us. The family’s mission statement is to “impact lives and create wealth”. That wealth is a wholistic thing, it is financial, emotional, spiritual, economic, all kinds of wealth for our family, employees, stakeholder, customers and everybody else. In terms of my family, that’s been the thrust of our lives. What does what I am doing today impact the lives of the people around me? How do I live a life of service? How do I lean into the idea that I have but one wild and precious life and how am I going to use it? How do I love the person in front of me in this precious day in this way? Our company is called “Abbey Color”. Having Abbey as a fifth member of our family for so long has constantly brought us back to what really matters, people who are fed, clothed, housed, loved and respected. Those are the basics, everything else becomes gravy. We work with that. I think that’s been a big part of my rootedness, the idea that we had a mission and a purpose statement as a family, which I admit is a bit odd. That shaped my childhood a bit differently compared to my friends’. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

It was exhausting. So, my family bought the company was I was seven. My dad had worked in Corporate America before that and he knew pretty clearly the values he wanted to bring with him and the values he wanted to leave behind. Boundaries were not really part of my childhood. We’ve had family meeting in nearly every vacation we’ve had since I was thirteen because we needed to be involved and understand what was going on. I mean, he didn’t share the financial reports with us until we were old enough to understand it but we knew the names of the employees, the names of the products that were being made, etc. We make a product we needed to send popsicle sticks along with it. They have to be separated and put into rubber bands. My brother and I had to do that for hours in front of the TV to save the people at work that time. We got Christmas gifts for the folks every year and we were also aware very early on of the privilege that we were born with. When my dad was young, he very skilled in baseball and he got a baseball scholarship to college. He would have never gone to college without that scholarship and therefore would never be in this position. We needed to live a life that respected that. My brother and I joke all the time that we were born on “third base”. Once we get home, it’s our job to hit as many RBIs as possible, it’s our job to bring everyone else home because we got a real big head start and we know it. We live that all the time, that was drilled into us from a very young age. We had financial and educational privilege. I’ve sat in so many school rooms, I have three post-graduate degrees and I am a lady. There are millions of girls around the world that can’t read because their culture says they can’t. I am aware in every single breath I take what a privilege that is. So, that’s a big part of it. However, my dad never missed anything important for our family. There was a boundary. If I had a piano recital at 7 o’clock, he was going to be there but that meant sometimes that he went to work at three o’clock in the morning. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

The primary answer is that I am not really good with numbers. A big piece of our family statement is the understanding that each family member also takes the gifts that they have and challenge them. None of us are completely well-rounded people. I grew up in the 90s when every college wanted a well-rounded student. Everybody’s got strengths and weaknesses and you get to a certain point in your life where everybody is chasing those strengths, focusing on your weaknesses is just going to waste time. You just acknowledge them, find other people in your team to fill them and you develop your strengths as much as possible. I am purely curious, I love words, stories, am obsessed of understanding patterns of how the world works. My dad’s patterns were all in numbers while my patterns are all in words and ideas. When I went to school as un under-graduate I originally wanted to be a youth worker because I love working with teenagers. That was going to be my place in this family, I wasn’t going to be in the day-to-day operations of the business but I was still going to fulfill the mission statement to impact lives and generating wealth. For a host of reasons, I was a youth worker for a little while until I decided that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I stumbled into a master’s degree in Social Work. That helped me define how I position myself in the world as somebody who really carries the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. Every human gets to make the decisions for themselves and if there are structural things in place, they need to be moved so they can make better decisions. Then we work that out but everybody is responsible for their own lives. There may be systems again that but you control your own emotional health. I talk about privilege all the time because I know how much I swim in it. I went to this incredible graduate program at Bailer University and had incredible mentors. Every time I asked a question, they would look at me and say that was a great question I had to find the answer to. I always thought that they are supposed to have the answer as they are the smart professors. Instead, they would insist that I actually had the answers and just had to find them. All of my questions came down in particular to the specific nature, society and culture of people of Northern Ireland which is the place I got my very first job after college. I spent a year teaching Sex Ed there. I left Northern Ireland to go to Texas for graduate school and when my time in Texas was over, I realized that all of my questions had to do with Northern Ireland. So, I moved back there and did my PhD. I studied how words form communities, how the specific languages that groups of people use bind them together into a community. I have taken that combined with my insane love of stories, my insatiable curiosity, my love of books which were my true friends before anybody else was and my human best friend, Dr. Erin. We combined all of our powers and now we spend our time doing empathy education. Understanding that the best way to answer to: “What am I going to do with this one wild precious life?” is to help other people see what we’ve been privileged enough to be educated in. That’s the journey now. It’s still fulfilling my family’s mission statement about impacting lives and creating wealth. I’m still the COO of the parent company, I support my brother as the CEO. He oversees the day to day in the factory and I’m his wing woman in running the business. Some days I am primarily the COO and not the empathy educator. I love the balance and the challenge. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

