During our LinkedIn Live event, Career plot twist: Building a toolkit for the unexpected, listeners heard from Leadership Academy for Women in Media director Kate Cox and alumni Jin Ding, chief of staff and operations at the Center for Public Integrity, Erika Hobbs, editor at Growing Community Media, and Zainab Shah, director of engagement and audience at The City.
The group talked about how their career paths are different from what they expected, what to do when dealing with a sudden change or layoff, building resilience in a tough industry and their experiences in the Leadership Academy for Women in Media. “There is a community of folks that you can connect with and reach out to and talk to, that has really helped me be resilient,” Shah said. “Because journalism is an endurance sport on some level.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Has your career gone like you expected it to go? How is it different from how you expected it to be?
Zainab Shah: My immediate response to that was to laugh. Because, for me, I’ve been in the industry for a little over 11-12 years, I want to say. When I started, it felt a little bit like, you go to school or college, you graduate, and you kind of expect the world to be a little like that, where it’s like, I’m going to study, I’m going to do my homework on a class, and then I’m gonna, like, get good grades. But navigating your career is a little different. A lot of times, you’re trying to figure out what you want to do, what you love doing and what you’re able to get paid for. That’s normally the three circles of the Venn diagram that I’m trying to overlap. So it’s been a little bit of back and forth, especially in the industry we work in and the economy we’re in right now.
Erika Hobbs: My career trajectory was nowhere near what I thought it was going to be, in part because I let life get in the way. There were things like going back to school and doing jobs in order to pay for that school, moving back home to Chicago and trying to figure myself out a little bit. But I will tell you, I’ve been in the business for a long time, and my dream has always been to stay in the business and to lead. All of that crazy stuff in the middle of my career all came to fruition when I got this job. So even though I didn’t take the path I thought I would take, it all ended up leading me to exactly where I wanted to be at this point in my career.
Kate Cox: Basically nothing in my life has gone as planned, and that includes career. I guess at this point, I’m getting better at rolling with punches. But I did other things in my professional life way before I became a journalist. I didn’t go to J-school until I was in my 40s, and didn’t graduate until I was in my 40s. So my expectations were sort of all over the place. When I entered the field, I hoped to have a job, which I did, but I never intended to go into startup media where I ended up. The one thing I have learned is just that I follow the opportunities more than any kind of a plan. That has left me flexible enough to say yes to things that I wanted to try or that I thought were interesting. It certainly hasn’t led to a linear career path, but I’m not sure those are so common anymore, either.
Jin Ding: I always joke with people that this is my 12th year of trying to get out of the journalism industry. Well, 10 years later, I’m still here. So obviously, my plan didn’t go well. I started my journalism career in China. At the time, English, I can tell you, since high school it was my least favorite subject to learn. I would never have dreamed that I’m currently using a second language to work every single day. When I came to the U.S., nonprofit journalism was not very much a blooming field as of now. Life kind of carried me into this, and I’m staying in it 10 years later.
How have you all dealt with a sudden change when it happened, be that a layoff or a different unexpected turn in your path?
Erika Hobbs: So for me, it depended on what the turn was. I’ve had really good ones and really bad ones. Something comes to mind that Korva Coleman told me during my cohort with the Leadership Academy: When there is a bad one, take the time to grieve before you do anything else. That’s an important thing for all of us to keep in mind, it’s going to be a blow if you weren’t expecting whatever your turn was. So take the time to grieve, to take a breath before you do anything else. But if there is a happy part of it, then celebrate that, too. Don’t forget that you’re human in all of this.
Jin Ding: I feel like it’s a privilege to have options. The majority of the time, what I’m facing is that I just don’t have the choice as an immigrant. A lot of time it’s driven by my visa decisions, driven by how the U.S. government decides whether or not I deserve a job. And I would have Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, but sometimes all of them would fall through overnight. So a big lesson I have learned through the years is that you just cannot plan everything. Just give yourself that grace of knowing that, “Guess what? I tried, and it just didn’t work.”
Kate Cox: In addition to taking time to grieve, which is important, there’s always a period of flailing around in panic. If you’ve gone through a rapid change, or a loss or a layoff, your nervous system is kind of in hyper overdrive. Taking a couple of days to center yourself before you begin to do anything is hugely helpful, because the one thing that I have not benefited from in my professional life is making decisions when I’m in a place of fear and panic.
