We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brandi Stanley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brandi below.

Brandi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

There’s a bit of advice some people might have heard that goes something like, “Your deepest wound is probably the thing you’re here to heal in the world.” Or, “Whatever is weirdest about you is likely what you’re here to give.”

Well, I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling pretty isolated because it didn’t seem like anyone really understood me. Constantly striving to hold complexity and nuance, I have lost a lot of friends and relationships in my life—and generally turned people off in work environments, too—because others seemed so fiercely loyal to holding onto their particular form of “dogma” or identity without seeing any valuable truth in seemingly “opposing” points of view.

Basically, these days, if you don’t completely perform an identity exactly how that identity group thinks those who belong to it should look, sound, or act, folks seem to think that completely cutting you out of their lives is the only way they can hold onto their own beliefs.

But for me, I’ve gone through a lot of significant identity shifts in my life. From growing up in Christianity in the South to becoming I guess what a lot of people might call “universalist” in my spiritual leanings; from turning vegetarian to deciding to eat meat again; or, from being an “artist” to falling in love with science.

In all of these identities or “disciplines,” people on the “other” side often wanted me to completely throw out my prior “identity” in order to accept that the new identity might be true, and it just never quite worked for me.

Similarly, I’ve never been able to narrow my passions down to only one thing. Throughout my whole career, I’ve been continually interested in learning new things and trying new things on, out of pure curiosity and a constant desire to learn. That doesn’t tend to work very well in today’s modern preference for specialists rather than generalists. The working world seems to want someone who’s an expert in one thing their entire life, but that’s mostly a relic of the industrial age, which we no longer live in.

So, my resume never looked good on paper, and I’ve spent a lot of my life not only misunderstood in my personal relationships but in my professional ones, too. While some might see either my values and beliefs or my professional commitments as “wishy-washy,” I find it to be an incredibly over-simplistic way to look at the value that people like me bring to the world—people who have a strong sense of self and strong beliefs and values, but don’t easily fit into “simple” categories.

Rather than continue to play the victim, shouting at the universe that I just don’t fit in anywhere, I decided to make it the entire basis of my “art” in the world. I started writing and creating other content, like my podcast, all under the name “This Plus That,” where I could speak directly to the importance of connecting “seemingly dissimilar” things.

Because, truthfully, we are all more than one thing. We are all *this thing* AND *that thing* at the same time. Asking us to remove any part of what makes us fully ourselves serves mostly to disconnect us from our whole humanity.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I spent nearly 20 years in branding and marketing. It was basically the only way I knew how to make the more esoteric or intangible things I’m great at—pattern recognition, uncovering someone’s values and helping them understand how to live that out in their lives and businesses, listening for deeper truths and helping others connect with what makes them feel most alive, and making connections between seemingly disparate ideas and disciplines (Steve Jobs’ definition of “creativity”)—somewhat marketable in a way that would also pay me an income of some kind, whether that was as a freelancer or a full-time employee over the course of my career.

But it also meant I spent a lot of time supporting other people’s work—using my skills to help other people become more successful while I was too scared to risk putting the same energy, effort, and belief into my own dreams and desires. After so long, it started to not only wear me down spiritually but felt like it might actually be making me sick physically. I developed a long string of chronic illness issues that I know came from other sources, too, but of course, everything is connected. How I made decisions about my work and contribution to the world also said something about what I believed about myself, what I deserved, and how the universe works.

So, in early 2021, after about a year of trying to run my own branding and marketing advice business full-time and experiencing massive panic attacks that only continued to exacerbate my health issues, I finally admitted that—while I didn’t know what I really wanted to do—I knew branding and marketing wasn’t it. It was a scary moment, but one that felt like I was finally being fully honest with myself for the first ttime. Sometimes hard truths are the most relieving to finally say out loud.

After giving myself a bit of a break and allowing my mind and heart to wander around in places that really lit me up, bolstered by unemployment during the pandemic, I came up with the idea of my podcast—talking with other people who were connecting the seemingly unconnectable and discussing why that matters so much right now, especially in a world that can’t seem to hold complexity and nuance, and for anyone else who felt like they didn’t ever just want to be “one thing.”

By September 2021, I’d recorded my first several shows, some of which included heroes of mine—favorite authors and people I’d never dream of getting the chance to talk to in real-time. I kicked my newsletter back up and began writing to an audience again. Both were under the name “This Plus That.”

Inching toward a year into the podcast, I’ve had many people, including total strangers, reach out and thank me for helping them feel so “seen” for the first time. As I say in the podcast trailer, “If the nature of the universe is paradox—if light can be both a wave and a particle and an electron can be both here *and* there—then I want people to know they can be both God and gay. They can love science and also dabble in tarot. They can be this AND that. And my guests are going to prove it to them.” That appears to be ringing true so far.

Now, I see more clearly that this is how it works. Doing what lights you up the most often tends to be what others deeply need to hear, know, or have.

What a gift.

I get to do what I love, and that inspires other people to do what they love, healing them in some profound way that comes *through* me but doesn’t seem to be *from* me. Then, when they’re inspired to do what they love, they gift that same offering forward to others, and receive the same sense of gratitude in return, as they get to heal others by doing what they naturally love to do anyway.

That’s my mission. That’s what I want more of. Without everyone giving what they’re here to give, we remain disconnected from ourselves, from each other, and from the deep healing that is so needed, today and tomorrow. I think separation from ourselves and others is killing us, and we can’t afford to sit around in jobs that we hate any longer. Not just because we’re “entitled Millennials” or something. But because withholding our gifts might actually make us sick, and might keep others living in “sickness,” too.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I think you can probably take some of the latter parts of my last answer to respond to this one! I stated it pretty clearly there!

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

There are a few books I’d say have significantly impacted my entrepreneurial thinking and basic life philosophies. While they aren’t “business” books, they’ve profoundly shaped the direction of my work and what I spend my time investing in:

Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Dr. Andreas Weber
Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brownand Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya & Raj Patel

But if you want some of my favorite business books, I especially love:
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull
Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business
and Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thisplusthat.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisplusthatpod/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thisplusthatpod
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyQeonew51eqogC8oawsxKA
• Other: Podcast (of course!): https://link.chtbl.com/thisplusthat

Image Credits
Rob Pizzolato for all