Meet Syeara Dunlap

We recently connected with Syeara Dunlap and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Syeara, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

My resilience does not come from me; its a completely separate acknowledgement that I am still recognizing from my self discovery journey. In asking where my resilience comes from I have to briefly discuss how I digest and understand the world. There are a lot of people and laws that oppose the way my soul would like to live peacefully on this Earth. Due to these facts, when obstacles occur in my life I have to digest it at two different levels. The first is my natural emotional response; this can take me down a dangerous rabbit hole, but typically before I cross that line there’s a quiet and powerful reminder that helps me calm down. That reminder enters and shows me where I can find grace in the situation. It can range between being reminded that there is a purpose in how I can impact others or even an understanding to look in the eyes of the other person to see their intentions passed the surface level. After, experiencing that I calm down to realize that regardless of how I am feeling I am being blessed to move forward and I cannot achieve the wins by allowing my physical reactions to be what can bring me down. So, that’s what fuels my bounce back, getting reminders of how I can make a impact.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

It is a long winded process to itemize and characterize the different titles and responsibilities that I have. I ask that one bares with me as we go through them in totality. The first thing that I need people to understand is that I do not have a specific genre in my career. I always aim to make decisions on what projects I involve myself with based on the purpose and intentionality, then I aim to apply my skills or learn new ones. Creatively and professionally, I aim to grow and evolve while working on the projects I’m supposed to. My journey started all the way from 2014, however in my present everything is getting more developed. Professionally, I started off as a manager, organizational representative, Consultant, Founder, and Administrative Support, in these roles I aim to learn the personal and technical strengths of the people around me. Creatively, I have transitioned drastically; I have gone from Founding multiple podcast platforms to entering the film industry and landing projects where I have been a Actress, Director, Producer, and 1st/2nd Assistant Director. As I look to the future I am looking forward to the new levels of impact that can be created.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Observation, self-accountability/mentality, and actively listening, these are the skills that are most impactful along my journey. They have allowed me to understand the soulful intentions of an individual by growing me internally to recognize it in others. Professionally, personally, or creatively these skills have grown me to understand how to read other’s boundaries and meet them there to create safe environments, set boundaries for myself so that I can continue to learn new skillsets, grow in new opportunities, and show up for people as 100% myself so that I can contribute in any aspect I am meant to. As far as areas of knowledge, those are still defining themselves as I aim to continuously learn and grow. In terms of advice I always want to be careful, so if one is looking for a takeaway from my experience, here it is : do not fight what really makes one full of joy and what makes one feel peaceful, pay attention to what makes you feel at conflict with others and be transparent on if your response needs to be worked on, and be willing to understand the perspectives and ideologies around you, and walk in the actions that reflect your own understanding (moving with respect for both parties).

What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?

This is a great question. We all have strengths and we all have areas of improvement. Everyone’s thought processes and situations are different, so it is difficult to suggest what is better than the other. However, it is important to be aware of and acknowledge one’s strengths and areas of improvement. The acknowledgment is a must because everyone has more than one skill they are good at, even if one needs more practice than the others, it is still there. One’s strengths are meant to open the doors of opportunity and along the way those opportunities will expose how one can improve. Once those areas reveal themselves one has a decision to make on how to move forward. By solely focusing on one’s strengths a person isolates themselves to cater to a designated audience, even if the skills are transferable amoungst different fields, the mentality that is built from focusing on strengths alone will only gravitate to a specific demographic. On the other hand, if one chooses to build their areas of improvement they will never lose their strengths or opportunities to practice them. By building in areas of improvement, one will undergo a process of transformation that will add to what one already offers in strengths. In hindsight, the process that one undergoes to learn ways in which they can improve opens their mind and skillsets up to understand and generate opportunities from demographics outside of what one is familiar with in only focusing on their strengths. For example, I love to play Spades. Many people shy away from the game, but there’s a misconception on how it’s played. Some people play with the mindset that the only objective is to win, and I have even played with people who have conceded mid-game after it was apparent that they would not win. One must understand that the main objective of Spades is to understand your partner in order to win. One of the rules include not being able to communicate with your partner once the round has started, therefore it is more important to understand how your partner makes decisions and how to work with it in order for the team to walk away with a win. In conclusion, I am aiming to depict the following: by only focusing on strengths or the objective to win, one will create a restrictive response pattern that can lead to one giving up and walking away, with frustration, from understanding a perspective outside of one’s understanding when it is clear one won’t win; by understanding one’s strengths and being open to improve in other areas, or by understanding how your partner plays, when the game begins one will be able to play all the way through by recognizing tools that aid in learning how read another and understand how to make better decisions that gets themselves and their partner in a better position. Win or lose one walks away with an understanding on how to apply which skills in any given situation.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Productions : Janelle Hernandez @janelle.h and Keenan @keenan.hadley
Modeling: @iconicallypsychoticltd.co
Photos : @rainchecklive

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