Episode 66: Inspiration, Information & Education: Create A Brand That People Connect With; With Emily Soccorsy
How do you create a brand that people can connect with? Today’s guest is Emily Soccorsy, the co-founder of Root + River. Emily explains that you need to go back to your roots and pour your life experiences and passions into your brand to spark an authentic connection with people. Discover how the impact and legacy that Emily’s immigrant grandparents provided that impacted her career and life. Learn how she tapped into her soul to create a business that reflected her passions and empowered her to bring her heritage into her work in ways she never thought possible. If you want to tap into your own soul and pour yourself into your brand, then this episode is for you.
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Episode 66: Inspiration, Information & Education: Create A Brand That People Connect With; With Emily Soccorsy
I interview Emily Soccorsy, who believes all great brands are spiritual experiences. As Cofounder of Root + River, a brand strategy team, she uses her magical talents for mission-driven leaders and organizations, helping them find meaningful language to finally express their brand in the way they have always wanted to. Root + River serves national and international clients to guide them in establishing an intrinsic brand that naturally stands apart from others. Once a journalist, Emily is the co-author of the book Rooting Up: Essays on Modern Branding and a frequent speaker and panelist.
She loves to challenge dogmatic thinking and infuse art and spirit into business. During my interview with Emily, we discussed the impact and legacy that her immigrant grandparents provided her that has impacted her career in life. Learn how she tapped into her soul to create a business that reflected her passions and empowered her in ways to bring her heritage into her work that she never thought possible. If you liked this episode, please like, share and subscribe so others can be inspired by leaders like Emily and their paths to success.
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I’m with Emily Soccorsy. Emily, do you want to get started and give a background on yourself?
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited about this conversation.
I’m glad for you to be here.
I am the CEO and Cofounder of Root + River. We believe all great brands are spiritual experiences. We started Root + River in 2016 to help leaders, solopreneurs, small business owners understand and articulate the soul of the brand and this idea that brands are spiritual. We help them put that into language they can use every day. That’s what I do in my day job. I’ve been building that company. I am also a mom. I have two daughters and a background in a variety of different communication degrees and a Master’s in Nonfiction Writing and chief cat herder, trash taker outer, all those numerous things.
All the things that are non-glamorous that no one sees behind the brand. I’m glad that you could be here. Your company is aligned with what we talk about on this show. It’s about our stories and belief systems we’ve developed over time that become who we are and then the question, “Is that me? Is that somebody else?” Getting to the root of ourselves. I would love to know your story about how you got to where you are. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up? What was your family like?
I grew up mainly in Arizona, in the Southwest. My roots, if you’re starting at the beginning, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents were both born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio and their grandparents were immigrants to this country from Italy and then one from Romania. My parents had an ethnic, blue-collar upbringing and we spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up. We lived in Cleveland and then we lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan in my young formative years. I was six years old. We spent a lot of time in that culture.
Growing up, we did make a move to Arizona but in most summers, we would go back for three months. We would spend our summers with our grandparents. Those are my roots. I look at life through the lens of family and how I am carrying on the dreams that my great grandparents had coming to this country, and the sacrifices my grandparents made. My parents did well. I’m trying to build on that particularly for the women in my family. My grandmother on my mom’s side was a powerhouse. She worked during the war. She had four children. My grandfather was in the Army for four years during World War II.
In the US or in Italy?
He’s an American citizen. He landed on D-Day all throughout Europe. My grandmother had these children. She told me this story that one summer, it was sometime after he came back from the war and she needed a job. She went down to Strouss, the department store in Downtown Youngstown. She applied for a job in the women’s coat department. She told the manager, “I will be your best employee. I will sell the most merchandise but I will have the summers off because I have four kids. I have to be able to take care of them during the summer.” This was probably in the late 1940s.
He gave her the job and she works there for 40 years. It was phenomenal. She’s like, “I demanded that. That’s what I was going to do. That’s the role I was going to play.” I remember she told me that story when I had just graduated from college and I will never forget it. I always hold that. It guided a lot of the moves I’ve made at certain times. There comes a moment that you have to define the future and tell someone what you want and what you expect, particularly as a woman in business. That’s the stew of where I began. I have three brothers and I’m the only girl.
