Margot Bloomstein wanted to find out how companies can beat cynicism and build trust in this moment. Years of research and a new book later, she has the formula: voice, volume, and—the scariest for all of us—vulnerability.
Margot Bloomstein wanted to find out how companies can beat cynicism and build trust in this moment. Years of research and a new book later, she has the formula: voice, volume, and—the scariest for all of us—vulnerability.
Margot Bloomstein is a brand and content strategy consultant, speaker, and the author of “Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, just out this spring. As the principal of Appropriate, Inc., she has helped organizations ranging from Harvard to Timberland engage their audiences with transparency, consistency, and clarity. Now, in Trustworthy, Margot opens up about how brands, and consumers, can use vulnerability and transparency as powerful tools to affect change.
Being able to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “What is uniquely me? What makes me distinct,” that's hard. And I think it goes back to that point of vulnerability. We have so much discomfort about confronting not our strengths and flaws, but our humanity—what makes us unique—that the idea then of sharing that with other people, that's scary. But it turns out that is the most rewarding thing for both us and for those other people.
—Margot Bloomstein, author of Trustworthy
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Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara challenges us to confront perfectionism and discover our perfectionist origin story. Who taught you to be a perfectionist? What else were they teaching you? And what's all this perfectionism costing you? If you want to take that challenge on, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Margot Bloomstein 0:00 If you stay neutral, if you don’t ever tell the world who you are, you don’t get to find more of the people that want to hear more about who you are and are like that themselves.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:22 Hey y’all, this is Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and you're listening to Strong Feelings, the podcast all about the messy world of being a human at work. This week, we're talking to Margot Bloomstein, the author of a new book called "Trustworthy", which is all about how organizations can build trust in a world of cynicism and misinformation. Yeah, we need that.
Margot is also an old friend. We met as content strategists going to conferences way back in maybe 2010 or so. And I will say I was totally intimidated by her back then. She had this whole consultancy, and she had a book coming out, and I felt like I was fumbling around trying to find my place in this new field. And you know what she did? She suggested we pitch a talk to a conference together.
Y'all this was a really big deal for me because I was not at all used to being on stage. And while I really wanted to start sharing more of my work, I was scared. I was petrified. So Margot used her experience, her network to help me get started. And, you know, at the event, I remember they ended up cutting our time slot down from 40 minutes to 10 minutes, which was pretty tough for a two -person presentation. And I don't remember a lot else about the event, to be honest with you. I don't remember any of the other talks. I don't remember anything, but I remember Margot being by my side on stage, and I will never forget it.
1:42 And I'm never going to forget this conversation either because we don't just talk about trust, we talk about one of the components of building trust: vulnerability, which is one of my favorite topics of all time. Vulnerability is all about letting people see you, even the parts that feel a little unvarnished, the parts that you're still struggling with.
This is hard for a lot of brands. I think we really saw that last summer when there were 10,000 shallow Black Lives Matter press releases going out where companies glided right over all of their internal problems and just made a statement. But it's really hard for us as individuals too, because vulnerability means risk. People might disagree with us. They might not like what we have to say. They might tell us to sit down and shut up. And for people who experience sexism, or racism, or transphobia, those risks are definitely higher.
2:33 So, what do we do about that? Well, listen up, because Margot's about to tell you how she worked her way through her own fears, her own doubts. She got to the place where she could own her ideas and write this book. And she's got a lot of practical advice to help you start trusting your own voice too.
SWB 2:52 Okay, y'all! I'm so excited to welcome our guest today: Margot Bloomstein. Like I mentioned at the top, Margot is a dear friend of mine, but she's not on the show today to talk about that time in 2013, when we got to pet a cheetah together. But trust me, that did happen. No, no, no. She is on today to talk about her work as a brand and content strategist, keynote speaker, and particularly the author of a new book, "Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap", which just came out this spring. Margot, welcome to Strong Feelings!
MB 3:21 Thank you so much. I'm stoked to be here.
SWB 3:25 Oh, I'm so excited to have you here. So I want to start with the book because it's new, and because it's really good, and because well, authors have to talk about their books. It's really important. So, tell us about "Trustworthy". What's it about?
MB 3:36 So "Trustworthy" is a response to what I saw as rising cynicism in our society and how it was undermining things in political speech and how media covered, or didn't cover, that political speech. And then as I started to dig into this topic, I wondered how relevant it was going to be to my clients in retail, and small businesses, and financial services, and healthcare, and nonprofits, et cetera.
SWB 4:03 Like everywhere.
MB 4:04 Yeah, everywhere! Everywhere. As it turns out, cynicism is super relevant because it undermines how we hope to teach and educate our audiences. And marketing is one of the ways that we do that, and everything that we hope to kind of push out to those audiences. If they greet it with more skepticism and doubt than interest and trust, we got a problem. And my clients have that problem. And I'm seeing that problem now across every industry, across all of society. So, I believe that we all need to do what we can do to improve our society, to improve issues, like trust in it. So I wrote this book and now I'm excited to get it out into the hands of everybody that can run with these ideas, adopt this new framework, dig into these new case studies and kind of work on this problem.
