When It’s Time for a Second Act
Just about everyone needs a rebranding at some point. Life is long. A brand isn’t forever. Over the course of your career you may realize that your brand has become tired or isn’t working anymore. Or someone new is hired, and his or her brand mirrors yours—but it’s bigger and shinier. Or you have an “Aha!” moment and realize you are really good at something (which doesn’t happen to be what you’re doing for a living now). Or your home life isn’t working, and you dial back on your career so that it fits your life better; you work less or work differently—from home a day or two a week, for example, so you can be in better charge of your own schedule. Or you get fed up with the traditional workplace or get laid off and want to start your own business or launch a new career. That’s when it’s time to start rebranding yourself. In fact, rebranding—reinventing—is a natural part of the career cycle.
Decades ago a career meant working at one company, developing one set of skills, and retiring with a nice pension or package. But let’s face it: neither careers nor life has been that way since the 1980s. Today finding a job—and evading layoffs—is harder than ever, which is why people entering the workforce often don’t expect to stay at any one job for longer than two to five years. The goal for many Generation Xers and Millennials is to pick up a variety of skills to increase their employability at any given moment. That has also been the goal of two very successful friends of mine, both of whom had been long and well established in their careers when each of their paths made an abrupt U-turn in midlife, forcing each of them not just to figure out how to remap their professional directions, but also to soul-search about who they really were and what they realized they wanted to contribute to people, to society.
My friend, designer, and entrepreneur Michelle Smith debuted her popular clothing label, Milly—a colorful, exuberant collection of women’s clothes—at a time of economic prosperity. Then, when the economic recession of the late 2000s hit, she was forced to rethink the entire look and philosophy of the brand. She had to regroup and think about what she really loved doing in order to assert her professional and inner value.
I spoke with her about how she came to terms with knowing that she had to rebrand, inside and out. “From the launch, I exceeded my greatest expectations. When I launched, I met my yearly business in the first three months. It was amazing, you know—Milly was a success from the start. . . . The business just kept growing and doubling in size each year,” she said. “I’d say when we hit the financial crisis—that was probably five, six, seven years into the business—that was the first time I realized, ‘Wow, this is not just a piece of cake.’ Because up until that point it had been so easy for me. And it was the first time that I was maybe second-guessing myself. . . . The whole market had sort of lost confidence, and no one knew if the clothing they were buying should be the most ‘Oh my god!’ amazing pieces, or should it be more practical? People won’t spend their money on maybe more frivolous pieces. . . . I had to really step back and say, ‘What do I really want?’ and ‘What do I really love?’ and only make what I really love. Don’t worry about what other people think.”
For Michelle this was a turning point. She wasn’t just taking a stand on the character of her professional value; she was also listening to the voice that was speaking to her through her sense of inner value and sense of calling. “I want to create pieces that give a woman an emotional reaction and, hopefully, make her feel beautiful and empowered and make her feel fantastic. . . . [But] there was all this confusion swirling around, and it became easy to sort of lose focus on who you are, who I was, and what my strength was. To try to just please other people, please the market. I think I lost track for a few seasons,” she said. “And luckily, I just refocused and gained it back. Luckily, I have always owned my own business and been my own boss, so I had the flexibility and the power to make those changes.”
Michelle’s experience brought to mind my own when I refused to read the news on Morning Joe that Paris Hilton had just been released from jail. To me it just wasn’t news; it was fluffy, gossipy drivel. And even though I was a freelancer on the show at that point, only earning a freelancer’s day rate after having been unemployed and depressed during what was for me a very dark period of time, I had a moment of clarity about who I was, my own sense of my professional and inner value. And I ripped up that script, literally, on live television. I didn’t care what everybody wanted. I wasn’t going to read something that I did not consider real news on the air. It wasn’t in me anymore to people-please on that scale. So I simply refused to do it. I could have been fired on the spot—and almost was. But that was also a moment in which everything came together. Joe loved it, and our viewers loved it. E-mails, Tweets, messages of all kinds came in from viewers who, like me, were sick of celebrity gossip being passed off as news. They applauded my move. It was my defining moment, as it turned out. It catapulted my professional value and my television career.
Michelle had a similar moment of clarity. “There were several seasons where I was so confused during . . . about 2009 . . . from a fashion point of view, when I launched, what I was doing was very ‘in,’ in 2001. It was coming out of the minimalist nineties where everything was very black and sort of very technical and serious. And what I was doing was very feminine and bright and colorful, and stores like Barney’s thought that was revolutionary—that I was doing colors and feminine florals. They were snapping up my collections like, ‘Oh my god, how avant-garde!’ It was funny, right? Because it was so different at the time,” she said. “But then by 2009, fashion had shifted. There was the whole shift to a very tough, aggressive sort of ‘urban protection’ look—you know, very androgynous. Leather, black, tough, biker. It shifted fashion across the board. And it really had nothing to do with where my heart and soul was . . . [but] I was really dependent on the large luxury retailers buying my collection. That’s what they wanted, so I had to bend a little bit. But I just feel like I sold my soul to the devil a bit for a few years.”
Once she came out of that period Michelle had a firmer sense of who she was—and, therefore, what her business was. “‘Perfectly imperfect’ is kind of my life. I’m a mother, I have my own business, and I’m working hard, but I’m not perfect. My Instagram is not full of perfectly staged photos with professional makeup and lighting . . . it’s very off the cuff. It’s real life. In the moment. I’m not afraid to show that to my customer. I think my customer is a lot like me, and we are all in the same boat together.” She is now rebranding Milly as not only a clothing label but a lifestyle brand—and Michelle is sharing her experience with our audiences at my next Know Your Value conference.
