Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
There are so many ways that you can measure success. Happy clients. Happy teammates. Growth. It’s all rewarding. And these are the things that keep you going.
But truth be told, it’s just as easy to find ways to get frustrated and sad because of the hard decisions and the tough mistakes and the exhausting hours. Until you see everything you’ve done in one minute and twenty seven seconds with incredible music.
What I’ve come to realize as I’m closing in on the fourth year of business, is that measuring success is exceptionally hard. It’s hard to know what is helping you and what is holding you back. You don’t want to get too comfortable with the wins, because they can just as easily be taken away by the losses.
The truth is entrepreneurs have to figure out how to measure success in the unique way that will allow them to succeed on their own terms and motivate them to KEEP succeeding.
If you decide to measure your success based on any one else’s definition of success - you will not only fail to succeed - you will fail to enjoy all the things that come with success.
So today, I’m gonna enjoy that little flutter in my tummy that I get when I see our work whiz by in that player.
How do you measure the success that is all your own?
Here’s a fact that will probably surprise no one at all: I have had some pretty mixed job reviews in my career. There has never been any doubt about my work-ethic, passion and commitment to my various jobs. Most of the critiques over the years orbited around my ability (or lack thereof) to “tone down my personality” or “be sensitive to other people” in my workplace.
I want you to try to put aside any thoughts of blatant or subliminal sexism today, so we can talk about just exactly how these kinds of comments shaped me for the better. And I also want to be fair to the people who gave me those good and bad reviews and say that they were all really incredible human beings who helped me reach my goals in my career under their leadership.*
Now that we have gotten all that pretense out of the way, all of this is to say that it would be easy to sit here and suggest it was all bullshit. That being told I was "bossy, harsh and aggressive” was all worthless. But since starting my own business and having my job reviews come in the form of happy or unhappy clients and joyful or disgruntled employees, well, my perspective has shifted monumentally. And that’s exactly what my first Ignite talk was about.
In five minutes, I manage to outline exactly how those negative job reviews gave me the fuel and the insight I needed to have positive, open and transparent dialogue with the people in my working cirlce today, whether they are peers, partners, clients, contractors, employees or vendors. I truly believe that the open dialogue we have built together has been the key to Mighteor’s success to date.
But what I want to talk about here today is something that was scratched from my Ignite talk because of time and because it just needed a little more depth and consideration than a slide and a 15 second sound bite. It’s this very challenging idea: Even the worst things ever said about us can serve as a mirror for discovering our best qualities.
The funny thing about living and working in an honesty vaccuum is that you can truly start to see yourself as a business person and as a leader with more self-awareness and more conviction. Authenticity is something I’ve explored at great length, in large part because I’m not impervious to negative comments, and I often find myself in something my best friends and my therapist call: “Liz’s Analysis Paralysis.” To quickly put a non-medical definition around the term: My particular breed of analysis paralysis usually involves me turning over a question or a problem over and over again in my head until it hardly resembles the actual issue at hand and becomes an amorphous blob of painful, debilitating confusion that is so large and so perplexing I’m literally incapable of making a decision or putting together a coherent sentence. In other words, I spend a lot of time in my head thinking about this shit.
The thing about being authentically aware of yourself is that you should be able to look at yourself with harsh realism and acknowledge when you could have been better. I am aware that my greatest flaws in my career have often coincided with my stubborn insistence that other people just needed to “check their feelings at the door” and focus on the task at hand. For example, I process my feelings deep in the quiet of my mind until I can’t move or speak. (Ahem, analysis paralysis.) Knowing that other people absolutely need to talk through things and emotionally process with others, out loud, has helped me to be a much more patient leader.
This came to a head and became something I need to face because of my employees. In one of my worst moments, I said out loud to an employee that “I didn’t care about his feelings.” It wasn’t true. I did care. But in that moment, all I could think about was solving the problem in front of us. From where I was standing, I could only see why we needed to fix it. I didn’t give enough thought to how we were gonna fix it. For him, part of that equation was processing the problem emotionally. I have been forced to learn how to be sensitive to that. It’s something I can honestly look back on now and say I heard when I was 22 years old in my job reviews, albeit in different forms. Talk about taking a while to change.
The fact of the matter is: Truly listening to someone or truly taking the time to hear something that is hard is not easy to do. But this act can be profound in its ability to make us better leaders. I’ve come to believe that listening is one of the most powerful forms of reflection. And since, it’s become one of my most intense areas of focus and growth over the last year. Coincidentally, I have also been accused of being an “over communicator” recently because I’ve tried so diligently to over correct.
It would be easy to just throw a “LOL. FML.” at that accusation. But the fact is, I’ll take it. I would so much rather be known as the boss who communicated too much instead of the boss that didn’t communicate at all.
In the Ignite talk, I asked: What would you learn? Whose trust would you earn? How would you grow? If you chose to listen. Today I would add: What hard, ugly, painful thing are you not listening to that could help you unlock your potential if you only chose to hear it?
—
*And in case you were curious, my two worst job reviews ever both came from women who felt that if I “toned things down” - I would be considerably more successful. The issue of policing women’s personalities are never as simple as they seem.
I’m sorry this week is just one giant promotion fest for all the things the Mighteorites and I are working on. I promise, very soon, we will get back to the business of talking about entertainment, feminism, business and life and career. But for now, I need to promote one more thing. And if I’m being honest, I’m very excited about this thing.
