Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

  I've known that I am an introvert from the first time I heard the meaning of the word.  Not to be confused with shyness or timidity, my introversion is more about conserving energy and being able to prevent myself from going into a state of sensory overload or overwhelm. Being in noisy and crowded spaces has always been a challenge. I talked about this quite a bit in my podcast, Your Own Best Company.  Upon hearing these things, some friends of mine suggested that  I might qualify as a Highly Sensitive Person in addition to being an introvert. They referred me to the book  The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You  by Elaine N. Aron. I had heard the term HSP in self-help circles but had never looked into it in  any detail.  There were definitely some parallels in the book that related to my experience: Gravitating to uncrowded spaces where solitude could be found. Finding ways to regulate the stimulation in my environment and my nervous system respo

I believe we each have our own unique way of influencing other people. One of the benefits of discovering this way, what I call your unique marketing modality, is that it helps lower natural resistance to be more publicly visible and assertive.  Resistance is a natural protective mechanism we all have, and highly sensitive people tend to have it even more acutely than others. While it's not a problem in itself, it becomes problematic if we let our resistance make our important decisions for us. The ego is doing its job to alert us to unfamiliar and possibly threatening circumstances. In the same way we all have patterns of resistance, we also all have an inner source of wisdom that we can learn to tune into. For me, the voice of wisdom comes more quietly than resistance tends to, and I usually need to be in an open and receptive state of mind in order to hear it. One of the things I like most about the marketing modality concept is that it lowers our natural resistance and allows u

I only found out about Danielle Gardner in the past few weeks from a friend who heard her interviewed in Tad Hargrave's Marketing for Hippies group. I found her YouTube channel and watched several of her videos, particularly the ones on Human Design and the implications for Generator and Manifesting Generator types as they approach business. She also talked about her new book, Quiet Marketing: A Calm, Minimal Approach to Business and Online Visibility for Highly Sensitive Solopreneurs (Amazon Associate link: https://amzn.to/3oMCxES ) This is a short book that you can read in an hour, but I'm going to suggest reading it again and breaking it up into daily exercises and reflections by chapter. This book reaffirms many of my beliefs and experiences about business being as unique as your fingerprint. She describes her own process of challenging the validity of each area of her business with regard to her personality, gifts, and desires. I found her story inspiring and would have l