Going. Ahead. With Gage: Interview with Sydney Williams, Founder of Sydney: Unfiltered

It’s almost the end of June (woah), it’s hot (always), it’s Friday (yay!), and it’s time for another Going. Ahead. With Gage (#GAWG)! My next guest is someone who’s not about drinking the Kool-Aid, but the sharing #TruthJuice and is taking life and her career by the horns – Sydney Williams, Founder of Sydney: Unfiltered!

Your background is inspiring because it hasn’t been a straight line and you’re doing what you’re passionate about. What are 5 things you’ve learned throughout your career?

All of the “5 Things” I started to think about or share were super cliché and things you’ve heard a million times before. Business speak. Corporate jargon. And that’s not my jam. I’m inquisitive, introspective, and really enjoy reflecting on where I’ve been and visualizing where I want to go. With that in mind, here are a few questions I’ve learned to ask myself over the years:

Am I doing this out of fear or love? This is most easily explained in context of my diabetes diagnosis last year. For years, I’ve been overweight and doing fad diets/workouts, trying to get #skinnyAF and all that mess. In 2016, I set out on a journey to love the skin I’m in and honor my inner athlete. In September 2017, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. When I found out, I vowed to love myself through the process. I’ve lost nearly 60 pounds since my diagnosis, and it’s not because I’m in the gym 2 hours a day and eating only steamed chicken and broccoli.

Instead of approaching weight loss from a place of fear (of being fat), and choosing love (for myself, as I am, right now in this moment today), the weight has literally melted off with minimal physical effort.

Professionally, I look at this like “am I doing this out of fear (for my financial situation) or love (of my art)” – and I’ve been choosing fear and love for forever. If you look at my resume, the path is not straight because I give myself a taste of love, and then run back to fear for a second, and then love myself again.

What do I need right now? This also stemmed from my Diabetes diagnosis. As a diabetic, I monitor my blood sugar levels constantly. The four factors that play into my sugar levels are: diet, exercise, medications, and stress. If my sugars are high, I review what I ate, how I moved, if I took my medicine, and where my stress levels are at from the day before. Then I make adjustments.

Once I figured this out, I realized I could do this with damn near everything. I realized I had a choice. And I could take action. Professionally, what did I need? What did I need in my marriage? What did I need from my social circle? What did I need to fill up my creative cup?

How do I want to feel? I learned about a concept called “core desired feelings” from a woman named Danielle LaPorte. Her book, The Desire Map, walks you through a new way of thinking about goals. In addition to getting super specific with what you want to achieve by when and how, she goes another layer deeper: How do you want to feel?

I want to write books, go on long hiking trips, and change the world. All good things to want. I’ve got a nice path planned for how to get there, but more importantly, how do I want to feel while I’m pursuing this and when I get there?

For me, in my life and work, I want to feel generous, grounded, and joy. I want to be generous with my time and talent, that fills me up. I want to feel grounded – and for me, that’s when my legs and lungs are working overtime hiking up a steep incline to get to a gorgeous vista. I want to feel joy in all of this because I’ve been wading through loss and trauma and emotional garbage for the last 7-8 years of my life and I’m ready to feel joy. I can cultivate joy, because I know what activities, people, and places bring me joy, and I can choose to do/see more of those things/people.

I love your Sydney: Unfiltered website and the #TruthJuice you speak that’s on any and all topics. What made you start your blog and stick with it?

I started the blog in September 2008, the beginning of my fall semester senior year at USF. See, back in my day, we didn’t learn about social media in college. I taught myself. My senior project was the blog and maintaining my social media platforms. I shared my writings on New Media and conducted analytics reports to see how much my followers/traffic had grown on the website and Twitter at the time.

The blog is what got me my first job. Well, technically, that was Twitter, but the blog got me to a conference that got me in the room that got me tweeting and got me noticed by my first boss.

More than all of that, writing is how I process. I better understand myself and the world around me through writing, so that’s what keeps it going. I’ve gone through periods where I had PLENTLY to say but didn’t publish it. Looking back, I wish I had, but I was scared.

At my first job, I was told by an assigned mentor that I needed to “tone it down” if I wanted to make friends at the agency. I wasn’t equipped to deal with that information in a healthy manner, so I did was I was told, like a good girl, and toned it down.

