We were lucky to catch up with Katherine Gramann recently and have shared our conversation below.

Katherine, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

Identifying as a creative is new for me. A lifetime of the label “entrepreneurial” meant that I always leaned towards roles within my career that felt “safe” to claim: marketing, consulting, etc. And while some of my work still falls under those categories, ultimately it wasn’t until claiming the title as Creative that truly artistic visions for my life made themselves available to me. I’d been walking a fine line between business owner and creative for years, always finding a topic or subject to focus my creative pursuits, but in deciding that my ideas and “creative hobbies” were actually worth sharing more widely, it pushed me to clarify what would make me happy in this new chapter. I sometimes wonder about what a regular job would be like, and I’d never dismiss an opportunity to rewrite the stories of what “regular job” even means. Often my personal and creative rhythms don’t jive best with super formal structures, expectations, and evaluations, but as I’ve now learned to rewire and self-resource, it might be an expansive opportunity to bridge my gifts, my current set of beliefs, and contribute to a team all while moving forward the mission of a company that I fully stand with. My mind is open!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

While graduating with a BBA in Marketing from UW-Madison felt like an accomplishment, it was laced with a little confusion because I had no idea where or how to begin my career, or even if a Marketing major made the most sense. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, always working in the family business or taking on business projects of my own, so I knew that I’d likely end up taking that direction, but nothing had really spoken to me. Graduating in 2009 also meant a strange economic landscape, so I was blessed that my sister’s employment with Google meant a somewhat open door for me to sneak in — and that I did. After a temp role and then two years in Global Advertising Support and two more years as a Community Manger for Consumer Ops (Gmail, Gchat, Google+, Hangouts, and Calendar), my time at this mecca was complete and I left the West Coast to return to my homeland of Wisconsin to start a new chapter. I had my eyes set on nutritional consulting, something I’d been working on during my full-time work, but upon return, I quickly jumped into marketing consulting because of my ease of acquiring clients and background in this work.

During the 5 years I was consulting for branding and digital marketing, I also began exploring spirituality, coaching and mindset work, as well as exploring more deeply the facets of branding that intrigued me most — storytelling and energetics. Slightly uninspired with the work I was doing, I set out ot create a brand that embodied the things that I loved most, both to create for the sake of creation and also to show other small businesses (cough, my clients, cough), that all I said about human to human essence of branding and storytelling “worked.” Lake Effect Co, an online apparel company and blog that shared about the magic, beauty, and adventure of nature, was born.

With the ebbs and flows of life managing a brick & mortar during the pandemic, and simply retail general, I sought to clean up my mindset and dive more deeply into the things I could control, so I became certified in NLP and mindset & Success Coaching in order to facilitate this for myself and others. So now, in tandem with running LakeEffectCo.com, I was doing coaching on the side. And what I didn’t realize I was also doing, was learning to live much more connected with nature, the moment, and myself. This chapter had opened me up to a skill that I never thought was mine: writing poetry.

As you can see, I’ve explored a lot of terrain in my career. While that’s a red flag for some, it’s actually written all over my soul’s blueprint to do things in this way — how do you write about or express or advise something if you’ve never gone there? I test life to see what works. This perpetual adventure creates a unique set of skills and perspectives that humans in my orbit enjoy and lean on as they navigate life and business.

The landing spot after all of this traversing? My vantage point and my words. I use them to support and guide readers, whether in relationships, as clients, or in my work with consulting and branding, short-form coaching, aesthetics, and even a touch of design for interiors. My first poetry book comes out later this year, and it’s the most excited I’ve ever been about something that I’ve worked on. What the Water Taught Me is a beautiful, ~200 page compilation of poems and images of the scenes that unlocked the words.

This work, and all of my career really, has been an opportunity for me to uncover and move towards my truest version of service and contribution, and it’s so exciting that I get to share this journey of living and creating from a place of integrity.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Time and again I’ve had to remind myself that everyone has their own unique relationship to TIME. Beginning my career in a time when cell phones became glued to our hands meant that everyone was learning boundaries, notification management, and what URGENCY really meant for them. As a people pleaser, my relationship to time was that there was never enough of it, I’d never done enough with teh time I was given, and ultimately I was always behind schedule. I didn’t realize the toll this was having on me until there was a day when friends were texting me to plan and I had a near panic attack from the sheer inundation — it was as if the dam had busted. I realized that the years of being available and responsive to the inquiries of others had created such a level of perpetual stress that I was constantly paranoid. This background monitoring, likely that we all do, needs a serious re-examination.

When I began to set boundaries, mostly with myself and sometimes with others, I saw how life looked completely different and how the quality of my work changed. When I was not on high alert 24/7, I made better decisions, stopped seeking to escape and numb out, and simply wanted to engage with humans again.

My first role out of college measured me on stats that tied directly to productivity (how many emails and phone calls could I answer per shift at a high level of quality), and I EXCELLED at this to the point that I was quickly moved onto the very team that rated quality. At every level of my education and career I was praised for my ability to do so much, so well, so quickly, and it took years of creating a new relationship to output and productivity, as well as choosing work and environments that were rooted in what becomes available if SPEED is not the top priority, for me to see what the true cost of this urgency was on my life.

On the other side of that journey, I now know exactly what I need to do to be aware when this is being challenged, how to communicate my needs around it, and to truly advocate for the shifts that make this more flowy pace available to myself and others. We are risking too much by living at such a fast pace!

Have you ever had to pivot?

No stranger to pivoting, there was a particular instance when the change that presented itself was most painful. After years of consulting and growing my personal brand to be someone respected in the small business community, a friend and I started building a unique business model that capitalized on both of our experiences as both business owners and consultants. We had been building a hybrid mastermind and educational space when it slowly started to become clear to me that I was heading in the wrong direction IN GENERAL. Not only had a I just invested countless hours and energy in building something that could go on to do so much good for business owners, but I’d built it with someone who I respected tremendously.

At the same time, I was also working closely in mentorship and writing my first book, and the main theme that was begging for my attention was: it’s time to stop prioritizing business. My soul was asking me, repeatedly, to consider my creative gifts and to make space for them.

After a challenging moment, I backed out of the project, I ended most of my consulting arrangements, and I went full into organizing what the next chapter would look like as a creative and a writer. Months later, I can now see exactly why it happened in this way and the countless lessons I’ve learned, and with the book manuscript in hand, a budding Substack community, and a sense of deep reverence and connection to this chapter, the short-term work at hand, and the vision for what’s to come.

Contact Info:

• Website: whatthewatertaughtme.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/kgram22
• Other: greatnow.substack.com

Image Credits
Moon & Wolf Co (overhead image of me writing, journals / books, etc.)