Started from the Bottom, Now We Are Slightly Above the Bottom

“The biggest mistake employees make is not understanding the true nature of the relationship. If you focus on the fact that you are there to help your boss be successful, you will become successful…. Think about your boss’s challenge. What is their biggest problem? Go solve it.”

—Kevin O’Leary (“Mr. Wonderful” on Shark Tank)

After a few embarrassing first jobs, we’ve gone on to become pretty mediocre businesswomen, all while keeping our full-time day jobs. On top of that, what we thought was going to be a little side-hustle passion project has become a second full-time job. We’ve made mistakes (lots of them), we’ve learned things the hard way, and each of us has brought our own unique set of skills to the LadyGang. We are not perfect by any means, but we do have some secrets that we’ve stolen from smarter people who have helped us along the way. First, and most important:

YOU HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE. And if that somewhere is in the mail room, or fetching coffee, or literally cleaning the bathroom floor, that’s okay. Do the things that nobody wants to do, and do them with conviction. Keep your bitchcraft to a minimum and approach an entry-level position with the same passion, poise, drive, and attention to detail that you would a shiny, important job. Trust us, your superiors will notice, and you will move up the ladder exponentially faster than you will if you approach the same job carelessly.

STOP SAYING “JUST.” We learned this nugget of wisdom from Erin and Sara Foster when we asked them to share their best piece of business advice with us. You should never apologize for doing your job or simply taking up space. The first and easiest step toward doing this is to start taking the word “just” out of your emails. You would be shocked to realize how often you use “just” in your professional vocabulary…we sure were: “just following up,” “just checking in,” “just circling back.” We tend to apologize by default for taking up someone’s time, taking initiative, or simply doing our jobs. At first, you might feel like your emails are abrasive or even rude without “just,” but trust us, omitting it will make you feel direct and powerful.

LIMIT THOSE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!! Always go through an email and take out at least one or two exclamation points. It’s important. As women, we tend to sugarcoat difficult conversations, and we want to leave a good, friendly impression. Plus, maybe we’re excited about a new project or connection or deal! But when every sentence ends with an exclamation point, communication starts to sound too conversational and super unprofessional. You’re hereby allowed to use one exclamation point in any business-related email, so choose your placement wisely. You don’t have to be sweet all the time; you can just be smart. And, more important, DELETE ALL EMOJIS IMMEDIATELY.

GO GET THAT MONEY. Be proactive and aggressive about it. Work your ass off, and don’t let anyone get in your way. Ask for the raise if you truly think you deserve it, because you’ll never move up the chain if you don’t show your worth. Don’t take it personally if you’re offered something lower. Because, guess what, everybody wants to pay everybody less money for the same job. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an entry-level position or you’re Bill Gates—someone at some point wanted to pay him less than he deserved.

KNOW YOUR WORTH. And know your value in your professional life. Don’t get ahead of yourself and think you deserve raises and bonuses and a great salary and benefits if you’re not qualified. There are a lot of people fighting for the same jobs these days, and things aren’t going to be handed to you if you’re not equipped for the position. Be realistic about what you’re asking.

LISTEN TO MINDY KALING. She once tweeted: “‘Why the fuck not me?’ should be your motto.” And she’s right, it’s a fantastic life motto. Someone is gonna get the gig. What if Michael Phelps woke up one morning and didn’t think, Why not me? Sure, he has the wingspan of a pterodactyl, but he could have very easily been like “You know what? Training all those hours sounds pretty hard, and the likelihood of me getting this is pretty slim, so I’ll just let someone else do it.” There are a lot of people out there with enormous talents that go wasted and unnoticed every day. A gift is absolutely useless without drive behind it. The biggest achievers are the people who think, Why the fuck not me? Be that gal.

MAKE BETTER MISTAKES TOMORROW. The truth is, you’re gonna make mistakes no matter how hard you try. You’re gonna fuck up more times than you can count, you’re gonna feel cuntstipated, and you’re gonna cry on the subway home. And, hey, that’s just a part of life and putting yourself out there. But remember: They are only mistakes if you don’t learn from them. If your boss yells at you, it’s not the end of the world. You still get to go to work the next day, and they are eventually going to forget about it. Just like no one is thinking about your divorce, your boss isn’t thinking about the minor mistake you made last week. They have way bigger fish to fry, so try not to be mortified for weeks on end about it. And listen up: Don’t ever make the same mistake twice. You’re gonna make new mistakes, you’re gonna make other mistakes, but always, and we mean always, make better mistakes.

