grow.
You know what used to trip me up all the time? My beliefs about how things should be. “I’m this age, and by this age I really thought that I’d be here by now.” Or “I’ve been working at this business for a decade, and I thought I’d be way more successful than I actually am.”
My very wise coach does a great job at pulling out the best analogies when I need them most. During one of our more intense conversations, she had me think about how plants grow. She asked, “Does a gardener go outside and plant a seed and expect to come out the next day to find a huge lush plant providing shade for her? Does she look at it expectantly and say, ‘Have you grown yet?”’ Without waiting for an answer from me, my coach said: “She does not. The gardener first goes to her garden and decides where her plant will go. She tills the soil, then carefully plants the seed, and over many months of attention and nourishment, she waters that seed and its soil each day. The seed begins to sprout, the first sign of life emerges and finally she starts to feel that her efforts have been worth it. One day, many months later, it dawns on the gardener just how much her plant has grown. She takes a moment and marvels at how far it’s come from that very first day when she decided where to plant it.”
About halfway through this beautiful story, I could see where my coach was going. I’m no dummy. She was trying to get through to me that growth takes time. That humans are just like plants. That we need to water and nourish ourselves over and over again, and that—most importantly—we must be patient. I’m not wired to be particularly patient. I like my plants to grow quickly, thanks very much. I like deals to happen at lightning speed. I like people to action things pretty much as soon as I ask for them—just as I would in return.
There’s definitely a time and a place for speed, but when it comes to growth, that work is muddy and slow and needs your endurance.
RULE #75: YOU’RE EXACTLY WHERE YOU’RE MEANT TO BE
I’ve always found a lot of comfort in thinking, “You’re exactly where you’re meant to be,” and I’ve committed that mantra to heart, often falling back on it whenever I’m disappointed about an outcome. When you lift your thinking to become a little more patient and philosophical about the timing of your life, suddenly difficult situations appear far less challenging.
We’ve all heard countless stories of people who have lost their jobs or been forced to close or dramatically change their businesses in the last eighteen months, and for many of those people, the forced changes actually turned out to be the nudge they needed to change what wasn’t working. I recently met Yvonne, a former long-haul flight attendant who lost her job when her airline employer was grounded. After initially being devastated at losing her role after twenty years of service, Yvonne sprang into action and got a job selling cars. Today, she says the change was exactly what she needed. She has a steady job that pays a little more, she no longer has to wake to a 4 a.m. alarm, and she sees her kids more than she has in years.
Business Chicks member Steph Prem will also tell you that sometimes, forced change is for the better. She calls it “divine timing.” Steph is a former Winter Olympian who owns and runs Pilates studios. Overnight, Steph went from running three booming studios and managing sixteen staff to having to reimagine her entire business. Truth be told, however, it was the change she needed.
“The first lockdown essentially forced me to fast-track parts of my business I would not have looked at when I was working sixty-hour weeks and running (literally running haggard) between three studios. The time I was gifted became an opportunity to put back into other areas of the business and think more laterally about how else I could work more effectively and reach more people.”
Eighteen months later—and after nine months of forced business closures—Steph’s large headquarters and studio no longer exists, and she says she’s better for it. She now services thousands more clients than she did before, via fewer studios, online programs, speaking engagements and delivering corporate wellness programs. Bricks and mortar, she says, is not the only way to reach and connect with people.
“As a former Olympian and Type A personality, I have the tendency to be very hard on myself. I believe in doing the work and fighting the good fight and not only surviving as a small business owner but thriving even in times of adversity. But it’s a fine line, and as someone who preaches health, balance and equilibrium in life, I was not going to be good to anyone if I continued down the road I was on.”
RULE #76: LET LIFE SURPRISE YOU
I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Six years ago, I packed up my family and moved them from Australia to Los Angeles so I could launch Business Chicks into North America. The first year of our relocation was a write-off. All I remember of those first twelve months is being in the depths of start-up despair, sacrificing everything—sleep, money, time with my family, my health—in order to survive. After I’d opened an office in New York, hired a bunch of people, bought a home, set up the company properly and navigated all the regulations required of companies launching in the US, I’d completely depleted our cash reserves, which is a fancy way of saying I had no money left. I didn’t have any sort of safety net to speak of. My husband wasn’t working at the time, and once I ran out of funds the Australian business had provided me with for the expansion, I was left scratching my head as to what my next move would be.
