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On Being Actively Anti-Racist

The below post comes from CR&Co &, just as my new business has committed to being actively anti-racist from now until eternity, so too do I.

Will you join me/us/everyone who believes the world isn’t truly free until everyone is truly free from racism, oppression, abuse, & the weight of colonialism.

“2020: A Year of Absolutes”

2020 has been a year of uncertainty, of unparalleled change, of pivoting like crazy, of unlearning… but mostly, it’s been a year of absolutes.

With Covid-19 spreading quickly across the globe, we absolutely learned the value of strong leadership. We saw the death & destruction that followed (& still continues) in other parts of the world where strong leadership is lacking or completely devoid.

With lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, & businesses being thrown into unchartered territories, we learned that we can absolutely change the way we interact & engage. We learned that there’s no “going back” to business as usual.

And, with the #BlackLivesMatter movement swinging into quick & decisive action after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, & George Floyd, we no know with absolute clarity that we must all be actively anti-racist at work, at play, at home.

These are only some of our new “absolutes.” We must listen. We must lace up our boots.

We must listen.
We must march.

We must listen.
We must shout.

We must listen.
We must write.

We must listen.
We must learn.

We must listen.
We must educate.

We must listen.
We must whisper to our children.

We must listen.
We must talk to our friends, openly & without fear of f*cking up.

We must listen. We must have conversations with our parents. We must listen.
And, we must actively do more to rid the world of racism & the systematic & inbuilt oppression of black people & people of colour the world over.

With all of these absolutes swirling we thought that, even as a small company just starting on our own journey, one thing that we can do moving forward (other than LISTENING TO BLACK PEOPLE) is to share resources. To pool resources. To gather information & curate caring compassion. So, this is our start. Our commitment is ongoing, eternal, forever.

If you, like us, are committed to being actively anti-racist – we thank you. If you aren’t as yet committed to being actively anti-racist – we’d like to help you get there.

As such, if you like us, have information or links to share – please do so on your own channels, or send through anything we can share to us to we can spread the word.

We are in this together.

Together.
Together.

Resources:

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Keep Calm & Plan Your Crisis Comms

Like all of us, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks glued to news outlets, Twitter, Instagram, podcasts, & other channels to keep myself & my family informed about covid-19. 

And, if I’m honest, I’m feeling pretty much at saturation point from an emotional & intellectual standpoint when it comes to what’s ahead. 

Right know we’re living in a time of heightened uncertainty & unknowns. The impact of this current global pandemic is just beginning to trickle into daily life for individuals, communities, & businesses worldwide. The tidal wave will come. It’s up to us to prepare for how we ride it to shore.

Closer to home here in New Zealand, despite the attempt of many businesses to go ahead in a quasi-BAU state, there’s one thing I am certain of right now: we’re in crisis-mode.

Unfortunately what I’m noticing is that the businesses who need them most don’t seem to have clear, concise, & longterm crisis-plans in place for times like this. 

My hot take is simple. Right now is the time to stop your BAU & take note of culture, context, content, & community when it comes to your business & the communications that you’re putting out into the world. 

For almost two decades I’ve worked with big & small brands alike not only to create clever & innovative campaigns across new & emerging channels – but to write crisis comms & community best practice to ensure brands responding with kindness, impact, & best practice at heart when it comes to communicating through social & digital media in times of crisis.

So here’s a gentle few things big, small, & sole-trader brands alike can do right now to ensure that what you’re putting into the world is kind, not tone-deaf. That how you’re responding to people in need is helpful, not distant.

  1. If your content calendar & media buying is done well in advance, stop all activity now. Look at the every placement. Take note of assets, products, words, & the tonality of content you’re putting into the world. If your comms are intended to be “cheeky” in good times, they’ll sound flippant at best right now.
  2. Check your words. It goes without saying, but the biggest faux pas that a business can make right now is to post or send out a communication that hasn’t been seen by more than one set of eyes. Without any malice meant, in times like these words matter. Messages matter. Thought & empathy matter. Read, re-read, & consider everything you put into the world as a business.
  3. If you’re scheduled to crow about financial performance or any kind of profit, put that on hold through consumer facing channels for the foreseeable future. Sure, share with your board & major stakeholders – but right here, right now, people need emotional reassurance. Profit talk isn’t going to help your brand when all we see are falling markets & trends towards recessions with huge global repercussions.
  4. Make sure you have enough resource available to handle customer conversations & community feedback. If you know it’ll be a stretch to have people monitoring & responding to questions across all channels, then be super overt about where you will be able to respond. Ask people to email you if email works best. If Facebook is where you can handle more customer interaction, ask people to head there specifically. Being super clear about where people can go for help is the kindest thing you can do for your staff as well as for your customers.
  5. If you’re a big business, ensure your customer care teams are looked after. Taking care of the people who take care of customers & employees alike is of the utmost importance. Empower your frontline staff with information & the ability to be humble, kind, & caring at this time. There’s literally nothing worse you can do than have customer care people reading from scripts – unable to veer into emotive territory.
  6. Have a plan around internal processes for signing-off official comms & statements, but make sure that your internal processes don’t hinder (or even sneak into) the conversations your representatives have with customers. Consumers want reassurance, not to know the ins-and-outs of your business. Your stress internally should not be placed onto the shoulders of already worried humans outside of your organisation.
  7. Listen to your gut. If commonsense & expertise are worth anything during more certain & stable times, they’re worth everything during times of crisis. If something feels “off” or a communication sounds distancing more than connective, re-jig, re-write, re-think. Less is more in times of crisis.
  8. If you’ll be laying people off or sending people home, have heart-felt words at the ready & empower your customer service teams to be human, caring, & kind in their responses. Crisis times aren’t times for “perfection.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The brands who most show their humanity through connecting authentically are those that people continue to love.

Hopefully these wee tips are helpful for you right now. 

If you’re in need of a check-up, check-in, or simply need an extra set of eyes over your crisis plans or content during this time please reach out. I’m here & willing to help as best I can. As per usual, slide into my DMs here with any questions you might have.

Together we can put good into the world at scale. Together we can do just about anything. Together we can keep ourselves, our businesses, our employees, & (most importantly) our communities safe right now.

Being respectful with our comms & content is the only way forward during this time.

Kia Kaha.

Cassie 

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The Art of Being You: Building A Better Personal Brand (without the BS)

Fu*k the rules, do what’s right for you?
Seriously. Fu*k em. 

Do you remember life without screens? 

I mean the glowing, talking, ever-present & omniscient ones we wistfully while away our lives behind (be they big, medium, small, or pocket-sized?

Do you remember going out with your friends at the dew-drop-dawn of each new day & riding bikes from sun-up to sun-down. Making up rules to games that didn’t exist yet & relishing in the art of unfettered play?

Did you dance on tables for the joy of & not because we needed fodder to feed an algorithm or three? 

Let me tell you… I did. Thank GAWD we didn’t have smartphones & cameras documenting every waking moment of our lives when I was young. Instead we embraced boredom as a challenge. We invented adventures & undertook them fastidiously.

We found joy in recounting our harrowing tales of escaping scorpions, rattlesnakes, & Bob cats (ahem, we never had to escape really – we never saw all the critters we imagined we’d escaped from, it was their trails in the shallow dust that reminded us they were there though). Oh I loved the days before digital applause became inherently tied to our own self-worth.

When was the last time you spent an entire summer afternoon lying in the grass looking up at the sky & watching the clouds pass overhead?
I can’t remember the last time I did it. 
Has my 13year-old daughter ever done this?
Ever? 
I’m not actually sure. 

My own memories moments where I was truly present haunt me like gentle ghosts. Nudging me. Nurturing me. All of them are specters of a past that whisper in my ears “Do you remember…” hey haunt me in rare moments of silence & stillness, prodding at a dusty corner of my consciousness reminding me of the innate joy in doing nothing. Now though, nothingness is frowned upon. 

In a world where we pay to go places without wifi & are easily seduced by the idea of going offline, we struggle when we encounter boredom. We’re now hard-wired for connection 24/7/365. But the connection our brains desire (damn you, dopamine) isn’t real connection. 

We are living in a time where our personal value is oftentimes measured by how busy we are, how many titles we’ve put next to our names on LinkedIn profiles, & how many followers see the photos/videos/words we upload. The measure is simple: if lots of people see the reckons we post & the breakfasts we tweet about (accompanied by inane/clever/snooze-worthy hashtags), then we must be very important & interesting. Right? 

Yeah, nah. 

In the past 20 years the fabric of our connected culture has become shinier, sure. And don’t we just covet the shiny things? We attempt to grab more & more of the twinkly stuff. We show only our highlight reels to the world. The ups. The celebrations. The rising from a fall. The highest of peaks. Sometimes we show glimpses of the hard stuff. But, that’s only sometimes. 

Mostly though, we keep our fears & our anxieties locked away. 
We wallow in our own defeats when defeat looks like us. 
When the person we see in the mirror isn’t perfect we hide them & from them. 

We disconnect to connect.

For most of us, social interactions are a smoke-screen. A proof-point of interacting with a modernity that has over-run us. It’s social media that defines us. All of us. We post dreamy smiles in golden sunlight in the hopes of living up to the expectations of people we’ve never met. Expectations that have yet to be defined. 

We follow. 
We follow.
We follow. 
We follow…

And, in turn, we hope others will follow us.
Why? Because being followable is the new wealth. 

Whether it’s 100 people or 100million, being followed is a new currency by which we buy & sell our self-confidence off of the back of likes, shares, comments & the ever-elusive idea of virality. Our sweet-fix digital culture is killing us though. Quite literally. We’re drunk on algorithms. 

Here at home in New Zealand our depression & suicide rates are higher than almost anywhere else in the world. We measure our value, our lovability, & our cleverness by double-taps on a screen somewhere else in the world. People we will never know hold our lives in the palms of their hands. 

Which brings me to the topic of Personal Brand. 

Google the term or take a wee squizz on any LinkedIn timeline & you’ll find a treasure trove of people talking about cutting through the din of digital content & becoming a thought leader by building a better personal brand than the next person. Millions of articles purport the best tips-&-tricks for hacking human algorithms (not to mention the social media driven ones) & becoming instantly likable. Instantly famous. Instantly worthy. 

This isn’t a new idea, in fact it’s an old one. It’s only the platforms on which we’re meant to sparkle that are different. Le sigh. Hands up if you’re already bored of all of the beaty-chesty congratulatory swill that people post in an attempt to feel any bit of anything at all. We chase this kind of interaction because we’ve forgotten how to say “Thank you,” and “Well done,” and any other nice thing to each other in real life – so we look for kindness online. 

Let me be the first to tell you though, the beaty-chesty stuff isn’t authentic or likable. We’re smart. All of us. We can sense bullshit at a thousand paces. When it comes to professional platforms like LinkedIn I can spot a boot-licker from just as far a distance as a bullshit artist. 1,000 paces. 

The most frequent question I get asked is: How can you tell if someone is authentic or not? 

