Hi, my name is Kelly.
Officially
I'm a visual note taker and visual literacy expert. My company, Kingman Ink, provides visual note taking services for large events in sales, marketing, leadership and technology. We also provide custom workshops for corporate teams. I have taught visual thinking skills to all kinds of teams as well as at the MIT Sloan School of Management's Innovation Period. I distill big ideas into simple visual stories.
and also
I'm a writer with many publication credits to my name (including the New York Times), an occasional collage artist, a meditator and mindfulness practitioner, an avid journaler and an Enneagram nerd. I like to geek out about visual thinking tools and how those overlap with personal growth, productivity and creative process. This site and blog are a container for thoughts on all that and more.
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.
Every [person], when [they] get quiet, when [they] become desperately honest with [themselves], is capable of uttering profound truths... we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
I believe we all have greatness in us
This is a thread that has run through my many lines of work and what I want to make clear to every person. In my experience, the difference between those of us who are sharing our greatness and those who haven't (yet) comes down to:
Making space to listen to ourselves, to open up to what is there, to engage the process.
Giving form to what wants to be expressed (words and pictures and anything else).
Working with those forms to make them meaningful and sticky to others.
It's our work to find our specific way through each stage. It is my sincere hope that things I write here will help inspire you to try some that have worked for me.