Episode #15: Feminine Energy & Becoming a Conscious Leader with Kelly Campbell
In this episode, we learn about conscious leadership with business and self-transformation coach Kelly Campbell. Kelly explains how to harness and balance feminine and masculine aspects (not gender-based). By integrating these qualities, you can become a more receptive and collaborative version of yourself which leads to greater trust and more predictable, sustainable growth.
Feminine Energy & Becoming a Conscious Leader with Kelly Campbell Episode Recap
In this episode of Two Marketing Moms, Kelly Callahan-Poe welcomes special guest Kelly Campbell, a conscious leadership coach who helps creative media and technology leaders transform their lives and advertising agencies. Kelly shares her journey of starting a cause marketing agency at a young age and eventually selling it after 14 years to focus on coaching. She introduces her six P’s framework, which focuses on personal development, purpose, positioning, people, pipeline, and profitability.
The conversation moves to the topic of masculine versus feminine energy, and Kelly discusses how these energies are not related to gender but are different aspects of being and doing. She emphasizes the importance of conscious leadership, which involves being self-aware and contributing positively to others and the planet. Kelly mentions that her coaching clients, mostly agency owners, often struggle with scalability and profitability issues, but she finds that the root cause is often fear-based behavior stemming from past traumas or experiences.
The hosts talk about the significance of active listening and how it can be a superpower in business interactions. They explore how listening to understand, rather than listening to reply, can create more meaningful connections and lead to better business outcomes. Kelly also explains her Partner Don’t Pitch PDF, which provides a framework for business development that emphasizes collaboration and understanding the prospect’s needs.
The episode concludes with Kelly Campbell highlighting her work on healing fears and old wounds for agency owners, which helps them overcome barriers to growth and success. Kelly’s insights and coaching expertise resonate with the hosts, and they express their appreciation for the valuable information shared in the conversation.
Show transcript:
Kelly Callahan-Poe
Welcome to Two Marketing Moms with Kelly Callahan-Poe and Julia McDowell. Today we have special guest Kelly Campbell. Kelly Campbell is a conscious leadership coach helping creative media and technology leaders transform their lives and their advertising agencies. She is the former owner of a cause marketing agency. She’s going to tell that story today, which has her six P’s framework focusing on personal development, purpose, positioning, people, pipeline and profitability. She is also the co-founder of Consciousness Leaders, a globally curated and diverse collective of conscious leadership experts helping organizations evolve meaningfully. She’s a keynote speaker on leadership, digital marketing and agency growth conferences across the country. And she has been featured in The New York Times, Women Entrepreneur, The Startup on Medium and Forbes.com. She’s most recently become a member of the Forbes Business Council as well. She’s currently authoring her first book, maybe she’ll tell us a little bit about it today, on redefining what it means to be a leader. She is the host of Thrive Your Agency Resource, a bi-weekly video podcast sponsored by Workamajig that helps agency owners navigate personal and professional growth.
Quite a mouthful, Kelly, you’ve got quite a resume. I first learned about you on LinkedIn, and we talked about this a little bit at Client Con, and you had done a video about masculine versus feminine energy, and I was mesmerized. All these lights were going off in my head, and I want to talk a little bit about that today. But before we do that, I want to start asking some questions about how you started, a lot of our listeners are either in college or just coming out of college and starting in the working world, and you’ve had an interesting path. I want to hear a little bit about how you started a cause marketing firm, at a very young age, and ultimately sold it 14 years later and decided to refocus on coaching. Can you talk to us a little bit about, what were the lessons learned from that experience and how that path kind of went for you?
Kelly Campbell
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, I’m really excited to be here, because we’re talking about all my favorite things. So, thank you for indulging me.
When I graduated college, I got a really small job doing graphic design and things like that for a screen printing company. Then within a few months, there was a large corporation that came in and needed a logo and some t-shirts made for their Palm Pilot application, that’s how far back we’re going. I really owned that project, because it was the first time I was actually doing real design work, right.
