I Don't Know How You Do It

I travel a lot.  A lot.  For more than 6 years I have had the privilege of running a business that I love, a business with a slight problem – its location.  I live in San Francisco and the business is in Madison, Wisconsin.  So, for 6 years and counting I have been “commuting” – dividing my time among home and Madison and business trips to cities around the United States.  People say to me all the time, “I don’t know how you do it” and there are two pretty simple answers.

First of all, I am pretty damn lucky.  While it was the investors who hired me who agreed to this arrangement, it is my team members who bear the brunt of the difficulty.  They are incredibly patient with me, with having a CEO whose lifestyle gets in the way of their needs sometimes. They work around my schedule and I work around theirs and we have developed mutual trust, something which is critical given the amount of time we spend apart.  So how do I do it?  In this case, I am lucky to be doing this, to be, in a way, having my cake and eating it, too.

But in addition, the answer is that we all do what we have to do.  Yes, I have a hard commute.  I am away so much, logging days and weeks away from my friends and my new husband, getting jetlagged and delayed, feeling like trips home are just that, trips rather than homebase.  But it is what I do for a business I care passionately about and have nurtured to success. 

 My daughter works 7-day weeks, with 12-hour days.  Why?  Because that’s what she has to do to make it in her career.

My son works a less-than-satisfying day job as he relentlessly pursues being an actor and growing his own business.  He auditions and practices and does it all over again.  Why?  Because he is committed to pursuing his dream.

My sister goes from her grueling profession to even more grueling nights and weekends as a graduate student.  Why?  Because she has a vision of where she is trying to get to and it is a hard road.

And my young friend who is a new mother gets up night after sleep-deprived night to attend her baby.  Why?  Because she has to.

We ALL have things we have to do which are hard to do and others can’t imagine.   And we do them because we are human, because we get to choose some of what comes our way in life and because we have to cope with what we are dealt.  Trying to imagine stepping into someone else’s shoes may seem difficult, but my guess is that most of us are doing something which someone else can’t imagine.   You don’t know how I do it?  I bet you do, actually.

What’s Jimmy Choo Got to Do With It?

After a day spent with doctors trying to find solutions to ongoing pain, I realized that in addition to the back pain and the foot pain, I am angry.  I am angry that my body is betraying me.

I’m that person who eats well, who exercised well until pain took that away from her, who is relatively thin and looks fit and healthy, and who was stopped in her tracks at a trade show this week in such searing pain that it took my breath away and reduced me to tears for a bit.  How can this be?  Sure, I’m ageing, but this?  Really?

I recognize I have little to complain about.  I have great health care, and I know that I will get to the root of this and solve it in time.  None of this is life-threatening and for that I am extremely grateful.  But it is debilitating, and gives me a bit of a preview of what life might be like in the decades to come.

So perhaps that’s the source of the anger: betrayal at this ageing of my body, a reality check with my own immortality.  I don’t think of myself as older, but these feet and that back just can’t do what they used to do.  No sexy high heels.  No fancy Pilates moves right now or Zumba.  No favorite sleeping position. 

Of course, I have managed to find a little consolation.  It turns out that Jimmy Choo makes a mighty fine motorcycle boot which works pretty well for these ageing feet and feels pretty sassy.  Smile.

About Breasts

I’ve been thinking a lot about breasts lately.  It all started after seeing “American Hustle”, in which it seemed to me that one of the cast members should have been listed as “Amy Adams’ Breasts”.

Last month I read an article in the New York Times about store mannequins being built to reflect the new “extreme” bodies desired by women in Venezuela.   I was appalled by the following quote from the maker of the mannequins,  “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”

More importantly, though, this week a friend underwent a double mastectomy. I am hoping this will be a big part of ridding her of cancer, now and forever.  And I also find myself wondering what it might be like to be a woman living without breasts. 

Every woman I know has a mixed relationship with her breasts.  Some think theirs too small, others, too big.  For as long as I have had them, I have resented their appearance on my body.  Men have desired them, ogled them, made lewd comments about them, and adored them.  Sports have challenged them, and clothes?  Don’t get me started.