We are an Italian family mainly. We moved to Arizona when I was six years old in the ‘80s. Growing up, I’ve always been a reader, a writer, a creator. I would bounce back and forth between the activities my brothers were doing, sports, and we had a swimming pool, so swimming in the pool, and then retreating into my room where I would create worlds, stories, characters, paper dolls and dramas with my Barbies. All these threads of storytelling, creativity, imagination and expression. I have a deep belief in language and a love of literature that springs from those experiences. We have a loving home. My parents are married until my mom’s death.
They were married for 30 years. I’m blessed to have a very nurturing environment. There are four kids in our family, so it was insane and lots of sports or basketball family. I played basketball in high school and a lot of different aspects to it. That’s what’s beautiful about a big family is you have access to all the things that your siblings are interested in to a certain extent and that has informed my diversity of interests that was carried on throughout my life.
What did your mom die of?
She died of cancer many years ago.
How did that affect the family?
They were a very loving couple. They were in love with each other and loving towards the four of us. She was a volunteer in the community. Her footprint was huge. Her heart print on all of us is huge. To recalibrate from that was difficult, the family fracture. We’re all still close but we had to rebuild all the connections because that hub was gone. I felt drawn to try to be that hub and then I realized I couldn’t be that hub because I wasn’t her. I can somewhat play that role but I’m not my brother’s mom. What was awesome about my parents and particularly my mom is she developed a strong individual relationship with each of us.
The loss was very personal. I’m an expressive person. I wanted to work through it, deal with it and express. My brothers had their different ways of doing that. I’ve confronted grief a lot in my life but I learned a lot about the different ways people close to you grieve. There was a reckoning with the gap in the middle. We all come at that from different perspectives. Coming up ten years later, we started doing family get-togethers a few years ago. That has helped to rebuild but it’s always with this loss in the room. It’s a different dynamic.
That’s an interesting learning that even with leaders or in business, everyone is taking in emotions and everything different. We want to do a one size fits all or what we think can fix everything but then you notice like, “I have to do this individually and nurture people in a different way than what they were doing.”
Create A Brand: There comes a moment that you have to define the future and tell someone what you want and what you expect.
It’s very relevant. Particularly for me, I’m a helper. I was the middle child too. I was the peacemaker and I wanted to be able to facilitate. Sometimes people need space and room to deal with things on their own, a loving base to turn too. That’s true as a leader and as a member of a family too. One of my mantras is to take good people at their word and let it be. If somebody is like, “I need this space,” or you get a strong feeling that they need some distance, you go to let that be what it is and hope that they’ll come back or re-initiate when it feels right to them.
Were your grandparents alive when your mom died?
They had passed a little bit. My grandmother had passed a few years before my mom got sick. I’m glad they didn’t have to go through that.
As you moved to Arizona, were they still as influential throughout your life?
I had all four of my grandparents until I was a senior in college. We spent a number of holidays. Either they would come to Arizona, one set of them, or we would go back to Youngstown and we would bounce back and forth between house for a lot of Christmases, Easters and all the holidays. They did have a direct influence. I’m not an immigrant, I’m not trying to experience it but when you come from a family where that is the root, it influences generationally. My father was the first one in his family to go to college and he’s an engineer. He’s got a Master’s degree. That was a huge deal. My dad would send copies of our report cards to my grandparents, reporting in like, “This is how it’s going.” He was proud and wanted to show them that were working to make progress on the risks and sacrifices that they’ve made.
I wasn’t as close because my grandparents died when I was younger but one of them was born here. One of them wasn’t, but both from Russia. They lived in immigrant neighborhoods and my grandfather became a CPA. It was a new industry in the 1930s. In my life, it’s not like I knew them as close as you’re describing but the influence of the sacrifices that they made and two generations later of trying to carry on what they did to benefit future generations. They were more in the blue-collar industry in order to help the next generation get to where they are and it’s always around me. I always feel it and feel the power of trying to serve what they did even though they’re not here. You don’t realize it sits with you.
