Ep.73/ How To Turn Your Setback into a Slingshot with Amy Shoenthal
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Amy Shoenthal, author of The Setback Cycle: How Defining Moments Can Move Us Forward merges science, anecdotes and interviews with some of the biggest names to and offers guidance on how to take yourself through your toughest moments and forge a stronger path forward. And how about this irony– Amy got laid off 2 days after we originally spoke!
Amy shines the spotlight on small business owners, entrepreneurs and leaders who have been historically underestimated yet are doing the work to reshape society. As a top contributor to Forbes Women, Amy has interviewed hundreds of influential leaders over the years, from Senator Mazie Hirono, Norma Kamali, Tory Burch, Marie Kondo, Robin Arzón, Eve Rodsky, Jennifer Siebel Newsom and more. Amy has spoken at conferences such as Social Media Week, NFT Week, the Mom 2 Summit, Luminary’s How We Built It, and more.
We talk about:
How our brain rewires after setbacks–to help us achieve
The 4 stages of getting over a setback
How to turn a setback into a slingshot for greater success
How Amy experienced her personal setback getting sidelined after mat leave then eventually laid off
How Amy grew a side hustle of writing into a full-time career
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How can we grow from setbacks?
I'm really excited to introduce to you Amy Schoenthal, author of The Setback Cycle. She writes about setbacks and the irony -- she got laid off 2 days after we spoke! Amy is a journalist, author, and marketing executive who has worked in social media marketing since that was even a thing. She works with founders and leaders to shape the narrative of their journeys. As a top contributor to Forbes Women, I love that she shines a spotlight on those who have been historically underestimated, yet are doing the work to solve society's biggest problems. She wrote a local children's book about the independent owned business in her own beloved neighborhood of Sunnyside Queens. We talk about the four stages of setback and how setback can lead you to success.
Plus Amy shares her own personal story of being sidelined on maternity leave and then later laid off.
In this episode you will learn:
How our brain rewires after setbacks–to help us achieve
The 4 stages of getting over a setback
How to turn a setback into a slingshot for greater success
Being self-aware and building realistic expectations
The identity crisis we face when we have a setback
How Amy experienced her personal setback getting sidelined after mat leave then eventually laid off
Quotes from our guest:
“And one of the things in the book in the setback cycle that I ask readers is what is fear preventing you from doing? And what is one small step you can take today to overcome that fear? So if you're afraid of leaving your corporate job because of the money, what's one small thing you can do today to maybe build up your side revenue?”
“A neuroscientist I interviewed for the book, her name is Chantelle Pratt, she's brilliant, she said, motivation is the biggest predictor of success. And she pointed out that that's because the reason we find success after we go through setbacks is that our brains are rewired. After that dopamine dip, your brain is sort of moving towards rewards and moving away from things that are painful… It is truly reprogramming the data in your brain that's going to dictate your decision making and dictate your actions moving forward.”
“After maternity leave, I got sidelined. I was removed from one account and my role was reduced on another. I still had some pieces of business to run, but it wasn't the same.”
“People who have gone through setbacks before are better at understanding when they're on the wrong path because they know the clues. They know the signals, they know what to look for. People who have not gone through a lot of setbacks are going to just sort of see the positive and keep going potentially down the wrong path.”
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Kim (00:02):
How can we grow from setbacks? Journalist and author Amy Shoenthal wrote about how founders and leaders persevere through and triumph over setbacks, and Amy shares her own personal story of being sidelined on maternity leave and then later laid off. We have a great chat about how our brain gets rewired from setbacks scientifically and how we can overcome. Welcome to the Exit interview with Kim Rittberg. Do you work for yourself and want to supercharge your business while still having fun? Well, this is your go-to podcast part MBA Part Cheer Squad. Every week I'll be joined by top business owners who share the secrets to their success. After I found myself working during childbirth true story, I quit my executive media job to bet on myself fighting the fear and imposter syndrome to eventually earn six awards, an in-demand speaking career and features in Fast Company and Business Insider. Now, I'm here to celebrate all you rock stars betting on yourself, and I want to help you win Tune in every Wednesday to hear from remarkable founders and don't miss our Solo Friday episodes, a treasure trove of video and podcasting mini masterclasses with me. Exit the Grind, enter success on your own terms. Don't forget to subscribe today and grab my free video tips at my website, kimrittberg.com.