A BRAND ISN’T FOREVER
I spoke with Maggie Murphy on Morning Joe in September 2014 and again later for this book. Maggie is a great example of someone who has rebranded after working for over two decades in magazines, most recently as editor-in-chief of Parade magazine.
“When Parade was sold to a new company last October, the entire staff was let go. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t actually looked for a job in twenty-six years,” Maggie continued. “I had moved from one position to another, from Us to Entertainment Weekly to InStyle to Life to People to Parade. A lot of people encouraged me to take time off, to think and reflect. But that didn’t sit with my DNA or my life situation. I have a husband, a child, a disabled sibling, and an elderly mother who are dependent upon me. I have worked since I was sixteen, and working is who I am. It’s the Mary Richards in me. I really enjoy tossing my beret in the air and moving toward something.
“But publishing is in a disruptive moment,” she said. “Things that were venerable truths are no longer true. And the thing that intimidated me was the transition: Can I find a place in what’s now a very different business? There was the fact that I wasn’t a kid anymore. In fact, the kids I knew were suddenly getting the really big jobs. I’ll admit there was this feeling of, ‘Oh my god, if they have that job—then what jobs are left?’ I don’t know if men feel this way, but I believe that many women worry about being displaced at a certain age.
“After the news of the sale was announced, the staff basically got together and started sharing résumé ideas and leads. They knew how to take care of themselves: ‘Okay, here’s how we’re going to do this, and here’s how we’re going to act.’ That’s when I realized what I had taught them being their editor-in-chief. That’s when I recognized what my brand is; it is empowering people. I do that well, so I needed to launch that skill in a new place. I know people like working for me, and I like working for people. So I just had to figure out how to translate that into a paycheck with health insurance!
“What I also tried to do is understand what isn’t on a résumé that might help me better pitch myself to a new employer. One of the things about me that you don’t get from a résumé is the fact that I can talk to anybody. I can talk to the president of the United States for a Parade interview. I can talk to Mika Brzezinski on national television. And I can talk to the woman at the cash register at Walmart. I had never completely realized that this is my gift—that I can go to a playground or I can go to the White House, and I can start a conversation with somebody. So I tried to not think of my next job solely by my last job’s specific parameters: ‘I work at a magazine.’ Instead, what can I do with that talent of being able to converse with people, and where does that skill belong now? It may not belong in the traditional universe that I’m used to. Maybe it belongs somewhere else.
“I started meeting folks, using my reporting skills, and figuring out what the opportunities could be. And that’s my first piece of advice to people who find themselves in an industry disrupted by change like mine has been. Decide that you wish to be part of that change—and of course you have to make a commitment both emotionally and financially—and then take steps toward achieving that. I know it can be demoralizing to fill out your hundredth job form—and you realize just how messed up the entire HR system is—but knowing that I was moving toward a next step kept me pushing on.
“I also tried to put my career in perspective for someone looking at my résumé. Working for Time Inc. helped me to be somebody,” Maggie stated. “At Parade I learned to lead. I loved being editor-in-chief, but I decided I definitely wanted my next job to be about building something. And that’s what I am doing right now. I joined Some Spider in January. It’s a digital startup, and it’s transitioning to be a multibrand lifestyle site; our site includes themid.com. I am the oldest person in the room—and the office is a big room; it’s a kick in itself to be working in an open space again after occupying the corner office for so long. The topics are the ones that matter to me and to anyone in the middle of life: your family, your friendships, balancing work and life, and, of course, how pop culture reflects and defines it all.
“How I got the job gets to my second piece of advice. Despite all the wonderful tools out there to help you job hunt, it still comes down to contacts, and it isn’t always the ones you’ve had for decades. A fellow by the name of Bill Murphy (no relation) responded to my note to him after I read about Vinit Bharara, the owner of Some Spider, in the New York Times. Bill helped bring me into the company last fall when I reached out to him. Those casual connections are sometimes the ones that really make things click.
“Along these lines, anyone who feels they may soon be downsized should start thinking about their peer groups differently. I have many wonderful peers and C-suite men and women in my corner. So many have done terrific things in terms of introductions and support. But here’s the truly amazing thing that I discovered these last few months: the people I once mentored now truly mentor me. These wonderful young women and men who were so smart and talented that I couldn’t help but befriend them have turned out to be the most inspiring folks to talk to. They gave me great advice. They helped me understand the new work world in a different way. They tweaked my pitch and helped me understand how to position myself,” she added.
“In fact, once I get settled in this job, another displaced editor and I hope to start a new kind of media group. It will be formed around the idea of getting all these terrific peers and all these bright younger folks together to help foster a different kind of mentoring. I think that in an industry as disrupted as publishing is right now, you have to both value your history and experience, but also work hard to know what you don’t know. Add some cocktails, and who knows what we might discover and create!” Maggie said.
“In terms of my job search, two moments really stand out. During a low week—when two back-to-back HR conversations went nowhere—my friend Sandy, who has gone through her share of job mergers and acquisitions, told me something a friend told her: ‘Maggie, just remember, there’s a job out there looking for you.’ It’s an old saw, but it really made me feel more in control.”