TAKE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR SHIT. If you piss someone off or you do something the wrong way, take the blame and admit it was your fault. Acknowledgment and responsibility go a long way. Pointing fingers and making excuses will only dig you a deeper hole. The discussion should end with “I know I messed up, and this is how it won’t happen again.” Don’t let something small snowball into something huge because you don’t know how to apologize. As long as you are growing, learning, and evolving from your mistakes, you’re doing it right. Another Ryan Murphy nugget: “In your darkest moments of pain and rejection, if you can just get still enough to let it land, and you can feel it and try and understand what it was about and move forward, comes great things.”

LOOK LIKE YOU HAVE YOUR SHIT TOGETHER EVEN IF YOU DON’T. Remember, no one knows what they’re doing. Everyone is overworked and underqualified. Charles Bukowski said it best: “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” You’re constantly going to be thrown curveballs left and right at your job. But at the end of the day, how well can you problem solve with grace?

DRESS FOR THE JOB YOU WANT. That’s why Jac is always in bikinis on exotic beaches: She wants to be a professional international drinker. But for real, no matter how much society evolves, everyone is still judging your outfit. Human beings are visual and shallow creatures. This doesn’t mean you need to wear expensive shoes or designer clothes. You don’t need to wear tight pencil skirts or uncomfortable heels, or spend three hours getting ready in the morning. It’s pretty simple: Show up as a chic, put-together version of yourself. It can be as easy as ironing your shirt or putting your hair on a slicked-back ponytail. Present yourself in a respectable way.

BECCA

Shoe Size Six: A Blessing and a Curse

During my time as a broke dancer in New York City, I had several odd jobs. I babysat for rich neighbors, I worked in a gift shop, I modeled shoes…

“What the hell is a shoe model? Is it like a foot model? Are people just going to be taking pictures of your feet? Is it sexual?!” Those are all the questions my mom had when I told her about my exciting new gig. I can’t blame her, because it did sound fucking creepy.

Let me enlighten you. When shoe designers go to market to show off their new collections for store buyers, they hire some skinny, broke-ass girl with a “sample size” foot to be there to try on the shoes and show what they look like on the foot (essentially, you’re a mannequin). Most sample sizes are a size six, so any dancer living in New York with a small foot was golden. Sort of.

They would fly me out to Las Vegas for the big conventions for retailers, and I would report to a hotel room that was set up as a showroom for the weekend. It was a twelve-hour day, and the appointments with buyers were stacked from morning until night. I rarely got a lunch break, and I was paid about $200 for the entire day. Back then, I felt like I had hit the jackpot. I fucking LOATHED the job, but I walked away from a weekend with $600 in my pocket, and that felt pretty great. It’s the broke bitch’s version of golden handcuffs, if you will.

I would be on my feet all day, shoving my (closer to a size-six-and-a-half) foot into the world’s ugliest shoes so that some fat, sweaty man whose family owned department stores across the Midwest could decide which styles to buy for his shops (because middle-aged white men really have their fingers on the pulse of women’s boot trends for the fall).

The buyers and sales reps would throw pair after pair in my direction, never make eye contact with me, and make comments about how the shoe would probably look better on a slimmer leg. As the day went on, my feet would swell, and I would develop lesions and blisters all over my feet from shoving them into cheaply made boots with no socks over and over. (There was no time for socks.) By the end of every day, I would be covered in sweat, my bladder would be filled with urine, and my self-esteem would be pretty much depleted. I would go back to my shitty hotel room every night and cry to my mom about how much I hated this fucking job, and I would vow to never take another one again, no matter what.

Guess what? I went back six more times. Why the actual fuck would I do that, you might ask? I needed the money, I refused to give up on my dream (another deposit in the Universal Energy Bank), and, at the end of the day, a girl’s gotta eat…thanks to her feet.

KELTIE

Break a (Chicken) Leg

I’ve always loved the idea of having a job. I’m a workaholic by birth!

Playtime as a child usually involved some sort of “job,” and one of my first experiences working was going to work with my dad. I’m pretty sure there was a childcare issue and I was “going to work for fun” for different reasons than the ones presented to me, but I was READY TO WORK. My only job was putting invoices in numerical order, and even though I slayed those invoices, I remember being severely pissed off when I was not allowed to answer the phones, use the checkout till, or swipe the fancy credit cards through the machine. It made me even more upset when, at the end of the day, some secretary checked my work like I might have made an error (I didn’t) and shoved the invoices away into a pile like they didn’t actually matter to the business (they most likely didn’t).

