Life is a journey of discovering yourself again and again
Guest post by Taylor Harrington
Hi Friends. I have a new friend for you.
Taylor Harrington is a skilled, empathetic, high-achieving, compassionate, visionary DEAR. She is currently the community at Dreamers&Doers, a highly curated community and PR Hype Machine™ catalyzing expansive success for women entrepreneurs and leaders.
In some ways, my book NAME YOUR WORK wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t become friends.
In early 2020, she sent me a note on linkedin to tell me that a workshop she attended with me in 2017 had changed the trajectory of her life and wanted to thank me for it.
Ummmm what?
The workshop she mentioned was the first one I ever hosted. I had literally never presented any of these ideas before.
Her reaching out set of a beautiful series of events for me. I realized that what I was up to really mattered and well beyond what I could do in a 1-1 or small workshop setting. And that how I approached what I was doing had grown in nuance and richness since 2017.
Taylor became a dear friend, someone who challenges me often with what she is accomplishing and, far more than that, WHO SHE IS as she goes about all the things she’s up to.
Wanted to share her fantastic forward with you ahead of the limited print edition launching July 25th at THE BOOK PARTY!
Life is a journey of discovering yourself again and again.
By Taylor Harrington
You, my friend, are about to dive into a process that will enable you to do that with intention, confidence, and love.
An Unboxable Leader is someone whose work doesn’t fit into one neat little category. I relate to that big time. Growing up, I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to be because choosing just one thing didn’t seem like enough. I felt alive tackling all sorts of projects, but I was lost when trying to describe their common thread. Without a compass for who I was, I said yes to too many things.
My search for a compass is how I ended up at Dana Ray’s workshop. You can imagine how validating it felt to be in a room full of people naming their throughlines. My life changed: for the first time ever, I said out loud who I was and where I wanna go.
As Dana likes to ask, “What’s the thread that runs through how you show up in the world?”
The process shared in Dana’s workshop helped me find clarity in myself, make smarter decisions, and find the people who would support that journey.
Dana taught me the importance of naming my work and why I do what I do. She stepped into my life to help me see that the dots in my zigzaggy path do connect and that there is power in pausing to name that connection. I learned to embrace that the traditional way of doing things isn’t for me and that’s okay. In fact, that’s more than okay—it’s great. I learned there are people out there who are also celebrating the journey of taking a nontraditional path.
In just a couple of hours, I was able to create a foundation for how I will name my work for the rest of my life. My Ground Truth emerged:
I seek to better understand people in order to build inclusive relationships and add more smiles to the world.
Suddenly, my major in advertising and minors in disability studies and entrepreneurship were woven together in this larger theme to learn about people.
If I didn’t have my Ground Truth, I would not have been able to tie my story together in a way that I felt confident saying and repeating. It allowed me to connect the dots and embrace that nothing about my experiences is random because they’re true to who I am. And they’re part of my path forward.
Over the next 12 months, whenever I was making a decision, I went back to my Ground Truth, asking myself if I was making a smart choice in alignment with who I am and where I wanted to go.
It was around that time, towards the end of my senior year, when a mentor of mine asked me what I wanted to do after graduation.
I leaned into my Ground Truth and said, “I want to make a difference. I want to connect people. I just spent the last four years learning to better understand others, and now I want to help them feel a sense of belonging.” I even added that I wanted to be surrounded by people like the ones I’d met at Dana Ray’s workshop.
His response was “I think I might know the perfect job for you. Have you ever heard of the author Seth Godin?”
That conversation led to a warm introduction, and later that month I was interning for Seth, which turned into a full-time role as one of six members of the Akimbo team.
I wholeheartedly believe that being able to articulate how I consistently show up in the world and consistently making decisions in alignment with my Ground Truth led me there. By sharing my Ground Truth and how it was connected to my dreams for the future, I found an opportunity entirely in line with that.
As you might imagine, my job title at Akimbo didn’t describe half of my projects—I was a professional “many hats wearer”. I built online learning programs, led community experiences, and created ways to connect people. I built programs that redefined what gathering looked like for people who’d opted into nontraditional career paths.
A couple of years into that work, I wondered how I could focus more on connecting with people directly and less on marketing. I went back to my Ground Truth, revised the language, and stuck it on my résumé, website, and LinkedIn.
I build powerful community experiences so that people can see the possibility of what could be.
This new expression of my Ground Truth built upon my original sentiment of wanting to better understand people. Now that I better understood people, I could help them see something new in their lives.
I tried this language on for a couple of months, weaving it into interviews and conversations, and I ultimately realized it was missing something. The possibility I was helping them see again and again was that they weren’t alone.
*Light bulb moment*
This led me to my current draft, the simplest one yet.
I create the opposite of loneliness in the world.
I learned this phrase “the opposite of loneliness” from the late Marina Keegan. In her commencement speech at Yale University in 2012, she shared, “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life... It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team.”
That’s what I want to feel and help others feel. That’s the feeling I continue to fall in love with and try to replicate in the world inside and outside work.
Today, I’m the head of community and the first full-time hire at Groove, a start-up that’s reimagining the vibe of coworking online, a place for people from all over the world to come together. It’s for career disruptors—people who agree that working solo, on our own unique paths, should be more social! It should be better!
And once again, I’m leading many different projects as an Unboxable Leader.
I’ve experienced firsthand the loneliness of paving my own path—the feeling that people around me just don’t get what I’m looking to create for myself. For years, I received unsolicited feedback: “Life would be so much easier if you just did it the normal way.” “Slow down.” “You’re doing too much. Be careful you don’t overdo it.”
And then I experienced the magic of finding people like Dana who really understood me, and everything changed.
I continue to lean into and understand new depths to my Ground Truth. I learn more about the truest version of me. I live it out more fully. The words I use grow with me.
Dana and her Ground Truth process changed my life, and I hope it can do the same for you. This process is powerful. It’s led me to new opportunities in line with who I am at my core. What a beautiful gift for us to be able to spend the rest of our lives naming who we are and building a life true to that name.