SWB 4:51 Yeah. Well, so you talk about trust and how we build trust as being kind of the antidote to cynicism, or at least, like, maybe one tool we use to fight cynicism. So in the book you talk about this framework that you just mentioned as sort of three big areas, like "voice," "volume," "vulnerability". Wondering if you can talk about how those three things come together to form trust?
MB 5:13 So as I look at trust, and when people have lost trust, when they've lost confidence, it's usually because they've started by maybe losing confidence in themselves, what they know of the world, what they understand about the world. And if you look at over the past several years, we've all experienced a lot of gaslighting. Whether we've tried to be more resistant to it or not, there've been a lot of politicians and organizations and media outlets saying, "Don't trust the evidence of your own experience. Don't trust the evidence of your own eyes. Just look to us for guidance." And I think when we've had that kind of experience, that destabilizes our sense of self and our knowledge about how the world works and what's going on in the world. That's tough. And, when we've lost trust in institutions, when people wonder, like, is the election going to still happen? Is... if Trump loses was, was he going to leave the White House? What's going to happen next--
SWB 6:12 Oof, too soon.
MB 6:13 Yeah. I mean, things that we used to take for granted about the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. Well, when we start worrying about those things, it's evidence that a lot has changed in our world. There's been a lot of social upheaval, and I think that we've lost trust in so many of those big institutions, big governmental institutions, but there's still an opportunity for businesses to now step into that space and say, "You know what? In a society where being a consumer is so much a part of how you navigate that society and how you interact with government services is so much a part of our daily lives, let's do what we can do to still foster trust and rebuild people's sense of confidence and their self confidence that they know what's going to happen next.”
And that framework that you described, "voice, volume, and vulnerability," that's how I see that people that are, whether you're a CMO or a designer or the UX team of one or a writer, or a marketer, or somebody that works in social media, what you can do to foster trust and rebuild people's sense of confidence. Voice looks at how we communicate in a familiar, and consistent, and distinct way from an organization. And when you do that, when you offer people language and...in kind of a visual style that they already know, you're kind of giving them that, that sense of like, “Okay, I know how this brand works. I know what to expect of them. They're not going to be hitting me over the head with a new site redesign right now. And just adding to my sense of chaos.”
In "Volume," I talk about how we know how much to say, like how much should a brand publish, how long should your blog posts be? How many images do you need in a photo gallery and how detailed should your imagery be? So that people feel like, "Okay, I know what's going on here. I feel like I can make good decisions and feel good about the decisions that I make when I'm interacting with this content."
And then in the third section, "Vulnerability," I look at how we can better engage people, maybe establish rapport with them, not by operating from this authoritarian sense of false bravado, but rather by kind of coming down to a more human and humane level of saying, “There are some things that we don't know here. Here's what we do know. Here's what we don't know and how we're learning to evolve.” If you are in a business that has royally screwed up or maybe the CEO has been caught doing something really, really idiotic. Okay. What happens next? How do you come back from that and continue to evolve? How do you bring your audience closer, so that they can be a part of your evolution?
8:57 And I think that's an aspect that applies to more and more organizations as we see how they prototype in public, how they make their values more visible, and that is such a point of vulnerability when they take on that risk of going out on a limb and saying, "This is who we are, this is how we are.You decide if you want to be a part of this and spend your money here.” That's a point of vulnerability. That is not a weakness though. I think it's a strength that demonstrates confidence. And when we engage our audiences, when we engage people with that mindset, with a consistent voice, with the appropriate volume of detail, to respect their interests and interest in self-educating, and with a vulnerability that is more human than not, I think that's how we build trust, how we invest in their confidence, regain their confidence, and then help them have those skills to bring into all their other interactions through the day.
SWB 9:52 I'm kind of hearing, like, when it comes to having businesses, organizations, you know, step up and choose to be more trustworthy, that it's like choosing not to let yourself lower that bar just because you might see it being lowered around you, just because you might have seen Donald Trump lowering that bar or whatever. Like, like we don't want to live there. And if we don't want to live there, then, like, Let's not live there. But I also hear, you know, of those three things, it strikes me that vulnerability from my perspective seems like the hardest for organizations and for people to really stick to, you know, once you say like, "These are our values," once you say, "This is what we believe in," well, people can call you out when you screw it up, right?
MB 10:37 Right.
SWB 10:37 Like, if you then fail to live up to that, somebody can say, "You didn't do it." And I see a lot of people really shying away from being vulnerable because they're scared, and I'm wondering both at an individual level and at an organizational level, how do we move past that fear and tap into what you talked about, the sort of, like, the strength and the power of vulnerability?