It’s present to me and whenever I’d made big decisions, I think about that legacy and how I can move the ball forward and I think about my daughters that way too. It’s like, “What move am I making now? How will they impact my daughters as they come into their own professionally? What doors can I kick open now that they will easily breeze through?” It helps me, grounds me and makes me feel connected to the universe.
The generations, the continuation. You had this interest in creativity even though you were in sports. What did you decide when you were little you wanted to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an actress, a fashion designer and an author. I wanted to do all of the things and have this perfect life but it wasn’t very specific but interestingly, I have written a book. In the process of that, I was creative but the approach to that was like, “That’s nice. That’s okay. We love that about you.” However, in the real world, that’s not something that has value. My mom was a feminist. She was like, “You got to be able to make your own money, support yourself and explore the world.” She wanted all these grand metropolitan things for me. It was like, “Those are nice ideas but let’s get real.”
What did she do?
She was a book editor. She was a teacher first and then she took some time away. She started doing editing on the side for a professor at Thunderbird College of International Management. She edited his texts for years and worked closely with him.
What did that change as far as your choices with what she was telling you?
She did that part-time on the side. Part of her missing piece was that career. As a feminist, living out the dream where you are in control. She had these four children and she was dedicated to us. I felt the pressure to be that and do that but at the same time, my heart was this creative heart. As I went into college, I was like, “I have to be practical about this.” I adopted those ideas and views. I ended up studying Communication, which I felt was a good midpoint and I liked it. This is probably hiding a little bit because you could get a Communication degree and do a lot of different things. This works but it’s practical.
I also spent a year studying abroad which was an experience I felt she encouraged me to have and I loved. It was amazing. I was in Edinburgh, Scotland for a year at the University of Edinburgh. It then got to the end of college and I felt unsure about anything. I was drawn to community work and nonprofits. It’s a love language. I want another international experience and applied for a variety of experiences like Peace Corps, Teach For America. I didn’t get accepted to anything but the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Programme hire recent college grads to teach conversational English in Japan. I was like, “Another year abroad, then I can figure out my life.” It felt wrong to join the rat race.
You feel there’s something wrong in your gut.
It didn’t feel right. I was like, “I’ll do this. How different can it be?” I knew nothing about Japan. I did not know the language. I packed myself up, moved across the world and was placed in rural Japan, four hours North of Tokyo by the Shinkansen, the bullet train in a little town called Hanamaki up in the mountains. I team-taught with Japanese teachers of English. I was the conversational English teacher in a very competitive high school. I had a pit toilet in my little teacher’s housing. I didn’t have central heating. It’s the same latitude as Washington DC. I didn’t speak the language. I feel like I know what it’s like to be illiterate. I was 1 of 2 or 3 foreigners in the area. I was a town celebrity. I had a couple of stalkers. That was interesting too. It’s a completely different experience that broke me down.
It wasn’t what you expected or you didn’t know what to expect.
I was naive. I didn’t do my homework and I was alone. My family was going through some crises. That was difficult. I was away. We’re very tight. I was alone in the middle of Japan in the dark and the cold. I had these big oil tanks that I had to get filled with kerosene and walked back to my little apartment. It was isolating. It’s patriarchal culture. For example, some of the teachers I taught with, I was expected to walk behind them on the way to class. They would pick me up from the teacher’s lounge and then we’d walk to the classroom. That was great training. I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate the culture at that time.
What did you learn about yourself with all of that? That’s isolated. There’s no one to communicate with you in a foreign country. You’ve made a commitment that you have to stick it out. That seems almost like a meditation retreat.
I learned many great things. I learn how to be alone. I hadn’t spent much time alone. I learned how to be my own company and established rituals for myself. I learned how important family is. It helped me deconstruct how I was living my life to please my mom not in a bad way. She wasn’t demanding anything but she wanted me to be this woman in the world. Here I was being this woman in the world, far away from my family and showing everyone how strong I was. I was expressive and emotional but I could do these hard things and I hated it. I was miserable.
