Reflecting on a year of Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h, Part One

It’s all a blur. Photo by Artur Łuczka on Unsplash

One year ago tomorrow, I logged onto a Google Hangout from my home office, still inadequately decorated for virtual keynotes as my more professional peers had done.

The person meeting with me had short, dark hair and intimidating glasses with thick black rims. I nervously launched into small talk, complimenting the lovely green flowers dotting the wall behind her. When the pleasantries were over, she dove in.

“I’m just going to cut to the chase,” she said. “We won’t be renewing your contract.”

She was a representative for the company, my former client, here to deliver The News. It was like a layoff but without the cushy severance.

Did she know this contract renewal (or not) represented six months of my business and living expenses? A third of my annual revenue, if not more, especially in the absence of other post-pandemic speaking engagements?

Not that it matters. This was business, and the company was making far bigger cuts across the board than me. To be honest, I am only surprised they didn’t do it sooner.

Once the shock wore off, the grief set in. Who am I without this client? What is left of my business? What will I do to replace the income?

It’s not that I didn’t see it coming. I did. It’s just that I didn’t yet know the answers to these questions. I couldn’t seem to snap my fingers and materialize an extra $15,000 each month overnight.

It’s not that I didn’t know I shouldn’t rely too heavily on one client—one being the most dangerous number in business, after all—it’s just that I failed to land more.

It’s not that I tied my entire identity and competence as a business owner to this one client, but then again, it was the most impressive contract I landed in twelve years of self-employment, and we worked together for seven great years.

It’s not that I didn’t believe I could pivot, or figure something else out; it’s just that by the time I got The News, I was exhausted from three years of attempts, and my savings had run dry. My financial and energy reserves were also teetering dangerously low. With all of it went my morale.

In 2019, as part of a certification course that paired well with Pivot licensing, I took an assessment measuring my energy-strengths. The results reflected my booming business, showing that I was highly energized by creative thinking, enthusiasm, optimism, and confidence in sharing my expertise.

I re-took the test the other day, five years later, while preparing to deliver this same session for a corporate client’s team-building offsite. Many of those initial qualities vanished. Courage, emotional control, optimism, and confidence were at a new low—as was the entire quadrant of relational strengths concerning working with others.

Here, in two charts, was a before-and-after snapshot of my humbling as a business owner: from flying high to scraping by.¹

The day I got The News, there was only one thing I could think to do other than cry: write. So I started letting loose here on Substack, and I haven’t stopped since.

I scheduled my first five posts to go live one month after The News on July 5, 2023, my twelve-year biziversary. Many times I talked myself out of taking them down. So what if I burn up what’s left of my reputation by sharing more openly about what’s going on? What is left to lose? (Don’t answer that.)

Looking back one year later, I can see that I was throwing myself a lifeline. A rope braided with your help, witnessing and reading, strand by strand, essay by essay.

“Here,” some wiser part of me said. “Grab on to this.”

This being capital-T Truth. What I was really going through, rather than trying to paper over it with people-pleasing optimism, as I used to do.

Here, I offered back to anyone else who needed to hear it. Take this rope with me. Let’s talk about what’s happening and how hard things feel—at least for me. Maybe for you.

Hard is a relative word, of course. Sometimes, I look back on the last year and wonder how I could be so whiny; what is wrong with me?! It’s the same self-flagellation that prompted me to write Pivot in the first place: why did everyone else seem so equipped to handle change while I was unbearably sensitive to every roiling wave?

As author Kazuo Ishiguro said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel the same to you?”²

❤️

Continue reading part two:

Reflecting on a year of Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h, Part Two

1. I can’t resist sharing this here:

2. Thanks to Jay Acunzo for first sharing this quote with me. Kazuo’s speech is now a book, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs: The Nobel Lecture.

Stay tuned for part two on Saturday, where I’ll share more on struggling with the “character arc” (or more accurately, wiggle-wobble) while writing about this last year.