Episode 27 transcript: How to optimize your hybrid or remote work environment with Melissa Romo

Podcast Introduction

[00:00:00] Melissa: The adage out of sight, out of mind is something that plagues people who work remotely, right? Like we are always thinking, do people know I'm here? Do people know what I'm doing? And, this is especially problematic for people who are new in a company, and they don't know, they don't have a network built up within the company, or people who are right out of college and are starting in their first job, and they don't even know what it means to work in a company. There's just a real angst that I just don't think we've been talking about these.

[00:00:30] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life. But what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath, depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma. And join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset. Took courageous action and designed the life that they always wanted to live.

[00:01:05] Aneta: Hey there. I'm so excited for you to listen to today's episode. My guest is Melissa Romo. Melissa is the author of two books, the historical novel, Blue-Eyed Son, and the forthcoming non-fiction book business title. Your Resource is Human, how Empathetic Leadership Can Help Remote Teams Rise Above. Melissa has spent her career in marketing and advertising working for multinational companies and brands around the world, including jobs in Warsaw, Paris, London, and New York. I enjoyed our conversation. We talked about why she wrote her upcoming book and how every leader and every employee who is working right now in this hybrid or remote work environment should be reading this book. We talked a lot about how to balance working full-time and raising a family writing. Two books while still doing that, and we also just spent some time talking about what it means to actually be in this new work environment and what companies will need to do to keep employees engaged and thriving. I think you're going to enjoy our discussion. Take a listen.

Podcast Interview:

[00:02:12] Aneta: Hi Melissa. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:15] Melissa: Hi, Aneta. I'm so glad to be here.

[00:02:17] Aneta: I've been so excited to have you on the show, and I think this is actually the best time because I know that you have a new book coming out that we're going to be talking about. But for those that don't know a little bit more about you and your background, can you share a little bit about your background?

[00:02:36] Melissa: Yeah, so I am a veteran of marketing and advertising. I started in advertising literally, Madison Avenue when I was, I don't know, I think 23, 24 years old, and worked on making commercials for gif peanut butter. That was my first job in New York. And I just loved advertising. I fell in love with it because I was so fascinated by the way that words and pictures and ideas could get people to part with their money. I thought that was really fascinating. But, it's just a very persuasive art form and I really loved it. And so I've been doing that my whole career. About eight years into my advertising career, I decided to get a business degree. So I got an MBA, and I don't think everybody needs to do that. But in my case, I studied history in my undergraduate degree, and I just felt like I needed the kind of business education that I didn't get in college. So that was good actually for me. It added a lot. And then since then, I've always been on the client side. And the most fun thing about being on the client side is you have the budget. So, you're the client, so you have the budget and I love being the one with the budget. And so I was at American Express for a number of years. I was at SAP Concur briefly, and right now I work for Sage, which is a cloud software provider. Headquartered in England and founded in England 40 years ago. In fact, we are, probably the oldest cloud software company in the world. And we're very big. We're a 2 billion, I think 2 billion pounds, revenue company per year with millions of customers all over the world. And I am very privileged to be the global head of content, social media, and customer advocacy at Sage.

[00:04:26] Aneta: That is so amazing. Congratulations on your amazing career. It's so impressive. And one of the things that I think is so interesting is that during your career at Sage, you mentioned that you're in New York City and the company is in England. So how does it work with your work schedule working for a company who is headquartered in England?

[00:04:49] Melissa: Yeah, it's something that happened sort of by accident. I started working for Sage in London and then a year into the job my husband was transferred back to his home base in New York with his company. So I asked Sage, could I just keep my, I mean, I'm brand new in the role. I really want to keep the job. And they, and they said, sure, just take your laptop and log in from New York and you can do the same job from New York. And, this was in 2017, this was years before Covid happened.

[00:05:21] Melissa:  And, less than 2% of the world workforce was working this way, like fully remote, like five days a week remote. It was very rare to be doing that. But I was lucky because I was working for a company that had grown through acquisitions and in particular in North America. We had grown through the acquisitions of a number of companies all around North America and so when I moved back to New York, I joined a campus, of employees at Sage, and colleagues at Sage who were remote. And actually, we at the remote campus are the largest campus in North America for Sage. Like, we're the largest group of people, even bigger than our North American headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. So, I wasn't alone. I came back to the States and was joining this population of colleagues and so I wasn't alone. And I think the company was ahead of its time in knowing how to take care of remote employees. I mean, one time I had a laptop sent to me the same day from Atlanta, Georgia. I was on the phone at the help desk at like eight in the morning, and by 3:00 PM I had a laptop at my apartment in New Jersey. So, the company's really good at taking care of remote employees. Whenever we have like a big town hall meeting or a big event or something like that. The company will often send swag t-shirts, notebooks, water bottles, whatever it is to the remote employees, like hundreds of us all over North America. So, I've been very included, which is not typical. I mean, most companies don't do that well, but Sage does very well. And most of my team though is in the UK. I have almost 50 people on my team. And most of them are in the UK and so what happens is I wake up, I get online at 7:00 AM That's my start time.