(01:25):
I'm really excited to introduce to you Amy Shoenthal, author of The Setback Cycle. I'm really excited to have Amy Schoenthal join me, but I'm going to be honest with the mom's exit interview listeners. Before I even read her bio, I'm going to say Amy did an interview with me for Mom's exit interview Now it's the exit interview we spoke and she's writing a book called The Setback Cycle. An irony of irony, Amy, what happened Two days after we spoke for our podcast interview,
Amy (01:54):
I experienced one of the most commonly experienced career setbacks. I was laid off from my full-time job.
Kim (02:03):
So basically I get a text from Amy that says, Kim SOS, you cannot run my podcast episode. It's all about how much I love my job, and I just got laid off and I read this text. I'm like, what? Oh my God, of course. Are you okay? First of all, I was like, are you okay? How can I help? But then I was like, don't worry. We'll rerecord the interview. I just wanted to share with the audience. I feel like it's so common everyone's been laid off, and it's such a common experience that I did want to share with the audience. So okay, briefly, I'm going to read Amy's bio and then we're going to jump into the interview. So Amy Schoenthal is a journalist, author, and marketing executive who's worked in social media marketing since it was even a thing for some of the world's largest brands from Proctor and Gamble to Google.
(02:43):
Her nearly two decade agency career has included public relations, event planning, influencer marketing, content creation and strategy, blending her marketing expertise, journalism training and storytelling prowess. Amy works with founders and leaders to shape the narrative of their journeys. Amy approaches storytelling as sense-making, and she's a top contributor to Forbes. Women shining a spotlight on those who have been historically underestimated, yet are doing the work to solve society's biggest problems. And she wrote a local children's book about the independent owned businesses in her own beloved neighborhood of Sunnyside Queens where she lives with her husband and four year old daughter. And her book, the Setback Cycle, talks about how founders and leaders persevere through and triumph over setbacks, and it's coming out in Spring 2024. Amy, so talk to me. You were in marketing in social media at an agency, and then boom, out of nowhere you were laid off. Talk to me about how you're feeling at the time, all of that situation and how it went down.
Amy (03:37):
Yeah. Oh my goodness. This is the first time I've really talked about this, so I'm a little nervous, but it's kind of exciting. So I had always balanced this full-time marketing agency career with my freelance writing and what had happened over the years. You just mentioned in my intro that I approach storytelling as sense-making, and I think that's so true. Telling stories is how I make sense of the world, whether it's through my marketing clients telling their stories through my writing and through my book. And what happened was I came back from maternity leave five years ago and my career was different. It looked different. The motherhood penalty is a very widely understood phenomenon. I believe it was Claire Cain Miller in the New York Times in I think 2005 in the early aughts that came up with this term, and she said, the worst thing a mother can do for her career, the worst thing a woman can do for her career is to have children, and I think wages decrease for every child you have. But of course, I knew all this and I naively thought, that won't be my story. I can overcome that. Absolutely. Leading up to maternity leave, I was afraid to tell my coworkers I was pregnant. I was in marketing. It was a very alcohol heavy culture. There were a lot of boozy lunches. There were a lot of happy hours, and you can't participate in that really when you're pregnant. I hid my pregnancy until I was showing it was obvious. Everyone already knew. You're like,
Kim (05:05):
No, no, no. I just had a big dinner. I just had a big dinner,
Amy (05:09):
Just really bloated. Again, what can I tell you?
Kim (05:12):
Too much seltzer, too much.
Amy (05:15):
Always, always. That's my excuse now. But I worked through it and I was motivated to build. I had just brought in these two big pieces of business and I worked really, really hard to build them one in particular, and I left on maternity leave. I had two people replace me. That's how much business I ran, and I was feeling good. I was feeling like, you know what? Forget what society says. Forget all these messages. I'm going to overcome all of that. And what happened when I came back from maternity leave, I was ready. I was one of those annoying people who was ready to dive back in. I love being a mother. I was not loving being the mother of an infant, so I was ready to use my brain in a different way. I was, and I came back and I asked for an update on my accounts, and I was told in exact words, I will never forget these words. You don't have to worry about that anymore. I wanted to worry about it though. And I said, okay, well, if I don't have to worry about that anymore, sure, sure, sure. The people who had replaced me had done wonderful jobs and they deserved all the opportunities and all the support and they wanted to stay on. I supported that.
