Amy Swift Crosby

There are times when your “surface” needs to be sealed, and other times when it needs to be porous. Often, it has to be at the same time to truly be useful.

When I first meet a client, they’ve developed “beliefs” about what can or can’t be done, either based on years of a certain strategy that no longer works, or a few traumatic experiences. These narratives may turn out to hold water, or they may be anomalies born of other factors they haven’t considered. Usually these (potentially) biased ideas have shaped what they think they’re hiring me / us to fix. But until we know more and ask more questions, we have to hold those “facts” in a suspension of disbelief. We have to treat them as wickable. If we accept them as absolute, our strategies will be as silo’d as the clients’. They need us not to believe them, as much as they need us to hear them.

“Facebook has never worked for us.”
“No one wants to read more emails.”
“People won’t buy things on the internet.”
“We’ve done it that way since day one.”
“Customers don’t want to share cars.”

True? False?

It’s often our job or role to press pause for others and drive a conversation that unpacks / disrupts / refutes / or (maybe) buys the reality of the perception. But how do you provide this valuable service to yourself?

It takes some fancy footwork to hold your own breath, stop your own film, pause your own song — long enough to see if you’ve inadvertently built a false narrative. You’re busy doing the work — so it’s not easy to also figure out what part of your belief system is being misshaped by actions as they happen in real time. Kudos if you can be that kind of ninja!

But bigger kudos if you can be open / humble enough to let someone else take a crack at it. They might challenge what you see as a certainty, or play Devil’s Advocate in a way that’s tiresome. But they’re offering you a non-stick surface, which is the only way to see blindspots — or better — unchartered territory.

You can be dual-materials to everyone else, and probably get paid to be, but the biggest favor you can do your own business is to put your precious cashmere in the hands of something more industrial, and see what happens. Could turn out to be genius.

When you come to the end of it, it’s only because warning fires were shot, conversations were had, ultimatums may even have been given…and things (still) haven’t changed. Ropes are long. They’re braided. They look simple, but they’re a complex weave that hold things together — really heavy things. They can take a lot, but they can’t withstand everything.

Knowing how close you are to the end of a rope is hard to measure, because you don’t know until you’re hanging by a thread typically. We find ourselves there when we haven’t been seen or heard, when too much goes unsaid, when a threshold is on the immediate horizon. And this is where it’s hard to not blame other people or situations, and instead, take one more shot at preserving the thing you’ve built or made together. It may be the final effort you make to save something that seems too painful/cumbersome/dysfunctional to save — it might be a role you’re in, a relationship, a job you do, the impact someone has on you — again and again. The thing is, it’s hard to resuscitate something that’s hanging by a thread. There’s just not enough material there.

If you’re thinking about rope, it’s time to communicate about it. If you haven’t communicated enough, and you’re at the end of it, it’s going to be even harder. So it’s worth knowing early on — am I in “rope” territory? And if so, where am I on it? Middle? Close to the end?

The bad news is that we only tend to think about rope when we’re looking at the end of one. The good news is, ropes are deceptively strong. Take one more step, if you can, to extend yours. You might be surprised by your own resilience, and by how much more there was that you couldn’t see.

Most of us (except the lawyers), think more about how to get “in” to something, than how to get out of it: How to break into a market or industry, how to get into a retailer/venue/distributor, how to get into the right partnership, relationship. How to “enter” is our predominant focus in life (because it’s usually fun), much more than how to “exit” (which is usually hard or at least less inspiring.)

But exits are just as important, and inevitable. Last week The Limited brand announced its plan to close of 250 Limited stores. You can be sure they had a deep, deliberate market penetration strategy decades ago, when they launched, and now are busy forming ways to get out of leases, liquidate merchandise, and disengage or relocate 4,000 employees. This month, some key relationships in my world are coming to a close, because the contract is over — or the reason for being has shifted. It’s strange, and hard sometimes. People and circumstances can leave their imprint on you — financially, philosophically – emotionally. But there’s so much to be learned from endings, if we allow it. The first being that other relationships may be just beginning, and in forming them, we all have to consider “what does the end look like…from ten different angles?” Because, it’s not just a contractual question – it’s a mindset that has to organize itself in a certain way — from day one.

Glory days feel never-ending. But all things change, evolve, morph — or die. Our honesty with that truth actually makes a thing better, for longer, with much more potential to repurpose — should that be possible.

It doesn’t have to be a bummer. It just has to be a plan.

I’ve always thought it really interesting that the same job or role can either be really fun, or painfully lame, according to the people you work with. I’ve done projects that were underpaid or tedious — but for really cool teams or brands— and almost forgot how much fun I wasn’t having on the work itself. You can probably recall a gig you might otherwise have bailed on — were it not for some worthy person (or group) who kept you tethered ‘till the end. It’s even true of where you live — the people (almost always) make the place.

At the heart of why we love – and stay somewhere – is belonging. For those of us who work from home or who are hired guns or talents who drop in, and then drop out, of a company’s ecosystem, it can be a little bit lonely. We don’t get that morning banter or smack talk like you get in an office experience. Our dispersed workforce has made being ‘part’ of something even more precious — as it’s easier than ever to feel silo’d and disconnected (and ironic in this age of hyper-connectivity.) I see people craving togetherness, but who also want autonomy.

As someone who works on-site with clients and/or agencies, as well as from my home office, with teams as new as 8 months and others as long as 15 years, I’ve realized that “belonging” isn’t created by one single thing, or even a constant physical presence.

It’s chemistry. It’s history. It’s having fun. It’s being good at what you (all) do, over and over, month after month, year after year — none of which is always easy. But being a reliable player is worth a lot. We all want those in our midst.

One-night stands are fun sometimes, and I still have them (professionally), but my favorite projects are with people I work with all the time, where there’s rhythm and respect – where we get to do what we do, but with new brands, new problems and different industries. We get to solve stuff… together.

Here’s to LTR’s. And may we do the work it takes to stay in them.