And they loved it so much that they actually offered me a job. And so, I went directly from the small little screen printing company like rolling in at 11 o’clock in the morning and kind of like super flexible still in kind of college mode, and immediately thrown into the super toxic environment. So, it was very male dominant, it was financial services, and then like a technology spin off. It was not just financial services, but a hedge fund, so very male dominant.
The workplace was not diverse whatsoever, there was a ton of misogyny, I mean, it was just like everything you could possibly imagine. So, this young, at that point, 21 year old gay woman walks in. It was just oil and water, right? So, I didn’t stay there very long, but what I did, not consciously at the time, but I kind of picked up on how they were operating. Meaning that there were a ton of cooks in the kitchen, they were not valuing their people; it was 100% about profits over the people. And so, as I was starting to kind of absorb all of that and realize how it was impacting me as an employee, I was like, this can’t be that hard. I’ve got to be able to do this better than this is being done. So yeah, it was just kind of brazen, I didn’t know any better, and at 22 I kind of just gave notice and started my own company. I thought why don’t I start a company that I would actually want to be an employee of. I think that’s where the first sort of thoughts or, maybe just like, I’m leaning into what does conscious leadership even mean, what does that look like? Not that I use those words back then, but in retrospect, that’s what it was. I wanted to create a company consciously where it was the antithesis of my experience.
Kelly Callahan-Poe
Can you dig a little bit deeper about conscious leadership and what that means to you, and how that’s become kind of the core of your focus and your coaching business?
Kelly Campbell
Yeah, sure, and then I can get back to some of the lessons that you were talking about, because I know that’s really important, especially for your audience. Conscious leadership, to me, is about being self-aware, number one and number two, it’s about being a contributor to things outside of yourself. So that means the people that are on your team, the community in which your organization is a part of the industry or the domain that you’re a part of, and then, from a larger perspective, your impact on the planet. So, it’s like, first the self, then others, then the planet all of that sort of mixed up in a little bowl is essentially a conscious leadership is right.
So, people get really hung up on the fact that there might be some spiritual aspect to it, or there might be some other aspect to it that they can’t quite put their finger on. Because consciousness in general is kind of this theory or thing that we don’t really know all how to define, but that’s what it means. It means being aware of yourself, what your impact is on other people and your impact on the earth. That’s it.
Julia
And yeah, keep it simple, because otherwise people don’t retain it, right? So, you’ve got to keep the message simple. And as marketers, we know that.
When I started my agency, several years ago, almost four years ago now, that was me wanting to create something that was from my core.
Coming out, you know, and developing those values and living those values. Because I didn’t want anyone else to dictate them to me.
Kelly Campbell
So true, so that’s sort of like a good segue for a lot of these lessons that I learned over the 14 years of having a cause marketing firm, where I did do exactly that, right? Like I developed a culture, sort of unbeknownst to me, or maybe naturally, organically, where I did value my people. I mean, I don’t have children, so, my team members were like my kids, I mean, I like really felt this supreme maternal instinct to make sure that they were well supported and taken care of and all of these things. So, the lessons that I learned from that whole time, I mean, were many, I’ll try to boil it down to like five for you, and I’ll go really quick with them, but there were so many. First of all, I think one of the most important ones was that I do not have to know everything or do everything myself. What I realized in retrospect as a coach, was that what I was doing in the early days was actually disempowering my people. If I felt like I had to do everything myself, what that actually communicated to them was that I didn’t trust them to do it. So, it actually disempowered them, which is the opposite of what I wanted to do. My whole leadership journey was about empowering other people and having them sort of surpass my legacy, right? So, I was acting in a way that was against what my values were. Another thing was that I had this belief for whatever reason was that I had to work hard in order to earn success. What that is, is false, and it’s a totally self-limiting belief, because it’s not true. You don’t have to work hard to be successful. It’s not that I don’t work hard now, as a coach or a consultant, it’s just that I work a lot smarter, right? I have more passive income streams, I value my time differently than I did back then.
