🤷‍♀️ Who is the Fearless Designer?

I am so excited and a little nervous to share this episode with you. This ep, unlike any other, is incredibly special to me as I finally open up about my journey and how I became "The Fearless Designer."

I take you back to my roots in the small town of Stawell, Australia, and share the milestones that led me to where I am today, from winning coloruing competitions as a child to feeling at home in University amongst like-minded creatives. 

Discover how a simple yet powerful word, "fearless," became the cornerstone of my brand during a transformative rebranding process in 2019, inspired by a passage from Elizabeth Gilbert's *Big Magic*.

Also you'll learn in this episode:

- How my early love for art and graphic design shaped my passion and career.

- The challenges and triumphs of starting my graphic design business.

- The emotional rollercoaster of balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship.

- Why embracing fear can lead to immense personal and professional growth.

- Actionable insights into refining your brand to better resonate with your audience.

Understanding and sharing our brand stories is crucial for building a community and connecting with our audience. I hope my journey will inspire you to reflect on your own story and give you the confidence to share with your audience.

Head to https://thefearlessdesigner.com.au/ to learn more about The Fearless Designer or follow along on Instagram @the.fearless.designer

Transcript

Morgan Macdonald [00:00:00]:
Hello. It is so great to have you joining me today on the podcast. Today's episode is actually going to be a little bit different for me. I'm going to share with you the story of how I became the fearless designer. I just realized the other day that I haven't actually shared my origin story very much on my social media or on my website or anything like that. But articulating our brand stories and sharing our stories are a really great way to build a community and an audience. So I thought, what a perfect way to demonstrate that by sharing my story with you. So I hope you can enjoy my little story time today.

Morgan Macdonald [00:00:35]:
And. Yeah, let's go. All right, going right back to 1985, a very, very long time ago. I was born in Stawell, or Staywell, as very commonly mispronounced. Now, Stawell is a very small town in the Wimra in Victoria, Australia. And I think there wasn't this many people when I was growing up, but I think there's about 6000 people that live in Stawell now. It is very close to the Grampians, near Halls Gap. It's about 28, 30 km away.

Morgan Macdonald [00:01:08]:
So it's a beautiful place to grow up. And my family and my parents bought us up on a farm. So I'm a farm girl. I'm not really a farm girl, but I kind of am a farm girl. But from a very early age, I loved to colour, loved to draw. And I entered coloring competitions like an absolute weapon. I wanted to win. I did what I could to win.

Morgan Macdonald [00:01:31]:
And I remember the day that one of my drawings, which I submitted to a competition, was shown on Saturday, Disney. They usually did a montage of people that had sent in colourings and stuff, and mine was one of them on that very day. And I nearly pooped my pants. I was so, so excited. Now, my creativity was nurtured by my nan, who always had plasticine to model or craft supplies at the ready. You know those polystyrene things that used to be the meat trays I used to craft out of that cutting paper, colouring, going outside and collecting leaves and sticks to create craft and art. And when I hit high school in 1997, I was so, so excited to try all the new subjects on offer, the main one being that of graphic design. Now I was really, really shy and self conscious.

Morgan Macdonald [00:02:24]:
So when I found out my old primary school teacher's husband taught the graphic design classes at high school, I just felt so comfortable and knew that I was going to be fine. So I just loved graphic design. The class from the start. Also really loved that we had to get the bus up the road to go to that class. So essentially we had 20 minutes taken out of that, those subjects, which was absolutely awesome. Now, I was all about drawing on paper, using the t square and the set square that we had to use. I was all about the competitions that we continued to do in graphic design class. I think in year eight, I won a chocolate poster competition, which was freaking awesome because I won a big, massive bag of lollies.

Morgan Macdonald [00:03:10]:
I don't know Remem, I don't know if you'll remember the pick and mix Lolly stores where you get to shovel all the different lollies into your bag and then you paid by weight. I think I won like a $10 voucher to that. So I was living my best life. So I went through all of my high school years loving design. It's exactly what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to do it at university, and I just kind of was like paving my way, getting through to know that I could go to university and study graphic design. Now, side note to that, throughout high school, I don't think I ever really felt like I fit in. I had friends, I had, I was well liked by my peers and my teachers.

Morgan Macdonald [00:03:51]:
I had good grades, but I kind of always felt like I was hiding away and not fully able to express my full self with my peers. So when I turned 18, I was already at university and I was studying a bachelor of visual arts, graphic design, multimedia. And I kind of felt like I was at home. There were like minded people there from all over the state. We were studying, we were using quark and flash and all of those really old school kind of programs that were around. And then I think in second year, indesign came in. So a lot of our actual university work wasn't done on computers because I am that old. So folio pieces were still mounted on card and we used zip disks to take them to the printer.

Morgan Macdonald [00:04:37]:
So it kind of actually does feel a little bit strange how far the industry has come in such a short amount of time. After university, I started my working career. I actually started it while I was at uni. So while I was at university, I worked in print shops doing graphic design and pre press work, which was really, really great because that was the stuff that I needed to know once I got out and into the workforce. So once I graduated, as I said, I kind of moved into my corporate career. I moved interstate into WA. I just got head first into the industry from there I've travelled internationally with my husband while he was my husband at the time, he was my boyfriend at the time and worked for large companies overseas. I worked in Canada, I worked in London, and then when I came back to Australia after that time away, I worked in the marketing department at Bendigo bank, which was awesome.