I also try to study myself enough to check in on my values, because our values change. Throughout our careers, our core values as people — our moral fiber may not change — but our values in terms of where your priorities sit, those change with every new opportunity. There is a period of time where you need to check in and make sure that your values are either the same as the ones you came into your last role with, or if they are evolving, have that conversation with yourself. There have been periods of my professional life where stability and consistency were the most important things. Right now I have a father with Alzheimer’s, and I’m a caretaker for him. And so family has replaced stability as a priority for me for the moment. Getting in touch with those values and taking a moment to get centered and talk to some supportive people is a good way to start that process after the plot twist.
Zainab Shah: I love what you said Kate, and I’ve often done and felt the same in moments of crisis and moments of change. I would also add that it’s really challenging in those moments if your job is a big part of your identity, and you’re very attached to it. Sometimes it’s really difficult to take and to separate that and not take something like that personally. My only advice would be that we are in an extremely unstable and unsustainable way of working in an industry at the moment, so don’t take it in that way. As a journalist, layoffs are almost always right around the corner for most folks, and it’s about always having a perspective and keeping that in mind.
After the processing, after the grieving, what have you done to move forward? What was helpful for that next step?
Erika Hobbs: It is absolutely legit and necessary to reach out to your network and say, “Hey, I don’t have a job anymore. Can you help me out?” Or, “Have you heard of anything?” Reach out to people in your extended network. For instance, I went to Medill, and we’re always taught to reach out to other Medillians to see if there are other opportunities. There might not be, but you probably will find somebody who’s going to be in your corner, and who’s going to be your litmus test to say, “You’re not crazy, you’re going to do this, just give it some time.”
Jin Ding: I would also recommend really digging in on what actually brings you more energy than losing energy. Job searching, job hunting, or even applying for something and going through interviews, it’s a really, really trying process. You probably want to really burn out, especially at a time when in this industry, there are more people applying for jobs than jobs that are open. At the time you’re doing this, you also want to find what brings you joy, what are the things that you can do to make you feel like you, making sure you feel you are filling your bucket instead of every single day just emptying it. For myself, I do a lot of volunteer work, and that actually helps me to feel like I am fulfilling my social responsibility. While I am doing the really hard work in journalism, that definitely helps me to connect with my community and make sure that I don’t feel like every single day when I finish the day I’m just gonna burn out another day.
Kate Cox: Such good advice. I think maybe without knowing it, after my last layoff, I did something similar, which was to try and get into a routine. That included job searching, but that wasn’t exclusively job searching. It took me a little while to get steady enough to kind of create a habit. Because job searching is a slog, especially if you are looking for a change of any kind from what you previously did. There’s kind of three buckets that I think it’s worth breaking things down into. One is what I could do, i.e. what’s on my CV, and what am I qualified to do? What would I like to be doing? And what do I want most to be doing? And getting in touch with those three things, gives you a framework to be looking for a job through: “Here are the jobs I could do, maybe they’re content jobs, here’s where I would like to be.”
My question for myself is “What do you want to do? And don’t say journalism.” And it turned out, I just want to help other leaders, I want to support other leaders to run their newsrooms ethically and fairly and humanely. That was the only thing I knew, and I took that with me into my job search. I did it for a couple of hours a day: send some CVs, browse listings, reply to emails, talk to colleagues and people in my network. Then I took the other part of the day to do exactly what you suggested, Jin, which was to fill my bucket some way: take a walk, see a friend, nurture that part of myself.
This is a tough industry. Where have you found resilience in your career?
Zainab Shah: It’s connected to what Kate was saying about figuring out what you can do with what you have, wherever you’re at. One of the things that I found really helpful, not just within the industry, but also outside the industry, is the friendships I’ve made with other folks who are in similar positions. For example, I have a great network and the group chat is often lit with people helping each other solve problems and solve challenges. Realizing that you’re not the only one who might be experiencing something, and that there is a community of folks that you can connect with and reach out to and talk to, has really helped me be resilient. Because journalism is an endurance sport on some level.
