How Exploring the Feminine Turned My Wounds into Strengths | Nicole Sorochan | TEDxVictoria

this photo was taken five months ago that's me in the middle I'm surrounded by some of the most talented and creative women that I've come to know working on the project amplify her these women are music producers illustrators animators photographers and videographers this is one of the most accomplished moments in my career today I'm excited to tell you the story about how I got here it's a story about the next rise of the feminine and it's deeply personal in order for me to tell you this story I need to introduce you to this guy Ian McKenzie in 2013 and I had just finished wrapping up our work on the featured documentary film occupy love when Ian turned to me and asked me if I would produce his next film now Ian's career was rising so the topic it had to be important so he turned to me and said yeah it's about women and electronic music seen from a global movement like Occupy - a film about girl DJs really in the tech industry I had to put my pantsuit on everyday and work to be the powerful woman in a room if I could do it why couldn't they the last thing I thought I would want to do was go around and ask a bunch of girl DJs deep personal questions about themselves or the lack of women in the scene or any scene for that matter I was the furthest away from identifying myself to a feminist as I possibly could be but then Ian said in his wisest and tone that's not the question I am asking Nicole I want to know what unique gift does the feminine expression have to offer our culture what unique gift I had no idea what he was talking about and to be honest I was a little embarrassed what did Ian know about being a woman that I didn't and then because Ian knows me so well he said Nicole you can direct the transmedia now transmedia storytelling is one of my favorite things to do it's when you take a character a theme from one platform like a film and you transport characters or themes over to another platform like a game or a mobile app in documentary filmmaking this is what creates impact building out your message to have multiple touch points to hit different audiences it's also called story world building so ian had me with the big juicy transmedia carrot a carrot that would lead me to one of my deep personal wounds a wound that I had clearly been avoiding but was affecting every realm of my life growing up as a girl can be really painful sometimes I remember in junior high school there was this alleyway where all the cool kids would hang out one day I decided to go meet my best friend there something was different as I walked up to her she had a cigarette in her hand she took the cigarette and blew smoke in my face all the girls around laughing spitting at me and calling me names this moment was significant because we had made a friendship pact earlier this year that we would never smoke we had been painfully watching her father died of lung cancer this was the first moment of weeks and weeks of girls harassing me girls I had known my entire life it was a game of girl roulette and I was the girl of the week it happened to most of us as we got picked off one by one this is one of the first scars that hardened me too my relationships with women I changed schools but the girls were still the same so I did what anyone would do I quit girl relationships in university my life was the same I had many male friends and few female ones there was a running joke amongst my guy friends who would introduce me to their girlfriends like this and this is Nicole the girl you'll soon hate in a crowd full of men I could be myself I was witty easygoing happy but put one more woman in the room and everything was different I would rarely say a word not because I didn't want to because but because the room now contained a climate of competition now as part of that whether I liked it or not in my last year university I started my first tech company with my three male roommates fast forward four more years and I'm on a bus traveling down to the Silicon Valley full of tech entrepreneurs and you guessed it I'm the only woman on it I have spent most of my personal and professional career as the sole woman amongst many men women are in constant competition with each other it starts early off in childhood and continues into adulthood we compete for the title of queen bee for the job or for the coveted position amongst men we compete for value importance and power it's something infectious and it's ingrained in our society and it's something we need to unlearn for two years ena and I would travel all over North America interviewing all sorts of women but what I wasn't expecting was that most of the women would have the same problem with the question around the lack of women that I did they found it polarizing it perpetuates the problem it was intimidating rather than encouraging as we dug deeper I also noticed that there were similar scars to my own in the summer of 2014 I met a producer named blonde Ron now blond Ron works loud sexual and kind of gross sometimes she wore Pizza bikinis she great smirk in Mondays and she dances like her vaginas on fire the first time I saw her perform she was twerking on top of DJ booth the crowd shaking everything they could I didn't get it why did she have to do all of that to get attention in that moment I judged her I judged her without being a part of the experience that she was creating I judged her the same way women had judged me my entire life I judged her knowingly harshly and unjustifiably the next day I had the opportunity to interview her and what I wasn't expecting was that she was going to completely blow my mind I can still watch that interview over and over uncut and for a documentary filmmaker that's saying a lot as blonde Tron she could be the sexually charged part of herself she was comfortable in her own skin she had fun on stage by being authentic she created a safe container where other people could also express their more sexual sides sides that are normally locked up for fear of being judged now as women we often feel judged around our sexuality but it doesn't stop there in our quest for equality we might have lost a part of ourselves along the way in our pursuit for success we look to mere ourselves after those who were standing in the positions that we wanted we put our pants suits on and took on a masculine way of being and that's okay but it's not the only way of being it undervalues the feminine the relationships between actions and people now that today the feminine is extremely undervalued