Firstly, let’s not beat around the bush. If you are wondering if someone might not be who they purport to be – then investigate further. Our guts are great at spotting/feeling when things don’t feel quite right. If you’re looking for something that’s based on a person’s online activity, a good rule of thumb to figure out if someone’s yanking your proverbial chain is simple. 

On LinkedIn, head to their “activity” tab & see how they interact & with whom. A person who never interacts with their own colleagues but who hammers ye olde LIKE button when it comes to the chiefs is an easy pick as a butt-kisser. When I see folks of this ilk, I unfollow/dis-engage immediately. There’s only so much brown-nosing a girl can handle up in a timeline, ya know? But that’s just one way to spot someone who is out for themselves instead of sharing themselves with others.

I believe that personal brand isn’t what you may think it is.

I’m here to bring you a different view on it. Instead of playing by other people’s rules, we get to write our own. We do! No one has to be one thing or another to have amazing thoughts & share them. You don’t have to be extroverted, shouty, or move at pace. You need only be who you are to be seen & heard. 

In fact, every single build a better personal brand article that I’ve read that doesn’t start with: “Fuck the rules, do what’s right for you!” is an article I automatically am cynical about. Cynical because if you’re going to tell other people how to live their lives, you’re not doing anyone a favour. 

So, in attempt to not write something that actually helps, & to answer questions that I get asked a whole heckuva lot, here’s my take on the best rules for building your personal brand online & offline:

  • FOLLOW THE WELL TRODDEN PATH
    Hahaha! LOL. Not. Don’t follow a path. 
    Follow a beat. Be it the beat of your heart, a beat of your own drum, or the beat of your favourite power song – follow by leading with that which feeds you. When you know your values & lean hard into them, then you’ll know the path you need to forge. I’ve always found inspiration in others. People who move through the world completely comfortable in their own skin are people I look to when my own comfort in who I am wavers. 

    The happier I am in who I am, the more I’m able to exist in a state of insatiable curiosity. I ask questions. And, I’m open to a magical melding together of electricity and stardust. To stand out, stand up. It’s not always easy to share. But it gets easier the more you do it. Don’t get stuck in the mud of the well-trodden path. Go on, Tiger. Tip-toe through the tulips instead. 
  • DRESS FOR SUCCESS
    Gross, no. 
    Dress for how you feel. 
    Dress how you want.
    Dress up, down, all around. 

    Just make sure that you are, in fact, dressed. 

    All of us should be able to show up in the world the way we want to show up. We must learn to take up space. To be visible in ways that work for us as individuals. Also, we must allow others to do the same. Celebrating diversity means being inclusive of any kind of vibe we bring sartorially. Obviously some professional engagements call for different attire and formalities. If you need to wear a suit, wear one. By all means. 

    But if you’re keen to wear that blue-flower print that makes you feel powerful, do it. Or, that bright orange number that makes you feel like a million bucks – it’s calling your name & does you no good hanging in your closet. If you’re more comfortable with a traditional corporate attire, that’s a-okay as well. You do you, Boo. You write the rules by which you play. If my penchant for double-denim is anything to go by, you’ll soon find out that when you’re at your most comfortable on the outside, you’re also your most productive & effective. Go on, give dressing for your idea of success a whirl. 
  • FOLLOW/NETWORK WITH EXECUTIVES & C-SUITE
    LOL, soz. No thanks. When I see people only managing “up” on LinkedIn & in other professional settings I instantaneously dry-retch. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t reach out to or follow people in positions you aspire to – just don’t let the idea of a corporate ladder be that which defines your personal branding strategy online (or off). Instead of seeking out the top-dogs only, follow people who inspire you instead. Search out people who have a genuine opinion & who aren’t afraid to share it. I always look for the helpers, the givers. 

    The people who spend most of their time with one aim in mind: to connect. These people are worth their weight in gold & then some. I’ve learned more from following people who are different to me & who are in different roles to me than I have by following a whole heap of CEO’s names John or Dave. With a good mix of colleagues, contemporaries, & kick-ass people who you just seem to gel with, you’ll make a much better impression on just on the world – but you’ll learn a whole lot more & be able to feed your curiosity more authentically.

    Also, things we should do more fastidiously are: 
    Thank people. 
    Compliment people. 
    Ask questions. 
    Banter. 

    Remember, building a personal brand isn’t about kissing asses. 
    It’s about trust, integrity, & being true to who you are as a person. If you’re keen on learning more from people higher up the ladder, follow away. But don’t forget to stop for a moment & look at everyone else around you. It might just be your network of contemporaries who lift you the highest as you move through your career. 
  • SHARE COMPANY STORIES 80% OF THE TIME, PERSONAL ONES 20%
    I see this a lot. Folks who are either a) drinking the Kool Aid hard-out & don’t realise the damage they’re dong to their personal brand by not branching out in their interests or who are b) looking for congratulations & adulation from others within their business alone. In the olden days of LinkedIn (yes, there were olden days & I lived through them) the rule of thumb was to only share stories about the business or industry you worked in, but that was because the platform was originally a hunting ground for job-seekers & HR folks looking to poach top talent. 

    If you were caught on LinkedIn during the Wild West days of the platform, you were always branded a person looking for greener pastures. Lucky for all of us, the platform has matured (hopefully as have we) & the facts don’t lie: to have people engage with you you must be engaging. Seems fairly obvious, right?

    Yet, I quite often see folks who will only talk about XYZ business & XYZ profits & XYZ strategy… blah blah blah. In all reality, if you’re looking to grow your personal brand online, you need to flip the above percentages. Or, be much cleverer in how you share information so that the people you’re hoping to engage with understand your personal drivers. If you share 100% business information, but can do so with a personal interest or a passionate & human spin, then that’s a-okay. Because… you guessed it… that makes the information you’re sharing relatable & valuable.

    I mean, I’m sure your big/small/medium sized business is awesome & that you are truly in love with the CMS, DMP, & campaign PIRs you work with… but tell me something interesting. Tell me something surprising. In fact, share a new idea. Say something bold. Something different. I’d love 100% of you & your ideas… but if you’re on LinkedIn, sure go on & pepper in some business speak. But please don’t make it an 80% love-fest about corporate policy.

    Humans connect. Be human. 
  • POST TWICE A WEEK ACROSS ALL CHANNELS.
    Again, this is another case of the “nopes”! What I mean by this is that winning the algorithm & going viral is kinda like winning the lotto. The odds are stacked against us all simply because of the vast amount of content being made & shared every second of every day. If you’re looking to do anything, look to make an impact on one person. Then two. Then three… etc. 

    Instead of trying to hack an algorithm, simply interact with intention. Quite often even I get caught up in thinking that I need to post to Instagram, or to Facebook, or to LinkedIn on a daily basis. But some days (ahem, MOST DAYS) I really don’t have that much to say. So instead, I fight the urge to post a bunch of waffle & instead I only post if I can interact in a way that gives. 

    When we give people our thoughts & our experience, then they receive the gift of knowledge. I love giving people my attention, my time, my expertise. Be boundless in how you give… give give give. 
    In fact, if you take anything away from this article at all, let it be this: GIVE. 
  • WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE
    A few months ago I called a guy on LinkedIn an asshat. It was the nicest thing I could think to call him after he attacked me via DM & in public on the wall of my own LinkedIn feed. I’ve never met this man & really don’t ever want to, either.

    New Zealand being small & Auckland being even smaller, I probably will end up next to this dolt at a conference or riding home on public transport – but so far, I haven’t had to breathe the same air as him. Without going into too much detail, this poor, triggered fellah didn’t like my language. He didn’t like my ideas. He didn’t like me at all. 

    So, instead of blocking me or just moving on with his own damn life he tried to put his sticky beak into mine. He wrote to my employer. He attempted to continue DMing me well after me having blocked him. He just really needed to stop being an asshat. In reality, what this stranger was trying to do was to quiet me. To take my voice & my freedom of expression. He tried to bully me online, then through my employer (they didn’t bite, either). He tried to make me feel small. At all of these things, he tried & failed. 

    I’m old enough & worn around the edges enough to speak my truth. I do it kindly, I do it often. And, I hope you do, too. To build your brand, use your language. Speak your truth. People can see right through anything that’s not authentic. And, when that happens you lose trust. No trust = no ability to network.

    Never be afraid to use your language. Your own form of poetry is that which the world is ready to drink in. No one is allowed to steal that from you. One of Dr Maya Angelou’s most impactful quotes in my life has been this “A woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing, she goes where she will without pretense & arrives at her destination prepared to be herself – & only herself.“

    Don’t watch your language, friends – use it. 

So there you have it. 
A lot of words on personal brand that can easily be distilled down into one common theme: build trust by sharing your passion, your knowledge, & by being truly curious about who other people are & why they do what they do.

Also, wear double/triple/quadruple denim whenever you please. 
Your body. Your mind. Your rules.

Dr. Suess said is simplest. 
He said it best.

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. 
There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Go & do you, Boo. 

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Mastering the Art of Wholeness One Day at a Time

We’re born whole.
All of us, in our own way.

When we’re little we’re confident in knowing who we are without question or doubt. We simply, are. As we master the art of motor-skills we reach out towards the world with each waking moment. We look under rocks to see what’s hiding there, we wonder how it is that light can dance on water, & we’re pretty darn tootin’ sure that there’s nothing better in the world that spending a day at the beach.

From our first breath we know what we like (hugs!) and what we don’t (being hungry/wet/etc). We also know what makes us giggle & what fills our minds with endless curiosity.

In the beginning all of our milestones are celebrated, too. Our first smile, our first words, our first spaghetti dinner (so beautifully messy), our first steps. As we grow, we’re told we can do anything – and I mean anything – if only we put our minds to it & work hard. More than anything though, we’re safe in knowing that we’re special.

Unique.
Individual.
Quirky.
Beautifully nuanced.
If we’re lucky, we maintain our awe when it comes to celebrating the differences in others. Mostly though, we learn that sameness is safer.

That said, when we’re young we find wonder in others. In their skills and in their successes. We play games, form teams, and work towards a common goal all for the sake of being together and growing together. We move through childhood hungry to learn and ready to take on the world. Oh that big, wide world. It really is our oyster in the beginning, isn’t it? 

Everyone tells us the world is our oyster. Which even now at 38yrs old makes me giggle. I love the idea of the world being something interesting & shiny – but as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy oysters, I’d rather the world was a musical & approach life like that.

But, I digress…

As a 4yr old, I loved playing sports. 

I’ve loved being a part of a team for almost my entire life. There’s something inherently grounding about knowing you’ve got the backs of your best buds on the field of play & that they know you’ve got theirs. Trust is established. Sometimes it’s broken. But mostly playing sports means we’re learning how different skillsets make a group of people stronger than a single individual. Also, beyond learning how to play by an established set of rules, teamwork builds up confidence & resilience in all of us. 