Maggie smiled. “The other insight came as I walked my daughter Maeve home from school one chilly November day. As a working mom, I didn’t do a lot of school pickup, so I thought it would be great. And it was. We stopped at the new crepe shop, shared confidences about her dad. It was just nice to see her in the afternoon on a weekday. But I must admit that as the days grew shorter and it seemed like I was spinning my wheels through job search engines, I longed for the routine of my old work day and being around people whose problems I could solve.
“This dovetailed with the fact that as the school year progressed, I found my daughter’s post-bus conversation a bit of a bummer. When I asked her how her day was one afternoon, I got slammed with, ‘There’s so much homework.’ How she had hated lunch that day. And French was still making her miserable. After feeling a bit lost in my own skin in those weeks, the boss in me came back to life. I decided it was time to manage the situation,” Maggie recalled. “I told her that from then on, I would give her ten minutes to vent about all that was wrong at school that day, but then she was going to have to tell me one thing she was going to do about it. I might be out of work, but I was capable of creating a positive working environment. I am not sure how this will all come out in Maeve’s version many years down the line, but I do know that staying positive, being around positive people, asking people to find solutions, and asking for help and encouragement at every turn is probably the best thing you can do for yourself. It’s also the best thing you can do for anyone you know [who] is in the midst of a transition.”
I had a similar rebranding journey. The year before kismet introduced me to Joe Scarborough and his morning news show at MSNBC, I was floundering at work and at home. Having been fired from CBS because, I now believe, I hadn’t grasped my true professional value and, thus, hadn’t made it clear to the network muckety-mucks how best to use me as an on-air reporter, I was out there hustling, but with no results.
Now I can see why. If psychoanalysts had read my résumé, they probably would have interpreted my professional life as that of a workaholic: willing to put in any amount of time and energy into whatever job you threw at me but overeager and unfocused. Now I was at home full-time, for the first time in my life a stay-at-home mom. And I was jittery and distracted in that role. In hindsight I was suffering a major identity crisis. I had been in TV news ever since I was an intern at age fifteen, and my whole self-concept was inextricably linked to working in the field 24/7. But I had no work now, and no one was hiring me. I was between two worlds, and at age forty, I didn’t know who I was.
With nothing else to lose, I ended up taking a practically entry-level job reading news during the daytime at a puny freelance wage at MSNBC, where virtually no one remembered my longtime career in TV news. But unexpectedly, being just another face, a worker among workers, gave me the courage to just be myself on air: down to earth, self-assured, curious, direct. That personality worked well with Joe Scarborough and, subsequently, the producers of Morning Joe. Within the next year I became cohost of one of the most innovative and exciting news shows on television. I had successfully rebranded myself.
It may seem a challenge to rebrand yourself, but consider the story of Bonny Warner Simi, who has done it four times. The three-time Olympian, TV broadcaster, airline pilot, and Fortune 500 executive says, “Life is full of chapters, and to keep passionate and excited about work, it makes sense to turn the pages on a new chapter every dozen years or so.” Although Bonny has had some overlap in her “chapters” (which, she says, is one of the keys of success), she has indeed changed chapters and rebranded every ten to twelve years.
As a child growing up in southern California, Bonny watched the Olympics on TV and came home one day from school to tell her mother that she wanted to be an Olympian and also to work for ABC-TV (the network that covered the Olympics at that time). She also made a list of a few other things she wanted to accomplish, including going to a good college and learning to fly. Any one of these would be a big dream for a fourteen-year-old kid who lived with her single mother and two brothers, with little means in a small mountain village.
In high school she competed in a full menu of sports, though never at an “Olympic level,” but the sport of field hockey did get her a full scholarship to Stanford University, her dream school. While there she won an essay contest to be a torchbearer for the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, and that is where she tried the sport of luge.
Throwing herself fully into competitive luge (while juggling college and field hockey), she did earn a spot on the 1984 Olympic team, and this is where most people would say “Success!”—but not Bonny. She remembered her childhood dream of becoming an ABC-TV reporter. “When the local ABC-TV station in San Francisco came to Stanford to do a story on the Olympics, I convinced them that perhaps they needed an ‘insider’s point of view’ by having an athlete help with stories from the Olympics.” Bonny was finishing her degree in broadcast journalism, so the job offer for a freelance job (and then, later, a full-time job) as writer-reporter-producer for KGO-TV (ABC) was not only in line with her dreams but also her qualifications and education. Bonny continued at KGO and then went on to cover several Olympics for ABC, CBS, and NBC as each of the networks earned the rights for the Olympics. This was Bonny’s “second chapter,” rebranding from athlete to TV commentator. Most would be happy with this and say “Success!”—but not Bonny.
She also had a dream of learning to fly, so after college and several years on the job, she earned enough to get her wings and quickly fell in love with aviation. She starting teaching flying and later picked up odd jobs flying corporate aircraft to build experience. After many years of juggling both professions, she made the decision to go full-time as an airline pilot. “I walked into my boss’s office at KGO-TV and told him I was accepting a job at United Airlines. He told me I was crazy, because nobody gives up a reporter job in one of the top markets in the country. I told him I had to follow my passion, and he understood.”
Bonny spent thirteen years at United, flying both domestically and internationally while also continuing her Olympic quest. She competed in her third Olympics in luge and transitioned to the sport of bobsled—rebranded herself as an athlete. She was ranked third in the world and was alternate to the 2002 Olympics (her fourth) and then retired from sport so she could do the commentary for NBC for the Salt Lake City Olympics.
