-------- work. --------

I see things differently.

I know how to make you see what I want you to see.

That sounds mildly sinister. 😂 But it’s also a fairly accurate description of what I’ve spent more than 25 years learning how to do.

My career has been built around identity, perception and response. I’ve helped industry giants, celebrities, founders and businesses figure out what they want people to see, understand, believe and ultimately do, and then I’ve helped build what was necessary to make that happen. Brand and identity. Direct response. Products and offers. Messaging and campaigns. Websites and customer journeys. Creative direction and production. I’ve helped my clients generate tens of millions of dollars, and I’ve had the unusual experience of working across enough of the pieces to see what happens when they actually collide in the real world.

That last part matters because I’ve never been particularly good at seeing those things as separate disciplines. I see what they’re doing to each other. A positioning decision changes the message. The message changes the offer. The offer changes what the customer expects. Something that looks like a marketing problem may have nothing to do with marketing. And sometimes the enormous thing everyone is trying to solve is being created by one tiny thing nobody thought mattered.

This is probably why I’ve always had trouble answering, “What do you do?”

Well... what are we trying to do?

One of the ways I eventually learned to explain my capability was B to Y.

My clients generally know A.
They know where they are.

They know Z.
They know where they want to go.

What they can’t clearly see is everything that needs to happen between the two.

I can see that space unusually well.

I can move out far enough to see the entire ecosystem and then move all the way in until I’m questioning one word, because sometimes one word really is changing the whole thing.

For a long time, I assumed this was simply the result of experience.

Do something for 25 years and, hopefully, you get pretty good at it. And experience absolutely matters. I have an enormous amount of information in my head because I’ve spent decades watching what people respond to, what they ignore, what they misunderstand, what makes them move and what makes something that should work fail.

But experience didn’t completely explain it.

There was something else I had been training myself to do for much longer than 25 years. I just didn’t know I was doing it.

I thought everybody did it.  Apparently not. 😂

-------- autism. --------    

At 48 years old, I found out I was autistic.

Suddenly, I had context for something I had been doing my entire life.

Autism didn’t give me my professional ability, and I don’t think autism automatically makes someone good at reading patterns. What I can see now is that living undiagnosed for 48 years required me to develop ways of understanding information that didn’t come naturally to me. 

I had been training myself to look beyond what was explicitly being said because, quite literally, I needed the additional information.

Then I took that same brain into a career centered around identity, communication, perception and response and spent another 25+ years sharpening it professionally. I didn’t know those two things were connected.  Now I can’t unsee it.

So I spent 48 years trying to figure out what everybody meant.

Here’s the strange part. While I was building a career around seeing things other people couldn’t see, I was also confused MOST OF THE TIME.

I knew I was smart. There was plenty of evidence that I was smart. I could walk into complicated businesses, understand what was happening, and solve problems other people couldn’t solve. But then I could have a completely ordinary conversation with another human being and walk away wondering if maybe I was a little bit stupid.

Not stupid, stupid. 😂

I just couldn’t figure out how everybody else seemed to know things nobody had actually said.

People leave an enormous amount of information out when they communicate. They assume you know what they mean. They assume you understand the context. They assume you caught the implication, recognize what they’re feeling, know what happened before you got there and somehow have access to all the information currently living inside their head.

I did not.

So I learned to look for more information.

If the words weren’t enough, I watched the face saying them. I watched the eyes. I listened to tone. I paid attention to behavior. I remembered what someone had told me before and noticed when what they were telling me now didn’t match. I looked for changes, inconsistencies, missing information and patterns. I collected all of it until I could fill in enough of the blanks to understand what was actually happening.

I didn’t know I was developing a lens.  I was just trying to function in the world.

And because I didn’t know my brain was different, I assumed everybody else was doing the same amount of work. I thought we were all taking in the words, comparing them with everything else we could see, looking for what didn’t fit, and then piecing together the fuller meaning. 

-------- identity. --------
                                    

I learned how to make myself understandable, too.  At least in pieces.

There’s another side to spending 48 years trying to figure out other people. While I was learning to read the room, I was also learning how to be read by it.

If you’re constantly paying attention to what people respond to, what confuses them, what makes them comfortable, what changes their expression, and what they seem to expect from you, you collect a tremendous amount of information about how you are being perceived. I got very good at understanding which parts of me made sense in which places.