MB 10:59 Yeah. And I mean, it's tough. I think if you work for a company that is very entrenched in, kind of, “how it's always been,” maybe they come out of that tradition of, like, the 1980s in marketing, where everybody wanted to seem kind of bigger and tougher and more established than they were. Like, everybody wore shoulder pads, like even our brands wore shoulder pads to make themselves seem bigger than they were. And that can work for only so long. I think we realized just how impenetrable those kinds of organizations are. And also how impenetrable people are that exist on that kind of superficial plane, where they're not sharing much about their own foibles and their own journey and personal evolution.
And I think that's tough because in many companies, there is a mindset of like, "Don't let them see you blink," you know, "Don't ever let them see you cry." And when we don't do that, when we don't engage as people, we put up these walls that make it really tough for consumers, for stakeholders, for our colleagues to get to know who we are and how we are. And you're right though. I mean, it takes vulnerability, and this is something like the Brene Brown talks about a lot that, how that vulnerability in personal connection, when we share a little bit about who we are and our interests and our fears, that's how we establish rapport with the person at the other end of the conversation. And it's that common rapport that allows us to really develop compassion, too, to say, like, "Okay, I get you where you are. Maybe I've been there too. Maybe this is more a story about empathy than compassion, but I get you where you are. Let me help you along in that, because maybe your journey is my journey too."
And I think for many people that are small business owners or, hell, even big business owners or folks that work in marketing, or if you're a manager, the past year has been a story of vulnerability, of saying, "Yeah, we're all in this economy-"
SWB 13:06 What do you mean? I'm doing great. You're--
MB 13:08 Yeah! Yeah. Everything's Fine.
SWB 13:08 Oh no, I was, it was fine.
MB 13:11 Yeah.
SWB 13:11 I mean, I'm thriving.
MB 13:13 Yeah. You're not seeing food on my face...
SWB 13:15 But that's the thing. I mean, I think it is. It's so quick, people want to put up that front, and I think this year... gosh. I mean, it's definitely told us, like, no, no, nobody can sustain that front.
MB 13:25 Right.
SWB 13:25 You can sustain it for a while, but man, It's gotta be crumbling by now.
MB 13:31 And furthermore, why would you want to sustain it?
SWB 13:33 It's exhausting!
SWB 13:33 It's the trade off. If the trade-off is better connection with the people around you, those you can say, "Oh, you have that problem with, like, your dog coming into your office and then making it stinky while you're in the middle of a presentation and try to keep it all professional? I have that problem too."
SWB 13:48 Yeah.
MB 13:50 Yeah. I think that those opportunities though, for connection, we are so used to running away from them. We've developed these habits of saying, "Any opportunities where people might see my flaws or see my struggles, I'm going to bury those far away," that we miss out on the opportunities that those struggles and those flaws offer us to connect to say, "You're going through that? I went through that too. Let me tell you, like, the story of-- And maybe you can learn from it too." Or even just to be able to say, "That stinks, that you're dealing with that."
And we love to connect. Communities are about connection. When we can help each other out, that's a beautiful thing. And I think now, if businesses realize, especially small businesses, realize that they are only as strong as the communities around them, there's such an opportunity then to say, "Yeah, we're dealing with this too. Okay. Here's what you need to know about why we're not open our normal hours or why we're not fully staffed. It's because our employees are dealing with these problems with their families too. So here's how we can better bring our product to you, and maybe what you can know about what our company can do for you." There are those opportunities for conversation and connection now, I think that we've never had before. We shouldn't ignore those opportunities.
SWB 15:07 Yes. I mean, as much as I don't want to sit around and be like, "There's a silver lining to this pandemic." I don't think of it that way. But I do think that there have been some shifts in what we can expect from each other and some shifts in....Yeah in like even how companies are talking, how businesses are talking, where they're sort of acknowledging, like, it's not business as usual. Acknowledging, "Hey, there's some things we can't do, or we've changed stuff, or here's what we're trying out, but we don't know if it's going to work." I hope some of that stays, and I'm wondering, what does it take for an organization to commit to continuing down that path, even after we get out of this pandemic where it's almost inevitable?
MB 15:43 I mean, I think when they start seeing the positive results of trying to connect, the positive results of vulnerability in the form of greater customer loyalty, in the form of maybe expanding their target audience, for better or worse companies measure value and impact in dollars. And when we can demonstrate the evidence in dollars, that's when they tend to sit up and take notice. But I think that we've seen examples of this also before the pandemic. One of the things that I write about in "Trustworthy" is several years ago when Ted was trying to reframe some of the content on its site, so, you know, big organization, big publishing platform. Who doesn't love watching Ted Talks? Turns out, one of the communities that kind of bristles in response to Ted Talks is the broader scientific community. When they see a talk that is perpetuating information that has changed, or maybe information that, that didn't really fall under the scrutiny of an approval of peer review....