Jin Ding: I think about long-term goals. Less about my career goals, but more about me being a human on this planet, what kind of impact I’m trying to achieve? It’s nothing related to the day-to-day nitty gritty, the problem is always about doing things that are going to make the biggest impact with my limited time and limited energy. In that process, it kind of just gave me that North star: knowing that OK, the current situation is temporary, the current problem is also temporary. If my life has 80 years, this is only going to be one out of the 80. That makes me instantly feel better. I do that exercise all the time, because sometimes the work is very overwhelming and life is overwhelming. But looking back, I know that in a lot of places that I find the darkest a moment before sunrise. That is absolutely true. When I feel like there is no way out, there’ll always be a window open. Looking back on that experience over and over, I find it easier to find resiliency in my career.
Erika Hobbs: Mine is similar to Jin’s. I think a lot about what kind of role model I want to be for the generations of women who are younger than I am, and particularly my nieces. I think about what I want them to see in me. What can they learn from me? How can I make them proud? With other women in the field, I want them to see that there are other opportunities, that there are going to be struggles with it and that they’re not going to have to fight because hopefully we’ve done it for them.
Kate Cox: I have a niece too, and I’m gonna start thinking of her in that way. If we take anything away from a difficult experience, resilience would be a golden jewel to take out of a painful experience. I had a hypnotherapist once who asked me at the very beginning of a session and I have thought about it for years and years since: “What evidence do you have that you can’t get through this?” I would expand that question to say, “What are some other examples in your life, professional or otherwise, where you did something really difficult and got through it?” Our lives are full of evidence of that, and not really full of evidence that we aren’t up to this. Even just checking in with that, I have done hard things, I will do hard things, and I will get through them is kind of how I boosted myself during a period of a real career low. Just to remind myself that I had everything I needed to get through it, except that I hadn’t been through it before.It’s part of your story, and it’s one of many opportunities we have to build resilience.
How has knowing your leadership styles and traits impacted your career and these decisions?
Kate Cox: I didn’t have a name for my leadership style, before I was a member of the WLA. Now, in supporting other leaders to do the day-to-day management of delegation and negotiation and ethics and all of these things that we teach at the WLA, probably the single most valuable thing that I come away with every time is, oh, gee, these are my leadership strengths and these are the areas where I need to grow. This explains a lot about the choices I’ve made in my career and the people I have and haven’t been able to work well with. It sort of centers you in the experience of a newsroom. It puts your leadership skills into context as it relates to managing across personality types and work styles. I didn’t realize how hugely valuable it was going to be for me to understand that I’m not necessarily a systems and processes thinker, I am a people thinker. Had I known that the last time I was in a leadership role, I think I would have better been able to delegate to my colleagues. I would have given less energy to things that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to move the needle on. It’s really transformative to find some language for things that you do instinctively, and then to be able to understand other people’s work styles through that lens.
Jin Ding: I wouldn’t say I found that I was way more introverted than I thought I was, but that was a very interesting discovery that happened during the Leadership Academy. And now I actually feel very comfortable with it now, like it all makes sense that’s why I have made those decisions. At the same time, I find myself now l leaning into my strengths.
Kate Cox: I’m so glad you brought up introversion and extraversion, because that is probably one of the most revealing workshops that we do at the WLA is to help people understand where they get their energy, and what saps their energy, which to me was a totally different way of looking at introversion and extraversion. I learned that I was a high functioning introvert who became extroverted as needed, and that explains so much about my professional history. I think people come into the WLA, maybe not knowing exactly how to describe their leadership style. As they explore those styles, not only do they find themselves but they find other leaders they’ve worked for in that framework and colleagues they’ve had. It just puts so many of your work experiences into context and it can be really transformative.
Erika Hobbs: My experience was slightly different. I had just come off of a job that was brutal, in which leaders were telling me that I could not lead. So I entered the academy thinking, “Oh, my God, what was I doing, and what’s my future going to be?” but learning that person, my personality style, and then learning what others were helped me to see red flags for jobs I shouldn’t approach at all. It helps me, along with that experience, to create a vision for the kind of leader that I actually want to be. It boosted my confidence to understand that I can lead.
What’s one belief about your career, about the industry, whatever, that looked different to you after the academy?
Erika Hobbs: I learned that I’m not crazy. We talk about this a lot, because it is a crazy field that we’re in and all kinds of strange things happen. We had the freedom and space to talk about bizarre things that recruiters do, or how long interviews take or strange things that people might say to us. And, you know, the kind of like the, you know, WTF moment, and we’ve had, we were able to go back to each other, right? And to talk and say, Yeah, that was strange. And this is why, and this is how to handle it. And you’re perfectly seen. And I think, at that point in my life, and sometimes even know, that’s more valuable to me than almost anything else.