As I moved into my teenage years, my dad found some more important work for me to do at his shop on Saturday mornings. I would drive into work with him and, for $20, I would clean the toilets, the disgusting urinals, and the coffee stations.

But my first real job was in the ninth grade. I couldn’t drive, so I needed to work somewhere within walking distance of my house and close enough that I could get there quickly after school. The only place that returned my inquiry for work was Liam’s Famous Recipe Chicken. It was run by Mr. Liam, an old man who barely spoke English, and I was hired as one of his two employees who never had shifts at the same time. As the bone-breaker (more on this later), I was paid $4.14 an hour for three hours at a time, two days a week. I wasn’t allowed to speak to customers, and I was painfully alone while I was working. Mr. Liam would simply write the hours he expected me on the back of a little dry-erase calendar taped in the doorway, and I would show up.

I had two responsibilities. One, pour giant plastic bags of “gravy” into huge vats to be heated. Two, stand at a huge double sink, unload bag after bag of raw chicken parts, and fish through them to find the chicken thighs. Once I found a thigh, there was a specific way I had to crack the bone in half so that it would cook completely in the deep fryer. After cracking the thigh, I sorted all the chicken parts by type. Legs, breast, thigh, and “unsure.” Then I rinsed them all with hot water and made sure that THERE WERE NO FEATHERS LEFT.

This is a real job. I was on feather watch for your chicken sandwich. There were an alarming amount of feathers left on the chicken parts, and when I found one, I had to pluck it out. Fun fact: It’s actually not easy to pluck a feather whose base feels more like a porcupine needle out of an almost frozen, slimy, slippery, dead chicken follicle. After removing all the stubborn feathers, I laid my chicken pieces on huge silver trays and dusted them with some sort of flour seasoning from a shaker, put them onto big metal stands, and stored them in the freezer. I was very particular about how my chicken pieces were laid out on the tray. I liked them to be perfectly aligned, all facing the same way, with the same amount of space around each piece. I’d also try to match up similarly sized pieces, as if to show that these pieces all came from one chicken and I wasn’t separating families.

At the time, there were only two chicken joints in my town: one KFC on the other side of town, and my Liam’s Famous Recipe Chicken. We were very busy. Just imagine how many chicken thighs and feathers I had to sort through to make just one family’s twenty-four-piece bucket of chicken.

There were some really great things about the job. It helped me save up to buy clothes I wanted at the mall, and it made me realize that I could save my secret work money and bribe eighteen-year-olds to buy me booze, instead of stealthily stealing it from my parents’ liquor collection. I got unlimited soft drinks during my shift. Plus, the alternate chicken breaker was a guy in my class named Shawn who would leave his Tragically Hip CD in the crappy little CD player when he wasn’t there, and I listened to it on repeat during my shifts. This helped me fall in love with one of the greatest Canadian rock bands of all time and the icon that is Gord Downie…RIP.

A couple things really bothered me about the job, though. First, I didn’t get to wear a uniform. I love a costume! Because I was hidden way in the back, gruesomely breaking bones, and no customer ever saw me, I could wear whatever I wanted. I was dyinnnggg for a work outfit. I once bought a Subway branded polo shirt at the secondhand store and wore it around the trailer park where one of my good friends lived when we had sleepovers. I tried to impress the neighborhood boys with the lie that I “had a job” and I worked at “Subway,” and I would even wear the Subway shirt out on Friday nights…but I digress.

Second, I really, really wanted to use the deep fryer, but I wasn’t allowed to. Commercial-grade deep fryers are scary as hell and endlessly fun. I got no joy from breaking the chicken bones, or making the gravy, but I was obsessed with dropping any available food into the wire basket and then watching it bubble up and cook in the fryer. Once in a while, we would get so busy that Mr. Liam would call to me to drop an order in the fryer, but 99 percent of the time, I was forbidden from frying. Sometimes, when Mr. Liam was not looking, I experimented by attempting to fry condiments: cheeses, tomatoes, lettuce, or any other toppings—just to see what happened. So fun!