They had a talk on their site that was featured because it was a great talk. The delivery was great. Problem was the information was not so great. And over time they came to realize that, "Yeah, other people are mocking this. The science has evolved far beyond what we have here. What should we do about it? People are criticizing us for it." And it's in those moments where an organization can embrace the vulnerability and the feedback of critics or say, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. We need to run away from this. We need to hide this. We need to pretend this never happened. We're just going to maybe quietly pull it off of our site or distract from it." And you can imagine how that works on a personal level too, when somebody calls you out for saying, like, maybe you did something wrong or you've, you've kind of walked into maybe a deeply personal issue where you need to really reckon with your beliefs. Maybe it's about racism or sexism or, or things that you've never really considered that really affect other people.
17:42 Well, do you try to run away from the problem and talk your way out of it? Or do you say, "This is a problem. I want to acknowledge it. I apologize for it. And now how can I be better? Help me be better." And oftentimes I've found that when both people and companies draw their critics closer, when we can operate from that point of vulnerability and confidence of saying, "Okay, I screwed up. How are we going to get better? Can you be a part of helping me get better?" That's when those critics can kind of evolve into being champions. And that's what worked for Ted. They drew their critics closer and they said, "Let's work on this together. Let's prototype in public. Let's brainstorm. How should we approach this content?" And they got a lot of feedback about maybe how to reframe it with adding additional notes, and commentary, and meta content around it to frame things appropriately to say, "Here's additional commentary on it", or, "This is what the broader scientific community is saying now. Here's new information, and here's a more, up-to-date talk that you can reference on it as well."
18:48 They got that kind of feedback, ran with it and made changes so that they could say, "We screwed up. Here's what we're going to do differently so this doesn't happen again." And I think that idea of true repentance, that's something that works on a personal level. That's what our colleagues, that's what our family is, that's what our nearest and dearest critics want from us when we screw up. And that's also what works best for companies that are learning, and living, and trying to do better. And I think now, especially when we're in an era of a lot of social change, we can just look back over the past year and see how Black Lives Matter became more a part of, kind of the cultural vernacular. The Me Too movement rose in such visibility and vigor. And we saw how different companies try to wade into those things to kind of grab onto that hashtag. And we saw how some of them screwed up. Some of them were exposed and grew vulnerable realizing like, "Wait a second. This big external issue that we think is really important, and we want to support with this new ad campaign. It turns out it's an internal issue too."
19:58 And I think the smartest companies, and the companies that will do best moving forward, are the ones that said, "This is an internal issue too, but it's okay. That we're trying to grapple with it. Let's, let's kind of fling open our doors now and bring more people into the conversation. We realized, you know, we do have problems with diversity, and inclusion, and racial equity. So what can we do to bring more people into the top of the funnel to mentor people, encourage them to stay here by changing our culture? Yeah. This is a problem. We want to change externally. We're going to work on changing it internally at the same time. So let us be a beacon for other brands too." So I think there's a lot of opportunities there to lean into the vulnerability and really evoke change.
SWB 20:43 I want to take a very brief, like, put a bookmark in this thing about bringing more diverse people in and bringing more mentorship in. I want to say, and also, recognizing that you probably have very talented people from underrepresented groups that are already there and don't actually need mentorship, just need support.
MB 20:57 Yes.
SWB 20:58 And I say that-- I was like my quick sidebar, I wanted to say only because so many times organizations respond with just mentorship. Which is also, I think, a very safe response.
MB 21:09 Yeah.
SWB 21:09 If that's the only thing you're doing, it's not very vulnerable. Right? But what you're talking about is actually, "Are you willing to air some of your dirty laundry? Like, are you willing to fling the doors open and let people see what's been working and not working what you've done and not done, et cetera." And I think when people do that, you know the response I see it's like-- You mentioned one of the big ones that just like, "Shut down, close it down," right? Like "Hide, hide, hide." The other one I see so much of is just defensiveness. Like, "No, no, no, no, no. Let me explain to you why, what we did wasn't actually problematic, and here are all the reasons we're actually good people." And guess what? That doesn't work either.
MB 21:45 Yeah and the...No number of defensive words, trying to wave a problem away...They won't change public opinion, but more importantly, they don't change the reality of your company. If people are saying there's a problem there, there's a problem there. And as long as people look at it and say, "There's a problem," it means that you need to do something to address it. And I think, yeah, when an organization can say, "We have this problem, so here's what we're going to try to do. Here's how you can hold us accountable for change, but let's share how this is going," that's a wonderful opportunity to really serve as a beacon, to other organizations to say, "Yeah, maybe you need to deal with this too. Let's see the best way to do it together."
