We recently connected with Susan Thompson and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Susan, thanks for joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you as a business owner?

As a 30 year educator – I have learn soooo many things, with many different lenses. Classroom teacher, theatre teacher, librarian and principal. The one consistent thing from all the vantage points is this – truth growth comes from paradigm shifts – these don’t happen without life experiences – UNLESS you are in a creative process – your brain (I am big into brain health etc) makes connections while doing creative work much like when the brain faces experiences which challenge the normal of thinking – the “safe” way of thinking. Also – Radical Empathy is the only way to shift a society. In the end – we as humans want two things – to be seen and to be listened to – not necessarily validated but heard for who we are in that moment – only then can we be ready to see ourselves differently.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Such a tough question! This, what they call “elevator speech” has been my true Achilles heel – LOL

The mission of Potential Grounds is to foster people’s potential by activating the brain’s creative and critical thinking connections. Our work spans from the individual to organizations. Our biggest solve for our clients is generating paradigm shifts to active meaningful change in their personal lives, teams or community.

True transformation is an active process. Brain research richly supports we can develop a growth mindset at any age. We have two brains – emotional and thinking.

Research also shows paradigm shifts, (or changing our truth) happen in the emotional brain and can only happen with life experiences. For our emotional brain to change on its own, it needs a life experience for the truth to shift.

Many self-help strategies – focus on ways to have your thinking brain speak to your emotional brain and over time, coaxing the feeling brain to hopefully shift. This can be very effective, but it does take discipline and time.

Often, we get fatigued by the work with the thinking brain, rationalize we need to focus on work, family responsibilities etc and say, “I will come back to this later when I have time.”

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Research also shows that in any creative work, the feeling brain is activated and impacted. You may consider yourself an uncreative person, but your creative work is found in the way you draft a work email, craft a presentation or the way you put together a birthday party celebration. We can’t have emotional brains without creative work somewhere in our lives.

What I am most proud of is people who have attended various workshops from vision boards to movement work come back and say – “this changed my life,” “I know now I can do difficult things,” “this was fun, while really making me think differently.” “I didn’t know I could do this.” One of the most powerful moments was a young adult who was with her father and sister, resistant, even frightened, almost shutting down in the beginning, ended the workshop arms wide open on top of a chair -center of attention for her creative group. Her father shared how grateful he was for providing the experience – “she came out of her shell.”

The bottom line is – creative work builds a deeper understanding and empowerment. It changes lives and it should be in the hands of everyone.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Well, I am blessed to begin this new adventure post retirement of a thirty-year career in education.

After retiring in a pandemic and having all of my plans shattered, I went into, like many of us, into a state of depression – I didn’t know that at the time, I thought I was just going through the necessary motions of getting through the day under the circumstances at hand. I had stopped dreaming of travel or spending time chasing personal interests of mine, like writing, art making and cooking. I had become somewhat bitter as well. I loved my career – teaching and leading students, teachers and parents to reach their fullest potential is why I got up in the morning – but for some reason I just didn’t want to take care of anyone anymore, and now, I found myself trapped in a place I didn’t want to be.

One day, in my backyard it just came to me – I have to serve – it is what makes me happy – it is who I am.

So, in true Susan form, I decided to start a retreat company…in a pandemic – LOL.

I valued time spent away from daily life – its transformational properties are undeniable. Every time I travel, my life is informed and improved.

I value creative work – anytime I have put myself in a place where I needed to take my thinking brain and hand it over to my creative brain – epiphanies happen.

Potential Grounds – as a name’s sake actually was developed twenty years prior with a fellow teacher and friend of mine. At that time, we believed in these above things, we were about serving others potential, but we were disheartened with the school system and wondered how we could provide this work to the public, on our own terms.

Potential was simple… and because there was just the baby internet of AOL – we believed we could only do this in a brick-and-mortar way – so a coffee house (Grounds) made the most sense. It was a grand dream we conjured on for about a year, but life got in the way, and it sat waiting for this moment in my backyard. I didn’t have a coffee house, but I realized – I didn’t need one.

So, for the next six months I researched, read, journaled and mediated on the next move.

It started with an invite to a three-day retreat as a simple personal Facebook post. I only needed four people to cover the cost of the rental, but nothing else – so the retreat itself was a financial loss, but it was a huge gain for me in that I had real data and experience to say my model of “growth coaching” (not sure if that is an appropriate term, would love some help on that) really does work and inspired me to keep going.

I am coming up on my year anniversary of that retreat. Since then, I have enrolled in a number of classes to teach me how to build my business and work with Instagram and built a website.

I have spent time building an email list – one which started with only friends and now has many people who didn’t know me before.

I took a risk and offered free workshops, in trade for free space at a new art venue – they were looking to expand their exposure and I was needing a place to get my work out to the public.

Since then, Potential Grounds was featured on a morning news program, we are doing monthly workshops, growing my tribe.

I have done strategic planning workshops for organizations, workshops on mindfulness for actors and I have a few private clients I mentor.

I am blessed this a post retirement effort and I have a pension to allow me to build this work. The challenge is – it is a twenty-four seven effort, and I am, by nature a workaholic, so honoring balance in my life is taxing, but necessary. It would be so easy to just get a side gig in the school system for the extra cash I would need to follow the retirement dream of travel, artmaking etc. but my calling is too loud, I need to see this through. And every time a finish a workshop or coaching session, my heart is so full, I can’t wait to find another way to reach new people.

Hopefully another retreat will develop which will not only serve folks but establish a financially successful business.

Until then, I will keep saying “yes,” what else?” and “don’t give up.”

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

These seems to be 85 percent of my time and energy – making connections with people – building my tribe as they say – and keep connected in various ways with many entry points. My initial reach out to friends to be part of Potential Circle (a weekly free email “blog” of thoughts and musings from my week – inviting deeper thinking and connections to my audience) came from my time as a theater teacher. Before each performance, we would circle up as a cast and crew and I would build an intention for the performance or focus their energy towards the service of creating an experience for our audience. In that vein – I reached out to my community, mostly via Facebook and asked if they would like to be a part of a virtual circle each week. From that I built a private Facebook page for these members, if they chose, to participate in other prompts and possibly engage with one another. I have been doing that for 8 months now. Some folks suggest I should take these entries and record them so they could be shared as an audio file so those inclined to listening over reading might gain from the work shared.

In addition – offering free workshops such as vision board work and creative brain health work using movement etc has slowly built my email list. So, I reach out to them on a regular basis – mostly via social media. I am in the beginning phases of this and I admit, it is a challenge. What I am learning is every time you offer something authentic and true to yourself – people respond. I have to trust that consistent meaningful engagement will pay out in the end. Sometimes, folks just want to know others are out there who understand their challenges, hopes and dreams and will empathize and inspire action.

I am still learning all the ins and outs with this medium – funny – a world, I wholly rejected with its onset – I have no choice but to engage and become an expert.

Mostly, I just try to treat every person I come in contact with as an individual – I try to build stories with them, always empathize with them and try to offer guidance when appropriate.

It has been slow moving – but to have people coming back for more workshops – as is now the case – keeps me going. My mantra is – if you keep opening a door, I will find a way to get through it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.potentialgrounds.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/potentialgrounds/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100071559962134

Image Credits
Jason Walz took some of these. [email protected]