Diane Curran, an author and the Wow Whisperer, joins Tonya Dawn Recla to talk about her superpower and the creative women entrepreneurs. Celebrating 45+ years of marketing and 4200+ presentations delivered in a diverse range of venues and creative media, she considers every day a fresh adventure. Diane’s worked with thousands of clients and managed projects for everything from Winter Olympics fundraising campaigns, the early stages of Fidelity Investments, and a wide range of high tech, business-to-business marketers, and many regional/national not-for-profit and cultural organizations during her Boston days. Listen in as she shares her knowledge about women entrepreneurs.
Hello, everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert, and I’m really delighted to have with us today, just a wonderful woman. Diane Curran is the “Wow Whisperer,” right? So I love the juxtaposition of those two words in and of themselves, it’s like we’re gonna, “Wow” has this great energy, but then there’s this subtle kinda flowiness to it, and that really encompasses her. She has this really neat creative energy to her, and her passion is very obvious just in the, not over-the-top, not banging you on the head with it, but a real understated, kinda just joy and passion for what she does. And you can feel that coming off of her.
But she works in the marketing and creative spaces, which is again very perfect for the conversations that we have here at Super Power Up! because we are the integrators, we’re the bridges, we’re melding worlds together to create this kind of holistic, rich experience for everybody. And she does that also in her work, which I think is great.
So I’m gonna let her tell you a little bit more about her superpower and stuff as we go along, but for now, why don’t we, if you would, please, join me in welcoming Diane Curran to the show. Welcome, Diane.
Thank you, Tonya. It is so great to be here, and I’m very excited to have a conversation with you and with all of those out there in the world that we can’t see but we know they’re with us. Thank you.
Perfect. Well, we’re gonna talk today about creative women entrepreneurs. That felt like such a perfect topic for you. But before we jump in, let’s go ahead and ask you, what are your superpowers?
Oh, I love that question. It is one when I first met you, you asked that of me, and I thought, “Oh, my gosh, no one’s ever asked that out loud to me before.” And I have joked for many years that my superpower, one of them, is invisibility, and what I mean by that is that I’ve noticed that I literally can walk through life and not be seen. I used to wonder about that because sometimes people would literally bump into me on the street, and I thought, “What, can’t they see me?” And I thought, “Truth is, they actually can’t.” But then I realized that, for many of us, it’s a superpower we take for granted. What I mean by that is that it actually brings with it privacy, it brings with it a sense of freedom, because you’re not always visible to others, not always available for them to look at you and therefore possibly judge you, and comment on you, and kinda come up and be with you when you’re maybe not ready to be in a conversation or be in a public kind of experience.
Listening is very proactive.
So it can be, in fact, a superpower, and what it has allowed me to do over the years is to learn to develop another superpower, and that is to be a listener. And listening, for me, is something that is very proactive, where you’re not simply there, witnessing what someone is saying and watching them, and being kind of quiet and non-energized. It’s actually a very active and engaged experience of reaching out and energetically holding the space for someone to shine. So, those are probably the two that come to mind first.
Oh, perfect. You know, it’s funny, I was laughing ’cause Neva is a big fan of invisibility superpower, but she constantly calls it “invincibility,” so it’s like, I think it’s a Freudian slip on some level. I’m not sure, I think her young mind might think, invisibility sounded cool, but I think she’s really gearing up for invincibility, but I had to smile at that. And she named some of the same reasons: it’s the idea of being kind of not seen. And I observed that in her, much like you described, and you’re the first person I’ve really heard describe it in that way. But when she was little, people would literally just run into her and then be shocked that she was there. What I’d notice, ’cause I like to kinda geek out on frequencies and vibrations and stuff is that I think that some people literally couldn’t see her. Like she existed in a frequency that they just weren’t attuned to, and so it shocked them in the physical world that there was actually a body there.
It’s absolutely true, and in fact, I have experienced this. It was one time where I was in an airport, and I noticed somebody across the way getting off a plane who I had had a very incomplete and dissatisfying last conversation with. And I thought, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not sure I really wanna engage this person right now,” and I thought, “Oh, relax, Diane, he doesn’t even see you,” and he literally walked right by me. I thought, “You know, what’s great about this, is that I knew the time wasn’t right for a conversation.” I didn’t have to do anything about it because he was literally not tuned into … As I observed him, I could see where his attention was: it was not on seeing who was there, it was not on being present for his environment, who might be a part of it.
And so, he was in a different space, so that invisibility, or invincibility, can give you the freedom to see what’s so and actually then pay attention to what’s available and what isn’t available.
I agree with that, and you kinda named it earlier where you said you used to wonder about that, and here at Super Power Experts, we help people discover their predisposed superpowers, and I always tell people that they always start off as one of your bigger challenges. And so it doesn’t surprise me that an aspect of you might go to the story of like, “Okay, wait, what’s wrong? Why don’t people see me?” But then to find, once we neutralize that conversation, then we’re able to really hone it as a superpower, and I think it’s so beautiful how you were able to trace that too, “I have this for a reason.” And you are a keen observer, then, of the environment, and then you are able to really sit and hold space for people in a way that those who perhaps didn’t traverse the challenging aspect of invisibility experience.
And to me they’re all indicators and little clues of the work that we came here to do and how we came here to do it, and so you touch people through that and had you chosen to stay in the self-doubt, kind of lower-self-esteem aspects of it, you wouldn’t have been able to unfold it in such a beautiful way.