At some point, I was like, “This isn’t maybe who I am now. I can’t do it like this.” My tendency is like, “I’m going to take something on. I’m going to take on the hardest possible thing and I’m going to challenge myself the most.” It failed. I was severely depressed by the end. I’m in a very dark place but still wanting to hold to that commitment and wanting to finish. I did end up leaving two months early, which at that time I felt like a complete failure but my mental health was on the line and I had to come home, so I left. It was a very maturing experience. I want to go back to see it through adult eyes but I’m not afraid anymore.
Create A Brand: Unless we can implement the idea, it didn’t matter. That’s a waste of time and energy.
We often talk about all the things that go right and our accomplishments and so forth, but it’s those moments that we grow and learn the most. When we’re broken down, how do we persevere? When you got back, what was next for you?
I was such a wreck when I got back. I was a total shell of a person. I also learned, “Don’t wind yourself all the way down,” but I kept learning that throughout my life. I had to start over more than it was when I left college because I had spent this time abroad and it was nothing on the resume. I was drawn to nonprofit work. There’s one thing that happened in Japan, which is I got the Japanese Asahi Shimbun, which was the English language daily newspaper. I would read it cover to cover. It was a lifeline for me. Somewhere along the way, I was like, “I love this. It’s writing and telling stories. Maybe I should think about being in journalist?”
That was niggling in my mind but I’m like, “I don’t have any clips. I wasn’t involved in my college newspaper. Nothing.” After I pulled myself out of the pit of despair, I started applying for positions. I made up clips, not falsified them but I started a family newsletter because I was learning about it all the time. I was like, “We need clips. We create clips. You got to see how I write. Here’s how I write.” It was one of those grandma-inspired moments like, “This is it. This is me.” I happened to get a job. I was lucky enough to get a job with a local community newspaper who is like that Moxie. I finally landed a job as an education reporter for a community weekly newspaper that started my journalism career.
That’s an important highlight for people to hear. You don’t have to have all the boxes checked to start. A lot of times, when we make changes in our experience or careers or what we want to do, we feel like we need to go back for all this education and do all of these steps. It’s like, “You got to start from the beginning.” A lot of times, that’s the hardest thing because it’s ego. It’s like you have a college degree, so you got to wrap your head around like, “I’m going to start as a journalist for a community paper. It’s going to take me a while but I got to learn the ropes.” It’s being okay to let the ego go and say, “This is something I want. This is something I want to learn. This is the way I’m going to learn it.”
There’s the fake it until you make it thing. That is powerful at the beginning of your career, as long as you’re doing it with humility. I think about the first day after I got the job. I’m like, “This is great.” I go in and after my orientation, I sit down at my desk and I’m like, “I have no idea how to do this.” I had gotten an assignment to cover this school board meeting. I remember sitting there and walked over to this other reporter in the newsroom who was nice. He was the senior reporter. I sat next to him and I was like, “Brian, I’m going to cover this story.” It’s like I totally have it but "Can you walk me through a quick sketch basic of how you would approach this?”
This is a guy who went to college for Journalism and was on the news. He had everything like five years of experience but he took pity on me like, “This is how you do it.” I’m sure with low expectations. Sometimes you have to fake it as you make it and have the humility to be like, “I need to learn. Teach me what you know. I will work so hard to acquire these skills and match my ability to these skills.” That’s served me well and luckily, Brian was there. We became good friends. There was a great culture there, a great vibe for all of us young writers. It was a sweet time in my career.
How did you get into branding, marketing and things that you do now?
I was with the newspaper. I eventually became one of the publishers of the region. I was starting to feel like I had a strong skillset. I was managing everything, sales, production and the writing stuff. I started to stagnate a little bit and feel like I needed to change. I went and did PR for a couple of years. That’s a common jump for a lot of journalists to make. I was good at that. The economy tanked, then we started taking on clients that we’re their beliefs were not aligned at all because we had to take the clients that were coming to us. My time there exposed me to businesses in a new way. The owner of the firm worked to get in the weeds of the business, and understood how the business was configured and what its goals were.
I was very excited to learn that and it started my strategic thinking more around business, communication and building that gap. I left when my mom got sick and took some time to help but I also started doing freelance. I didn’t think of it as my own company at that time. I don’t want to own my own business. I’ll see if people call me for writing, social marketing, communication newsletter writing. My biggest client hired me to come in-house and lead the brand from a marketing communication standpoint, their VP of communications. I did that. Throughout this whole time, as I’m building the skillset and seeing these different businesses in the way they’re communicating, there’s this huge gap.