Morgan Macdonald [00:05:31]:
So it wasn't until 2012 that I decided to go out on my own and launch my own graphic design business. And that was a really steep learning curve for me. But I seemed to have found a really great mix of clients and I hit the ground running and I kind of didn't really ever look back. It wasn't until 2014, when I had my first baby, that the wheels started to fall off. Now I married my husband. Oh, gosh, we've been together quite a while now, but I met him when I was in my third year at uni and we've travelled all over the world together and we got back and we settled in Bendigo, and that was just after the GFC, which, what was that, 2008 or something like that. But we got married and worked and started planning our family. Now, I was never someone that had always wanted to be a mother.

Morgan Macdonald [00:06:19]:
I did know that I wanted to be a mother, but I wasn't a very maternal person. So keep your kids away from me. Don't want to hold the baby. And I'm still like that now. I think that's just part of who I am. But when I gave birth to my first son in Feb. In early 2014, I was still emailing clients while I was having contractions. I was a week overdue.

Morgan Macdonald [00:06:40]:
I was still trying to meet deadlines, and I came into motherhood probably a tad naive now that I look back on it. I knew that it would be life changing and I knew that my work situation would need to change. But I didn't plan on maternity leave and I didn't really plan on anything. My pregnancy was stress free. I didn't know that I had any pains or aches or anything until I went into labor. So when my son was born, I had an eight hour labor and then emergency caesarean. I really wasn't prepared for that. And being really exhausted physically after that, I really struggled to kind of get back some energy and I put a lot of pressure on my.

Morgan Macdonald [00:07:22]:
A lot of pressure on myself to feed, a lot of pressure on myself to feel like I was a good mum and that I was doing it. I also didn't want to leave the house and I couldn't feed and I used it being the middle of summer as an excuse. And I kept hearing babies crying when I was trying to go to sleep, even though my baby wasn't crying. And I think the hardest part was I didn't set any clear boundaries in regards to my business. So the pressure to get back into client work was just like that little thing sitting on my shoulder constantly. And it really, really, really did start to stress me out. And I wasn't coping at all. I was pretty sure I had postpartum anxiety.

Morgan Macdonald [00:08:00]:
And it wasn't until after I had my second son a couple of years later that I realized I put so much pressure on myself the first time around. And the second time, I was able to adapt a little bit better to the situation. And I was able to understand that, you know, work had to take a backseat while I was raising two kids, and scaling things back was very important. Now, I'm not sure if any of you have had a similar situation after becoming a mum, but I kind of lost focus and control of who I was. I'd outgrown my old life, and I was different, and I felt different, and I looked different, and my life was different. And as my boys grew, I knew that I needed to rebrand my business. My business wasn't the same as what it was before I had had kids, but it had been the constant thing for me during the years that I had kind of stepped into motherhood. And I knew that that had evolved, too.

Morgan Macdonald [00:08:54]:
So I decided that I needed to reclaim part of myself through my business. And it was. It was an opportunity to evolve. So I decided to rebrand my business in, I think it was 2019. So it took me so long to come up with a new name. I don't know whether you've named your own business in the past or had to come up with something it feels like you're naming another child. So I literally had scraps of paper laid out on the floor, like, handwritten, and I would swap and mix and match and test it out, new names, and then I'd sit three together and take them away. Anyway, I eventually ended up on the word fearless.

Morgan Macdonald [00:09:34]:
Now I love the word fearless. There is a fantastic section in Elizabeth Gilbert's big magic where she invites fear on a road trip with her and her creativity and acknowledges that fear will always have a seat, but it will never drive. So I highly recommend you can, if you can, read that passage. It's such. It was such a light bulb moment for me, but I think it really some. Well, I've summarised it poorly, but I laughed at it. Because the humour in her words, I also recognized that fear was holding me back. So the fearless designer was born.

Morgan Macdonald [00:10:10]:
As my alter ego, I would love to be the fearless designer, but every day I get up and acknowledge my fear and I tightly put its little seatbelt on and I put it in the car and I go on that road trip every day with myself and my creativity and fear in the backseat. And I will always be fearful when I try new things, new jobs, new clients, anything. But I'm just not going to let it stop me. But by feeling the fear and doing it anyway, my brand and my business is going to evolve and it just resonated with me. During the rebrand of the fearless designer, I really went back to my foundations. I refined and redefined my why and my purpose. I crafted brand values that were more in tune with my ideal customer and my business. And I tweaked my visual brand to be more authentic and a better representation of myself and my business as it currently was.

Morgan Macdonald [00:11:07]:
Simple, authentic and fearless. And I am so, so, so proud of what I've created. I know that it's going to keep evolving over the years and that branding is a journey, not a destination. So I just really wanted to share my journey with you today. I know I've packed a lot into the last however long it's been, but I feel when I was. When I was going through my story and refining how I was going to articulate some of the emotions that I went through, that has, it's actually made me want to rebrand a little bit more, to share a little bit more about me and my learnings and my hard times and my good times as I've built my business. But I also wanted to give you the opportunity to look back at your business or your life and know that if you're feeling lost or confused or mismatched or don't think that your audience is getting the message that you're trying to put out, there's always, always time to tweak things. Getting confident on your foundations is the super most important thing to do.

Morgan Macdonald [00:12:09]:
And I can't wait to share some more tips on how to do that, some more actionable tips on how to do that in upcoming episodes. So I really appreciate you if you've listened all the way through and taken the time to hear my story, I feel like sharing stories is so important in our journeys and if you have any questions or would like to share your journey, please reach out. I would love if you could rate, review or share this podcast with anyone that you think might love it, and I hope it gives you some inspiration to share your story with your audience really, really soon. Thank you so much, and I will catch you very, very soon.