In a world where it is publicly discussed if Hilary Clinton shows a shadow of cleavage, a world which has grown comfortable with the word “breast”, as in “breast cancer”, yet a world which still glorifies young women willing to bare their breasts for attention, what is a woman supposed to do when faced with losing her breasts?

As Betty Rollin said decades ago, first you cry.  And then you do what makes you comfortable, regardless of the worldview on women’s bodies.  It’s a very personal decision, a decision made while facing one’s own mortality.  I would hope that we would all grow more comfortable with the sight of a beautiful woman, breastless, one-breasted, reconstructed, flat-chested or bosomy and just celebrate who we are rather than our cup size.

The Wedding Planner - Attention to Detail, Part 2

Confession:  I have been some version of a control-freak for much of my life.  I learned early on that if I wanted something done well, I often needed to do it myself, and while that may have taught me some leadership skills, it also reinforced trust issues and the inability to delegate.  Over time, I have been trying to unlearn and re-learn, trying to balance leading through doing with leading through teaching and delegating, understanding when good enough is enough and when it is not.

And then came planning my wedding. For a period of approximately 9 months, Andy, my (now) husband, and I planned our wedding.  We are both planners; we like to think things through in advance, we are able to juggle multiple tasks and thoughts and complexities, and we really enjoy planning and executing complicated events.  So planning the wedding was a task, often a second full-time job, which we both enjoyed, riffing off of one another’s thoughts, spelling each other when necessary, and taking on the parts which were our specialties.  While Andy selected every song for the playlist and every item of food and hardware and firewood to be purchased for two dozen weekend houseguests, I worked out every detail of design and color and texture.  Together we planned the logistics for all family members and friends.  And all went without a hitch because of the great detail of planning, the relentless checking and thinking and notating and documenting, the extreme attention to detail.  

Except.  Except for two things.  One was the weather.  We planned an outdoor wedding in Sonoma in October, a most glorious time of the year when it never rains.  And while it didn’t rain, it did get mighty cold and windy in the evening when all of our guests were supposed to be dining and drinking under the stars.  We knew from experience that Sonoma nights are cool, yet we didn’t plan for this fact, and many of the details so carefully planned had to be pushed aside for some on the spot triage to keep folks from freezing.  I never got to see those amazing desserts on the carefully curated selection of antique cake plates which I had lugged around the country, as dessert had to be rushed indoors in a helter skelter fashion.  But I also saw people turn from being guests to being helpers in a moment of need, giving roles to people who had wanted to participate in the wedding and now had something new to do, and who have talked ever since about, “Remember when it got so cold?”  In this case, our lack of having a Plan B resulted in a changed, positive experience.

 

On the other hand, having planned everything within an inch of our lives, I fell down in the planning of having a “Day Of” coordinator, and hired a “good enough” who didn’t turn out to be.  What I needed was a mini-me, and instead hired someone who was convenient but ultimately ineffective.  The wedding didn’t fall apart as a result; too many details were planned and on auto-pilot.  And the meaning of the day and celebration was paramount, far more important than details which weren't perfect.  But the stress caused by my poor hire’s deficiencies wore on others and caused stress where none was necessary.  And that was MY doing, my not listening to the inner voice which was telling me that she was, indeed, not good enough.

Did any of this ruin the day?  Absolutely not.  The day of love and gathering, friends and family, beauty and celebration was amazing and powerful.  Was everything perfect?  No, and life is not perfect.  Compromise in life is necessary.  But learning when to compromise on details and plans is really the key.  Some things matter more than others, and that’s really all there is to it.   It’s up to you to figure out which is and is not.

From a Sobered CEO

In a business which depends on relationships, relationships with our artists and relationships with our customers, my company bends over backwards to make the everyday possible, even when it feels impossible.  And yet, there are the occasional times when for some reason or other, we are unable to succeed.  Today was such a day, a day in which many members of our staff were verbally abused by a potential customer, and I was forced to make the decision not to accept this customer’s business.   It was a hard decision.  It was counter-intuitive to everything I know about service.  And it was the easiest decision in the world in order to protect my staff from further abuse.  I wondered during the process what the legendary Nordstrom position would be, what Seth Godin might say, yet knew that this was necessary, hoping that in this day of viral information that taking the higher ground would speak as loudly as this customer’s abuse.