Kim (06:21):
And your maternity leave was three months? Three months, six months.
Amy (06:23):
It was 12 weeks. It was 12 weeks, which is actually not even three months.
Kim (06:28):
Yeah, it's true. It's true.
Amy (06:29):
It, I think that firm has expanded its policy since then. But yeah, I got 12 weeks, which it was a lot, right? And every mother experiences this, I'm carrying my pumping bag to and from the office. Don't forget, this is before the pandemic. This is when you're in the office five days a week and it's like this visible signal to your coworkers that maybe you're not as dedicated to your job as you were before.
Kim (06:52):
The black canvas bag with the zipper for the pumping bag is like, Hey, everybody, I'm on the mommy track. Don't worry about me. Nobody cares about my job anymore.
Amy (07:01):
I got sidelined. I was removed from one account and my role was reduced on another. I still had some pieces of business to run, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same, and there was no conversation. There was no thoughtful conscious strategy for my career. Okay, so we're going to give these other people this opportunity. That's cool. I mean, I'm sad. I built that and I wanted to continue to participate in it, but okay, you're edging me out. Where else am I going to go? There was no discussion of it. There were canceled meetings. When I tried to approach the topic, there was a lot of avoidance of the issue I was having. And so when you're ambitious and you're energetic, you find other places to direct those ambitions. And I jumped into new business pitches. I took on a big agency marketing initiative that I was really proud of and I worked so hard on, and that got a lot of attention and a lot of positive visibility, and so I was really proud of the stuff that I was able to work on, but it was really unfortunate that I had to come back from maternity leave and completely rebuild and refined my place with very little support.
(08:06):
And so one of the places where I directed my ambition was in that little freelance writing hobby. And so I started writing more and more articles. Again, when I have a problem, I need to sort out. I turned to writing and writing stories about other people, and obviously I started noticing that everyone's story, the part that really lit them up when they started talking about it was when they worked through some sort of setback. And that's generally what sent them on their journey to whatever they had built, whatever I was interviewing them about.
Kim (08:40):
And did you find that you were drawn to people's setbacks already? Because basically you were sidelined after maternity leave and your job was kind of, I don't want to say your job was evaporated, but parts of your job had been basically evaporated from you.
Amy (08:52):
It's possible. I'm always fascinated by stories in general, but it's possible that I was noticing it more because I was working through my own. And the funny thing is I didn't even realize that I was entering my own setback. I kind of sleepwalk into it because again, you're a new mom, you're navigating your place. You have this whole new life. You're dealing with childcare, you're dealing with, again, nursing and pumping and all that crazy stuff. You're not sleeping that well yet. And to come back to a reduced workload, a lot of people would see that as a gift. And I really tried to see it as a gift. I was like, oh, they're being so accommodating, and that's so nice and I really, I'm going to try to appreciate that, but it wasn't my choice. I didn't have a say. I wanted to dive back in.
(09:40):
I was ready. And so I turned a lot of that ambition and energy to this little side hobby that all of a sudden the tables turned and things shifted, and that little side hobby became front and center. And it was probably, my daughter was probably like a year old by the time one of the founders who I had just profiled for Forbes said, you captured my voice really well. Would you ever be interested in doing some ghostwriting or helping me with, I know you do social media strategy. Would you help me with my social media strategy? I want to be a thought leader. So all of a sudden I start working. And then I started working with her. I wrote a couple, I wrote a couple of her LinkedIn posts. I created a whole strategy for her. She became one of the top voices on LinkedIn.
(10:24):
And then I started telling other founders who I would develop relationships with after I covered them that I was doing this work. And that was very appealing to a lot of people. So all of a sudden I'm doing freelance writing, I'm taking on clients. I formed an LLCA year before I eventually got laid off. I even had, I'm a member of Luminary, which is a professional women's networking and career building group that has an office space, a coworking space in Midtown. So by the time I got laid off, my LLC was formed, I had a few clients and I had office space. It was ridiculous.