You absolutely can educate others in a field you are passionate about. That is one of the primary posters of our work: everybody has something that they can teach other people about whether it’s a very personal trauma that we can understand or a hobby you’ve picked out and we can learn more about. One of my posters is that we all have things to learn from each other. So, I have three basic mottos in my life. One is: “When somebody shows you who they are, believe them” from Maya Angelou. That’s one of the driving forces of my life. The other one is: “Different people are different and yet we are all the same”. That delightful balance. The last is: “Everyone is more complicated than we give them credit for”. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I have spent a lot of time in YouTube. My partner and I do a lot of videos around empathy and empathy building. We have a lot of conversations around inclusivity versus diversity and why I hate the word ‘tolerance’. I do lot of conversations of ‘equity’ versus ‘equality’ and we do them through talking about culture. So, humans are invested in stories. A lot of us learn about ourselves and cultures by the art we consume from TV, movies, books, documentaries, etc. So, we’ll take tv shows like Bridgerton for example and do episode by episode recap that talk about the deeper stuff that’s going on in it. We talk about the romance genre and what it means to celebrate pleasure from marginalized groups. We talk about the way they bungle the race conversations, about the feminine agency that is happening underneath the table. We analyze all of that. When you as a viewer watch Bridgerton, you can hopefully get a more empathetic view. Empathy is an emotion of sympathy; you feel bad for something or you recognize that something isn’t great about someone’s life. You combine that with an attempt to understand. Either you understand because you’ve gone through that yourself or you educate yourself around that understanding. Understanding very clearly is not condoning anyone. I can get your motivations and still think you’re a crackpot. That’s my right as a human being. However, my responsibility as a human being is to understand where you’re coming from. That’s our work. We talk a lot about understanding. Honestly, we’ll do a video about a documentary that is made about girls in Afghanistan and one of the things that we have to remember all the time to talk about is that we’re all human beings. Just because they look different from you and have different life experiences doesn’t mean that they’re not human beings. They’re not statistics on a spreadsheet, they’re not the headline of the nightly news. They are humans and if you think 20 minutes thinking about those humans, you’ll be a richer person. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

There’s a quote by Anne-Parker Coleman that I learned in undergrad that says: “Your calling is where your deepest passion meets the world’s deepest need”. That’s my answer for why I do this work. I am convinced that what we’re talking about each other is terrible and is getting us to where we are. Since the summer of 2020, Erin and I have had a lot of intentional conversations about how do we respond to this world. We have the training, the time, all these things, how do we respond? What we noticed was that no one was talking about how hard it was to do life with people who are different than you but how incredibly mandatory it is. We’ve lolled ourselves in our sense of security that you can adjust yourself with people who are exactly like you and you can’t. You can do that on Twitter but you can’t do that on real life. So, how do we bridge that gap? I got a really great training as a listener and a question asker. Erin’s got a great training as a question asker and an educator. So, let’s mash all that together and your answer to ‘why’ is because this is where our deepest passion meets the world’s deepest need. We absolutely believe that understanding is not condoning and we will spend the rest of our lives teaching that principle. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