Another one is that over the course of that 14 years, I’ve learned how to trust my intuition. I wish I had learned that earlier on, because imposter syndrome is real, right? And like you actually do know the answers. But we are raised in a society where, especially as women, we’re taught sometimes, either directly or inadvertently, that we don’t know the answer, that we don’t know what we’re doing, that there’s a different way or a better way to do it than the way we believe. Our intuition is a really powerful thing. I think so much so that we can use it to our advantage.
Another one, which we’re definitely going to touch on today is that I can actually operate in such a way where I balance feminine and masculine aspects. That I don’t have to embody these masculine aspects just because I’m in a male dominant field.
And then I think the last one, which has really been sort of pervasive since it’s become sort of a mantra is the idea of essentialism. So, for me if it’s not a definite yes, it’s a definite no, it makes my life and my decision making so much easier. I’m a pretty decisive person to begin with, I don’t really waffle back and forth, but trusting my intuition, and this idea, or theory of essentialism, in combination has been like, very powerful. The application of that is like when a new client comes in, within five minutes, I already know if it’s not a definite yes, it’s a definite no. And no, for me just means that I’m going to refer them to someone else who might be able to help them. So, lots and lots and lots of lessons.
Julia
You just dropped like a bomb on this podcast, like, I wrote down all five of those, because it’s, like therapy. It’s like workplace therapy, like the last one, Kelly, I feel like it’s for you. We were just talking about simplifying our lives, working smarter, not harder, and essentialism, I think, could do both of us good.
Kelly Campbell
So that was actually a book that I read, it was literally called Essentialism. Greg McEwen is the author, and the big takeaway from that, I do recommend that you buy the book, but the big takeaway is just if it’s not a definite, yes, it’s a definite no, and it just makes everything like, you can just relax, it gets rid of all that anxiety.
Kelly Callahan-Poe
You know, if I had thought of that in my 20s, I want to save myself a lot of dating time.
I’m not quite sure where to go from there, because you gave some really great stuff there. I want to move into the masculine and feminine energy, because I think that’s where we all can resonate most. I mean, it’s funny, because literally, Julie and I five minutes before this call, were talking about some of these very things. And simplifying the things that we do on a regular basis and not recreating the wheel and streamlining and working. Not working harder, but working smarter. So, all those things literally kind of came out of our mouths as if it were like a recent aha moment.
But that’s a lot of the things that COVID did to us, you really, you’re working longer hours, surprisingly, in spite of not having that commute. And so that efficiency component is so important, so, I want to go over to your Partner Don’t Pitch PDF that you have.
I’m going to put this up for people who are looking at the YouTube video. Not everyone can see it, obviously on the podcast, but maybe you can explain a little bit. Your new, “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” masculine and feminine way of doing things, which is a concept that’s been talked about in relationships, but not so much in business.
Kelly Campbell
Yeah. And this is why I say I have no competitors, because nobody’s talking about business development from the standpoint of masculine and feminine energy. But we really should be because this is, if you want, I’m not a big fan of the silver bullet, the secret sauce kind of stuff, but this is kind of it.
And it’s really interesting. So, when you’re talking about feminine and masculine energy, the first thing to know is that we’re not talking about gender at all. What we’re talking about is an energy or an aspect, right? So, you have being versus doing. So, being, from a Buddhist perspective, would be associated with more of like a feminine, again, not women, but like feminine energy. I’ll use a bunch of different words to give you different contexts, but feminine energy would be more like receptive energy, reflective, collaborative, talk about collaboration versus winning. The idea of collaborating with other people and having a shared experience, versus the masculine energy, which would be more associated with winning or individualism, or sort of like I don’t know If I want to say dominance yet, but like the idea of I win, versus we collaborate and create something together, right? So feminine energy would also be generative, creative, masculine energy would be more like execution.
