Be Colorful, Be Bold.

It's crazy how one person can change the trajectory of your life. How a coach can make you love a sport, or quit it entirely. How your someone can make you fall in love with sunsets or trivia nights. How a teacher can make you fall in love with a career path.

Professor Rosann Hassey was that person for me. She started off at Proctor and Gamble as a Brand Manager, became the Assistant Director at Harvard Business School, obtained her PhD in marketing, founded and leads a non-profit and is a professor at the University of Cincinnati. 

Be colorful, be bold. That was the lesson I learned from her.

I had the pleasure of being in her branding class during my senior year at the University of Cincinnati. I didn't realize how perspective-shifting that class would be.

It started off small. I loved her energy, her passion for branding, her extensive experience, her red-framed glasses, the fact that she shops locally, and the way she'd high-five students the moment they answered a question right or shared something exciting.

I got fascinated by how she made everyone feel like the most special person in the room, I started paying closer attention to the content itself — and I found a real passion for branding. Understanding your target audience, catering to their desires, and tailoring every message to meet their needs was genuinely interesting to me. My old dream of going into sales morphed into something new: using my creative side, backed by an understanding of exactly who I wanted to reach and what message would land.

Professor Hassey's boldness opened my eyes to more than a career path — she gave me insight into the kind of person I wanted to become. She showed up to class every day with a charm bracelet that jingled with every movement, lectures full of insight, elaborate outfits, and enough knowledge to fill a library. She's unapologetically herself. She built people up, encouraged them, and filled them with knowledge, all at once — and she pushed her students to challenge the envelope of their own views and get to know themselves better.

The real turning point came in a one-on-one meeting. I went in to talk about a rebrand I'd done for my podcast — mostly because I wanted her opinion on my brand kit colors. Instead, she pushed me back to the basics: What's your niche? Who are you trying to reach? What are you actually trying to convey?

I started explaining my mission, my vision, and how I used to think of myself as a neutral person — plain clothes, average ideas, a mostly logical view of myself. But I'd recently started leaning into the truth that I'm bubbly, full of personality, creative, and colorful. She spoke into that. She built me up, encouraged me, and equipped me to walk in that truth with confidence.

That conversation changed how I saw myself. Instead of hiding behind labels that didn't fully describe me, I started describing myself with the whole truth — creative, colorful, and all the nuances in between.

So here are three questions worth sitting with this week:

Do you know what makes you, you?

Are you leaning into the small and big things you genuinely enjoy, or hiding them behind labels that don't fully fit?

Are you walking confidently in who you actually are?

Lean into your passions and your identity — that's where the real excitement in everyday life shows up.