Plateaus, Momentum, and Transparency
Hi! So it’s been a hot minute, huh? Actually, and a cold minute, too. And another hot one. IDK, weather is weird. ;)
Anyway! If you’ve been following on Facebook or YouTube, there’s been a bit more activity in each of those places than on this blog/journal/whatever but things have been at a bit of a standstill for a while. Not forgotten, not ignored, but paused, mostly because I realized that I am not designed to do things on my own and really need a business partner for this. I’ve talked about that some in a YouTube video (both in a regular video nearly a year ago, and in several BookCraft live sessions) but never managed to get a post up here about it.
I definitely wrote a post. Entirely wrote it in my brain. Mostly wrote it in a post. Saved the draft. Never got back to it. Ironically, it was a post about ADHD and “body doubling” by having someone else present to keep you motivated as well as on track. Guess I needed someone else making sure I got it posted.
But I digress.
(Again. Because that’s going to be the name of my memoirs one day, I’m quite certain.)
My point is, I’ve been actively talking to and looking for someone to partner with me, and I’ve finally found someone who we’re at least going to give it a shot! Now, with something I’m this passionate about and that’s been this many years in the building, and with which I have this many different factors in mind, it’s super important that anyone else getting onboard with it have time to acclimate to all the different factors before necessarily being 100% locked into anything, but I do at least have someone I’m working with for now and that I’m very optimistic about being able to continue working with, and actual stuff is in motion. I don’t want to be cagey or keep what that stuff is from you, because you know I’m all about transparency, but neither do I want to promise on things that I end up not being able to deliver so I’ll tell you where we currently are rather than where I hope we’ll be:
We’re in the wee stages of planning more of the administrative and behind-the-scenes stuff, meeting regularly and doing basically all the boring-but-necessary research and numbers-crunching and such like. The stuff I’m not as good at, which is why I needed to find someone to work with who is!
But something interesting is happening—I don’t want to say in my life, but let’s say, within my observational sphere. I’m watching two different companies that I have varying degrees of association with deal with some struggles. Now, you all know (if you’ve consumed any of my posts anywhere more than just this one blog post) that I’m all about keeping it real and being as honest with you all as I can about both my struggles and my successes, and as the company grows and there’s more to be honest and transparent with you about, I fully intend to keep that up to the best of my ability. I am not, however, about putting others on blast, so I’m not going to reveal all the details of the companies involved. I’ll say what I can, though, to explain what this has to do with Pixie Elegance and with my heart for this company.
One of the two companies is one that I believe in the idea of and I believe in what the founders have been aiming for, but for several years I’ve been wary of how some of it is being approached. With this company, within the past week, I have been aware of some specific incidents that are related to communication. The message disseminated from leadership to the employees as a result of this was, in essence, “There are things that do not need to be communicated because they only lead to problems, work things out in your heads instead of out loud.” And yet, from what things I could observe (and of course without being more directly involved I could only observe so much) it seems like a lot of the problems were because things that were communicated were misunderstandings and miscommunications and it is more communication, not less, that might benefit them.
This of course has had me thinking about how much I want to make sure my employees at Pixie Elegance feel free to discuss whatever issues they have with me, with each other. I don’t mean gossip, but in my experience, when people are free to ask questions and openly question things, the desire to whisper about it and accidentally spread assumptions that turn into gossip is significantly lower.
But then there’s this other company. I know fewer of the details involved in this one (and I don’t know all the details with the other one either) but it’s a media company with several smaller media factions under it, and there have been some accusations made against the leadership of the company about the lovingness and inclusivity involved, including accusations of racism. There was an initial response post made by leadership in their Facebook group but many people were questioning the legitimacy of the post because the details were kept so vague and there is a known factor of NDAs involved in something somewhere along the way.
And that’s why I’m typing this post at 4:30 in the morning instead of, like . . . sleeping. Because I woke up and was tossing and turning and just couldn’t sleep because this was heavy on my heart. My brain kept racing between different things that I know, things that I hope, and things that I fear.