SWB 22:29 You know, it's interesting as you talk about that, I think about how hard that feels to people before they do it. But what I know is that once you do it, it actually becomes incredibly freeing because when you are unable to be vulnerable and you're on the defense all the time, like, there's a lot of work to keep that wall up and to constantly be saying like, "No, no, no, no, no. I can't bring in any new perspectives." Once you can just say like, "Okay. I hear that this person is saying that they have an issue. I hear that something isn't working for them," I don't even necessarily have to agree with it or understand it, but I can just take that in and acknowledge that and then say, "Okay, well now I need to look at myself and figure out what to do with this information." It's so freeing. You don't spend all this time trying to, like, convince them or protect yourself. You can just go, "Okay. There's information. Now what?"
MB 23:22 Right. Right. And it's freeing and I would so much rather focus on action than obfuscation.
SWB 23:29 Yeah.
MB 23:30 And on building a better future and building community rather than building that wall.
SWB 23:36 Yeah. Yeah. Like, spend your time and money and energy being better and not trying to convince me that you're better.
MB 23:42 Right.
SWB 23:43 Well, so I, in all of this talk about vulnerability, which is, like, a topic I could talk about for like 17 hours, I want to kind of bring that around to you a little bit, because I also know that when you write a book, that is a vulnerable process.
MB 23:58 Oh yeah, yeah.
SWB 23:59 There's vulnerability there. And I know that this book also, it's your second book and your first book, "Content Strategy at Work" was squarely sort of in the peer community, right? It's like for people who do content strategy related things at work, and/or people who might do content strategy things at work. This book is a broader audience. It's sort of reaching beyond that network that you may have already had. And I'm wondering, you know, as you thought about putting a book out in the world, that's going into this bigger audience, being a little bit more mainstream. What fears did you have to face to feel like you could do that and to go for that?
MB 24:35 Ooh, how much time do you, um, let me tell you how many times I cried in the writing of this book and then in the editorial review process.
SWB 4:44 Oh, I will tell you, I would feel disappointed if it was none, because like, then I would feel like, "Oh my gosh, how many times did I cry?"
MB 24:49 Yeah.
SWB 24:50 But it's okay, also it's good. Everybody if you're thinking about writing a book. It's still, it's okay. Cry a little and then it's still okay.
MB 24:55 Yeah. Yeah. And I think change comes out in, sometimes in the form of, like, all that moisture that is leaving your face. Well, I think in writing this book, like the, maybe that first point of vulnerability was saying, "Yeah, I want to commit to this idea. I think that this idea is important enough that it can't just live in a blog post and snarky tweets, responding to the world." It can't just live in the form of a talk either because I had been digging into this topic and speaking about it for five or six years, I think before the book came out. But I was feeling more and more that, okay, I can be speaking in front of an audience of a few hundred people that can afford to attend this conference. But I want to affect change at a grander scale. I want to make sure that these ideas that I think are so important, I want to get them out into the hands of everybody that can run with them, and a book helps make your thinking more portable and more viral.
25:54 And that's what I wanted. And I think that the way I got out of my own head, the way I got past my own ego, was to focus on that goal, to focus on the vehicle for achieving that goal: the book. More so than on the sort of emotional and personal cost to me. There's something that Billy Shore, the founder of Share Our Strength said in one of his books. I think he said that if the problem you are trying to solve, if the need is so great, you can't, kind of, step away from that work. You will succeed because that need will not let you fail. But basically you cannot turn your attention away from it as long as you feel like the problem is still there. And I think that was kind of a big part of it for me, because I saw how this issue around cynicism and trust and how we empower people, or how people feel disempowered and disenfranchised, and then kind of turn to other sources of information or throw their hands up in the air and say, "Well, everybody lies. They're all out to get you can't trust anybody." I saw that problem was just getting bigger.
27:04 And I think in so much of my work in content strategy and so much of my speaking, I've always tried to marry the vision with the tactics to say, "Yes, there is a brighter and broader future out there. Now here's how we're going to do it. Let's unpack this work and get to work." And the book was my way of saying "Here's how we get to work." And then I think along the way, yeah, there were a lot of those points of tears and, and indecision. Like, first, okay, I bought into this idea. I thought this idea was so important, but then I wondered, "Well, wait, am I really the right person to, to write and talk about this idea? How dare I?"
SWB 27:44 Mmm.
MB 27:45 I have a post-it note that hangs, I've got like a million post-it notes that hang in front of my computer, that stare back at me every day and say, "How dare you try to clean us up? How dare you try to clean your desk?" But this one post-it note says, "How dare I? Well, I just keep doing. And then I dare some more." Not super eloquent, but that idea of kind of like, just keep doing the work and then the work gets done. I think kind of living in active voice that way, of saying, "Well, I am going to keep plugging away at it." And as I continue the research, as I continue interviewing people, that is how I gain more knowledge to be able to speak about this topic. And then as I first kind of started approaching publishers, I started getting pushback from some academic presses saying, "Well, this isn't really an academic book, and hey, you're not an academic. How dare you?" And like, it's true. And then I wondered also, well, I'm not a big marketing guru, and I hate that term. I'm not somebody...I don't like leaning into the term “expert” because I feel like our industry is changing so quickly. And Doing content strategy does not make you an expert. It makes you a content strategist.
