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Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers. This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What now?”.
Hosted by Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, The Wobbly Middle features interviews with famed city superwomen, dazzling entrepreneurs and revolutionary midwives and doctors who reveal what they’ve learnt through their own wobbly middle experiences.
[00:00:00] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Season two of the Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women reinventing their careers in midlife.
[00:00:11] Patsy Day: Hi, Susannah.
[00:00:13] Susannah de Jager: Hi Pats.
[00:00:14] Patsy Day: How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:15] Susannah de Jager: Today's guest, Aundrea talks about elements of work that are outside of your control, how you can best prepare and manage the unexpected, unpredictable, or outright obstructive. Hers is a particular scenario, imagine managing Donald Trump, but the point is a value to many of us. Prepare, practice, and supplement.
If you want to pivot, restart, or completely change your career, you're gonna have to be outside of your comfort zone, and guess what? It's gonna be uncomfortable. But that doesn't mean you can't prepare in a way that will make you feel that an unfamiliar scenario is at least more manageable.
Practicing with a friend on the likely interview questions, reading up on areas that you're not currently an expert on. These are all things we can do and will help us feel more confident on the day. Going on an online training course would be a great one as well, where you acquire a skill that you know you are lacking for that particular new direction you want to go in and all of these are things that are within our control and will make us that much more impressive, competent, and of course, very importantly, confident when we step into a given room and need to perform.
Even practicing in a mirror, and Pats, this will make you laugh. I don't know if you've seen this, but think Hannah Wadding and Ted Lasso or filming yourself, to see what trips you up when you try and answer a question can be really valuable.
And finally, and this is a theme that's going to come up lots in season two, is those skills that we don't acknowledge we have, that we don't put value on, that we perhaps don't even think of as skills, and all I can say here is you need to talk to friends, because often they will be the best people at holding up a mirror and showing you something positive that you didn't even know was there.
And Pats, how's your wobbly middle?
[00:02:03] Patsy Day: It feels impossible for me to start season two without reflecting on what season one has given me. When I resigned from my role as an in-house lawyer, I just couldn't see what my working life would look like in the future. It was just a void, and it sounds silly over dramatic even, but it felt like I was standing in front of a huge body of water with a low mist and I just couldn't see the way forward.
But now thanks to this podcast, to some work I'm doing on Safe House Amsterdam, which is a story for another day, and thanks to the support we've gotten from our friends and families and listeners. Those stepping stones to get me across the water, are slowly beginning to emerge. But enough about me. Tell us about today's guest.
[00:02:59] Susannah de Jager: Today's guest, is the incredible Aundrea Cline-Thomas, a three time Emmy award-winning journalist, a media entrepreneur, and a champion of storytelling in all its forms. Aundrea's career has taken her from the front lines of breaking news to launching Mountain Court Media and the Rewrite, a platform dedicated to helping media professionals navigate career transitions.
Aundrea's journey into journalism began in her teens with a two week newsroom experience that left her hooked on the power of storytelling. With a career marked by resilience, excellence and a passion for helping others own their narratives, Aundrea brings a unique perspective on career reinvention, the evolving media landscape, and the art of embracing change.
Most of us are not seasoned journalists, but it doesn't mean we can't learn from that approach. I cannot wait to hear more from her. Aundrea, welcome to the show.
[00:03:55] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I am so happy to be here. Thank you both for having me.
[00:03:58] Patsy Day: As our listeners can hear, you were born in the States to parents who moved over from Sierra Leone and that community that your parents built around you while growing up still plays a really important role in your life. You were a good student and initially wanted to be a teacher, but then you got hooked on journalism. Tell us about that.
[00:04:21] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Yes, I was about 16 years old. It was the summer before my senior year in high school and I did a program at a university in Washington DC. It was just a two week program for high school students to introduce them to journalism, and as you said, I did really well in school, but I was pretty bored. You know, everybody says, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And there was nothing that I said, I wanna do this forever. But in that program, they showed us how to shoot video with these big old cameras. They took us to a local news station, and then we put together a story, on the National Mall in Washington, DC and so with that camera, people told me about their lives and I thought it was the most incredible thing, and I was like, this is it. This is what I wanna do. I wanna tell people's stories forever.