The third, and most important, hardship of my first job was that a year or so before I became employed by Mr. Liam, I became a vegetarian. It’s a long story, but I had been deep in eighth-grade ballet classes when I pulled my hamstring. The same night, my mom happened to cook a ham for dinner, and when she pulled it out of the oven, I realized, for the first time, that when I ate meat, I was actually eating an animal’s muscle (like that of my sad hamstring). I decided then and there that I was no longer going to eat anything that had feelings. And other than one small exception during my first marriage and a period of time when I didn’t realize that French onion soup is made with beef broth, I haven’t eaten anything that has feelings since. Obviously, all land animals have feelings, and any sea animals that have played major roles in Disney movies also have feelings. Some fish have feelings (the pretty ones), and some don’t (here’s to you, delicious, ugly-ass tuna). Anything that seems more like an insect than a cuddly animal can also be eaten, i.e., lobster (looks like a spider) and scallops (I don’t believe they have a brain). Disney rules come into play with crabs—because Sebastian in The Little Mermaid has such a cute little personality, I just can’t eat him.

So, chicken-bone-breaker was my first job, and I’ve had many terrible, gross, and barely paid jobs since. Working hard from a young age taught me to have a good work ethic, professionalism, and humility. On my way to my “dream job” I learned how hard show business would be. I learned that I would have to do a hundred terrible jobs to support myself. To be honest, one of the main things I learned during my twenties, while trying to be a professional dancer, was that being in the arts is an impossible fucking way to live. I trained my entire life to chase a career that was basically less than livable, even when you did book a job. Even when I was dancing with Beyoncé, I wasn’t being given health insurance or being paid what someone in the upper echelon of any other profession would make.

Even though I eventually became one of the most in-demand dancers in New York City, I still did what they call a “side hustle” almost every night just to get by financially. I’ve listed just a few of my esteemed positions here, and I’ll add that I’ve spent a large portion of my life in a sparkly costume or bikini doing something very random and odd and got paid to do it. Eventually, I got really burned out from making it and yet…still not making it—and that’s when I chose to make a major pivot and retire from dance altogether. For my next chapter, the universe chose to throw me mouth-first into being a television host, a career that my dancer work ethic and drive served beautifully. After working my ass off for another decade, I’ve managed to make this second act work because of the hustle that’s been in my (excuse the pun) bones since way back at Liam’s Famous Recipe Chicken.

A Complete List of Keltie Knight’s Jobs

JAC

Never Trust a Trust Fall

When I was a kid, my dream job wasn’t to be a big powerful LadyBoss. There’s a video of me sitting on my cousin’s steps when I was five, and in it, my mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I jumped up, wearing uneven pigtails and thick red-framed glasses, and I shrieked, “I want to be a mouse!” Not like the Chuck E. Cheese’s mascot—I wanted to be an actual rodent. I wonder what the psychology is behind that one. When I finally understood what a “job” was in my preteens, my dream was to work at Hollister, a.k.a. the beachy California version of Abercrombie & Fitch. Just as dark, stinky, and douchey as A&F, but they had a punk-rock playlist and more edgy shirts that said things like “I’m with the band” and “I kissed the lead singer.” I literally fantasized about standing out in front of the store next to a shirtless dude, spraying people with their god-awful perfume. Ah, what a dream.

During my early high school years, my parents wanted me to focus on getting good grades. I think the only time I was grounded was when I got a B+ in AP Physics in tenth grade. In my defense, my teacher was an alcoholic who spent the entire class talking about how good his “root beer” made him feel, and one time he congratulated me on a hickey I had on my neck. That definitely wouldn’t fly these days.

As my sophomore year came around, my mom realized that I spent all my free time taking brooding artsy self-portraits, so it was obvious that I had time to get an actual job. Hollister, my dream workplace, was overflowing with job applications because it unironically was the cool place to work, and apparently I wasn’t the only one intoxicated by the overbearing stench of cheap cologne in the store. So I decided to apply to work at Hollister’s dorky step-cousin, Old Navy. They hired me immediately, without any work experience whatsoever, because…it’s Old Navy.

I’ll cut right to the chase and admit that I lasted there for eighteen days. During those eighteen days, we had more team-building exercises than I ever thought existed. We tossed around a beach ball and shared “fun facts” about ourselves (my fun fact was that I hated team-building exercises). I accidentally dropped my coworker during a trust fall because I saw a hot guy walk through the door. Do you know how rare it is for a smoke show to walk into Old Navy?! We had to deal with internal theft (I hope those $2 flip-flops were worth it, Susan), and I was promptly fired when I went to Denver for spring break because I failed to tell them I needed my shifts covered. Oops. I was an unreliable teenager…what can I say?