Kim (11:03):
When your main company knew that you were doing the side hustle, they were fine with it, I assume, obviously.
Amy (11:08):
So it benefited them because I would have access to people. I would get tech executives and speakers from different industries to come in, share intel with my coworkers. And so I leveraged my side hustle to be beneficial to the agency. It all kind of worked together, so that was good. I'm sure people had opinions about it and talked behind my back, but on the surface it was very widely accepted and welcomed.
Kim (11:36):
And talk to me about the nitty gritty of, so you would interview someone for a Forbes article about setback. They felt you captured their voice well, then what would you be doing for them? For LinkedIn,
Amy (11:48):
I only do this for a handful of people, but I basically create a thought leadership strategy. LinkedIn is part of that. I try to understand what their goals are like, okay, why do you want to be a thought leader? Who are you trying to reach? Are you trying to get your company acquired? Are you trying to acquire other companies? Are you just trying to get your voice out there and build general awareness about you, yourself and your journey? And so yeah, I work with people to do that. It's social media strategy, it's storytelling, it's marketing and it's writing. And sometimes it's ghost writing, so it's obviously bespoke to every client, but that is essentially what I do.
Kim (12:24):
How did you feel when you got laid off?
Amy (12:27):
I was fine. And the two people in the meeting, it was like I had my weekly one-on-one with my boss, and I go in and I see in the Google Hangout there's him and there's the head of hr. And I was like, this is it, baby. This is it.
Kim (12:42):
You always know. I'm like, oh, I'm meeting with my boss and HR got it. Here's my
Amy (12:49):
Laptop. I was like, okay, here we go. And I texted my husband, I'm about to get laid off, and I go into the meeting, my husband starts calling me, I'm ignoring the call. He's like, what is going on?
Kim (12:59):
But you're saying you were fine with it, but you weren't blindside. You did not expect it.
Amy (13:03):
Yeah, I thought I had a little more time with them. I liked it. I liked working there. Despite all the challenges and the being sidelined after maternity leave, I still liked my colleagues and I loved my clients. I'm still very close with the clients I worked with there. And I found my way back to enjoying that job. I didn't like what happened. It was a very, was a tumultuous experience. It was certainly a setback, but I found my way back and I was happy to work there. I never would've left on my own, never would've left on my own. But when the decision again was made for me, I wasn't shocked. I knew the business wasn't doing well. There had been many rounds of layoffs that year. We all saw what was happening in the tech industry and the economy. It wasn't the biggest shock, but I was bummed. But when they were delivering the message, I forget who it was, but one of 'em said, wow, you're taking this really well. I was like, well, it's business. What do you want me to do? It is what it is. Let's just talk about logistics. And I think I was like, oh, no, no, no. I am sad. And I was sad. Of course I was sad. You're like, no,
Kim (14:07):
No, no, no, I'm not bad. Fine with it, but whatever.
Amy (14:10):
Yeah, I mean, of course I had, but I remember I was sitting actually right here in my spot, and I remember closing the laptop and I walked over to the window, it's right in front of me, and I looked out the window and I was like, okay, am I going to start crying? What's going to happen? And the tears never came. And all of a sudden this big smile spread across my face and I was like, what the hell is going on? And I just realized it wasn't for a lot of people getting laid off as a setback, and for me it was a green light. It was like, go see what you can do. And let me tell you, three months later I have a full roster of clients. I'm probably bringing in about two of what I was making at the agency. It's really unbelievable when again, you spend years researching it and you really don't understand it until it happens to you. It's unbelievable what you can do when you're forced to do it.
Kim (15:04):
It's interesting. It's like that phrase, right? Necessity is the mother of invention. So you had already started building the side hustle, but the truth is when you need income, you'll find income. And I think that it's when you need it, you have to do it, you do it. And I think I'm growing my business, and it wasn't really until I had good corporate when I started my business, I had two really good, one really good corporate client and some smaller projects. And then I realized I actually don't want to be doing three days a week for one company. I really want to be more in charge of my time. I want to work with more business owners. Also, the skills I have, a lot of people don't have and don't know it. And I'm such an extrovert, it's fun for me to teach, but I realize I need to start doing these things that I don't know how to do.
