Episode #12: Failure
We all make mistakes, but few talk about it. In our 12th episode titled “Failure”, we cover our biggest failures at work. From people and politics to decision-making abilities and misaligned expectations, we share the difficult lessons we learned and the stories that strengthened us.
Failure Episode Recap
In this episode of the Two Marketing Moms Podcast, Julia and Kelly discuss the challenges of admitting and talking about failure, something many people avoid doing. They acknowledge that failures are often pushed to the back of our minds, but they believe it’s essential to confront and share them to grow and learn from the experiences. They were inspired by a quote that emphasizes the importance of embracing past failures and sharing the lessons learned from them.
The hosts then open up about their own failures in the marketing industry. Kelly narrows down her failures to two related areas: people and politics. She reflects on how studying target audiences is common in marketing but not studying and understanding each other, leading to challenges in cooperation and alignment.
Julia initially writes down her specific failures but then realizes the underlying issues were poor decision-making and misalignment. She shares a personal example of failure in setting up a client relationship with different visions and expectations.
They both agree that talking about failures vulnerably can lead to personal growth and share how they hope this episode will help listeners categorize their own failures and release them, learning from the experiences.
Kelly also shares insights from her mentor, her father, who stressed the importance of understanding where the power lies and recruiting the right people to manage politics effectively. He emphasizes that 90% of problems are people problems, requiring cooperation, common ground, and understanding differing opinions and viewpoints.
Julia, discusses her biggest failure in business, which revolved around poor decision-making. She had the opportunity to take over a piece of business but wasn’t sure if it was the right choice for her. Instead of confronting the decision head-on, she spent a year in limbo, seeking advice from various people and looking for cold, hard evidence before finally deciding to trust her gut and follow her own path. This decision led to some challenging consequences, but it also opened up new opportunities and made her a better decision-maker in the end.
Julia and her co-host, Kelly, also talk about fear and bravery in making difficult decisions. They emphasize the importance of being brave and taking risks, especially in the face of the unknown. They share their experiences of quitting jobs without having a new one lined up, and how that decision made finding a new job more challenging. They discuss the significance of standing up for oneself and addressing concerns with bosses to create a better working environment.
Kelly shares her own failure, which involved taking a job with a toxic work culture and a CEO who thrived on competition and high turnover. She reflects on how the experience taught her to avoid working with negative people and prioritize company culture and leadership integrity in her future career choices.
In conclusion, both hosts highlight the importance of learning from failures, acknowledging the role of mentors and networks in personal growth, and recognizing that failure is not always solely the individual’s fault. They express gratitude for the lessons learned from failures and how they eventually lead to better places in their lives.
Episode transcript:
Julia
Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms Podcast — work and life strategy from two moms with 50 plus years of marketing experience between us. We talked about the struggles, the fails and the wins while balancing being a boss home life and being a mom in the advertising and marketing industry. Hi, I’m Julian McDowell and I am here with Kelly Callahan Poe.
Julia
And today is a very revealing episode, Kelly, take it away.
Kelly
It is a revealing episode. And we’ve been talking about doing this for what six months. And it took us that long to be brave enough to actually talk about it. Failure is a challenge to talk about and admit, and frankly, probably most people don’t necessarily even admit their failures to themselves, let alone to the world through a podcast and put it out there.
I kind of put this in the same category as our last podcast, which was the worst business advice we ever received. Because in both cases, you tend to put your failures, as well as the worst business advice received in the back your head and you don’t really dwell on them, right.
And I think it was a really great exercise for me. So today, we are going to be brave. We all make mistakes, but few talk about it. And we’re going to be talking about it today. And we were both kind of inspired by this quote from the Williams Whittle Book Club that I read in a book called The Storytellers Secret by Carmine Gallo. And I’m going to read this quote to you really quick, because it meant a lot to me. And it said, “we all have profound crisis of confidence or even fail at some point in our careers, inspiring leaders embrace their past and have the courage to share the lessons they’ve learned. Appreciate your roots, protect those roots and share the stories that strengthen you.”
