Interviewee Name: Rona Maynard
Website: http://www.ronamaynard.com
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Rona Maynard: I'm a storyteller and the common thread in everything that I do, whether I'm giving a speech, writing an article or blog post, or leading a memoir workshop, is pulling meaning out of experience – my experience or someone else's. We are all looking for meaning, I provide that.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Rona Maynard: I am not sure if I have one, but the common elements would be that there is always some kind of physical activity. I love walking. I get many of my best ideas when I'm walking. Or I go to the gym and let my mind drift while I'm listening to my music. I spend quite a lot of time at the computer either working or prospecting for ideas that are going to spark something. I love the Internet because it brings me in contact with so many things that I didn't know existed. I find it a constant source of inspiration. I belong to the Verity Women's Club where every time I walk through the door I feel lifted up and inspired, and I try to go there as often as I can. I am always trying to engineer my mood and incline it toward creativity.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Rona Maynard: I would say that there are a few ways. I learn from the example other people, so I like to meet people and listen to their stories, find out how they have overcome obstacles in their own lives, and I still replay in my head conversations I had decades ago when I was a freelance writer and met some really extraordinary people. I also learned a lot from my reading. I read a lot of biographies and memoirs.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Rona Maynard: I would give up the illusion that I could meet all my challenges by myself. I would ask for help more often, and that is hard to do if you are proud, independent, self-reliant person. At least it was for me, but I find that other people's insights can leverage my own.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Rona Maynard: I think it's asking for help, what I just talked about. For instance, I had run up against an obstacle in my business life. I was receiving push back from a client, and I didn't think it was fair and I was taking it rather personally. Instead of just brooding over it, I started asking people in my network for their take on it, what they would do, how they would handle it, and person after person confirmed my hunch that it was unfair and the reaction said a lot more about the person than it did about me. I was able to let it go, and I was also able to find a constructive way of speaking to the client about it so it was good for both of us. It ended well. I was very pleased the way it ended because what could have felt like a crashing disappointment felt like a challenge I’d met successfully. It took three or four people to convince me that I was on the right track.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Rona Maynard: I'm going to talk about one of the things that I do, which is memoir workshops for women because this is the newest thing and I have been working on it for less than a year. These are very small, intimate groups. It takes a lot of time to launch each one – a lot of personal marketing time, a lot of preparation time, and a very intense day in a room with anywhere from three to eight women “workshopping” their stories which is really “workshopping” their lives. Talk about intimate!
When I started this thing I was very concerned about making it pay and trying to fill each one at maximum capacity. I was always disappointed if I couldn’t get eight people. I found that a focus on numbers was actually an obstacle for me because some of the smallest groups were actually the most rewarding for the people who attended them. I realized that there was a limit to how big this business would ever get because it's all me all the time, and I cannot do it for 50 or a hundred people. I have to do it on the weekend because that's when people are available and most of people who come are people I’ve met personally. They’ve heard me talk about it and think “Gee that's cool I'd like to come.”
So you see everything that happens with this business is personally driven by me, and animated by me and that's an obstacle to its growth. But I reframed it and came to see this not so much as a problem but as an opportunity because each time I do another group I learn more about the process by which people form and tell their stories and engage people with these stories. And I'm started to think of other things to do with what I've learned. I could write about it, develop products based on it, there are a lot of things that I can do, so I’ve become really relaxed about it now. And the more relaxed I am the better it is.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Rona Maynard: I will talk about my memoir workshop and keynote speaking. My memoir writing workshop is not a typical writing workshop. A typical writer’s workshop is promoted to people who are focused on publication. I believe there are many reasons to write besides getting published. Meanwhile getting published is more difficult than it has ever been. Publishers are not willing to take any risks anymore on a new writer who does not have a “platform.” They really only want bestsellers, so I'm attracting a different group because I'm reaching out to primarily midlife women who have lived some pretty rich stories, who have never had time until their children were grown to contemplate the richness of those stories and how their own experiences have formed them, the lessons they have taken from their experiences, how they can make those experiences live for other people. Most of the people who come to my workshops have never been able to write anything other than a PowerPoint presentation because they were just too busy, so this is their first creative sandbox to play in since they were kids. That is how it's set up, and I don't even pay lip service that until you’ve published you have not succeeded. That's very freeing for people.