When I was four years old, I started playing softball. Even though I was one of the youngest kids on the team I loved the physical, mental, & emotional aspects of playing a game I loved. In my first year, I excelled. In fact, I took out “The Little Slugger Award.” Not only was I quick rounding the bases on little feet, but I could connect my bat with a pitch more often than not. For full disclosure, my Dad played for the Los Angeles Dodgers back in his Glory Days – as Springsteen calls them – so I could catch a pop-fly & throw a ball before I could even put one foot in front of the other.

If anyone was swinging for the fences it was Little Cass (fun fact:I’m still swinging for proverbial fences daily). Believe you me not only did I play the part, I looked it too. I swaggered like a little slugger & owned my athleticism. I wore high Bobby-socks with stripes, short golden shorts, a purple jersey, & a visor that reigned in my pig-tails (just) while keeping the sun from my eyes. I walked confident in knowing myself. I stepped up to the plate without fear of a slider or curve-ball. More than that, I loved my bruised shins & skinned knees.

Off the diamond, I took pride in out-pacing the boys at foot races. 
Eat.
My.
Dust.
Stinky, beautiful, silly boys.
Ah to be a child of summer in Southern California, eh? 

Through primary, middle, high school I was comfortable in my skin. I was comfortable in my competitive & curious nature. I was passionate about my dreams & was single-minded about doing what was right by my own moral compass. The Little Slugger was growing up. And, she was growing into who she knew she could be. 

While sports were a big part of my maturing into an adult, music was as well. I played clarinet in the marching band & sat as second-chair in our concert band. From 8yrs old I took lessons, practiced a ton, & honed my skills when it came to ye olde liquorice stick. NERD ALERT! Am I right?

When little doubts about the coolness of clarinet playing started to trickle in to my psyche in high school, I swapped the clarinet for the piano. Whilst most of my peers were deep into honky tonk country twang or emo music like Nine Inch Nails, I was into Elton John. He was all glitter, glamour, & amazingness (he still is). So, following in Uncle Elton’s footsteps, I took to playing rock music on a classical instrument. I love it then & I love it now.

Through teenager-hood, I kept my nose clean, studied hard, played music, learned experimental photography, wrote poetry, played sports & got more & more excited about the whole “the world is your oyster” thing we’d all been promised.

Fast forward to university life.

After high-school I had one last hoorah of a summer to share with friends before heading north up the 101 through LA & Ventura & on to my college campus. Upon arriving in a new town full of people I didn’t know, I became more introverted than I’d ever been. My confidence took a hit. But, Santa Barbara is a magical place & I met people & made friends quickly. I also found solace in the comforting nature of playing sports.  

I had dreams, too. BIG dreams. Whilst at UCSB – a school that had tenured professors & Nobel Laureates at our disposal – I wanted to do two things with my life: the first was to play tambourine in Elton John’s band, and failing that – I wanted to travel the world as a photo-journalist.

My poor parents were forking out dinero like no one’s business to educate me & here I wanted to live on the road shaking whatever I could shake (yes, including that which my momma gave me…) in a band of older, foreign men. Oy vey! My parents, being the amazing humans they are, laughed the Elton fantasy off & masterfully steered me towards a more secure future. When I graduated from UCSB after four years with a degree in History & Spanish Language/Literature, I put my tambourine away. Tucked gently away in a box or a dresser drawer somewhere.

Graduation day was a trip! Family from across the USA came to celebrate. Missouri mixed with So-Cal mixed with the UK. It was magical, fast, & the earth seemed to be spinning at a pace that was faster than normal. At one point in the day though it seemed as if the world stopped for a moment & pivoted in place. Actually, the world didn’t pivot – what it did was it threw me for a good ‘ol 360.

Looking back I reckon this 360 happens to almost all of us at a big juncture in our lives when we cross the threshold from child to adult. 

Enter working life. 

Whoa, welcome to the real-world, Little Slugger. Where once the world I was told that the world was my proverbial oyster, I learned that wasn’t true. Lots of grit, very few pearls.

The world it seems, is a ladder. And, to climb it, we must start at the bottom rung & climb only as & when we’re allowed to. Your gender, skin colour, economic standing, & culture all determine how quickly you get to move from rung to rung. The rules? They’re the rules & we’ve got to play by them. Yuck.

At the point in life when we learn that we must play by rules we never had a hand in writing, things get uncomfortable. So to become more comfortable, over time – without even realising it – the rules become us. We become them. We don’t question anymore, we simply do what we think is “right.” In doing so we tend to lose ourselves to labels assigned to us by random job titles, undefined skillsets, & somewhat relevant professional experience. We truly believe that this is the only way to be happy & stable & to pay the bills every month when they come due.
Again, yuck.

In today’s modern media world, world we’re connected to our devices & to each other all of the time. There’s no clocking in & out for the most part. We’re tethered to our emails. The pings, buzzes, whizzes, whimpers of notifications tell us we’re busy & important.

We’re always on.
Everything we post, comment on, like or share becomes a part of what is now deemed our “personal brand.” People we don’t even know form opinions on our skills or bankability by the people we follow on LinkedIn & by people with blue-ticks who re-Tweet us on Twitter.

Older Millennials like myself are of an age where we’re the test-cases for a huge social experiment that we’re not sure is going to turn out super amazing for our physical or mental health. We dove into the world of online & digital without nary a look back – & now that’s a lot of what we seem to be doing. Looking back. Social media & the people who built platforms to hook-us (hello dopamine) have a lot to answer for. But so do we, the willing participants of said experiment. When do we decide that enough is enough? I don’t have an answer just yet for this question, but I’m working towards one.

I remember long car drives as a kid. We’d roll down the windows & sing to whatever tape was in the player. Mostly it was Tom Petty or Wynonna Judd. We didn’t have phones to distract us. We took photos without anywhere to post them other than to our friends through the mail or on our bedroom walls.

It’s different now, eh? Do you find it hard to remember disconnected times?
I sure do! In the world we’re working in & navigating today though, we’re on. Logged-in. Liking, sharing, commenting, hash-tagging. To what end though? What I’ve noticed quite a lot recently is that, even though we’re living in new times, we’re still doing things like our parents did before us. And there parents before them. Ad infinitum… 

We get up each morning, get in our cars, hustle kids to school and head in different directions to spend time with people who aren’t our family or loved ones. If we’re lucky, we don’t get stuck in traffic for an hour before arriving at an office where we send emails, cover our asses, and sit in meetings all day.

Only to wash, rinse, repeat day in and day out… year after year… and for what? Security? The ability to intertwine our job title into the fabric of our own importance? 

The longer we play the games of adulthood, the more we believe in a false-idea of becoming who we should be. 

Right here, right now we’re living in an era where anxiety, depression, & suicide rates are sky-rocketing. In the past two trips around the sun I’ve lost six (SIX!) friends to depression & suicide. That’s six too many. We’re a generation of lost kids – kinda. We’re lost not only to others, but to ourselves & we’re digging our heels in deeper & harder when it comes to how things should be. We’re blinded by a blurry past-tense that the generations before us believe we need to bring into focus while living in a present-tense that is just that…tense.

Work-life Balance is BS.

Enter work-life balance.

Never truly-defined, we chase an idea of work-life balance that is, at its core, an illusion. As we chase this illusion, we move further away from who we are at our core. If you can’t define something at scale then how do you attain it? Dunno. But we’ll try! We’re hard workers.

That 4yr old Little Slugger I used to be? Yeah, she became a whisper of a memory that was merely a ghost. A memory. A thing of the past. For many years I learned to dress as someone else & recited lines verbatim from professional up-skilling books like a good corporate citizen. I replaced the Little Slugger in me with a woman in a business suit who straightened her hair every day, wore expensive heels, & donned make up – all in an attempt to hide herself. To fit in. I tucked away the intense blonde curls that used to naturally grow out from my under my cap. While she was away, I missed my Little Slugger. So much.

A few years ago I worked for a company with a great reputation as a place to be employed. My first day on the job was magical. Great people, great vibes & lots to dig into & help with. Not long into my tenure with the business, a senior member of staff took me into a room & told me that I was not, in any form, to communicate outwardly through social media, digital media, or anything IRL without express consent of the business even if said communications were personal & seemingly unimportant.

My opinions? Yeah nah.
They weren’t mine to share anymore.
Huh? Wha? Bacon powder…?
How’s that supposed to work?

Before working for this particular business I’d built myself up a fairly strong personal brand over the course of a decade or so working with some big brands across sectors. I loved the challenge of new tech & media. I loved learning, growing, & sharing ideas. I spoke passionately at conferences on a range of topics spanning from professional to personal & back again. I also stayed sane by writing blogs for myself & an occasional article or three for publications with big readerships. Oh, I was also friends with a whole lot of people from a whole lot of different walks of life.

All of these things were giant red-flags for the company.
I was told I was a risk to the brand.
I was told to stop or else.

Or else.

Long story short:
Over the course of my tenure working for this company I stopped.
I went with the safe route – mostly.
I succumbed to or else.

I stopped tweeting.
I stopped blogging.
I stopped speaking.
I stopped seeing my friends.
I stopped going to the gym.
I stopped taking photos.
I stopped learning.
I stopped calling my family.
I stopped smiling.
I stopping chasing my creative passions.
I stopped being me.
<insert sad panda emoji>

I STOPPED BEING ME! And, I crashed & burned big time emotionally because of it.

For a long time I was angry with the business who’d given me the cease-&-desist order for the hard times I went through. But over time I realised that I’d played the game, their game. And the game won (as did my eventual therapist & her bank account for all of the sessions I needed to un-do the un-doing of me.) I was at fault for not pushing back. I could’ve chosen or else & probably been better for it. I didn’t though.

Toeing the line meant breaking down. My marriage broke down. My confidence broke down. My mental health broke down. My life became something that was not my own. Leaving the job was the biggest gift ever. It took a while for me to stop being angry with myself for playing the game. Especially when I could see it happening in real-time.
But, I’m better now. Much, much better. And, kinder with myself.

There’s hope for all of us, yet.

In truth, we all play the game. And, in playing it we become a part of the machine. So the machine keeps going…slow, steady & unchanging. All the while, we lose pieces of ourselves. We take up less space. We speak up less, and we forget to lift (or fear lifting) others.

Recently there’s been a revival of purpose-driven brands though. Businesses big & small who champion their people & who truly believe that great brands aren’t built from the ground up, but rather from the inside out. When I think of great brands I think of their people. 
I think of the women of Wildfang.
I think of the people who make Patagonia magical.
I also think about Nike.

Nike? Yep! As a business, it seems as though (from the outside looking in) they empower people from all across their organisation to post, create, & curate information about their time working for the businesses. I feel like I know more about the beating heart of the gigantor that is Nike than I do about some local brands closer to home.

I also think about my friend Miri Rodriguez from Microsoft. Miri is a powerhouse. She’s a storyteller, a momma, a friend, a colleague and one helluva human being. She also happens to work for Microsoft. In knowing Miri, I’ve taken a different view of a brand that once was corporate, buttoned-up, cold, & looming in my eyes. 