28:57 I don't want expertise. I want perspective. That's what I want to share. And I think so by continuing to do the work, by interviewing people, cultivating more conversations, sketching out kind of how these conversations fit together and the different ideas that I could pull from them, that's what allowed me to keep moving forward. And then as I worked with, with my developmental editor, Jill, she was amazing at helping me kind of continue to interrogate the material and ask more of it to say, well, am I really meeting the needs of my reader? Somebody that's going to pick up this book, how are they going to use it? And she kept asking me as I was gathering these interviews and drawing conclusions from them, “Well, so what?” And I think it's forcing that conversation of, “so what,” how do you use this? What can people do if all these things in this book come true, then what is that new future that we can embrace? That forced me to reckon with the fact that I don't think I had ever written a conclusion in 25, 30 years….
29:58 Yeah. There was a little bit of therapy, I think, that went into that and, I think readers should be happy that it was therapy between me and my editor rather than therapy between me and somebody picking up this book. That they're getting the results of that. Yeah, so I mean even just for that, like, I was unpacking the fact, like, okay, how come it is the fact that in a lot of what I'm writing, I like to lay out the evidence, and then I might as well be saying like, “Okay, QED, everybody that’s good. We're all on the same page. Let's move on to the next thing.” And I wondered why that was, and she forced me to reckon with the fact that, I think going back to, I don't know, middle school or high school, I was always worried that I'd be the person kind of coming into a discussion and saying, “Oh, but what about this?” and then to have other people turn and say to me, like, “Well, duh, everybody knows that you're stating the obvious.” And I think that is my biggest fear: stating the obvious. Because maybe that means that other people are just going to kind of blow it off and say, “Well, that's not relevant. That's not important. Why are you wasting your time? Why are you wasting our time? How dare you?”
SWB 31:03 Wow. Margot. Wow.
MB 31:04 That was a lot to unpack! And she pointed out to me that so many things that are obvious to me because of my experience in the industry….Yeah. I'm not an academic. I teach in a graduate program, but I don't have a master's degree or a PhD or something. I'm not an industry analyst, but I work with a lot of industries. She pointed out to me that the experiences that I do have are what make my offering unique and my voice distinct.
SWB 31:35 Yes. Yes, yes yes.
MB 31:36 Yeah. That was a lot to kind of grapple with. So if there are good strong conclusions in the book, it's because we had a lot of those painful conversations along the way.
SWB 31:48 You know, it's so common. I hear this so often where people will look around and say, “Well, here are all the things that I'm not.” And it's like, “Yeah, you're not those things.” Yeah, you're not a PhD level researcher. You're just not. But then pausing and saying like, “Well, but what am I and what do I bring to this? And what does the experience that I have give me that other people wouldn't have. And that's not a comparative thing in the sense of like, “Oh one is more valid than the other.” I mean, some types of expertise are really important for certain subjects, but, you know, but it's more about being able to look and say like, “Okay, no, like. You brought something specific to this” and to let that exist, instead of saying like, “Oh, I need to pretend as if I'm somebody I'm not,” which is tempting, but isn't very vulnerable.
MB 32:32 Right right.
SWB 32:33 I love you talking about that. Yeah.
MB 32:34 And when somebody wants to be your friend, when somebody wants to read your book, when they want to attend your talk, it's because they want you. Otherwise, they'd pick up the book, or listen to the talk, or go hang out with somebody else. Being able to like, look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “What is uniquely me? What makes me distinct.” That's hard. And I think it goes back to that point of vulnerability. We have so much discomfort about confronting, not our strengths and flaws, but our humanity. What makes us unique that the idea then of sharing that with other people, that's scary, but it turns out that is the most rewarding thing for both us and for those other people.
SWB 33:31 This is so great. I love talking about all of this and we've gone so deep talking about you and your work. I would love to actually take this moment and say, let's transition to a little bit of a segment about our listeners because I think that this is a great moment to start thinking about giving them some advice. I know that a lot of people listening are listening, and they're like, “Wow, this is cool. Like, this is really smart. She wrote this book. This is interesting.” And like, “Oh wow. It's so great to hear her talk about this”. But it's still really hard for them to imagine doing some of these things for themselves, or maybe they are kind of like, “Oh, I'd like to do some speaking, but I don't really know how to start that.” So I'd love to get some of your perspective on what other people can do. So are you ready to help some people out?
MB 34:13 Yes. Let's do this.
SWB 34:14 Okay. So first of all, you talked about the fact that letting yourself sort of be more human and letting yourself have that perspective come out, that it's so rewarding even though it feels scary at the same time. I know it can be risky. You know, the more that you kind of let yourself be visible, the more that you have opinions that can be disagreed with. Like, somebody might disagree with you. You might get pushback from a publisher like you did, you know, how do you deal with that? How do you put up with, or sort of learn to live with not everybody understanding you or not everybody clicking with you?