You have all this passion and you pour in all this energy, all this money, all this time and then when it comes to communicating that, we’re using cliches and catchphrases. You’re unable to pour all of that into language that’s different, true and reflective expressive of who you are. Being that’s one of my special gifts, it was like this injustice. The people who were able to do that were big companies with bazillion dollar budgets. That was an injustice to me. I started seeing that problem and I knew I could apply it in the circumstances I was in but beyond that, people should know how to do this better. It was around about this time of leading our marketing team that I met Justin Foster, who is my business partner and Cofounder in Root + River.
He was doing brand consulting. He came in and I hired him to come into the company and help us to get our arms around the brands. His approach was in alignment with my thinking around this. He was a one-man-band. It was a little bit like seeing a street performer. He’s got the harmonica in his mouth, hitting the drum, facilitating and strategizing all at once. I’m sitting there going, “I can make this better and add onto this process.” He’s also playing that traditional consultant role. He comes in, tell them what they need and then leave. I was like, “That is useless because you disrupted the whole environment. You shape these ideas that are not done yet. Unless we can implement it, it didn’t matter. That’s a waste of time and energy. Let’s work together to see if your ideas can be implementable.”
After doing that and it was with great results, that was a point where I was like, “We can do this for other people.” Our sounds harmonized and we balanced each other out. That was the moment that Root + River was born. This idea that we could bridge that gap for people. We can give them the words but also show them how they can make it real in the world but not become marketers. We didn’t want to be an agency. The old one is to have a perspective of teaching people how to brand in a new way.
What have you learned about people through the process of branding?
We call our process intrinsic branding. It’s from the inside out. We go deep with our clients. It’s not unusual for clients to cry. It’s not unusual for clients to work with us again and again as their business shifts and changes because they feel like we are inherently a part of their business and their brand. Sometimes, it’s not in the branding business. We’re giving your soul space to breathe business because people have these passions and these pursuits. For whatever reason, they don’t feel like they can be forthcoming about what is powering them.
They feel like the world has told them that, “You have to make it something other than it is.” When we come in and we say, “We’re going to build on what is. There’s no division between who you are as a person and the work you’re doing.” They’re relieved and it sparks a lot of creativity for them and that reframing opens up a lot for people. I humbly say we’ve changed hundreds of lives by providing that space and guiding people through a process to help them name what moves them every day. That has been just a huge honor.
It goes back to what you were talking about with your grandma and your mom of whether you’re living your life for yourself or out of duty and where you start shaping your life differently because of that perception of what you should be doing. I know many times I’ve started businesses that have been maybe in a traditional area but a little bit different. Even my speaking business was interesting because I didn’t know how to do a speaking business when I started.
I was trying to figure out what my differentiator was. I paid a speaker agent to look at my website, tell me if I had it right. I had on there that I was a CPA, yoga and technologist. She said to me, “No one cares that you do yoga.” That ripped me apart. Anyone goes to yoga. Luckily, in my gut, I was like, “She’s wrong.” That takes time to find that within you of what feedback do you listen to? What feedback do you not listen to? That’s overtime of knowing when you’ve got off track because you went against your gut and you went with what people told you to do.
That story gave me chills in a bad way like I wanted to tackle her but it’s very common. In the 20th Century, brands were about manufactured reality. The whole Mad Men era was around manipulation, coercion and blunt force trauma marketing. You could take an idea. You could make people aspire to be a Betty Crocker standard and then make them feel terrible that they couldn’t achieve that and sell them products in the gap. In the 21st Century and certainly post-pandemic, that is not effective. We are in an age of inspiration and information from a brand standpoint and education, all rooted in the truth of who you are. In the age that we currently live in, if you are pretending to be something you are not, you will be exposed and your brand will be damaged. I think of Cuomo going through the exposure of the brand is not what it appeared to be.