By 2003 she was a Boeing 737 captain at United and was fairly senior, which gave her a good schedule and allowed her to raise a family. At this point most would say “Success!”—but not Bonny; she never lets moss grow under her feet. “I still enjoyed flying, but I wanted to do more. I became very interested in the business side of airlines and took some time to get degrees in HR, business, and engineering. At that point JetBlue Airways was just getting started, and I was very intrigued by their customer- and employee-friendly business model, so I decided to make a big career change—and leave United for JetBlue. When I told the United chief pilot, he told me I was crazy because nobody gives up a seniority number at a major airline to start over somewhere else. But I knew I wanted to follow my passion.”
This was Bonny’s fourth big career move/rebranding. She started at JetBlue as a junior pilot (first officer) and later became a captain. However, what intrigued her was the business side—and she spent several years in various departments across the company and is now the VP of talent. In her current role she oversees all the hiring for the Fortune 500 company as well as leadership development, performance management, and other human resources functions. She also maintains her currency as an airline captain and flies frequently. Although she no longer competes at the Olympic level in sports, her sixteen-year-old daughter is now a member of the Junior National Luge team.
From Olympian to TV commentator to airline pilot to Fortune 500 executive, Bonny has rebranded herself many times—(and may not be finished yet). What advice does she have for others considering major career rebranding? “Above all, follow your passions. Find a way to get paid for doing what you love; that way you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life. If you are just punching a clock, then every day is work—and it is time to explore other options. Never be afraid to take a big career leap, even if others think you are crazy. One way to reduce the riskiness of a career change is to do both at once—both your old role and the new one—until you’re comfortable with following your heart. Passion is contagious, and others will believe in you if you believe in yourself.”
TURNING IT AROUND IN YOUR OWN LIFE
I’ve known Diane Smith for years. She was the colleague of my husband’s whom I mentioned earlier—the woman I had asked to drive me to the hospital when Jim was out of town and I went into labor with my second child. Diane was basically like my sister during that childbirth—holding my hand, soothing me through painful contractions, and being right there for the delivery of my beautiful daughter Carlie. After that seismic bonding experience, Diane and I have been dear friends ever since.
A career Connecticut TV reporter, Diane had for years been the brain and voice of a regular and much-beloved segment called Positively Connecticut. With her characteristic vigor, smarts, and enthusiasm, Diane reported on uplifting stories, a welcome break from the often depressing or violent pieces local news stations are known for running. She was famous throughout the state, viewers loved her, and, just like her show, everything about her radiated “upbeat.” Except for one thing: she struggled with obesity, a condition that had gotten worse over the years. She never talked about it; she was in complete denial. Confronting negativity—even if it was the blunt truth—did not mesh with the brand identity Diane had built over the years.
But through all her trademark charm, I could see that her inner demons tormented her. Moreover, after expanding Positively Connecticut into books, a half-hour TV program, and a radio show, the brand needed a reboot. It was time for Diane to look at her life from the inside out. For Diane, it seemed like everything was leading to a dead end. She was ripe for a rebranding and for rediscovering her amazing value.
I said to her, “Diane, it’s time for you to rebrand. What’s your new brand going to be?” She looked at me blankly. I told her that she had been in an unending battle with her weight but that she needed to start a journey and fight it, once and for all.
I believed in Diane as a professional, and I cared about her as a friend—and that included her health. I said, “Look, here’s the deal. Obesity is a huge problem in this country. It’s not just you—it’s all kinds of people. And it’s getting worse and worse. It’s going to impact our economy and our health care system. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to make yourself over into a healthier person, and that’s going to be your new brand. You’re going to talk about obesity, about public policy. You’re going to become an expert on what’s happening in this country that’s making us fat and tell a compelling story about turning it around in your own life.”
Diane and I collaborated on my book, Obsessed: America’s Food Addiction—and My Own. By the end of it we had learned more about ourselves and each other than we’d ever expected. It was painful—confronting our own psychic bugaboos was taxing at every step, and the work was exhausting. But our final product was fresh and honest, and it resonated with readers.
To me there is always an opportunity to rebrand, and Diane took the ball and ran with it. She looks and feels amazing. While we are both still employed in TV news reporting, our brand identities are now richer and more multifaceted than ever.
Our brand identities shifted because we got personal. We had the guts to be vulnerable and connect. We investigated our own inner lives. We laid bare our personal stories as they related to the topics we were covering as journalists. We inserted ourselves into the story of America’s obsession with food. We became real faces that readers could attach to the problems and controversies of the day. We chronicled our stumbles, our wipeouts, our day-to-day battles, and our victories, no matter how small.
In writing the book and following its publication, Diane and I each had our own separate rebranding journey, but to both of us, the experience was wonderfully and oddly freeing. For the first time in our lives each of us felt as though her public self and the deepest part of the mind’s secret psyche were finally—in midlife, no less—merging into one whole person.
You may be wondering: How do I get a rebrand like that? The short answer is: if you duplicated our rebrand, it wouldn’t really be yours. Instead, look inside yourself. The rebranding process begins with no small degree of soul-searching. What do I love to do? Where do I want to go with it? How does what I’ve accomplished so far help to position my rebrand? Most importantly, ask yourself if you feel at peace—not if you are “happy.” To me, aiming for “happiness” is like shooting at a moving target: as soon as you think you’ve got it locked down, it shifts. Finding peace is the real accomplishment.