And so that’s what we’re going to be doing today on our episode on failure. I think the first place that we’re going to start is figuring out how to encapsulate what are our failures and reveal them upfront without telling our stories.
Because I literally sat down, as you saw on a piece of paper, and I wrote my top five failures, and I narrowed them down to two. Because I don’t want to reveal everything. This is not a reality show. But a lot of them have commonalities. And so, my failures in business can be narrowed down to two areas that are related. And that’s people and politics. And we’ve talked a lot about this in previous podcasts about how in marketing, we spend a lot of our time studying the target audiences that we’re trying to reach. But we don’t spend a lot of time studying and learning about each other. And so that’s kind of the theme of today. What are your two failures in terms of themes and topics?
Julia
I started with writing down my actual failures and then realized, well, let’s zoom out of those specific things and figure out what was the real failure, right? Like the situation was just the situation. So, I boil it down to poor decision making, or maybe not being able to make a decision. And then also mis-alignment, when one person or one organization is not aligned with your thinking, and you either know it and ignore it, or you have no idea.
Kelly
Would that be more culture fit?
Julia
Could be a lot of different things. In my case, like my example, it’s much more about just the failures that I made trying to set up a new client relationship and expectations from my end and maybe just a different vision than the client had. And it turned out to be a failure. And it haunts me.
Kelly
We’re going to work on that today, Julia. Once you get these things out, we’re going to release them. We’ll find some doves and little messages and let them fly.
Julia 4
I know it’s going to be so therapeutic. The reason why I liked this episode because it was your idea, Kelly. I’m going to give you credit for it. I was open to talking about it, because I do think that talking about your failures, like the quote says when you’re vulnerable is usually when you can grow the most.
I recently was talking to a business coach, just like two weeks ago, and I just sent him an email and said, I need to talk about a couple things, because I just really need to get vulnerable. I need to say the things that I would never tell anyone in the world. And he was said vulnerability equals growing. So, I think we will grow and then hopefully, people listening will be able to kind of categorize their own failures, acknowledge them, and then what we’re going to do let them float away.
Kelly
Exactly. But we’re going to learn from them, too, right. And there’s a saying that I actually looked to see if it was attributed to someone, and it’s not. And it said, “people grow more from their failures than they do from their successes”. And I think that’s absolutely true. Because that’s when you are kind of are slapped in the head with an error, it’s something that you needed to fix, or you could keep making that same mistake. And I’ll make a similar analogy to like dating in your 20s, when you continually date the same type of guy that shows up at your house at 3am continually, and you’re like, you know, not going to work for me. That’s another podcast.
Julia
Agreed, both of my big failures that I do tend to dwell on had huge breakthroughs.
Kelly
All right. So, to prep for this episode, I talked to my dad. My dad is one of my biggest mentors, and he always has wonderful pieces of advice and wisdom. And he’s turning 80 this year. So, it’s fun to get this stuff down on paper and to hear his stories and about his failures and his successes. So, I always interview him for some ideas before a podcast. So just to give you a little background, my dad was an international businessman, he started one of the first cellphone companies back in 1983 in Seattle. I was actually the only kid in school that had a cell phone in my car,
Julia
Like a Zack Morris phone in your car?
Kelly
Like literally a cell phone with the cord that’s attached to the inside of the car. And it was good and bad, because my mother would call me at like five minutes to midnight with five kids in the back of the car saying, ‘come home” and I’m like “ok”– so good and bad. Anyway, his specialization was in bringing together =cellular and cable and he packaged them together, as broadband technology internationally. He worked in Russia and Poland, in the Czech Republic, and Spain, France, and he had many challenges. And a lot of them had to do with communication and language and explaining the complexity of the technology that he was trying to build so that people would understand it. And he had some really great wins. And he had a couple of big fails in different countries around the world.
And so, when I told him that my failures, were all related to people and politics, he said the following “people is politics, because all people are political, you are either for management in a company or you’re against it. Politics is about power from the center being distributed out.”