[00:07:18] Melissa: My typical day is 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM and that's kind of how I bracket my day. It will sometimes be earlier, if there's really an important meeting and I really need to be part of it live and sometimes things will run later if there are people I need to talk to in North America, there's just a lot going on, like I'm working on a couple of presentations today, and so after I talk to you, after five o'clock today, I'll do a little bit more work. But that's just to get ready for something tomorrow. So, my day is very fluid and I think that's a privilege of being able to work remotely and work at this sort of different asynchronous time zones with another team, it does kind of make your day more fluid. What I think I've learned about it though, is you have to be really disciplined about bracketing your day. Right? There has to be a start at the stop otherwise, you find yourself cooking dinner and floating back to the computer, and then you check the mail and then you float back to the computer and you might do something in the kitchen again. Change the laundry out, and then float it back to your computer.

[00:08:17] Melissa: So you find this happening like all day, all night. And that will wear down your soul. So you really cannot do that if you work remotely. I'm not always really good at it, but I know how important that is. Now after doing this for six years.

[00:08:31] Aneta: That's such a great point, and I'm seeing that so often with clients of mine is really helping them create these boundaries for themselves and create a physical and like emotional space and distance between their workday and then their personal life and their real life. Especially if you're working from home, most of the time those lines get blurred so easily. And it's in most of our natures or many of our nature to try to do as many work things and personal things at the same time. So yeah, absolutely it can, it can lead to some challenges over time.

[00:09:07] Melissa: Yeah, 100% really can.

[00:09:11] Aneta: So, how do you feel like what you've done in terms of working remotely, having a team overseas, kind of working these various hours, how did that do you think, lead you to write the book that you're writing right now

[00:09:26] Melissa: So the book I have coming out, April 3rd is when it's coming out. It's called Your Resource is Human. How Empathetic Leadership Can Help Remote Teams Rise Above. So it's all about, it's a leadership playbook, a management playbook for managers of dispersed teams and remote teams. And I would also say in global teams. Actually, it's not just for hybrid and remote teams. It's also if I think about my situation for most of my career I've worked in global advertising and global marketing, and even if I was working for a company that was five days a week the office in a global job, you're still in a paradigm where you are not altogether as a team, right?

[00:10:09] Aneta: Right.

[00:10:09] Melissa: You'll have some people in New York and some people in London, some people in Paris, whatever. So your team's, remote debate is kind of incidental. It's just when you're in global business you're never always together with each other. And so I've had, my whole career, 30 years to think about one problem, which is, how do you actually connect a team and how do you glue a team together, whether or not physically in the same place? And my starting point was working in global marketing, and that was always my challenge. And now it's a challenge for even more people because of remote and hybrid work, right? So I've realized that what I learned in global business is super applicable to managers now who are trying to join a team that might be located in Connecticut and Tennessee and California and whatever, and different places around a single country. So it's not really a global business, but now everybody's a remote and or hybrid. And so, I wanted to help managers know how to find the glue, right? Find the glue.

[00:11:11] Melissa: How do you keep a team tightly knit together? How do you keep people motivated behind a mission and how do you keep a culture palpable and exciting to a team that never sees each other in person, or very rarely sees each other in person? I think this is today's big man management challenge, and so I wanted to write a book about how to face that and how to be successful in that context.

[00:11:32] Aneta: I love it. I think this is so timely and relevant, and I know that you are so tied to your why and that you want to hopefully leverage this book. I hope everybody reads it. I think every leader should read it, of course, and then share it with their teams. But, how many people did you interview in the book and maybe what were some lessons that were new for you? You probably had some assumptions and expectations and some things you learned.

