Episode 4 :: Shannon Watts

Minisode – Knowing what you suck at

Back to: The Green Room Podcast

(00:09):
Courtney: Welcome to the Green Room. I’m Courtney Martin. Today I’m thinking about the way legendary organizer and advocate Shannon Watts works, which is to say not alone and not apologetically. Let me share a little clip of my interview with her to remind you.

(00:27):
Shannon: Now, I know there is no one except maybe another woman with ADHD, who was a mom who could have done what I have done for 11 years as a full-time volunteer, which is to wake up every single morning to get so enmeshed with the details of gun violence around the country every day, to tell those stories, stories that wouldn’t be seen by other people if I hadn’t made Twitter, my full-time job in addition to all my other work. It took such a huge amount of focus and determination that was absolutely my ADHD For 11 years. I could work seven days a week, 10 or 12 hours a day on the issue of gun violence and not burnout.

(01:12):
Courtney: Wow.

(01:13):
Shannon: I do think that I can credit my ADHD for that. Did I get anything else done in those 12 years, 11 years? Not really. I can only focus on one thing at a time. Every single time I’ve hired anyone, I’ve said, I will need you to be my left brain, and I can tell right away when someone else has a DHD, and that’s fine. That’s great. I know they’re going to be creative, but they’re not going to be helpful to me unless we are creating together.

(01:42):
Courtney: What

(01:43):
Shannon: I need someone who knows that I’m not going to be able to go back and find the email they sent me six months ago who knows that each day is a new day. We got to start all over again with all the tasks that are going to be required of me, who kind of walks me through and creates the structure that I will need in order to be successful. And so I was very lucky that at Moms Demand Action, I was able to hire a chief of staff. I had an assistant, I had a communications rep, and then the entire team generally who understood the way I worked, and in my personal life, I have often had to rely on virtual assistants who also served as my left brain. I just wrote a whole book and I needed an editing coach, and that was my plea. It was like, who can help me create this book but also be my left brain? I can do the creative part, but I need someone to keep me on task. So it is a privilege to be able to do those things, to be able to afford some of those things, but I know what I need in order to be successful, and that’s, that’s people who think differently than I do.

(02:50):
Courtney: I was sort of stopped in my tracks by this fantastic modeling by Shannon for two reasons. The first was she’s unapologetic about her ADHD. This thing that was often a source of struggle for her in the context of traditional schooling became her absolute superpower in the context of her activism against gun violence. She lived, breathed and slept her work for a decade because of the hyperfocus that A DHD allowed her, and it is so damn refreshing to hear a woman not apologizing for that, isn’t it? The other thing is I feel like she’s modeling not just embracing your own form of neurodiversity and apologetically, but being self-aware enough to seek out team members who can understand your superpowers and challenges and have different ones of their own so you can make a great team together. This is something people pay a lot of lip service to.

(03:44):
I feel like I always hear people talking about this, but I don’t hear that many leaders unabashedly owning what they’re shitty at and what they’re great at in public, and talking about finding team members who can roll with them at this level of transparency. I think this kind of honesty with ourselves and with others allows for a different kind of devotion to our work because we’re not spending so much time every day feeling bad about ourselves, trying to work on shit. We’re just not good at apologizing to others for our shortcomings or bumping up against people within our organizations that are duplicative or competitive. You get all that out of the way, and you can focus like crazy as Shannon did on what matters most, which in this case is getting guns out of people’s hands so they can stop shooting our kids and everybody else.

(04:36):
What could be more important? I love her. I love her brain. I love the absence of her apology and the presence of her conviction and collaboration. Thank you so much. Shannon. What did you learn from Shannon’s episode? Have you navigated a similar moment and what got you through? Send us an email at greenroom@freshspeakers.com, and if you like what you heard today, please give us a rating and a review and tell a friend. The Green Room is an independent production of fresh speakers produced by me, Courtney Martin, along with Vanessa Valenti, Casey Molina and Allison Cook. Allie Bobman is our editor. The Green Room is possible. Thanks to the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I’m Courtney Martin. Thanks for listening.