I could have started fundraising, but I was so exhausted that I knew I’d be lying to any investor who naturally requires their founder to be all-in. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye and say I was ready to give my all. I’d started with my all, and somewhere along the way I had well and truly lost it.
During this time—without a doubt the hardest period of my career and my life so far—I looked down the barrel of failure and exhaustion, but I didn’t entirely bury myself. Yes, I stayed home a lot and wasn’t motivated to meet new people or do anything that required any extra energy from me. I just managed to find enough energy to face each day and do the bare minimum of what’s asked of a parent to four kids at the time and of the owner of a company whose idea hasn’t gone according to plan. You could say I was hibernating, waiting for sunnier days, but really, I was just well and truly stuck.
I had enough foresight to seek support during this time. I hired that very wise coach I just mentioned (who I still work with today), and I’m not sure she understood much of what I was saying during our first session over Skype—I cried many tears of shame and wiped my nose so many times that I gave Rudolph the reindeer a run for his money. The sessions got easier, as they always do, and over time she helped me see that it’s impossible to keep moving at full throttle without having some of the wheels fall off. She helped me see that it’s okay not to keep climbing as aggressively as I had been, and that it’s okay to pause for a while and regroup. I came to refer to this period of my life as base camp. I’d been climbing the mountain of entrepreneurship for so many years and had reached a fairly high cliff on the edge of that mountain, but now my body was telling me, “Stop, go no further. Rest here. Acclimate.” So metaphorically I built a tent, rolled out a sleeping bag and lay on the side of that mountain while I took time to catch my breath from the past twenty years of building companies and the more recent failure of trying to start one.
You might see a little of yourself in this story? I think burnout and not being able to know which way to turn is becoming more common for us all, and it can be confusing and debilitating. We’re often so wound up about how the world will perceive us that we lose the ability to tune into what we really want from our lives. From this experience of resting at base camp for a while, I now know that the best view comes after the hardest climb.
If I hadn’t taken this time out to properly grieve the failure I’d experienced and give myself the space to think and create, many things wouldn’t be out in the world—during this time I secured my first book deal and went on to write Winging It; I developed a brand-new product with our international Knowledge + Study Tours, which have garnered a cult following; and our fifth child, Piper (who’s such a delight), was also born.
What those years generously taught me (and it’s a lesson we all need to hear from time to time) is this: don’t be in such a rush to figure everything out. Rest a little at base camp if that’s what’s required. Get good at embracing the unknown, and let your life surprise you.
RULE #77: YOU ONLY NEED ONE YES
Arianna Huffington got rejected by 36 publishers when she pitched her second book. When I first heard those numbers, I didn’t really believe them, thinking surely they must be a little bit embellished for the sake of a good story. At the time I couldn’t understand how anyone could recover from being rejected all those times without feeling like they were a huge loser. And then the exact same thing happened to me.
The initial publishing deal for my first book was just for Australia and New Zealand, so we started shopping around the rights for America, thinking it’d be as easy breezy as it had been the first time around. And with that naïve assumption, so began the universe’s cruel game of ensuring I suffered in the same way Arianna had.
For months, I pounded the New York pavements in the snow, schmoozing every publisher who’d take a meeting with me. One met me at a Starbucks in the Financial District, telling me she’d be sure to pitch it in. Never heard from her again. One guy took the matcha latte I bought him at a café in Midtown, promising the world, before disappearing into the cold New York winter, never to be seen again. At one particularly harsh meeting, they didn’t even save me the embarrassment of holding their rejection over for an email the next day, instead announcing, “It’s not for us,” right then and there, followed by awkward silence as I gathered my coat and beanie and got the hell out of there. That meeting sent me straight to a downtown bar where I ordered a shot of vodka before steeling myself for the next showdown. I’ll admit that was a low point.
