You’ve probably noticed that I have been making some changes lately on this site and on my social channels. What you don’t know is that I have been going through a reengineering process to fulfill my passion and mission of advocating for cultural awareness and diversity… little did I know that I was going to lose my cool in the process.
I’m a lover of social studies and have a girl-crush on Brené Brown who in her most famous talk speaks about leaning into the discomfort. Of course, before I set out to do that, I needed to have my parachute and security net: I decided and cyber stalked pursued my dear friend Elayna Fernandez to be my coach. She is amazing, really, anyone who’s had the pleasure of working with her will attest to that.
Me? Well, I really hired her because I’m not going to go talk about my business with just anyone out there, plus I was sure I could pull the old friend get-out-of-jail-free card. I had it all figured out, I will charm her, soften her with humor, I will make her see my way… or so I though. So, what happened, you might be asking? She is making me lose my cool, like for realz.
Before I get to that and how it happened, I have to go back to tell you that I have been naively working toward these goals, to empower people and speak about multicultural living, American Latinos and bilingualism in the US. I have been excited, working passionately (and blissfully unaware) towards this reinvention process, and she has been helping me and patiently waiting for the right moment.
To be honest, I now recognize my plan was a bit flawed. I never thought that by working with me she also had that friendship advantage thing, like, of knowing that if she would have started this process by telling me that, I might have moved to Nebraska or Fiji to go off the radar, and she probably would have never heard of me again… which you all know would have been a great loss to the digital world an all, but the point is that she knew, she really knew. And she waited.
—Friends know you like that—
I have been so excited creating and putting into words my ideas about how awesome is going to be when we embrace multiculturalism as a nation, when we nurture American Latinos and groom them to be the next great generation of Americans, building, creating, entertaining and innovating. She has guided me through in such a way that I see all those seeds I had in me blossoming like beautiful spring in my heart.
Then we got to the point of creating a new tagline, one that could better describe what I’m all about and what this site and my work are about. And I was all down with it, on the same page, brainstorming, ideas flowing, etc. With her help, I arrived at the perfect tagline: raising cultural awareness to create social change. That explains my purpose so beautifully, and I couldn’t be happier.
And then it happened: we were chatting on Whatsapp, which left no room for me to think that she said something else and I misunderstood, or that she was joking. She asked me if I was happy with the tagline, if I felt that it summarized what I do, and I said yes. Then she said six words that changed everything: “now comes the tricky part… ready? To which I replied confused and thinking maybe that message was intended for another person: “what tricky part?”
She answered immediately: “now that we reduced your message to a sentence, we reduce your sentence to a brand name.”
This was my reply:
I’m not going to go into more detail on how exactly the conversation went, but what I can tell you is that thinking of changing one of the things you created and feel the most proud of is scary. And she reminds me that I’m only scared because I choose to as I could choose to be excited, and that’s that. But I was genuinely scared, and I know that’s a sign that something big is about to happen and it isn’t negative for me. So I spent the next 72 hours thinking about this proposal and came up with a list of ideas of what that new brand name might look like.
As I burned the midnight oil writing this story, I couldn’t help but sing in my head that Gospel song “this little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine”. Turns out, this light that is so passionately ignited in my heart is not cool. So, when I said she was making me lose my cool, is not that I was mad at her or anything. She just literally asked me to let go of Cool as my brand, to aspire to something greater.
After all, passion is like a flame. That’s why I never bought the whole Bella falling in love with Edward thing in Twilight. Who is going to choose a cold vampire, when there is a hot werewolf to keep you warm at night? Me neither!
What do you think about the changes you’ve seen so far and what would you love to see?
Love your site will be posting to facebook