How Failure Led Me to Launch a More Authentic Business ~via the indomitable @BeckyGaylord
"Commitment to authenticity in life and work..." After reflecting on those insights, I decided to write about it. That’s because a significant element of my business do-over is to restart creating and sharing content myself, and not just for clients.
This year, I launched my consulting business 2.0. It’s timing that many (sane people) would consider to be as horrendous as when I initially became an entrepreneur a decade ago, in the aftermath of the last major global financial crisis.
Each of the two undertakings was an accident. Perhaps “contingency” is the better description, in the sense it wasn’t my first plan.
And yet, amazing things resulted after I finally embraced what actually unfolded. It hasn’t been smooth. For awhile things seemed to go way off track. Still, the value of insights I’ve gained from experiences that felt uncomfortable, and resisted initially, keeps accumulating.
It’s similar to an irritant that gets inside an oyster’s shell, which transforms into a lustrous pearl. The mollusk secretes a strong material that coats the intruder and protects itself. It takes years, and happens rarely, but the precious result is treasured.
We humans have the equivalent of this. Indeed, I consider a list of such “oyster items” to be more significant than a bucket list, which seems, by contrast, transactional and static: Do it. Cross it off. Move on.
I wrote about oyster items in a blog post published in the first weeks of 2012. I’d thought it was lost, along with scores of other posts I created that year.
Just days ago, I re-discovered it and re-read what had been on my oyster-items list.
I realized I’d undertaken most of those since then — accomplishments that are now accumulating worth and will continue to do so. The thing is, it was only possible to appreciate that valuable growth because of the ten-year span of time that had lapsed.
Commitment to Authenticity in Life and Work
After reflecting on those insights, I decided to write about it. That’s because a significant element of my business do-over is to restart creating and sharing content myself and not just for clients.
It’s possible to seek joy, love and benevolent breakthroughs in life and work. (Graphic created by author)
I’ve decided to more completely align my work with my life and philosophy for living it. I believe the best prospective clients will not only value my skills, experience and approach but also want to work with the human who is uniquely me. There’s no downside, the way I see it, to authentically showing who I am, how I think, what matters to me and why.
The six-word story version is…
Seek: joy, love and benevolent breakthroughs.
Until five years ago, I regularly developed original and relevant content for my own website and wrote weekly for the fabulous blog 12 Most (may it rest in peace) while also contributing pieces elsewhere, such as to PR Daily and Social Media Today.
I’m a former journalist, published in The New York Times, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Businessweek and elsewhere. My last role in the industry was associate editor for The Plain Dealer, writing editorials and columns.
When I left, I rooted my consulting in strategic communication, influence and advocacy. Writing is part of me. So creating content makes sense. It shows off my talents and how I approach projects and work.
Developing content that others found useful and relevant significantly expanded my audience on social media platforms, especially Twitter. It also established my credibility online and within a wide digital community.
What Happened: I Stopped Rolling
Then, life got messy. I stopped creating and sharing my own ideas online. And I stayed stopped. I gathered moss. For the past five years, I basically ignored the most important client of all: My own brand.
Well, we must (re)start where we are. I realized last year that I had to do one of two things.
Engineer a total business overhaul and continue consulting with a new website, brand, approach and marketing.
Partner with the right organization and embed in-house, adding value to that group and for its clients — while bringing in new business.
I am creative, strategic and naturally demonstrate authenticity and leadership. I’m also an extrovert who thrives when working with other smart thinkers and doers.
So I scouted for the right place to land, in terms of the organizational culture, leadership team, the overall fit, as well as its services, clients and plan for growth. I believed a demonstrated track record of winning, directing and completing successful projects for a roster of clients, and my business development chops, would act like lowered landing gear for my touchdown.
Yes, I knew there was a pandemic and that economic upheaval was disrupting life and work for everyone. And that nothing was the same or easy — including networking, career transitions and job hunting. I went at it, anyway.
That became Plan A.
Spoiler alert: Plan A fizzled. Despite many nibbles of interest and conversations that seemed promising, I didn’t land with a new team. I must own that going on a brand-building and content-creation hiatus, which extended a few years, didn’t help matters. At all.
I Started Rolling Again…and So Much More
Still, I kept growing. Gained new skills, including certificates in UX. I found my exceptional research and writing skills, natural empathy and instinctively strong penchant for aesthetics and design are a perfect way to expand my expertise. And demand for digital content creators and user experience professionals is projected to continue to surge.
I overhauled my resume and worked with a new career coach. I reached out to many former colleagues and associates to reconnect. I focused on people with whom I considered the relationship to be warm and engaged, although many were connections I’d allowed to become dormant. Some I messaged, in fact, I’d last interacted with decades ago. That let me face fear. Not everyone I messaged responded. That let me find grace in humility.
