Perhaps you are interested in what I do on a personal level. Here’s my take on why I do it on the collectivist level:

I don't just want to spend my life coaching people and reading tarot cards. I’m a former journalist looking to understand the landscape of communications and connection in 2025, which means I have immense propensity for analyzing and architecting the cultural conditions where authentic stories become magnetically compelling. I have already helped large swaths of people understand and welcome each other more, and I’m looking to build out something in the coming years that will only continue this.

Consider me the consultant who solves the problem most communities and businesses don't know they have: they think their positioning and ideology is logically sound, but it's creating emotional disconnection with real life individuals.

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Lulu Cheng Meservey of Rostra speaks of the "go direct" revolution, in which she tells founders and business owners to bypass traditional media and speak for themselves. This revolution in Public Relations speaks to me because I see time and time again how things burgeon on even the private level.

They were right about the medium being broken. They were wrong about the solution being simple.

Speaking directly to your audience doesn't matter if you don't understand the cultural moment you're speaking into.

Having your own platform is useless if you're unconsciously playing the wrong archetypal role.

Building your own narrative falls apart if you can't see your own blind spots.

The problem isn't just traditional PR's gatekeeping. The problem is that most people—including founders—don't understand how culture actually works.

Most people think communication is about message control. If that were true, you’d never have a fight with your spouse or disagreement with your boss.

It’s actually about cultural positioning. People spend too much time focusing on reaching audiences instead of understanding the zeitgeist those audiences inhabit. That’s also why you keep having those fights or boundary issues you are hopeless about kicking.

A"go direct" approach assumes that authentic founders naturally know how to position themselves culturally. This is like assuming that brilliant engineers naturally know how to design user experiences. Some do. Most don't.

"Be authentic" has become the most useless advice in business communications. Everyone thinks they know what authentic means for them. Most people are wrong.

What you think is authentic is often just your unexamined patterns playing out in public. What feels natural to you might be exactly the wrong energy for the cultural moment. What you consider "being real" might be the performance of realness that your audience can spot from miles away.

Your psychological blind spots always become your brand vulnerabilities. Not cultivating cultural intelligence about yourself will fuck you in the long run.

The parts of yourself you can't see are the parts your audience will notice first. The stories you tell yourself about your motivations become the stories your market tells about your company. The patterns that feel natural to you might be exactly what's holding your positioning back.

Cultural intelligence is a skill. And without it, going direct is just shouting into the void with better distribution.

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What I do that others don't: I make cultural intelligence accessible by connecting it to references and patterns people already understand.

Instead of starting with frameworks (top-down), I start with relatable experiences and build up to insights (bottom-up). People feel understood before they feel educated.

Why cultural intelligence? Because the pain of cultural disconnection is found everywhere, but people don’t know where they’re going wrong.

Strategy only works once you accept why you have the problems you do (take it from Chesterton’s Fence)

Instead of explaining abstract frameworks, I show how positioning challenges connect to familiar cultural moments, generational dynamics, and aesthetic patterns.

Real authenticity requires understanding: what archetypal role you're unconsciously playing, how that role lands in the current cultural context, what shadow patterns you can't see about yourself, and how your personal psychology intersects with your professional positioning.

Speaking directly to your audience doesn't matter if you don't understand the cultural moment you're speaking into.

Having your own platform is useless if you're unconsciously playing the wrong archetypal role. Building your own narrative falls apart if you can't see your own blind spots.

The "go direct" revolution focuses on distribution: how to reach your audience without intermediaries.

I focus on cultivation: how to create the cultural conditions where your message can be truly received.

Every communication exists within a cultural context that determines how it will be received, regardless of intent.

Traditional PR ignored this context, focusing on message control and media relationships. The "go direct" movement overcorrected, assuming that bypassing media meant bypassing the need to understand cultural dynamics.

When you build a scene around your cultural intelligence, you're not just getting customers. You’re also getting better relationships and collaborators, and access to the knowledge elites will soon prize themselves on and become a marker of status. You're creating the conditions where your particular way of seeing the world becomes valuable, where your specific expertise becomes essential, where your authentic positioning becomes magnetic.

If you care about this and want to connect — may I meet you?

Hit me up at crystal.duan95@gmail.com