Diane A. Curran has been immersed in marketing for a number of years. At one point, she worked on projects for major national direct marketing clients. Later, she became a solopreneur, consulting one-to-one and began Wow Whispering which she has been doing ever since. Diane's commitment to the arts has been equally passionate, making over 4,000 presentations between business and the creative arts, ranging from boardrooms to museums, and even mystical mountaintops in Peru. Diane wrote her biz book trilogy, The Marketing Deck, to give today’s impatient mindset instant access to creative ideas and intuition with custom card games.

Contact Info

• Website: www.TheMarketingDeal.com
• Social Media: @TheMarketingDeal
• Twitter: @wowDianeACurran

Most Influential Person

• My sixth grade teacher. She brought her love of art to everyone in the class, no matter what their talents were. She was present and giving to everyone.

Effect on Emotions

• Mindfulness has allowed me to pull myself up when I'm feeling the pressure of the stress of a deadline.
• You say, you know what Diane, here is the deadline and here's how far you are. Let's see what you can get done and not be anxious about it because that just gets in the way of actually accomplishing anything so my emotions are willing to be as wild and crazy as anybody's.
• But I realize they're [my emotions are] only one part, so they can coexist with something else that I can't even define. I think you've got the word for it – mindfulness.

Thoughts on Breathing

• I have had to learn to re-breathe because apparently I have a little hitch in my breathing.
• My various wellness coaches have taught me some breathing techniques. I've learned to slow down and breathe through my diaphragm and just literally become present to the physicallity of breathing.
• Once I become present to how physical a process it is, it just really evens me out and brings me present and kind of calms down my emotions.

Suggested Resources

• Book: Heal Your Body by Louise Hay
• App: A Time tracking App at www.GetHarvest.com

Bullying Story

• My experience was a teacher bullying me as a kid, which you would never expect.
• I have teachers who are just like the light of my life and then I have a second story of kids bullying a teacher.
• The first experience I had was in the fifth grade. I had a music teacher; I was playing the cello. I had studied it for one year and had been invited into a quartet.
• We played a concert and it went over really well. I was surprised at how wonderful an experience that was and this teacher, after the concert was over, came to my fifth grade classroom and took me out of my class.
• He brought me into the hallway and stood there with his arms folded and said, Diane, I want to tell you something important. I know that you are studying piano in addition to studying the cello. Any good muscian has to choose one and they cannot do two instruments because it doesn't work and you have to choose. He was very stern.
• I said what are you saying and he said, I want you to choose between the cello and the piano. I looked at him and said, are you telling me I have to do that right now? He said, yes. What I said was, in that case, I choose the piano.
• He turned on his heel and stomped down the corridor and left me there in this darkened hallway and that was the end of my cello career. He forced the choice; he wanted that much control and as you know, bullying involves manipulation and control and power plays and cowardice.
• If he had been mindful, he might have said, that is not what I was expecting you to say and let's see if we can work something out.
• Anything could have been better than that.
• The second story; I was a senior in high school and I was in math class. We had a math teacher and there were some kids in that class who were just nasty kids and they were seniors in high school and they were boys and they thought they were hot stuff.
• They decided they could pick on this teacher who was a mild mannered, kind of nervous guy who was doing his best to teach us advanced algebra, not most kids' favorite subject to begin with.
• Over the course of several months, they literally got to the point where they would be throwing chalk at the teacher when he was turned to write on the board. They were laughing and just being so mean. This teacher was so mild mannered he would just try to laugh it off. But you could see it was really, really getting to him.
• These boys were so mean they literally got to the point where they would throw the chalk intentionally at the teacher's back to hit him and snicker and laugh.
• The rest of the class had no idea what to do because the boys were bullies. It got to a certain point where it was just a mess.
• When I went to my fifteenth high school reunion, a friend of mine reminded me of what happened. He said, after class, you got me and Barbara aside and said what can we do about this.
• And so we all marched down to the Principal's office and told the vice-principal what was going on.
• The next Monday that teacher was gone on a leave of absence and a new teacher came in. He let us know that he had been a sergeant major in the service. He was not a tall man, but I'll never forget, his name was Mr. Rahilly and he made darn sure that everybody knew exactly how to pronouce it.
• Mr. Rahilly took that class in hand like nothing flat and at the end of the year he said, now, I've got the grades for everybody, and I'm going to, on principle, mark everyone down a full grade from what they tested at, except for three people.
• I won't tell you who they are, but that's how it's going to go. Those of us who had voiced something were allowed to keep our grade and those who had kept quiet were not, including all the bullies.
• It's extraordinary how sometimes you have to wait for something to transform. That teacher was very mindful, so much so that he was not just teaching math, he was teaching life.