S2E10 - Female Leaders in Advertising: Taking Control in an Uneven Playing Field

Life isn't fair. So what are you going to do about it?

In this episode, Jill Brinsdon shares her journey as a creative director and prominent leader in New Zealand's advertising industry. She talks when to play the game and when to jump ship and the importance of personal agency in shaping your career and driving change. She also talks about the important role men have in shaping the future of advertising. 

Warning: A couple of F Bombs.

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

That whole furore with Campaign Brief stating that all of the top creative directors were in fact blokes just made me go, Oh my God, it really hasn't changed.  Are you Kidding me. It hasn't changed.    

Jill Brinsdon is a creative director living in New Zealand.  She caught my attention when Cindy Gallop the ultimate feminist icon of women working in the creative industries. shared a post that she made.  In the post, she talks about being featured in an article in her thirties when she was a creative director at an agency. And they referred to her as battling her way to the top. And honestly, I would have not even really noticed it and said, great, I got recognition, feels good, and I would have called it a day, but she saw what I did not, which was this. 

And this is a quote from her post. "I was in my thirties. There was no battle. I was the best for the job."  She called them on their bullshit and made them change it.    She goes on to say  it was just one incident after another,  groping, minimizing commenting inappropriately about her postpartum body, expecting that postpartum body to shrug off the baby and get back to work so she started her own branding agency in her thirties and she just got on with it.  I could be talking about myself. This felt so familiar.  She remarked at the end of her post that she thought she was going to be the last generation fighting for   "pay equity. idea equality, body sovereignty and a level playing field. And then she goes on to say the fact that "nuanced, exclusionary, micro, aggressive discrimination, persists is criminal." I knew I was going to like Jill. And I knew she was wildly intelligent and I had to have her on. 

So let's hear her story. 

I've just listened to your trip to New Zealand. 

Oh, you did. 

You were in my neighborhood  I shifted to Arrowtown two years ago. 

Oh my God. That's so amazing.

Isn't it? Yeah. I was listening to you saying we rented e bikes I bet you just about went past my cottage.  

Yeah,  I'm kind of now enthralled with that whole part of the world. I've never been to that hemisphere. 

And what made you choose it?   

There was a woman we were colleagues at an ad agency, actually.  Where we  both committed this horrible crime of being female at work, you see. 

I know that crime. 

 There was another woman who also committed this crime, and  the three of us were all laid off in the department,, and  the 20 something guys remained. We were all let go. One after the other just the women. 

Wow. 

Yeah, we bonded over that. I've seen that one..   She was always  really supportive of me,  we had a male boss who really bullied me, who I actually liked in a lot of ways. She was always like, he's  mean to you. I'm like, I know   he was really mean,  he was really a bully. But we were just so used to it. .

Oh God. God. 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what? You know, what's been so interesting. I did that post and it just took off and went super viral. And then at the same time,  I'm getting lots and lots of feedback from women  and I realized that what they were really responding to so powerfully was that I stood up to it. That I hit back all the way through, I hit back.  

Talk about that post. And I want to hear what that response was.  

I've been posting just quietly every week and telling a kind of story, something that happened in my career, either recently or a long time ago.

 I had a post ready to go  but the whole thing was blowing up  with the industry publication in Australia. campaign brief, like all of those industry publications,  a lot of the agencies pay money to be involved. It's very symbiotic. It's also very, you know, back scratching. And every so often they bring out  top 20 X, top 20 Y. What's the best ad of the century? Who are the best creative directors?  It was like the top 20 creative directors and one of them was female. And 19 of them were the lads. And there was no conversation around it. It was just, this is the way it is.

  Isn't that interesting there's so few  female talented people out there, that's what that must mean right?. 

That's what they were saying.   to be honest, I think a huge number of   these people  just live in their own echo chambers    and listen to each other and women continue to be probably a little bit annoying around the edges. And what's great is that it became a catalyst for,  A very strong conversation that women and men took part in, which basically said, come on, this is ridiculous. It's time for it to stop. It's time for us to look and act like we are a modern industry with modern sensibilities  that is interested in equality and diversity and 

 That conversation was being absolutely thrashed.  Everybody was up in arms. There were a lot of really interesting thoughtful, comments from women in particular, and from a number of men that were very supportive . So I had a post ready to go.