I don’t mean I was walking around pretending to be different people. The versions were real. I have a serious business brain. I’m creative. I’m funny. I can be intensely analytical. I can walk into a room full of executives and know how to operate there. I can also spend an unreasonable amount of time delighted by some bizarre old thing I found for five dollars. Or find myself completely in awe at the idea that I have just a few months to plan what I want to try to grow in spring.  All of those people are me.

The problem was that I learned to separate them.

And then I chose a profession that made me exceptionally good at doing exactly that on purpose. 😂

Branding is largely an exercise in identity and perception. What do you want people to know about you? What matters? What doesn’t? What do we emphasize? What do we leave out? How do we create enough consistency that when someone encounters you again, they recognize what you stand for?

I’ve spent decades helping other people answer those questions. I understand how powerful positioning can be. I know how to take something complicated and make it clear enough for another human being to understand, remember, and respond to it.

So when it came to myself, I did what I knew how to do.

I positioned me.  Or at least I tried to.

But it just always felt like a lie.  By leaving out different parts of me, you couldn't really see me.

Business Kristen made sense in one place. God made sense in another. There were parts of my creativity that supported the professional story and parts that didn’t. There were things I was fascinated by that had absolutely no obvious relationship to the thing I was supposed to be known for, so those stayed somewhere else.

That’s probably why it took me so long to see what was happening. I wasn’t inventing versions of myself. I was selecting which true parts of myself another person was allowed to see.

And if you do that long enough, there’s a question waiting for you underneath all of it:

Who are you when nobody else gets to decide which parts belong?

-------- sight. --------

I started asking a different question.

Once I understood that I had spent most of my life collecting information other people didn’t seem to need, I started noticing how often the same process showed up everywhere else.

I don’t really accept the first layer of something very easily. I want to know what’s underneath it. If something doesn’t make sense, I pull on it. If two things contradict each other, I want to know why. If everyone around me seems perfectly satisfied with an explanation but there’s a piece that doesn’t fit, unfortunately for everyone involved, I’m probably going to keep asking questions. 😂

It happens in business, obviously. Someone tells me what the problem is, and my brain immediately starts looking around the problem. Is that actually what’s broken? What happened before it? What is it connected to? What are we assuming is true because we’ve repeated it so many times that nobody is questioning it anymore?

But I do the same thing with almost everything.

I do it with people. I do it with language. I do it with rooms, and objects and things somebody else has discarded. I can look at a plant that isn’t doing well and immediately want to understand what it’s trying to tell me. And I absolutely do it with Scripture. If I read something Jesus actually said and it doesn’t line up with something I’ve been taught my entire life, I need to know why. I want to go back to the source. What does it actually say? What was added later? What am I assuming because someone else handed me the conclusion before I ever looked for myself?

The subjects can look completely unrelated from the outside. To me, they aren’t. I’m doing the same thing over and over again: looking closer, gathering information, questioning the obvious explanation, finding the pattern, and trying to understand what is actually there.

That is probably the best explanation I can give you for why I share such a strange range of things. I’m not trying to establish myself as an expert in everything that catches my attention. Sometimes I’m showing you something I know deeply. Sometimes I’m letting you watch me investigate something I barely understand yet.

The lens is the constant.

And if you stay around long enough, you’ll probably start noticing something else: I’m not particularly interested in telling you what to see.

I’m much more interested in showing you where I looked so you can decide what you see for yourself.

-------- signal. --------   

The lens eventually became the work.

There was a point when I realized something that, in retrospect, should have been obvious much sooner: before I could build the right thing, I had to see the right thing.

For most of my career, the seeing and the doing happened together. A client brought me something they wanted to accomplish, I figured out what stood between where they were and where they wanted to go, and then I helped build B through Y. The value was easy to point to because there was something tangible at the end. A brand. An offer. A product. A campaign. A customer journey. A business that worked differently than it had before.

But none of that started with the deliverable. It started with what I could see.

That became especially obvious when I started paying attention to the distance between what a business believed it was communicating and what I was actually receiving from it. I could look at a website, an offer, an email, a piece of content or an entire brand and start forming an understanding before anyone explained what I was supposed to understand. Sometimes what I received matched the intention beautifully. Sometimes it absolutely did not.

And there it was again: the same gap I had spent my entire life navigating with people. What you mean and what you communicate are not necessarily the same thing.