I had a moment of peace when I took on my role at Morning Joe. When nobody else knew it, I could tell that the show was going to be great. It was the first interesting show that I had ever been on. I felt a sense of professional serenity: this was the job I wanted, there was no other job that would be better for me, and I could grow other brands from it.
But the moment when I finally felt personal peace was during the process of writing this book. Hearing from other women about their challenges at home and their stressful careers. Being able to come to terms with and share my own. Growing my value has finally made me feel like I can enjoy the moment. No more faking and pushing round knobs into square holes. I now relish moments with my family and miss work when I need to, cancel a meeting if I am too tired, and enjoy truly connecting with my very patient family. I have arrived—and I love my jobs, all of them . . . at home and on the road.
This is exactly the route that former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers took when she finally left Washington and a lifetime career in political consulting and communications. She decided to enlarge her career and family life on the other side of the country in an entirely new business. Dee Dee had just moved to Los Angeles to start her communications career in the entertainment industry at Warner Bros. when I talked with her about what it was like to shift gears—and coasts—in midlife.
ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF GETTING OLDER
If you’re old enough to have voted in 1992, you know all about Dee Dee Myers. The first woman and the second-youngest White House press secretary in history, Dee Dee was just thirty-one years old when then-President-elect Bill Clinton tapped her to head up that vaunted office. When I look at pictures of her back then—with her short, coiffed hair and gorgeous Brooke Shields eyebrows—it makes me chuckle with delight, remembering how implausibly young and superbly competent she was in that groundbreaking role.
For years after her tenure at the White House Dee Dee was a mainstay on TV news programs as a political analyst (including with us on Morning Joe) as well as serving as a consultant to Aaron Sorkin on the smart, addictive, award-winning television series The West Wing. She also headed up her own Washington consulting firm, Dee Dee Myers, Inc. She went on to join the Glover Park Group, a Washington communications and lobbying power center, as managing director of strategic communications. But after a more than twenty-year career navigating the relentless high wire of Washington politics, Dee Dee decided it was time for a rebranding. She had lived, breathed, eaten, slept, spoken—done—Washington. She had worked a Washington schedule. Now in her early fifties, with a fourteen- and eleven-year-old and a husband of eighteen years, she wanted to try her hand at what Beltway insiders sometimes call “the other Washington”: that other one-company town, Hollywood.
“At fifty-two, you don’t really have the amount of opportunities to look at your skill set and say, ‘What do I want to do?’ and ‘How can I get there?’” she said candidly. “I sort of had my antenna up because I was open to something. I thought, ‘I don’t have a tremendous amount of time if I’m going to do something that’s going to be really different.’ I could have gone and done something in Washington, and that would have been a big change, but [this was] something really different.”
Before I asked her about her new job, I was keen to hear exactly why and how she had put her “antenna up.” What had driven her to jump into the reinvention pool when she was a Washington mainstay? “I think you have to be open to possibilities. It doesn’t mean you have to take everything that comes along, but you have to be open to it. You have to be willing to try it on. You have to be kind of like, ‘I could do that, I could do that, I could do that,’ as you look around and believe that you could do that. Because I feel that at fifty, you know what your skill set is. It’s one of the advantages of getting older, [though] there are plenty of disadvantages,” she said frankly.
In fact, it was her sense that her particular know-how was becoming irrelevant that had compelled her to join the Glover Park Group in 2010. “I feel like I made a very conscious decision to come to Glover Park because I had been working for myself for so long. I thought, ‘There are things that are happening that I don’t know about, there are skills out there in new media, in social media’ . . . and I wanted to go into a different environment where I knew I could apply my skill set but that I was going to learn stuff I didn’t know. So that was a very conscious decision but always with the expectation that it was a step to something else. I loved Glover Park, so I wasn’t looking to leave, exactly. But I didn’t think that was the final destination. I didn’t think that I would be there fifteen years.”
Listening to Dee Dee talk, it struck me that she had incredible self-knowledge. And that self-knowledge had emerged as an invaluable tool in carving out a rebranded life for herself: understanding, for example, that she’s the kind of person who is going to want to widen her perspective and career down the road, that she’s someone who sees herself working past sixty-five. This is key, in my opinion. If you have that kind of insight and foresight—even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going ultimately—you nonetheless have a solid sense of your basic direction. That is, you know that you’re in store for a rebranding, even if you have no idea how your career and life might change in specific terms. This is hugely important. Because although that personal intelligence on its own might not pack enough momentum for a big push in your life, it certainly staves off inertia and keeps you alert to rebranding opportunities—and you’re positioned to act when they present themselves.
That kind of insight and foresight was clearly a major reason Dee Dee had kept those antennae up, so I asked her to describe to me how the job had crossed her path. “I really thought that I was going to get Warner Bros. as a client; this is how I got into conversation with them. I knew they were looking for a communications person or they were getting ready to. . . . I met [the new CEO], and all of a sudden I felt like the Dick Cheney of Warner Bros.: I was going to help them find the right person, and I ended up taking the job myself!” she said. “But it wasn’t obvious . . . [because] although I worked in media, I never worked in the entertainment business, and I have never worked for a big company. And I said that to my now-boss . . . and he said, ‘No, no, no, I want diversity’—and he’s Japanese American. He says, ‘not like me, although that’s important too. I want people who have all kinds of different backgrounds sitting around the table. I want all those different perspectives.’ Which was a very compelling argument for me, both as, ‘Maybe I could fit in here,’ and also, ‘That’s the kind of guy I want to work for.’”