MB 34:50 Personally, I don't deal with it very well. Knowing that there's someone out in the world that dislikes me or thinks less of me? Oh, that’s really, really tough. And I think whenever that happens, because it's a when not an if. Whenever that has happened, when I, when I heard back from publishers saying like, “Yeah, you're not who we want”-
SWB 35:11 “We’re gonna pass.”
MB 35:12 Yeah. Yeah. That's always awesome. Or even hearing from colleagues that are like, “Hmm, I disagree. I don't know.” For me, it's a long time that I'm trying to make shorter between getting that kind of feedback, kind of sitting with it and feeling like “Oh, they don't like me.” And then remembering like, “Well, wait, there are other people that do like me, and maybe I can also learn from this feedback,” either in how I'm delivering, what I'm delivering, or who I'm approaching when I'm making that kind of emotional gambit to say, like, “Do you like this thing that I've made, do you like these ideas that I have? Do you like me? Maybe I need to package that in a different way, or maybe I just need to bring that to a different audience.” So that's tough.
And I think the idea of putting yourself out there around certain viewpoints and values for many businesses that's a tough and scary thing. Cause when you put a stake in the ground, you're saying, “This is what we believe. We're in support of, maybe these issues around immigration or these different social issues.” It means that yes, you're going to alienate some people. And then you're going to find more of the people that now that you've kind of put up your flag, you've shot off that flare saying, “This is who we are. Now they're going to be able to find you. And if you stay neutral, if you don't ever tell the world who you are, you don't get to find more of the people that want to hear more about who you are and are like that themselves.
SWB 36:34 Yeah. You stay in that shrug territory.
MB 36:47 Yeah. No, nobody likes a shrugger.
SWB 36:50 Right. So for those people who...they're done shrugging, they're done keeping themselves small, they want to speak up and they have something to say. If somebody wanted to start getting into public speaking or getting into publishing their work, and they're at like, step one. Where would you suggest they get started?
MB 37:09 Yeah, so you're ready to kind of let your freak flag fly, I guess.
SWB 37:14 Yes, exactly!
MB 37:15 I'd say first don't call it your “freak flag”. It is just your flag. It's you saying, “Well, this is who I am, and I know now there are other people out there like me or that value these ideas and wanna kind of tease them apart.” I would say to start speaking: start speaking. And I think you can look at different organizations on smaller stages. Like meetups always want to bring in new speakers. Many of them offer kind of, like, lightning talk opportunities. If you're just trying to put together an idea in the form of a talk, maybe share your work, I think it's okay to approach a meet up and say, “This is something I've been working on. I'm looking to gain more experience speaking about it, but also I want to get in touch with more people that are on board with this idea. Can we share this in kind of an open forum?” And maybe you put together a five minute talk, maybe you put together a 25 minute talk.
Maybe you start out with, kind of, more of like a Q&A among colleagues. I think there are a lot of those opportunities. And then right now especially there are more of those opportunities because we're all on Zoom, and you're not bound by a geography. So you can approach more organizations, or you can kind of take to Twitter and say, “Hey, on this date, I'm going to be speaking about this. And I will be hosting the zoom session myself.” Or work with an organization like Women Talk Design, which is a wonderful platform for people that are starting speaking or interested in starting speaking and maybe want training on it or want more forums for it. I think they're great. Innovation Women: they also offer similar platforms and training like that. So I think there are ways to find more outlets for your voice. And also if you want to start writing about it, start. Start on your blogs. Start on Medium. I'm still trying to figure out where the best place is to be publishing on those things, and the best feedback that I've gotten is “try it everywhere.” Try it, fling it around, see where it sticks.
39:07 And I think that applies to platforms, to audiences. I think the worst thing that you can do is to not try. But once you start putting it out there, that's something to which people can respond. That's how you get feedback. That's how you learn. Well, did that platform work? Did that time slot work? And then you can modify.
SWB 39:27 Yeah. I think what I'm hearing there is that people can get so spun around thinking about, “Well, is this the right place for this? Is this the right way to start? Is this the right platform to be using?” whatever it is. And I mean, when you ask yourself, “Is this the right thing? Am I going to do it wrong?” that just creates this situation where you've raised the stakes on yourself. Like, “Oh no, if I do it wrong, then what?” And most of the time it's like, well, If you try it out and it doesn't get the response you wanted, then you can try something else. But like, It's not actually the end of the world. It just feels like it.