Jin Ding: When I joined the Women’s Leadership Academy, I had been working in journalism nonprofit grant organizations for seven, eight years. That also means I’m almost a decade away from my last newsroom job. At the time, I felt there was no way for me to return to a newsroom because I joined a newsroom job very early on in my career and burned out very easily, as many young journalists did in the past. I thought there’s no way I’m gonna survive on newsroom again, at that time, but I wouldn’t say Poynter or Women’s Leadership Academy changed my mind about it, but by the time I walked out of the program, I actually believed that I should have a space in journalism, newsrooms, and with all the experience I’ve had in grant organizations that I could have still find a new job. And a few months later, I did find a job at The Associated Press. So I would say that was very amazing. To walk back to a newsroom and say I am more mature, now I know how to navigate this industry, and I think I have something to contribute.
Kate Cox: I love that. I think that’s kind of a common experience for people who come out of the WLA, you know, you come in loaded with whatever baggage you’ve got, whether you’re in transition, or you’re not the leader you want to be currently or you’re trying to get somewhere else, whatever place you’re in, when you come in to the WLA there’s kind of a day or two where you’re trying to get a feeling for the room and where you fit in it.
But what I come away with after every cohort is a reminder of how many interesting jobs there are in journalism. One of the things we say at the beginning of the program, courtesy of my colleague at Poynter, Kristen Hare, there’s no capital J journalist anymore. You know, my dad was a journalist in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and had a healthy, active, thriving newspaper career for my entire life. And that is not the field that I entered. And so what I’m interested by and it’s inspired by is just how different the roles are on every team, from visual to data to special projects, to investigations to people centered issues, we have people in the WLA who are doing every kind of job in newsrooms, and that is really exciting to me. It’s a kind of, it builds mental resilience. It reminds you there are places to go, and that there is a network of more than 500 women who have done this program, people who have done this program, excuse me, and who are out there doing interesting work. That’s the thing that happens for me every time. They may not have come in believing that, I think I came in believing opportunities were limited, and that you have a heyday and then it’s over. And that just isn’t so. The journalism field is so incredibly dynamic right now, and there’s lots of opportunity.
Zainab Shah: There were some practical things that were really big and helped me move in the direction I wanted to. One of which was how to take things off of your plate that you don’t need to be doing or want to be doing and delegate. It feels small, but it really freed up space for me to develop my role in the direction I wanted to develop it in and have an impact and do things that I really want to be doing. The other thing was like a mindset thing, and connects to what Kate was saying earlier, where I felt like a lot of agency and I felt empowered, like there was possibility in the newsroom for taking my career in multiple directions, by myself, but also agency in how, as an industry, we do have some power in the direction that we can take and go in as a whole, and the direction that we want to see our respective newsrooms take and go in.
For those listening who might be in the middle of their own career plot twist and navigating their own unexpected turn, what resources be they books, podcasts, tools, anything that comes to mind, would you recommend?
Erika Hobbs: When you have stress, it really bogs you down mentally, physically, and you are going to make mistakes, or you’re not going to make the best decision right away. Obviously I read industry related things, but for me, what I really needed to do was to focus on spiritual practices, which include yoga and also meditation. Then finally, there is a woman I read all of the time, who still kind of keeps me going. Her name is Kate Bowler and she has this wonderful book of blessings. It’s sort of ecumenical, but there’s this great book with blessings that address every facet of your life. So taking that time, to free my body to free my breath, and to free my mind and to get a little bit of inspiration goes a long, long way.
[More than 20 resources for navigating change in your media career]
Jin Ding: Yeah, I would say I listened to anything from Brené Brown just to get my spirit up. Sometimes you just need someone to drum up the beat for you. I really love her podcast on Spotify. I also want to recommend a book called “Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving” by Celeste Headlee. Sometimes we try so hard and nothing works, and it just makes you feel so done. But this book taught me basically how the human body and our human history shows that we are not made for this many hours of work and this many hours of deep thinking, and it is OK to let go of that.
