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.
Here’s a shocking idea: what if we all stopped hating Monday so much? What if we no longer stood in line at Starbucks on Monday mornings with a pit of dread in our stomach? Instead, what if we embraced Mondays the way small children grab Mickey Mouse’s leg for the first time at Disney World?
I don’t hate Mondays. In fact, I kind of like Mondays. I find calm in starting my weekly routine, making my to do list and looking ahead at all the interesting projects we’re tackling at Mighteor. And on Monday nights, I find it strangely easier to leave the office, go home and settle into my evening. Of all the days of the week, I often find Monday the least stressful, because the pressures of getting things done or meeting deadlines rarely falls on a Monday.
Maybe this is the life of an entrepreneur. We are forced to make our own weeks happen and the feeling of a fresh start on Monday morning is distinctly part of the spirit and culture of working at a small company. In fact, when I find myself thinking late at night about my company and the kind of culture I’d like us to try and build and retain, I often come back to the same thought: I don’t want my employees to dread Mondays.
Now, this may seem like an insignificant thing to consider. Our policies on healthy balance, open communication and work product may seem like the first things that should come to my mind. However, when you dive a little further into the emotional equation for why we love some jobs and loathe others, it’s often because of the people around us and how their thoughts and feelings impact our thoughts and feelings.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who works in sales and he was telling me that he stays off social media on Mondays. When I asked him why, his answer was so simple:
“Everyone I know is so full of complaints on Monday mornings. It’s just not a good vibe to start my week with.”
Groupthink is a real thing. There is no doubt in my mind that our cultural obsession with worshipping Friday has a lot to do with one guy, somewhere, standing around a water cooler and turning to the guy next to him and saying: “Mondays, amiright?” And before you know it, our cultural disdain for Mondays is born. We hate it, because we hate it together.
Reframing Monday can do wonders for your outlook on life. In so many of my jobs, I remember talking with colleagues about their weekend plans, but rarely, did we commiserate about our mutual passion to kill it on Monday. That should bother us as people who spend the vast majority of our week at work. And while I can completely understand that my deep passion for tackling a new week with verve can’t be shared by everyone, it is worth considering the impact it would have on our work place culture and ultimately, the bottom line, if we tried to at least not make it the worst super villain day of the damn week.
Going to a job that you hate or that you even just dislike, has real negative impacts on your health. Don’t believe me? Just ask someone who retired after doing a job they hated for 30 years. People have honestly told me that they feel like a different person. That, in retiring from a job they hated, they were freed to become who they always felt they were. I don’t even know how to make sense of that kind of thinking. But I think it starts with everyone buying into the idea that Mondays suck.
Mondays only suck if you hate your job.
Mondays only suck if you hate your colleagues.
Mondays only suck if you had such an epic weekend that work seems boring*
Mondays only suck if you live for the weekend.
Mondays only suck if you let them.
We have the ability to realign our expectations and our experience of Mondays. And it starts by no longer turning to each other and saying: “Mondays, amiright?” And instead, asking: “How are you going to be awesome this week?”
*In fairness, this seems like a worthwhile excuse.
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?
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*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.
The things that often inspire me to sit down and start typing are a little bit… off. There is nothing I love writing about more than things that are a little weird, a little uncomfortable and yet all too ubiquitous to ignore. In fact, it’s not unusual for me to grab my laptop and start writing a sweet or touching film, only to abandon it after 30 minutes to pursue some strangely funny thought that entered my mind like a lost gnat.
This is exactly why I found myself compelled to write a film about dick pictures last year. I know I’ve told you about my adventure in Milan, Italy where I spent 10 days last year writing a film in the Wes Anderson Cafe. But what I didn’t tell you is that the film was about a recently single woman facing the realities of a dating world where intimacy is traded for smartphone photos of our private parts. In fact, it’s called Private Parts.
The funny thing about writing a movie about dick pictures is that while I’m really proud of the film, it’s kind of a hilarious phenomena to explain to my mentors and family why it’s doing so well in competition. In fact, this strangely saccharine script about dick pictures was not only the runner up at IndieFest, it was a finalist at the Seattle International Film Festival.
Just like my characters, I’m having to face that really bizarre experience of talking about my very intimate inspiration. Inevitably, if you tell people that your movie is about guys sending women pictures of their penises, people ask if you have received one. The answer is yes. And I think more of us have than we would ever admit. I’m not pretending to be a nun-wannabe over here. But I can tell you this: the number of times it was exciting is equal in measure to the number of times it was totally unexpected and a little bit gross.
