Leila Belle Carter

God's grace and His will for my life.

The best career advice I ever received came from Brian Smerdell, a leadership consultant at Wells Fargo for whom I was branding a website for when I was living in Charlotte. He served as a mentor to me and told me something that I think he had learned from his own mentor along the way: 'You either win, or you learn', he said. I love that because it instills this feeling of fearlessness in you whenever you realize that you can't lose, and that anything that you go through is going to culminate to your benefit. Once you truly believe that, that's whenever you start approaching life in a different way.

I would say to seek out mentorship and consultation from someone who's doing what you want to do. For me, I have found extremely useful pieces of advice from people that I've been consulting myself. Some of the people that I have consulted are consultants themselves, and so they poured back into me. Additionally, one day when you can pour into others, do so with an openness your past self would thank you for.

Over saturation. There are so many Ai designers nowadays and it's becoming more and more difficult to find the people who still appreciate art made by hand from legacy artists. Every piece is a collector's item- I don't provide prints or lithographs for my private paintings. That's how value is retained and respected at the highest levels. Every work is unique and exclusive and highly vibrational with gemstone or mixed media textural elements.

First is glorifying God in everything that I do. That's my priority every single day. Second is manifesting from a place of transparency and connection. I think that trying to bring out someone's inner essence through the design that I make happen, or trying to understand through consulting someone what their bigger picture goal is, or their higher why, really comes down to having those heart-to-heart conversations. Asking questions like: what kind of feeling are you trying to evoke by having someone walk into this room, or open this product, or see this brand, or this website? So it really comes down to trying to bring out that energy that someone wants to communicate through the design work that we do. The third value would be just creating a legacy of intentional design. Focusing on making a brand that can go beyond a 9-to-5 to someone, an enduring brand that's going to be established to the point where it's going to feed their children's children for generations to come because of the way that it's executed.