Hey there, Hannah here 🙌

I’ve been in a hyperfocused flow of creativity and change behind the scenes. After welcoming a brilliant wave of new VEA members - welcome again! - I put my head down and went a little quiet on the newsletter front, but I am resurfacing. I want to start sharing more of what is happening for me, some of the inner workings of my brain, and the things I am learning and thinking about that I know can help you on your own journey too.

One thing most people don’t know about me, aside from my nearest and dearest, is that I am an avid writer. And I don’t just mean newsletters and social media posts. I am writing a whole-ass novel. Actually, it is a whole-ass trilogy.

Children of Frida is a psychological folk-horror thriller set on the isolated northern island of Wyre, following a community of mysterious women and children whose hard-won safety begins to fracture when a shipwreck brings outsiders to their shores.

And there’s a backlog of other ideas (Netflix, let's talk!).

• There’s 65 Days, in which the Earth has been knocked out of its orbit and is slowly, but very surely, falling into the sun.
• There’s Say Nothing True, about a walled city under constant surveillance where telling the truth can get you disappeared.
• Then there’s The Summit, a dark sci-fi story set inside a vast, never-ending, multi-level business conference controlled by an AI that is harvesting the last scraps of human hopefulness for its own survival.

I also have at least six concept restaurants permanently rattling around in my brain. One is Burrito Bros, a Super Mario-themed hole-in-the-wall with two employees and only two things on the menu: The Mario, a meat-based burrito, and The Luigi, the vegetarian option.

Whenever I tell people about ideas and stories I have, they are usually met with laughter and then followed with something like “Wait, that’s actually brilliant.” None of my ideas arrived in my brain fully formed, carried down from the heavens by some divine creative stork. That isn’t really how creativity works.

Creativity and good ideas often come after a collision 💥

You take one thing out of context, smoosh it together with another seemingly unrelated thing, and see whether the combo creates something interesting or useful. It’s what fusion restaurants do. It’s what musicians do when they blend genres. It’s also what great marketers and business owners do when they take an idea from an entirely different industry, setting, or experience and adapt it for their own audience. It's also why traveling to places that expand my ways of thinking and showcase different ways to live has resulted in my wonderfully unconventional life.

Creativity is not just a nice extra for a VA, freelancer, or business owner. It helps you:

• Create more interesting content in a sea of sameness (we don't need another blog on "why you need a VA")
• Describe and present services in ways that make people understand their value
• Find solutions when a client’s plan is just not working
• Spot opportunities other people tend to miss

It helps you create better offers, systems, client experiences, processes.... It also helps you position yourself as someone who brings thought, initiative, and perspective to a business, instead of being a mere task-doer. This is the stuff that'll make you irreplaceable.

This is also where I think humans still have an enormous advantage. AI can generate tons of technically competent answers, but it cannot live your life for you. It doesn’t have your strange fascinations, the places you’ve traveled, the mistakes you’ve made, or the random thing you learned three years ago and suddenly found a use for today. That's where your work becomes much harder to replicate.

The best part is that creativity can be practiced!

A lot of people think they just aren't creative. I was one of them. Years ago, I adopted a habit of writing down ten ideas every morning, and I still do it (almost) religiously. Most of the ideas are poopy. They are meant to be! They are messy, silly, and sometimes a bit...out there.

Imperfect action isn't just something I teach: it's something I live and breathe.

One idea the other day was a smart bathtub that plugs itself and begins running at a scheduled time, ready for a tired 9-to-5er to arrive home and soak in it after work. Honestly, that one is not even half bad. I promise you there have been much, much worse.

Yet sometimes, there is gold.🏆

I also don’t restrict the ideas to subjects that are a typical fit for my biz. I don’t sit down every morning and force myself to write ten ideas about how to help VAs and freelancers. That would get stale super fast. I might write ten unique hotels I would create, ten inventions that could make cities better, ten concepts for a book, ten ways to make an event feel theatrical, or ten things people pretend to enjoy but secretly hate. Sometimes a mix of all and more.

By allowing my mind to expand beyond the immediate confines of my business, new and better ideas about it show up too. New ways to support my audience. Better ways of explaining complicated things. Analogies, offers, headlines, systems, events, and entire campaigns have emerged from things that, at first glance, had absolutely nothing to do with Digital Nomad Kit!