And to be fair, it’s not as if I haven’t sent a scandalous photo of my own ever. I too have traded in intimacy with pixels.
To this day, I don’t know how I feel about sending sexy pictures back and forth with boyfriends or random partners. If I’m being totally honest, I always get more of a thrill from the weird gifs of my boyfriend’s face contorting one way or another than anything else. But these photos, they reveal something about how we form our relationships now that have never been part of our romantic entanglements before. And if you don’t believe me, you just need to know that there are now lawyers out there that have cease and desist letters on file for divorcees and the broken hearted to prevent their own private images from being saved or shared.
Alas, it turns out that our most private moments reveal some of the most profound truths of our humanity.
I’m proud of the script and if you live in Seattle, I’d love for you to join us for a live reading at SIFF in December! For those that don’t know: “SIFF Catalyst First Draft live script table read series, now in its fourth year, features unproduced scripts that were finalists in the 2016 Catalyst Screenplay Competition.”
Private Parts will be read December 14th. You can RSVP here. And maybe when it’s done, we can trade a few stories about our own adventures in exchanging our private parts.
This whole thing started with a mission: support female led films on opening weekend whenever possible.* If you want to read more about why, you can read that post here.
This is one of those depressing months that reminds me how much more work there is to do in terms of getting more women in leading roles. There is only ONE, ONE movie this entire month that stars a woman in the leading role and that woman is Meryl Streep. While I’m happy for Meryl, I’m a little depressed that this is the state of our cinema. The Intervention comes close, but ultimately, it’s an ensemble cast full of amazing women (and dudes) so it doesn’t reach the same threshold.
So let me make a plug for a movie I saw last weekend that had many great women in supporting roles: The Hunt for the Wilderpeople. While there was not a female lead, the women that served as supporting characters were funny, thoroughly thought out and talented beyond belief in their roles. So, if this list depresses you, go check that one out.
AUGUST 5TH:
Five Nights in Maine (Written and Directed by Maris Curran)
A young African American man, reeling from the tragic loss of his wife, travels to rural Maine to seek answers from his estranged mother-in-law, who is herself confronting guilt and grief over her daughter’s death.
AUGUST 12TH:
Florence Foster Jenkins (Starring Meryl Streep)
The story of Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York heiress who dreamed of becoming an opera singer, despite having a terrible singing voice.
Disorder (Written and Directed by Alice Winocour)
Vincent is an ex-soldier with PTSD who is hired to protect the wife and child of a wealthy Lebanese businessman while he’s out of town. Despite the apparent tranquility on Maryland, Vincent perceives an external threat
AUGUST 26TH:
The Intervention (Written and Directed by Clea DuVall)
A weekend getaway for four couples takes a sharp turn when one of the couples discovers the entire trip was orchestrated to host an intervention on their marriage.
Black Songbird (Written by Raquel Deloatch)
Blinded by ambition to find the killers of her childhood friends and advance her career, rookie journalist Knight Daye is recruited by the FBI to go undercover as a party hostess at a club that fronts for organize crime. Knight enters there glamorous world, but learns that there is something more sinister lurking behind all the glamour.
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One additional note before I go: I am not able to tell you if these movies are objectively good or feminist friendly, as I have not seen all of them. The point of this list is to give you a place to start. The truth is that we don’t have a lot to choose from, but part of the battle is giving you the information. Information is power. However, shared knowledge is also key. So if you see one of these films or have seen an early screening, please let us know if you recommend it or not in the comments.
I only do laundry once every 60 to 90 days. For some people, that may seem totally insane. Maybe even gross. Quite honestly, I feel a little embarrassed that I know this about myself. But ever since I started my business, my life has become all about efficiency and reducing the amount of shit I do in my life that is totally and completely time consuming for no good reason at all. Laundry and dry cleaning was one of those things.
It all started when I went to go pick up my “go-to” suit jackets and sheath dress from the dry cleaner and the bill was $89. For three damn items. In case you didn’t know this already: there is a lady-penalty at the dry cleaner. A men’s shirt will get the steam and press for anywhere between $3.99 to $9.99. My silk shirts? The absolutely absurd price of $19.99. It’s the opposite of economical. And it just caused me a lot of stress always trying to figure out when I was gonna pick up my wardrobe.
And then I discovered this big secret: what if I didn’t even need to own nice clothes? Besides the basics, of course. What if I could avoid understanding trends and just let someone else do that for me?