As a keynote speaker, I'm really not about seven tips that will ensure you instant success. Yes I have tips and I have lived each one of them, but it's all about the story, it's all about the example, it's all about bringing advice to life to the podium because I would have no credibility if I don't do that. I find I'm never convinced by speakers who hand down wisdom from on high, unless it's anchored by experience. You also have to have the ability to laugh at serious things. Not to be grave, humor really gets us through the hardest passages in our lives so bring it on. The times I've been laughed the hardest are times when life has been the hardest.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Rona Maynard: I'm going to tell you about the turning point very early in my career. It was the second really big break that I had. I was a young editor, I’d been working for five years at a women’s magazine and I landed a job at the newsmagazine that paid 50 percent more, which just goes to show how shockingly underpaid I was. That was a long time ago.
I was hired by the big boss himself and I remember him telling me that he was disappointed with the people he currently had working in senior jobs because he thought their thinking was predictable and he thought I would shake things up. He did not say that most of these were men by the way, they were, and a lot of them were old, grizzled veterans who didn't think too highly of women. So essentially he was telling me I'm hiring you because you're different, and I think that's a good thing.
Well what did I do when I arrived? I tried to fit in, I was hazed because I was a woman and I tried to be just like everyone else. So instead of playing to my strengths I just closed the door on all of that and before I knew it the boss became disappointed in my work. I got into power struggle with him, I blamed him for all of the overwhelming stress. I lost my health, I lay around tossing and turning at nights, and I subsisted on coffee and aspirin at the office, and you can imagine what that did to my stomach. I really lost myself and lived in constant fear of being fired. I wasn't fired but I limped out there a deflated and disappointed person.
Years later I understood what I had done wrong. I had done two things wrong. First I was not using my greatest gifts, I was thrashing them really. Second, I had expected every mentor to be warm and fuzzy, and this boss was not and therefore I couldn't listen to what he was trying to teach me.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Rona Maynard: My very first break was when I was young in my mid-20s working with an academic journal. That was the only editing job I could get. I desperately wanted to work for what was called a consumer magazine, one that regular people read. I had been knocking on doors for a very long time and did not have super credentials for one of these magazines when a woman named Mildred Istona who was then the editor of a magazine called Miss Chatelaine took a chance on me and gave me a job even though I didn't have the formal credentials that had been specified in the announcement of this job. I later learned that the personnel department had recommended against hiring me, she hired me anyway she went with her instincts.
I was pretty headstrong and I know that she was told not to hire me, and in the time that the worked together at the magazines I thought that she was treating me unfairly and I went to the personnel department to look for a shoulder to cry on and I was basically told to “suck it up because if it wasn't for her you would not be working here,” which was true.
Sometimes you have this unrealistic expectation of what a mentor should be. That they are someone who coddles you and tells you how much promise you have, and yes some of them do really speak to the promise in you but some effective mentors can be very thorny people, they can be very tough people. The fact that they do not look the way that you think a mentor should look doesn't mean that you shouldn’t listen to those people. Over the course of a career you’re going to have many different kinds of mentors.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Rona Maynard: I think I have already described that. That was the one where I went to the newsmagazine and I just went into a tailspin. It was really of my own making, but of course I didn’t see it at the time because I felt very sorry for myself. Though a lot of people who were there with me would tell you that I didn't fail, and they have told me that. I felt that I had because I had such high expectations for myself.
Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?
Rona Maynard: My biggest disappointment has been the realization that my friends and I are not going to be the first people who live forever. That's my biggest disappointment.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Rona Maynard: Deciding to fire someone who had been a terrific employee and no longer was. I can't overstate how tough it is to do that, I think especially for women because many of us believe that there is a button we can push to release that person's energy and talent and channel them positively to our business. Well sometimes you can't do that and sometimes a person who has been a top performer becomes through no fault of yours a liability and this is what happened.
Managers have told me in many businesses that they have never fired anybody who should not have been fired sooner and that certainly rings of true for me. I had to realize that as long as I kept this person around I was going to be using only about 70 percent of my strengths, and I was going to be so focused on turning around what couldn’t be turned around. I felt a lot better when it was done, but it's never easy.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Rona Maynard:
- One of the most powerful ones occurred when I was in my early twenties. I was 23 years old and I was at my parents’ house. My mother had kicked my father out after dealing with many years of alcoholism, and my father was trying to insinuate himself back into the household. I had always been afraid of my father, he was an angry, intimidating man and he took a lot of that out on me. I got the brunt of his rage when I was growing up. I had my little boy with me who was a toddler, and I heard my parents fighting. My father had been chasing my mother around the garden, and he followed her and was shouting with his fist in the air, and my mother clearly didn't know what to do. She looked as if she was ready to knuckle under him and let him into the house. I don't know where it came from but I walked down to the foot of the stair and looked at my embattled parents, and I said to my father in a very calm voice, “You don't live here anymore it's time for you to go, you are going now,” and he left. After he left I was utterly exhausted, as if I had poured all my strength, strength that I didn't know I had into that moment. I realized that I didn't know what I would have done if he hadn't left, but he did leave, so what I did in that moment was tap into that power I didn't know that I had, stood up to someone who had intimidated me, and it was a touchstone moment that stayed with me for many years afterwards. In fact when I had to fire that person I told you about earlier I thought, “I sent my father away so I can send this person away. It's going to be easier and it was.”