I’m glad I got over that! Since I started writing regularly again in 2015, ramping up pretty heavily since my diabetes diagnosis, I feel muuuuch better.

What project have you worked on that you’re the proudest of and why?

I’m most proud of the documentary I was in earlier this year. I’ve been on the other side of the camera for a long time working on the production/planning/account side of commercial projects. So, to not only be on the creative side again, but to have it be about my journey since my diabetes diagnosis was a really special experience for me. My husband and I quickly bonded with the crew, and we are working on a pilot for a new storytelling platform they’re creating for the patients they profile. I’m really excited to see where we go with it and where this part of the journey takes me!

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received and from who?

Shortly after I joined the first agency I worked at, a colleague told me that my #1 job was to make my boss look like a genius for hiring me. As a younger employee, that was a task my people-pleasing self had no trouble tackling. As a more seasoned professional now with some management experience, I LOVE LOVE LOVE this advice even more, because now I have seen the cycle through, and understand what it means to be supported in that way by the folks on my various teams.

What advice do you have for junior level employees wanting to make it to the C-Suite one day?

You’re never too young to be in the C-Suite. Trust your gut when it comes to you career. If you feel like you’re ready for more and you’re not getting it – are you asking for it? You have to advocate for yourself. There is not a pre-determined path to a C-Suite. Our generation does business differently. I said I wanted to be a CMO by the time I was 35 and got it at 32. And once I got there, I realized I didn’t like it, and that I was chasing a dream that wasn’t mine. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

So my advice is to get clear on who you are WITHOUT that title, without your job, without your career, and then bring all of you to the role. Once you get up to C-Suite status, you’re putting in some serious time and have a tremendous amount of responsibility.

Also, all C-Suites are not created equal. My CMO title (short duration at an early-stage startup) does not carry the same weight as the CMO of a Fortune 500 company.

What’s one of the most difficult decisions you’ve made in your career and what did you learn from that experience?

I’ve made a bunch of difficult career decisions:

I left my dream job and dream hobby (skydiving) when my boss/coach was convicted of raping his 14-year-old niece. At the time, I was still reeling from Adam’s death and as the person in charge of PR/Marketing/Events for his business, I wasn’t going to clean up his mess. As a woman, as a rape survivor, and as a decent human being with a moral compass, I could no longer continue to be affiliated with or generate revenue for that business or that man. It was difficult to recover from, but it was actually one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made.

I left a really swanky corporate marketing job to take a chance on a friend’s company. Looking back, I was getting stale at the agency. I had joined in a pretty low point in my life, down to my last dollars in my bank account, and getting back to a regular salary and benefits was exactly what I needed at the time. But I was put into an account director role and was a creative stuck in spreadsheet land. I was good at spreadsheet land so that’s where I was typecast for that particular role. From that departure, I learned that I don’t need a six-figure salary to be happy.

Most recently, I left the company that I thought could be my final destination, professionally. I worked my ass off and got the CMO gig at my friend’s company. I joined and quickly realized a product line had been built, but not a business, so we added Co-Founder to my title so I could take more ownership of what needed to be built there. It was clear it would be a while until we got around to what I came here for: Marketing. So, I started wearing other hats: investor, operations, production, managing inventory/supplies, etc. Ultimately, in witnessing what this woman was building and seeing her dreams come to fruition, I realized I could no longer ignore my dreams. Turns out the timing was appropriate for my departure because when I realized I couldn’t ignore my dreams anymore, she told me she couldn’t afford my salary and wouldn’t be able to for the foreseeable future, and seemingly out of nowhere it was over.

In this experience, I learned what boundaries I needed to establish, how to establish them, and how to hold true to them. Most importantly, I finally, FINALLY chose me! I didn’t have anything lined up before it ended. No backup plan.

Honestly, the last 36 days have been some of the most challenging of my life, but at the end of the day, I’m inspired. I know whatever comes next will be incredible, and in the meantime, I’m doing my best to enjoy the break.

I love book recommendations to help me grow in my career and challenge my thinking. What books would you recommend as a must-read for career growth and just for fictional fun?

Career growth comes from personal growth, so I like to start there. The #1 book I would recommend to any woman right now would be “Playing Big” by Tara Mohr. Following that, “The Big Leap” by Gay Hicks. For a great leadership read, I love “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott.