We were lucky to catch up with Jacob Kleinman Phillips recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jacob, What were the conditions that allowed you to develop your empathy?
Growing up, my childhood didn’t necessarily look like anyone else’s. I grew up with two moms, a twin sister, and a grandmom all in the same household. It was a household of ALL woman in a world that was different than your normal mom and dad family. And in it, I was the minority. This meant I was usually outvoted in decisions where the male vote never stood a chance, like wanting to watch sports on TV versus some Disney princess movie. I had to deal with the female emotion levels that seemed to furiously take over at the same time every month. I even had also seemed to have been unanimously voted ‘man of the house’, which had responsibilities that needed to be performed almost at all times. Like keeping the peace and managing sanity levels for all parties involved as well as being tuned into your surroundings to keep everyone safe and protected.
My household growing up certaintly had its fair share of challenges, but it also had its perks as well. From an early age, I began to develop a deep sense of empathy and awareness for understanding feelings, perspectives, and behaviors. As I grew older, this skill became more useful and impactful. Sometimes it was as simple as being able to genuinely connect with another person whether it was a small child or an older adult or even to just put a smile on someone’s face no matter the situation.
Nowadays, I use this ability to be fluent in human and empathize with others with my business. I specialize in helping small businesses and nonprofits infuse human into every touchpoint of their business with branding that speaks from the heart and allows them to connect directly with their audience. It’s a process I’ve developed overtime that has allowed me to dive deep with my clients and pull out insights and ingredients that allows them to be unique and differentiate themselves from the crowd. During this process I’ve heard things from clients like “it’s as if you’ve known me my whole life” or “you are basically inside my soul” as ways to describe how aligned my work can be to who they are and their vision for their business.
It’s definitely safe to say that my skills of empathy and the person that I’ve shaped into today, is a direct influence from the environment I grew up in and the people I’ve met along the way.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am the Owner and Brand Design Strategist of Touchpoint Design, which is a design agency that specializes in helping small businesses and nonprofits infuse human into every touchpoint of their business so that they can stand out with intention and purpose with a clear message that resonates directly with their tribe.
I’ve been running this business for almost 4 years having opened it in February the month before Covid started back in 2020. Since opening it, I have been on a mission to make a difference by building brands that connect humans to the services they need and businesses to the humans they exist for. It’s a very human-centered route that I went, but it’s my favorite part about it and is the absolute backbone to all the services I offer.
What I love about what I do is I’m super passionate about the work. I’m very grateful that I get to help people bring to life their craziest visions. It’s empowering. It’s enlightening. It’s just inspiring. My whole business started just because I was looking for an outlet to be able to help people, but in a way that aligned with what I really loved and what I was really good at. What’s ironic is I never even thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Growing up, entrepreneurism was something that just wasn’t an attractive idea to me. Then as I grew more in my journey and began finding rhythm into the things that filled me up inside, I then learned that entrepreneurism could be a vehicle into achieving that.
So call me crazy, but I’m out here doing what I love and creating work that is helping build my community and enabling people to pursue their dreams.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three skills/qualities that have been most impactful for me have been Perseverance, Irrational Confidence, and Kindness.
Perseverance shows up most when you run into adversity. You get a choice to either let that hardship define you, destroy you, or strengthen you. If you pick that third option then you are equipping yourself with a growth mindset and a mental toughness that will only allow you to persevere through the odds and continue to pick yourself up growing into a better human. This is a mindset change more than anything because when you see hardship you will now recognize it as opportunity versus a burden.
The next is Irrational Confidence, which is the ability to face your deepest darkest fears with grace, poise, fearlessness, and confidence no matter how uncomfortable or impossible it seems. This is the power of being able to believe in yourself, your gut, and your intuition no matter the odds. Early on, it’s hard to recognize your own intuition and what it means to who you are; however, I think early on is the best time to start looking for it. This is when the world starts to put filters on your dreams and makes them feel impossible. Some of the most successful people in the world had to take impossible journeys in order to get to where they are today. In order to take those steps towards a vision that may look blurry, unclear, or impossible you need to trust yourself and focus your energy less on the results and more on the effort. The effort is something within your control, the results are not. By being effort focused it will allow you to focus on one piece at a time and develop confidence by seeing the fruits of your labor physically being put it. In time, you will allow yourself to see the things that no one else can see because you’re looking for the patterns that make sense to you. Then, in combination with some Irrational Confidence you will be able to chase your dreams, especially when no one else believes in them.
Lastly, Kindness. Also, secretly known as generosity, but don’t tell anyone I told you that. This idea is centered around putting others first. It’s having a ‘giving’ mindset versus a ‘taking’ mindset. This is the type of ingredient that gets you the farthest in life because it brings people along your journey with you that support and believe in you. The best way to continue to develop and improve on Kindness is by going out of your way to show up for someone else. This can be as simple as listening more to as powerful as volunteering at a charity. What I love to do myself is also reconnect myself to my why and my purpose and what I’m doing, especially framing it in a way where I’m ‘giving’ first.
Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?
The past 12 months has been quite a journey. I’m knee deep into entrepreneurism and running a business, so the amount of learning that I do on a daily basis is insane, diverse, and always in motion. The biggest area of growth though has been my mental toughness. Whether that was intentional or not, it’s something that has been showing up most in the biggest ways for me. For example, when running a business you run into many challenges whether financial, emotional, etc. To have the ability to be grounded in a mental state that allows you to stay poised and in control to make strategic decisions, lessens the load of the perceived difficulties.
One of the biggest reasons for this improvement for me has been educating myself more on strategies and exercises to help overcome mental roadblocks. Julia Pimsleur, has been a huge influence and resource on that for me. I remember being in a workshop she had ran a while back and some of her ideas on being able to separate the emotion from the actual situation has been game changing for me. Having the ability to be able to build the toughness and knowledge I need to run a strong healthy business is invaluable.
Contact Info:
- Website:www.Touchpoint-design.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/touchpoint_design
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/touchpointpassion
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobkp
Image Credits
Mordecai Nuccio