Zainab Shah: There’s this book by Adrienne Maree Brown called “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds,” and it basically helps you examine your relationship with change, how to navigate and how to affect it. I found that to be really, really helpful. At more than one point in my life, when there’s been a career plot twist or a plot twist in my personal life, it’s been really helpful to refer to that book. It’s actually a whole series. The second one in the series is called “Undrowned” which is also really fantastic. It’s about Black feminist life lessons from marine mammals. I know it sounds super niche, but just trust me, it’s really good.
Kate Cox: Love, I love that not everybody just jumped right in with a bunch of job-related books. And I think that theme is kind of important to pay attention to, because there’s plenty in our libraries about how to move on from one professional opportunity to another and how to navigate, you know, various parts of your professional life. But you really have to pay attention to yourself as a whole person going through this experience of change. Whatever helps you return to yourself, the person you feel most joyful being, is probably your best option, rather than immersing yourself too much in career related stuff, which is what you’ll be immersed in all day as you look for something else.
I read Bessel Van der Kolk’s book “The Body Keeps the Score,” which is an exploration of how traumatic experiences affect our bodies. It was transformational for me in a lot of ways. But the primary way was that it helped me understand that unless I gave these feelings and fears and anxieties and feelings of panic a place to go, they were just going to stick around and hang out in my body. That was partially how I got through a really trying period after a layoff.
How has your network through Poynter or beyond impacted your career resiliency, from friends and peers reviewing resumes, to making introductions?
Erika Hobbs: When I finally was open to the idea of reaching out to the network, right, I realized just how wrong I was in the past. Because plenty of opportunities came up. It takes time, you can’t wave a magic wand and expect people to pop up something for you. But I will tell you in the past six months, I picked up several freelancing jobs through a network, and then two potential full-time jobs, both of which I ended up getting offers for, and I’m working today at one that I thought was best for me.
Jin Ding: I have a Poynter plus AAJA sister who helped me overcome every moment that I told myself, “No, I don’t deserve this.” Every single time she encouraged me to go for a bigger dream job and ask for the salary I want, and reminded me that I can post the questions to the Women Leadership Academy Slack and ask about how to prepare for the executive level of job interview. I posted in Poynter’s Slack and many of my Poynter sisters gave me a lot of good advice, and I prepped for the interview and felt confident to walk into that room.
Kate Cox: When you leave the WLA, you take two things with you. You take the cohort that you’ve built over the week that you’ve been in Florida, but then you join the wider cohort of 550 plus people at this point. But then there’s this other delightful part of being included in the alum community, which is that you remember the work that the people in your cohort were doing. So when you need to hire a great reporter for something, you’ve got someone to call. Or when you’re doing a special project — I just had someone reach out to me from a previous cohort who is doing a special project now that involves something I have expertise in and so wanted some recommendations on people she should reach out to.
I love that and love the specificity of it. It’s like suddenly you have 29 more subject matter experts in your network when you leave Poynter. All these people’s specialties, in politics, in sports, in investigative journalism, in programming, in subscriptions, there’s all this expertise now that you can tap into when you leave. For your specific projects, for openings, for moves you want to make, there’s kind of a limitless community of experts, which is really exciting.
We’ve had a lot of career advice back and forth, but I just wanted to ask what is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Zainab Shah: It’s OK to quit. And shoutout to Stacy-Marie Ishmael, she wrote a whole piece that you can read on Poynter where she talks about, sometimes it’s the best thing for you to do. And it’s absolutely OK to quit.
Jin Ding: My former boss told me that, when things are getting very difficult, you just need to trust that your reputation will carry you through this. At the moment, I didn’t understand what that meant, or I didn’t really believe in it. But as the months and years unfold, I truly understand what that means now, and it is absolutely true.
Erika Hobbs: Mine was to choose your battles wisely. I think I cared a little too much about my job early on, but once I heard that phrase, you learn to live that.
Kate Cox: I had a boss a bazillion years ago, who, when I was working in a totally different industry, said to me “Say yes to every breakfast, lunch and dinner.” That was long enough ago that we didn’t have cellphones and email, but I still think it completely applies. It’s worth having every conversation, no matter how outside the box it might be, as opportunities come your way to even find out what else is out there. I just said yes to whatever conversation came my way, provided it was respectful of time and boundaries and all of that. Keep yourself open to where your next opportunity might come from and who it might come from, and that might look very, very different than what you think it will.
RELATED TRAINING: Apply by Sept. 8, 2023, for Poynter’s 2024 Leadership Academy for Women in Media.