Today I am introducing the Internet Video Masterclass. A new web show that my team and I have brought into the world to help give brands, businesses, nonprofits and everyone in between, the tools they need to make better internet video for any and all platforms.
You can watch all of the videos here on our website.
Or, better yet, you can Subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get all the latest. If you like these, I’ve already written season 2. And Beyonce may or may not be the theme of one of the episodes.
This is what we do every day at Mighteor: we make great internet video and we come up with ways to get it seen. I would be kind of failing myself and the entire premise upon which my business was formed if I was not growing and continuing to expand the usefulness of video content. Many of the things we talk about in the series are topics that we regularly discuss with our clients in planning their video strategy, and while I’m nervous about giving away all our knowledge, I’m truly hopeful that it opens the doors of possibility for other big things in Mighteor’s future.
So here is how you can help me out this week. Share the series with your friends. Your professional contacts. Your Twitter feed. The more we get this out there, the happier I will be.
And yes, I am aware that I’m a total goober in these videos.
No. I don’t know how to be less of a goober.
One of the things I’m working on this year is “putting myself out there more” - which translates to: more speaking engagements, more pitch competitions and more media appearances. Add to the list: more putting myself in Mighteor video. And not just when we have been able to highly edit me either. So perhaps there could be nothing more bold or brave in this category than putting out a live show. On Facebook!
Mighteor Mondays is a live show that will stream on the first Monday of the month of Facebook Live. We’ll talk about current trends in internet video, how you can take advantage of them whether you’re a big brand or a budding vlogger and we’ll take your questions and answer them! All you have to do is “Like” our Facebook page and join us on the first Monday of the month at Noon EST/11AM CST/10AM MST for about 30 minutes. I promise it’s gonna be a good (and informative!) time.
Of course, if you just want to join us so we can talk Live about the latest issues in gender representation, our shared excitement for Sherlock Season 4 or wax poetic about our favorite animated shows of the 90s, we’d be happy to have you for that as well!
The first episode will air Monday, August 1st. We hope you’ll join us. Especially cause I don’t think it’s going to be very fun if I’m just sitting on Facebook Live by myself for an hour!
And just in case you are wondering, yes, we will be recording the show and saving each episode for playback later in case you want to hear more about that topic and aren’t available when we are live.
When I was growing up, I always remember my mom saying: Have an attitude of gratitude and you’ll always be happy. I know my mom was not the first person to come up with this, but I’ve been acutely aware of it this week. Over the last two months, I’ve been thrown into a washing machine of intensity between my grief and my growing business.
In many ways, it’s been a blessing. Having work to do in beautiful locations like Evergreen, Colorado and West Palm Beach, Florida makes it really hard to feel sad. The mountains and the oceans have a calming effect, even when you’re hauling massive gear bags through the sand and woods. And the work is beyond gratifying.
But if you’re an entrepreneur who has had to keep your nose to the ground and get mounds of work done over several weeks, resulting in giving up weekends and long nights in the office - you know that it’s hard to feel that grace. You know that it’s hard to feel at peace with that insanity. And you long for it like a sweet from your childhood that’s no longer in production.
You just keep working. And you forget to check in with yourself.
Here’s a theory: Emotional things happen when on airplanes. (Amy Poehler explores this thoroughly in her book, so I know I’m not alone!)
As I made my descent home on Wednesday night from our latest shoot, I was disconnected from my phone and my immediate technology. This is such a gift. It refocuses my mind away from: WHAT MUST GET DONE RIGHT NOW and allows me to focus on: WHAT I’M FEELING RIGHT NOW. I was struck by two feelings:
1. I love what I do. When I think back to my days of working in a cubicle and compare that to holding a $10,000 rig on the beach, I almost can’t believe there was a day when I did the former.
2. I have successfully built a life I’m really proud to live. When I think about the people in my life, the circles I’m a part of, the work that has my name on it and the legacy I am trying to build, I’m proud of that.
And letting those feelings in is not something that I allow very often. Maybe it’s my Midwestern humility or maybe it’s fear of being considered shallow or egotistical. Or at my worst moments, I think it’s my fear that it will all go away if I don’t keep my nose down and my fingers typing furiously. Either way, this was an important thing to feel, because since I started my business three years ago, I’ve NEVER felt it this profoundly. An intense sense of peace that has not existed in 39 months washed over me and I slept better on Wednesday night than I’ve slept in years.
On Thursday, I walked into the office with joy in my veins. I was so happy to sit down and edit and work with clients. And in the middle of a music selection, I just started tearing up. Now, I am a firm believer in not crying at work, but these were tears of joy. I turned to my colleague Chase and said: I’m so grateful that this business journey has worked out. And I really hope that it continues to work out.
He laughed. Because he often knows what I forget: We work really hard and do amazing work.
For the last three days, I’ve allowed myself to bask in gratitude bombs. Because that’s how it feels. The shockwaves of finally, finally allowing myself to feel a shred of joy about what I’m building and the success we’ve experienced to date has given me whiplash from the peace that settled in the air around me.
If you’ve been working your ass off like me, I recommend you allow yourself to feel a sense of joy for the journey, because it’s all your own. And it’s worth celebrating.