As I thought about it more, I realized that Dee Dee’s rebranding journey was amazing for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that everything on her résumé that she worried was a drawback was actually seen as valuable. Dee Dee’s age, her professional experience, and even her seemingly ill-matched background all turned out to be advantages when the right rebranding moment arrived.
This confirmed something that I firmly believe. If you know how to extract the fundamental learning from your past work experience and you can see how it ties into your brand now, any part of your background—even those parts that you perceive as unimportant, detrimental, or to have taken place so long ago so as not to matter anymore—can and will attract the new job, venture, or change that you were waiting for. Even if you didn’t know that you were waiting for it.
Believe me, there’s nothing magic here. It’s all about how you see yourself and your place in your field and in the world. If you’re confident and assertive about your background and you do in fact have the chops to do those jobs that are potentially of interest to you, you’re already maneuvering yourself into a good spot. You project accomplishment. You radiate success. You embody your professional and inner value. You’re already in the game.
In Dee Dee’s case her background at the White House was still relevant to her professional value, even more than twenty years old. “Coming out of the White House, I was young when I went in, and I was young when I went out. I think that was part of my brand, and I think it wasn’t necessarily the strongest part. But I think you go to the White House . . . and you become a veteran, your experience is so intense. So you’re young, on the one hand. On the other hand, you’ve survived the crucible of the inner sanctum of American politics,” she said philosophically. “No one looks at me and thinks ‘young’ anymore, but there are a lot of benefits on the other side of that. I think because I’ve been around for such a long time, that gives me a certain amount of experience and calm in a crisis—and I think one of the things about going through the White House in your early thirties is that you really learn how to distinguish between something that is a crisis and something that is important but not a crisis. And that lesson has been very valuable to me in many settings, [including] the one where I am now, where we have important problems and urgent challenges, but we rarely have a full-blown crisis—no one is going to die.”
Although she was confident that her brand value could morph into a new career, Dee Dee was also intent on protecting her inner value as a mom first and foremost. Indeed, knowing that family time would not be at risk in Warner Bros.’s work culture was a major reason she took the job there. “I work hard, but I also have boundaries around it. . . . People [at Warner Bros.] have lives, which is another reason I was willing to take a risk on this. I talked to people, and they were like, ‘People work hard when they have to be there, and when they don’t have to be there—and know the difference—they go home to their families, and that’s something that is valued and respected by colleagues,’” she emphasized.
She also talked at length about how important it was that the company had been flexible in allowing her to move after her children’s school was out for the summer as well as how essential it was that they find just the right fit in new schools for their kids to ease the transition of moving coasts. It was clear that Dee Dee’s inner value, derived from time with her family and at home, was every bit as important to her as making this bold rebranding move. “You know, we have dinner [as a family] every night . . . I really limit the times I go out. I have a little more of that here; there are movie premieres you have to go to, and it’s important to show up. But if it’s optional, even if it’s something I want to go to, I don’t go,” she said. “My daughter . . . is in the school musical and has rehearsal until six o’clock, so she gets home a little before me. But I’ve got to get home before 6:30 p.m. when I can.”
I love that because Dee Dee knew how she had already established herself in her career, she was able to grow when the time came. I also find her path and outlook very grounded. Even though she didn’t know exactly what a rebrand would look like, she knew that eventually she would want a change and that she would recognize the right move when she saw it.
But the path to rebranding doesn’t unfold in such an indirect and thoughtful way for everyone. Not at all. For some the need to rebrand comes on suddenly and all at once. It seems to come out of the blue, when it’s in fact the outcome of living through a period—sometimes a long period—of unhappiness or upheaval. Instead of rebranding in the form of a job hunt, such experiences can be more like heightened moments in which you feel called to do something you realize you have always wanted to do but hadn’t known it before. I have had that experience. Twice. So has television executive impresario Nely Galán—times a thousand.
THE LIFE I WANT
When Nely started working from home because she saw that her son was growing more attached to his nanny than he was to her, she had another revelation—again, triggered by her son. “My eight-year-old son said to me, ‘Mom, why do I need to go to college? You never really finished college, and you’ve done really well.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, that is a thorn in my heart!’ I did get into TV early in my career, and I dropped out of college, but I am a very studious person and I didn’t want my kid to think that [not graduating] was okay,” she said. “So my husband, who at that time was in our life by that point, said . . . ‘If you were going to die in a year, what would be on your bucket list?’ And I said, ‘I would go back to school and I’d get a doctorate.’ And he goes, ‘Then you should do it.’”
So she did. With her life’s accomplishments as the wind at her back, Nely took a sabbatical from her career at the end of 2008, went back to school, and earned a master’s and doctorate in clinical psychology in just four years by attending courses all year round. Specializing in family therapy, she worked in a free clinic in LA as a therapist treating gang families. “It’s the single-greatest thing I’ve ever done. I feel like it completely changed my life for the better, and it made me walk through my fears of thinking that if I go away, I’ll never work again. Which is ridiculous. It helped me to close a lot of issues in my own life and really deal with a lot of issues with immigration. I feel like it was a missing piece of my puzzle, I really do. . . . It changed my point of view about everything. It changed my life. It changed how I relate to people,” she said, brimming with conviction.