If you think about it, from a biological standpoint, you need masculine and feminine biology to create life, right? Super simple concept. In a marketing agency, you need strategy and execution to create a good product to create something that’s effective, to birth something that’s going to work in the world, right? You need the being in the doing, you start to get into some territory where there’s like, really clear delineation between these things where you get into the I versus the we and I think if we don’t want to use feminine and masculine because it’s too triggering for people, or there are some men who don’t want to have like any association with like, feminine aspects. Then we can literally boil it down to like we versus I. This is why female leaders, and this is proven, this is not my opinion, female leaders are more generative, they’re more inclusive, they are more effective leaders, by and large, right? That’s a blanket statement, but the way that they operate, the way that they lead is different. If they are embodying these feminine aspects, and that’s not to say that we don’t have male leaders who don’t embody feminine aspects, we certainly do. By the way, those are the most effective male leaders. So, it’s this idea of what is good for me, versus what is good for all of us, right? Dan Price from Gravity Payments is a great, great example of a male leader, a white male leader, who really embodies this like feminine aspect, when he changed the entire structure of his company, so that everyone had a $70,000 starting salary, including himself. That’s a very collaborative, generative, equitable mindset, right? And then he took the action to actually put that into place. So yeah, there are definitely people who do that, who are not necessarily women, but by and large women embody these things. And again, you need both. So, I’m not saying this is not to say that women are better and men aren’t, or women are more effective, and men are less effective. What I’m saying is, you definitely need both, right? I happen to work with a lot of agency owners, agency leadership teams that are couples, right. What’s interesting is the couples could be married heterosexual couples, they could be same sex partners, whatever the case may be, but a lot of partners somehow make their way to me. I don’t know if it’s because I have a more therapeutic spin to my work or whatever it is, but I realized that what makes those companies so successful, is that those partnerships are really strong. And if you actually look at the aspects of each of those partners, one is definitely a little bit more feminine, one is a little bit more masculine in terms of one being really great and having great strength in the being side and the other one having a lot of strength in the doing side.
Julia
I totally believe that my husband, at the beginning of setting up my business, was very involved in creating the brand. What I thought from how you break out how the being doing collaborate and win and where I thought I would have landed and where he landed was actually completely opposite.
Weirdly enough, he was being more of a collaborator and I was being more of a winner and he was being more we and I was being more I and so I feel like this is such a good gut check to me like when I downloaded this from your website, I just I marinated on the being versus doing because lately I’ve just been doing and I realize it’s just like such a good check for me. I realize I have to open up space for the being because my clients appreciate both.
So when you bring something like this concept to people, when you’re coaching, are people open to it, does it take them a while to really understand and catch on?
Kelly Campbell
No, because one of the big pain points for marketing agency owners, marketing firm owners, is bringing in new business, right? So, if I’m saying, hey, you’ve been doing whatever you’ve been doing for X number of years, and you know how it’s going, and I’m providing a different approach, they tend to be pretty open to it. The other thing is that what I’m saying here, just like you said, this is brand new information to you, but it also makes a ton of sense. I’m not saying something here that’s irrational, right? So, I think the combination of that, and when I’m talking about business development, in these contexts. We’re talking about making small changes to let’s say, the order of their proposals or the language inside of their proposals, or maybe the positioning statements on their websites. We’re not talking about reinventing the entire wheel, we’re just talking about modifying it in such a way, so that it’s less about the I, and more about we, the collective we, meaning the prospect, and the organization showing that partnership right up front. So inside of that PDF that you’re referencing, there’s an entire section about how to actually create your, what do I call it a connection deck, right? So, there’s, a whole section there, and then, on that same page where you download it, there’s a whole video that kind of takes you through this 10 slide connection deck. And it just gives you a different framework to actually put these things together and put them in front of your prospects. It does all of the things that we’ve been talking about. It shows that you’re more collaborative, it shows that you’re listening more, it shows that listening is probably one of the most important things, right? It shows that you care, it shows that you’re curious, it shows that you are invested from the beginning. All of that makes a lot of sense in business development. Because organizations don’t do business with organizations, people do business with people. So, if I want to do business with you, I want to really feel like you understand me, right? Like you are listening to me, you value me, you see me, you hear me. And if you are able to do that in such a way where you repeat back to me what I’ve said, but in your own words, or even in my own words, and then we start to have a dialogue, the trust gets developed really quick that way. And that’s what business development is all about getting as quickly as possible from like, no relationship to trusted relationship to partnership.