And, weirdly, I had   touched on the fact that it didn't seem that the advertising industry had changed that much. Now that whole furore with campaign brief stating that all of the top creative directors were in fact blokes just made me go, Oh my God, it really hasn't changed.

Are you kidding me. It hasn't changed. So Saturday morning  between you and I, I wasn't furious about that at that exact time. I was furious with my Latino boyfriend for being a dick the night before. So I was sleeping up in bed beside him. He was asleep. He's oblivious and asleep. And I just smashed out this post and I wrote it. I think I wrote it in 45 minutes flat.  I could have come up with 50 scenarios to demonstrate what my career path was like. I just came up with four, they fell out very easily. Then I kind of, then I kind of made a call to arms basically and said it's really not good enough. And the thing is there's, you know, these kinds of situations, they're so layered, they're so complex and layered and it suits patriarchal systems for them to remain complex and layered because on every level, you can't say this is because of that.

This is because of that, because if we could pinpoint that singular thing that was that, we could fix it.  But what I absolutely said in my post was that nothing will change if men don't join the conversation and agree that things have to change.  I did say there were plenty of great men in advertising and I worked with a number of brilliant men, lots, more brilliant men than brilliant women because of the time that I was in advertising and was supported by many of them, not all fair to say, but you know, was well supported by a number of them.

But as long as men continue to just box on and go, Oh, Oh, look at all those creative directors. That's great. Say nothing. Remain mute. The problem continues. So it's the absolute muteness of the silence that rains down upon things that will allow the system to perpetuate. And it will perpetuate in perpetuity.

You can't silo women and have women   just talking about this. 

 It can't just be women that go, that's not fair because actually life isn't fair from the moment we're in the play park, it's not fair. You can see the dynamic at play between boys and girls, between strong girls and shyer girls, between timid lads who might grow up to be nerds and in fact near at the earth versus, you know, the jocks, you know, you could almost see in the play park, the kids that are going to be the jocks, it's not fair.

And so To me,  there's no great victory in saying that's not fair. You actually have to get under the bonnet. You have to look at what's going on and you have to make it a whole conversation, which involves men, women, and others  it has to involve all of us 

 What do you think is wrong? You said it's a  complex mix of different things which also kind of obscures the validity of it, because you can't pinpoint one thing that one person did. It doesn't have to be this egregious thing I almost thought that you were saying it was cumulative.

So what do you think is really going on that it never seems to get better?  

I mean what was interesting about my post as well is that it was clearly within the industry of advertising, but I can't tell you the number of women who messaged me and said, it's the same in engineering. It's the same in IT. It's the same in this. It's the same in that unless they're actually female lead industries,  the patriarchal systems are at play. They've been there for a very long time and they're not really going to be undone.  

Yeah. So what are some of the people  that responded to your post saying to you? 

I reached out to you because you weren't trying to impress people where sometimes on LinkedIn, you feel like people are writing things  made to make themselves look good . So you neither seemed like you felt sorry for yourself or like you were being self aggrandizing, but you were just being really honest. and people don't seem to do that enough

no, they really don't. All of the social media platforms want us to put our best foot forward, you know,  the  shiniest version of ourselves.

But, you know, the truth is that my advertising career was a very successful one. And actually I always pushed back  and when I did get a lot of the messages from women, they basically said, thank you. I I've never been able to push back. Too many times I've been taken to my knees by the behavior of men  in the main.

How did you, how do you think you survived it ? Because I've been pushed out of agencies  for being outspoken. 

 It's interesting the way things happen in in little sets, you know, in our lives.

You know, like you were saying, you went to New Zealand and you get these, you know, then suddenly you have all these different thoughts and they all join together and you're like, Oh wow. Okay. Now there's been a real epiphany for me in some ways since that post.  I've been going to the British and Irish film festival and I love film festivals.