Well now that is exactly what I do. I rent roughly 75% of my work week wardrobe and it’s awesome. No laundry. No dry cleaning. No unexpected dry cleaning bills. And no worrying about what to wear. New clothes just show up at my front door. Then, after I wear them, I send them back. I don’t have to wash them. I don’t have to steam them. I just wear and return.
This is how I do it:
From Monday - Wednesday, I wear my Rent the Runway Unlimited items. These tend to be my most busy “meeting” days, so it’s a lot of high end Diane Von Furstenberg dresses and Vince and Theory jackets and blazers. These things going extremely well with my existing accessories, so it’s super simple to just throw on a DVF sheath dress with a pair of heels and nice earrings and that’s that.
Then, on Thursday morning, the UPS guy picks up my RTR items and I pick my items on Friday for the next week. The nice thing about RTR is that you don’t have to send everything back at once, so you can hold onto that romper that makes you feel like a badass and send back the other items and just get two more items that week.
For Thursday and Friday (and the occasional Monday when UPS fails to deliver on time) I wear the items from my Le Tote. Le Tote is a funny thing. It allows you to rent the whole gamut of wardrobe items from gym attire to dressy dresses. Because you get five items at a time, I tend to be a little more adventurous with my Le Tote and have even bought one of the sweaters I had in one of my first Totes. The types of items I generally get from Le Tote are things like a sassy French Connection sweater or a Free People blouse. They tend to be my Friday items, when I’m not as likely to have a bunch of meetings but still want to look good just in case something does come up.
Le Tote does require you to send everything back at once, so I do have to plan a little better and there have been a few times when I did send something back without wearing it because the fit was bizarre or I just didn’t like the item on me. But I figure, in the big picture, it’s not a big deal.
The other really unexpected bonus of this system is how much simpler traveling for work has become. These days, I pack my LeTote and RTR items on every trip I go on, wear them for the work excursion, and then have my hotel ship the items back for me. I go home with a super light bag, which means I usually just fold it up into my laptop purse, and within a few days of being home, a new wardrobe is on the way.
What does this cost me? Altogether, I spend $200 per month on these two services combined. I don’t shop anymore. I do less laundry. And I’ve eradicated my twice monthly dry cleaning bill. I am pretty confident when I look at the numbers, I’m saving money.
Of course, most of my friends are baffled by this. But here’s the thing: there are SO many things I have spent a hundred bucks or more on in my closet that I’ve worn once and then I felt tremendously guilty forever because I never wore it again. You know what items most commonly suffer that ending? Yeah, they are the things that are colors. The blue dresses. And green skirts. And that one pink blazer I bought because I was losing my freaking mind. And while I don’t think this is for everyone, I do think it’s for people who like to dress up and want to look chic and polished for their job, but just don’t have the capacity to actually pull it off.
To put it in concrete terms, these are the things I most commonly rent: Really bold patterned shirts and rompers, sheath dresses in all kinds of colors, special event dresses for parties, networking events and big deal sort of activities, blazers and skirts.
And these are things that I don’t rent: Bras and underwear, accessories and jeans or my black skinnies. Socks, obviously. Shoes or footwear. Also, my purses usually last the whole year or two, so those I skip too.
The last, and perhaps, the most emotional reason why I just can’t imagine stopping this lifestyle switch any time soon is because fashion is so, so wasteful. When I think about how many crappy items I have purchased from Forever 21 and H&M over the years, only to donate those items one season later, it makes my stomach hurt. While wasting money sucks, ultimately, it’s the fact that most of that clothing winds up in a landfill somewhere that really gets to me. I literally can’t handle it. So while some people might be weirded out that I’m essentially “sharing” a wardrobe with hundreds of other women - that doesn’t bother me one bit. The way I see it, we share our cars, our homes and now, we share our closets.
Never in one million years did I think this would be a topic on this blog, but it’s turned out to be this great thing in my life. I love how it simplifies my life. And I love how it gives me space to free my brain of wardrobe questions and instead look at how to spend my energy on my business every week.
If you want to try one of these services, I’ve got coupons, because why the hell not ask, right?
Le Tote will give you $25 off your first tote (50% off) if you use THIS LINK HERE . OR the first three people to email me with the subject line GIVE ME A TOTE at elizabeth(at)beinggeekchic(dot)com - I will send a free tote to you!
Rent the Runway will give you $30 off your first rental or $30 off your first month of Unlimited if you use THIS LINK HERE.
Share economy, FTW.