People matter. 
People being themselves matters.
Good brands aren’t built from the ground up, they’re built from the inside out. 

Life-life Balance rocks my socks.

I have a hot-take on work-life balance: I don’t believe it’s actually a thing.
In fact, I call bullshit on the entire notion of it. Instead, I believe there’s something more attainable & real, I believe in life-life balance.

So many of us talk about the ever-present struggle to attain work-life balance. WORK- LIFE BALANCE. Ahhhh… if only. 

Let me explain, I don’t start & end when I walk into an office or a meeting. Nope, I bring myself – all of myself – along for the ride. The quirks, the silliness, the passion, the belief in a better world. And when I bring my whole self to work, the ensuing trust engendered means the business gets just as much a halo effect from me as I do from working with them. Chasing the unattainable is what our parents & our grandparents did. It’s not what I’m about to commit to. Not for one more day/hour/minute. 

The reality of the work-life balance fallacy is that we’re living in the most connected time ever known to humanity, yet we’re still expected to disconnect from ourselves when we’re at work. Lucky for me, I’ve found a great business to work with that is filled to the gills with people I admire, respect, & like. I’m allowed to be me. All curls & denim & big ideas.

A little while back a colleague of mine lost her father. Her Dad had been ill for a long time & had weathered some scary storms of getting ill & then getting better again. So, when the end was actually nearing she was understandably upset. We’d seen her ride the rollercoaster of grief – hope, sadness, despair. We’ve all been there, all of us.

Here’s where magic happened: Instead of asking her to wipe her tears & park her grief at the door, our leaders wrapped her up & lovingly supported her through some of her darkest days. Watching a trusting relationship between colleagues unfold in real time & with real tears filled my heart. Our friend brought her whole self to work.

She showed up when she could on her terms.
So we showed up for her.

This is what I mean by life-life balance. 

We all get 24 hours in a day. 
We do not stop being who we are when we cross the threshold to an office block. 
We get one life.
One. 

Living it individually & authentically is the only way any of us will ever be truly happy or connected to ourselves, the people around us, & the environment that sustains us.

Back to good.

How do we then find ourselves if we spend most of our time in places where we learn to be anything other than the confident, curious small humans we were waaaaaaay back in the beginning?

We must empower each other in our weakness & walk confidently in our unknowing. Weaponising the unknown or poo-pooing curiosity is like shutting off a tap when you’re already thirsty. In a world that awards a highly curated, overly-perfect ideal of “self” at work, it’s necessary for us to feel comfortable in our own skin. To do this we must allow for imperfection.

What does empowerment look like for me? Well, it means sitting at the boardroom table in double-denim, docs, & a backwards baseball cap while simultaneously being respected for my experience, ideas, and passion. Because, in reality, getting back to who I was when I started out life – hungry to learn, impassioned by the mundane, and driven to help others is where I want to be more than anywhere else.

It’s also where any brand I work for will get the most value from me. Over the past few years I’ve gotten to know myself again. I’ve learned to trust my intuition & I’ve started having playing just for the sake of having fun!

4yr old Cassie, went away for a long time.
I spent almost 20 years pushing the Little Slugger away.
But, lucky for me, she didn’t go too far. 
She’s back & ready to take on the world.
She’s at the plate, smiling & swinging for the fences.
She whispers “Bring on those curve-balls. Bring on those change-ups.”

I don’t have any high socks, short-shorts, or pigtails anymore – well, I do, I just kinda wear them at home when not many people are looking at me – but I am very at home in my skin.
And, I wish the same for you. 

Go on, revisit your passions. I hope, in doing so, that you find your Little Slugger again – that part of yourself that is curious, comfortable, & charging ahead without fear. 

When you re-connect with yourself, confidence & calm are what you’re left with.

Talk about magic! 

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My Favourite C-Words

If there’s anything I love in work & life it’s a good deep-dive into C-words. LOL. WTF? Hold the phone…

Yeah, welcome to my mind. Always a bit left-field, but that’s cool. Left-field was always my favourite position on the old baseball diamond anyhow. Seeing that I was born a literal C-word and seeing that C-Word was once an actual nickname that my ex-husband’s ex-girlfriend lovingly called me, it just makes sense to feel close to them.

To me, C-words just feel a bit warm, cuddly, & slightly badass. Think about the beauty of the C.

Clever. Cookie. Craft. Caboose. Capsize. Cheeky. Chuffed. Cervix – a ha! Caught ya sleeping didn’t I? 

As a young girl Cookie Monster taught me that “C is for Cookie, & that’s good enough for me!”And if any song has ever helped me through life it has to be this gorgeous wee love-letter to sweet treats in which flour, sugar, water, & choc-chips are melded into a blob of heavenly nom-noms. That said, I’m not here to talk about Sesame Street, ditties, or naughty words that march along in 4-lettered-giggles. 

Nope, I’m going to dive a bit deeper when it comes to Cs. These Cs are the ones that might make or break a brand, a person, or a profession. Since I’m addicted to the rosy-colored outlook of life, just ahead we’ll be focusing on the things that can make your business stronger, your soul fuller, & your journey through life a wee bit sweeter. Your job? Embrace the essence of optimism inherent in the ideas ahead. 

Buckle up, Team. Here come my fave C-words! 

CREATIVITY

Defined as the use of imagination or original ideas to create something, creativity is my C-word Bae. It’s easy to fall in love with a concept that melds together originality & functionality.

It’s also fun to live & work in a profession where the art of crafting a strong strategy & marrying it to clever creative iteration is soul-filling. Within the bounds of creativity are abundant opportunities to not only find clever ways to deliver marketing & ad campaigns that are both effective & memorable, but there’s also a spark of magic in moments when all of the pieces of a proverbial puzzle come together. 

Call it what you will, I know instinctively when we’ve had an “A ha!” moment. By rights, as someone who can live in big blue sky while still acting as a tether to the reality of business needs, creativity is what keeps me going. I’ve been reading a lot of articles recently on the future of work, the impact of AI on marketing, & on crucial factors for driving business & individual success in a saturated digital marketing world. Of all key attributes & skills required to drive success, I bet you can guess which is the stand-out winner. Yep, head & shoulders above anything technical, creativity is what we need to start teaching our young ones to embrace if they’re going to be successful as they grow.

I should also be completely clear here as I write this. I’m not talking about teaching our sweet young people to be like the presumptuous, wanky, assholish once-were-super geeks who style themselves as savants & name themselves as “Creatives” with a capital C whilst looking down on anyone who doesn’t have the ability to wear tight leather pants or to sit around all day drawing on walls & calling a scribbled storyboard art. Nope. There’s a fresh hell reserved for the creatives who actually believe that their minds are better than those of others. The truth is that every single one of us can be taught to be more & more creative.

We can wire our brains for strategic thought & we can also wire our brains to think beyond the norm – to love playing in the realm of ridiculous.

To do this is pretty simple, we create a cheat sheet (we marketers love a good cheat sheet, don’t we?) Dialling up creativity in any situation can be done in five simple steps. The first step is to understand the problem you’re attempting to solve & understanding associations between questions, problems, or ideas from other fields. When you can look beyond your product or campaign to another & see connections with the idea you’re attempting to harness, you’re on the right path! From associations, the next move to make is one towards questioning. 

Early on in my career I often fell victim to building ideas upon wobbly foundations – or, rather common wisdom. It’s the job of a creative mind to question common wisdom, to poke at it, to shake it in the box, to break it a bit. When it comes down to it, newness only happens when we step away from the old ways of thinking & doing. Therefore questioning is critical.

From here, we must take the time to observe the behaviour of customers, competitors, stakeholders, & suppliers. When we watch others we often are able to visually see just how things might be done better, more efficiently, & more effectively. If we skip the observing phase of creativity, we miss out on crucial information in building ideas that meld originality & functionality. 

Networking, like observing, is a process by which to introduce & challenge new ideas with people who see the world differently to you & your team. At this point in the creative process it is key to ensure your networking & working groups are diverse. Diversity isn’t just a catch-phrase for modern times my friends, it’s a necessary ingredient to being successful. There are only so many of the same faces & places we need to re-hash before everything becomes banal & yawn-worthy.

After networking & sharing your concepts wider than the team you work most closely with, you’ve now reach the experimenting phase of your creative journey!This is where you get to pull together all of your strategy, information, iterations & ideas & try them out. 

The best & worst part of the creative process is sharing what you’ve created with others. It’s exhilarating & horrifying sharing something you’ve created with people who might not see your vision through eyes that understand the method to your proverbial madness. But it needs to happen.


Brilliance that isn’t shared is brilliance wasted, yes?

Embrace that fear, my friends. Share your ideas – & as you do, take people on the same journey that you went through in concepting. The sell-in is much easier when people understand how you made it from a David Bowie to a pair of skateboarding sneakers.

I couldn’t write about creativity without including a strong nod towards those moments we all have when we just can’t get into the groove of creating. We’re all different when it comes to how we create, too. Some of the most brilliant creative minds I’ve ever worked with can create on the spot, in a room full of people. They feed off of the energy in a room. I can’t do this. In fact, situations in which I am put on the spot to deliver brilliance scare the shit out of me. I need a more hybrid experience. I need time to myself to work through the first few steps of the creative process, & then need others in the networking & experimenting stages to optimise ideas & executions. 

Knowing that we all thrive in different environments is key to being a successful leader & a successful marketer by rights. When I need time away from the hustle & bustle of the office I walk. I leave the noise & head outdoors. I find there’s no better way to understand & embrace a wandering mind than to wander. While wandering I am able to focus on a singular problem & to hone in on a single source of truth that leads to many ways of approaching a solution. Whatever it is that helps you find your creativity, know your levers & pull them when you need to. We’re all creative & we’re all creatives. All of us. 

So own your creativity. Own your art. Own all of it & be proud of whatever brilliant ridiculousness your mind conjures up. Author Liz Gilbert has summed up creativity & the pursuit of living a creative life in a way that I am in love with, she calls it Big Magic. 

And, I’m all for this kind of magic.

COMMUNITY

Talking of magic, another favourite C word of mine is the glue that holds humanity together. Beautiful, imperfect, necessary, & strong without community we’d all be wandering through the world alone. I remember when of social media & online chat started to seep into daily life. I was in college in Santa Barbara & my roommate, Carrie, downloaded AOL Instant Messenger. The interface was so easy, the ability to connect so quickly was novel, & the feeling of community was immediate. As silly as it may seem now, we actually used to chat to each other online while in the same room! Not long after discovering the ease of community building when adding people into chat streams & conversations, the first murmurings around Facebook started. We already had My Space. Why did we need/want/require something other than My Space?!? LOL. Oh how interesting it is looking back on the days before the big blue logo! 