[00:11:55] Melissa: Yeah. Well, I interviewed 35 people for the book from all around the world. I interviewed one woman who works for a company in Tokyo. I interviewed a few people in Germany. I interviewed someone in South Africa, and many people in continental Europe. A few people in Ireland, and in the UK. Lots of people in the US. There's a very global perspective in this book, which is what I wanted. And, one thing that surprised me, was interviewing the general manager of Logitech's video camera business. Right now, Logitech is a giant company, right? And they produce, cameras as one of their big business lines, I think in the order of billions of dollars now. He does not do his one-on-one meetings with his team on video. He actually gets up from his desk and does his one-on-one meetings on the phone, like old school on phone, on his mobile while he is walking around his neighborhood. And I remember he was telling me this in the interview and I'm thinking, are you allowed to say that? Are you allowed to say you don't use your camera? I mean, this seems like a foul. And, he said no. He said you can't get hung up about always needing to have the camera. And he said that you'd need to walk around like this. I think one of the real pitfalls physically of remote work is we don't leave our desks. Like we're just physically in a chair way too long and we don't commute anymore. And so that's going to have physical impacts on us.

[00:13:16] Melissa: He's very aware of that. So he thinks, well, I'm having a one-on-one, I'm going to use this time to take a walk and get my exercise. But the other thing he said that I thought was interesting is he says he listens better. He's more focused when he takes himself away from his laptop. And when you think about when you're in a Zoom call, I mean, there are so many things to distract yourself with in Zoom calls, right? I mean, you're getting instant messages, you're getting emails, even if you have the no notifications, turned off the temptation to look and see, has someone just emailed me? Has someone just messaged me, right? You might be working on a PowerPoint deck, and so while someone's droning on in a Zoom call, you think, well, I'm just going to go and work on my PowerPoint deck, right? And, I'm sure some of us out there have gone on Amazon because we were late buying someone's birthday present. There are just too many things to do and multitask while you're on a Zoom call. And I thought his insight was great. He said, you just have to know when the cookie jar is in front of you and just walk away, right? Walk away. So you get better focus and you're listening to the person on the other end and you're having, a substantive conversation, which for him was, away from the video. So I thought that was really interesting.

[00:14:26] Aneta: I actually love that because I mean, what he's doing, he's going outside, he's moving his body. He's releasing some of the cognitive overloads that happen from being connected and tethered to all of our devices, eliminating distractions. So, in a sense, he has found what allows him to feel very grounded. And to connect to other people. I love that. I think that's really insightful.

[00:14:49] Melissa: Great, isn't it? Yeah, it's great. So the book is full of stuff like that, so...

[00:14:53] Aneta: And so are there, maybe the top three things or what are you willing to share as a sneak peek of the book with the audience today, some lessons?

[00:15:03] Melissa: There are two things that I want to be taken away from the book, and it's the two halves of the book. So the first half of the book I write about how it feels to work remotely, and I write about it really from the perspective of someone who has been doing it for a long time. I've been working remotely for more than a decade. Obviously, a very concentrated period of time working for Sage, but before that, I had other instances of working remotely for various reasons, for several other employers as well. So I've done it for a long time and I've learned what is hard about it. And, I've learned a lot about myself and actually my suitability to work remotely. For example, I'm a highly extroverted person, so putting me at home five days a week is utter torture emotionally. For years, I didn't understand that. I just thought, what's wrong with me? Why can't I just, buck up and get to my desk and be motivated and be plugged in and be all happy and everything because I'm an extrovert and I want to be at an office and I want to sort of float around and talk to people and see people serendipitously and have those relationships in person. So that's my preference. Some people want that and some people don't. And this is what I learned in writing this book and I wrote the first half with a very selfish motive. I was trying to understand why remote working was hard for me personally, right? So I was researching all of the things that were pitfalls for me. Extroversion is a big one, right? And why is it hard for an extrovert to be at home? I learned that, right? And there's actual science behind why it's difficult for someone like me to be at home. And so I write about that in the book. What is the Science? In the first five chapters, there's a section in each of those chapters called The Facts Behind the Feelings. And the facts Behind the feelings are, what I want to do is, I want to get people connected to the feelings in a factual way, right? I want people to read it and go, I get it. I believe it. I believe this is out there. The data says it's out there, and this is how people are feeling. So the whole first half of the book is I want you to sit down, whether you're a remote leader or a remote worker, and I want you to empathize with that experience of working remotely or working in a hybrid way. It's just either be seen if you're a remote worker, I want you to read it and go, wow, okay, finally, someone is explaining this to me, right? Or if you're a manager, I want you to read it and go, okay, I get it. I get why this person is behaving that way, or why this person feels that way, or whatever. So I want the first half of the book to really drive a lot of empathy. And then the second half of the book, I introduced something called the remote leadership wheel. So, there are lots of wheels out there and there's an emotions wheel, that's very famous, famously used in different contexts. But this is a remote leadership wheel. And the remote leadership wheel contains the five emotional pitfalls that I review in the first half. To really understand those. And it reveals what I call five emotional counterpoints. Like none of us is a psychiatrist and no manager can be expected to be a psychiatrist, and none of us are going to solve, emotional problems for the people who work for us. That's asking too much. But we can focus on bringing an emotional counterpoint into the conversation and into the experience that a colleague is having in their job. So for example, boredom is a big problem when you work remotely, not because you're bored with your job, but because you're bored with the four walls, right?