It’s not possible. I would have opposite advice. Nobody cares about what you sell, your product, your service, they care about and they make decisions based on who you are and what you believe. Is it that you are a yogi that you practice yoga, that you teach yoga? That opens up a whole other realm of the possible connection with people who believe what you believe. That’s more essential than your certifications because anybody can buy anything from anyone. We all have that countless opportunities. We buy from people we love and trust if we are in-tuned into our intuition. Even if we’re not, we still make decisions there.
You can always tell when someone’s trying to be something they’re not or copying other brands because that worked for them. When you spearhead your own path to people that are like, “This is the way you do it. This is the way you set up a business. This is the way you message,” then that’s not the way you message. You’re left to go, “Does that work for me?” You do have to take in certain things of like, “What in this would I overcome if someone like that person came to my website? How would I get that person comfortable? Is that a clear decision of what clients you want or what clients you don’t want?”
Your job as a brand or as a marketer is not to convince anyone of anything. It is to be yourself clearly enough, confidently enough that the people who do not believe what you believe are repelled as quickly and efficiently as possible. I met your audience to think about branding much more as strategic repulsion. You want to be so confident and clear in that you are repelling people because if those individuals that come in who are misaligned that you feel like you have to convince once, you’re going to have to give them again. They will become a drain of your time, resources, energy of your organization. They’re going to tick you off. They’re going to tick your team off. If you repel them at the outset, they never would have come in. The trade-off to that is you attract someone who is aligned at that root level. Now that person adds energy, loves what you do, recommends you to ten other people. We build a business around that. We build a brand ministering to that individual, creating experiences for that individual.
Create A Brand: We are in an age of inspiration and information from a brand standpoint and education, all rooted in the truth of who you are.
You’re not spending the extra money to try to serve someone outside of who you are and what you do. Thank you so much for sharing your story. There are many great nuggets in there. I love to end with some rapid-fire questions. You get to pick a category. Family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
Let’s go spiritual.
Things or actions I don’t have that I want.
More creative time always.
Things or actions I do have that I want.
I’m grateful for my home. I thank God every day for my home and the people in it.
Things or actions that I don’t have that I don’t want as far as spirituality.
I’m not a regular churchgoer but I was raised Catholic and I found a lot of comfort in the gathering together. Ever since the pandemic, I have my spiritual practice and prayer meditation but I am missing that communal experience.
I was saying that to my son. I’m Jewish but the Temple’s been closed for so long. I was like, “I want to walk in and sit there.” You don’t realize until it’s gone. That tradition and spirit. Things or actions that I do have that I don’t want.
I have a tendency to steal my own joy. I’m a very industrious person. I can work so hard that I’m taking the joy out of things that are typically joyous for me. I have to realign myself. I’ve been working on that to find joy and to let joy in. It’s hard.
That’s hard as an entrepreneur. Sometimes you get wrapped up in everything you were talking about with Justin before you met him. Now you understand. You get involved with many things that get away from the reason you got into the business. Thank you so much for sharing. Is there anything that we didn’t cover or any takeaway you want people to walk away from this conversation?
Please reach out to me directly. Our website is RootAndRiver.com. My personal website is EMJoyInc.com. I write there and I put out every other week an email of creativity called Thought Cookie. You can learn more about that there if you’re intrigued by that. Please reach out. I’m very accessible. I’d love to have a conversation with you if intrinsic branding feels like something you’re interested in.
For those reading this, sometimes everyone goes toward marketing but branding is the core of everything else. I can tell you from knowing Emily in many ways, when you see her brain working, there’s nothing better than being a part of it.
I feel that way about you. I’m honored to be here with you and share this mind-meld.
Thank you so much for being on and sharing with our readers.
You’re welcome.
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For our Mindful Moments and reflecting back on this interview that I had with Emily, I’m recognizing some of these key areas that are helpful for us in understanding our belief systems, but also understanding that the brand that we want to put out into the world is important. A lot of times, when we talk about a brand, it happens to us because we’re not maybe intentional or thoughtful enough about what we want to put out into the world and how we want people to reflect back on either ourselves or our companies.