Recently, DNK partner Michelle Maree, who has hosted VA-cation with us for the past two years, was preparing to launch a new group program. We had a call beforehand, and I was firing off what likely felt like increasingly wild and wacky ideas about how she could describe it. I could see it in her face, but I persevered.

At one point, I told her, “It’s kinda like a Portuguese man-of-war.”

"A what!?” she said, understandably so.

The Portuguese man-of-war looks like a single creature, but it's actually a group of specialized organisms called zooids. Each one executes a different function, but together they collaborate as one interconnected whole. Above the water, you see the floating sail, but underneath is an entire complex system with capabilities stretching meters below the surface.

To me, it was the perfect way to describe the depth, collaboration, and combined reach inside her program, guided by the sail. A random piece of marine-life knowledge (somewhat, I was stung by one of these bad boys, so I went on a deep dive, pun intended) was now a business metaphor. What had appeared irrelevant became an integral part of her live pitch a week later! I was both amused and extremely pleased watching her explain what a Man-o-War was - inaccurately calling it a jellyfish, but that's okay 🤣 - and seeing how strongly it resonated and stuck with her.

That is the value of having a bigger internal reference bank. You stop reaching for the same examples everybody else in your industry is using. You have more places to pull from, which means your ideas sound more like you and are much more likely to stick in somebody else’s head.

Challenge for you: write 10 ideas every day.

Don’t judge them as you write them. Don’t demand that they make money. Don’t force them all to relate to your work, and please don’t make them behave.

If you skip a day, who cares? Nobody is watching. Start the next morning again and let your mind run free. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be writing your first psychological folk-horror trilogy in no time, haha.

If you are going to commit to this, I'd love to hear from you - hit reply and tell me!

An Invitation: Intimate Group Mastermind with Me 🥰

This is also, incidentally, what happens when you put me in a room with someone else’s business. My brain immediately starts pulling things apart, making unexpected connections, and firing off ideas they may never have considered.

August's upcoming mastermind is a 90-minute session capped at just 12 people, which makes it small enough for everyone to get real airtime and for my brain, energy, experience, and attention to be properly focused on you and your business.

These sessions often become a bit of an idea fountain. ⛲️

They are intimate, focused, energetic, and exhilarating, and looking closely at one person’s business almost always creates a springboard of ideas and breakthroughs for everyone else in the room too.

You can bring me the thing you keep dancing around: an offer that isn’t selling, pricing that doesn’t feel right, a message you cannot quite articulate, a business that has started to feel stale, a business that is just starting! The next level you can see but don’t know how to reach, or an idea that needs sharpening - you can also come with absolutely no idea what your next move should be.

We can work with that too.

You can ask about anything related to your freelance business or your journey through the VEA. No question is too big or too small, and you will leave with clear next steps, sharper positioning, honest feedback, new possibilities, connections, ideas, and the type of momentum that comes from spending 90 focused minutes in a room of people who get it and think outside the box with you. 💡

You don’t have to speak if you would rather listen. You can ask your question live, place it in the chat, or simply soak up what unfolds. A replay will also be provided if you cannot attend live.

August 17th, 1 pm New York time.

VEA member? Enter your member code when booking to access your special rate (hit reply if you need this!).

Now go forth and get wild with your ideas!

Hannah

'...Hannah took one look at my website and, with a completely likable clarity and directness – said: “You need to add this and this”. Next, she (without batting an eyelid) came up with a great idea for scaling my business to a group program – something that I’d been wrestling with how to do for AGES...'

Alison Carminke

"Hannah’s strategy sessions are the bomb.com, and you need them in your life. Especially for this price? Hot damn. Get your shit on track with new ideas about how to provide something that your audience will actually buy and feels in line with your biz goals. She not only gives you her ideas, but also access to any network help she can think of. Priceless!"

Taylor Lane

'...Since then (strategy call), I’ve signed four new clients and booked six readings for January! I will definitely be booking another session with her as I look to further expand some of these ideas...She has an incredible breadth of knowledge in her field coupled with a magnetic humor and sweetness in her delivery...'

Emma Collier