Epilogue

TWO WEEKS BEFORE this manuscript was due to my publisher, I was feeling confident and excited to be one step closer to sharing my career experiences and work-life lessons with the universe. Sold-out book tours, signings, and New York Times Best Sellers List, here I come!

Then, I had an unexpected communication meltdown.

One hour before being live on the scene of a traffic nightmare so bad it was deemed #carmageddon, I was paired with the only photographer I ever purposely dodged. The one bump in my workplace yellow brick road that made an otherwise smooth and pleasant work-life torturous. The last thing I wanted to do was be trapped in a live van with this photographer for the next nine hours, trying to play nice while ignoring his disparaging remarks about women and laziness.

On this day, I had enough.

Frustrated, angry tears unexpectedly started welling in my eyes and I excused myself from the newsroom. How could this be happening!? I just wrote a 70,000-word book on communication and here I was, hiding out in a dark edit room until I could calm my breathing enough to face the world and begin my assignment.

As I gasped for air, on the brink of hyperventilating, I realized something. I had done everything right and the best I could up until this point, and I wasn’t going to let another human being take away my dignity like this. This visceral reaction was a beacon that this situation needed to escalate to the next level. Two fellow female reporters, close to my age, told me in confidence several months earlier that they had the same experiences and also tried to avoid the photographer at all costs.

With red-rimmed eyes, I pulled a manager to the side and said, “Walk with me.” We made it to a nearby stairwell and as best I could I laid out the issue at hand as concisely and cohesively as possible using everything I had learned along the way in my five-city journey to be sure my message was getting across clearly and was taken seriously. It was. Less than five minutes later, I was re-assigned to another photographer (who was known for his professionalism and hard work) and we hit the ground running going live multiple times throughout the night, kicking butt the best we knew how.

The truth is, when you have a record and a reputation for effectively communicating more than 99.9 percent of the time, you have the luxury of credibility. You are allowed to have a momentary lapse to process and strategize your next move. Even if you effectively accomplish everything in this book, it’s not always going to be roses, unicorns, and bluebirds landing on your outstretched finger. You can’t control how other people behave, act, or carry themselves. But if you’re able to apply bits and pieces of the techniques discussed every so often and get through something you otherwise wouldn’t have another day—take the small victory. Use that as training ground for tackling the next situation.