Hello 2025!

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Welcome to our first newsletter of 2025!

I so enjoy coming together with this community, in this space, and in this way.

If you're new here or could use a refresher so you can get your bearings again after the holidays and intense start to the year, here's the content you can expect in our monthly(ish) newsletters:

• reflections and musings from me on topics related to communications and marketing and work and life (and how they're interrelated)
• updates on our work with awesome clients and our awesome clients' work in the world
• trends and insights about our industry
• happenings in our community
• books we love and think you will too
• special offerings (like workshops! keep reading below ⬇️)

We also have a blog where I or the occasional guest writer write about Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Personal Growth and Development, Branding, and Design and Creative.

Thank you for pulling up a seat in Asana Consulting's circle of clients, colleagues, and friends as we venture off into 2025.

💟,

Nancy

The Year of Your Brand's Story

I recently shared on LinkedIn the news that this is the year Asana Consulting will be returning to branding workshops, after a five-year hiatus. We'll be opening registration for our one-hour Brand Storytelling Workshop taking place on January 29 from 1-2pm on Zoom. Keep your eyes out for the details on email, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

This first workshop of the year is my way of bringing my love for and expertise in brand strategy to people who want some help and support with telling their brand's story. The date is my oldest daugher's birthday (i.e., the day I became a mom 21 years ago which is some bonkers mom math), which is also Oprah's birthday, Lunar New Year and the first day of the Year of the Snake.

Brand storytelling is one of my favorite parts of the work I do with our clients. In my prior career chapter before starting Asana Consulting, my colleagues often called me the "chief storyteller" of the brands and missions we were bringing to audiences and communities.

Resuming workshops felt right for the start of 2025 for a lot of reasons. I love to teach, meet new people, and bring people together to learn in community. Workshops are also a way for me to bring the strategic branding framework we use with clients to individuals who know their brand (whether it's a business brand or a personal brand) needs attention but have no idea where to start. Workshops are also great for people who know brand strategy is important and valuable, and are willing to invest resources towards it, but need help clarifying their branding needs and priorities.

My love for brand storytelling isn't surprising. It's the place in communications and marketing where words, stories, hearts, and strategy intersect, and I love all those things. I also love brand storytelling for its empowering effect on brands. It provides the material needed to craft effective audience engagement and create meaningful audience experiences. It is also the key to creating trust between brands and audiences - and keeping it. And it is a source of renewable, sustainable energy for brands to prosper and shine.

The Year of Not DIY'ing Your Brand Story

In one of the last newsletters of 2024, I shared my thoughts about why getting help and support is a power move and how getting better at practicing NDIY'ing - Not Doing It Yourself - has been an uplifter for me in work and life. This mindset allows me to cast off old messages and models about going it alone, bootstraps, lone wolves, blah blah blah. It reminds me that daily life is so much more enjoyable and enriching when I shift my thinking and behavior from Me to We.

The more I practice this, the better shot I have at detecting and deactivating the old messaging and models that shaped my original notions about success and wellbeing when it comes to adulting, business, parenting, work, money, and health. Those make much less sense to me today. Fending off the DIY mindset creates conditions that support the majority, at no one's expense.

Nature is my inspiration for this mindset: it creates strength and protection through relationships, as seen in symbiosis; it wrests resilience and survival from threats, as seen when lodgepole pines open their cones to airdrop seeds onto the forest floor when fire's heat flushes through their roots and trunks; and it creates comfort as seen in the spirit of mutual aid and collective love infusing the human response to the fires that engulfed Los Angeles towns and neighborhoods.

What's Your Word of the Year?

In January 2020, I had big, bright, bold plans for the year ahead. In my memory, everyone around me was zinging in hopeful anticipation about 2020. I reviewed the past year with a microscope and rebuilt systems. I made a vision board that took up most of a wall. I set business goals and made action plans. Swiftly and terribly, 2020 became one of the hardest years in the entire human story.

Now, I go through new year's passages differently. I still reflect on the year that has passed and create a vision board for the year ahead. Together, these help me focus on what aligns for me at this time, and what doesn't align. In the place of the big plans and bold agendas of the before times, I prefer plans and activities that allow me to be focused and also flexible, resolute and also responsive.

I've also become a Word of the Year person! My word for 2025 is "Steadfast" - it stirs in me an energy that encompasses and balances bolstering and beholding, grounding and expanding, the sensation of my feet on the earth and my face to the sky. It feels just right as my word for this year because it holds me steady and lights me up, all at the same time and in cozy proportions.

What's your word of the year? Hit reply I'd love to hear it!

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What Our Clients Say

Testimonials

Dr. Elizabeth Cohen
Founder of Afterglow: Life After Divorce
Author of Light on the Other Side of Divorce
​New York, New York

Angela Wells-Sims
Principal/Founder at Durant Bailey Group
Baltimore, Maryland

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News from the Bookshop

Book Rec

Prepping for brand storytelling workshop inspired me to finally read How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth (2023). This book by co-authors Kate Tellers, Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, and The Moth, with Foreword by Padma Lakshmi breaks down the art and science of story development and storytelling in various formats and examines why the sharing of stories is such a powerful form of human connection and learning.

Also over in our Bookshop shop, you'll find a new section called "Spirit Medicine," for your spirit needs a lift, a gift, or a moment to pause and be companioned by words in various forms. If you have recs for this new section, send them my way!