And what’s great about it is that … Okay, so this is interesting. My phone ringer that I carefully turned off is now ringing. So, I don’t know what that is.
Yep. It’s not surprising on this show. It’s, you know, we’ll always be tested to make sure that we are clear, that all of that human stuff is okay.
Well, you know what, it’s perfectly fine. So it’s kinda funny, because it’s ringing to remind me of something, and that is that, if I may, I’ve actually been blessed with a third superpower.
Absolutely.
I feel like I have way too many to count, and-
You can never have too many superpowers.
And here’s the one that’s hilarious, given what I’ve just said about invisibility, and it has to do with, I’m gonna call, oh, a natural enthusiasm for life. And what I mean by that is that when I am particularly interested in something, and it could be something I know nothing about, or it could be something I’m steeped in, like the arts or marketing, I get very excited. And people notice that when I’m doing presentations, or whatever it might be, speaking publicly, and I literally cannot help myself. Meaning, I am allowing myself to be taken by it, and in the process, it’s not about what I have to share, it’s about connecting with others such that together, we can actually allow energy to percolate up and be interesting, and exciting, and full of discovery for whoever is participating at that moment with me.
You’re a person who is exciting me now.
So, I can’t help myself, I get excited, and you’re a person who’s exciting me right now.
Oh, what a great compliment, that’s so cool. You’re speaking of something that I call “synergistic collaboration,” and it’s the awareness that we have that there is energy that exists between us, and that energy is the creative element, so there’s friction as the two energy bodies meet up and not friction in a negative way but friction in terms of the energy meets up against something. I contend that our most powerful places, our most creative aspects, exist in there, because left to our own devices, we can create and everything else on our own, but I’ve been in keen observation of what happens in the space between people. And so when you give in to that, most of us are so busy, as you said you witnessed in this gentleman that you didn’t really want to talk to, but it wasn’t a fear or wasn’t founded anyway because he wasn’t engaging in the environment.
But when we give in to that rather than need to cut ourselves off, or shelter, or have our defensive mechanisms up, there’s this real, amazing thing that it starts to occur. I describe it to people like I have these little birthing projects all over the world because I do this show, and I’ve done it so much now where people call and have a consult with me, there’s this energized kind of feeling. It’s like, okay, well what can we create together? And rather than go right into an agreement and what does the world of form want, and what are we gonna create, and what should we brand it, and what should we do … Instead, it’s just saying, “Look, I feel connected to you, I love you, you love me, and let’s just give in to that synergy and see what comes out of it. And it’s-
And it’s funny, ’cause that’s kinda how Justin and I agreed to parent Neva or to develop our marriage between us, and so it’s such a beautiful unfoldment.
It truly is, and you remind me of two things, and I’ll start with the second one first. In speaking about how you and Justin relate to and relate with Neva, I’m mindful of something that occurred just last week. A lot of times when I do my art tours, I’m a docent at a museum and I get the opportunity to tour visitors around to art that spans about, oh, I’m gonna say five or six centuries. And so my groups of people are anything from kiddos, little kiddos in strollers, all the way up to older folks with walkers and everybody in between.
And oftentimes, I find that my most interested visitors are kids, I’m gonna say between around five and maybe ten or eleven, who, because I give people a chance to talk and interact, it’s very interactive. They’re actually up for when I say, “So, is anybody noticing anything about this painting or this particular aspect?” And they’re so cute, they raise their hands, and every once in a while, when they raise their hands and I kinda walk over and say, “Hi. so what would you like to share?” Every once in a while there’s a kid who isn’t used to being called on, or if they kinda get called on, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what to say now because I’m actually being listened to.” And I have found that with most kids, if you just give them a few beats, out comes this amazing observation, or discovery, or question.
The other day I did it, I walked over to this little boy, and he kinda stopped, and he kinda had that, “Oh, my gosh” frozen moment. And the next thing that happened was his mother put her hand on the top of his head and looked at me with an apology, like, “Oh, he doesn’t really know how to talk,” or “He’s kind of shy,” and I thought, “Ooh, she’s taking away this moment.” Because she’s trying to protect him, I get that, but as a result, I watched him shutting down. I said, “You know what, I’ll come back and talk with you later.” Because he just, he wasn’t gonna talk, and I could sense that combination of the expectation that he wasn’t going to be able to talk took over, and he took it away from himself. Even though he wanted to.
And we as adults have that all the time. I call it sort of the loss of everyday charisma, and one of the things that, in my work, I look to do is wake that up in people, such that they begin to allow themselves to be seen, to develop their own visible superpower in a way that is natural and comfortable and not pushed and forced.
That’s just beautiful, and I think that you’re speaking at something that’s near and dear to my heart with regard to parenting and how … and I would even add on top of that it had less to do with her wanting to protect him and more to do with her insecurity about what that meant about her. We see that a lot with parents, and I certainly have had to overcome my fair share of that. But how beautiful that you were able to observe and still hold that connection with that child and really see. So there was an impact that was made there, even if it wasn’t, perhaps, as full as it could have been. You did connect.
And so we’ve been having a really great conversation right now with Diane Curran about creative women entrepreneurs, and I think you can piece together how she just embodies that and that very essence. So we’re gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, I wanna dive into that a little bit more and see if we can’t flesh out how we can encourage that creative aspect, similar to the work that Diane does with her clients. So stick with us, and we will be right back.
Find out more about Diane Curran at themarketingdeal.com.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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