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.
I’m drinking a glass of wine at hour 14 of a 15 hour day attempting to hit two client deadlines. I have to be at the office at 8AM the next day for meetings. And my boyfriend, who I haven’t been able to spend any time with, is playing video games while I type away. He refills my wine every so often, but for the most part, I’m not there. I’m waist deep in my stressful place that I lovingly call “the forest in my head with little lumberjacks who climb the trees and whisper why the hell did you do this again?!”
The next day, I sit down with bagels for my team. We’re catching up on the day and coordinating details on our upcoming shoot. Everyone is in a good mood. And then one of the guys says to me, “I finally know what you’re talking about when you say people treat you differently.” He had been privy to a few conversations about various crews and production opportunities - and I was noticeably not included in the dialogue. I get SO tired of saying it, but as a woman in production: I am often not included. Or, in the worst case scenarios, I am considered not good enough to be included. At some point, I decided to not even bring it up with my team for fear that they might resent me for it. Some days, it just spills out in a hurtful rage. Despite spending 10 years of my life in this industry. Despite having won the little and big awards. Despite my proven track record of working hard. I am often not included. I was proud of him for noticing.
These are two scenarios in just the last week where my heart sank because being the boss is hard. But being the female boss is somehow harder.
When I started the process of forming my business, I was focused on one big thing: don’t fail. Because if I failed, I would forever be the woman who couldn’t get her production company off the ground. I figured if I got past year one, that fear would dissipate and something else would fill that void. Nope. Maybe past year two? Again, no. Somewhere down the road of year three? Definitely not. If anything, it is getting worse.
And what you find out as you start to grow your business is that the wins are bigger, but the losses are much, much bigger. Somewhere along the way, we started being able to pitch the likes of Cartoon Network and the Times and all these organizations that have real power and cache. Getting in the door is the reward for the hard work. Not getting the job over and over is the acknowledgement that there is more work to do.
The trouble is that I’m tired. And the forest? Well it’s starting to look like a great place to take a nap.
But then a client says: “Mighteor is fucking awesome.” Or “Mighteor contributed to our success as a company and helped get us where we are today.” And it’s like a temporary steroid shot that we are doing something right. That our hard work and dedication to this crazy idea is somehow paying off in the way that we had hoped.
This is the pendulum that I swing on. One day, I’m so down and so exhausted that I just don’t want to keep going. The next day, I get the validation from my team or our clients or a professional associate that makes me feel like this ridiculously impossible task of not failing is one that I am still up to. I am still committed to not failing.
But I believe that the pendulum swings even harder because of the pressure that we feel as women. There’s this idea that we are supposed to make it all look perfect.
“My business is great!” “Everything is wonderful!” “All my clients are the best!”
And you know what? Maybe I put myself at risk of seeming totally ungrateful for saying it, but it’s true: This job is exhausting and not very fun sometimes. But you know why I say that? Because I know this core truth about myself and about this journey: Anything worth doing is going to be fucking hard.
Climbing a mountain.
Paddling a great lake.
Raising the money.
Making a film.
Starting a business.
Life has taught me that even the most profoundly painful and difficult journeys are rewarding not just because we got to the destination or the goal - but because each step we take to arrive there teaches us something we can carry for the rest of life.
On five separate occasions this year, people have asked me some variation of this question: How did you find your mentors?
And usually I stammer out some combination of: I met them through a job. Or through a recommendation from a boss. Or through a networking organization. But the truth is, really, how I met these people is that I put myself out there to meet them. And then, I really, really talked with them. It was like I was dating them. I courted them. I complimented them. I asked them to “be mine,” in a sense.
As one of my last professional acts of 2015, I was on Levi Weinhagen’s Pratfalls Podcast. It’s a wonderful show about the literal and metaphorical pratfalls of being a creative person living a personal life, which can come with relationships and children and parents and siblings and friendships. On the show, we talked about mentors and it strikes me that there are two kinds of mentors in my life. The ones that I’ve talked about above were a certain type of valuable relationship, but the ones I’ve been exploring more recently have a different kind of makeup. I call them, Mutual Mentorships.
It’s sort of like the concept of the squad, but blown up even bigger. It’s this notion that we can break down the structural expectations we have about what mentorship looks like (one person with all the knowledge comes in and provides someone else with knowledge) and expand it to be about a more collaborative exploration of everyone’s unique talents.
Mutual Mentorship says: No matter what your title, role, salary, bonus plan, career path, education - you have something to offer others professionally.
It’s funny, in all other areas of work and play and love and relationships - we stray away from the concept of top-down hierarchy because it’s largely considered ineffective at best and downright foolish at worst. It disincentives listening because it communicates that some people have more to offer than others. And it perpetuates traditional power structures by reinforcing the idea that you have to have a certain amount of it in order to be worthy of giving other people advice.
Deconstruct that idea and suddenly the available talent pool for “mentors” grows exponentially. People that have asked me to “mentor” them have often taught me just as many things about myself. Defining our relationship under traditional power dynamics limits what I can take away, which frankly, is a lot. It undermines mentors too, because it suggests that we don’t have the ability to expand into bigger roles or evolve our thinking even on topics which we are considered to be the “experts.” Perhaps challenging who can be a mentor would allow us all to broaden its value.
Now back to the question of finding mentors. I suspect the reasons this question comes up is because many a person is looking to improve their network in 2016. New Year’s has that effect of making people want to be more goal-oriented. And finding those powerful mentors is important and can change your life. But don’t let that be the only network you build this year.
Consider investing just as much time and effort building a mutual mentorship society in the circles you already live and work in. Invite former colleagues. People you’ve hired. Vendors you’ve collaborated with. Friends who you admire professionally. Old professors. Your yoga instructor. The diversity of the group will help to establish a powerful sense of “We” - and what the “We” can offer one another is beautiful.
Things have been busy in brain Liz. I promise I haven’t completely fallen off the grid, though. After a week-long trip to Hawaii, I’m really looking forward to sharing a new Geek Travel Guide with you. On top of that, lots of videos are happening over in Mighteor Land. Here’s a few you might enjoy.
WOMEN WHO STARTUP
This really rad organization is one I just can’t get loud enough about. It’s a collective of women in startups at all levels who are supporting each other and making great things happen. We did this Big Video Web Header for them and I’m excited how it turned out. You can see it in action on their website, womenwhostartup.co
WHY NOT SUNDAYS?
Special thanks to Sarah of Yes and Yes for being the host in this fun little video. And extra special thanks to the crew who endured -3 degree temps on the day of the shoot to get the project pulled off. We had a lot of fun despite the crazy weather.
If you live in Minnesota and want to get involved, visit whynotsundays.org
(Source: mighteor)