I kind of completely camp out and  there's a real wave of female stories going on and two of the films that I saw In fact, one of them wasn't in the festival. One of them was Madame Clicquot about  Widow Clicquot's whole true story with the Veuve Clicquot  brand. And that was a remarkable story just about a woman in the late 19th century  who had to push through and everyone thought she was mad and you know because she was strong and she was clever and she had clarity around what her pursuit was but the fight was unbelievable.

The other film which completely stopped me in my tracks was about Lee Miller who was a fashion model and then became a war photographer. Remarkable war photographer was right there when the gates opened of Auschwitz, when the war finished, like some of the most remarkable imagery from wartime, from that war in particular, was Lee Miller.

And in the film, Lee Miller said,  I was born determined  and that was my lucky streak. And I thought, shit,  that's what I had. I was a little girl brought up in the bottom of the South Island.  And I say that  I was pretty much brought up in a poverty of expectation. The only expectation that I really ever had was to get out of the house and get myself to school.

And I made my own school lunch. I just had to get on but right from word go, I just had this.  Oh, I just had this little redhead drive in me.  I never understood right from the beginning. I never understood why women thought their wedding day should be the best day of their lives, but men put a ball and chain   around their ankle, you know, I'm like, how does this work?

Sorry. How is it her best day and his worst day? I don't understand that. I didn't understand beauty pageants.  I didn't understand so many of the things that little girls were supposed to absolutely aspire to. And I also absolutely knew that I was going to have a career. It was always going to be about a career for me.

So I just kind of got on with it really. And I think there was a point in my career when I think I'm going down a rabbit hole here. Tell me if I am. 

No,  I like this.

Point in my career. I was at one of the big agencies and if I'm completely honest, I wasn't getting a lot of traction.

And also I don't think I was very good at my job at that point.  Something hadn't quite clicked with me  what I wasn't doing was what the boys were doing. And, and at that time I was like, Oh, this is so boring. Why do I have to do this? They would pre sell their ideas down the hallways.

They would, you know, meet at 6:30 at the bar when I was heading home, and talk about the campaigns they'd been working on. Everything was a campaign about the campaign or, you know, a campaign about the idea that they wanted sold. And it was a hugely competitive time. I was a copywriter at that point and we were all competing for every single idea.

We had to go into a room. It was like the Coliseum, you know, and I was buckling. I wasn't very good at it. , but part of it, if I'm completely honest, part of it was because I didn't think it was fair.  And anyway, cut to the next agency and it dawned on me that the thing that was in common with all of my experiences as I was boxing on to try and be a brilliant creative in advertising, the commonality was in fact, me. I was a part of what was going on here.

And that in fact, if I wanted to be in this  particular coliseum playing with the  lions   I needed to study the game a little more or get out of the Coliseum or get out of the ring,  get out of the ring   or figure out how to play . So what I did was I looked at what the rules of the game were.

I looked at my own integrity and my authenticity. I knew that I couldn't be anything but me. that's my USP, you know, I'm a special gal  I've got some charisma  I've got some energy  I have a sense of humor,  I needed to hold onto who I was, but I also needed to much, much better play the game. 

And I did. I doubled down. I pre sold ideas. I had pre meetings where I brought people in on early stages of the ideas so they had more involvement in those ideas. When I say people, nine times out of ten, I'm talking about dudes. Um, guess what happened?  They became more involved in the success of my ideas because they had a little touch of it.

There's a phenomenon that probably still exists in advertising, which is those people who seem to always be, be in the room when the big idea happens, so they can get their name on the certificate.  I've worked with numerous men over the years, but I'm like, I don't think they've actually had a single brilliant idea of their own, but they sure know how to position themselves in the room when the big idea is happening.

So they are award winners.  I had to just release to the fact that some more people were going to be on the bus with me. That's fine. As long as I was still at the front of the bus, mostly driving the bus, then away we went. So I guess what I did was re-engineered my own approach to how it was going to be.

