INBOUND Bold Talks: Erika Napoletano "The (Not So) Fine Art of Losing Your Sh*t"

I had a completely different talk until yesterday morning. So I want to start off with a question. This will explain why I have a completely new talk. Have you ever been in a situation where all you can do, where it's everything you can do to not lose your shit? No. Hands up. All right, so that is what my yesterday morning was like. I'd been on the road for 12 days in Chicago, got home Sunday, saw my dogs, and fuck. I've got to get on a plane to Boston on Tuesday night. Not to be ungrateful, to be here. Small print. And so emails started coming in, and you just have one of those days where it's like, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph have taken a shit in your Cheerios. And every cosmic force possible comes along, and there you are losing your shit. I hammered out an email to my two mentors, the people who keep my shit together. And I'm like, send. Fucking send. Ah. My phone starts ringing and, like, emails start pouring in from the shoe. All right, do you need to talk? Are you on a ledge? Are you killing yourself? What's going on here? When I really lost my shit is when my friend and mentor, Erin, who is my. I met her because she was my speaking coach for TedX last year. She was like, all right, all right, Erica. All right, just lay it on me. And I'm like, all right, I'm exhausted. I'm tired. I fucking hate what I do. I don't want to do this anymore. And I've never said that before. And she's like, erica, it's okay. You don't have to. What do you want to do? I said, I don't want to be the unpopular girl. I'm so tired of being the marketing and branding chick who says, fuck. And you fucking laugh. I'm having a crisis here. But she's like, erica, honey, it's okay. It's okay. You don't have to be that girl. What do you want to do? And she's like, what do you want? I was like, I want my own column. I want my own column again. And I was like, I don't want it to be for Entrepreneur magazine or American Express. Open forum. I'm sorry if you're here and you're hearing this for the first time. And she's like, that's okay. Who do you want to write for? And I said, I don't know. She's like, come on, you can name one. I was like, no, I can't. She's like, come on, just take a deep breath. Calm down. And you Can. And I said, you know what, Erin? The truth is I can't. Because I've spent the last 10 years of my life writing everything I write for everybody but me. I teach people how to find their voice. Somewhere along the way, I've lost mine. So that is why I scrapped my talk. And today we're talking about the not so fine art of losing your shit. Because yesterday I lost my shit and I'm still in process. If there's shit from here to there, I apologize, I'll clean up, but I'm still losing my shit. And I've never given a talk from handwritten notes before, but this is what I've got today. And if you want to judge me for that. So let's do this thing. What's next? I spent the entire plane ride yesterday thinking about one question. What makes us lose our shit? I mean, we're the people that other people look to to have their shit together. We're supposed to have it all, you know, buttoned up, tied in a bow and pretty. And what I've come down to in the last 24 hours is. Is. And sorry, Arianna, I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night. But it comes down to the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell other people. And what happens when those two stories aren't the same. So let's start with the stories we tell ourselves. I am not going to blame anybody if you leave the room because I'm about to tell you you a story that has some real language in it. Aside from the F bomb. We have all in this room dated someone who is certifiably batshit crazy. But we've told ourselves that they're not, that that's normal. And we've made excuses for those people anybody in here ever had. The last time I made excuses like that, the guy showed up drunk at my house with a gun. I don't recommend it, but the police are very nice people in situations like that. We have all made excuses for those people. So I want to tell you a story that I call The Slowbright Bronco. June 17, 1994. If I jogged your memory, you might remember that as the day of the slow white Bronco Chase with O.J. simpson. But for me, I remember it as the day that I met Mom. He was my first long term boyfriend and I was still in college in Houston. So I flew to Knoxville, Tennessee to meet his family. And our first trip that day was to meet his mom. And probably the first indication that I should have had that Something was going to go horribly wrong is when we were leaving, I grabbed my purse and Joe was like, what are you doing? We're just going across the street. He lives across the street from his mother's house. Problem. So we go across the street, and the one thing I remember about that day is it was June in Knoxville, which is like three wadded up wet monkeys in your panties kind of hot. Like the kind of hot that you are not gonna fix until you do things God never intended with a window air conditioning unit. So we show up on the doorstep of his mom's house, and we knock on the door, and this is what I hear from inside. God damn it. Somebody get that off the tv. I want to watch the game. Joe, what the fuck was that? Oh, that's just Phil. That's Mom's boyfriend. Awesome. The door opens, and there's a woman standing there with hair the consistency of cotton candy, who has been ridden harder and left wetter than the monkeys in my panties, Marlboro dangling from her lip. I have just met Joe's mom. Yay. So we go into the living room, and there in all its glory is the fill tube socks, basketball shorts, wife beater, mullet. Suddenly, I had no more questions about Phil. So we all start chatting, and Phil turns on his hospitality gene, and he starts asking me about my trip. And. And I just say, you know what? I'm just happy to be here. I've never been to Knoxville before. Knoxville? Knoxville. It's Knoxville. As in vulva, like the car. Ironically enough, I was an owner of both at the time. Still an owner of one, But I didn't feel like getting into a semantics discussion with a guy with a mullet. So I go into the kitchen. I realize that Joe has abandoned me with Phil at this point, so I follow the voices into the kitchen, go through the swinging door, and his mom is standing there with a glass of wine, kind of teetering. It's 4 o' clock in the afternoon. She is shithoused, teetering up against the fridge. And. And Joe's like, I'll let you two get to know one another. And I'm just like. I'm standing there for what's 20 seconds? And she's just, you know, honey, you're cute and all, but you ain't never going to be as good as Pam. Pam was Joe's first wife, mother of his. Or mother of his son. Father. Or, you know, mother of his son. And as I was soon to learn in the next chapter of the Joe Vandergrift