And what he means is, you really have to understand where the power lies, if you don’t understand where the power lies, you can’t manage politics. And he said that 90% of the time, your key problems are people problems, because problem solving requires cooperation. And it’s about finding common ground slowly and gradually, and involves differing opinions and points of views. And his philosophy was that you really need to recruit people that are going to help you kind of narrow that difference and recruit people who are experts in their area, because especially if it involves technology, there’s a there’s a big learning curve. And he felt like his failure often came because he didn’t recruit the right people, or grasp the right ideas, or technology and getting people aligned in those areas is always the biggest problem. And for me, that was a big epiphany that literally everything associated with people boils down to politics and people is politics and I hadn’t thought about it in that way. What are your thoughts on his philosophy?
Julia
I mean, I think It’s right on, I completely agree. If you can’t get along with people, if you can’t build favor with people, if you can’t communicate with people, and we’ve talked about this on other episodes, really understanding, where the other person is coming from, what their personality traits are, how they will respond to you, being who you are, if you can’t do that, then you’re living on an island of one. You can’t expect to have great relationships, you can’t expect to have great successes, if you cannot figure out how to get along with people. And that is people and politics.
I saw that I was tagged on this really long LinkedIn thread, recently, and someone had asked, What’s the worst business advice you had ever received? Of course, I was I was so jazzed that one of my colleagues had asked this and of course, I read every comment. And he also asked what’s the one thing you wish you had known when you were younger? And someone wrote this? “Politics matters. In fact, it’s all that matters. Results are secondary, doing a great job is secondary to whether the boss likes you.” And, I mean, maybe that’s not 100% true, but it is people and politics and exactly what you said, you have to get to where you have to understand where the power is at, and how it’s being distributed and to whom it’s being distributed, or not been distributed to you. I think that’s a great quote. And that’s a fabulous lead into what we’re talking about here today.
So, if people are, you know, on power trips, and they don’t really have the power. That’s something that’s hard to distinguish, but yet really an insightful thing to have when you are navigating people and learning how to get along how to come to consensus how to rally people, all the above.
Kelly
And that’s actually the definition of politics is coming to a consensus getting a group of people to come to consensus, which is always quite difficult. I actually looked up the definition because I wanted to make sure I understood, even though you know, we know the word, but you know, how is it really, truly defined? And so that’s really important.
Julia
So right on, I agree.
So, one of my biggest failures in business was around poor decision making. And I think, I have to look back and give myself a break a little bit, because I just didn’t have all the things that I needed in my tool belt to actually make a great decision at the time. But as we’ll talk about later, it just reevaluating how that failure happened. And everything that came out afterwards, made me become a better decision maker. So, the situation was, I was given the opportunity to take over a piece of business. And, looking back, I’m not sure if I was ever interested necessarily in doing that. I was actually, in the back of my mind, I was much more interested in creating something new. But I could never confront that decision head on. It took me a really long time. And by a really long time, I mean like a year, which is way too long to be in limbo. And I just kept on looking for the cold, hard evidence, like somehow, a skywriter is going to come and say Julia do it. Instead of just trusting what my gut and my head was telling me. And I was literally looking everywhere for advice, like, let’s talk to you, let’s talk to you. Let’s talk to you people that knew me people that didn’t, so that the answer would become clear. And in the end, I finally I think it was my husband, he was just like, you have to just make a decision, Julia or you’re going to be so miserable about it. And in the end, I did have courage and I went with my gut. Obviously, there were things that exploded afterwards. And of course, the road was not so straight. I mean, it was rocky after that, because every decision you make, especially those hard ones have consequences, whether they’re good or bad consequences. And I think for a long time, I was avoiding the bad consequences. And just instead of saying, Yeah, this is going to happen. But there’s also going to be a lot of good things, and just make the decision. Also, in retrospect, I would say, it probably just took me a year to get there. I mean it took me a year, other people might have taken like, a month, but it took me a year.
Kelly
So that is fear, too, right?
Julia
Oh, yeah. And there’s a fear of building bravery to make the move. And because the unknown is so much tougher, versus the known, which is tough.