My book agent was working overtime to ensure we got the job done, and her next move was to line up a meeting with a publisher out of San Francisco. She called me and said, “These guys want to meet you in person, and there’ll be at least five of them in the meeting. You don’t happen to be in San Francisco at all in the next week, do you?” I told her, as luck would have it, I would indeed be there next Tuesday and Wednesday. As soon as I hung up from that call with my agent, I booked my flights.
The following Wednesday morning, I showed up on that publisher’s doorstep. I knew this was the one, and they acted as if they knew it too. My agent dialed in from New York for the meeting and when it was over I called her from an Uber on the way back to the airport. We all but said, “We did it!” because every cue the publisher gave was that they were all in.
The acquiring editor of that publishing house showed an unreasonable level of enthusiasm and kept my hopes high for days, even sending me a gift with a handwritten note: “Can’t wait to be your American publisher!” Still, something was up, because where was my deal? Five days passed after our first meeting, and then came a confusing call saying, “We absolutely love you but can’t publish you,” with no real further explanation. Dang (and pass another shot of vodka, please).
The rejections continued to flow. One publisher ushered me into her dingy office and had to move a stack of books from a chair so I could sit. I couldn’t see one inch of her mahogany desk as it was covered several feet high with piles of paper and books. She said, after it had become clear she had no interest in me, “Yeah, maybe you need to get a podcast first.” I wanted to say, “Yeah, maybe you need to clean your desk first,” but of course I didn’t. There were the two senior executives at a publishing house who told me, “You’re great, but the category is crowded.” Another said, “You need more of a platform.” Another said, “You have something special, but you are unproven. Come back when you have three books under your belt.” Another: “Tell me how many Australians you’ve ever heard of on the New York Times bestseller list?” And so it went on.
It was so soul-destroying that I told my agent not to tell me about the responses anymore. I was in a deep relationship with defeat that was best explored alone rather than fueled by any more rejection.
Still, my long-suffering agent had a job to do, and one day she called to reason with me. “Okay Em, we’ve exhausted pretty much every single publisher in the land, so I think it’s time to have a conversation about where we go next. I do, however, have three publishers that still have the book in front of them, and one would like to have a call with you tomorrow.”
I took the call reluctantly with that publisher, expecting my ego was in for a final blow, but I put my big girl pants on and showed up like the pro I am.
The call started in the same way a lot of calls with publishers had started: they say all the right things and you begin to think you have a chance. I wouldn’t let myself get too excited, but I had to admit this one felt a little different, like a good Tinder date out of another hundred that hadn’t worked out. I didn’t need to do much talking, as the publisher was happy to share how much she’d loved reading the book (a friend had brought it to her in New York when she’d visited from Australia), and how when the pitch had crossed her desk she jumped up and yelled to her colleagues, “This is the book I told you about!” It was clear that she could have kept talking for a lot longer, but after some time I politely cut her off saying I needed to go, because if you’re going to be rejected, you might as well handle it efficiently.
Two days later, I was sitting in a diner working away when an email arrived from my agent. At first I was confused and couldn’t make out what she was trying to say through all the exclamation marks. It was perplexing to me because my agent doesn’t use exclamation marks. She is a straight-up-and-down, spectacle-wearing, native New Yorker who drinks turmeric lattes and appreciates good grammar. She would never waste an exclamation mark for no good reason.
When I got past the overuse of punctuation, there it was in the second glorious paragraph: a book deal. I could have just about kissed the waiter who happened to be refilling my Diet Coke at that very moment.
All up, I have forty-seven rejection emails from the experience, that I might frame one day. Recently my colleague Lucy printed them all out and left them in a pile on my desk. I re-read every single one. At the very bottom she’d printed out the contract for the book deal with a bright Post-it Note: “You only need one yes!”
Success seems easy for some because we’re too lazy to look beyond what we first see.
We’re led to believe that if we’re doing it right, life is easy, and that our sole purpose as humans is to seek more ease and comfort. I believe that’s an unhelpful narrative that needs rewriting. We need a different story to tell our children as they lay their heads on their pillows each night. We need to tell the truth and explain that struggle is inevitable, like a next-door neighbor you don’t love but have to coexist with. Not only is struggle inevitable, it’s also vital. Can we learn how to recognize it yet somehow not let it take over? We need to appreciate the effort, give thanks for the rejection and remember that, at times, one yes is all we need.