[00:18:37] Aneta: Right.

[00:18:37] Melissa: You're bored with the four walls. You see the same thing day in and day out, and that feeling starts to bleed into your actual feelings about work. So the counterpoint to boredom is meaning. Now, the reason that the counterpoint of boredom is meaning is that research shows that we most often feel bored at work when we have lost sight of why we're doing the work. That makes sense, right?

[00:19:03] Melissa: If we don't know why we're doing it, then we've lost the meaning. We just don't care. And then we become bored by it. It becomes just a rote activity. So, in that part of the leadership wheel, it talks about how you can align meaning with someone who might be feeling those sensations of boredom with what I call a leadership blueprint. And the leadership blueprint gives you discussion starters. It gives you a few things to scan to really understand if the person you're talking to is struggling with boredom. And it gives you some actual tactics of what you can do to bring meaning into that person's work experience. Basically, what I'm doing, it's funny because I got all the way through writing the book and I wrote the leadership wheel and I explained the emotions and the counterpoint emotions. And then I got through writing the book and then I was reading something that Brene Brown says in one of her books, I think, and in her book Dare to Lead, which is an amazing book.

[00:20:00] Melissa: So I was reading Brene's Dare to Lead, and in it she says, the one thing we can never have with empathy is a decision tree. She says, you can't say, if a person feels this, then you should empathize like this. Right? She said you can't have that because empathy is more nuanced. You just have to feel it at the moment. You have to sort of key in on it in a very organic way, and you have to react in an organic way. So basically she said you can't have a decision tree. And my leadership wheel is basically a decision tree. So... I was like, ok, great, well I'm violating probably rule number one from Brene. But for me, I, and it was funny because I thought about tearing the whole thing up and like, okay, maybe I just need to rewrite this because Brene says I can't have a decision tree. But the truth is, I'm not a psychologist. I mean, she is. I'm not a psychologist. I'm a manager. I'm in the chair day in and day out. I have to just have a playbook. I have to just know what to do.

[00:20:54] Melissa: And we're often told as managers how important emotional intelligence is and how important it is to be empathetic and all this stuff. But those are very wooly, nuanced concepts. For managers who are just not naturally feely like that. I really think a manager in that frame of mind needs a decision tree. They need someone to spell it out. It's almost like me talking to or like a woman talking, I'm not going to say my husband, a woman talking to her spouse, right?

[00:21:19] Melissa: It's like, I feel this, and so if you can help me feel this, that's going to balance things out. Right? So that's what I'm trying to do with the book.

[00:21:27] Aneta: You know what's so interesting is that it starts with self-awareness and everything does, and if the worker is not aware. If you weren't aware that you were an extrovert. If you weren't aware that, what you were experiencing was maybe boredom, if we couldn't label those feelings, it has to start there. And many of us are not very good. And just dropping into our bodies and even spending any time in reflection to ask ourselves those questions. So it starts there, what I'm hearing you say, and then it's being able to share and articulate that to your manager and then for the manager to be able to listen and to have some sort of we call it a tree. I think you can teach someone this. I think there should be guidance there because not everyone is equipped to know how to do it on their own. And emotional intelligence is a course. Emotional intelligence is part of most MBA schools, right? So I do think that we can teach some of these nuanced skills. Not everyone is going to be born with it, but it's required to be, I think, a good leader to be emotionally intelligent. And I think going forward, what you basically have found is that in this new environment, this global environment, in this remote or hybrid work environment, it's going to be important for managers and for their teams, for individuals to be able to have these discussions around their work environment and how to make it more productive. Yeah.

[00:22:50] Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. And, the book has in the front of it, you're completely right about the fact that it's hard to know ourselves, right? It's hard to really know where we are and what we need emotionally. So the book has a diagnostic questionnaire at the very beginning.

[00:23:05] Aneta: I love that.