For one, it gave her a completely new view of her professional life in the television business. “I say getting a psychology degree has given me quantum compassion. Because when you’re in the entertainment industry and you have psycho bosses or you deal with celebrities who are psycho, you get a little jaded. And then you realize, going to school . . . here are the symptoms, [here is the] diagnosis. Symptoms, diagnosis. And you really learn when people have certain symptoms and certain issues and they seem unruly in the world, there are only two or three things that could have created those symptoms. And none of them are very good. So you need to understand that people have really sad childhoods sometimes, [and if you] don’t have the privilege of learning about that, then all you see is the ugly behavior. I still feel like when those people show up in my life, I need a boundary and I don’t need to accept that. . . . But I have more compassion about it and I have more understanding of the severity of it.”
Getting her degrees in clinical psychology also gave Nely “quantum compassion” for Latinas struggling to make a living, to earn their own way in the world, and she found herself called to give back to the larger, national community. “[Putting aside my career], I thought, ‘What would I have done differently?’ And I realized that maybe I would have done more content around empowerment and entrepreneurship. So I decide, because I had to write a dissertation anyway for my school, that I’m going to write a dissertation about Latinas in America, and I’m going to crack the code. I’m going to look at everything,” she explained. “And what came out of the dissertation [was that] I realized I need to go and do an empowerment tour and bring together these Latinas, all the Latinas, who have succeeded—the stories of these people, talk about the pain of immigration and all these things in a forum—and meet these women one-on-one, city-by-city in America. I need to create a women’s movement around financial empowerment for Latinas.”
So while she was still in school, Nely rebranded herself and launched the Latina economic empowerment platform Adelante!, a Spanish “one-word version of ‘Just do it!’”, conducting tours across the country to a combined audience of more than fifty thousand Latinas. Each seminar features talks by such powerful women as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Soto mayor and writer Sandra Cisneros during the morning segment of the event and then hosting practical, how-to business seminars in the afternoon.
Now Nely has extended her new brand as an activist and women’s movement leader to launch a digital platform, which is built to stream Adelante! webinars as well as a show that she shot on the road called Rich Latina, Rich in Every Way, interviewing Latina women about finance and definitions of abundance. As a storyteller, she wove together different women’s narratives around questions. What is it like having a rich life? Is it to make money to pay off your house, to send your kids to college, to have a trip around the world? How do we reframe abundance in our community? The answer became clear to Nely.
“I know what abundance is for me . . . the most important thing for a woman is to be completely self-reliant economically,” she said with passion. “Why I push entrepreneurship is [that] everyone has the ability—especially in this digital age—to start an online business. I’ve met a million women on the road who sell their own clothes. It’s almost like a flea market on eBay or Amazon, and it teaches them to always have one place in their life where they’re an owner. You can work at a corporation, but at home? Start a business online. That’s your ownership . . . and I believe that women will not allow themselves to be beaten up or to put up with a bad husband if they have their own money. Everybody who meets my husband is like, ‘Oh my god, he’s such a great guy!’ And I say, ‘I don’t believe there’s a Prince Charming in the world. I believe Prince Charming is me.’”
In reinventing herself and dovetailing her recharged inner value so beautifully with her newfound professional value as a clinical psychologist, activist, and eminent Latina woman with experience and wisdom to share, Nely was also able to get perspective on many of her past relationships with men and where they had gone wrong. She had unwittingly allowed a choke hold to wrap around her inner value, working 24/7 as a television producer and senior executive. “[I was always] with guys who were projects that I needed to fix. Somehow, I thought, ‘Well, how can you not fix yourself for me? I’m great!’ And again, if I had known [what I know now] as a psychologist: You can’t fix other people. They have to want to fix themselves—and the fact that you want to fix them means that you haven’t fixed yourself,” she said. “I realized that my job was not to fix other people or expect things from other people; it was to fix myself and expect things from myself. And I think when I finally owned that and knew that some man wasn’t going to make my life beautiful, I realized, ‘Wow, I can do it! I can make my life beautiful. . . . I can create exactly the life I want. I can buy myself a great watch if I want, instead of expecting some guy to buy me the perfect birthday present and always getting it wrong!’”
Nely’s journey to rebranding herself is a remarkable one—courageous, heartfelt, admirable, ambitious. When you talk with her not only do you hear in her voice the peace that comes from having nourished all aspects of her value, but you also clearly feel the excitement and passion she has for her new focus in life now. You know that the road to discovering her mission—that feeling you have when your professional and inner value have finally matched up—has not been a cakewalk. Nely’s peace and passion have been hard-won, and her story is a powerful reminder that you cannot give back until you’ve given your all.
She was quick to point that out, especially to women in their thirties. “I think women, in their early parts of their life [need to earn money]. When I had the most life force, I don’t even remember eight years of my life in my thirties. So in the years where you have the life force to work twenty-four hours a day, make money. [Even if there’s] no balance in your life, make the money and invest so that when you get to my age you can give back.
“Giving back is privilege. . . . If you take care of other people before you take care of yourself, you’re a wounded healer, and you’re going to resent it,” she said. “What I find is that women who create transcendent work, the women who have transcendent reboots [do it] because something under their nose is gurgling, and when they see it, they finally turn it into a business. I didn’t really understand that the reason why my television business was so successful is because I could tell the story of immigrant Latinos. That was my pain and my joy. In my total understanding of that, I could do that better than anyone else. Right now I’ve tapped into what it means to be a Latina while also being an entrepreneur, while also being a woman who has had to reinvent. In tapping into all of the pain of being a single mom and losing the person I thought I would end up with, realizing that my TV job is not forever because I didn’t want to work twenty-four hours a day forever . . . going back to school and taking that risk, and all those pieces of the puzzle, in all those pains, I have found my next thing.”
