Kim Castle, creator of kimTV and star of the reality series naked kim, is a fresh voice for today’s new breed of feminine leadership. As an overdriving, type-A woman, Kim drove herself to the ground running her business and helping others with theirs. As a result, all the relationships in her life suffered—family, friends, and, most important, the one with herself.
She has worked with large brands, including IBM, DIRECTV, General Motors, Domino’s, Wolfgang Puck, Pedigree, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Diet, M&M’s, Disney Interactive, Paramount, and many others. She has also guided hundreds of small-business owners in creating their brands—from idea to the Inc. 500 list.
As cocreator of BrandU® and host of various shows, she has co-led a dynamic enterprise that is devoted to empowering entrepreneurs around the world. She has had an impact on more than 30,000 members internationally. Kim has been featured on CNN Headline News, Fox Business News, Yahoo! Small Business, and Inc. magazine. Her work has won a Webby Award for General Motors and she was nominated for the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Women Making a Difference Award.
Funny, fashionable, vivacious, and vulnerable, she shows powerhouse women (and the extraordinary men who love them) that in order to take care of their world, they must take care of themselves first. Learn more about her shows at KimCastle.com.
I’ve never understood what people mean when they say, “It is not personal, it is business.” That’s because I don’t separate who I am as a person from my business; I make everything personal first and foremost. I am more about the relationships and connecting with people first. And sometimes that means that things slow down because I would much rather make relationships and get that kind of energy going.
Men and women do a lot of things differently, including the way they process information. When working together, it’s important to recognize these differences to minimize miscommunication and to work effectively. Men are typically linear thinkers, which means they process information in a very straightforward “point A to point B,” step-by-step way. Women, on the other hand, are nonlinear thinkers. Our thought processes are characterized by expansion in multiple directions and diffuse awareness, rather than moving in a single direction. What’s more, men are wired to discuss what they think as opposed to what they feel, just the opposite of women.
So what’s the problem? Nothing really—if you recognize and embrace these differences. The business of business itself is very male-centric and linear in focus: You have an idea, you create and sprinkle in some innovation, you bring it to market, and you rinse and repeat. On the other hand, for women, it’s all about creation, with which women are truly connected. Our power of creation is something with which we are born. But the creative process is more unstructured and far-reaching than the linear approach. As a result, there’s a “culture clash” between these different styles. As a creative director and digital content creator, my work requires a lot of creativity; I help clients develop and express their brands via digital media and expose them to new audiences. As a nonlinear creator, I personally have to work hard to follow the linear path in order to deliver projects on schedule.
One can view men as typically being “detail” people while women are “big-picture” oriented. I definitely think of myself as a “big-picture” person. When I work with a client, I don’t base potential results on their current state; instead, I create a plan based on the client’s end goal. To plan strategically from where you are standing today is not going to get you very far.
I believe, in general, that women bring a greater understanding of the whole (again, that big-picture quality). It’s how we are wired: multidirectional multitaskers. There’s something about the old saying about moms having eyes in the back of their heads. We see and take everything in. When we walk into a room, everything talks to us. The opposite is true of men. Single focus gives a man the ability to walk into a room and walk over a pair of socks to find his phone and not even see the socks.
On the downside, I think that many women put their needs last. We go, go, go, and run until we drop. We rest because we’re forced to by running out of steam—we rest just until we get a jump start and we’re off again. Unfortunately, it takes far more energy to restore us from empty. It’s important to remember that we have a responsibility to ourselves first, and that responsibility is to be whole, happy, and peaceful. In order to take care of the world around us, we must take care of ourselves first. That’s the hardest thing to learn. Business, motherhood, and all of those other roles come after.
Women who have taken an idea and made their dreams come true inspire me and encourage me to go that extra mile. Because my life revolves around entertainment and brand, I am certainly inspired by women like Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, Skinnygirl creator Bethenny Frankel, and Jennifer Lopez. I’m also drawn to amazing lifestyle designers like Tory Burch, Donna Karan, and the late Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. These highly successful women created great wealth and security for themselves and the people in their world by being fueled by an idea and a dream, a willingness to play full out, and a deep commitment to continue until they reached their place of full expression.
But the meaning of “success” is often nebulous for women. There is no hard and fast definition of exactly what success means. It can be fleeting or can remain a constant in a woman’s life. And although most people have to work hard to get it, for others, it practically falls into their laps.
I can attribute what I think of as my successes to three things:
The first is a willingness to keep growing, keep challenging myself, and push past so-called boundaries. For example, I was a sickly child and suffered from chronic asthma. Because I was severely allergic to trees common in my hometown of Miami, simply breathing could cause an asthma attack. I found that being in the water was a very soothing thing, so I swam a lot and became a synchronized swimmer. At the age of seven or eight, I thought, What would happen if I stayed underwater for longer period of time? Would that do anything? After much practice, I found that if I would do underwater laps I could expand my lung capacity; no matter what, I wouldn’t stop and I kept doing it and doing it and before I realized it, my asthma was completely gone.
The second factor is my persistence. When I make my mind up on something, I don’t let go until I make it happen. My husband sometimes calls me relentless or obsessive because when I focus on an idea or something I want to experience or accomplish, I literally won’t stop until I get it. I’m not sure where I got it from, but I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember.
Third and finally, I am always aware of how I make people feel. That has always been the wind in my sails. It’s my genius and a big part of what I bring to the world. This was a major reason why I branched out on my own to create kimTV. I’m passionate about creating television shows wrapped around an idea and fueled by the values of a brand.
I’m a big believer in honoring one’s source, an appreciation of the greater aspect of where something comes from. To “honor the source” means that you acknowledge where you got the knowledge, and use that knowledge to help someone else. By doing so, you honor the hand in front of you, to whom you’re giving the information, and you honor the person behind or beside you who gave you that information. In the process, you create and then maintain a connection—reaching, handing, reaching, handing. It’s an active demonstration of context that surrounds us. This creates a circle of strong, intelligent women, and provides a connection and a place where we foster each other.
Whether we realize it or not, the world looks to us for peace, flow, beauty—a state of “rightness.” It’s our role to create it, through our work, through our family, through our communities … but first we have to be it for ourselves.