Episode Notes

Bring vitality to your life, strengthen your relationships, and expand how you contribute to the world by clarifying your life’s buckets. Heather Boschke talks about how she fills her life buckets by understanding what sets her soul on fire in life and her relationships. We ponder this essential question, what sets your soul on fire?

Heather Boschke is a strategic marketing leader with over 20 years of experience that spans Fortune 20 companies to non-profit organizations. She acquired a marketing degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from the University of Minnesota. She is an adjunct professor at Metro State University and teaches marketing.

One of the activities Heather loved as a child was drawing. As the seeds of conformity took hold in middle school, her artistic expressions went dormant until 2020. The coronavirus pandemic opened a new portal for Heather to recapture the joy she felt drawing in her childhood while simultaneously reinventing how she expresses herself now.

Heather began creating bird illustrations and discovered a desire to share her love of birds with others. These illustrations and her knowledge about birds are showcased in her children’s Little Birdie Buddies of Minnesota book this year. Her inner bird is singing as she fills another of her life’s buckets, expressing herself through bird watching, illustrating, and becoming a self-published author.

As you might have noticed, birds are a theme in Heather’s life. In 2021 Heather left the corporate world and started her marketing firm, Vogel Venture, to help small and mid-sized organizations drive growth and engagement regardless of team size or budget. The word Vogel means bird in German, which speaks to her heritage and the strategic (bird’s eye) approach combined with the tactical planning she brings to clients.

Vogel Venture evolved out of being laid off and being fired once. Heather wrote a post about those experiences on LinkedIn. An illuminated path to entrepreneurship appeared out of her contract marketing work. She followed it by starting Vogel Venture. A second path opened after a conversation with a prior work relationship. Heather decided to co-create The Joy Corner, a regular segment on Nichole Niemann’s virtual show called Arkansas Style. The Joy Corner Exploring your life’s buckets can feel like flowing down a river. Opportunities pop up when you are in the flow of life.

Heather flexes her marketing prowess, another of life’s buckets, as we discuss engagement and re-enforcing marketing fundamentals. To know your end users, storytelling, and anchoring marketing activities by measuring results are good places to start. Creating simple anchors like a monthly theme can elevate your brand and structure your marketing efforts. “Marketing efforts can flounder when there is no structure,” says Heather.

The vlogs on Heather’s website are worth exploring. They are short and to the point, like this: “It is important to show up on social media. Think of social media as prospect warm-up.” Heather tells us more about that concept.

In another vlog, Heather highlights that your brand is a promise. She describes what it means to answer the question, “what is the experience you want your customers to have?” Trader Joe’s is an example of a positive customer experience. Heather describes how she feels from entering the brightly lit store, collecting her desired groceries, encountering cheerful cashiers, to walking out through the automatic sliding, steel-framed glass doors.

Other branding insights that Heather helps us understand are how to choose social media channels and why it is manageable to be on social media. She helps us figure out how to become known and increase our ability to have people care about us. She says that the bottom line is this, “people don’t do business with people they don’t know and don’t care about.”

We finish our conversation with three ways you can fill life’s buckets.

1. Identify what sets your soul on fire. We know values are essential. What activities do you enjoy? If you won the lottery, where would you invest your time?

2. Get clear on what you want in life and what you want your life to be.

3. Schedule it! Prioritize your life to fill all of life’s buckets: relationships, meaningful work, and overall activities supporting your well-being. Heather schedules naps to rejuvenate her spirit.

After this motivating conversation with Heather Boschke, I discovered a Sparktype assessment by author Jonathan Fields. The assessment underscores what brings meaning to your life. Take the assessment if you would like to dive deeper into what sets your soul on fire. DOWNLOAD

 NEXT STEP: Challenge yourself and do the Conscious Attentive Leadership Mentoring (C.A.L.M.) Activities, below.