I mean, we’ve talked about it, I’m not that big of a risk taker.
Kelly
You have talked about that.
Julia
So yeah, it was all of that. It was bravery. It was clarity. It was so many things packed into one situation that almost like it was decision paralysis. Maybe that’s the better way to describe it. It was decision paralysis. And I think, and I may, I’ll talk about this a little later. But I think that that whole situation, which played out over a very long amount of time, did make me a way better decision maker. Now I can be like, Okay, this needs to this needs to happen, or this needs to not happen much quicker, much faster with so much more confidence. So, there you go. That was that was my biggest failure that I still talk and think about.
Kelly
But aren’t you in a better place now than where you were?
Julia
It was the best decision I ever made in my life, it led to a breakthrough in my career, a breakthrough in my life, really a breakthrough in my confidence. It was almost like it just opened the floodgates of my creativity; it’s squashed a lot of myself doubt. It paved the way for me to really blossom. And so, that failure and all the little things that came with it, definitely turned into a great thing. I can’t regret it. No regrets.
Kelly
Yeah. So, I’m not a therapist, but to a certain extent, do you really call that a failure? When, ultimately, you’re supposed to be on a different path? You just didn’t realize it soon enough?
Julia
I mean, the failure of my decision making that’s a really good question, Kelly, very good question. Although it turned out to be good for me, the repercussions are the consequences. Some of them weren’t so great. You know, it led to broken relationships, strained relationships, probably some, some unanswered questions on from everyone involved. And that is still icky. Feeling right, because I wasn’t able to clarify, to be clear about my decision and why I was making that decision. I eventually literally pulled the plug. That’s how I decided to make my decision. So, my gut all along, was saying, I should not proceed and instead, do my own thing and create my own thing from scratch. And yeah, so there was a lot of failures that did happen out of that, even though even though there was the ultimate thing was good. All of those other little icky things, I do have some regrets over.
Kelly
I love that. Well, thank you for sharing. Congratulations. It’s gone. It’s gone.
In analyzing my failures, I’m going to put them in a couple of categories, quitting a job and being laid off from a job. And I’ve done this in both cases. And in advertising, kind of like in Silicon Valley, failures is considered a badge of honor. Right? Everyone in the advertising has been laid up at least once, if not many times in their careers and being laid off happens for many reasons, it can be because you lost a piece of business, it can be because of revenues. And it doesn’t mean you’re being fired. But of course, you tend to blame yourself when you’re laid off, right. And so, I want to talk about my first failure, which the lesson I’m going to give you the lesson up front and then talk about it, which is, and we’ve talked about this in past episodes, never quit a job without a new one.
Julia
Yes.
Kelly
And if you want out, you need to buy time to look for your next job by being brave enough to try to work things out with your boss and address their concerns. And so, I’m going to give you the scenario of, of this particular situation. I was young, I had a female boss, who was an incredibly smart woman, but also a micromanager. She not only told me what to do, she told me how to do it, and who to do it with. I mean, literally to that level of detail, I was in a little, little teeny box, but I had this this big title. And she continually not only berated me, but my team. And she really had unrealistic expectations about getting things done. And frankly, I was afraid of her. And I was too afraid to stand up to her. And the reason that I was afraid of her part of the reason was she was one of very few women in a sea of men in the company. And she clearly had the support of her boss and senior management from my perspective. And so, I felt that I could not push back on her.