It was my younger brother who was in school mid-way across the country in Missouri who invited me to become a member of The Facebook. My first reaction to the new platform was reluctance. My second reaction (very soon after the first) was happiness. I could see people I know who were super far away from me & check in on people around the edges of my community, too. IRL & online really started to meld into one here. And, for a while the social part of social media reigned supreme. When it came to community & community building it was all of us together. Before we as a media & advertising profession over-pivoted on shouty advertising in a traditionally community space, we stayed fairly kind to each other too.

But things, as they do, changed. From my perspective, change is good. It’s constant. It’s the only thing promised to any of us. But somewhere along the line over the past decade, with a glut of social media channels finding their way into our brains, we seem to have forgotten the heart of what matters most for people as a whole, & that’s the connective power of community. In the past year I’ve lost a handful of men to depression & anxiety. All of these men were young. They had young families. They were talented. But, with the pressure to keep up online with the likes, comments, shares & witty retorts – they lost a true community. For them, even with all of the connections available online, IRL was a lonely place. My heart breaks for those they left behind. My soul longs to do better by our posterity to ensure community is the centermost aspect of any connective outlet we as humans are a part of. 

So, how do we dial up community in an era where ad units, whiz bang interactive ad placements, & more ads hit us on the daily than ever before in human history? Well, firstly we need to invest in our people. Who are our community managers? How do they see the world? Are they taken good care of on & offline? Once we as marketers & business people learn to treat the online world as a place just as beautifully suited for building positive interactions as offline, we’ll literally be saving lives alongside driving business return. Not a bad combo, right? 

Also, when it comes to community, taking the time to banter & have fun as a brand is of the utmost importance.

The gorgeous reality of a democratization of communication in the form of social or online media is that we’re all able to connect better & more frequently on our own terms. We’re able to see, hear, & invest in truly diverse ways of seeing the world.

Basically, community managers who do an awesome job at their jobs are some of the most woke & empathetic people I have ever met. And, if we can shift the conversation to business performance for a hot second, community is the root of all sales. It always has been & always will be. 

This is why there are creative agencies out there who are still attempting to peddle “viral videos” in response documents. They’re not just going to make you a video. Nope, they’re after virality. Why? Simply because social currency & viral sharing are things you cannot buy. They’re at the upper echelon of the community scale online. They’re Wonka’s golden ticket. The only way to cash in your ticket is to invest in community. There are no more happy accidents & social media shortcuts. Humans are mostly immune to bullshit. So why not turn away from the BS & dive into authentic community building? No matter the channel, platform, or space – if you have an engaged community, they’ll follow wherever you are. And that is magic! 

CHANGE

Ah, ch ch changes. Turn & face the strange indeed. When it comes to the most impactful C word of them all, change has to be it. Change is our only constant. It is both a North Star of hope & a black hole painted in shades of despair. Everything & nothing all at once, change is what every movie, song, story, & creative endeavor is about at the core. And, cliché or not, change is both the cause & effect of everything any of us ever do in life. Which means that getting comfortable with it – or rumbling with it as Brené Brown might say – is the only way to live a truly fulfilled. It’s in the rumbling that we build muscle memory & mass. It’s where we gain grit & strength & maturity. 

If we spend our time at home, at work, & at play afraid of change we’ll spend our time in a constant state of fear. And, bleurgh. Yuck. No one wants to live like that. Embracing newness & seeing opportunity in change takes practice though. It also takes communication. When we talk about comfort & joy a lot of the words that we weave into societal narratives are that of a language of stability & relative sameness. We love the idea of jobs that don’t go away, homes that are forever homes, & families that never veer away from what popular culture tells us families should be. I call bullshit on all of this. 

When you think about growing up, what are the stories you tell yourself & others? Are they banal stories of days that turn into months that turn into years that become a life of doldrums & sameness, or are you a bit more like me & see your defining moments as the ones you could never have seen coming? When I was a kid there’s no way I would have guessed that I’d become a professional storyteller living on the other side of the planet in a country smaller in size & population than my home state. I’d never have guessed that I’d have married young. I definitely never would have imagined that I’d have been a young mother, or by rights, a young(ish) divorcee. 

Going through the pain of a broken marriage meant that all I knew was change. And I had to get comfortable with it on ground that I wouldn’t ever describe as common. Far from home in a country that didn’t raise me, I came of age because of change. I became a better mother because of change. I became my truest self through a complete unravelling. I learned that love wasn’t stagnant, but a rollicking ride. A rodeo ride of sorts. One minute I’d be racing around barrels, then there’d be eight seconds of sheer bull-riding terror. All up though, life’s been one helluva rodeo. That’s all thanks to change. 

There’s something superbly beautiful in embracing the grit that comes along with the pearl of change. When it comes to our work, the most important thing we can do as professionals is to embrace the changing nature of communication platforms & to try our damndest to love little moments of newness that shift & change our goalposts daily. The world of a successful marketer is a world in which change is seen as a curveball that we’re well ready to knock out of the park. 


Embrace change, embrace a fun-filled journey. 

CONSCIOUSNESS 

Wokeness. It’s a thing now – to be woke that is. I’m pretty chuffed about it being so, too. For far too long there seemed to be a gap in our knowing & our actions when it came to how we comported ourselves in an ever-growing & ever-churning consumerist society. We learned young that bigger meant better. We were told that the more you have, the more you’re worth (not monetarily speaking). We were also sold the idea that if we wanted to be happy, we needed to not show any cracks.

The end result? We’re all cracking a bit. With an incoming tide that is now allowing us to ride to a shore of soft, sandy wokeness – we surfers of sustainability & circular economies are changing how we live, how we buy, what we consume, what we create, how we worship, how we parent, & what we consider love.  We’re awakening to our impact on the world beyond our own selves & are starting to understand just how potent each & every human being is. All of this is so very overdue, too.

I can remember being a very young child, maybe six years old, thinking about how much trash our little family of four made every week. We had a big dumpster out of the back of our home & wouldn’t fill it weekly, but I’d say we definitely filled it monthly. I remember watching my Dad tie up the ends of thick plastic bags that were almost as big as me. He was strong with big muscles, kinda like He-Man. Still he lugged the rubbish bags out. They were heavy. 

My mind always wondered: 
How in the hell did we create so much waste? 
Where did it go? 
Did everyone else make just as much rubbish? 
Why weren’t we recycling everything?

My heart & head are heavy thinking through all of this right now & the implications of how much I personally have hurt the earth over the course of my lifetime simply by throwing shit away. I’d like to pull out the “I didn’t know any better!” card, but somewhere even in my little girl mind I knew what we were doing wasn’t right. Trash just didn’t evaporate. On the scale of heathen to woke, I’d say I’m still waking. In work & in life I am much more cognizant of how the things I buy & the things I throw away impact the planet & posterity. When working with large organisations I outright refuse to engage in down-&-dirty retail for products that are made without sustainability, longevity & a circular economy mindset baked into them.

How can we work towards helping our brands & businesses become woke? First we need to be aware of our need to awaken. From there we need a plan. A mindset shift away from money being the be all & end all in defining business success needs to happen. And, when we advertise, we need to do so morally & ethically. Yeah, it might take more time, resource up front, & be challenging in the first instance – but we can literally make the world a better place by thinking consciously when we plan our campaigns & content calendars. Waking up can be confusing, but oh what a world to inhabit once we’re all awake together.

CAKE

Who would I be if I made a list of favourite C words & didn’t even make a nod to the deliciousness that is cake. No matter your sweet, spongy, icing-laden tickle of choice, cake just makes the world go round. In good time & in bad, there’s cake. From standard chocolate to funfetti, life is too short not to enjoy & indulge every once in a while. A good life rule: just eat the damn cake. This C word has nothing to do with marketing or business (unless you run a cake marketing business), but has much to do with balance & blood-sugar which means it’s a-okay with this sweet-toothed tiger. 

In conclusion, when it comes to C-Words, we can have our cake & eat the heck out of it… too. 🎂

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Hello Bath Bombs, Goodbye Social Media – Why I Respect LUSH’s Decision to Leave Social Media

Last week UK company LUSH (yes, the bath bomb brand that I cannot walk past without having either my daughter or my wife – or both – beg to go in!) told the world that they would soon be “switching up social.” And switching things up, they have done! 

In a statement across channels – LOL, yes, social media channels – LUSH took what I see as the first step of brands bidding adieu to paying bajillions of dollars for little community or brand return. Their move will be one which other brands are bound to follow. Increasingly, businesses are paying to fight algorithms for space & attention.

By saying what many of us are already thinking (that social media is actually making it harder for all of us to connect to each other directly), LUSH peeled back a layer of the banality that social media marketing has become.

Increasingly the lazier marketers amongst us have stopped asking questions & simply open our wallets & budget lines to the main platforms. Believing in “success metrics” that have been proven to be fudged time & time again, we blindly trust in platforms that commoditise human attention, but that pay no attention to humanity itself.

A thoughtless like, comment, or share does not a successful campaign make. Strategy is not found in spots & dots on a media recommendation, it is carefully crafted around human insight & strong stories that matter. We seem to have been blinded (sometimes blindsided perhaps?) by the shiny metrics of reach & engagement

Across the inter-webs, LUSH has riled up a lot of anger & angst amongst so-called social media gurus. They’re seeing red, team. My recommendation: Namaste, my friends. Namaste. Let’s all take a deep breath & then rock into how we move forward in ways that better society & drive the purpose of our organisations. In the wake of the disgusting cowardly attack on Christchurch where the murders of 50 people were live-streamed on Facebook, brands need to do better for & by their customers.

Those who have taken to being 100% okay with wading knee-deep in sponsored posts, collection ads, mid-roll interruptions, & beyond must now start rethinking why, how, where, & what they will spend their money on when it comes to serving their customer bases. Should we still invest in social media marketing? Yeah, I think we should. To an extent.

As someone who’s worked in social media since working in social media was a thing, I get it. I see, feel, & have experienced the beauty of social in changing the lives of customers for the better & in opening up conversations where before there was only one point of view being shared.

However, I see LUSH’s side of things, because I remember those good ‘ol days of social media where the SOCIAL aspect was what made all of the connectedness between consumers & brands beautiful.

Now though, it is time for all of us to start critiquing the nature & quality of what we’re served (& what we’re serving) on social.

From the moment brands started trying to outbid each other for a share of our wallet & attention spans, we’ve become datapoints, our humanity seemingly forgotten. Digital pollution is real. We’ve a glut of soulless content being thrown into our lives, & trends seem to be that we’re disconnecting more while opting for online experiences that are individually tailored to our own needs & wants.

We’re also facing bigger issues than a company that sells yummy-smell-good-products going off of Instagram & Facebook. 

We’ve yet to tackle ethical marketing on these platforms. We’ve yet to consider how much data & information we’re giving up as businesses to platforms that aren’t truly concerned with our purposes. We’ve yet to flex our collective muscles in demanding the major social media players put money into protecting the humans they so desperately need to keep on site. The good news is that governments are getting involved now. Rules will be in place mandating safety & the distribution of factual information over the misleading.