I also developed and delivered new training on communication basics, expanding my services. I provided pro-bono projects for small nonprofits. I read relevant books, incorporating into my professional and personal development many of the great ideas I came across, such as James Clear’s incredibly useful Atomic Habits. I’m now reading parts of it for a third time.
And, I focused on inner work and growth. The meditation practice I began several years ago is now twice daily. I would as eagerly miss it as I would oxygen. It seems to lift and carry me through my days. It’s enabled me, more regularly, to detach with compassion, put things in perspective, slow down — even as I am productive — and focus with a sense of purpose and humor, but not stress. I also take dance classes several times a week at a studio in Cleveland, not far from my home. I started two years ago and kept going with classes over Zoom when Covid forced the studio to close temporarily.
I kept re-framing my approach to Plan A, trying to make that work. I revamped versions of Plan A until I was about midway through the alphabet before realizing that the right thing was right in front me of the whole time. I’d just resisted realizing it and embracing it.
Now I’m on Plan B.
Turns out, they weren’t mistakes. There really are no mistakes if we capitalize on them. And learn. So we make new ones. And learn.
There aren’t really coincidences, either, I believe. And that’s how I found the topic for this post.
The source code for all content I created the year I started blogging had been preserved on a server owned by the former host of a currently moribund website of mine. I obtained a link to the file last year. (Thank you, Yurich Creative!) But it was zipped and unreadable with any software that I’d ever owned, used or even heard of before.
While I was pursuing Plan A, it didn’t seem worth the effort and hassle to excavate ancient content I’d developed.
But now I’m determined to restart blogging and to publish twice week. And I was pretty sure that I would discover a bunch of old ideas I could freshen and remake into new, updated and useful content. First, I needed access. That sent me searching for an email Dennis Yurich sent me in April 2020 with the link to it, which had been stored on MediaFire. Tech types might roar (in disgust or laughter or both) when I admit I’d never heard of MediaFire. But I hadn’t. So I signed up.
That led me to Brackets, a discontinued source code editor created by Adobe Systems. It’s free and open source. Or, more accurately, was. Adobe stops supporting that software Sept. 1, 2021 — that’s today.
Coincidence? I choose to think not.
After all of the digital digging, despite being camouflaged amidst rows of HTML code, my old blog posts were, indeed, readable. I copied all of the text that Brackets showed and pasted everything into a new Google document, scrolling to the end to be sure it was all there. It filled 227 pages.
Then I began reading. I found the oyster-item post. It was worth the work to crack open that virtual safe. It held gems. Pearls, actually.
We Don’t Start Over, but Build on What Has Been
It really felt like finding old treasure. Or a time capsule. Maybe both. I have all of the earliest blog posts and other content that I created to share. I see the evolution in my approach and style. I will find new ways to repurpose my old ideas. Many are still quite sound, such as having a list of oyster items.
This snippet is from that original post. The source code, which Brackets revealed, shows it was first published Monday, January 23, 2012.
Many accomplishments amount to a big deal, eventually. But they might not appear to be so grand when they happen. It’s as if time and other life experiences are required before the luster and worth are evident. Oyster items do matter. They’re worth tracking and shooting for in the same way as bigger more obvious achievements.
Six oyster items were on my list in that original post:
Become a Toastmaster
Teach a college class
Finish my Masters Degree
Acquire three skills this year (and each year)
Join another nonprofit board
Learn HTML
How have I done? Well, I haven’t attended even one meeting of Toastmasters International and know hardly any HTML. Yet.
But I can check off the others: I’ve taught graduate-level communications classes, finished my Master’s, took on several nonprofit leadership roles and acquired many more than three skills this year — including, just in the past week, using Brackets and MediaFire.
I taught myself how to create a short animated video, now featured on the home page of the website I designed and developed to relaunch my consulting business. That happened about three months ago.
And, in the past year, I also completed certificates for UX courses from the Interaction Design Foundation. I’ve become a real fan of that organization. Every day, it highlights a quote on the site, which it emails to those who subscribe. When I went to the organization’s website to insert the URL address into this post, the home page featured this quote:
Quote featured on website of UX online design school Interaction Design Foundation
No. Coincidences.
Amidst the false starts and wrong turns, I accumulated enough research to provide the basis for my own book on how to fuel personal and professional resilience, even through a pandemic and global recession. I’m going to put writing a book on my list of oyster items.
I will keep adding to my list and hope never to stop finding new ones nor appreciating those I have accomplished already. Their value is apparent and will continue to increase more, over time.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling confident about my new skills, fresh website and renewed commitment to create and share my own content. I know now that many of the personal and professional insights, lessons and growth that resulted in recent years came only after making what initially seemed like mistakes on the way to get to this point.
Those are benevolent breakthroughs, after all. And I believe that as I seek more of those, as well as joy and love, I will also connect authentically, powerfully and successfully with clients who want that, too.
Logo created by author for the relaunch of her company and website in 2021.