[00:05:09] Susannah de Jager: You just said, I want to do this forever. I think it's really interesting given that we are doing The Wobbly Middle and talking about people pivoting their careers and before you even get into it, I don't think anyone has the answer to that question or increasingly we're not going to.
[00:05:24] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: But we ask children that all the time, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Not, what are your interests? What brings you joy? Who do you wanna serve? It's what do you wanna be? And at that point, I've said, now that we're the generation that's not getting the gold clock, we're not gonna be in corporate for 30 and 40 years like our parents were.
But because we were assuming the rules of our parents' generation, you went into a place and if you had a good job, you just stayed for decades.
[00:05:53] Susannah de Jager: I remember reading somewhere not so long ago that if you ask children, what's your spark? They will have an answer and at a particular age they will stop having an answer. Cause they'll have unlearnt to instinctively know.
[00:06:04] Patsy Day: I was also thinking about when we tend to come to the various crossroads in our lives, we go back to those questions, what are your interests? We go back right to the beginning, and so if our children develop along the lines of what their interests are rather than the end destination, maybe they won't find themselves so much in the same bother as we find ourselves.
[00:06:29] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I was very clear of this was my interest and I finally had a name of a job that could allow me to pursue that. But through my career, always knowing that I could take these interests and have another job title associated with the same thing. So it's true. I will tell stories forever. I'm just doing it in a different platform and that's why I don't believe in Plan Bs. I believe that our plan A just need to look different.
[00:06:59] Patsy Day: Yeah, I think you're doing a lot of very interesting work on educating people about transferable skills and how they see themselves. If you set us up for your television work, you won three Emmys, what kind of stories were you covering?
[00:07:17] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Oh wow. So during my career, I was covering a little bit of everything. So I was a local news reporter for more than 15 years in the States. Moved around to five different cities, made my way up to bigger and bigger markets. first it was just any and everything, and then I started really honing in on education and then Government and really talking about how policies impacted people in their real lives. Really with a lens of disparities and why do some people not have what they need? And for instance, I was doing a lot of work in New York City around Rikers Island, which is an infamous jail, and really questioning our thoughts on what people who were accused of a crime, what their rights should be and are, what conditions should they be in? And how when we turn a blind eye to that, it makes us less safe,Just really looking at things like that. But also run of the mill crime. Lots and lots of crime reporting and I think that doing so much crime reporting. Especially when I lived in Philadelphia, it just started changing my heart of saying, I don't know if this is what I signed up for.
Being at crime scenes, you're also a first responder. I have been privy to people's worst day of their lives and their visceral reaction to their worst day of their lives. I always say, I would show up either on the best day of your life, but most likely on the worst day of your life and so just having that dichotomy is just something that I always grappled with.
[00:08:52] Patsy Day: Tell me about how you would replenish your stores of resilience.
[00:08:56] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Oh boy.Not in any way that was super robust. I'd sit and watch reality television when I came home to like veg out, you know. It caused so many questions of like, why do these inequities exist? Or this mother that I interviewed, we are the same age, but we live completely different lives.
Why do I have opportunity? And she does not have this opportunity. As journalists are supposed to question systems. So I always was questioning, why do some people have, and other people why don't they have, and what's the rhetoric around it?
But it was just really hard. have a great group chat. My friends in the industry when you have a bad day because it's something that people consume, the products that, we created. But they don't have any idea what it's like to be on the front lines every single day. But it was tough. It was really tough.
[00:09:52] Susannah de Jager: What you demonstrate there is a really high level of empathy, I don't know if your upbringing affects that at all, or if you just think that's who you would always have been.