How did you not get your ideas  stolen from you? That seems to happen a lot,  people  take credit for other people's ideas in the room. 

By the time I was moving into that phase of my career I was running a creative department So I wasn't just one woman with her ideas trying to hustle them I was running a department and I had a department That were were actually full of sort of almost non advertising type people.

I had people that were out of art school. I kind of had geniuses and misfits as opposed to the people that were in the room and wanted their name on the certificate. There was a sort of purity around the creativity we had anyway, and I really protected that. 

I was a precocious creative director. I was quite a. young female creative director. I think one of the stories I told on the LinkedIn post was, an article being written about me actually at this particular agency where I stepped up and finally got good at my job. About me battling my way to the top, you know, tough. She's tough. And I thought, you know, wow, I was like 32 years old. I was a young creative director and I was a female creative director. I was incredible for that industry, you know but that wasn't the storyline.

The storyline was, she must be a tough bitch,  it's the seventies poster. She's aggressive, he's assertive.

It was the seventies poster and I just wasn't having it really. I just wasn't gonna have it. 

 I never was a  pushover  but at the same time, those politics. I wasn't really good at 

they're crippling. Yeah.  My instinct has always been.  To push back. And my instinct has always been to see what the learning is.  My pivot into the agency I talked about  I went, you know what, I am the one that's got to shift.

I'm the one that's got to change the way I'm playing this because I really enjoy the business.  There was so much about that stage of my career, which was fantastic. It's like, Oh my God, I'm getting incredibly well paid to essentially Have ideas and I also loved the business of business. So no surprise I've shifted on and moved into strategy and then into branding because it gets me closer to my leaders, you know, my business leaders and it gets me closer to the business because I want to be able to use my creativity to affect change at that strategic level.

You were saying I got fired. So did I. At one agency. Um, I love this story.

Actually, at one agency, the first year I was there, at the end of the first year, the general manager, who was an American male, who I absolutely loved, one of the best people I've ever worked with in advertising, him and I were pulled into the chief executive's office and given a 10, 000 bonus for being great contributors to the agency. 

Cut to 12 months later and I'm booming like the agency's going gangbusters. The GM and I had led a number of new business wins. My mana was quite big in the agency at that time. And we were flying like everyone was having a great time. I still had my misfits and  creatively brilliant creative department, but we were playing it our way.

So I get pulled back into the chief executive's office. And the year before I mentioned he'd given me a 10, 000 for being a great contributor to the agency, he gave me a hundred thousand dollars to go away. 

Why?

Because I had become essentially a little bit too strong in the agency. put a different lens through this and we could say I had become too important to the agency. My energy was too big. When I walked into the agency in the morning, which was a large open plan agency, he said, you can see people turning around because you've walked in the door.

Again, if I put a different lens on that, that's called charisma.  

anyway, I took my hundy K.

Do you feel like they think that it was becoming more your brand, the agency?

Yeah, I think that I was leading the agency too much that was making him distinctly uncomfortable. 

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. 

Yeah, but , here's the bit. The bit is.  I went  dickhead.  I didn't go.  I need to change myself. I need to bring myself down a peg or two. There are  three ways ahead when something like that happens to you. One is You can beat yourself up to the end of the day because what did you do to create that to happen?  I didn't believe that I had much to do with it, to be honest. I believed it was his own insecurities and 

yes, a hundred percent.

And really not dealing with the role that I had played in the blossoming of that agency, not dealing with it. And I do think if I was  a dude.  There would be no conversations around this. I'd get another 10 grand for being a good contributor.  So one approach is to beat yourself up. 

The second approach is to beat up the agency and the patriarchal systems that this kind of decision supports. That's another approach, beat up the agency, beat up the system that supports the agency to behave like this. The third approach is.  What a windfall! A hundred grand! Thank God I can have summer with my kid. I can give myself some breathing space. I haven't had any for ages, and I'll figure out what I'm gonna do next. This is great!  That's the road I took. 

That's how I am,., I would always get energy. I remember getting let go in my late 20s from something, and my boyfriend at the time was so devastated when I told him this.

