Creator's Block

Over the past week, I've enjoyed stalking Marcella's Instagram posts to live vicariously through her while she enjoyed a week beach vacation. Though I'm always happy for my friends and coworkers when I see their vacation posts, I can't help but feel that ping of jealousy knowing I have a week of work ahead of me when they have a week of lounging and relaxation. This got me thinking: how often am I comparing my life to others? Do I live too much in a negative state, diminishing my life moments when I see others sharing seemingly perfect moments? Comparing yourself to others (or even to the ideal version of yourself) is oftentimes rooted in insecurity and jealousy, but it also seems to happen on a daily basis. Is there a way to avoid or change this way of thinking? Is it possible to have a positive experience when comparing yourself to others? How do we overcome comparing ourselves to our colleagues? In this episode of Creator's Block, Marcella, and I navigate through these questions and more.

Have you ever had a challenging week only to realize later that the conversations and obstacles you faced pushed you to do and be better? This was one of those weeks for me. I've had some tough conversations with team members both on and off my POD, and while it's never fun to have challenging discussions, I know we’re growing because of it. I’ve mentioned on past episodes before but I recently moved into a managerial role as Account Supervisor, managing a team of 6 Account Executives. Since I was an Account Executive before, I feel I have a deeper connection and compassion to the issues and concerns they face. That doesn't automatically make me a good manager though. Having an honest and true connection with your manager where you can share your thoughts and feel like you're making a difference doesn't happen overnight. It's something we all must work towards. I recall the days of feeling like my voice wasn't being heard and questioned whether I was truly valued in my role and at my company. We're fortunate

As I write this, we’re exactly one day after the wrap of IMPACT Live 2018. It’s been a crazy couple days and I honestly feel like I could sleep for 48 hours and still be tired. However, one of my favorite parts of IMPACT Live is that I basically have no choice but to unplug from work and actually focus on some professional development (PD). One of the great things about our culture at IMPACT is we are encouraged to work on our own professional development, especially through events. To be frank, IMPACT Live is a big investment for our company. It's all hands on deck and we all have assigned roles, but we're also there to learn and absorb as much as possible. I was able to sit in on most sessions and I not only felt like I was learning, but like I was recharging my passion-o-meter. One of my favorites was on Sonic Branding with David Meerman Scott and Juanito Pascual, which basically is how music can serve your brand. (How cool is that?!) This all was a welcome intervention for me, because I am actually REALLY

Recording this week's episode with Marcella was extra special because we were able to record it together, in person! As a remote employee at IMPACT, I only get to come to Connecticut and see my fellow IMPACTers a few times a year. The annual August trip has easily turned into my favorite because it's IMPACT Live week. (For those of you who don't know, IMPACT hosts a two-day event where marketing and sales leaders come together to learn, collaborate, and make valuable connections.) The week is action-packed with amazing events, learning sessions, and happy hours, but that also means we're all a little tight on time when it comes to our traditional work activities and responsibilities. Marcella and I started chatting about what the best "time savers" were and there was one thing we both kept bringing up: templates. Now, templates can be an array of things -- from templated website pages to playbooks for ABM strategy. Listen in as Marcella and I discuss the pros and cons of templated work! What kind of templates

For decades, we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F**k positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let’s be honest, shit is f**ked and we have to live with it." In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesn’t sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is—a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k is his antidote to the coddling, let’s-all-feel-good mindset that has infected modern society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up

All work and no play makes marketers and creatives dull guys and gals, right? Well, actually, it's a lot more than that. This week, Justine & Marcella unpack how to avoid burning out at work, when everything gets to be too much. 

The past couple months have been very exciting for me at IMPACT as I transitioned to a new role of Account Supervisor. In addition to being the point person for a select few clients, I now manage a team of six Account Executives.  Without even realizing it, this new role and added responsibility has been something I've been working towards for a while now, all stemming to what I consider my passion in my career: helping people.  Though "helping people" is a super generic passion to claim, it's something that encompasses so many aspects of my life. But determining that passion, honestly, has not come easy... and that's OK.  All too often we are pressured to follow our dreams and pursue our passions, but what happens when we don't really know what our passion is? My first job out of college was as a copyeditor for a small shopper marketing agency where I worked on in-store offers for Kraft Foods. Though I learned a lot in this role, I will never forget the day my Mom asked me how things we're going and I broke