[00:10:04] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: It completely does. So I had the benefit, my parents are from Sierra Leone, West Africa, and I had the benefit growing up, going there every other year and we would stop in the UK as well because I have family in Leeds. And so we'd, go to Sierra Leone and then go to Leeds and then come back home. So it'd be like a two, three week vacation and I was always fascinated with how other people lived. I got to see people in just different places and spaces and one thing I loved about Sierra Leone is that even though it's such a poor country, there's so much joy. I just admired them so much. and just seeing how people did things differently. I think that's what wet my appetite, once I learned about journalism, oh, I can do this kind of at scale. But that's how my parents raised me, was that it's your responsibility. You were born in the United States, you have immense privilege and it is your responsibility to give. As a human, this is your role.
[00:11:04] Patsy Day: I want to take you back to something you said earlier about broken systems in communities and also how the systems that would usually hold people or governments to account, who would tell those stories, that traditional media system is also breaking down.
What do you see as how traditional media finds itself in the position that it does now?
[00:11:28] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: The practical answer that people would give is that there are far more options that journalism is no longer the gatekeeper on information and people can get the news wherever they want. Is it journalism? No. A lot of it isn't actually journalism.
So I think that an executive might tell you it's the expansion of options is the reason why it diluted audiences and when you dilute audiences, you can't get the advertising dollars.
If you can't get the advertising dollars, you gotta lay people off, and here we are. My deeper answer is thatI think the traditional media ignored communities, especially marginalised communities. Didn't diversify their ranks,didn't have the perspective that they needed in the storytelling, the context, the nuance. Didn't celebrate that, and by the time they caught up, it was just too late.
You had so many journalists of color who have been fighting for years, for how stories are being told. The number one business mantra is that, you have to know your customer. If you don't know your customer, you will die, right? Like you will collapse. And so that's what we're seeing right now is that news did not actually know its customers. So I think from a very just standard business perspective, it wasn't centering audiences and getting to know audiences in a authentic way and creating a feedback loop. And so, here we are.
[00:12:48] Patsy Day: So when did you begin to either fall out of love with your journalism role or see the writing on the wall?
[00:12:56] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I still love it. But I just saw that the industry was constricting in a lot of different ways. I've moved to five different cities, and in, in 15 years, that's really hard to never have roots, right? The pay, it increases exponentially, but I saw the pay being cut. I wasn't spending holidays with family. I was, missing a lot of the life that I wanted to be present for in service of this job and I love it and I so grateful that's the path that I took. But the cost just became too high.
[00:13:33] Patsy Day: Was there a moment when you thought, I need to start thinking about what comes next?
[00:13:39] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Yeah, there was a moment years before and there was this network anchor, her name's Ann Curry, Asian-American woman who was like gold star. She was what everybody should aspire to. She was so smart. She was, so personable. She had gravitas. She could do the light story, but then she could talk to a world leader and run circles around them, and she was forced to leave her job and her co-anchor was Matt Lauer and what we know now is that he was in entangled in like,allegations of inappropriate behavior.
We know that now in the Me Too movement. He got ousted in a big way, but we didn't know then about the power dynamics that she was grappling with behind the scenes. That led to her having to leave thecompany, and she was in tears on air saying goodbye, and I was on my couch in tears. She embodies literally everything that they tell us to strive for. She made it to the very top of the mountain and it felt like public humiliation to me, and that's when I was just like, wow, no one's safe, and if it could happen to her, it could happen to me. And that's when I think I really took the rose color glasses off and said, I'd love this, but at what cost?
Everything I had done was in service to this career. And slowly said, okay, well what else do they pay people to do?How else could I use my skills? Like I could speak? Well, that makes me really uncomfortable. I start to sweat. I like speak to a camera. Okay, fine. But speaking to a room full of people, ha, that makes me nervous.