If somebody says they don’t need an empathy coach, my answer would be “okay”. I don’t know how to convince someone that they need to have empathy for other people. That’s not my work. My work really comes in when people for example say that they know they should listen to sexual assault survivors but their knee jerk response is to ask what she was wearing. I love the space in between these things. I love it when people come to me very confused and say that they know that black lives matter but why don’t all lives matter. I respond that I love the question and I want to dig into that. Someone might not understand why the Washington football team’s name was so bad. Great question, I would love to unpack that. I would show that person all these activists who have been doing it forever who they’ve never encountered because social media is a circle and we just keep talking to people like us. Let me expand that. That’s the answer to the questions. There are lots of social scientific research that say that we live richer lives when we live it with difference in terms of organizational strength. The more inclusive your management team is, the stronger and resilient your organization is, the less crisis it will have, the more diverse it will be, the less you’ll spent on employee turnover. I also fundamentally believe that humans want to do their best. Most of us don’t want to actively harm other people. So, when somebody calls you a racist, you know that’s harmful and you’re really embarred, you double down and say you’re a good person. Somebody like me can come along and say that those two things can be true at the same time. You can be a very good person and entirely accidentally racist. So, let’s talk about that. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

A lot of people that come to me have been watching the news and don’t understand it. they have a question they have no idea where to ask. One of the first conversations we had about this was with somebody who was a white woman who didn’t understand what the big deal was with asking her black employee if she could feel her hair. She just wanted to feel the cornrows because she thought her hair was cool. First of all, we don’t need to touch anybody’s hair or body. She didn’t know how to ask that question to anybody else. She knew that we were safe and were not going to judge her. That’s where it usually comes from, the DMs we get on Instagram, emails from folks who don’t know where to ask their questions. We’re happy to help. I have friends that are women of color or disability rights activists and they’ll have tons of people comment on their Instagram posts and stories. I know that they are exhausted from these comments and want these people to talk somewhere else. I will talk to this person or DM them only with the consent of the account holder. How you encounter us is through conversations like this. I spent a lot of time going into other incredible spaces people share their platform with me and I get to talk about it, people learn about me that way. People come to watch our recaps of “Bridgerton” and “The crown”, “The handmaid’s Tale” and find us in other spaces. We’re turning that content into a podcast soon so that more people encounter it. we’re going to do transcripts of these conversations so people who have difficulty viewing or hearing or can’t learn orally, can learn from writing. We’re trying to get into many things. I had the privilege of doing a Ted Talk, I’m applying for more. People don’t look for it that often so I try to be “obnoxious” so when they have a question, they immediately think of me as the person who will give them the answer. We want to be a default in someone’s brain. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

First of all, understand that you’re going to screw up a whole lot. You have no idea what you’re doing and that’s okay. There are a lot of people who know what they’re doing. Find the right ones and ask the right questions. We went through some coaches that were not good fits for us, that didn’t understand what we were trying to do and tried to put us into their box instead of acknowledging our box. One of the lessons we had to learn was to cut ties with people. You’ll screw up, waste money, you’re not going to know where it’s coming from for a little while, you’re going to make sacrifices. If you are in whatever you are doing primarily to make money, I cannot encourage enough to not do that. From my perspective, so much of making money on things these days is like lightning in a bottle, catching it is great. In terms of that, just get used to not knowing where things are coming from. So, set up other systems. So, if you’re doing something right now, are in a 9 to 5 job, want to break out and do something else just make sure you have enough in your account to make sure you can live without a paycheck for six months. That’s the minimum of what you’re probably going to end up doing. Talk to people who are doing it, find a grant, not a loan. Do a lot of the money stuff around that so you can breathe a bit as much as you can. Technically, this is my second job. I have two full time jobs. Our benefactor for a long time when we were trying to figure things was our parent company. We had the support of my brother and father who supported me 100%, that believed in me and where I wanted to go. They wanted to fund this. We went to the board of directors who loved it and accepted to fund it too. Here are the growth margins we needed to have and they would keep going. That’s our story. Our parent company gave us a safety umbrella, made sure we had health insurance, made sure that we could eat and keep a roof over our heads. Another thing I can say is that you won’t only screw up with your ideas but is actually good that you do. You are not your target market nor audience but all of us see the world from our own lenses. So, the more you put the product out there whether your product is your own brain or a widget that you made, the more you’re going to get feedback of how other people encounter it. So, you’re going to need to evolve and you need to figure things out and shift the situation. When we first started out, we were not empathy educators, that’s not a phrase we would’ve used for ourselves ever. We were doing something kind of like this and we called ourselves culture consultants. That’s really different. We had people come at us saying they didn’t know what it meant. We were so sure it was clear because we it was clear of the two of us. When someone tells you that something isn’t working instead of going defensive you can ask that person for ideas. None of us really know what we’re doing. We’re all just doing our best. So, we’ve been saying ‘yes’ to every opportunity we can for the last five years. I have spoken on VFW halls, I’ve done Zoom interviews, I’ve talked to high school classes. We said yes to everything not only to get exposure but for me to practice, to hone our skills. We had to make some hard decisions. There were times that organizations promised to give us a platform that would’ve been great but there wasn’t going to vibe, it didn’t jive with who we wanted and we didn’t want to be attached to that organization. So, even though they would’ve paid us, we said ‘no’ and did something else for free because it was more in line with what we were doing. That got to a point where I realized what we really wanted was for us to do speaking and education. So, instead of finding a business coach, we found a speaking coach. We were chasing that instead. It’s 94,000 pivots before finding out what you’re going to do and you keep pivoting. It’s messy and you have to let it be. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