Don’t get me wrong here, I always have been quite the fangirl for social media. I love the democratisation of connectedness & of creating content that can be shared far & wide (or not at all). Social is a great tool for driving business & conversations when used with good intentions. But we’re living now in a time where bad actors & brands with budgets begging to be spent in our timelines need to be reigned in. LUSH’s move to lessen time & resource on social media is only the beginning. 

As I see it, until the main channels put money & effort into creating truly safe spaces & until we as global citizens can value metrics beyond a shallow like or share as measures of success, then we can change the game by not playing it.

If everyone is just going to accept the status quo, then nothing will change. And change is what is needed. From a brand perspective, LUSH still has people ready to talk & interact – just in a one-to-one way that doesn’t originate from a social media channel. Email, DM, live chat, & (shock/horror) phone calls still remain.

Businesses spend the dollars that the social platforms are after. By rights, it is brands that stand in a prized position – businesses can change the world for the better. First though, we need to start looking beyond ROI & bottom line as measures of success.

As we move forward into a time where generations growing up now will never know a world without connected technology, it is on us right here & right now to look beyond the sweet fix of shiny reach numbers & dive deeper. It is on us to to better.

While it might not make sense for all brands to quit social media, LUSH as a brand seem to be putting their money where their heart is. And, if that’s the case, I’m all for it. 

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The Great Un-Following: Why I Unfollowed Men on LinkedIn for Six Months

Ah, the modern age. The internet has not only connected all of us in a Wild West kinda new frontier style, but it’s also opened up the opportunity for the democratisation of content creation and proliferation. 

Call it what you will, but most of what people push out into the vast & unending universe online is akin to unlimited drivel. It’s chatter without reason. Chewing-gum for the ego & the brain. 

The world is awash with opinions right now. As an unshakeable optimist, I’d like to say there’s more good information being shared than bad or banal – but going by gut instinct (no data was harmed in the writing of this assertion) I imagine good content is at peak needle-in-a-haystack alert right now.

Our online world is oversaturated with opinionated people who shout at decibels that could puncture eardrums. Armchair warriors and keyboard enthusiasts with little real-world experience (if any, at times), tippity-type away on subjects that they may or may not know a single thing about.

With the onslaught of social media & the reigning court of our age being a handful of powerful algorithms, I thought I might try to break – or rather, retrain – an algorithm that I still feel an affinity towards in the hopes of becoming more wokethat I think I am. (NB I don’t think I’m all that woke at all, but that’s for another blog post.)

Over the course of the past six months, I’ve been undertaking a very small (sample size of one, ahem, moi) experiment on LinkedIn. This wee experiment is quite possibly the most intentional & focussed ongoing personal challenge I’ve undertaken on social media ever. Yep, ever. My reasons for sticking to the experiment started quite shallow if I’m honest – I simply was getting bored with the platform but saw enough of a tiny glimmer of amazing content amongst the shouting & chest beating that I thought I might be able to turn that glimmer into quite the shining blaze.

I also have to come clean about something. If we all took a ride in a Wayback Machine to some point in time about 9 years ago you’d have heard a younger me saying things like  “I don’t like LinkedIn at all. It’s just a bunch of people shouting about their CVs or looking for a job. There’s no substance.” But, like the tides of time, my stance on the platform has changed as it has changed.

Recently I have come to really enjoy LinkedIn. In fact, the words “favourite social media channel” and “LinkedIn” may or may not have been used in the same sentence many times together. Okay, not “may have” they have been. Right here & right now LinkedIn is really the only major social channel that seems to offer me any value when it comes to learning new things, understanding the business world in a wider sense, & not having to wade through what secondary connections ate for lunch last Tuesday. I mean, you take a good pic of sushi, friends – but I honestly don’t give a fig about it. 

You see, LinkedIn is smart. The folks behind the channel pivoted when they needed to. They evolved their channel without pummelling the platform. And, they have given us an algorithm that seems pretty fair right now – all things considering. The content I’m being served seems fair, focussed, but also allows for exploration without being ballsy in attempting to be way too contextual. Believe me, there’s a creepy side to contextuality sometimes. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of annoying bananas (this is what we call people who grind our proverbial gears at my house) who are only ever trying to toot their own horns, hack the algorithm (remember when spaces between lines of SHOUTY CAPS TEXT was a thing?), & are self-serving jerks who assume a connection means it’s time to sell, sell, sell. But, for the most part, Linked In is a cool space to while away some time whilst scrolling for clickable headlines.

So it was when I started finding myself a wee bit bored with LinkedIn that I realized why I was getting bored, most of the articles & thoughts being shared were those of men. White men, specifically. Now, don’t stop reading here & brand me a man-hating-so-and-so-feminist, I love the fellas for their minds. However I was really longing for more diverse world views, opinions, & topical discussions. 

Thus, my experiment was borne. From the moment I realized why LinkedIn was losing its lustre for me, I started unfollowing almost all of the dudes I’d been following who I didn’t know IRL. My hypothesis was simple: if I unfollow a truckload of guys that like to pontificate whom I don’t know, then I can retrain LinkedIn’s algorithm to serve me more female, LGBTQ, non-western voices & content. 

Fast-forward six months: I haz findings! 

Before I tell you what I found out, I should probably tell you what I thought would happen when I started unfollowing 99% of the men in my newsfeed. I thought that I’d start seeing more and more original content by women. I thought I’d start understanding women in business more in-depth. And, I thought that I’d see a lot more ideas bubbling to the surface in my industry in which I’d be able to network more widely with women who are making change happen.

But, these things didn’t eventuate. More & more I started to see posts by women in my newsfeed outnumber that of men. However, the content that 90% of the women were sharing was that of men. I was (& am still) floored by how hard it is to unearth original content made for, by, and about professional topics that originates from the minds & souls of women. I started to get pretty frustrated with the lack of content penned & shared by women, before taking a deep breath and remembering that, no matter how smart an algorithm or AI is, we cannot take away the human variables to the equation.

Society has told us for a long time that our thoughts aren’t welcome at the proverbial table. We hold our tongues when all we want to do is speak. We look to each other for confidence and sisterhood, but we have very few female role models in the public domain of whom we can learn from & share their stories. To say I was & am still disheartened by a lack of content by women would be an understatement. But, I’m heartened to know that more & more we are putting our voices into the public realm. We’re facing the potential for bruised male egos & the anger that comes alongside the bruising. 

I’d like to use this small experiment to ask all of us to do a few things when it comes to being super cognisant of what we’re sharing online – especially in public forums like LinkedIn. 

When & where you can, ladies, please write more, record more, podcast more, pontificate more, share your unique points of view & your wisdom with the world. Men & women alike deserve to learn from your experience. Women especially are longing for your voice.

Men, whenever you can, LIFT WOMEN. We need you. We really do. Give us space at the table & just as much space online. Also, when it comes to algorithms & re-training an AI system to share content more evenly across diverse people & opinions, why not share twice as many posts from women as men? We’re not even in the running of the race yet, let alone about to lap you or even tie for back of the pack. The more you share our ideas, the better society & LinkedIn can & will be. 

All in all, six months has taught me an important lesson:
We need to fix society before we start can hacking algorithms.

Keen to follow me on LinkedIn, click here.

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FREE FOR ALL: THOUGHTS OF AN ENTITLED MILLENNIAL ON MUFFIN BREAK’S BAD CALL

Oh, muffin.

What a week it’s been here in New Zealand & Australia for millennials. We’ve waded knee-deep into the murky waters of professional self-identification as part of a wild, unruly younger generation in the workforce. And, as I see it, most of us are stronger for it.

I need to be completely open & honest here right up front:
I just squeak in to the millennials category. Just. And, like many folks my age, I’ve at times felt shame in admitting my true self as part of this new, heathen generation of professionals who are coming in to the workforce not only with an education but also with strong a sense of self worth.

I often hide my millennial status. Especially on LinkedIn or in any professional forum online or offline where even the mention of being a millennial is met with a hiss & a dismissive gesture. I’ve often avoided millennial conversations at work in the past. And, I’ve called myself a Xennial more times than I’m proud of to try to somehow be less millennial than I am. 

Screw that.

As Bob Dylan once crooned (yes, I’m damn well quoting a 1964 Dylan masterpiece here)
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly aging
Please get outta’ the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’…

Right here, right now, and henceforth I am a proud member of the millennial generation. Not as young as I once was, I am currently servicing a mortgage, working full-time, raising a child & beautifully embarking on my second marriage. By all accounts, you’d think I was (GASP! HORROR!) old. And, I kinda am. But that’s neither here nor there… because, a millennial I am.

The news this week here Downunder has been seeped in millennial-bashing by older generations of hard-nosed corporate die-hards & TV armchair warriors who fear the internet & social media, but love a good trolling session disguised as aged pontificating in the comment section of local newspapers & community Facebook pages.

As much as I hate to admit it, it sure stung this week when a human being (high in a muffin management position, and with the ear of the media) decided to tar all humans of a certain age range with a brush of selfishness, entitlement, & unworthiness… all because no one is beating down her door anymore asking for free internships or unpaid work experience.  

Yep, the General Manager of Muffin Break in Australia had a right good public boo-hoo about millennials. If my eyes could’ve rolled out of my head, they might have. Which means it’s not surprising at all that online chatter against her & those who think like her has hit full-online-steam-train status.

Finger pointing at millennials is equal parts cringeworthy & foolhardy. It also makes me anxious & giddy. Through foot-stomping attempts by elders to intellectualise an inherent disdain for us new aged generation of rabble-rousers, I’ve come to see as clearly as day that strong-arming youth is the last way to entice us to bake muffins for free. We were raised better than that. 

The irony of where conversations against this way of thinking have been undertaken isn’t lost on me, either. That someone can badmouth an entire generation of people, & is now facing backlash on social media just makes me giggle. Oh the hellish world that we now occupy. A world in which your job title doesn’t make you correct or better than anyone else. A world in which the democratisation of information has helped us all pull together to do better and be better by each other. 

Oh my soul, this lady is so lost. She’s isn’t alone, either. All you need to do is hop online & search ‘Millennials’ & you’ll be served up millions of mentions that brand us as kids who grew up on participation medals – afraid to win, though not willing to lose.

Older generations have always feared/questioned/looked on in disbelief at the changing tides of younger generations, this isn’t new. This is inherently human.

What is new though is that we younger folks (ahem, millennials & beyond) are armed with a whole lot of information that previous generations haven’t been armed with. We’ve watched our grandparents & our parents. We’ve learned from them. We know what we want to be. And, what we’re willing to put up with to get there.

We know our rights.
We know what we think is right.
And, we have the right to choose. 

Who we are is not what our position descriptions denote. We are not words written on paper by someone else. Nope. Not us. We’re a generation built of expectations of creating a better world. We’re dreamers, hard workers, & open hearted labourers. But, we ARE NOT a free for all.

