Cara Jones
Founder & Producer
Storytellers for Good

http://storytellersforgood.com

“When I was a kid I had big dreams. I wanted to do great things for the world. Now, as I allow my dreams to breathe again, they are just as big as when I was a kid.” ~ Cara Jones

Telling a Different Kind of Story

It is a cold, foggy day. Cara drives over the Bay Bridge, from San Francisco heading east.

She thinks about how it used to be. There’s no photographer there to drive her around in a big news van. Nobody to figure out the directions or carry all the gear.

“On that day,” Cara says. “I had to arrange all the shoot details and pick up the videographer myself. When I was a reporter, I used to show up at the station and everything was taken care of.”

Cara shared her business idea with Ryan Rigoli of Soulful Brand, feeling scared just talking about it. She had just graduated from the PCC at New Ventures West and planned to be coach for single women entrepreneurs. As Ryan asked her questions, Cara started second-guessing that direction.

With 10 years in the broadcast industry, Cara had a passion for storytelling. But she didn’t want to cut the typical prime-time news. She wanted to shine a light on inspiring stories but didn’t know how.

Ryan recognized this as her deep calling, completely aligned with her previous work experience.

“Part of me wanted to scrap my history and start over in a completely new field as a way of erasing all the negative experiences I had in the industry,” says Cara. “At the same time, I didn’t want my experience to go to waste.”

Previously, after an award-winning career in TV news, Cara Jones had quit her job and bought a one-way ticket to Argentina, having “the most amazing adventure of (her) life.”

At that time, she carried this dream to tell inspiring stories with her. When she returned to the U.S., an agent told her that the job she was looking for didn’t exist.

“I thought I might have to create this job or keep looking,” she says. “I didn’t find anything that matched what I wanted to do and I didn’t know if I could actually get paid telling inspiring stories.”

Considering what it would take to do this on her own, she wondered:

• Where do I focus my energy?
• How do I create a business out of doing what I love?
• I am just one person—how can I do something of significance?
• How do I bring this to life?

Cara crosses the bridge to the East Bay. She feels small and breaks down in tears.

Even though she has years of experience, she spends the whole day accompanied by doubt. She hears a voice in her head asking, “can I still do this—will people question me?”

The pro-bono video she creates that day becomes the first project on her new website. She needed content, and she had it. But she still wasn’t sure if this could be a business. It felt bigger than her. Right behind the doubt, Cara found herself intimidated.

Creating a Business & Making it Work

“I couldn’t see myself at a desk job,” Cara says. “I knew this work was calling to me and had been for years. It felt like the time to do it. I knew if I didn’t, it would always bother me.”

She recalls one day, right before New Year’s Eve. Her friends wanted to go out that night in a limo, and when they asked her to join, she burst out crying.

She didn’t have the money.

Cara marks this as one of several emotional breakdowns she had during that time—not being sure about what she was doing. Some people were extremely supportive and others were saying, “just get a job—something, who cares?”

For 6 months, Cara spends days alone with her computer, watching her bank account shrink.

She finds herself confronted by the decision to invest in this or find a full-time job.

“Up to then, my life circumstances had taught me to ‘leap and the net will appear,’” she says. “When I would feel fear, I would just do something. From leaving my reporter job, to traveling, to arriving in San Francisco without a job and 10 days later getting two freelance gigs.”

While doing some brand strategy work with Soulful Brand, she understood who she really was and why she was here. Cara made her decision. A decision that would draw on the power of her community.

“I used to tell people I just had this little project,” she says. “I knew that if I held an event it would be harder for me to turn back—I have that tendency. An event would make it a real thing. I started planning a fundraiser for my first round of pro-bono videos for non-profits.”

Cara also did a letter campaign to all her friends and family in an effort to make her dream come true. Between that and the event, she raised $12,000. This step became the way for her to get her name out and her portfolio built.

“I felt this great sense of accountability,” says Cara. “These people rallied to support me and I thought, ‘now I have to make something happen!’ There was a lot of support from the Bay Area and beyond. I had declared my vision to a broader world.”

Her fundraising event turned everything around. She made a connection with someone that led to a part-time teaching job at the local Academy of Art University. This gave her grounding as she continued to build Storytellers for Good.

She explains, “I could work one day a week and have time to do my other work.”

Epilogue

As a result of seeing the video Cara shot that day, crossing the Bay Bridge, one of Cara’s biggest client is still with her today.

“I feel like I’m in phase two right now,” says Cara. “I’ve established myself as a business that has been successful. I have more work than I can handle. This is my busiest year!”

Cara is scaling back her part-time job at the Academy of Art and while doing 2–3 video projects a month. She’s also booked on projects for the next 6 months.

Where is the coaching in all of this?

“My coaching shows up in my ability to be more present with people in an interview capacity,” she says. “While learning the skills of a coach allowed me to coach myself through this process.”