Julia
Yep. So tell us, the people listening, where we can get this PDF, because you all need to go get it?
Kelly Campbell
Yeah, so that’s just on my website. It’s www.klcampbell.com/guide.
Julia
Great, everyone needs that. So I don’t remember where I read or heard this, but you say you have two superpowers, one of which is intent, active listening, which I agree is a total superpower.
I recently read something that was kind of related. It was a quote, when we think of listening, we think of focusing on others in order to hear them, which, obviously, we do all freakin day on zoom. But the more I learned about it, the more apparent it became that so much of effective listening is actually being aware of yourself, your own tendency, habitual responses, your body language, what draws an emotional response from you, even the environments, company or time of day that can make your listening power stronger or weaker. And I was like, oh, wow, okay. How can I be a better listener? I’m on all these meetings, I’m trying to absorb what people are saying, what they’re trying to give off. So, being part of an agency, especially in a client facing role, how can people practice their listening skills? Or how do you approach this in your work?
Kelly Campbell
So, this is a really, really beautiful question. I love this question so much, because we can really kind of like anchor into a lot of practicality, right? So, all of this comes down to listening to understand versus listening to reply. So here again, when we use these words, I’m going to associate the masculine and the feminine with them. So, when I listen to understand that means that I am dialing up my curiosity, that’s a feminine aspect.
When I’m listening to reply, that’s sort of egoic. I’ll even use that word egoic, or solution centric, execution focused, masculine aspect. Right? So, if I’m listening to you, but I’m already formulating my response to you, am I really listening to you right now, because what I’m doing is I’m, I’m formulating in my mind, and this is the first time I’m actually saying it out loud, so, I’m working through it with you. But like, as I’m, as I’m listening to you, if I’m kind of in that masculine mindset, I’m formulating my reply in my mind, which means I’m not entirely listening to you. And what I’m doing is I’m making sure that you come away from the experience, thinking that I solved your problem, and that’s what I mean by egoic. Right, as opposed to, you start talking and I’m literally just dialed in, I am like, actively listening, I’m maintaining eye contact, I’m intently listening. What starts to happen naturally, is if you shut off that part of your brain, where you’re starting to think about replying, what happens is your brain, your mind will start questioning things. I wonder what you mean by that?
There’s going to be this natural questioning, that’s what curiosity is. So, what happens is, if you start to say something, and I say, “Hey, can I just interrupt for a second? You just said, blah, blah, blah, right?” Like, I repeat back to you what you said and respond with what did you mean by that? Can you tell me a little bit more about why you used that word? Or what does that actually mean at your company, because at my company means something different. What you’re doing is you’re now starting to create a dialogue, and so, what all of this kind of like does is it creates this organic dialogue that builds more trust all back to what I was saying before, it leads to the other person. In this case being like the prospect or the client, it may lead to them being more seen, heard, understood, valued, all of those good things. And do you know what it also helps by natural extensiog, closing new business. So, whether you’re an account director, account manager, and you’re like trying to upsell the client, your job, in that moment, is to really understand from that client, what is the underlying pain point, right? What is the underlying challenge if they come to you, and they say, hey, we need this piece of this functionality built on our website? You’re not just an order taker, and you say, okay, great, great functionality on website, you ask questions, well, what’s driving that decision? Can you tell me a little bit more about what the process looks like? Now, we might be able to come up with a solution that’s even better than what you’re actually dictating that we do, that by the way, might actually cost them more money, which means that you’ve done a really good job in terms of upselling. And, not just for the purpose of profit, but for the purpose of actually meeting their underlying need.