Not a lot of sleep and a lot of hubris. We definitely thought we had something so special that everybody would jump on board with immediately. That didn’t happen. We had some targets which were given to us. We didn’t really know what we were doing. Our family company sold widgets, selling training is a whole different thing. So, this was a learning curve for everybody, not just Erin and myself, it was a learning curve for my family too. That first little bit was a lot of heartfelt conversations. You may set a goal you think is realistic for a certain period of time and you may later realize that goal wasn’t realistic. So, when is it realistic? Who do we need to talk to make it realistic? How do you do all of these stuffs? It is much more humility than we ever anticipated. Leaving Academia where the entire point is to scrape and tear other people down to be the expert and then moving to business where you had to be collaborative was one of my best choices. It was full of people that weren’t me and that was a whole shift. I fell in love with collaboration. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

I don’t think I’ve found the perfect audience and I don’t know if there exists such thing. People talk about it as though you’re going to find that golden egg and it doesn’t work like that. What I did was, I showed up everywhere, in any networking event I could. I showed up in everything I could faking it until we made it. I have Ph.D. in Sociology which is about analyzing systems. I focus on gender, religion and language. I know a whole lot about those categories, how they overlap. I am really comfortable in what I know. The list of what I know versus what I don’t know versus, what I need to actively unlearn and relearn in a different way, that list is very small. I’m really proud of that PhD. I wrote a book and got a PhD out of it. what a PhD in philosophy means is that someone is really good at project management, they’re really curious and an independent worker. It doesn’t mean that I have everything together. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

Write it all in pencil, you’ll probably going to change it. Get to know Canva if you’re not good with graphic design because it’s free and simple. Be a sponge, learn as much as you can. Let your brand be new and curious. You can still be an expert and be new, that’s something a lot of people don’t grasp. You can be an expert at this field but new at the job. I’m terrible with branding, I don’t really understand it. I have friends who are great at it. I sit them down, order pizzas and talked at them with how I wanted to be and they talked back at me with what they heard and we heard from there. I know I can’t do any of this stuff so I found people that could. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

I don’t have an answer. I tried showing up as much as I could. We tried Facebook Live and it didn’t work. My advice would be to keep track of what’s working, tell yourself you’ll be doing it for three months, evaluate and be ready to drop stuff. So, pick a social media platform. Right now, Clubhouse is great for teachers, trainer and speakers. I think TikTok isn’t a great thing for entrepreneurs to be on even though there are rumors that it is. I am no social media expert so I have no idea. We decided about the things we would spend time doing and where we would do them. I absolutely abhor the word ‘hustle’ and ‘grind’ because that kind of really celebrates exhaustion which is a side effect directly related with being an entrepreneur, it shouldn’t be a goal. Find people to delegate tasks to and get feedback honestly. If you go to a business pitch session to get a grant and everybody says it is not a viable business option, maybe it really isn’t and that’s okay. I know I might have crushed your dreams with that but some of this journey is that. Some of the journey is realizing maybe you’re not the person to make money doing a certain thing. Understanding where you’re going to cut your loss is a good idea too. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