Let me start speaking. So I was in Nashville at the time, Tennessee, because I was on air, people would say, Hey, can you moderate this discussion? Can yoube the mc for this event? And I just started saying yes, and people were like, how can I help you? And I was like, Hey, if you have an event, I can come and mc it. And I would just be terrified. But I just pushed myself to do it, and just little breadcrumbs over time of saying, where are my deficits? What would I have to build up? What skills would I have to build up to be marketable in a broader marketplace? What would I have to do? And then I put myself in position to do it and be extraordinarily uncomfortable and terrible at it.
But I was like, if I can do it enough, I could get pretty good at it and so I just kept doing it. And little breadcrumbs over, 10 years, I mean, it wasn't a light bulb. But it was in my consciousness. That's when the seed was planted of always preparing myself and starting to think of myself more broadly and not just in a silo.
[00:16:22] Patsy Day: What would you say to people listening about how they could prepare themselves for the next step rather than coming to the cliff edge?
[00:16:31] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Yes. I've been thinking about this a lot because through my podcast I interview so many people about how they've navigated it and I've come up with Empower is the framework that I've devised around this.
The first E is envision. So it's really like pausing. I think people are like, I don't like this. Let me go to this other thing. And I was like, wait, wait, wait. You gotta stop. You've gotta pause for a moment because everything is not awful, right? What did you love? What lights you up? What don't you like? what do you need? How do you work best? Deconstructing that and getting a sense of who you are to give your kind of next pursuit some sort of direction. The M is for money, and I think we don't talk about it enough. It's go chase your dreams. Like the wobbly middle is when you have, you might have children, you might have a partner, you have bills. This is real life and you have to understand how much runway you have, and determines the type of risks that you can take. I made sure that I was saving money.I knew how long I could go without earning a dime.
The P is for personal brand. I've told thousands of stories, but the hardest story to tell has been my own. If you talked to me two and a half years ago, doing this podcast would be wildly uncomfortable because I would've been so uncomfortable with talking about myself.
But look, people can't help you if they don't know who you are and what you bring to the table and what you desire for yourself. So I think that's really important.
O is for organised, and that's creating a strategic action plan. So I don't do this willy-nilly of oh, I'm just gonna go out there. I know it seems like that. But really calculated in thinking about, all right, here are the levers I'm going to pull. And then, what's the return on investment?
The W is widen. So you really have to widen your network and understanding and also widening your perspective, really understanding that, life could look different if you let it and the difference might be the best thing ever, right?
E is evolve some of the similar things of just evolving your perspective of things might look different, and then the R as the results. I've talked to people it's like, oh, I've just done this for likeeight months has it any of it worked?
No. Well, we need to do something different. We can't just do what we wanna do if it's not yielding the results that we want. We just can't go blindly in it. Let's take a moment again. Assess. You can't do it after a week, you can't do it after a month, but maybe after three months of consistent effort, then let's assess and see, hey, is this leading to what we want?
And I think the key for me has been pulling all of those levers at the same time. But you can't just do the things that are easy for you. You gotta do the things that are also hard for you and I truly believe that over time, you'll have so much return on your investment and it really could be like greater than you could have ever imagined.
[00:19:31] Susannah de Jager: I feel like anyone listening that didn't think that was amazing, you need to listen again. But, you talk a lot about discomfort and I think it's a really interesting concept because we're almost from an evolutionary perspective, hard word to try and avoid discomfort.
But there's more of a zeitgeist now around habit forming and long-term goals and not giving into short-term. Do you have a way that you push yourself through discomfort,
[00:19:58] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I have the muscle memory for it because this is a thing I love that I chose journalism because it taught me everything that I needed to learn to survive and so if you think about it being an on-air reporter. I've had gaffes on live television and I have, you know, like they come to me, Aundrea Clein Thomas is live and then you're like, oh my God, my mind goes blank. Or my heart is beating so fast, it's beating in my ears and I stop breathing. You know? And then you finally speak and it like comes out creaky and just, you want to go under the ground. I think people think oh, how do I make discomfort feel less horrible?