The previous version of this episode was corrupted, and we sincerely apologize for that. This is a big week for Creator's Block. In fact, it's quite a milestone for myself and the podcast.  In a couple of weeks, Creator's Block will return (on July 17, to be precise), just in time to celebrate its second anniversary. But I will not be returning with it, as Marcella's co-host.  While it's bittersweet for me to leave the podcast I founded two years ago over lunch with Jessie-Lee, I'm excited to share the reason for my departure.  On July 11, the premiere episode of the Content Lab -- hosted by yours truly -- will be launching as a new weekly podcast for IMPACT. (Click that fancy link to learn more about my new show and to subscribe to updates!) But my departure also brings with it an exciting announcement -- a new co-host. Justine Timoteo! In fact, given that it was her first episode, Justine got to pick our topic. And it was a great one. In her words, here is what we talked about this week: "Improving my overa

Ah, work-life balance. It's kind of like parenting and finding true love -- everyone has an opinion about it.  "There's no such thing as work-life balance, only work-life blend." "There's no such thing as work-life balance, only LIFE!" "You can only spend X number of hours a day doing work, without ruining your personal life." "If you're not committing X number of hours to work, is it even worth doing or being passionate about?" The sheer number of opinions about work-life balance can be exhausting to sift through. It's unfortunate since it's a necessary conversation, given that remote workforces and having clients that span the globe are much more commonplace, making it harder and harder to "punch out" at 5 p.m., on the dot.  So, this week, we invited our very own Director of Strategic Partnerships Vin Gaeta back to the podcast to unpack this popular topic. (He recently just got married and has a little baby girl on the way, so he had a lot of great thoughts about finding that perfect balance.) Enjoy! 

I don’t know how it happened, but I sneezed and somehow we’re now weeks away from the end of yet another quarter -- and not just any quarter. The second quarter. Which means we’re almost halfway through the entire year. WHAT?! While I’d love to say that I’ve got all my ducks in a row, and all of my plans to "crush my goals" or whatever are going along swimmingly, I would be lying. Here’s the thing though. Now that the finish line is in sight, I’ve noticed a lot of people saying, “I don’t have time for this, I don’t have time for that” -- myself included, I’m not immune -- in a way that makes me wonder if that’s really the case. Do we really not have enough time?  It doesn’t matter if it’s crunch time or a slow down period, time is a commodity that’s always in short supply. And while there are definitely instances where I genuinely, in good faith, do not have the time I thought I would have, I don’t think we’re always willing to admit with how much control we do have over our own schedules. If I'm being honest

One of our long-time listeners, Frances Bowman, reached out to us awhile back with a request -- to talk more about how to give good feedback to creative marketing pros like us.  While we've dipped our toe into this topic before, her note got me thinking about one of the most challenging instances of when knowing how to give good creative feedback matters the most.  How do you give effective feedback to your marketing creative -- whether that's a designer, developer, or a copy nerd like myself -- when they give you a draft that is below the quality or caliber of what you were expecting?  Because it doesn't matter why it happened, ultimately. You're still faced with the situation of course-correcting the creative project in front of you and providing constructive feedback without blowing up your relationship with that creative -- or your agency, if that's your creative setup. So, this week, that's exactly what we're going to do. Instead of talking to creatives like us, we're talking to the marketers, the leader

Marcella and I are back with a brand new episode. This week, we're answering a very important question: What do you do when your personal life starts to leak into your work life?

We spend a lot of time talking about how to react to change, but we’ve never really discussed what it means to be an agent of change at an organization, and how to implement change effectively. Now, if you're a creative or marketer just starting out in your career, you may be wondering why this conversation is relevant to you. Well, at some point your career, there's a good chance you will either want to do more or will be asked to do more in a way that influences those around you -- and goes beyond the scope of just doing the thing. It could be as small as a new process or tool being rolled out, or you could be a part of a sweeping organization change. But here’s the tricky thing about change, and I’ve said this before -- even when change is positive, it’s still, by its very nature, disruptive. So, how do we make changes effectively and positively when we're asked to step up to the plate? To answer this question, I brought in IMPACT's Chief Strategy Officer (and my mentor) Tom DiScipio to talk through some o

We're back! And, for very selfish reasons, I am really excited about today’s episode. Not too long ago, I had a lot of fun collaborating with Chris Duprey (our COO) on an article which has since been published on the IMPACT blog:  Flash to Bang Leadership: Are You Reacting or Responding to Your Teams? Whether you’re a leader or someone who aspires to be one, one day, I highly recommend you read it. Or, if you're more of a visual person, he also did a video of it: At one point in that original article, Chris discussed his mindful meditation practice, and how it influences his actions not only at home, but also at work.  While he noted that he's still a “beginner” with his practice, I did want to share my favorite passage:“It has allowed me to live more in the moment -- to put things in perspective, before I respond. What I’ve found is that this has made me a better communicator at the office and at home. (And, it’s slowed down my flash-to-bang!)When you can create this space between stimulus and response -- m