So instead of pushing back and trying to change my situation, I quit. Because I felt that it was an untenable situation for me to move into. And ultimately ended up being a good thing, because within a couple months, I got pregnant, and had our first child and I needed a more flexible working arrangement. So, it worked out for me. But the point of all that is, is I shouldn’t have quit, not having a job makes it harder to find a job. And that’s just the simple truth. And I really should have been braver in standing up to her, and figuring out how to work through our issues, to try and see things from her point of view, even though I might not have agreed with it, at least until I could find a better opportunity elsewhere. And I think, everyone gets fed up in their career. But quitting can make everything harder. And so that was my first lesson, in terms of, we’re all going to have people problems, you quit a boss, you don’t quit a company. And so how do you work out things with your boss, such that you can continue to come into work every day. Because you don’t want to be dreading coming into work every day. And there’s gotta be a way that you can verbalize what your issues are. And I think times have changed. You know, more corporations are more open to hearing feedback than they were 20-30 years ago. So, I think, and the dynamics are very different. There are more women in senior management. I think one of the things that you and I talked about was, the generation ahead of us, of women who are baby boomers, we’re Generation X, you’re a millennial, oh my god, I keep forgetting millennial.
Kelly
I am a Generation X. But the women above me, competed against other men. And so, they didn’t really understand or were not told to help a lady up, right? Our generation as was your generation, and the generations under underneath us know that. And I think because the other generation above me had to claw for everything that they got, they saw other women as competition, because there were so few there were already up there in that rarefied air. And I understand that point of view, and so That’s what this podcast is all about. We want to pull other women up to learn from our mistakes to make their path easier. But my mistake was not standing up and being braver in the situation and just giving up.
Julia
Yeah, so your failure was your disappointment in yourself?
Kelly
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Julia
I almost recently quit a piece of work that I got, because it was just so miserable to start. And then I was like, Nope, I don’t quit. I am going to power through figuring out this like bowl of spaghetti.
Kelly
Lots of point of views point of views on that one. All right, we’re ready for number two for you.
Julia
Number two, okay. This is also a people thing. So, like, I call it mis-alignment. So really, what happened was, I got a pretty sizable contract. And it allowed me to grow and expand my team. And I was super pumped. And I really saw it — and we talked about another episode is the worst business advice, growth equals success. I thought, I’m building my agency, I have to prove it to everybody, like everyone needs to see that I am doing this and I am successful. And to be successful, I need these big contracts, and I need to have all sorts of people working under me. And that will be success, then people will label me as successful. And so, I was kind of blinded by that and really didn’t put the right resources behind the contract. I couldn’t figure out really how to make the client to fulfill what I thought they were looking for. And it ended up not being the right fit at all.
I don’t think the scope of the contract was what I thought versus what the client though, and had a vision for it. But I think ultimately, the client actually had a different vision. And whatever they read, that I had scoped out, they read it with a totally different filter, and we just weren’t aligned from the start. I was trying to get to Main Street, and they were trying to get to Fifth Avenue. And eventually, the contract ended prematurely. And it made me feel like a really big failure. That’s me being really vulnerable. I’m not saying specifically when and how and who this happened, but it made me feel it, it still kind of makes me feel like a big failure, because I just, I couldn’t see the forest through the trees there. I was like, No, growth equals success, growth equals success. And, you know, I think the positive now is that, I know how I want to run my business now. And it’s not necessarily with growth equals success. Every time I lead with that, it seems like maybe perhaps I’m being too greedy. Instead of really looking at if it’s the right fit, how do I want to grow my business authentically. So again, it turned out to be a really good thing. I felt icky about it at the time, probably still kind of do. But yeah, it really ended up being a great learning lesson with maybe even a bigger opportunity down the line, that I could have repeated the same mistakes.
Kelly
How could you have in essence stopped or kind of stopped yourself, or would you have would asked more questions up front? How would you have rectified this sooner in the relationship if you had it to do over again?
Julia
Well, I think one of them and maybe, it’s an advertising thing, but I’m making clients be way more involved with the scope of work. Setting out their vision, right? So, a lot of the times clients come to me and they feel like, oh, Julia is listening to me. She has heard everything I’m saying, and she will put it down on paper, which I do. But I do it with my own angle with my own background and experience, I interpret it the way that I am perceiving it, right. And so, clients sometimes just trust, which is great, right? That’s what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to earn their trust, so that we can have a great relationship, a great working relationship. What I could have done better is made sure that we went through it really closely. We talked through how each thing would work. To make sure that everyone’s aligned. In my past, I’ve had clients who are like, wait a minute, let’s go back to that scope. I didn’t really quite understand it, or there’s always going to be some misalignment there, right. But being better at that will surely I will surely avoid this mistake. In the future.