And he's like, why are you acting like that? You act like you won the lottery. I'm like, I don't know. That's just how I am. I get to move on to something else. Anytime something didn't work out work wise, of course, relationship wise, I would fall apart. But with work, I'd always be somehow like, okay, and next. I never got upset. I got a little insulted or maybe mad for a minute but the overwhelming feeling was a rush of  excitement. 

In the last few weeks, it has dawned on me that an awful lot of how it's worked out for me is just literally the inherent nature of who I am, that I will not be the loser I will not lose because even if you get lessons from it, that makes you someone who's stepped away from it better than you left it.

And, and that's just inherently built into me. It's just there, you know? So, so yeah,  I'm sure I'm skidding over the fact that no one likes to get booted out, even if it is with a decent size check. Nobody wants that. I was having a great time, you know, it was working and then suddenly it wasn't working anymore.

But  we have to practice what the bright side is. We have to flip it on its underbelly and see what color the underbelly is. And then we have to polish that up and see what we can do with it, one of my sons was with me recently, actually, and they grew up in my agency that I started, Radiation, in 2000. . And Cody, the young one, would be in there running around and  he roasted me saying, oh yeah. I remember the early radiation days. You'd be like, I'll be watching you working. And you'd be like, Oh, is that a tall building burning down over there?

Great. You guys can get really good at putting out fires. This is going to be a great experience for you. Now, what have we got going on over here? Oh, that campaign is not going through. What a great opportunity we have. Like he was roasting me. But what I loved about the roast was that one, he nailed it, but two, I just spent all of my time looking for how we could leverage the situation we were in.

Anytime something like that happens, you get better. If you had stayed in that role, no matter what, you would not have  as much depth to your character. Every time there's adversity,  that's how we grow.  One equals the other. That's the math on it. So we did a part two and we kind of jumped all over the place, but there are a few key moments I wanted to share here. I loved her visual about all the changes in the ad industry that she feels she nearly missed. 

And at the same time, she has countless stories of challenges she faced and feels proud to have overcome. Take a listen.

I visualize me calmly walking along the street and there's, there's a war directly behind me and there's missiles right behind my head missing me by two inches and  there's  quicksand, which I somehow just, meander past  and I kind of look back on it now and  I did feel like I was wading through mud pretty much, you know, like it was a little bit hard, harder than I felt like it needed to be.  There is a performance in what that industry is. If I'm honest, there were aspects of the game I enjoyed. 

 You had to get into the slipstream of it and swim better. 

I kind of got to the point in my advertising career where I thought  I'm not going to go much further with this job. So I started my first agency,  I thought, right, the industry is falling apart. Brand is experiential. It's cultural. if the business can't actually deliver on the promise the advertising agency is making, then it's going to fail. And I'll get the blame. I'll get the blame. Because I'm, you know, In charge of putting the lipstick on the pig, you know, the lipstick wears off.

The pig is still a pig and everyone goes, fucking Jill Brinston. Those guys fucked up, you know, like, no, no, it was always a pig. You never gave me the chance.  So with Radiation, I loftily called it a brand navigation agency, which never took off. I was way too up in this clouds. Wherever the brand needs to live. We will help it thrive. So it might need to live inside the hearts of the employees. It might need to live more thoroughly  in the customer space, you know, so wherever it needed to live. 

 I started my business. I had a real clarity around the fact that I wanted to work only with emotionally and creatively generous people, and that included my clients. So no more creative departments, no more art director, writer, I didn't understand that anymore. I can't believe it still exists. I would have people who were brilliant at creative. Concept development. Then I would bring designers in. I've always loved designers because they obsess about the detail. So it was concept development, and then we would use designers. It was writers. If we needed writers, I sometimes was you journalists. I was really mixing up. How do you, how do you get to the end solution? We're making decisions based on how to feed the mouths that we had to feed and  while I was always committed to that, I thought it's the wrong order of things. It's not why I, it's not why I stepped into the blue ocean alone. It's not why I learned to swim.

None of that, you know, so I started Tricky, which is my present agency about six years ago. At that time, radiation still existed. I knew that it would be More interesting and more exciting to start a new agency with new people, which  was resolutely in the brand strategy, storytelling and design space.

So we literally released ourselves from the responsibility of comms.  I could smell as well that comms was quickly becoming an algorithm. Soon it would be  putting in keywords and then, Oh, look at, I didn't even know about AI five years ago, but I could tell that soon it would be about putting in keywords and the ad would spit itself out.

So I wanted to be well away from that.  I wasn't really a true creative director. I didn't dream in colors. I was very interested in the business side of things.

I loved my clients. I loved how business worked. I love being able to  move the needle for them. So Tricky was. much closer to the front of that. 

It's  really important to me that we have full access to the culture of the organization we're working with. 

Absolutely how I work and why I always felt uncomfortable in ad agencies. It was like working with half a deck. Like you don't know how the business runs and I was never interested in advertising. Never ever.

I just got pulled into advertising. I liked business, how you can coalesce  all of the troops around a single idea at the company. I feel like I cut off the knees in the advertising model. 

It's incredibly arrogant that whole narrative around “an idea can change the world”, you know, like, an idea can change a sort of a time and a place, but for staff, that idea won't change the world. If they already work for an organization that makes them feel disenfranchised or doesn't don't they don't particularly want to do a great job because they don't feel like anyone's treating them very well, then there's no idea I can have that's going to inspire them out of that tepid place. It's simply not going to happen. Sometimes you have to say look you're not you're not even slightly ready to go to the marketplace because you have a staff you have a culture that isn't nearly ready  to support and embrace what it is you're trying to achieve.

So let's start there and then you'll be able to spend half the money and double the effect because behind you, you'll have a workforce that really care .

You had a lot of responses to your post.  What is your read on women in the creative industries and what their struggles are and what they are battling with and what would you say to them?

Talk to them about reducing down the narrative of what everybody else thinks, looking at the playing field, if you like, for what it is and what you can get from it and if you really want to get something from it, then being pretty strategic about how you want to get that.  To me, there is a gamifying nature in almost all industries. I didn't just get contacted from that  post by people in creative industries.

I had a woman who was a CMO in a bank in Australia go, holy fuck, this is happening to me on a daily basis. Give me strength. I had people from engineering. I had people from IT  everybody saying, it's every day. It's prevalent. How the hell do I Teflon coat myself? 

 I'm being Buddhist here, the only behavior any of us can change is our response to what's going on at the time.

Yep. We can't change the patriarchy. We can't change that guy trying to block my pathway. We can't change.  those people thinking that about me. The only control we actually have is our response to it. And if our response is primarily negative, and if we primarily think that's not fair, then we're stuck.

There is actually no movement. Now, it isn't really fair  since the minute we're in the play field when we're three,  there's still going to be the kid that'll knock you over the head because he wants to play with the toy you've got, you know,  funny how I said he,  but it could be a girl.

we can't actually change the way they, Did that to you,  but let's look at your response to it. 

What's the story I should tell myself that I had this awesome potential. . Everything seemed to fit and then suddenly I don't have it now. I could easily go. Well, what did I do wrong? Like you said it was before or what a dick, . Or what's the third thing?

We will go into our own whirlpools and then suddenly we're down the bottom of the whirlpool and we can't even see the light.  You might be imagining Okay, here it is, ageism at play again. It may be that someone's done an identical project and they came highly recommended by the chief executive. There are so many pitches I've poured my heart into  I felt so confident we've just, there's no stone unturned. They seem to light up when we shared everything with them  and we lost so many pitches I thought we'd win, we lost.

So many pitches I desperately wanted that we didn't get. Conversely, there were pitches that I thought, I'm not really sure how that went, that we won. I guess what I've learned when I've picked myself up out of the ashes or the gravel or the, you know, and I've got gravel rash all over me because the car took off without me and then with other people and it's my, it was my, they were my client and it was my, these were my ideas. When you pick yourself up in the gravel rash heels,  I came up with an absolute  philosophy that you will get the clients that you deserve and the clients will get the agencies they deserve. So if the clients want to work in a certain way  and you're not reflecting that certain way.