[00:23:06] Melissa: There's a version for remote workers. You're an individual contributor. And then there's a version for remote managers. They ask similar questions, but phrase differently depending on whether or not you're a remote worker or a manager. And once you take that questionnaire and your score, you will see it basically scores along the five emotional pitfalls of remote work. So you will see where you have real vulnerabilities, emotionally. You may not realize that you are actually profoundly lonely and you just didn't realize it until you took this questionnaire and then you go, wow, actually loneliness is a thing for me. And then once you do that diagnostic, then you can hone in on the parts of the book that are about loneliness, right? And what's the counterpoint emotion to loneliness, which is belonging? So that's something that you can do at the very beginning of the book. And one of the emotions is also guilt, right? And, this is another one. It's hard to push guilt back.

[00:24:04] Melissa: And even I know it and have studied it and have written a book about it, but I had a personal emergency recently, and it took me out of a couple of meetings and I even left my own manager hanging on a Zoom call waiting for me for like 10 minutes because I didn't show up because I had this emergency. And when I got back to my desk and I saw that he didn't gotten the message that I was gone and that I had an emergency and he was waiting. There was this miscommunication, someone wanted me to deliver an excel document and I was late with it. And so I was just scrambling and I was in this absolute storm of guilt because I had this personal issue come up and I felt like I was letting people down at work. And it was this huge storm of guilt. And you just feel that more as a remote worker because your online presence and what you deliver to people is really the only way they know you're alive right? No one sees you in a building anymore. So, it's really the only way they know who you are, and what you do, and so you just immediately feel guilty. Guilt is a big thing, and so if you do the questionnaire and you see that guilt is where you score really highly, you think, okay, I need to understand this, and then I need to be able to talk to my manager about it. And then we need to just kind of keep it in check so I don't get into these really stormy moments of being hard on myself.

[00:25:26] Aneta: I'm seeing that too when I do presentations for companies and we talk a lot about cognitive overload and we're talking about burnout because we're seeing a lot of burnout. And part of the challenge that people recognize is that people feel they have this expectation of themselves that they need to be on all the time. They have to demonstrate that they're always available. They have to demonstrate that if they're working remotely, they are working, right? There's, this need to, or people are, thinking about the perception. I had a couple of people tell me that during Covid, they would love to go run at lunchtime, and now that Teams is an app on their phones. If someone sends them a message on teams, they will stop their run, which they're doing because it's a way to release stress and do something healthy for themselves. On their lunch hour, they feel obligated, not because someone told them to respond and then they are breaking the thing that was supposed to be healthy in the first place.

[00:26:26] Aneta: And so I don't know if you saw or if people talked about that, but it sounds like a little bit of the guilt or just this expectation of always feeling like you need to be on.

[00:26:35] Melissa: Absolutely. And it's the adage out of sight out of mind is something that plagues people who work remotely. Like we are always thinking, do people know I'm here? Do people know what I'm doing? And this is especially problematic for people who are new in a company and they don't have a network built up within the company. Or people who are right out of college and they're starting in their first job and they don't even know what it means to work in a company. So there's just a real angst that I just don't think we've been talking about these things. The remote conversation is really about how many days of the week is a company going to ask its employees to go in. Which days are those going to be? Is it going to be fully autonomous? Are we going to mandate it? There's a whole legislative landscape that's changing every day, in terms of people's right to flexible work. So we're paying a lot of attention to policymaking. We're paying a lot of attention to the org design and all of that is really important. But what about the person working remotely? Is that person actually suited for it or are they going to struggle?

[00:27:43] Melissa: We're not asking any of the questions about their psychological needs and their emotional needs, and frankly, if those are hampered and really weighty issues for a remote worker. It doesn't matter how good your strategy is, it doesn't matter how good your org design is. It doesn't matter how good your policies are, the person's at home and they're suffering. And so it's just not in the conversation right now. And I think that's why with this book, I want it to be in the conversation. I want us to be looking at each other and let the person says they want to work from home, but let's really have a meaningful conversation with them about what they need to feel good about it. And what they need from their leader to feel good about it.

[00:28:26] Aneta: Melissa, first of all, I have to ask you, how were you able to write this book, do all the research, to have the interviews while managing your current workload? I mean, you've got so much going on and I know you've got a family and you've got a life, right? So how were you able to balance at all and to make it work?

[00:28:46] Melissa: Well, it did help that I work, I work sort of UK hours. And, I overlap with the UK so I was saying before that I work 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM So at 3:01, I was working on a book. So, that was what I was doing, and it was a lot of nights and weekends. There's just no other way to get it done. It's just you get the thing that you give up is your personal time, your time with your friends, and your time with your family.