During this time, I was positive that I was going to be a music photographer, so I convinced my mom to let me intern at different music-related jobs rather than spend my time at a random store that wouldn’t teach me any real skills related to my chosen “line of work.” (The fact that I said “line of work” as a high schooler is embarrassing, but, you know, I was pretty embarrassing.) I interned at two different indie-rock record labels where some of my favorite bands were signed: Fearless Records and The Militia Group. Instead of teaching me any useful skills, they used my extra set of hands to mop the floors and organize office supplies—and one time I even had to help some guy craft a plan so that his girlfriend wouldn’t catch him cheating on her. After a few weeks of scrubbing toilets at each record label, I moved on to bigger and better things: interning at our local rock radio station, KROQ. This was where I actually used some of my skills to create flyers and ads for upcoming shows. In between creating graphics for the radio station’s next giveaway, I used my time to teach myself photo editing on Photoshop, and to browse my favorite punk-rock news website, absolutepunk.net.

From new releases to leaked songs to scandals to straight-up gossip, AbsolutePunk was your one-stop shop for everything in the punk-rock music community, and I devoured that shit like it was going out of style. When I wasn’t scrolling through the endless abyss of new records and band drama, I was bringing my dad’s fancy Canon 10D camera to concerts and taking pictures of bands from the crowd. I was teaching myself aperture, shutter speed, and more by trial and error, and for a sixteen-year-old, I was pretty damn good. As soon as I had a decent portfolio of live photos, I sent in my résumé to AbsolutePunk to apply for a staff photographer gig. To my surprise, they hired me immediately! Well, I mean, “hired” is a stretch, because this was an unpaid internship, but for me it was a massive accomplishment and a dream come true. I was the youngest “employee” there, and one of the only girls in a sea of dudes working for the website. I had an “admin” username (which is when I started going by Jac instead of Jacquelene, and everyone thought I was a guy) with a super important avatar and everything.

AbsolutePunk was my entry into a world I always wanted to be a part of, and the very first step I took in my career. I finally felt like my time was spent working toward a tangible goal that I was actually passionate about. It was the first time I experienced professional competition, received professional praise, and had to deal with professional sexism. This job gave me my first taste of the sweet highs and bitter lows of trying to pave my own professional way, and the rest is history.

KELTIE

“It’s Show Business, Not Show-Fun”

If you’re a host stuck between being a nobody and being a star, the entertainment world will label you as “green” or as a “cub reporter.”

To the outside world, I looked like I was crushing it. My name was appearing alongside a big, network-syndicated show title. My parents could watch me every once in a while on TV. I had a fancy agent. I had a lawyer to do my contracts. I was being paid(ish) for the first time as a host. The most telling thing was that, at this time of my life, random people I had known at some point in my past—an old ballet teacher, someone who used to be in my class at school, a friend of a friend—were all coming out of the woodwork to “reconnect” because they saw me on TV. Proving that, up until now, I was not deemed worthy of their efforts. Notoriety is a really weird thing, because it started way before I had felt any inkling of “making it,” and if I’m completely honest, I still get the Sunday Scaries every week and wonder if this week I will “make it.”

As a cub reporter, I put every ounce of energy into my job. I was working twelve to sixteen hours a day, every single day, pitching at least twenty-five stories a week. I was learning what made a great interview, what made a great story, how to get good TV ratings, how to dress on camera, and how to talk on camera. I was figuring out how to play in the major leagues and look like a million bucks when I had about twenty bucks. Mostly, though, I was trying to please my absolutely unpleasable boss.

To put things in perspective, I grew up as a ballerina, trained by a woman who makes Dance Moms star Abby Lee Miller look like a saint. I went on to become a professional dancer and was either constantly rejected or criticized in rehearsals. Finally, I went on to dance with the Rockettes, and my boss was a Bob Fosse protégé who never smiled, always wore black, and would stand in front of me during most kick lines, screaming my name until I was kicking and crying at the same time. During my stint as a Rockette, before every single show I did, I would receive a long list of notes from our dance captain, detailing basically everything I had done wrong in the previous ninety minutes. So I’ve never been precious about getting feedback or having a tough boss. I thought I had thick skin.

Boy, was I wrong.

This boss would give me hives whenever I saw his name light up on my phone. I would get emails that said things like “Come see me this afternoon,” and I would spin like a top, counting down the hours, thinking of all the reasons I had messed up, only to be greeted with something as simple as “I’m sending you to New York again this week.” One day, I was his favorite; the next day, I was inches away from being let go. I never knew which version of my boss I would get. Because I’m a people pleaser at heart, this yo-yo destroyed me. One time, my boss called me on the phone and yelled at me so awfully that he only stopped yelling when he rear-ended the car in front of him. Another thing this boss used to do was have me sit on the side of our show’s stage and then “test” or “audition” other people who were exactly my “type” in front of me while I waited to film the show. I was never sure where I stood, and I was always on my tiptoes, even when I wasn’t standing in a four-inch heel.