I think of it in terms of at least I'm in the arena. I'm there, I am doing the hard work. And so the people who might criticise me, show me what work you're doing. At least I have the guts to try. I have the ultimate confidence in myself that it will be terrible the first try, but I have always gotten better. My proposition is that I might not know how to do it now, but I'm smart enough to figure it out.
And if I do it enough, I'm gonna get better. I'm gonna be great at it, actually. It's supposed to be messy and ugly. In the beginning, you're going to stutter. And so in this season where I've had to take even bigger leaps, I can take bigger leaps because I took small leaps. and for other people who they don't have a television career.
Have you ever moved away from home? You had to navigate new environments, you had to make new friends, there's small things that you've actually done in your life that has put you out there. So I'd say start with the small thing. It doesn't have to be go blow up your life. I actually advise against that, but I did it and I advise against it. But I think it's the small things of go to a place that you've never been, that you've been really curious about. Join groups and don't ask any of your friends to come with you so you can like, engage with strangers. All those little things just developed the confidence. So once I took a big leap, I had taken so many small ones that I was just like, here we go. Buckle up.
[00:22:16] Patsy Day: After you blew up your life as you referred to it, which was about two, three years ago, you started Mountain Court Media and that was producing you even produced the NABJ interview with Donald Trump last year. Which is really quite something. So you started working for yourself building a media production company, and now you've taken on something else, which is the rewrite program.
[00:22:45] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Yes, I have. The rewrite is community of journalists and storytellers, actually all over the world. We have folks in the UK that are a part of it as well. They are interested in, reassessing, reimagining, and reinventing their careers in the face of the industry upheaval. Which is a global upheaval that's happening right now.
[00:23:04] Patsy Day: Something that is at the heart of the rewrite is exploring your transferrable skills. I wonder if you can tell us how we should be thinking about our skills.
[00:23:14] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: What is your superpower? And sometimes that's too big of a question,
[00:23:17] Patsy Day: Oh, thank God. I actually thought you wanted me to answer.
[00:23:20] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: But there is something we all have them though. So what I did was, because I asked myself the same questions over and over because I never had the answer the first time because I didn't know how to center myself. That's the thing is that I was like fitting into spaces and losing myself in the process.
And so when I started asking myself questions, I was like. Oh my God, I don't know. And so I would, I sent an email to friends and say, Hey, if you had to describe me to other people, what would you say? And I started paying attention to, oh, if I had a great day, what happened? What was I able to do? Who was around me?
And I started trying to look for patterns. What did I get complimented on? For me it was like my empathy, the thing that I thought was, not necessarily a flaw, but isn't always beneficial was actually my superpower.
It's hard to see what's special about you because you're in the same spaces with everybody who's like you.
[00:24:20] Patsy Day: How do we articulate that into something that can go on a CV or how do we market our soft skills?
[00:24:29] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I stumbled and fumbled and bumbled for a really long time. I'm a big fan of practicing out loud. So knowing how to introduce myself has always been really difficult. After I left, before I was a reporter for the station period, done, and that came with whatever gravitas or whatever people thought about what that meant. And then I left and I was like, well, what do you do? And I was like, well, and I go into this whole thing and it's practice, and I practice in the mirror. And especially since I do a lot of different things now, I'm like, I don't want somebody to think I'm scattered. And so the advice that I got from, Kendra Bracken Ferguson, she said, okay, it depends on who the audience is. So for some people, she's like an investor, she's an entrepreneur. She does a lot of different things and she's like, it depends on who the audience is.
So for me, for this interview, I am the founder of the Rewrite,and Host of The Next Best Thing podcast because that's about the career and life transitions. For somebody else, I'm a corporate media trainer and I just talk about that part of what I do. So I had to learn that by doing it really poorly, but getting in spaces where I have a lot of practice. So I'm a part of a coworking space but it's also more of a community called Luminary. It's based in New York, but it's global. and I'm around women and so that makes it more comfortable for me and it's a non-judgmental space. And that's taught me how to like, alright, you have to introduce yourself and go.