For her, the doubt used to be a scream. Now it’s a whisper. Cara has experienced the power of following her heart and having things just show up. And chances are that’s going to keep happening ; )

“I don’t know what’s coming next year but so far so good!” she says.

Cara continues to dream.

“When I was a kid I had big dreams,” she says. “I wanted to do great things for the world. In my news job, I kept measuring myself against other people—having families, being married. I tried to be like everyone else. In the process, I turned some of my dreams down. Now, as I allow my dreams to breathe again, they are just as big as when I was a kid. I am feeling the fear and doubt—they bring me alive.”

Cara reminds us that fear is really excitement without breathing. She sees her fear as a sign that she’s moving in the right direction. And then she takes a breath before leaping.

What’s coming next for Cara?

• Telling her own story (she’s currently writing a personal piece she wants to share with single women).
• Helping others recognize the stories that limit them and move into the ones they want to live.
• Leading workshops that will help people tap into their stories.

As Cara shines a light on inspiring stories, she finds new value in “the power of television and the media to influence the way people think, act and experience life.”

Given the authentic nature of the Storytellers for Good videos, it may not be just the light of the camera that’s shining. This reporter seems to have a light all her own.

Advice for Coaches

If you’re dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough. I wish someone had told me that fear and doubt are just part of the process. Don’t look at running into them as a roadblock. If fear and doubt are there, you’re doing something right. Be willing to step out of line with your peers at times. We might not make the same salaries as the people we went to college with. We have a different kind of path than other people.

For the sake of raising awareness, see if you can recognize your own and other brands you know in these 3 descriptions of common types of brands today (you may have a center of gravity around one of these, but on a given day, your activity pulls you towards another)…

A bland brand is one that does not risk standing out. They may not put out marketing communications at all, or when they do, they sound so much like everyone else that they may as well be invisible. Bland brands are often unconsciously limited by a fear of being rejected and a fear of success. This is how most of us start out. It’s nobody’s fault that in the beginning, we are often unclear, so the best we can do comes across as the generic professional. A bland brand needs clarity and a willingness to be seen.

An egoic brand puts out marketing communications that create dissonance and distrust through fake posturing and fear-based messages. Egoic brands are unconsciously limited by a focus on self-success and a fear of failure. They forget about who they are serving while worrying mainly about money and status. They want to appear more than who they are because, more than likely, that’s how they’ve been taught to do business. Egoic brands need to relax and let themselves be real. Ironically, the most honest and open brands gain more trust than the ones who pretend everything is perfect.

A soulful brand elicits marketing communications that foster resonance and connection through clear and inspiring messages. Soulful brands practice whatever it takes to be conscious and free of limitations. As a result of knowing and embodying their true selves, they are aligned with their highest intent in thought, word, and action. This is a matter of choice, not a destination. If this is your path as of this moment, then you already have a soulful brand.

When an entrepreneur’s brand identity can be articulated in alignment with their true self, it can be called a soulful brand. Until then, brands are often unconsciously limited by their ego and do a disservice to the quality of the conversation possible between themselves and their clients.

With too much ego, a brand can either become an overtly grandiose image of who they want to be (but are not) or a bland, diminished, homogenized member of the crowd. When there is little acceptance of the true self, the brand identity and its promotional efforts feel off. No promotional strategy can offset the feeling of being untrue to oneself—they must play off one another for both the entrepreneur to feel good inside, and for the customer to feel good engaging with them.

Regardless of where your brand is today, know that your intention matters most. From there, you can find a balance with the identity you are showing others via your business and the identity that is the true you.

No rush,… we’re all practicing ; )

• • • • •

For some ways to bring more consciousness to your brand, check out our free ebook: “4 Key Elements to a Soulful Brand.”

But at the beginning of each project, they often didn’t really know who they were. This was my favorite stage of the process—the unknown that held the potential for self-realization.

I realize now, branding was truly never about the illustrations, the photographs, the placement of these elements together, or the colors… those were simply the things we focused on while traveling a road seeking clarity, asking the question, “does this feel like you?”

Branding was always about the journey my clients went through—starting first with this feeling of being in a fog, and ending up with this sense of who they were and as a result what they would do to share themselves with customers. In other words, with inner clarity came inspiration.

While we engaged in discussion around the way things looked, this design process of saying “yes” to one idea and “no” to another, was simply the refining of their sense of self; their practice of articulating by way of conversation what was aligned with who they were and what was not.

Over time, the design iterations gave them a way to affirm themselves, so that when the designs were removed from the conversation, even without the mock-ups, or the slide presentations… even if they were in an elevator or on the beach, they could tell you who they were without the need for a logo or an image.

Who they were, their brand, had become embodied with clarity; they lived and breathed their identity with greater depth and ease. Not because their logo was blue or because it had an eye that looked like a hawk. They embodied clarity because of the organic, iterative conversations—you know, the way people change over time when you ask them to declare over and over again who they really are.

The fact that they had this end product, be it a new logo, or poster, or website—this was simply a representation, a reminder of the clarity they had attained in themselves.