I help mission driven change makers build worlds with their content, a cornerstone in creating that special relationship with their listeners.
TL;DR
We don’t need a pause from the internet. We need to create the internet that we want to inhabit. I believe that self-expression and content can heal the world. When we build considerate and ethical stories, we can build bridges. When we care about who is hearing what we send out on the other side, we create from a different place. And by doing so, I believe that you can change the internet.
“Ok, stop the violins, Katarina - I’m scrolling through this page because I’m busy making content, and I’d like to find a better way to do it”. I get it. Well I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to be busy with it, by creating less assets that hits deeper, that spreads inspiration and care you don’t have to be so busy anymore.
Discover the tenants of Conscious Content here.
Total eclipse of the heart
I loved the Bonny Tyler song and I truly felt it every time it came on the radio. I’m not here to talk about 1980s power ballads, but about today’s context in which we create content. An eclipse is a covering of something. And that’s what I see online. I miss the heart, feeling and the true emotional fiber behind why we share what we share. A part of the work I do with clients is to unveil your beating heart, your very reason for doing what you do and once we have clarity on that we move onto creating some really, truly connecting content.
I help small business owners and creatives to focus on the human on the other side of the content you make, cut away the fluff and the noise, and help them slow down to create work of true quality.
Do you have a story to tell?
Let’s talk.
If you want to hear about how I got here and why I do the work that I do. Read on.
I was born in the depths of Scandinavian winter. Shuffled between the embrace of my two (kind of hippy) parents who were separated by the time I was born, and officially divorced before I turned 3 years old. I carry legacy from both of them in me.
My father Magnus was a writer, literature fanatic and alcohol addict. He would recite poems and educate me on the big writers when he wasn’t scotched in front of the TV getting drunk. He came from Värmland, a mystical, poetical region with deep forests. Home to many writers, poets and musicians. My father was also aspiring to be all of that, but worked as a middle school teacher to pay his bills. In his younger years he was a social justice activist, that is how he met my mom. Oh, and he loved to sing (I do too). He died from alcohol poisoning when I was 13 years old.
My mom is a technical wizard who was often frustrated that I didn’t think like her (I suspect I might have a version of dyscalculia). Mom is from a region of the steel industry, Östergötland, and her family had been running factories since the 1600s. Ambition and logical thinking, along with entrepreneurship were strong values of that side of the family. She first dreamt of being a medical doctor, then hoped to inherit the steel factory family empire from her father, but ended up being a IT consultant at the rise of the internet. Her sense of ambition, and questioning stayed with me. And she opened the world of the internet for me.
At the age of 9 I started my first school newspaper. I remember the chilling feeling of excitement when the modem started “singing”, and the frustration when someone needed to speak on the telephone and thereby cutting off my internet connection. I went to basketball boarding school at the age of 15 to get out of a home full of addiction and mental health problems. After having hurt my knee during sophomore year of high school and being benched, I got curious about the second hand shop next to our school and decided to investigate their fundraising and foreign aid.
I made that investigation into my high school “thesis project”, and got a scholarship to pay for a trip to go by myself to Tanzania at the age of 17. There I realised that the world is not about foreign aid, we are just all the same. But the only “career” I saw was in international relations. EU was a little too far fetched, foreign aid felt disempowering. The only hope I could see was during a micro-finance internship over a summer in Sénégal. But it still felt tampered with a sense of “The white man’s burden.”. So I decided to see if corporations could help with economic development. As I was chipping away at my master’s thesis on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), I was covering as an evening receptionist at Oriflame in Stockholm. They soon hired me as a creative assistant. Which led me into the start-up world and online world. I was perhaps sliding instead of deciding in the web and marketing space from 2011-2015 until I burnt out and felt quite out of alignment. And started fumbling with podcasts.
During my sick-leave from my corporate job, we fundraised a media project about cancer survivors, I added that we should document people all over the world to the pitch, which we later won. In 2016 I went once around the world and interviewed cancer survivors in 11 different countries. I still want to use the power of the internet to unite worlds, bring humans closer and spread hope. At the very smallest scale but also in a big way.
In 2019, parallel to developing award winning narrative podcast series I also opened a podcast studio, that was designed with the mission to get a more diverse set of voices on the microphone. With the support of Swiss foundations it ran open to the public for 2 years. I later tried to run it as a business, but almost went bankrupt when I tried to hire a team to replace me as a went on maternity leave and gave birth to my first child, a daughter. Luckily other recording studios had opened since, and Podcast Tower could close its doors to the public. Today the studio supports some change makers on a basis of capacity. Since it’s opening the studio helped more than 150 podcasters to share their voice. It was an intense first lesson in “real life business school” for me.
So now what?
If I’m not running a studio or running around interviewing people all over the world, now what? Well, I’ve realised that I still have work to do, even though it looks a bit different. A bit slower, a bit more mindful and a bit more conscious.
Sharing our stories and our voices in a more crowded media landscape, in the age of information overload, I’m pulling from my experience in my own curiosity in technology, belief in the power of story, slalom through online marketing and all those “thumbs up - we’re rolling” moments with aspiring podcasters. Turns out it is the real, true stories that cuts through the noise of the “marketing cloaks” we’re all protecting ourselves behind when we’re speaking about our work.
Hearing and sharing stories that connects and spread hope is what drives me. And that piece about we’re all the same people? That has been the source of my creativity throughout my teenage years. And turns out this is exactly what people now turn to me for, informally for years, but now it is time to make it official.
My contribution to that is Conscious Content.
A claim for a more human world where your voice and your message, can make a true contribution, based on the following principles:
Spread care with the ideas you share
Have a voice without making all that noise
Build a creative practice with your content that feeds your inspiration and your mission