in this dominant masculine culture it's a symptom of an unbalanced society blonde Shawn really taught me how to feel safe and create that safe space for people to be able to express themselves without feeling judged imagine what we could do as women if we felt free and safe to express ourselves amplify her was starting to impact a lot for me I was learning all about unique feminine expression for me that translated right into the boardroom at work along with my male co-workers we'd always try and solve problems from point A to point B problem solution well my brain doesn't really work like that and so I used to run away into the closet and puzzle piece everything together I always got to the end and came up with the solution but my journey was a little bit different it's something that I thought was weak and I used to hide it but now this project has taught me that that's really something to be proud of and I've actually incorporated it into the business world and our business is more successful because of it and it's probably why I like to build story world's really puzzle piecing everything together moving across platforms so as the film started to wrap up it was time for my favorite part the story world building my team decided that we were going to take six of the music producers and transport them into a comic book to take their natural avatar like personalities uncover won't turn it into a strength you know like superhero ins really create characters that we could really mirror ourselves after and who better to tell the stories women so we would pair them with six comic book illustrators so now my brain was buzzing with creativity and I was getting really excited but there was still a problem comic books don't have music and part of the unique feminine expression that these women really had to offer came through in their music so we added six more women animators animators that could take the comic books once they were drawn and animate them into video motion comics and then the music producers could come in and score them underneath okay so let's do some math here we got six music producers six and we added one more so seven comic book writer illustrators and six animators was I crazy was it going to be able to handle 19 women in order for this project to really get the importance that we wanted it to have we knew that we needed to blunter on it we needed to create that safe place for people to really dig deep and that's exactly what we did in June of 2015 we went to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest and women from all over North America joined together to tell stories of transformation I still remember the first time I stood in front of all the women that came out to the retreat I wasn't sure who was more awkward me or them one of the things that I was learning was that collaboration with other women in their lives was just as rare as it wasn't mine so the process of really collaborating with each other was almost more important than the end product but the end product it's shaping up to be pretty cool every day was planned with a purpose we discarded old feminine tropes we uncovered wounds we built stories of transformation and we envision new characters through collaboration women really explored their unique gifts in deep community with each other and instead of being defined by those around them they define themselves okay let's watch a video clip this is a behind-the-scenes clip of the making of the graphic novel at first I thought it was a comic which it kind of is I was like cool somebody's gonna draw me then Nicole started talking about a animating it and I thought it's a cartoon which it is but it's not it's both of the things I feel like the violin is my voice I always thought a woman's voice should be heard it's not screaming and chatting feminism it's taking it from a different angle it's pretty unusual to be asked to come up with a really kick-ass story that you're really happy with in collaboration with people you've never met before as I've been opening up to collaboration with the team it's just been this really powerful coming together of emotional resonance and then creating story from there it's been really different is removing the aspect of competition usually when I am around a lot of women the trends to be a lot of drama and ego involves we talked a lot about sisterhood not being in competition with other women in your field other women in general but being an ally we're all here to lean on each other and to learn and so what happens is so much more beautiful in genuine people can only see one part why isn't that just so obvious to everyone that everyone is all of these things that women are all of these things that people are so much more than what we just see what does the true feminine look like if given a chance to express itself and for us we thought the answer was everything it looks like everything I want to see the hero's journey change to something where you're not erasing what's happened to us we are not erasing our wounds every wounding becomes a part of my story in my string in our quest for equality we need to rebalance the feminine and the masculine the feminine traits that we have written off as weak are some of the most important traits that our culture needs in this time we need to take them out of hiding dust them off and put them on like a pizza bikini really on them in ourselves and recognize them in each other as women we need to learn to collaborate with each other instead of compete support each other instead of judge one another for me I never would have thought that I would be collaborating with the girl who was twerking on the DJ booth but when I step back and actually saw her not only did I recognize that she was a brilliant music producer but also a brilliant businesswoman and just last week she asked me me to be on her board of directors for her newest LA based company and that's how we're going to flip the Equality question we're going to lift each other up to those coveted positions that we wanted together and we're going to do it on our own terms because sometimes our biggest wounds become our greatest gifts and moments like these they might even change our world they certainly changed mine thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 65,231

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Humanities, Activism, Feminism, Film, Gender, Media, Multimedia, Music (topic), Social Change, Society, Women, Women in business, Women's Rights

Id: NxIbZj8bw4U

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2015