- When my mother was dying and could no longer speak – my mother was a very controlling woman, had high hopes for me. I remember sitting by her bedside, she hadn't moved for weeks and just drifting into a talking meditation with her and I told her that I wanted to be the editor of Chatelaine magazine sometime. At the time, I was a freelance writer, and this was a scary moment for me because it was going to involve competition with other people. It involved framing a large goal and going after it. I had superficial qualifications for that goal. While I was speaking to my mother, she squeezed my hand. She was telling me to go for it, that was formative. I felt that my mother was setting me free to pursue a dream which had never happened when she was well.
- The third formative moment was leaving that job. I gave myself 10 years and I was right to do that because my enthusiasm started to wane close to the end of that period. It was like a love affair that had gone dead, there was just no juice anymore and part of me really wanted to stay because I had made a success of the job, I was known to be successful, I walked to work every day, there was important place for me, I belonged. When I told a friend of mine that I was leaving that job she said she was shocked and that “People are going to forget about you, and they're not going to want to take your call, this is the biggest thing you’ll ever do,” and I said, “I don't know if this is the biggest thing that I’ll ever do,” but I was shaking a little bit because I didn't know what would come next but I just trusted myself to find something else, and I found a number of things.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Rona Maynard: Writing my memoir. My memoir is a story about how I became my own woman because of, and in spite of, the woman who formed me, my mother. It's called My Mother's Daughter and it is the first thing I had ever created in my life that was purely for my own satisfaction, that was mine to shape from beginning to end. I had written hundreds of magazine articles, I had written a very popular monthly column in Chatelaine when I was the editor there, I had a constant stream of letters about the column from grateful readers but it wasn't really mine. It was a space that fitted between the ads, it belonged to the magazine, the magazine was a Canadian institution. I was in that column standing in the doorway of Chatelaine inviting people into Chatelaine, and with my book I was inviting them into my life.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Rona Maynard: Overwhelmingly so and some of the most important mentors were not bosses or colleagues. I have a friend named Chris, whom I actually met in the workplace, but our friendship formed after we were no longer working together. Chris was diagnosed with cancer and given three years to live at a time when I was struggling with a deep depression that I hadn't divulged yet to anyone. I felt it was my fault and I remember thinking that if there were any justice in the world I would be the one with cancer because Chris loved her life, I hated mine and I wanted to die.
But I figured that I could fake good cheer for a couple of hours so I invited her to lunch to cheer her up. She came sailing into the restaurant with a bright red jacket in her highest heels and she proceeded to regale me with outrageous stories about cancer. The most outrageous story she told was about lying in a hospital bed after her mastectomy feeling sorry for herself, then she heard about a man down the hall who was worse off. He had cancer of the penis, it had been amputated and he was sitting down with his blind wife. The nurses were too embarrassed to go near this guy unless they had to.
Chris trundled down the hall with her IV hooked up to cheer this guy up and told him jokes. She cracked him up and the blind wife and pretty soon people were coming into the room from all over to find out where all the fun was, and it struck me that if all those people could laugh in those circumstances, if they could pull together and find meaning in their lives why couldn't I?
I had decided by that time that I was not going to take my life, so I was going to have to make it a life worth living. It was after that conversation that I picked up the phone and dialled a woman's mental health clinic. There were also people I interviewed who were mentors but they didn’t know it. I just found myself thinking years afterwards about what they had told me. I had one special beloved mentor in the work place whose great gift to me was every time I started to get bored or complacent she would toss me a new challenge and let me run with it. And she wouldn’t come down hard on me if I messed up. She would just let me learn.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Rona Maynard: They were all teaching me to believe in the power of passion when it’s yoked to possibility. If you believe that your gifts are going to take you somewhere, they will. My favorite boss Keitha taught me that I had the ability to make something work that was new. She put a whole section of the magazine in my hand when I didn't have a lot of experience and just trusted me to figure it out. She didn't expect me to come knocking on her door for advice and solutions. She just sent me away to figure it out and I did.
With Chris my friend with cancer it was all about loving life, loving the potential of life and the many connections it offers even in the midst of a crisis. You can, and should always find something to laugh about.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Rona Maynard: Know and embrace your greatest gifts, be your best self and not a clone of anybody else.