[00:29:09] Melissa: I went for months and months without exercising, which I do not recommend. So I really sacrificed a lot to write the book. I wrote the book in five months from like the very first word on the page to deliver the manuscript to the publisher. And that's with 35 interviews, I think 26 endorsements. And 150 research citations in the back of the book. So it's a very heavily researched book because as a history student, and as a history degree holder, you would expect nothing less from me than to do loads of research. So I did that. So it was a really heavy piece of work. And, and that's it. You just have to sacrifice the other things in your life. But I knew it was short-term, so I was able to feel like, look, if I can just power through, just getting this manuscript done, then I'll feel like a human again. And the funny thing is like, I did power through and I felt like a human briefly, and now I'm into marketing, so I don't feel a human anymore.

[00:30:03] Aneta: Yes. Well, so tell us. I want to make sure that everybody who listens gets a copy of this book. So I know it's on pre-order. I saw it on Amazon. I do love the book cover. I love that it's orange and I do love orange. Yes. I love it so much. So tell us, about the pre-order and how does that work? People can just go order it now and when will they receive the book?

[00:30:25] Melissa: So it will be out April 3rd in Kindle and paperback. And you can order it on Amazon. You can pre-order the paperback on Amazon. And basically what happens is you place the order, you pay for it, just like you were buying anything and then you get a message from Amazon that says, this item will ship on April 3rd. So that's it. So, that's how it works. It's pretty easy. It's called, Your Resource is Human by Melissa Romo, so you can find it there. So please pre-order and enjoy. And mainly I want it to help people. I want people to feel seen. I want people to feel understood. I want them to have a language to talk about their experience of working remotely. And, I absolutely 1000% believe we are never ever going back to five days a week in the office ever again.

[00:31:14] Melissa: It's just not going to happen. I mean there are certain sectors where that has to keep happening, obviously, but for knowledge workers, and for global business and technology and, companies and jobs that don't need to be done in an actual office are not going to be done in an actual office. We're just the business case is too good for remote work. The cost savings on real estate and commuting are too good for both companies and employees. We're just never going to go back to five days a week. So, if we accept that right, we accept that that's where we are. That doesn't mean hybrid's not going to work. Hybrid definitely works. And I actually think hybrid is the right model because it gives everybody a little bit of a balance of both. But if we accept that the full-time office thing is over, what I worry about over many years, and if I think about my teenage sons going into the workforce, what I worry about over many years is that we become very islanded, isolated individuals as people. And I want us to have the tools to prevent that. So I want this book to get into the hands of as many people as possible because I do see the techniques in this book help to keep people tied together, which I think is just so important for business and life.

[00:32:22] Aneta: And there's your why. That's why you worked so hard. That's why you sacrificed. That's why you always go back to the why. And so we will include all these details in the show notes, but I also have to talk about your first book. Blue Eyed Son which I read and loved so much. And I think that was where the history part of you and living overseas, I think I could see that in that book. So tell me a little bit about the first book, which was fiction, and like why did you want to write it? What was it about the story? Like how did you, how did you birth? Something like that, which is so different.

[00:33:00] Melissa: Yeah. I, well, thank you for asking. I mean, I started making notes for the book in 1999 when I was living in Warsaw, Poland. I was working for Gray advertising. I was doing ads for Procter and Gamble over there, post Berlin Wall and all that stuff. And here's the thing about Poland, nobody in the west really understands what Poland is all about. Right? The only thing we really know about Poland is it's over there in the east somewhere near Russia. We're not exactly sure we could find it on a map. I mean, we can be honest about that. That's how I was before I went, right? And so it's kind of over there somewhere in the east. We know that the Holocaust happened there. We know it from Schindler's List. So we have some popular culture. References and historical references are very prominent and that's how we know Poland. But when I lived there, I thought what we know in the west is not actually what Poland is, right? Poland is a country with a very rich, deep thousand-year-old Slavi history. They have their own food, they have their own culture, they have their own language, they have their own customs. And I learned all about that while I was living over there. And the thing that astounded me was the fact that despite the fact that they had been invaded and occupied and destroyed repeatedly by their neighbors, that culture survived. And I found that completely magical. Like, how does a country that's been ripped up, like a piece of paper over and over again, glued back together, ripped up again, glued back together? Like that's their history. How does that culture survive? And I've found that to be astounding and so fascinating. So the reason I wanted to write a book was I just wanted to bring people into a world. That I was seeing living in Warsaw, living in Poland. I wanted to bring readers into that world and I wanted them to get closer to what Poland is actually about, what their history is about, and what its people are about, and I have a very low attention span. I love to read, but I'm a terrible reader. I mean, I get distracted by everything. And the only formula that works for me is what, Dan Brown uses in the Da Vinci Code, which is very short chapters with cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. And if I don't have that, I can't keep going. I just can't. I lose it. I just put it down and I'm sort of, I move on to the next. So that's the formula I used when I wrote this book. I wanted to have a very fast pace, relatively short chapters, cliff hangers, right at the end. There was, it's called a checkered flag. I can't remember who said that but there was writing, the interesting teacher had, they called it checkered flag. They said, what you want to have the right at the end of the chapter is not a bow, but a checkered flag. Like you don't want people to feel like it's wrapped up neatly. You want them to see a checkered flag, which makes them feel I can't stop. I have to know what's going to happen next, so here I go in the next chapter.