When you think about branding, it’s important to take it to the lowest common denominator of what is important to you? What is the impact that you want to make in the world? Are you effectively doing that? Are people walking away from you and feeling what you want them to feel whether they’re using your products, services or interacting with you as a person? One of the areas that I wanted to draw upon and for those of you that have had immigrants in your family, you probably related to the conversation that Emily and I had about her grandparents that were immigrants, were part of fighting in the war, the effects that had on their family, and also what it has for the generations after.
Create A Brand: Nobody cares about what you sell, your product or service. They care about and make decisions based on who you are and what you believe.
I related to her feelings toward this that I did not know my grandparents for very long in my life but many stories I’ve heard and the sacrifices they made in order to have the freedom that we all have in this country. Sometimes we forget about that. It gets lost in all the debates but how many people fight to put their foot on US soil, and be able to live what is perceived as the American Dream and when people have made that sacrifice in your family. I know for myself, it’s always with me because I think about their sacrifices, how much it helped my life only two generations later to be able to have the life that I have if they hadn’t made the sacrifices that they did.
A lot of times, those can affect your belief systems when you think about all of your ancestry and what gets passed down as far as stories and so forth. It’s important to understand when you’re feeling like you’re trying to serve a higher need or are you serving your soul? What Emily talks a lot about was making sure that you tap into your soul and truly understand what makes you. The problem is that when we don’t give our soul a space to breathe, we might be following these messages and stories too strongly in our lives because we feel a sense of duty. Those people that sacrifice so much have a different kind of mindset that we may have in this current day of what success looks like or what careers we need to do in order to have success. Without exploring who we are, we end up following those pathways but maybe it feels out of alignment with the things that we are doing or want to be doing.
It’s important to tap into when we’re feeling off, how we step back and look at, why do we do what we do? Are there things that we could try on the side? It doesn’t mean we have to give up our day job or anything that we’re doing as far as our daily life but play. Try something that maybe fed your soul. If it’s a creative thing that you’re going and maybe learning a new instrument, learning how to sing, knit or it’s active or it’s a not-for-profit or a charity that means a lot to you maybe from your past experiences that you want to give back into the world.
It’s like what Emily did where she started writing articles, remembering how much she enjoyed words, putting that to paper and creating stories then when she started taking a different route and writing articles, knowing that you have to start over. You have to do that groundwork in order to create what you want in the future. Sometimes that can feel like a backward step. The thing is, if you can keep in mind during those times where you’re in the learning process, which is the hardest thing, that you have a future vision and you may not be clear what that future vision is. I’m sure reading Emily’s story, she couldn’t have imagined having this branding agency that she has now and being able to spark creativity in other people.
In order to get there and to be able to create what you want to create in your life, you have to be very open to the experience. As you saw in Emily’s story, because she became a writer, because she faked it until she made it, and asked people for help along the way so that she could learn what she did, over time, that’s where she eventually met her partner. He was coming in as someone they hired for that business and being open to what he was doing and how she might relate to that. These are all important stories because she wouldn’t have known that she was going to have this partner and have this agency if she had never put herself out there and tried it and started over, be humble. All of those things are important.
It’s important to emphasize these key areas that she said of making sure that you’re rooted in who you are, whether that’s an inspiration, information and education. You take those three areas and set goals around that to make sure that you are in alignment with who you are and you’re inspiring others with the things that you want to inspire, not just by example. It doesn’t have to be anything big. Also, understanding when you’re creating a brand that people believe or connect with people they relate to and that seem authentic. If you’re trying to create a brand based on what you see somebody else do but it does not fit, it shows. It makes people uncomfortable or question. Be okay with who you are. Don’t try to convince anyone of anything. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Emily.
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About Emily Soccorsy
Emily Soccorsy (So-KOR-SEE) believes all great brands are spiritual experiences.
As co-founder of Root and River, a brand strategy team, Emily uses her magical talents for mission-driven leaders and organizations, helping them find meaningful language to finally express their brand in the way they have always wanted to. Root + River serves national and international clients to guide them in establishing an intrinsic brand that naturally stands apart from others.
Once a journalist, Emily is the co-author of the book Rooting Up: Essays on Modern Branding, and a frequent speaker and panelist. Emily loves to challenge dogmatic thinking, and infuse art and spirit into business.