(15:47):
I didn't know how to start an online course. I didn't know how to start a coaching course. I don't know what Kajabi is now. I do, but I'm not great with my backend bookkeeping. But I was like, I need to do this because I'm working. I need the money. And if he comes this thing of whatever you're scared of or whatever you don't know how to do, you just figure it out because you need to. What I love is that you'd already built this side hustle. I would like to know what advice do you have for someone trying to turn their side hustle into their main business?
Amy (16:15):
I would say just keep doing it. Just keep building. And one of the things in the book in the setback cycle that I ask readers is what is fear preventing you from doing? And what is one small step you can take today to overcome that fear? So if you're afraid of leaving your corporate job because of the money, what's one small thing you can do today to maybe build up your side revenue? And so if you were to walk out the door tomorrow, think about if you were to walk out the door tomorrow, what would you need emotionally, logistically, financially, what would you need? Another thing I have in the book is this decision-making framework, and it talks about just the small steps you can take to build toward the big thing that you actually want. So the big thing doesn't seem as far away.
Kim (17:07):
I love that. I think that I've heard a lot of those things about small steps. And last year I gave a keynote speech about fear because as I launched my business, I might be an extrovert. I'm a media expert. I worked in TV for 10 years. I launched US Weeklys video unit. I've worked at Netflix. I really am an expert in my industry. That doesn't mean that I don't have that insecurity and the fear that everyone else has. I absolutely do. One thing as I was writing this speech was clarifying my thoughts on fear. As you're talking about, I really do think to your point about think about what fear is preventing you from doing. And I like to say weigh your desire and your fear. And when the desire weighs more, that's when you're going to take the steps to fight the fear. I have a lot of people in my life, not clients, but sometimes clients, sometimes friends who are like, I have this thing on my to-do list, but I haven't gotten to it. And I'm like, you don't want it that badly. That's the
Amy (17:58):
Truth.
Kim (17:59):
If you want something really, really badly and you don't know how to get it, talk to your friend, get a therapist, get a coach, get a strategist. But if you are really not doing it once, you know the steps to do. I just don't think you want it that badly. And so for me, I wanted it. I was like, I'm ready for this. I'm ready to grow my business. I'm ready to be on bigger stages. And what I realized was I have to put myself in front of the camera. I was very insecure about showing up on camera, worried people are going to judge me and
Amy (18:26):
Make we think I was
Kim (18:27):
Foolish. Exactly. And now that's exactly what I advised my clients on. I had all those same fears and it was only the point at which I really thought about what fear was preventing me from doing. To your point, it was only the point at which I was like, me hiding is only going to keep me tethered to corporations because
Amy (18:44):
You
Kim (18:45):
Can't build a business where you're working with other business owners. When you're invisible, you are invisible If you're hiding from the camera, I always say hiding from the camera is hiding from clients and I don't want to hide. And so it was the fear that was preventing me. And then I pushed through and was like, I want this enough. I'd love to jump in more about your book, so I know it's called the Setback Cycle. Talk to me about why do you think setbacks so often lead to success?
Amy (19:08):
Well, it's like you said, necessity is the mother of invention. But I actually want to go back to something you just said, which is motivation. You were so motivated, you wanted something so badly. One of the a neuroscientist I interviewed for the book, her name is Chantelle Pratt, she's brilliant. I love her. She said, motivation is the biggest predictor of success. And she pointed out that that's because the reason we find success after we go through setbacks is that our brains are rewired. After that dopamine dip, your brain is sort of moving towards rewards and moving away from things that are painful. And so if you have a painful experience and don't always, a setback is not always necessarily a trauma or a big massive event. They can be little. There's the daily micro setbacks. If you're a parent, you have three every morning getting your kid out the door. But there's these reward centers of your brain that are either moving you away from the worst thing or pushing you towards that reward, and that is all taking place during a setback. It is truly reprogramming the data in your brain that's going to dictate your decision making and dictate your actions moving forward. I can get really into the nerdy science of it all.
Kim (20:29):
So I am actually interested in this nerdy science. So okay, you're saying that the dip, so we experience a failure and we feel that dip, we feel low. So let's say you don't get a promotion, so it's not even necessarily getting laid off, but let's say you're skipped over for a promotion. You ask for a promotion, you don't get it a raise. You have that downwards, actually, I don't want to say raise. A lot of people are self-employed people, fine. You really want to land a big client. You've been working on this client and you think you're at a yes. And then they're like, sorry, we don't have the budget or something like that. You really lose this client, so you're working for yourself. You're going to land this big client, and the big client says, sorry, we don't have budget. You're super down. You feel super low. So that's the setback. Then talk to me about the science happening in your brain.
Amy (21:10):
Sure. A dopamine dip is when things don't go as planned, and that's sort of the pain center of your brain. The part of your brain where all of this information is stored is the basal ganglia, and that dictates decision-making and your future actions. It's also where language learning is stored. And so my favorite analogy in all of this is someone could score very low on a language learning assessment. You are not wired to learn a language very well, fine, no problem. But if that person, maybe that person speaks English and that person just falls in love with someone who speaks French, all of a sudden their aptitude for language learning is going to increase. So all of these things that we I guess identify as, or these things that you think are set in your brain, of course we're all prone towards different talents and skills and whatnot, but all of these things that you think are set in stone are not.
(22:10):
It goes back to what you were saying about motivation being the biggest predictor of success. And I think when you have that setback and now all of a sudden you need to figure out why you didn't get that promotion because you want to avoid that really painful feeling again, you're going to work towards figuring out how to avoid that and that's going to motivate you to maybe do things a little bit differently. Then you would have done them had you gotten that promotion. If you got the promotion, you would say, okay, great. I'm doing a great job. Everything's fine. I'm going to do things the exact same way I've always done them.
Kim (22:46):
So let's say we're talking about people who are working for themselves. So let's say I lose out on a client, I thought it was a lock and they say no. So you're saying me having that rewiring of my brain, it's learning a new pathway because this pathway sucked. Let me find the better pathway. And so then I'm going to say, how do I learn to be better at closing? How do I learn to be better at sales? How do I change the outcome next time?
Amy (23:10):
Exactly. It's going to motivate you to do things differently or try something different because the thing you were working towards didn't. It's like when you're working towards a path and now the path is no longer available, that is the definition of a setback. It's a reversal in progress. And when that reversal happens, you have to figure out a whole new path forward. And that's the key to learning and rewiring. That's why creativity is born from setbacks, from negative experiences.
Kim (23:38):
And I don't know if this is a part of your research or what you've done. Do some people not have that? I was setback and now I'm going to push even harder? Are some people like this is the setback and that's the new level of my life. I can't go past that. I can't move past that. Are there predictors? Are there things? If you're that way, how can you build that muscle?
Amy (24:01):
There's a lot of answers to this. I'll give you two. Number one, people who have gone through setbacks before are better at understanding when they're on the wrong path because they know the clues. They know the signals, they know what to look for. People who have not gone through a lot of setbacks are going to just sort of see the positive and keep going potentially down the wrong path. How many people do you know who were in jobs or relationships and didn't get out of them until years later? And then you said to them finally and they said, wait, you knew because they didn't realize it themselves because maybe they hadn't endured a lot of setbacks and so they were just sort of working towards the thing they thought they should be doing. So that's number one. People who have gone through setbacks can frankly better navigate the setback cycle because they see the signs and they've been through it before.
(24:50):
The other thing I'll say is people who can learn better are people who take the time to digest the feedback. There's four phases of the setback cycle. Number one is establish, and number two is embrace. The embrace phase is one that many people, myself included, would love to skip over. I don't want to embrace what happened. I don't want to feel my feelings and deal with the pain. I want to fast forward to the next two phases of the setback cycle to emerge. Emerge is like emerging from your setback. It's explore and then emerge. And so I don't want to sit and embrace, but if you sit and embrace, that's when you really understand, again, that data that just rewired your brain. Why was that so painful? What does that say about where my values are or what my mission is like? Yes, of course it sucked to not get that big client working for myself.
(25:46):
And I put so much of my time into that and now I'm not going to get the money and the exciting opportunity that I was looking forward to, but dig a little deeper. Did it insult your intelligence? Did it say something about your identity? There's all these sort of deeper cues that if you listen hard enough, you can find them and it teaches you. So going through embrace is it sucks, but you have to do it. And so those people will be better at working through the setback cycle versus someone who just wants to fast forward to emerge and get onto the next thing. You won't take the time to learn and you won't be better equipped to navigate your next setback.
Kim (26:26):
Who is someone who persevered through a setback through your research, someone who persevered through a setback and came out the other side in a way that really had a large impact on society.
Amy (26:37):
Oh my goodness, I have so many stories about this. I think one of my favorite stories, they're all my favorite, but the one I put in the intro is a very distinct one. It's a rashma. She is the founder of Girls Who Code, and then she created the Marshall Plan for moms, which is now moms first. She many years ago, she ran for office and she went up against Carolyn Maloney, who's the incumbent. I believe she just retired, but it was the incumbent in New York City who was a big political machine. And Rushma was this new, she's like 33 years old. She's new, she's young, she got a lot of energy, a lot of celebrities were backing her. She got a lot of attention and she thought, wow, maybe I can unseat this congresswoman who has been a staple of New York City life. And a lot of people had felt like she was very out of touch, and Rushma was like fresh, new energy.
(27:34):
Who would better represent her constituents? Well, after a very, very public and highly visible campaign, she lost and she lost in a big way. She lost 80% of the vote. And so it was what she called a public spectacle of failure. And when I interviewed her, she said, if I hadn't failed in that way, I would not be as fearless as I became. Because she was no longer afraid of failure. She had failed in the most public biggest way, and she had to go through the cycle. She had to figure out what was next. She had to deal with it. And that's the thing that led her to create Girls Who Code, because on that campaign trail, she visited schools and she saw how big the gap was in STEM education and how girls seemed to be dropping out of science and engineering and computer programming between the ages of 13 and 17.
(28:30):
And she was trying to figure out why that was happening. And she would talk to educators and people, and she did a lot of research and it was a self-conscious thing. They did not feel welcome, and they did not feel motivated, frankly, to continue in those classes. And so she figured out a way to fix that with girls who code. And now that organization has helped more than half a million girls learn to code. That's a very important skill. We can't have girls dropping out of computer science these days. And then she used the same sort of, I think she told me, I just rise like a phoenix from the Ashes. If I see an obstacle her, my friends say, don't get in Rush MA's way. I will just push right through it. And it's true when the pandemic happened and everyone was trying to remote school their children at home, and so much of the invisible laborer was falling to moms Rushma was like, what are we doing?
(29:26):
Why is no one doing anything? And so she created a relief plan, the Marshall Plan for moms, and then that turned into this whole movement of moms. Now it's moms first, and she's having conversations at the federal level, at the local level to actually for change. I mean, we're about to fall off a childcare cliff where 3.2 million children are about to lose access to their daycare, to their childcare because the relief funding is about to expire. So there's a lot going on in the childcare world, and Rema is one of the people who's working to fix that, to raise awareness and raise funding and advocate for legislation that addresses this very, very big problem that tends to be a setback for many, many people's parents specifically.
Kim (30:11):
Awesome. And I want to go back to your own personal story. I would love to know, how do you, in this next stage of your life where you're working for yourself and you're building your own business, how do you prioritize? I like to say, what is your life vision? What are your top priorities?
Amy (30:27):
I don't know if I have a life vision, but I have a daily vision of how I structure my day in order to be able to get things done. First of all, I give myself one to two things that I need to accomplish every day. I felt like when I was a manager at a company, I had a lot of little things to get done, a lot to approve a lot of conversations with the people that I managed and dealing with their careers. Now I have to do deep focused work during a lot more of my day, and there's a lot more pressure because it's all me. And so I am, again, back to motivation. I'm very motivated to go above and beyond for my clients. And so if I have a strategy to write, I have a big marketing strategy for a large nonprofit to write today after this interview, and that is the only thing I'm going to get done today.
(31:15):
I'm going to get that strategy into a really good place. Monday and Tuesday of this week, I had to, part of the book plot process is getting blurbs, which means the most influential people saying something nice about your book. So you have to write them these emails and kind of go back and forth and asking the most influential people for favors and this very big favor like, Hey, will you endorse my book? Can I put your name in my marketing and whatever quote you give me, it is so nerve wracking. So I gave that task to myself on Monday and Tuesday. That was my morning because that was very energy intensive to reach out to these folks and do that. And then now, yeah, midweek, I shifted into client work because I have a big presentation two weeks from now, so I better get started.