[00:35:52] Melissa: So, the book is a mystery. It's a mystery about something true that did happen in Poland during World War II that is not been written about except by our historians but has otherwise not been written about. And it's a true fact. It affected hundreds of thousands of people and has not been written about. So when I discovered this, I thought, I need to write about this, like just this needs to be somewhere in a story. So that's what it is. It's called Blue-Eyed Sun. I'm looking for someone to do the German and Polish translations. I'm looking for a Hollywood producer who wants to make a film. Daniel Craig is who I have in mind. The blue-eyed son. I figured it out. So if there's anybody out there listening who has Hollywood connections, everyone who's read the book, including people who don't even know me has said this is cinematic and it has to be.

[00:36:42] Aneta: It totally is. I had the same thought. I loved it and I finished it in a weekend like I just started and I couldn't stop probably because of that checkered flag. I didn't know you were playing me like that, Melissa. But it worked and so, I kept telling my husband, I said, did you know this? Like, this is true. I didn't know so much of the history and I don't want to give it all away here cuz I think I want people to go and find the book. It's on Amazon, and easy to find. I wrote a review of it. And, yeah, I think that's something that people should check out as well. Yeah, and also just I'm amazed because I know how hard it is to write and especially hard to write and have all these other things going on. So I applaud you for doing it twice. One, publishing on your own, and now of course working with the publisher. So, what's next for you? Are you constantly seeking the next big thing?

[00:37:38] Melissa: One thing I know for sure is that writing is so hard, but for some reason, I keep doing it. So it must be what I'm meant to do. Cause I can't turn my head away from it. So, my husband groans and leaves the room whenever I do this, but I still have a long list of books to write. So I want to write a book about, business sustainability. And the book is, about how sustainability is such an important theme right now. It's something that everyone needs to be involved in. And, I did a course at Cambridge University at the start of 2022. It's at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership, which is absolutely first-class. And it was a virtual course. It went on for eight weeks, but I thought it was going to break my head. It was so hard. And the grading was hard. I mean, half the people in my cohort. Failed, I think didn't get grades, because my average grade wasn't great. So that was tough. But what I learned is that sustainability is not the domain of the sustainability people, it's the domain of absolutely every person in business. It's the person who does and manages the manufacturing. It's the person in procurement, it's the person in the travel office. It's everyone. It's a person who does events. And so I want to write a book that helps anyone in any business know what their role can be, right?

[00:38:53] Melissa: And how to seek that rollout. I have a working title and I have an outline and everything, and I want that to be my next book, and I have to decide if I want to do it myself or pitch it to my publisher. So we'll see what I want to do. Having a publisher definitely speeds things along. I will say that, at least in my case, I mean, she's been keeping the process going really fast. And then I do have a prequel to Blue Eyed Son that is about one-third written. So it's one thing.

[00:39:19] Aneta: I didn't know that. That's, you can hold it out.

[00:39:22] Melissa: I've been holding out, I was writing it during the pandemic and, I actually think it's an even more fascinating story than what I wrote about in Blue Eyed Sun, which I think is fascinating. So that's coming, the prequel to Blue-Eyed Son. Then I have a couple of other novels that are less advanced than the prequel to Blue-Eyed Son. I would just like to figure out how to do it with less anxiety. I would and then I just enjoy the process. Right. And I think if anyone's listening and they want to write a book I would say I've done it. I've self-published and I've done it, with a publisher. Both are absolutely 100% valid ways of bringing a book to market. And all the tools that a writer needs to produce a good product are available on the market. You don't actually need to go through a publisher. You can find an editor, you can find a cover designer, and my advice is to invest in a cover and invest in editing because you want to put out a quality product. And this is the way I approach Blue-Eyed Son. I hired a cover designer. Professional who is an Athens, who created a beautiful cover and I had an editor and I had a proofreader, and I funded all of those out of my own pocket, and I'm glad because I feel like it's quality, it's a really quality product, so it's possible. So if you have an idea and you feel like it needs to be in the world, don't let the publishing industry discourage you, and don't stick it in a drawer if you believe in it. There's at least one other person in the world who's also going to believe in it and be helped by it and want to see it. So, just write it.