THE WORK I WAS MEANT TO DO
I have found exactly what Nely has found: that the most powerful rebranding comes not just from hard work but also from hard moments in your life that forge your core as a human being. Finally being able to find myself in my career and to take my place as cohost of Morning Joe was my first major rebranding experience. I had made it to the other side, riding in on a surf of painful, difficult, life-changing experiences.
But honestly I don’t think I would have been able to occupy my chair as fully, self-confidently, and joyfully as I have—and still love to do, all these years later—without first hitting a dark bottom. Without every last illusion about my professional value having been obliterated by being laid off and my subsequent unemployment. In my early career I had believed that if I worked hard enough and did everything I was told, I would be rewarded. Wrong! As much as I had killed myself on the job, that approach was just volunteering to be the plaster for other people’s molds. I wasn’t really myself. I wasn’t the accumulation of my professional and personal experience. I wasn’t greater than the sum of my parts. I wasn’t radiating success. But by the time I walked into Morning Joe, I walked in, unapologetically, as myself. What we see with Dee Dee and Nely (and myself) is that age can be a good thing. Call it maturity or confidence or just being done with the BS.
I had a similar “Aha!” moment when I took serious stock of my professional value and realized that if I didn’t share my experiences with women on a national stage, I would know that I had missed my true calling. I felt driven to help women learn how to be their own best advocates to get what they deserve in the job market and to get compensated accordingly. After painful and sometimes downright humiliating experiences of falling on my face at the negotiation table many times, I had finally overcome my fears of not seeming appreciative to my bosses, of irritating them with the “inconvenience” of my request to earn what I was worth. Through trial and error I had learned how to convey my value as a professional, and I had reaped the rewards in salary and stature. I found my voice, and for the first time I understood the exact nature of my power and worth.
To say that this was an enormous milestone for me was to understate it by a factor of a million. I felt as if I had been handed the keys to the kingdom. And I wanted my first decisive move to be opening the door for all women. Every woman, I felt, was entitled to know now what I had learned the hard way. No one was going to speak up for us but us. To get ahead as individuals and as a worldwide community, women needed to know their value.
Now, writing this book, meeting women every day who have learned their value and made their brands match up, I feel Nely’s sense of passion, elation, and conviction. This is the work I was meant to do, and I am getting to do it. I feel indescribably lucky and grateful to be of service to women at this point in history. I’m not saying that it isn’t hard work; putting together conferences and enlisting the help of sponsors is a long, painstaking process. Writing books in the way that I want to write them—raw, vulnerable, saying the things that no one will talk about—is an emotional and intellectual feat that pushes me to my limit every time I do it. This is something I take on in addition to my “day job” at Morning Joe and all the other work-related events at which I host, moderate, and appear as a guest speaker.
But I know that helping women to do what took me so long to understand how to do—being brave, speaking up, having confidence—is what I was made to do. I know that any role I can play in helping hard-working women to work smarter, to advance, and to nourish themselves in their careers and in their lives is a blessing. I know this deeply in my heart and gut. I don’t take it for granted, not for a second.
And I also can’t let other women take their contributions for granted. One of the outcomes of my lightning-rod rebranding experience has been that I have become an implacable advocate for any woman in my path who I believe isn’t getting her worth. I just can’t stop myself. Like Nely, I’ve had my turning point, and there’s no going back. And whether they want it or not, I am on women’s side, and I’m not shy about speaking up about it. Former George W. Bush Press Secretary Nicolle Wallace knows that about me well.
YOUR TIME IS WORTH MORE THAN NOTHING
When Nicolle left the White House, as I wrote earlier, she went into television and writing, and for the first time in her career she had to change brands. “When you work at the White House, you are working on behalf of someone else who is working on behalf of the whole country, so you’re so distanced from your own voice, literally. I mean, you’re never speaking for yourself,” Nicolle said.
“And my job was literally speaking for the president, so it took me a long time, and I don’t know if I did it in my time at CBS. I think we use that term as women ‘finding your voice’ in a lot of different ways, but when it was literally your job to speak for someone else as a press secretary and a spokesperson, it was that task on every level,” she added. “So that transition was a long one for me, and I had a lot of mentors during that period. Katie Couric was one of them. Mike McCurry was one of them. But it is a very internal process, letting go of your old professional identity and having faith that the other one will work out. And it took me years to do. I went back and forth a little bit. I went back into politics and did McCain-Palin, and if the universe was ever screaming at me to take a break from politics, I finally got it after that. And it wasn’t until this process of letting go of working in politics, for government, again that I found my own voice and started speaking my own mind.”
But it took a lot of coaxing to get Nicolle to ask for what she was worth under her new brand. “I was at ABC and after the 2012 election I was never on. I called you and said, ‘I like it here, but they never use me. What should I do?’ and you [Mika] said, ‘Get out of it! And we’ll have you on here. And do you want to have a contract?’ and I said, ‘That would be great.’” In my opinion there is always a deal to be made, and Nicolle told me she enjoyed being on Morning Joe. She just never thought about charging a fee. No. No. No. No. No! I told her time is money, and Nicolle’s time had real value. She has since commanded speaking fees and has a full-time hosting role on The View. I knew this would happen. She just had to think that way too.
What is the lesson here? Your time is worth more than nothing. Your time is a big part of your value. If you know you understand that, others will buy in.
Need a cheat sheet to remember how to do that? It’s time to bring it all together.