Florence

I knew it on a bench at Piazzale Michelangelo.

Late in my stay in Florence, in 2005, I had fallen into a habit. Most days I walked somewhere beautiful and sat down in front of it: a statue, a church door, the whole terracotta city spread out below the Duomo. Florence has more of those than one person can use. I sat alone for hours, sometimes lost in thought, sometimes with no thought at all.

That day, on that bench, I noticed something was missing. I was not thinking about work.

No client. No deadline. No plan I should have been writing. For the first time in more than a decade, nothing in my head belonged to an agency. I had freed myself, and it had taken almost three months.

Numb

I left my job in December 2004, after nine years, and I have told you about the road out of Stone Town where that decision found me. What I have not told you is how little of me was left when I walked out the door.

I was numb. The business had consumed me so completely that I could no longer relate to anyone who was not in it. People outside advertising asked me simple questions about my life, and every answer I had involved a media plan.

So on January 2, 2005, I flew to the Western Caribbean to Honduras, with my parents to find my roots. After a few days with family, the three of us took the ferry from Puerto Cortés to Placencia, in Belize, and checked into Francis Ford Coppola’s Turtle Inn, a row of Balinese-style bungalows on the beach. Then a small plane north to San Pedro, on Ambergris Caye, and a boat up the coast to Matachica.

The sharks

On Ambergris Caye I booked the three of us on a trip to swim with sharks. I did not give it a second thought. I said it the way you would say Let’s go fishing, and bring your parents.

The boat took us out to the reef, part of the second-largest barrier reef in the world. The guide threw fish to the sharks while we watched from the deck and told us not to worry; they would not be hungry anymore. Then he said Jump, and all three of us jumped.

The sharks circled us. We snorkeled toward the reef, my mother and I in front, and when I looked back, my father was swimming for the boat as fast as he could. I called out to ask what was wrong. Nothing, he said. He would just much rather stay on the boat and take photos of us.

So my mother and I swam the reef with the sharks for an hour. At one point, one of them glided right beside me, six feet long if it were an inch, and all I felt was awe. My mother felt the same. Neither of us was afraid.

I had tried this once before, years earlier, in Tahiti, on my first honeymoon. I jumped in, was horrified, and climbed straight back into the boat. In Belize I did not even remember that day. Something in me had changed since Tanzania, and I did not have a name for it yet.

I ask myself now whether I would take my parents swimming with sharks again. The answer is no.

We flew home on January 25, and three days later I left for Italy.

Getting off the clock

The fear had gone somewhere in the water off Ambergris Caye. The job was slower to leave, and I would love to tell you Italy fixed that in a week. It did not.

For weeks I still dreamed about deadlines and the job. My body was in Florence, and my head was still in a conference room I no longer had a key to.

Blaise Pascal wrote that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact: that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. I used to think that was a line for monks. Florence showed me it describes a skill, and that people like me lose it without noticing. After a decade of being useful every hour of the day, sitting on a bench and letting an afternoon go by with nothing to show for it was the hardest work I did that year.

When the work finally left my head, I understood how much room it had been taking up, and how much of that room had been fear.

Thirty-five agencies

In April 2006, Ionic Media, a small general market digital agency, hired me as VP, Media Director. They had partnered with a larger agency in New York to go after something enormous: Verizon Wireless’s Hispanic media.

Verizon had let that business spread across the map. Almost every city had its own marketing manager, and almost every manager had hired an agency for the region. By 2006, thirty-five agencies were working on Verizon’s Hispanic advertising, and Verizon had decided one would keep it all. Three of us made the final.

That is the kind of room where fear writes the plan.

For years, Hispanic agencies had fought to win Spanish-language budgets, dollar by dollar, from clients who were never quite sure they needed them. So there was one audience nobody raised: the Hispanics who lived mostly in English. Nobody had to forbid it. Everyone understood that the moment you talked about English-dominant Hispanics, the money might walk down the hall to the general market agency, and all those years of fighting would walk out with it.

I wrote them into the plan.

We would speak to Verizon’s Hispanic customers in Spanish and in English, and address both properly: English-language creative, and a communications plan built for people who live between two languages. We ran bilingual spots on networks like SiTV and mun2, which were made for exactly that audience.

I was not afraid. I had felt that in the water off Belize, and now, for the first time in years, I felt it at my desk. Every line of that plan had to answer one question: am I writing this to win, or to protect myself? I was going to write the best media plan Verizon’s executives had ever seen, and I knew it while I was writing it.

The plan never needed a revision. Not one, from our own team or from anyone else. It went to the client exactly as I wrote it, and we won.

Who paid, and who was right

Thirty-five agencies became one. People in our business say sentences like that quickly, and I do not want to say it quickly. A great many people lost business, and some lost their jobs, so that our plan could win. I knew it then, and I have not forgotten it.

What I think about most is that the frightened agencies read the money correctly. After the recession, the budgets moved, exactly as they had feared, and the Spanish-language business went with the English. Once the holding companies saw how much money was sitting with the Hispanic agencies, they came for all of it. All that caution did not keep a single dollar where it was. Within a few years, Verizon’s Hispanic media had moved to Publicis.

Publicis called me in New York to ask whether I would run Verizon’s Hispanic business. I was in the back of a black car, returning from a meeting with a member of my team, when I said no. I had just joined Mindshare, and I told them so.

 What I would tell her

One. Count the days it takes to get off the clock.

Most of us give ourselves two weeks between jobs and call it a break. It took me nearly ninety days to stop dreaming about deadlines. If you walk into the next role with the last one still running in your head, you will build the same job again, only with a new title on the door.

Two. Read your plan for fear before anyone else does.

Go line by line and ask which choices win and which protect you. Cut the second kind, or at the very least know which ones they are.

Three. Assume what you are protecting will move anyway.

The Hispanic agencies read the future correctly. Their budgets moved within a few years regardless, and their caution bought them, in the meantime, plans that could not win.

Which line in your current plan is there to protect you?

Ingrid Reyes

Founder, The Reinvention Project. A publication by Optima IQ™.