[00:40:45] Aneta: That's right. I agree with you. I'm self-publishing my book and I also invested in a really good editor, which is very helpful. And also working on the book cover. Those two things are so critical and people know they're professionals. They know how to do things, and they can shepherd you along. There are just some things you don't want to figure out on your own.

[00:41:05] Melissa: The other thing too is it's really not possible for a writer to edit their own book. I read this psychological study once. And I can't quite remember all the ins and outs of it, but basically, it was something like, you're blind when you write something. If I write the quick brown fox jumped lazy dog. If that's what I write and then I go back to edit it, my brain is going to see the quick brown fox jump lazy dog because my brain knows that's what I wrote and that's what my brain's going to read. What I'm not seeing is the word over that is not there. It's not there. And so we actually are not capable of editing our own writing. And that's why, aside from quality, that's why you really want someone else to be editing for you.

[00:41:48] Aneta: Absolutely. Well, I am so excited about all the things that you have going on right now, Melissa, and to know that you've got more books coming out because the world needs your books. I love reading your books and I can't wait to order the latest one. I actually think that you need to send Blue-Eyed Son to Reese Weatherspoon. She makes amazing movies and stories and she does, what she loves female characters. So I think that she might be your person.

[00:42:16] Melissa: Yeah. No, you're right. I just saw where the Crawdads sing and...

[00:42:20] Aneta: Me too. Yeah.

[00:42:21] Melissa: Yeah. There's a whole mystical thing in that book, which is also in Blue-Eyed Son and very character driven and a strong female character. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I need to send it to her. Can you imagine the stack of books that get sent to her? But anyway, she has to pick something, right?

[00:42:37] Aneta: Just take action, put it out in the universe. So you got to figure it out. It works for other people.

[00:42:41] Melissa: That's right. That's right.

[00:42:42] Aneta: So the final question that I want to ask, is something I ask everyone, what does living the width of your life mean to you?

[00:42:50] Melissa: To me, it is being kind to yourself, which took me a long time to learn. It doesn't mean kind of, driving yourself into the ground and accomplishing a thousand things, right? It just doesn't mean that, but it means knowing what reflects, what you care about, knowing that's where you want to spend your time, and being kind to yourself when you reach the borders of the limits of what you're capable of. The energy you have, the mental energy, the physical energy, whatever. And when you hit those limits, knowing that it's okay to put the pencil down and just be at ease for a moment and just not try to not really be a striver. And I've always been a striver and I've pushed myself to the limits and I have worked myself into the ground. And what I want to do is live the width of my life in meaningful ways, but not in ways that take away from just the quality of being alive. Right. The point is not to blow our screws every day. I mean, the point is just to enjoy being alive. Enjoying being alive and being connected to things that reflect what you're about, is what I think living the width of your life is.

[00:43:55] Aneta: I love that. What a beautiful way to describe it. Thank you so much for coming on today. I enjoyed our conversation. I learned so much about your book, and, I just love everything you do, you just do such excellence and you're so thoughtful about the entire process, I want to thank you for being so supportive of me on my own. I would love to come have you come back on when we get Reese Witherspoon to produce. Blue-Eyed Son.

[00:44:22] Melissa: Blue-Eyed Son

[00:44:23] Aneta: So here we go.

[00:44:24] Melissa: Thank you, Aneta. I loved our conversation. I loved it. Thank you so much.

[00:44:29] Aneta: You're welcome. And I will include all the details of Melissa's, books, both of them in the show notes and in ways that you could best support her. And before we leave today, anything else that we can do to best support you?

[00:44:41] Melissa: Just pre-order my book. I have two kids to put through college.

[00:44:45] Aneta: There you go.

[00:44:46] Melissa: So that'll help your resources on Amazon. Yeah.

[00:44:51] Aneta: I love it. Thank you so much for your time today. Take care.

[00:44:56] Melissa: All right, thanks, Aneta.

Podcast Outro:

[00:44:57] Aneta: If you enjoyed this episode and want more content like this, I have just released a bestselling book Live The Width of Your Life, 365 Daily Meditations on Living with Passion, purpose, and Peace. You can get your copy today on Amazon. The link is in the show notes, and I will see you next time.

End.