I know a lot about millennials, and here are a few things I know for certain:

  1. We know better.
    In her rant to the media, Muffin Break’s GM reckoned that entitled millennials have been given an “inflated” sense of self-importance due to all of these new fangled apps that connect them to the interwebs. Apparently young people who talk to other young people get ideas. Unfiltered ideas. Powerful ideas. Geeky ideas. All of these ideas aren’t eventuating into work ethic though, are they? These young whippersnappers with all of their new-fangled ideas are no longer beating down her door or forging a path to her front counter begging for unpaid work experience to advance their careers. “There’s just nobody walking in my door asking for an internship, work experience or unpaid work, nobody” she lamented. Publicly. Team, she said this to the media.

    My first response? Well, after picking my jaw up off of the floor, I laughed. Surely she’s somehow, accidentally been eating one of those funny muffins & she’s not thinking clearly. My second thought, after realising that marijuana doesn’t cause the kind of daftness she’s spouting was “Good golly y’all, never in all of my millennial years would I consider working for free at making muffins (or selling cars, or paper pushing, or coffee making, or anything really).” I’ve always had to pay the rent, put food on the table, raise my family. Cold hard cash is needed for that. The antiquated idea working your way up a ladder still needs to equate to a living wage. Ladders don’t pay the rent if climbing up each rung puts you further down the breadline.

    We know better now, too. We also know that underpaying people (which Muffin Break has apparently been known to do in the past) or not paying them at all is illegal. Ahem, illegal. We’re not selfish for wanting to be paid for our time & our toil – no matter how important or inane. Our non-millennial parents taught us better. Society taught us better & wrote policies to protect us from this kind of thinking. We want to work hard. We’re crazy about the mahi.  And for it, we ask to be paid appropriately. That’s the exchange… not all for nothing. Thanks to those who came before us, we know this for certain.
  2. Exploitation is on display.
    Exploitation & exasperation, this is exactly what this GM & her cohorts who shake their fists at the youth of today are advocating. Folks who used to intern for free were usually either able to be supported by their parents (the lucky ones) or were so desperate that they saw no other way than exploitation to get a foot in the door. Data tells us that “a lot of people are willing to put up with exploitation because they’re desperate and fearful and really need a job.”  Data also tells us that, on average, unpaid internships leave most young people $6,000 out of pocket. Let me just remind us all, too, that most internships aren’t for the big time. We’re not talking internships that lead to high-stakes here, those are usually reserved for a very upper-class & very privileged few anyhow. We’re talking about muffins here, folks. Baked goods & tasty treats en masse.

    The mindsets of leaders who promote old school views of just-feel-lucky-to-be-chosen-and-do-what-you’re-told-kid are exasperating at best for an older millennial like myself. I’ve never, not once, considered working for a business or corporation for free. Why? It’s take/take on behalf of said corporate without any give. Value needs to be exchanged in one way or another. Believe me, I worked for almost nothing when I was of intern age. Let me be more clear: I worked my ass off for a tiny pay packet that I collected monthly. My pay barely covered gas in my car & rent, but gosh I was proud of the money in the bank. Why? Because I earned that, damnit. I worked long hours. I made friends with colleagues. My job became a source of pride. And the pay, though crazy low (even for the time), sufficed. Could I have done the job without pay? Nope. Never in a hundred years.

    If maligning a generational workforce based on apathy around the killing off a value exchange between employee & employer is a thing now, then I’m going to ensure I wave my millennial flag daily. Not paying people for work is exploitation. Having to continually repeat this is exasperating.
  3. My Snowflake Generation.
    There seems to be this weird belief in older generations that all millennials believe we’ll be CEO in five years.

    Really though, who says all or any of us want to be CEO anymore? The climb just doesn’t seem worth it if you end up living in fear of the changing whim of stakeholders, shareholders, or anyone holding your mental health hostage. We’ve seen work burn our parents out. We’ve seen the climb take over lives. And, we’ve learned. Kinda. We’ve also, even in our youth, burned out too. We don’t need to define ourselves by our position descriptions anymore. We are not words on paper devised by imperfect middle managers who, even with the best of intentions, still see us as numbers on an org chart. We’re alive in a time where the democratisation of information, news, & creativity is inbuilt into the fiber of our beings. We want to work hard. We want to make the world a better place. And, we want to be able to live on a decent wage.

    The benefit of youth is the ability to dream without bounds. We are the people who lap up content from people like Brene Brown, Simon Sinek, Hannah Hart, & Glennon Doyle. We look up to people who believe in the future & in the good we can do to heal a planet that a more corporate world misused prior to us. We are self-starters & we dive deep into learning through novels, podcasts, deep-reports, popular culture, community projects, & documentaries that we’re planning on writing. We know better than to chase dollars over experiences. All in all, we know better than to hurt others for the sake of the bottomline. We know we get ONE GODDAMN LIFE, and to live it fully, we need to work for the greater good. Are we selfish? Ahem, we’re human. So sometimes, yeah. But, we’re also not going to be duped into scrubbing muffin tins for anyone for less that what our time is worth. Unlike the icing on a lemon glazed treat, our generation of snowflakes aren’t melting anytime soon.

My take on millennials is simple. We’re just like all the other generations that came before us – but we’re connected to more. Tethered to it, seemingly. The pressures generations before us faced, we face now. But differently. We’re still trying to find relevance in the world. We’re rushing headlong into a world in which we now need to reverse the effects of global warming. We know we need to do more, better.

We also know what our hearts desire. Doing business with millennials (ahem, with any woke or waking humans) isn’t hard.
All you need to do is:
Put people before percentages.
Put heartcounts before headcounts.

When this happens, most people (not just millennials or Gen Z, etc) will show you loyalty like you’ve never seen before. When we believe in a mission, in an action, in something better – you’ll see the hard yards we’re willing and able and capable of shine through. Inked in positive outcomes for your bottomline. Actions speak louder than words (remember that one?), we believe in this.

Care about us, care about our dreams & aspirations, too. When we care, we’ll ride to the end of the universe in a broken down starship to grow a business. When we don’t? We move on.
Fair enough, too, right? 

Snowflakes? Yeah, nah.
More like caring humans who want to do well by family, friends, society, business, nation, & planet.  

Millennials, you’re okay with me. And wow, I’m hungry now.
Anyone know where I could get a snack…?

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Come At Me, 2019! 

It’s January 1st, 2019. I’m writing this from the future. Kind of. 

I’m sitting in my living room in Auckland, New Zealand looking at the ocean. The ball hasn’t yet dropped in NYC & most of the the Northern Hemisphere is still winding-up for a night of frivolity.

From my vantage point, the first sunlight of 2019 just peeking out from behind the clouds & is warming my feet as I sip a coffee. My computer is perched on my lap. It’s peaceful. Quiet. Blissful.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. The tippity-typing sounds of my keyboard are all that I hear (other than a sweet song of our local Tui couple who live in the Kauri tree outside our window), & they’re currently serving to remind me that I’m determined to start this year right – right here & right now. 

After the coffee is finished, that is.

My wife is happy, still lounging in bed. Our daughter is on the couch next to me. Giggling intermittently at something on YouTube, eating Nutrigrain, & regaling me with minute-by-minute updates of how/when/where she met her idol (a Shortland Street actor) on a small town beach somewhere 14 minutes out of Whangamata yesterday morning. 

This life.
This IS The Life.
Idyllic, right?
Yeah, completely. 

As with most new starts, heralding in 2019 with my two beloveds is the best gift I could imagine. We were well abed before the fireworks started exploding over our city last night (lucky for us, we can see & hear them from home) which means we’re well rested & ready to see friends & family today. 

Yes, there will be mimosas ahead.
And no, the diet doesn’t start until tomorrow.
Or, actually, it’s not starting. Screw diets. 

Hugh Jackman (uh huh, the buffed & uber-cut Wolverine himself) recently said that all of the steamed chicken & broccoli in the world is not worth being a TEN. “Be a six, a seven… be anything! Just eat the yummy stuff while you can!” Hugh, I’m with you. I’m eating for curves from here on out, not for speed. 

I digress. Seeing that it is New Year’s Day, I can’t help but look back on the most recent trip around the sun we all made it through. I can say, hand on heart, that last year was a constant lesson in growing up. And thankfully, in growing older.  

I grew up a hundred times last year.
Maybe a thousand if you split big moments into smaller ones.

I grew up in flying to California for work & in driving across the desert to see Elton John in concert for the 21st time in 21 years. This time we had great seats. Seats so great that not only could we see Elton right up close – but that we were invited on stage AND I DANCED ON STAGE while Elton played Saturday Night’s Alright! Holy cow, Batman! If you know me, you can imagine the weight of this moment. A moment that came & went faster than any other moment before or since. This blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment was something my 12yr old self could only ever dream of. Something she dreamt of for decades. And now? Grown up Cassie has cried a lot of happy tears since remembering it. Bucket List dream, tick! 

I grew up in saying “F*ck it!” to the cost of a ticket home for a 4 day turnaround. I hopped on a plane to surprise my hero (my Mom) on her 70th birthday & spent time with my brother & his family in doing so. We got Mom good, too. She was BEYOND surprised & I think it’s fair to say that she had a magical birthday. Talk about money & time well spent. Memories are all we carry with us for life. I grew up going home. I also grew up throwing caution & my bank account to the wind. Invest in people & moments. Always & often. When you can, take a side road or push yourself beyond a well-worn routine. I promise you’ll find magic in the unknown.

I grew up staying close to home & in travelling across oceans & countries to speak on topics close to my heart, & even closer to my profession. Social Media Marketing World, two VidCons, Digital Day Out, Growth Marketing & too many more to count. I grew up as I grew into my own voice. A voice I’ve made quieter throughout my lifetime as not to be seen as too opinionated or obtrusive. F*ck that. I grew into me, into the words I spoke & speak. Instead of running away from having an opinion, I backed myself. I swallowed my anxiety. I found myself in my fear & transformed it into excitement instead.

I grew up when depression hit me. Literally, right in the face. When my wife picked me up off of the concrete floor, the black eye it left was a doozy – but not as much of one as the slog back to finding myself. You see, I’d been lost for a lot longer than I thought. Growing up is hardest when you have to admit you’re not as strong as you think you are. When you showing your weaknesses to others is all you can do to survive. With great support, great insight, unending love, steadfast friends, the best therapy, & the right medication, I worked my way back to me. I am still working my way back to me. And, I’m cool with that. 

I grew up when I learned that kindness is often mistaken for weakness, yet I stood strong in my own skin. Frightened, but safe. I refused to be an asshole just because being an asshole was easy, or everyone else was being one, or because it felt good to be a jerk. I held my tongue when I needed to. And I let it loose when necessary as well.

I grew up by opening up. And I mean really opening up. Talking to people I trust about hard stuff meant I was able to build foundations of stone in relationships instead of falling for the sweet words spoken by people with feet of clay. By sharing my whole self with others I’ve realised that I need to practice what I preach & be kind to myself first. The good news is that I have promised to be nicer to myself. To give myself the space to fail, learn, grow, & repeat. 

