Meet Megan Rees

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Megan Rees. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Megan below.

Hi Megan, really appreciate you joining us to talk about a really relevant, albeit unfortunate topic – layoffs and getting fired. Can you talk to us about your experience and how you overcame being let go?

At the end of 2022, I was part of a mass layoff. I was taking a lunch break, buying a big ticket item during a post-Thanksgiving sale when I came back to work to find I no longer had a job.

The next 48 hours were a rollercoaster, everything from shock to grief to the feeling of finally being free. I allowed myself to feel all of my feelings, gathered all my resources, and decided to go down a new path. I took it as a sign to finally follow-through with my businesses. I had had a small version of one on and off for many years, but always on the side of my “real job.”

While it’s been exceptionally hard, I also feel like I’m stepping into my genius and utilizing all my gifts. I have a different relationship to money, no longer using it to fill a void created by being powerless at work. I feel like I’m in control of my own destiny for the first time in my life.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I have a portfolio career with three branches, but they all have one thing in common – I use my creativity and my love of storytelling to help people heal and become the best versions of themselves.

I’m a drama therapist and licensed professional clinical counselor who specializes in helping people who’ve had a bad time at work – stress, burnout, bullying, and or just a very toxic workplace.

I’m a coach who helps people find the bravery to make big pivots, or set boundaries with their day jobs so they can reclaim their energy, time, and worth.

Lastly, I’m a consultant who works with companies to help them create psychologically safer teams. In other words, I help companies stop being so damned toxic. My dream is that this business puts the therapy business out of business.

When I’m not doing those 3 things, I’m dedicated to my screenwriting craft. All of the themes that come up in my professional work make it to the page, and then some.

I’m about to launch a series of events to help people step into their Main Character Mindset. Some of these will focus on how to talk about yourself when you network and some will focus on how you talk about yourself in writing.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The best tools I have for anything life throws my way are my empathy, self-awareness, and curiosity and I honed each of those things by traveling.

When I was in my 20s I lived abroad in two different countries. I had to navigate, sometimes quite literally, getting around and everyday life tasks in places where I was new to the language and customs. I constantly had to figure things out and problem-solve, sometimes on the fly.

By staying curious, I learned about things I never could simply by reading about them, like what everyday sounds are and what the seasons smell like in other places and how these things impact the way people behave. I learned to see mistakes as opportunities to learn. And whew, did I LEARN!

Being outside of the familiar helped me gain perspective on where I came from and what matters most to me. It also helped me to see the world from other people’s eyes and to value how that helps me understand the bigger picture.

I truly believe the world would be a better place if everyone spent time outside of where they’re from. We’d all be more rounded individuals and feel more connected as simply fellow travelers on this planet.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I think a lot of people, especially creatives, don’t spend enough time and energy cultivating their gifts. I also believe that when people don’t, they have all this extra energy that doesn’t know where to go and often it just ends up haunting them in the form of anxiety. It’s like the mind tries to make sense of it by assigning it the task of evaluating everything we do.

Sometimes people don’t realize what their gifts are because they come so easily to them. Sometimes they’ve gotten a message that they weren’t good enough at their gift or that it wasn’t worth pursuing.

In 2020 when everything seemed awful, an extremely creative coworker complimented me on my ability to write copy for the company we worked for that was gloriously on brand. I was shocked to find out that not everyone was doing this. She said something like, “didn’t you notice we always send you the work to re-write?”

No, I hadn’t. Because it came easily to me, because it didn’t feel like work, I assumed everyone could do it, but I was wrong.

Towards the end of the year when I was getting gaslit at work and my gifts were constantly being exploited and under appreciated, I went over to my neighbor’s deck. It was October 30th. After she listened to the latest work drama she looked at me and said, “November is National Novel Writing Month, and you’re going to write a novel.” I looked at her incredulously.

But then, two days later, fueled by caffeine and donuts, I started writing. I wrote 1668 words that day and about that much each day for the entire month of November. Each of those blocks in my day was the only part of the day where I wasn’t overwhelmed by anxiety. It was then that I realized two things:

I am a writer and I must write.
I will never spend another minute of my life second guessing myself, playing small, or letting anyone besides me be the boss of my time, energy, creativity, or worth. I’m on a mission to help others get to this place and truly believe that when we all do, there’s no social or environmental issue we can’t solve.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

headshot by Jenn Heflin
WGA strike photo by Jerry Jerome https://jerryjeromephotography.pixieset.com/
and J.W. Hendricks https://jwhendricks.pixieset.com/

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