The difference is that now I know better than to immediately fill in the blanks for you.

In fact, I don’t want the blanks filled in. I don’t want to know what you meant before I look, because the moment you tell me, I lose access to something valuable: the ability to experience what you’ve created without your explanation correcting it in my head.

That realization became Signal.

Signal is one expression of my lens, not the definition of it. It takes something I have been doing across people, businesses, language, and identity for most of my life and gives me a way to use it deliberately.

Instead of immediately fixing what I see, I can simply show you what I received and let you compare that with what you intended.

There’s something I really like about that, because I’m not handing you another person’s formula for what your business should be. I’m giving you information you normally cannot get from inside your own head.

What you do with it is yours.

-------- God. --------    

Two words: Be You.

Simple enough.

Except apparently I could make even that complicated. 😂

Those words came years ago, while I was finding my way back to God and beginning to recognize His voice in my life. At the time, I thought I understood them. Of course I should be myself. Who else would I be?

It has taken me years to realize how much I didn’t understand about that question.

I had spent decades learning to read other people so I could understand them. I had simultaneously learned how to make myself understandable to them. Then I built a career around identity and perception and became professionally skilled at deciding which information matters, which information distracts, and how to shape what someone else sees.

I knew how to position almost anything.

Including myself.

So when God said Be You, I don’t think He was giving me a branding strategy. I think He was beginning a much longer process of making me ask who that actually was.

What did He put here? What was actually me? What had I learned to become because it worked? What had I hidden because it didn’t fit? What had I decided was irrelevant because I couldn’t figure out how to explain it? How much of my identity had been organized around being correctly received by somebody else?

Those questions are still producing answers.

They’re also part of why I’m willing to share the process while it’s happening. I don’t think identity is something you solve by choosing three adjectives and writing them on a vision board. I think sometimes you have to look at the evidence of your own life. What keeps showing up? What comes naturally? What have you survived? What have you built? What have you been drawn toward again and again? What produces fruit?

And maybe most importantly: Who are you when you stop asking the world which parts of you are allowed to count?

I can’t answer that for you.

But I can show you what happened when I finally started asking it of myself.

--------  multiplication. --------    

I have been given a lot.

That sentence used to make me uncomfortable.

There is something about saying plainly that you are talented that feels like you are breaking a rule.

We’re much more comfortable talking about the things we struggle with. Tell people where you’re deficient and you’re self-aware. Tell them you know you’ve been given a lot and suddenly we need to have a conversation about humility. 😂

But pretending I haven’t been given much doesn’t make me humble. It just makes me dishonest about what God gave me.

I can do a lot of things. I can think strategically and make things with my hands. I can build a business and pick up a camera. I can see what’s wrong with a brand and what’s wrong with a room. I can write. I can produce. I can create. I can find something somebody else walked past and immediately see possibility in it.

And for years, I kept trying to figure out which of those things I was supposed to take seriously.

Which one was the business? Which one could make money? Which one would people understand? Which one deserved my attention? Which one should I become known for?

I think I was asking the wrong question.

What if my responsibility isn’t to decide which of the things God gave me are important enough to use? What if I’m supposed to use what I’ve been given instead of trying to organize myself into something that makes more sense to everybody else?

I don’t know which thing I’ve been given will matter most. I’m not sure I’m supposed to know.

That’s where Multiplication comes in.

It changed the way I look at what I’ve been given. Instead of asking which thing I’m supposed to choose, I’m learning to ask what I’m doing with what’s already in my hands.

If you'd like to understand why this is important to me, I've dedicated an entire page to it. :)

-------- substack. --------   

So, that’s a little bit of how we got here.

There is obviously more to the story. Fifty-three years is difficult to cram onto an About page, and I’m pretty sure neither of us wants me to try. 😂

But if you understand how I see, you understand a lot about why Soul Sparked exists and why you’ll find me talking about things that may not appear to belong together at first. Business. God. Identity. Autism. Things I’m building. Things I’m questioning. Things I find interesting for no immediately obvious reason. They all come through the same lens.

If you want to know more about me, see that lens in action or just see what I’m seeing today, come join me on Substack. That’s where I’m writing, thinking out loud, following patterns, and sharing what I find as I find it.

You don’t have to be interested in everything I’m interested in.

Just come curious.