Hello friends, and welcome to the second wave of Covid-19!! 🦠🦠🦠 Ok, we kid, we kid, welcome to another edition of the 4 AM Report.
Wait. We DON’T kid! We ARE inching into the dreaded “second wave” and BOY are we not ready for this! 🤬
Rolling shutdowns are already occurring, and we’re thinking it’s going to be a long, cold winter. 🥶😷🥶
Our guest on the podcast this week, Gini Dietrich, is an author, featured speaker, and owner of a 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 Chicago based 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 PR/Marketing/Comms agency – plus she’s super hilarious, ridiculously smart, and an all-around great person.
She’s also been juggling a full household on lockdown – kid, husband, and NEW PUPPY 😳🥴🐶💩 – while ALSO being the powerhouse behind umpteen numbers of properties nestled under the Spin Sucks brand.
Because spin does indeed, suck.
She writes about all things marketing, PR, and communications, and she has faithfully tracked every single day of lockdown, on her Facebook account. Seriously. Every single day.
Hilarity, pain, frustration, fatigue, resilience, love, shock, and joy are just a few of the myriad emotions she’s written about, since mid-March.
Can. Relate!
She also started a series on the Spin Sucks site, called My Hot Mess, which featured industry peeps sharing how they were dealing with this new upside down world.
As the summer rolled around, and more of us were getting into the swing of things (LOL right?) she switched it up – and Survive and Thrive was born. Susan wrote her own Survive and Thrive story, you can read it here!
On the show this week we talked:
🦠 Life during this looming second wave of Covid-19.
🤯 The emotional shift that comes with “Oh no. Not AGAIN!”
😴 Its impact on sleep…glorious, delicious sleep…why hast thou forsaken us??
💣 The “six-month wall” of burnout people hit when faced with uncertainty and upheaval.
🎉 Plus, when you do grab that elusive sleep, the incredible power of dreams!
Here’s a sampling:
The Loss of Rituals and Routine
“I remember having a conversation with somebody, probably like, late April, early May. And he said to me, ‘Well, nothing’s really changed for you. You’ve worked from home for so long.’ And I was like, ‘Except that I have a seven-year-old sitting next to me and my husband’s over there working. And I haven’t been alone in seven months at all. I mean, I still have my office and my computer and all that. And that hasn’t changed, but everything else has. The ritual used to be, I’d get up and work for a couple of hours, and then I get my daughter ready, and take her to school on the subway. And then I would go and ride my bike. And then I would start my day, the second part of my day, because I’d already worked a couple hours, but then I would start the meetings and things like that. And that’s all gone. So, there’s none of that sort of, “my time.”
Living in a House of Cards
“One of the things that the experts have been talking about is how women especially, have sort of built this life that is a house of cards. We’ve tried to perfect it in a way that allows us to do what we need to do from a business perspective. But it’s so reliant on so many other people. And you know, it used to be, like, we wouldn’t leave our village, right. And we had the village. I mean, they say it takes a village to raise children. And I think that’s really true – we would have parents and grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles, in our village, but we’ve dispersed, and grown and all those kinds of things. But what this year has done is it’s taken that and just completely demolished it because you couldn’t have people in your home, you couldn’t have your nanny or your housekeeper or your babysitter, you couldn’t even have parents or grandparents come and help. So, this house of cards just was demolished. And I think what we’re finding now as people, and especially here, well you guys to where it’s not country wide, like the regulations, and the guidelines and all that are not the same. Some people have their kids back in school full time, and some kids have it as a hybrid, and some, you know, are completely distance learning and some don’t have kids, and some are helping aging parents. And so, there are all these pieces of it, where I think in the beginning [of Covid-19] everybody was in it at the same time. And we were all certainly in different boats, we were all sort of rowing in the same direction. And today, we’re not. And I’m noticing that people are less patient and less forgiving of, you know, the [seven-year-old!] intern sitting next to you.”
Survive and Thrive!
“I don’t think anybody would have guessed anything going into this year. But, um, several years ago had a business coach who said to me, ‘You need to decide if you want to be a really good communicator, or if you want to be a really good company grower.’ And I was like, okay, that’s fair. I decided I wanted to be a really good company grower, and I’ve done that. I miss doing the work. And what this year has allowed me to do is to get back to doing the work. I sit on two boards as their chief marketing officer, and I’m serving as an interim Chief Content Officer for another company. And I think I’ll be serving as the chief communications officer for a fourth company. So, I definitely have my hands full. But I’m doing really interesting work for clients that allows me to build process and build a team and then go on my merry way. I would not have anticipated this. And I love it. I think at the time, I chose the right path to be a really good company grower and do that and build my business. But I have missed doing the work.”
This was a super-fun interview – and seriously – there was CHAOS! LOL Give yourself a mental health break and have a listen!
If you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at c+p digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