Kelly
I think I’d like to have an episode just talking about scope of work. Because I have the same problem. Having been in RFP land all this week, and will continue for the next couple of weeks, because no one did anything in 2020. And now all of a sudden, they want to do everything. And that is the biggest challenge is I feel like a lot of clients are coming to us and saying, You’re the experts tell us what we should do. But their budgets may not align with what they really should be doing. And then they get the proposal, they’re like, Whoa, that’s way too much. Yeah, so I think that’s something that’d be worth chatting about in another podcast.
Julia
Yeah, it’s a tough thing. I mean, it’s scoping is something that you really get better at with experience. I think, when I was younger, I definitely would not have been able to do it. But you know, for me once the scope is in a contract I have to deliver.
Kelly
So, I’m going to talk about my second failure. I took a job many, many years ago that I, despite reservations about company culture, and its high churn rate and its leadership, and I’m going to talk about this, had some red flags. Early on, in the interview process, I was actually interviewed by a roomful of 10 people who were all supposed to report to me. And during the course of the interview, there were hardly any questions asked of me, which is, which is really, really rare. And so, I got the job offer and I accepted it. But a week before I took the job, the CEO called me to say that the entire team that I had met had quit.
Kelly
And that I’d have to rebuild the entire team. And there was a rationale behind it, there was some politics and issues between different divisions in the company. And literally, like 15 people quit before I started. And so, he said, the opportunity is you get to build your entire team. And so, I said, Okay. And I proceeded, and I was slowly able to hire some new people. But I was never able to hire even close to the same amount of people that were running the business in my department prior to, I think I was I had a third of the people that were running things before me. And these were very big pieces of business, and complicated pieces of business. And there was never enough people to handle the workload, the client suffered. And it was a very difficult, challenging position to be in. And it turns out that the CEO really thrived on competition. And we talked about this and this kind of culture of fear. And he would talk about people behind their backs. And he would, in essence, backstab people as revenues would go up and down. If they were down in a particular quarter, he would eliminate people. And he would call in the senior management team and say, okay, who do we get rid of next?
Of course, you know, your name is going to come up eventually. So, any miss on revenues have to be someone’s fault, and no one was safe, and he would really pit us against each other. But this time, I had learned my lessons of the past. And I was very verbal, I did communicate my concerns to the CEO. I did communicate my concerns about the culture, about the people about the turnover, about how much staff I needed to do the work. And how important the role of what of our department was in terms of building relationship within the agency. He did not approve the addition of other people.
So, the strangest thing happened and it’s hard to even recount it now. He replaced me while I was still at the agency. One day a new guy started and I didn’t know he was coming. And he had an office next to mine. And he kept coming into my office asking me all sorts of questions about my accounts, and I didn’t understand why and finally he came in and shut the door and he said, Look, I was hired to replace you. I didn’t know you were going to be here when I got here, and all of your accounts are in my contract. And I was like, Okay. And he told me to expect to be let go, which I was shortly thereafter. And as my replacement he didn’t last very long in that situation either.
And there’s a lot of lessons learned from this and I’m going to start with one we’ve talked about many times in the past which is never work with **holes. My Dad a funny quote, he says, and I won’t use the swear word, he said, if someone’s an a**hole on Monday, they’re going to be an a** hole on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, you know, just don’t work with a**holes. Bottom line. Not only are they bad news, they create an environment where other a**holes are also acceptable. And this was the scenario there.
But the bigger more important thing was integrity and culture are extremely important. And if you’re not aligned with that particular work culture, you’re not going to fit in. And a company that has a high turnover rate, which you can find out really from looking at Glassdoor and other, types of third party sites, is a serious red flag. And I failed to see the warning signs while interviewing. I mean, clearly, I should have asked a lot more questions. When I found out that all the people that were going to report to me were gone. But I’m never going to again, work with a leader who doesn’t respect their employees.
