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Today’s Topic: VERSATILITY: BUILDING A BIGGER BOX with Guest Lisa Miller
My Co-host Anna Larson of NomadAbout and I were so excited to have guest Lisa Miller of Handwritten Aloha on. As a business professional who is very versatile in her business life, we couldn’t wait to dive into a Right Brain vs. Left Brain conversation with her! She’s a CPA & a Senior Consultant for Hawaii consulting firm by day and an amazing calligraphy artist every other second she’s not doing the other thing.
Versatility is defined by the internet as able to adapt or be adapted to many different functions or activities.
Does this not define Lisa with really using both sides of her brain. And well!!
Lisa Miller’s Bio:
Lisa Miller, Artist and Calligrapher, Owner of Handwritten Aloha based in Kaneohe, Hawaii. Born and raised in Hawai’i, Lisa Miller, learned italic style calligraphy at a young age, while hanging out in the art room after school.Her mother, Ann, bought Lisa her first Osmiroid calligraphy pen when she was twelve years old.
In 2003 Lisa was introduced to Plein air painting with oil and acrylics by well-known Hawai’i artist, Mark Brown. In the following years, she continued to paint with Mark, on her own and also broadened her capacity through art, watercolor and calligraphy workshops.
Handwritten Aloha, a boutique art and calligraphy design studio, highlights Lisa’s art, which now includes oil, acrylic and watercolor painting, often combined with modern and/or italic calligraphy. In learning to digitize her work, Lisa is able to design and reproduce artwork for commission and retail products.
Lisa is a CPA and works full-time as a Senior Consultant for a Hawaii consulting firm, strategically combining finance, operations, strategy and data analytics to achieve results and helping leaders achieve business success.
Toolkit: Google Drive
Anna & I talk about something we use daily. Like daily, daily. Google Drive. There are so many reasons why in my business that I appreciate this cloud-based storage for everything I use. I was a super fan of the M-word products, but when I started working with a client, they used Google Drive for many of their operational files and communicating that with the team. So it was a natural transition to use. Here are some of what Google Drive says on their sales page about it (Plus, you can start for free with this…drive it before you buy it…my kind of thing!)
Store any file
Keep photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more.
See your stuff anywhere
Your files in Drive can be reached from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. So wherever you go, your files follow.
Share files and folders
You can quickly invite others to view, download, and collaborate on all the files you want–no email attachment needed.
#Questions
So during our show, we like to ask 3 questions. Anna & I do pre-production strategy sessions and research our guests so we develop very customized type of questions for the 15 Minute Coffee Chat. When we researched the left brain vs. right brain, the infamous dress popped up and we thought this could be interesting.
Left Brain (Blue and Black) represents the numbers, analytical part of thinking, while the Right Brian (White & Gold) is the creativity part of how we think.
As of this writing, I see white & gold. Our initial research conversation happened around 11:00 am, and when I finally got around to making the above graphic for our show, it turned into 10:45 pm. Exhausted and went back to the same site, with the same pic and it SCREAMED black & blue!.
I freaked. A phone call was made at 11:00 pm to Anna and shared the same pic and screeched out “What color are you seeing?” She looked at me through Video Conferencing Cam thing and was like….”White & Gold” (I imagined her also mentally thinking “Fool” at the end of that answer.}
Her husband jumped in and he saw blue & black as well. And then we both were like “Whoa”. Was my brain telling me that it was a long day of work (on a Sunday) and it just wanted to shut down its creativity side and just get this done?
When we asked Lisa this question, she said “White & Gold”. We talked about how the brain does use both sides when doing all things. Some days, you may shift more to the Left and some days you may shift more to the right. Recognizing this in your business can help with putting Aces in Places. A term I learned from my previous job. And how Anna & I work on many projects together.
What color are you seeing? And then come back at a very different time and see if it changes for you!
Food for thought Question
Anna asked a great question regarding Lisa’s wonderful LinkedIn article written as a husband & wife series regarding Pop Up Concepts. Must read here.
She talks about 5 tips of When & Why Pop-Ups. If you aren’t familiar, a pop up concept is:
“Pop-up shops are taking over the retail world and rethinking traditional brick-and-mortar and big-box stores, but what exactly is a shop that ‘pops up’? Introduced as early as the 1990s in large urban cities such as London, Los Angeles, Paris, New York City, pop-up shops and pop-up retail are temporary retail spaces that sell merchandise of any kind. That’s right, just about every consumer product has been sold via a pop-up shop at one point in time. From art to fashion to tech gadgets and food, pop-up stores are exciting because they create short-term stores that are as creative as they are engaging. And, they come in all shapes and sizes.” {source: https://www.thestorefront.com/mag/what-exactly-is-a-pop-up-shop/}
We felt this concept of business had great ways to look at your business. This led us to ask Lisa about one of her tips, “When in doubt, innovate, or innovate anyway.“
#CoffeeCupSponsor
Loving Lisa’s Right Brain Coffee Created Mug (yes, that’s her design and art on her mug)!
Today’s Starbucks Mug is Japan style from my cousin’s best friend who had a rocking trip to a place I hope to cross off my bucket list. Doomo Arigato Gozaimasu Cuz!
We also shamelessly ask that if you want to sponsor a coffee mug for our next episode send us an email, a DM on Instagram or comment on our Facebook Video Live Post. Let’s make it happen.
Where can I find: Lisa Miller
If you need a Lisa in your life, find Lisa here
Mahalo for joining on our 15-minute coffee chat journey with my fellow boss lady cohost and friend Anna Larson!
If you missed last week’s coffee chat, click here.