Chronicles a woman who could do no wrong. So we walked back across the street that night after Pat, his mom, and Phil had passed. Passed out drunk in some fucked up pipe cleaner looking sculpture kind of thing on the couch. And I look at Joe and I'm like, well, that was weird. He's like, what do you mean? He thought that was normal. So I started to think that that was normal. That's what I mean by the stories we tell ourselves. Now let's talk about stories we tell other people. Where I am now, I get to go around the country and I get to talk. I get to make people laugh. I get to help them get to their next better version of themselves from wherever it is they might be. And I get called by Fox Business, not Fox News. I get called by Fox Business about magazine columns I write. And I'm frequently called by like USA Today to be an expert source in branding and marketing. And some of you are probably looking at me in here like I am one ungrateful little whiny bitch because you would kill to have USA Today call you. You want to be on Fox Business? Well, let me tell you, until yesterday, when I lost my shit, I thought that's what I wanted too. Because I'm surrounded by head nodders. I'm surrounded by people who look at me and they're like, hey, Erica, that was awesome. I really enjoyed that. You know what? I would kill to do that. Hey, how did you do that? Can you teach me how to do that? Fucking you can have it. You can have it all. I've put myself in the position of being exactly what I said I would never be, which is victim to what everybody else says I should be. We fall into the traps of listening to other people and telling the stories that they and we want to hear because the truth is so fucking terrifying that we will do anything but say what's true. And when we're more focused on the version of the truth that's palatable versus the truth itself, we get stuck. Our hearts become restless, and even the greatest days somehow suck. And nothing is ever going to remotely get close to being right until we reconcile these two types of stories, the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we're telling everybody else. And we stand in the middle and we own that what is actually the truth. And that's why I'm coming out today as an advocate of losing your shit, because it's of incredible benefit. You get to say the things you've always wanted to say. When I blurted out to my mentor on the phone yesterday. I fucking hate what I do. I don't want to write these magazine columns anymore. I don't want to be the unpopular God. I don't give a shit that I wrote a book. Oh, my God. Did I just say all that? Yeah, I'm saying that at a conference for inbound marketing where I've been brought here as kind of an expert. Check, please. But what happens when we lose our shit is we can return the validation to where it belongs, ourselves, instead of with everybody else. Bridges collapse when they're overburdened and. Level with me. We've all been in an elevator. When someone of girth gets on and your eyes glance over to the button pad to see exactly what the capacity is of the elevator, you're a dick if you say you've never done that. You've also made judgments when somebody sits next to you on a plane and doesn't buy two seats. Because when we're not reconciling those two stories, our stories are taking up too much space. Everything in nature has a capacity, but somehow we put ourselves through lives saying we don't have that kind of capacity. We. We're not subject to nature's rules. We can do everything. I can fucking do everything. Can't you? I can. And that's what I've been doing for so very long. So what can we do to reconcile these two stories, the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell everybody else? Well, the first thing is we can create an environment for ourselves where it's safe to tell those stories. I call it scary safe. I have mentors, people I trust, where I can pick up the phone or dash out an email like I did yesterday. And guys losing my shit. Epic. The funny farm could have come for me yesterday, and I'd been like, wee, what's for dinner? Just feed me so I don't have to do anything. Create that safe environment for yourself where you can say the things you can't say anywhere else. The second thing we can do is we can stop attacking other people for sharing their truths. Facebook is a fucker for this. You know, whenever I get a sinus infection, I never realize how many of my friends went to medical school, because everybody knows exactly what I should do. And politics make Facebook even worse. Just know that some people in this world are going to be metric douche nozzles no matter what you post. And that's just the way they are, and you don't have to pay attention to them. And the third thing we can do is embrace the not so fine art of losing our shit. It's unpretty. Like flying on an airplane with your face swollen from crying all the way to the airport and realizing that you've just eaten two lunches because you're spooled up that you forgot you went through the fucking Wendy's drive thru on the way to the airport so you had to order nachos when you got there. And I'm like, why am I so bloated? Oh, I double lunched shit. But when we lose our shit, we give our gut permission to call bullshit on that story, G. And our gut tells us that what we've been doing for so long is unacceptable. So I'll end with just a few things. One story is really all we need. And if you're living a life where you have to tell the people that you love the most one thing while you're feeling another, I recommend you lose your shit. Because the most exhausting activity in the world is walking around trying to keep it together. And that's what I've been doing for a very long time. And I don't know how many speaking gigs I'm going to get after this, especially ones where I'm called in as a marketing expert. But here's the thing, you can have every one of those speaking slots because I don't want them. I want to go and talk to people about making tough choices and I want to spend my life telling stories to about and for people who like to think that's what I want to do. And that's a truth that goes beyond the world of branding and marketing. And I live for the moments. The moments that mean the most to me in this career that I've built as a branding and marketing expert are the ones where people send me an email or pull me aside after a talk and they tell me that something I said changed their life. And what I've realized, as I was up until fuck all of the morning last night, that every time people come up to me with those stories, they're talking about a moment where I only had one story and I didn't have the story gap. And so what I'm working on today is continuing the not so fine art of losing my shit and realizing that having one story is a. Well, it's a pretty fucking awesome feeling. So thank you and may you lose your shit and may it not be graceful.