One day, I was requested to be part of a big cast photo shoot. I was thrilled that I was included in the new pictures day for hosts. It meant that my boss might be keeping me around a little longer. Why would they spend money on photos of me if they were going to replace me? Emails confirming the time and place of the photo shoot had gone back and forth, with my boss copied. I was excited! The hair and makeup department had confirmed with me that they would be there. I had gotten a call from our wardrobe team about the shoot, and they asked what I wanted to wear. I picked out a few of my favorite dresses and handed them over. Next, I got a call from another part of the show’s team, letting me know that my boss wanted to preapprove what I was going to wear in my new photos. Wardrobe called again to say that I was meant to bring my dresses to my boss in person and let him choose what I would wear.

I walked into the conference room, as requested, with our wardrobe team, surrounded by eight of the senior producers and staff from the show. I didn’t even dare to speak. Wardrobe held up a red dress and a yellow dress on hangers and said, “Here are the dress choices you wanted to see for Keltie’s photos.”

My boss took one look at the dresses, one look at me, and then stated loudly, so that everyone in the room could hear, “I never asked for pictures of Keltie. I don’t need to see these dresses. Whhhhhhy would I need pictures of Keltie? What for?” He then turned back to his computer in silence. No one said anything. The wardrobe woman gave me the side-eye, and we tiptoed out of the office. I did what any woman would do, and I ran into the bathroom stall and tried to muffle my tears with five back-to-back flushes. I was mortified and heartbroken.

I never found out why my boss had humiliated me in this way. I’m not sure if he was trying to take me down in front of others, if it was a bad time to ask about the look, or if he simply forgot about the shoot and/or that I worked for them. Hours after this conference room debacle, it was decided that I would wear the red dress. The photo shoot went on exactly as planned. There were many more little heartbreaks with that boss, and also times where he championed me and made my wildest dreams come true. I’ve had good bosses, hard bosses, and amazing bosses between then and now and while I’m very thankful for him, I still get hives when I hear his name. Since this time, I’ve also become a boss, which has given me perspective and a master class on the way I communicate with people.

I’ve learned two lessons. First, never take anything personally. Keltie the worker and Keltie the human being are two different entities. I have to keep those people separate. When something goes terribly wrong at work, it doesn’t mean that I am a waste of space. It just means I wasn’t my best at work that day. When I come up with a bad idea and it falls flat and fails in front of a room of my peers, I am not a failure. My idea was bad. I’ve realized that 99 percent of the time, when something really crappy happens at work and someone says something hurtful, it’s rarely actually about me. When an A-list celebrity curses me out on live TV because she says I put words in her mouth, even though I was just doing what I was told to do, and I want to crawl into a hole, I remember that this A-list celebrity doesn’t hate me, she hates “TV host Keltie Knight,” and it’s not the same thing. I can still watch her movies and laugh (but I’m petty, so I won’t).

In the same vein, I’ve been short with people at work for a variety of reasons: I’m tired, I’m stressed, I have something else on my mind, I’m not fully present, I’m pulled in too many directions. If Jac or Becca took it personally every time I was short with one of them during LadyGang when I’m in “get shit done mode,” we would be the Real Housewives of Los Angeles, pulling out one another’s hair and fighting. I’m kind of a dick sometimes at work. I’m not great at handling stress. I can see now that almost everyone is in the same boat. Besides the actual work stuff, we all have real lives that we’re trying to deal with and navigate in this new world where work is 24-7. We’re all a little extra stressed because the pharmacy closes at five but we work till six, you know? So I try my best not to see it as a personal attack when things go poorly at work.

My mom always said to me, “Keltie, it’s show business, not show-fun.” It reminds me that I don’t have to be best friends with everyone, and that not everyone is going to like me, and that a bad day at work doesn’t equal a bad life. Also, we are imperfect human beings, not robots, and that means we are going to make big mistakes sometimes. I’ve made plenty.

The second lesson I’ve ever learned is to take the blame when you need to. Own up to making a mistake. Make it clear that you know why it was wrong, and then never make the same mistake again. Being self-aware is one of the most important tools I use at work. Read the room’s energy, and try to learn from the things your coworkers and bosses might not have the courage to say to your face. Remember my rule of thumb: The first time you fail, it’s a fuckup, but if you make the same mistake again, “You’re fired.”