So that one was one that was really a big challenge for me to get over being replaced by a man who had less qualifications than I did in that arena. Oh, you can’t make this stuff up. So that was a challenge. And one of my biggest failures, because I was unable to see what was right in front of me, or I saw it and I didn’t acknowledge it in the way that I should have, I should have left way before, or perhaps not even accepted the job in the first place. So those are my two failures. And I think we’ve got a lot of themes to talk about, do you want to give me your themes, and I can talk about mine as well.
Julia
There’s so many. And I feel like we’ve talked about some of these on other podcasts episodes. I think one of them for me, related to my first failure is that I truly had a clear appreciation for mentorship. And I realized that I had a lot of mentors around me. And I hadn’t unnecessarily acknowledged them. I hadn’t thanked them; I hadn’t really maybe tapped their full potential. And so that was a huge learning. For me, that came in on that first failure is, I was so kind of maybe, selfishly in my own head, trying to trying so hard not to make a decision, that there were a lot of people around me that were rooting for me to make the decision, that I ultimately did. And they saw the vision way before I could acknowledge it. And so, since then, I have really put in a lot more effort to ask for mentorship, ask for advice. Like I said, a couple weeks ago, when I reached out to someone to help me get through kind of a roadblock like that is such an important tool to getting through your failure is mentorship. And going along with that is that I also finally understood the value of my network. So maybe if they weren’t necessarily mentors, but just the value that other people bring to your journey, like, I’m kind of sometimes can be like a lone wolf, and I like to be on my own. And I need to also acknowledge that the people around me are willing to help, and they really bring a lot of value. I mean, once I’d made my decision, I also talked about this on an on an episode, I had no plan B at that time, because I was so against making a decision. I had no plan B. So, when I went with my gut and said, Nope, this is not the right decision. I am not going to pursue this. It led to me having to end my employment. Because it was the dead end that I got to Which maybe I maybe if I had made a decision earlier, it wouldn’t have been a dead end. But obviously, I’m happy. I’m happy with the decision. But, that was huge. Once I got there, I was like, Oh, great, I have no plan B and so that I started reaching out to this network, and these people stepped up to the plate. For me, and I’ll always be grateful. So those were like two really great things that came out of that and things literally, that I think about every day, I will never take, I will never take them for granted again.
Kelly
Wonderful, wonderful. To recap, don’t quit a job before we have a new one. We keep saying that over and over again. Stand up for yourself. And I even I tell this to my staff, if they disagree with something, let me know, I might push back and say No way. But I’m never going to say it’s my way or the highway. You need to stand up for yourself. Always. And I listened to this podcast the other day with a business coach named Scott Anderson. And he was on the podcast talking about the theme of being 10%. braver. And he argues that failure stems from not being 10% braver, and if I had been 10%, braver, I would have taken another action. And I like that. Because I think that’s a great way to think about the actions that you’re taking in your life. Because if you really just push yourself a little bit more to be braver.
Another one that that you and I have in common is that we don’t suffer fools lightly. And so, communication is extremely important. And if I look at the commonality of some of the bosses that I’ve had issues with, they were really, really poor communicators. And they ended up using me as their mouthpiece, because they couldn’t communicate well without acknowledging it, necessarily, but pushed me to do so. And communication is so important in what we do. We’re in marketing, it’s a communication business. And if you have a manager who’s a lousy communicator, then they’re in the wrong line of work, and you have a red flag. So, you need to ask yourself, and this is important. Do you admire your boss? Are they someone you want to emulate or learn from? Are they someone that you’re going to have to adapt to and work for someone who’s going to make your life worse? And if so, then you’re in the wrong place. And so, buy yourself some time and find a new job and get out. You should admire your boss. Right?
Julia
Yes. You’re going to spend more time without boss, then maybe your family?