Possibly it's cultural, possibly the alignment wasn't quite right. You know, to some degree I've learned to say, okay, universe, that one wasn't for me. And there were reasons I don't know about. You've kind of got to give it up to God to some degree in that way and go, well, it wasn't mine. You know, it really wasn't mine and it never was and I kidded myself. I really thought our idea was genius and then it was cancelled or  worse they choose no agency and  they decide to do nothing.  I had that happen once with this one company in particular, where I interviewed many, many times in New York and they were going to start a whole new department. I was going to run the department, the same company  in their UK headquarters,  years later, same thing, different set of people, same department. I was the one that we're looking at. Both times, they never went for the whole thing that they were playing with this idea.  It shaped my life though because I didn't move to London.

Yeah, I had to come back to New York. I was living in Barcelona and we were going to move to  London and then because after all these interviews over many months where I thought  I just need to sign on the dotted line, it changed my life because I went back to New York.

I couldn't go to London really without this job so these things do shape your life 

massively. 

Yeah, and the thing is we can be furious about it and get bitter about it or we can go that one wasn't for me  because that's the only power we really have you know. What can I learn and that one wasn't for me and that gig that you're just talking about that slipped out of your fingers,  you have to say it's that wasn't for me.

There was something about that job that wasn't for me. There wasn't an alignment I thought there was, but there was something I wasn't seeing.  And so it wasn't for me and lick your wounds and pick yourself up and move it forward. What do you do the next day? I kind of have a process where I give myself 48 hours to be fucked off.  I'll go out with the dogs and I'll probably have one too many drinks and I rage against. The rage against the machine, I do give myself that we're all goddamn human.

Give yourself the time to rage against the machine.  And then go, it wasn't meant to be that. Oh, there was something wrong with that alignment that I don't know about.  Sometimes I will go back to the client and say, let me know what I can do better next time. And sometimes they'll say nothing.

Nothing. It honestly was a split here and then they don't even really tell you. Well sometimes they'll say, look, they fundamentally, you guys didn't really demonstrate ABC. And I'll think, okay, interesting. Thank you. And again, if you go in to seek that kind of feedback, you just have to take it,  put it on the silver tray.  Everything is learning, whether that learning is, thickening up my skin or how to bounce forward, not back, or whether that learning is being gracious in defeat, or whether that learning is, I shouldn't have even gone for that piece of business.

I fucking knew there was something. You know, I had, I had something recently where I thought maybe, I don't know, they seem really nice. It's not really my bag, but they seem really nice. And in the end, I didn't get it. And I didn't deserve to get it because I didn't really want it, and I think again, universality of it was that it wasn't meant to be mine, you know?

So when they said, Oh, look, we're, we're going to move forward with someone else. I was like, Oh, thank God. Why was I doing this? You know, it's like chasing the wrong dude.  Yeah. Oh my God. Right. That's what I would say, you know, that the power, you have to hold the power within you. Every time we're furious with someone else about what's happened, we're letting that power go to them,  whereas the power rests with you. You have to, fury is fine, but move through it and then go, it wasn't meant to be for me. What do I learn from it? What space does it now give me to go somewhere else? And really watch the match between your, your clients, you know, really watch that, the cultural match, the values match.

What do they think? What do they feel? How do they respond? How do they look after their staff? You know. What are their allegiances? Like, find out if they're your people.  And then if you do get into some sort of kerfuffle later on down the line, you'll get through it better with them as well, because they are people like you.

You're really working with people like you.   Hold your power because you do have that one thing.  Yeah, sovereignty, we have agency over ourselves and that includes the response to disaster. You can either be rolled by life, or you can jump on top of the ball and roll across the top of it, you know? 

You have full control over whether you want to respond positively, negatively,  Acidically, you know, furiously,   you have that control.

So what are you going to take from it?  Yeah. And then own it, whatever you do, own it. Yeah.