I grew up a lot last year. A lot. In ways that perhaps even I’m unaware of right now. I lost friends & made others. I let negativity crawl into my heart & it almost broke me. I also ate far too much Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream (can someone ever eat too much of it?) I apologised when I messed up – believe me, I messed up my fair share. And, I’ve started to find comfort in relaxing. We don’t always have to pray at the altar of busy-equals-important to be successful. Slowing down is the best way to dive deep & create.  

This year, I’m sure there’ll be just as much (if not more) growing & knowing more about myself, my beloveds, & the world we all share. I truly believe that the journey is what we’re here for. Not a pre-determined destination. 

My hope for 2019 is that I’ll be able to grow older as well as to continue to grow up. Our time here on earth is finite. Each day we get above ground is a blessing. To everyone reading this, I wish you the best of the best. I wish you happiness, kindness, optimism, & adventures. And, as Whitney Houston once crooned to Kevin Costner as he walked across a chilly tarmac & away from their slightly weird love affair “above all this I wish you looooooooooove!”

Bring on this year. It’s bound to be a goodie.  

15 things for 2019 

  1. Just buy the damn ticket home, you’ve got the money (if you don’t, you’ll pay it off.) As often as you can, be with the people that made you. Be in the places that heal you.
  2. Try new things often. Start. Simply, start. Nothing’s scarier that not doing something… so jump in. The water’s fine, I promise.
  3. Enjoy the heck out of routine. Never feel guilty about routines that help you feel grounded. Whether it’s your first sip of a morning coffee, a not-so-secret-dorky-handshake with a colleague, or the way you reach for your toothbrush before bed. Relish in routine when you can.
  4. Talk to your friends. Ask them questions. Listen to what they tell you about yourself. Truly listen. And if you need to pivot or make a few changes in your life, that’s cool. The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. You’ve got this.
  5. Talk to strangers. Sometimes the most insight you’ll ever find happens in conversations with people who have zero context of who you are or where you’re from. When you’re a blank page to a new person, you get reflected back to you the openness you give. Be open. Laugh often.
  6. Enjoy the hell out of your greatest hits playlist. Why is it that we feel guilty listening to the songs of our youth on repeat when we know there’s a GIANT AMOUNT OF NEW MUSIC happening out in the wide world? I have tried for so long to stay up with the kids. Nah. Not anymore. I reckon we should all relish in tunes that get our motors running. Sing all the songs you love over & over without shame. Repeat is a feature on iTunes for a reason, Team. 
  7. Enjoy your work. This one is very important. It takes remembering that what society says is valid work isn’t actually what validates any of us. If what you do day-in-&-day-out does not feed your soul, find something that does. There’s no such thing as “balance” when it comes to work & life. You only get one life. Treat it as a gift. 
  8. Get outside more. Run. Walk. Jump. Climb. Sit. Sleep on the beach. Breathe in the air. Swim in the ocean. Surf. SUP. Skateboard. Skip to your lou, my darling. Do whatever it is that moves you. Just get outside more.
  9. Prioritise time for yourself. Hand on heart, I am really shitty at this. I give all of my time to others. Well, 99% of it. And, though I love my people, as an introvert I need time to myself to decompress. I love being in my own company & sitting in an emotion or moment & feeling it. Make time for yourself if that’s what you need. Tell those you love what you need & protect your headspace. 
  10. Walk away from drama – or, run from it. This one’s simple. If people don’t make your life better, then they’re making it worse. As with your job, you have the ability to chose who you spend your time & energy on. Spend it wisely. 
  11. Fall in love with the words that other people write – then write your own. I love a good hour or two getting lost in #inspirationalquote hashtags on Instagram. The elegance & eloquence of other people’s pain & passion drives me wild. The musical movement of words on a page fill my soul. And, in turn, I put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard). Falling in love with words is my favourite way to while away an afternoon. 
  12. Food is fuel – and FUN. As Hugh Jackman said above – eat. Don’t worry so much about being a TEN. Ten is kinda perfect. Perfect is boring. But, you know what’s never boring? Cake. Eat the damn cake. I’m not saying you should ignore the kale or the broccoli or the sashimi – but along with the inherently healthy, a treat is okay if you’re lucky enough to have one.
  13. Hug your little humans more often than necessary. Cliche alert: they actually do grow up so fast. So, so, so fast. I remember the moment I found out I was pregnant with my daughter as if it was yesterday. The detail, the fear, the excitement. That’s saying something, too, because I can’t even remember what I had for dinner yesterday. I also remember the moment she was born, her first words, holding her & rocking her to sleep 1,000 nights in a row. She’s almost 13yrs old now. She’s her own perfectly imperfect micro-adult. I miss the baby years, HOWEVER I love her now more than ever. And, I still cuddle her, yell out from other rooms how much I love her, & try my best to annoy her, kindly. 
  14. Dance. Anytime, anywhere, with anyone. My wife & I dance basically from sun up to sun down 24/7/366 & we aren’t in the least bit sorry. No music? No worries. Just dance regardless.
  15. Remember, no matter how bad it gets, there’s help. The most important of my list – this is a reminder that hidden behind even the blackest of storm clouds is a summer sun. Asking for help is hard. When I asked for it, I felt like a failure. I felt weak. I felt broken. But you know what, my friends & family helped me get through those feelings. Now I feel strong. I feel worthy. I feel potent. I feel helpful & hopeful. We all fight our own battles. We wage our own wars. If ever you need me, I am here. I see you. 
2018, Wrapped Up.
Posted on

SELLING MY SOUL TO THE SCROLL

DEAR LORD,  SOMEONE SOMEWHERE PLEASE TAKE MY PHONE AWAY FROM ME!
Hide it from me.

Throw it out the window from the 100thfloor (but, ferchrissakes check for pedestrians below please, I don’t want anyone injured.)

Toss it overboard into the sea – have it swim with the fishes (then retrieve it to dispose of it sustainably if possible.)

Seriously though, please someone help.

I HAVE NO SELF CONTROL & AM ON MY PHONE FOR WORK, PLAY, & COMPLETE MIND-NUMBING RIDICULOUSNESS AT ALL TIMES!!! HELLLLLLLLLLP!

Whew.
Sorry about all of the shouting to start this all off. But, I needed to get that off of my chest. Recently I’ve been struggling with how damn addicted I am to screens, & to scrolling.

Mindlessly, mostly, too.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much more productive a human being I could be out of work hours if I spent less time on any kind of device. Thinking ain’t doing, I know.

But, it wasn’t until the recent iOS update that I was hit squarely between the eyes (seriously, right in the brain) with irrefutable information on how much time I’m spending on my phone. With the new “screen time” data available that I now see – in unmistakeable numbers – just how much of my time I’m wasting scrolling.

The numbers aren’t pretty, Team.

A small story:
Day one after the new iOS update I confidently opened up my phone to check my usage data for the day. I’d had a busy day at work & busy bookends to the day doing the school-run & school pick-ups. Surely I would be an exemplary example of digital mastery and methodical app mastery.

Um, nope.

I’d spend THREE HOURS on my phone on social media alone. I spent 2 hours of that time on Instagram. What the actual f*ck? I couldn’t even remember being on Instagram. Let alone any of the content I’d apparently consumed. Yuck.

From this point, I realized I’d need a self-intervention. After having taken all social media apps off of my phone this time last year – they’d crept back into my daily life & back onto my homescreen. When I say ‘crept’ I mean hit my iphone like an avalanche of time-yet-to-be-wasted. GAH!

From the second day of recording my screen time, it became glaringly obvious that I’m still a tech/social-media addict. I know I’m not alone in this. But, when you’re someone who studies the physiological & psychological effects of new media on our brains – I should be better than Josephine Bloggs at logging off. Right?

Again, nope.

Right now I’m wrestling with taking all social apps off of my phone again. It is definitely time to start putting limits in place to stop myself feeding the feed with a soulless & unending scroll that my attention isn’t even paying attention to.

Because time-wasting is most literally wasting time. And there’s nothing I abhor more than wasting our most precious & unrenewable resource as humans.

Hints

  1. Be super intentional when it comes to your time & attention
    Don’t just be intentional, throw a cape over your shoulders & be SUPER intentional with who & where you spend your time & attention. I have found it pretty hard/frustrating to focus my attention with my phone anywhere within eyesight. To counter my own lack of intestinal fortitude when it comes to ignoring the siren call of my iPhone, I try to put my phone somewhere out of eyeshot from the moment I get home from work. I find myself being pulled back to it like a fish caught on a fishing line. But the more I practice the distance-method of living with tech, the better the results of ignoring the need to feed the feed!

  2. Take the apps that drain the most of your time off of your phone
    This time last year I took all of my social media apps off of my phone. Why? For the same reason that I’ll be doing the same thing again this year: they are a waste of time 99% of the time – for me at least. Mindlessly scrolling in an unaware & numbing way is such a darn waste. By taking apps off of my phone, I’ve foundthat my time online is much better spent. I hop onto a channel, do whatever it is I feel I need to, then hop off. Simple? Seemingly. The urge to tap into another universe (AKA social media) is strong. Going cold-turkey is one way to get more of you back into your days!

  3. Set yourself a time limit for aimless scrolling (chewing gum for the brain)
    If you can’t go app-less on your phone, or you’re prone to aimless scrolling on your desktop – fear not! A good way to get out of the habit of scrolling is to set yourself a time limit. I try to scroll for no more than 15minutes at a time before getting back on track & focussing in on more productive pursuits during the day (or night.) You might need 30 minutes of mindless online socialising to calm your brain a bit – the important thing is to set yourself a realistic limit so that you’re not heading online for a single google search & then look up only to realise you’ve spent ten hours reading through the entire history of the Vikings when they landed in England. Tough cookies though, them Vikings.

  4. Notice what makes you feel good, bad, or indifferent… do more of the former & less of the latter two
    This is so so so important. SUPER important, even. Being present & understanding your gut feelings when you’re online is something a lot of us don’t do well – myself included. It’s hard to make a concerted effort to understand your feelings & emotions when you’re mindlessly scrolling. That said, once you start to understand what makes you feel good, bad, or otherwise, you can curate your feeds to suit more positive interactions. Just because you’re supposed to love Beyoncé & follow kale-eating macro health bloggers doesn’t mean you have to if following them makes you feel a little bit less that the awesome you already are. It’s totally okay to unfollow or never follow the crowd in the first place. You do you, Boo.
  5. Read more books with actual pages
    Whoa. What? Yeah, I know… right? Books with pages. They’re bad for trees, but man alive, they’re sure good for your brain. They don’t have notifications, in-built distractions, or need ad-blockers to keep $hit you’re not interested in from stealing your concentration away. Books with pages are great because you can write in them, you can touch each page as you turn it, & there’s no such thing as an endless scroll. You know how far along you are in a story simply by looking at how deep you’re literally into a book. If there’s one tip in this article I follow fastidiously, it’s this one. Books with pages are modern day rock stars. Truly.

 

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