We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Darshana Patel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Darshana below.
Hi Darshana, thanks for joining us today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?
Turn the tables. It was 1987. My freshman year of high school. I had risen from the ranks of a bumbling, fumbling little Indian immigrant who failed contractions in second grade English to the ultimate communication perch on a Friday night. I was the DJ at Golden Skates, the premier roller skating rink in the Greater Cincinnati Metro area. I dreamed that opportunity into existence and did a double-take when the “Disc Jockey Wanted” poster magically appeared on the counselor’s door. I took the entire poster, knowing that position was destined for me.
I was delighted when the rink manager, a woman, agreed to let me audition, although I had no real DJ experience. But my passion for the microphone, communication, and music came across the long, green-corded telephone when I told her that I had become known for my humorous delivery of the dreaded, “high school morning announcements” and that I was a loud and proud marching band snare drummer. She was intrigued and said, “I’ll give you a chance.”
My dad drove me to audition without my mom knowing. She’d never have let me go. The rink manager showed me the workings of the turn tables and how to fade, match BPMs, and even scratch. She showed me all the lights, smoke machines, and all areas of the rink I’d have to oversee from the main rink, dance floor, rentals, concessions, and seating area. Being a DJ was being an orchestrator of safety, entertainment, cooperation, satisfaction, and even sales and marketing. Core life and business skills. After a brief orientation, she stepped down from the DJ booth, handed me the rink rules and said, “Turn on the mic, queue up your songs, and imagine you have a rink of rowdy people wanting to skate. They need to listen to each of these rules first. How would you get everyone to listen and agree to these rules?” That was my audition. And I nailed it by humorously delivering the rules with a jarring and exaggerated Indian accent over the beats of early hip hop. “Take what you have and make what you want.” My parents always taught me.
The role of disc jockey taught me everything I need to know about life. Leadership, flow, cooperation, the human potential, and intelligent systems design. Frequency is reality. Every insight and lesson I’ve experienced across my big corporate roles, entrepreneurship, relationships, music, and motherhood can be mapped back to the rink which I believe is a microcosm of human design in the macrocosm of systems. There is a book in there somewhere.
Darshana, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
“Alien” best described me on my immigration papers in 1973. It playfully captures the frustrations I experienced balancing the limits of language and contradictory cultural logic as an early wave of South Asian families settling into the US. I struggled to make sense of home and school and I didn’t have words to express the world I experienced as “energy.”
One day, my world changed with the arrival of my brother’s shiny, white Apple iic computer with the tiny black and green screen. With latchkey time on my hands, I taught myself the BASIC programming language from the single used book on the shelf. The computer and I naturally evolved together to pioneer, engineer, and program some of the core solutions running many sectors of today’s commerce and industry. I helped usher in the first wave desktops and databases and engineered the foundations of today’s internet solutions for the world’s biggest corporations. In short, I built a lot of sh*t. But over time, I saw logic fall away from leadership and greed overtake the senses, rendering our technology solutions more and more nonsensical. Like, why do we still have 5 remotes for one tv?
What I came to realize over the course of my life and career was the deeply oppressive and extractive nature of our systems and traditions. The way we operate organizations for predictability and efficiency depreciate people like machines while trying to inflate a diminishing return and bottom line. People are drained and unhappy. Extraction has reach its limits. Where is true, emergent innovation? Why have the fruits of our labor not flourished towards greater collective fulfillment?
These questions run deep into the roots of my life as a child bride at age nineteen, arranged with a dowry and the whole traditional Indian setup. I was studying computer science and business, shaping my future in Information Systems in the early 1990s while being married off right out of college, per tradition. I felt an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between a life of possibility and another of tradition.
I came to question, “Why aren’t families and society designed to nurture one another’s safety and actualization? Why does society diminish versus empower us? And how does technology and communication affect these dynamics?”
But it was the day my daughter was born and greeted with, “Oh, it’s a girl,” that I truly experienced the impact of silently honoring tradition at the expense of divine potential. I began to see the subtle dynamics between power and culture. In that moment, as a new mother, I made a silent declaration to alter our course to healthier conditions. So we did.
My life seemed to be a petri dish of conflict, change, and complex communication as a first generation Indian, divorced single gay mom in the South with an alien perspective. Incidentally, I attained advanced degrees in all three and an endless supply of “see what happened was” stories. “If there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it” became my mantra and my work evolved across dimensions from leading and engineering global technology solutions to being an entrepreneur and energy healer, professional ghostbuster, producer, percussionist, and an author and creator of a new body of knowledge called IONATION® – the Lens, Language, and Logic of Vibrational Intelligence.
My vision is to “Change the Way We Change” by inspiring innovators and problem-solvers to Turn Your ION with vibrational logic. Reality is vibratION, which is an array of inFormatION. IONATION® is an evolutionary operational framework of vibrational intelligence.
I work with individuals and leaders to navigate the inevitable waves of complex changes ahead. From individual energy attunements to group-level innovation, conflict, or change facilitation, we can customize the right engagement for you or your organization to revolutionize your problem-solving capacity. Be prepared for what’s ahead. Turn Your ION with IONATION®. You’ll see multidimensionally.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is the freedom to grow and evolve as an individual and to share my observations and experiences in new ways. Being an artist allows me to be multidimensional and weave together the vast array of perspectives I see and experience. Artistry is creative latitude.
In the coming years, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to displace non-creative aspects of life and work, I believe it will be vital for each of us to question the deeper meaning and purpose of our lives and to shape a world that nurtures the expression of our divine potential. As a creative, I feel like I’m naturally preparing myself for what is to come.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I learned the value of the pivot in a line from Kenny Rogers, “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.”
I’m currently in a major pivot and have been a nomad traveling and camping for nearly a year at the time of this article. I wanted to face all my fears around money, survival, and safety while connecting with a deeper inner peace, immersing myself in nature, new experiences, and diverse people. I let everything go aside from a backpack, basic camping equipment, my small vehicle, and a few of the IONATION® Field Guides. As the world enters this next phase of major transitions and increasing complexity, I wanted to deepen my self-awareness, flow, and source connection. I find that the major times I pivot are times of evolution.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://turnyourion.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unscriptedway/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnscriptedWay
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshanapatel1/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/turnyourion
- Other: https://paypal.me/turnyourion
Image Credits
Select photos: Rupa Kapoor
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