[00:25:54] Susannah de Jager: I love the way you speak about community and it's the thread that you've pulled all the way through this conversation, and I think it's so important because you're talking about if you don't know how to describe yourself, ask your friends. If you need support, you need to find yourself, ask your community. Reach out to people, and I think that so often, and it's one of those things going back up to the start of the interview that we almost unlearn when we're children, it's okay not to have the answers. It's okay to reach outside yourself and to look elsewhere to people that you trust, to tell you either things that you can't see clearly for yourself or to give you that support when it gets hard.
[00:26:33] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: And sometimes they're just a few steps ahead, That's the thing with my podcast is that, I'm talking to people who are 10 steps ahead of me, of man, I'm struggling with this. How did you do it? And then just doing what they say and looking at the themes. But we can't go this alone.
If you're trying to change your life, that's really hard. If you're going counterculture, that's really hard and the difficulty sometimes thrusts you into isolation and saying, I'm the only one, or other people won't understand me. But even if you have those feelings, you just have to go outside. If you're trying to go in another way. Sometimes you need other people around you.
[00:27:15] Patsy Day: In terms of the people who you call, I've been scratching around in my notes for some advice that you repeated, so please correct me if I've got it wrong. But you saw an executive coach and he said something like, name three people that you would call, in your network to help you get a job or an introduction and at the time you could only think of one, and that was sort of a pivotal moment in your life. What struck me about that was when we say networking, everybody just cringes. But I thought what was really helpful about the comment, in your beautiful quote, if I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes.
But it was this idea that when you go out to meet people, it's not transactional relationships. What can you give me, but how can I be in service to you? And I think turning that networking experience around to think of it, you being in service to someone else, was a very helpful thing for me to reframethis horrible idea of networking.
[00:28:21] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I went to a conference and they're like, it's just making friends because friends wanna hire friends and that's when the light bulb switched on for me. And it was around the same time when the executive coach had asked me that question, if you lost your job today, who are the three people you would call?
Not to commiserate with, but who could open a door for you? And I only had one, and he said, well, you have some work to do. I'm an introvert too, so I'm not extroverted. People think that just because I was on television, I was extroverted, quite the opposite. I have a very lovely relationship with my couch.
I go out and I say, okay, out of this event, I just need to have three or four like solid conversations with people and then I can leave but I just wanna connect with them on anything. I love their shoes, I love their jewelry. They say something that I think is cool, I wanna learn more. Boy, has it changed my life. Like literally from a very tangible perspective of keeping me afloat in this entrepreneurial journey where I haven't known what to do and I'm figuring it out. We're all out here just performing, and when you're like, man, I don't really, I don't have it together. And they're like, oh, great. I don't either. Let's grab a drink so we can talk about these things. So it's been, it's been amazing.
[00:29:36] Patsy Day: Well, I think that the final thing I'd just like to ask you is something we ask all our guests, is what would you tell your 30-year-old self about where you are today?
[00:29:46] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: I would like to tell my 30-year-old self first, you're not old. I had a whole meltdown freak out when I turned 30. Sobbing. Cry, oh my God. All these things hadn't happened yet. That I thought my timeline was busted. No, is that, you're right. Your instincts are spot on. And just lean in. It just gets better.
[00:30:10] Patsy Day: Thank you so much.
[00:30:12] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Thank you. Thank you both for having me. It's been wonderful.
[00:30:16] Susannah de Jager: It's been really such a joy and I feel like you've given us and our listeners so much to work with, so thank you. You've been really generous.
[00:30:26] Aundrea Cline-Thomas: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:30:30] Patsy Day: Thank you for listening, for sharing your stories, and for being part of the conversation.
[00:30:35] Susannah de Jager: New episodes of The Wobbly Middle are released every other week. Please follow us and leave a review. It really helps others to find us.