You show up consistently somewhere every time. So, pick a thing, show up there and be consistent. People don’t want as many bells and whistles as we think they do. If you’ve never been on YouTube, you need to spend some time there. The people that have the biggest audiences are the ones who show up and talk to the camera but they show up the same way on the same day every single time. I swear that this is what people are craving. What we know from research is that millennials and GenZ which is who every entrepreneur is going after because we’re the ones with the buying power and increasingly decision-making power. What we want, and I say this confidently as an older millennial who does research on GenZ, is reliability and vulnerability. They want to know you’re going to be where you are when you say you’re going to be there and they want to know they’re not being fooled. They don’t want to think you’re perfect. I think a lot of the really aggressive toxic positivity is going to start dying pretty quickly because people are exhausted by it. You have to show up, as yourself, as your product, especially if you want to do coaching. I’m not necessarily hiring your skillset, I’m hiring how well you listen, I’m hiring how well you address real life problems. I don’t care that you got somebody else to seven figures. It doesn’t mean you can get me to seven figures because I may not be that person. I want to know if you can get me there, if you can talk to me. So, testimonials are great, are important but you need your audience to get to know you. For example, we go live every Monday morning at 11 am on YouTube and Facebook and our audience knows that. They also know that it they miss it, they can replay it on our channel on Tuesday and it’s going to show up on our Podcast on Wednesday. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

Well, first of all, you’re not tacos, everyone cannot love you. You need to get really comfortable, really fast with admitting you are wrong sometimes because when we know better, we do better. We can’t know everything. I make mistakes all the time. Second of all, not everybody is going to click with you and that’s okay. Third of all, how you get better at everything is practice. People aren’t looking for slick packaging. We know the Kardashians are fake; they are going to be the last major family that gets away with that. That’s not what we’re looking for, everybody is taking down TikTok starts now, going after beauty vloggers, we don’t want the veneer anymore, we want to know you. I talk about inclusivity, empathy, vulnerability, racism, gender stuff. There are people who don’t think I should be in these spaces. There are also people who want me to be in these spaces because they can’t be there themselves and want me to be speaking for them. There are people who are completely indifferent and don’t want to have these conversations at all. I know in the core of my being that these are the conversations Erin and I need to be having. We have tons to learn, we’ll screw up, listen to as many people as we can, we are constantly looking to grow. Fundamentally, this is the space we know we want to be in. If we left because a couple of people didn’t want us to be there, we wouldn’t be true to ourselves and might not respect all the other people who might want us there. There are balances to this. If you’re on year 3 and haven’t made any money, you still have no audience, maybe not the space for you. I would encourage you to talk to somebody about that. Innately, if you change who you are because somebody doesn’t like it, you are robbing the else of your wisdom. That’s what I could encourage folks to keep in mind. In terms of mindset, that’s really hard. There are a lot of great methods and ways to get more comfortable in yourself. I’m in “Fake it till you make it” group and find other people around you feel comfortable with, people who can carry your trauma for you when you can’t do that for yourself. That’s your circle. For some people that’s a coach. I have a wonderful coach myself. Erin is that person for me, my mother is that person for me, a couple of other friends can be part of that support system. We’re just constantly holding each other up in that way and they remind me not to change because somebody on the internet is mad at me. Sometimes I’m speaking about a marginalized community and if a member of that community says that he felt offended by what I said, my immediate response is to thank that person for telling me and apologizing that I hurt him. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

Every business coach would say yes but it’s important for people to have a balance. Everybody familiar with Harry Potter will know there’s e professor called Horus Slughorn in the sixth book who “collects” people. He maintains relations with people he thinks are important because he wants that clout. We all know people like that in real life. Is it important to know influential people in your space? Absolutely. Should you go after them and ask them to do things without a relationship first? No, that’s creepy, don’t do that. My speaking coach is a big name and endorses me and it’s a big deal, it’s exciting. However, I wouldn’t want her to do it if she didn’t actually know me or my work. I’m a huge anti “pay for play” person. I don’t believe in buying followers, paying to speak places unless it’s a particular culture of your industry. I got asked a couple of weeks back to pay $5,000 to speak on a podcast and I thought they were joking because I would never pay that amount of money. I’m a big believer of relationships because change and growth happen when we’re in a relationship. Do we need those influential people? Yes. Just don’t slide into their DMs asking them to promote your product because they’re exhausted from that. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