Kim (32:03):
But you have a goal in terms of when we work at a company, it's like, oh, I want to rise to this level, or I want to do this type of work, or I want to shift into that area. Do you have that sort of idea whether that's one year from now or three years from now, where you want to be?
Amy (32:18):
Honestly, if I could be in this mode 1, 2, 3 years from now, I have three main clients and another one that I work with here and there, but I have three clients on retainer. That's enough for me because I do a lot of work with each one of them, and having three allows me to really focus on each one of them and do a really good job for them. Plus I have my writing for Forbes, which I have a few articles that I need to focus on. Plus I have my book marketing. And so if I could make a career as this sort of 40% book author and journalist and then 60% marketing consulting, which is kind of what I have going on right now, that's how I spend my time. If I can do that in perpetuity, that would be great. This is it. This was the goal, right?
(33:04):
I worked at that company and I loved it, but I kind of always knew that this was the end game. And so I'm in it. I've reached the goal, and so now the goal is to just maintain this level. And if you talk to me again, our interviews tend to be outdated fairly quickly. So if you talk to me in a week or a month, maybe I'll have a bigger goal. I mean, I think I would love to write another book. I really liked writing the book, marketing the book, maybe another story, but I loved writing the book. I would love to write another one. So yeah, some level of this balance I would happily take plus, I mean silver lining of all of it. I get to spend more time with my daughter because I'm consulting and it's more flexible, and I don't have to sit at my laptop checking
Kim (33:49):
Slack
Amy (33:49):
Until 6:00 PM anymore. I make my own hours. And that is, I always heard people talk about that, and I kind of didn't believe it was true because I was always like, well, you have clients, but these are my clients. They're not clients of a firm. They're my clients. And I get to tell them, let's do our meeting in the morning. I got to go at 2:00 PM I want to make it to pick up. That's really nice.
Kim (34:13):
It is such a nice benefit. I was hearing what you were saying about the setback earlier. My daughter said something about, we have this journal, we write back and forth to each other, and she said, today, something about the question was, in 10 years you will do more of this, or in 10 years you'll do less of this. And then she said, in 10 years, you will not need to be on your phone as much. And I was like, oh. And then I was like, am I on my phone a lot? I thought I was doing better, and I'm like, okay, we can always do better. So I think it's interesting. I feel like I get a lot more time with my kids, but I do think the struggle of separating my brain is still a thing that I grapple with. It doesn't matter. I think that the motivation and the hustle, even though I'm working a great schedule now where I pick them up twice a week from school, the summers, I have a much more chill summer. It's a great balance, but it does remind me that it's on me to keep the balance and to when I'm with them, be really focused on them. And so I was like, oh, you're crushing me. Okay, my last question for you, fill in the blanks of this sentence. I know you've had a lot of transition in the past year before My life was, and now my life is,
Amy (35:18):
Ooh, okay. Before my life was stable, but boring. Now my life is exciting, full and purposeful.
Kim (35:33):
That's awesome. I love that. Amy, I love learning so much setbacks. This is such a great interview. How can people grab the setback cycle and how can they connect with you?
Amy (35:42):
The Setback Cycle is now available for pre-order, so you can go anywhere you buy books, bookshop.org, Amazon, of course, Barnes and Noble. I have a little micro site called the setbackcycle.com. If you want to learn more about the book, you could connect with me there. You can connect with me on social media. I'm at Amy Sho, A-M-Y-S-H-O on Instagram, formerly known as Twitter, and of course LinkedIn. And you can read my Forbes articles on Forbes Women.
Kim (36:14):
Thank you so much.
Amy (36:15):
Thank you so much. This was fun.
Kim (36:21):
Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to exit the grind and enter success on your own terms. This is the exit interview with Kim Rittberg. Don't forget to grab my free download, how to Grow Your Business with Amazing video at kimrittberg.com and linked out in the show notes. I'd love to hear your feedback. Make sure to submit to me what you learned from the show and how you are crushing it on your own terms. Connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn at Kim Rittberg, R-I-T-T-B-E-R-G. And this show is edited by Jillian Grover and produced by Henry Street Media. I'm your host and executive producer, Kim Rittberg.