MB 40:01 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I emember first time I tweeted. It was 2008 and I was sitting in a bar in Portland with my then boss. We'd gone there to watch a presidential debate, and I remember she had her phone in front of-- I love that we went to a sports bar to watch the presidential debate. But, I remember she had her phone in front of her and I was like, “Oh, I want to talk about this stuff with more people. More people need to be paying attention to this.” And she was like, “Are you on Twitter yet?” And I was like, “No, let's help me on this path.” And I remember I wrote something. She helped me set up an account there and I tweeted something, and then I was so nervous. Cause I was like, “Wait, did I word it right?” For my three followers at that point. But I cared so much. And, I have to say like now, yeah, I still care. Like, I want to make sure that I'm spelling things right. Do I spell things correctly all the time? Hell no. Twitter, you still don't have that edit button. So I...Oftentimes I'll delete my tweets that have the typos and then retweet them. And it's fine.
SWB 41:01 It's fine.
MB 41:02 Yeah, we get so stuck in our own heads that we worry about making the thing perfect, when you should just make the thing. And I mean, in working on “Trustworthy”...it's like a six year path I think from when I first started digging into this topic and speaking about it. I think I've spoken on it, before I started writing the book, I’d probably done 20 or 30 talks where every time I was learning more, getting feedback from the audience, maybe I had done another interview, continuing to evolve my ideas. And that was all before I had developed that “voice volume, vulnerability framework.” Like, that didn't happen until like maybe 18 months ago. So I was continuing to prototype in public and get feedback along the way. And that was a long path. I was going to say a long path to perfection. No, it was a long path to publishing. And yeah, the thing is out in a book now and that's, you know, it's hard to--
SWB 41:57 Shh, no, we don't talk about the part where it's imperfect though. It's great. Once it's printed, it's done and that's what matters.
MB 42:04 Right. But we forget though that iteration is a form of creation. And that's the only way any of this happens or gets better.
SWB 42:13 Okay, I think that is the note to end on. So Margot, everybody's going to have to follow you online or buy a copy of “Trustworthy” so that they can keep getting your brilliance. Where is the best place for people to keep up with your work?
MB 42:26 You can find me on Twitter at @MBloomstein follow stuff around the book there, but I'm going to be talking about it maybe in your town if geography matters to you, cause it's all on Zoom anyhow. The hashtag is #trustworthybook and you can find it everywhere books are sold.
SWB 42:43 Everywhere books are sold. Margot, thank you so much for being here.
MB 42:46 Thank you. This was so much fun!
SWB 42:51 Did you hear Margot there at the end? “Iteration is a form of creation,” y'all, and that is the subject of today's closing segment: you've got this. That's where I help you take the advice from our guests and put it into practice in your life because you've got this. So let's talk about iteration. In design and tech circles, we talk a lot about iteration. We talked about beta versions. We talk about minimum viable products. We talk about, you know, releasing frequently. But a lot of us are not comfortable with that when it comes to our personal work, when it comes to sharing our ideas. We hold them close. We keep them hidden. We tell ourselves that we'll share them once they're just right. Perfectionism is alive and well.
And for a lot of us, perfectionism even seems like a good thing. Who doesn't want to have high standards? But the truth is perfectionism doesn't lead us to perfection, unfortunately. It actually keeps us stuck where we are because we rarely reach brilliance alone, locked in our heads. We reach billions when we share, when we get feedback, when we form new connections, when we tweak, and when we, yes. iterate. So if you won't let anyone hear your ideas as you develop them, then you miss out on all of that. So if perfectionism doesn't lead to perfection, what's it really doing? Well, it's actually a fear response.
It comes up when we're afraid of what other people will think. And it's often tied to some deep rooted feelings of worthlessness, of questioning our own value as people. Because when we don't have a secure sense of our own worth, well, it's really, really hard to face criticism. It's really hard to put something out there and not know how it will be perceived because it can just tear us down. And so what this ends up doing is it also shuts us off from learning. We fixate on all the ways that we're flawed. We fixate and all of our “failures,” and it shuts us down. It stops our growth.
44:46 So if you're a perfectionist, here's what I invite you to do: spend some time taking a long, hard look at that perfectionism. Get out a notebook and free write about it. Where did you learn it? Who taught you to be a perfectionist? What else were they teaching you? What tends to trigger your perfectionism? What are some of the fears that are underneath it? Where does shame crop up for you? Where does shame keep you from sharing? And what's all this perfectionism costing you? What's it keeping you from in your life? Then zoom out and look at what you wrote down. What are you noticing or learning about your perfectionism? Can you see some space where you might be able to let down your guard, where you might be able to try iterating instead
For more on this head to activevoicehq.com/podcast. I'll be posting these prompts and other resources to help you work through your perfectionism. So you can bring all those brilliant ideas to the world. Take a look, and let me know if it's helpful. I remember you've got this.
45:46 That's it for this week's episode of strong feelings. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Head to activevoicehq.com for all the details about our coaching and leadership programs and to get our newsletter full of even more strong feelings. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced the Emily Duncan. Our theme music is “Deprogrammed” by Philly's own Blowdryer. Check them out at blowdryer.bandcamp.com. Thanks again to Margot Bloomstein for being our guest today. And thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, give us a rating wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. See you later.