You have your story; your power and we need to hear your voice. I don’t care how old you are. Nonetheless, you also need to realize that if you’re 22, the market doesn’t probably want you as a lifestyle coach for people in their forties and that’s life and that’s okay. That’s how the market works. That doesn’t mean you can’t be a great lifestyle coach to focus on teens, their peers or someone in their late twenties. Part of understanding your market is understanding who you are, what you offer. Sometimes is not just a matter of time, expertise is earned for sure but it’s also not gained only through longevity. I know 65-year-olds who don’t know about empathy as much as I do. I’ve spent 30 years thinking about it, that’s different. I am the worst interviewee for this kind of thing because my answer to question is saying that everything is messy. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

I don’t have the answer to that because I’m not a coach. What we really are is educators. I’m great at walking side by side with you and solving your emotional problems but I’m probably going to throw you to a therapist really quick if it gets too intense. Part of my social work understanding is that I only work with people a certain way and there’s other people that are good for them. We’re not anti-racism educators because that’s not what we do, for a ton of reasons. We’ll work with you on your empathy and when it’s time to work on anti-racism we’re going to address you to some other folks we think would be great for you. In terms of how do you make money, there are so many people that can answer that question and my tip for finding the person that can help you with that is find the person who listens to you and asks what your goals are and their first question is not how much revenue you want to make? Find the person who asks you what difference you want to make, what impact you want to make. Find somebody who’s first question is not “who is your ideal client?”. Nobody actually knows the answer to that question. Making revenue is a pipe dream, is a goal you can not do much about 90% of the time, especially when you’re starting off.  Figure out what change you want to be in the world and work backwards from there, it is a much more authentic business, you’ll be burned out a lot less. Find folks that resonate with you there. Both Erin and I have written books but none of you would want to read them. We’re in the process of writing one we hope you’re going to read but we’re researchers so we have interns, a research institute and a partnership with a university down in Charleston, North Carolina. So, we’re gathering and analyzing data and while we’re doing that, I’m not just going to wait to make money just on that book. I’m going to be doing other stuff. I’m going to be chasing Ted Talks to get more credibility. There are a lot of business folks for whom a PhD means nothing. They want to know my business credits. That’s how you get in. I know it’s messy but I will say that your story, your calling, the thing that you want to spark with, we all need it. the world is constantly changed, improved, evolving because humans take the risk to share their gifts with the rest of us. If I can beg you to do that because we need you. Those of us who are already out here are doing what we can but if you’ve got a spark we haven’t filled yet, that means we need you to fill it. Please come join us, get out there. The details are annoying, stressful and overwhelming but there are a lot of folks that can help you with that. No on can help you with that spark, so, if you’re listening to this and you’ve got it, chase it. it may no be something you can make money on but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

I hold myself very loosely. The things I see as priorities, the emotions I have, the world view that I have, I spend a lot of time reminding myself it’s not the only one. I do the best I can to decenter myself from the world that I experience. That makes it easy for me to see when there’s a hole that needs to be filled and for me to fill it. it doesn’t become about my baggage around that or my fear around that. It becomes about “I need to serve and there’s the service”. My mindset is entirely one of service. That’s why I’m here. I believe very firmly that we’re spiritual being having a human experience. We are eternal and there are lots of other things that happen around the universe than we understand. If I believe that truly than that means my life here is but a blimp in the grand scheme of everything. My job is to make everything better while I’m here. I’m going to screw up. I’m going to screw up, some people might even consider me terrible. You just do the best you can every day and do the best you can the next day. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly

I actually have two. One is that you can do any of this alone. I saw a post recently saying that “Alpha females hunt alone” and I think that is dumb and toxic. The other one is the vibe we have going on about being a Girl Boss. I’ve especially seen it on Instagram. That toxic positivity, claiming that everything is fine, is a mirage. We are allowed to have complete breakdowns in the bathroom. That’s not a shameful thing, that’s just life. To me, those two things come together. If you are somebody who thinks that you can do everything by yourself, I guarantee you also have toxic positivity and vice. It just can’t work that way. The biggest myth about entrepreneurship is that it’s something you do by yourself. Even if nothing else, you didn’t build the building that you’re sitting in. we all need each other all the time. So, those are two entrepreneurial advice I would burn with fire. The human experience is so much more beautiful, vast and messy than Instagram and TikTok lets it be. – Kristen Nielsen Donnelly