Last week's episode with Kathleen Booth about carefrontations got me thinking about the different types of conversations we have every single day as creatives at IMPACT.  As I pondered life and existence and work, it dawned on me that there are two critical conversations all of us have throughout our career. And not just once -- many, many, many times. When we need to tell someone we're going to be late or miss a deadline, and when we need help. What's interesting about those conversations is that they both deal with managing broken expectations. On top of that, they're completely unavoidable -- nobody's perfect -- and are not exactly fun to have. So, we're going to tackle each of these conversations individually in this episode -- the dos and don'ts for each, and how to minimize the number of times you need to have them in future.  To be clear, having to tell someone you're falling short is never going to feel great. But there is a way to have them be much more productive than they are painful. Enjoy!

Marcella is off this week, so I invited Kathleen Booth -- IMPACT's VP of Marketing and the host of our Inbound Success Podcast (check it out!) -- to join me once again. Our topic? One of the most powerful communication techniques Kathleen taught me back in the day at Quintain, which also has the worst name in the history of space and time: the carefrontation. Yes, it's a goofy word. But if you work on a team or you're a people manager -- or have any aspirations of the latter -- you need to know how to give and receive carefrontations. So, what is a carefrontation? Why do they work, and how do you have one? That's what we dissect in this episode. Enjoy!

We’ve talked about change before in the big, global, life-quaking kind of way. Switching careers. Going to a new company. Starting a family. Moving. But today, we’re going to address a different kind of change that's specific to the workplace. Where you’re not moving, changing your life, or pivoting your career by choice. Instead, you’re going about your business one day at work, and suddenly change starts happening to you and around you -- without warning. These can be little changes, like a new process or a new hire you didn’t expect. Or they can be bigger, like mergers or internal restructuring in responsive to rapid, positive growth. It’s a bit of a different mental state, because in those moments, it can feel like things that are outside of your control. You were fine with how things were going at work -- or maybe you weren't, but you at least wanted to be consulted on the solution.  The challenge is that even when those changes are good, change, by its very nature, is disruptive. So, your knee-jerk reac

This is going to be an emotionally honest episode, because I went into it feeling both motivated and excited, but also somewhat defeated.  On the one hand, it's the start of a new quarter. And during our team meeting yesterday, we talked about new objectives, new processes, and all of those great “turning over a new leaf” feelings. The kind of stuff that makes you feel refreshed and ready to take on the world. On the other hand, the end of last quarter, which concluded last Friday, ended in… well, failure. Quite a bit of it. And I was still emotionally licking my wounds. It was a shame, too, because, in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the end of the quarter, I was energized about what I was working on. I felt positive about it. But then, on Tuesday, things began to unravel.  By Friday evening, I felt like I had just survived a Michael Bay movie. (Unfortunately, not in the, "I saved the world!" kind of way. In the, “My home that I just remodeled was blown up by aliens or evil robots from space,” kind

Last week, we announced the bittersweet news that Jessie-Lee was leaving the Creator's Block podcast to take on her new role as co-host of the IMPACT Website Throwdown.  That's why we decided to dedicate this week's episode to the concept of change. More specifically, those moments where we need to make big choices -- tough choices -- that facilitate professional growth. What's weird about those moments, however, is that even when you know something bigger, better, and greater is on the other side of your choice, the decisions we need to make to get there can be very painful and uncomfortable. But why? That's what we're unpacking this week -- the good, the bad, and the ugly around making the big choices that can make or break our careers. Enjoy!

Last week, I devoted close to two days of my life revising, refining, and reworking the copy for a new piece of pillar content that will be launching later this week. It was all about growth-driven design. As a content and inbound marketer nerd, I've always understood the high-level value proposition of growth-driven design. "The traditional website process is costly, painful, and out-of-date. Growth-driven design is agile, better, leaner, meaner, etc. It's the future of website redesign, because it's built on a framework of continuous improvement." This all sounds amazing. In theory. But as I continued to work through the content, I couldn't help but feel a little overwhelmed by the demands of growth-driven design, especially given that sometimes it's put forward as a less painful website redesign approach. You need to create your strategy. You need to research your users. You need to create what are called fundamental assumptions. You need to create a wishlist. You need to prioritize that wishlist.  You nee