Kelly
And again, you’re not going to agree with everything with your boss. And of course, there’s going to be things that irritate you, I’m quite sure there’s things about me that irritate my team. But I would hope that at least, there’s some basic respect and admiration for some of the things that I do in the hustle that I have. And, lastly, it’s not always your fault. So, you and I can look at these things. And there’s so many different factors, that it’s not always our fault. Sometimes failure is the boss, or the culture, or the failure of a superior to listen to feedback that can make things better, or a job that’s made impossible for a number of reasons. And so, we need to learn to recognize when we could have done better, and then get over it. And because maybe at that time, in that situation, where we were in our lives, there’s really nothing that we could have done to make it work. And I think the main thing that you and I need to acknowledge is that every failure that I’ve ever had, and I believe you would agree with this, I’ve always landed in a better place than where I was before.
Julia
Oh 100%.
Kelly
And I’m grateful for the failures because whether I knew it or not, it was right to end things when I did and move on to the next chapter.
Julia
100% no regrets.
Kelly
I agree with that. I absolutely agree. Yes, I could have done things better, but you can’t regret it. The mistakes made you who you are.
Julia
You touched on a good another good point, too. Like within that failure, you can never walk away and say that it was 100%, my failure, right, because you played a role and every person or thing or entity played a role as well. And that’s a theme through my biggest failures too is like, I’m willing to take responsibility and accountability for the role I played in those failures, right. But I do give myself the grace to know that it wasn’t all me. Of course, when we do take it on, it can lead to some scars, it can lead to some things that holds them back for a really long time, because it is a deep wound. That’s hard to get over. But part of getting over it is, and really acknowledging the failure and trying to figure out the good stuff that comes out is not necessarily all on you. And that’s the part that helps you let go, huge learning. As someone who’s very self-critical, it’s very hard for me to get to that place. So, I just have to keep telling myself like…
Kelly
Before we release the doves…
Julia
And burn things.
Kelly
I got the doves back over here. And I’d like you to acknowledge that, you’re 10 years younger than me. And you are in such an amazing place for your age, I wasn’t where you were, at your age — you have how many kids under 10? Three, three, under 10, right?
Julia
Yep.
Kelly
Three kids 10 and under – mine are teenagers, I’m in a very different space, in terms of my job responsibilities as a mom. So, you’re running your own business with three kids under 10.
Julia
Really kind of insane
Kelly
You need to give yourself a break. Because not only are you a mom with young children much younger than I am, but you have a side hustle of a podcast, you wrote your own book, you started your own business when you were pregnant with your third child. So, from my perspective, from the outside, you got it all. So, I’d like you to acknowledge that you’re in such a better place than where I was 10 years ago. And so, you know, that self-criticalness of each of us is where we need to watch it and appreciate because from the outside people don’t know what you’re struggle with.
Julia
Kelly, you can see my daily fails with being a mom and doing work. It’s not easy.
Kelly
Well, I’m there as well, especially when you have teenagers who criticize you on a regular basis. My son, his new his saying about me is “you are so extra”. Meaning like, I do too much like, “you’re so extra, mom”. So that’s an insult, apparently.
Julia
Well, I thank you for the compliment. First of all, you’re right. I think part of the reason why you and I both kind of aligned on this podcast was that talking about these things and acknowledging them and putting them out there. Really, we’re not doing things that are just so unique. You know, there are so many other moms and women that have probably been through some of these very same experiences. And you’re not alone. You’ve just said it like as an outsider, your perspective is so much more different. You know, my successes and failures. And vice versa, right, our own inner critic is usually the worst. I really love this episode, and I’m so glad we did it because I’m all let’s evaluate. Let’s point them out. But what came out of that was great and, and I agree. If I could rewind the clock and not know make those mistakes again. I mean, maybe I would have done some things a little bit different. But the outcomes. Oh, thank goodness they happened.
Kelly
No regrets. So now I think it’s time that we release the doves. Raise your hands. Julia release the doves.
Julia
Releasing the dove. They’re gone. Gone. Release your failures. Only after you’ve done the analysis, and you can say, Hey, I learned some things and it only took us six months to figure this out.
Kelly
Well, thanks, Julia, a great episode and I’ll talk to you next week. Thanks, everyone.