I know that the leadership of that company has the best intentions when it comes to inclusivity and non-discriminatory practices. I don’t know them personally, but there’s a degree of “you can act the part and say words in public but you never know what’s happening behind closed doors,” and then there’s a degree to which when you consumer media from someone in several different forms for several years, no it’s not the same as knowing them, but people simply have times that they’re more guarded than others and there are things that you can hear in their voices especially in the less guarded moments. Things can be edited, sure, but I fully trust that the leadership of this company has no such intentions, and I can only imagine how they’re hurting as they’re navigating this.
I also know that things get messy with humans involved. We’re messy people. We misunderstand things. We have different sensibilities from one another, and what is a matter of letting something go to avoid it becoming a big messy thing for one person is tacit agreement to another. What love and inclusion look like would be define differently by almost every one of the most loving and humanitarian people I know. How much more so when you mix in people who, while not necessarily being intentionally unkind, are sometimes unthinking on one factor as their minds are focused on another? (That’s entirely leaving out people who are, in fact, unkind and even downright cruel. I’m operating on the assumption that this would be with people vetted to the best of the leadership’s abilities to have good and kind people in place, but nobody is going to think exactly the same or run things exactly the same way the original founder would do so.)
I know that non-disclosure tends to lead people to imagine things worse than what there actual was, which is a big part of why I am so dedicated to transparency; but I also know that it is sometimes legally necessary. So is being vague in a way that apologizes without admitting culpability. It absolutely sucks, but it is how our legal system often keeps things locked down.
I hope that these accusations are proven largely untrue, and that any that may be true are things that are dealt with appropriately. I hope that this company comes through this relatively unscathed, because frankly, I trust what the intentions of the founders’ hearts are and in that trust I don’t believe they deserve to have their company ripped out from under them or even just to have it take a major hit as a result of some things allegedly having happened within the company but not from them directly.
I fear my own intentions. Not my intentions for a transparent company, but how much I’ll be able to be as transparent as I wish to be, and how much others might decide that any non-disclosures mean that I’m hiding something rather than that I’m obligated under legal necessity to keep something private for safety’s sake.
The biggest thing, though, is that I feel things very deeply, I care very deeply. I have ideas, I enjoy marketing, I’m passionate about the arts and artisan goods and regaining the origin of products and the true meaning of a honed craft, but let me tell you, I love people. Deeply. I cannot, do not wish harm on anyone. I can’t fathom what that’s like. I tend to assume the best intentions more often than not, partly because I really think that most people have good intentions but don’t necessarily have the whole picture of how their actions/words are affecting others. There are definitely exceptions to that, not only in people who quite obviously don’t have good intentions, but also in certain actions or words that if someone tries to claim it’s with good intentions their “good intentions” involve harming other people, and that I cannot abide—but I still don’t wish harm on those people, I just wish I knew the magic words to instill love and compassion for fellow humans into their hearts!
I want to build something here. I want to build something that reconnects people to how the products they use are made. I want to build something that connects artisans and consumers. I want to build something that matters. And I fear having accusations made one day because it’s impossible to keep everyone happy, because it’s impossible to closely watch every single member within an organization, especially as it grows, and because it’s impossible to (safely, legally, and with a stable company) stay completely transparent about everything no matter how much I might want to.
So I just wanted to take some times to talk about all of that now. I don’t have any conclusions here, I don’t have any great wise words or brilliant thoughts on moving forward, other than that I’m excited to finally be off the plateau and moving forward again! But the juxtaposition of those two situations in my mind, overlapping over getting moving once more with Pixie Elegance . . . it means something in my brain and in my heart, you know? I just felt that needed to be expressed somewhere, if only for the sake of getting a bit of the weight off my heart, and for putting it out there for my own accountability.
When my company gets big enough for it to matter, this post will still be there for me to look back to and say, “Yeah. That’s my heart. That’s what it’s all about. And that balance between transparency and legality is no easier to traverse than I thought it would be (probably even harder) but my heart for people is the thing I need to remember.”
