The Right to Be

Melanie Spring is the leader of The Brilliant Rebellion, a movement dedicated to people who are ready to fully step into themselves and pursue their purpose. She is a web designer turned marketing expert turned brand strategist turned international keynote speaker. She had a full career in marketing and branding in corporate America and as an entrepreneur. She transitioned out of her brand strategy agency to become a full-time public speaker and now considers herself more of a Brand Storyteller.

Episode Highlights:

11:43 - Radicalism and different truths. “I created The Brilliant Rebellion because I wanted to help people understand who they really were, and I've always been a bit of a rebel. I never fit in anywhere. Over time, I realized that the actual brilliance of rebellion is not about going against something, but it's going back to the original state of who you are. Radical means to go back to your original state. How fascinating is that? Looking at the idea of being a rebel is really taking all of the stuff the world put on you and going back to who you are innately before other people got a hold of you. We started building out retreats to help a lot of people only to realize I was just doing a very expensive tour of my own experience and helping myself understand what it means to be a part of a community. We launched it this year as a part of a community to create a space for people to go online and meet other conscious people who are wanting to collaborate with them on big ideas that they couldn't talk about on social media, in public, or with their friends. They needed to be able to have a higher level of consciousness and awareness to be able to disagree with someone consciously or have an argument about something that they truly believe in because all of us have a different truth. That's the idea behind The Brilliant Rebellion.”

13:48 – The right to be. “Every person that we have come into the community has to be on the path to growth. As long as they're committed to the path to growth, that's the idea behind the conscious collaboration. If you're being conscious about how you're sharing or what you're sharing, you're also not doing it from a place of pissing people off because that's not conscious or collaborative. Here's the thing, The Brilliant Rebellion believes that every single human has the right to be. If someone doesn't believe that they can't join The Brilliant Rebellion because all humans have the right to be. If a human is against another human, that's not conscious collaboration.”

15:07 - The process of joining The Brilliant Rebellion. “We have an application and a small cost of $49 a month or under $500 a year. You have to be committed to wanting to show up in community. Although people want community, they have to be willing to give as much as they receive. You have to be a giver and a receiver. We have two soul mixers every month and we get people together around really big conversations. Our next one is about sex in the business space and using your erotic energy to be a magnet for marketing. It's thinking about bigger topics and having bigger conversations around things that most people aren't willing to talk about.”

16:26 – The community’s top three personas. “Most people that come to us for this community are looking for church without the doctrine. Most people that come have a life coach, an entrepreneur group or a place where they can talk about certain things, but they want to keep track of their growth and willingness to have deeper conversations and sharing some of themselves. We have these things called Soul Circles, where someone brings a mastermind-styled question, and they can have other people sit with them in that really tough thing that they're going through or amplify the really wonderful thing that they're going through. How often do we get to do that? There are three different personas. The first one is people that are just starting on the path and they're into self-help and growth but just don’t know what to do with it. They don't necessarily want to coach but need some support. The second one is people who are at the other end of the spectrum who've been on the path for a really long time and are guiding other people, but who's there for them? The mentors and the guides. The third one is the people who are taking a left-hand turn in their career or life, where they've done something for a long time, but know there's more to learn. If someone has a question, we'll have someone that we can send them to for the answer.”

19:51 – Soul Mixers, Soul Circles and In-Person Meetings. “The Soul Mixers are twice a month, and we do Soul Circles once a month. The Soul Mixers are the topic conversations, and the Soul Circles are for us to sit with each other and share what's going on with each other. Once a quarter or so, we'll do an in-person event so people can come and actually meet each other in real life. Having a conversation on a podcast is nice, but to share dinner, conversations, or eye gazes with somebody you don't know is such a deeper connection than sitting on a virtual call.”

27:30 - The Brilliant Rebellion app. “We use an app called Mighty Networks and then customized the heck out of it, which is super helpful for people who don't want to build an entire app for themselves. We realized there are beautiful spaces to be able to do these kinds of things without having to start from scratch. My husband is an incredible tech genius, and I love him for doing the research that he did for this: we realized that the HOME community, which One Moksha (the OM in HOME) is our parent community (one: we are all one and moksha: the highest level of enlightenment). We have the free community in the main space and the paid Brilliant Rebellion community where they go even deeper together. People can join the free or paid one, but really in the end, we just wanted to connect people to each other and share people's events, podcasts, and information or get new guests for different people's podcasts, TV shows, or whatever they're doing. We wanted to make sure that we could amplify as much as humanly possible. Plus, most people don't want to be on social media these days. Things are becoming political or religious and they want a safe space to be able to have conversations.”

33:14 – Energy, intuition and alignment. “Before the pandemic, I was a full-time international keynote speaker. One of my favorite speaking gigs that I ever did was in Norway and, very similar to this conversation, I had them do some eye gazing. If you know anything about Norwegian people or people from the Midwest, you know that they don't like to be close to each other or stare at each other for long periods of time. After they were all finished, they thought it was awkward. They couldn’t believe I made them do that, but they met people and got to have conversations with people they would’ve never acknowledged. I like having those conversations from stage to help people understand that they can actually go deeper and connect with each other's energy. My favorite stuff to talk about is energy, intuition, and alignment.”

35:50 - Community-driven events rather than teaching, sharing or leading. “All of the previous Brilliant Rebellion retreats were about diving into personal growth and helping people understand who they are and how they can show up in their business. My husband and I decided to partner with each other last year, where we were able to sit and help people experience the idea of being limitless; to know they can choose anything and everything that they want to if they decide that they can leave their luggage at the door of possibility and walk through. We started doing these retreats together and were focused on the idea of wonder. It's actually a collaboration instead of me teaching, sharing or leading. I'm actually having the community come in with the ideas for the topics.”

Episode Resources:

Melanie’s Website 

The Brilliant Rebellion’s Website