Meet Neysa Garcia-muhammad

We recently connected with Neysa Garcia-muhammad and have shared our conversation below.

Neysa, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

My purpose was not necessarily found, but it was validated. When we’re being our true selves, we’re always moving in our purpose. It’s social conditioning and societal pressures that keep us away from our purpose and mission.

I’m naturally an amplifier. I have a way of helping people expand on their vision. This is how I navigate the world and what I do for my friends without even thinking about it. It took a lot of reflection on what fills me up and gives me energy to realize that this element isn’t just a personality trait. These are the very things that motivate me to get up every morning.

Other pillars of my purpose came through experience. After years of working in corporate, I learned that it’s not enough to find roles in which I can do cool work. I have to make sure the environment has the right people and culture. Being a Black immigrant woman meant that my work wasn’t going to be enough. I have to make sure that my roots are planted in the right soil.

When my partner and I started Ginger and Carrot Productions, we knew that inclusivity and authenticity were the most important values we had to have in common with the people we work with. We’re always thinking about the quality of life we’re creating for ourselves and the impact we want to have on our community.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My partner and I founded Ginger and Carrot Productions in summer of 2021 just after we got married. We wanted to have creative careers that allowed us to be our full selves in the work that we do. As a result, we learned how important that value system was for our clients as well. We’ve provided food photography, filmed short form documentaries, and created social content for our clients. Last year, I even took on some coaching clients to help people clarify their own vision.

What we’ve learned is that making creative assets are so much more than the photos and the videos that are in the queue for social media or the brand’s website. In order to communicate your vision effectively, you need to refine your skills as a leader. That means being clear on what’s important to you as a founder, director, or creative lead. It also requires you to become deeply self aware so that you can show up as your best self and empower your team to do what they do best. Leaders who are great at these skills produce the best work.

In addition to our creative services, we’re adding thinking partnerships to our offerings so that we can support founders and leaders from beginning to end of the creative process.

Brands that are transitioning out of the start-up stage and into the mature stage especially find themselves walking a tight rope with how the brand evolves over time. They can schedule a discovery call at calendly.com/gingerandcarrot to find out more about how we can help them produce captivating content and make the best decisions going forward.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The most important qualities we nurture on our journey is our ability to listen, cultivate self awareness, and increase our capacity for failure.

Listening is important at every stage because our clients do need us, they are having their own experiences, and in many ways they communicate that to us all the time. We pay attention to that so that we know how to support them, how to produce the best work for them, and what services to offer next.

Listening is also how we stay up to date with what is changing in the industry.

Self awareness is something we might not hear about all that often in the creative space, but it’s one of the most important skills. The short version is that we’re not all the same. We have different gifts, different talents, and different times of the day that we’re more productive or less productive. Understanding ourselves on a deep level allows us to stay in tune with making the right decisions as business owners. It also takes us out of comparison mode so that we can stay focused on our own growth.

Lastly, expanding capacity for failure is essential for growth. 100% of our revenue is from 20% of the decisions we made. The other 80% were failures. That means that failure is necessary. It’s not about avoiding making mistakes, but making them as fast as possible so that we know what works and what doesn’t work. It’s not easy to do this especially growing up being taught that mistakes are the death of who we are. The more I work through this, give myself grace in the process, the closer I get to another piece of the puzzle.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I believe it’s better to go all in on your strengths. We do find ourselves in a position of having to be proficient in other areas until we do have the resources to outsource. That’s okay in the beginning of our journey, but we should always be nurturing our strengths.

As an example, I’m an executive producer, I help people execute on a vision, I lead people in creative projects, and I’m a natural creative. I’m not the founder of an accounting firm. I’m not a lawyer. I built a business around something that I do really well, but also that I find easeful. Of course, there are aspects of the business that aren’t centered in my gifts, but what gives me the bandwidth to do that work is knowing that it gives me an opportunity to be creative and collaborate with creative people.

Operating in your strengths also means that you’re uniquely positioned. Whenever people worry about the saturation of a market, that let’s me know that they’re not really tapped into what makes them unique. No one can be more you than you. There’s never competition when you’re in your own lane.

If you want to reconnect with your authenticity and align your brand with your purpose and mission, schedule a discovery call at calendly.com/gingerandcarrot

Contact Info:

Image Credits

The people represented in these photos are Coach Lauren Morrison, Tia and Jamie of the Wonder Brew, and Neysa and Tabari of Ginger and Carrot Productions.

All photos were produced by Ginger and Carrot Productions

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