Julia
Yeah, I think you touched on such a good outcome of listening, that you can formulate questions, right? Like I’ve learned over the past couple years, just that the questions really matter. Having good questions, not like canned questions, but questions that come out of the listening, which is curiosity. So cool. Any other questions for Kelly, Kelly?
Kelly Callahan-Poe
One of the things that Julia and I have talked about in the past is kind of the older generation above us, I’m older than Julia, but the generation of women above us who really had to compete more with men versus other women. When I was growing up in my 20’s I had a lot of female bosses who didn’t really want to help a girl up because they were having to deal with their own issues with competing with men. But we’re in a different place now and I don’t want to pass that on in any way, shape, or form. That is one of the main reasons we started this podcast is so that we can help others. To help other women not make the same mistakes that we did and that’s why we’re saying them out loud. I mean, we actually did an entire episode on, on failure, and what our biggest failures were and didn’t tell all the details, but we told enough to kind of give people some basic lessons. We’ve also done an episode on our top 10 biggest mistakes. So, I think a lot of these things are really helpful for any women on their way up the ladder. We always say it’s not a ladder, it’s a jungle gym, because you don’t always go up, sometimes you take two steps back, and sometimes you go a couple down, and sometimes you just fall off. So two questions that I have is one, what is the biggest questions that you get from advertising agency owners. What is their biggest struggle is that if you’re willing to share that, that maybe universally, agencies are reaching out to you with?
And then, how do you address them?
Kelly Campbell
So, it is an interesting question. Most agency owners are reaching out to agency growth coaches and growth consultants, saying that they have scalability and profitability issues. So that’s fine to believe that, that those are actually your issues, but what I have found by and large is that those are not actually the issues.
Scalability in and of itself is not an issue. You have to figure out how large your organization is and how large you actually want your organization to be right. And as opposed to this idea that success is tied to headcount or success is tied to revenue, what do you actually want? Because when we use metrics like that, those are very masculine metrics, we’re not talking at all about the growth of the people that are under our stewardship. We’re not talking about the impact that we’re making through our clients.
And profitability is a lagging indicator, right? It’s like stepping on a scale, you don’t just step on a scale every single day with the idea that you want to lose weight, and just hope that the numbers go down. It’s a lagging indicator, you have to take action in order for those numbers to change. So, I think most say that their issues are scalability, people issues sometimes and profitability. But when I actually dive in, and dig underneath, I find that most of them are really, operating in a way that’s very, very fear based. And a lot of these fears come from past trauma, past wounding, different experiences, or events that have happened in their lives, anywhere from when they were very young, all the way through maybe early adulthood. So that’s kind of the work that I do. And what I mean by that is they question their hiring choices, they question their numbers, they tell themselves that they’re not good at the financials, they question if their service offerings are actually as valuable as they can be and they have issues with pricing.
Julia
Did you just crawl inside of my head, right?
Kelly Campbell
Everybody has the same issues. It’s just like, what is the specific mix for each person? But I could literally say, here are the 20 different things, and you would tell me, oh, I have 16 of those. So that’s what it is, it all comes down to fear. So, once we kind of heal those fears, and heal those, those old wounds or traumas or whatever it might be that are contributing to you being the one holding your agency back, well then, the world is literally your oyster.
Kelly Callahan-Poe
I love that. I think we’re going to end there. We appreciate your time, Kelly, and we look forward to chatting you again and we both maybe making appointments with you.
Julia
Kelly, thank you. Thank you so much for your time.
Kelly Campbell
Thanks for having me on.
