Cancel Culture: Why You Must Plan For A Fall

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

DI GILLETT – Host (00:08.59)

Let’s talk about cancel culture. I’m Di Gillett and this is the Power of Women Podcast, the place where women supporting women isn’t just a sentiment. It’s the unapologetic decision we make every single day. Now bringing Reese with a spoon to Australia should have been a career highlight for my guest, but instead it became the moment her professional world literally turned upside down.

 

Jacqueline Brooker is an internationally recognized authority on communication, influence, and the power of the spoken word. Yet in 2016, Jacqueline found herself at the center of one of the most public moments of her professional life, and one that played out in the headlines and in public opinion, experiencing the kind of scrutiny that risked destroying her professionally and personally. But it didn’t.

 

And what we’re going to focus on rather than walking on eggshells and retreating into the silence when a crisis hits is how to build your business strategy and train for the event before it happens. Joining me from Queensland, Jacqueline Brooker, welcome to the Power of Women Podcast.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (01:24.123)

So excited to be here, Di It’s I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (01:28.418)

Me too. And it is sometime since you and I have caught up. I know I know we caught up in in Sydney at the Forbes Women’s Summit, but we’ve actually got a bit of career history together. I

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (01:41.23)

I know and it was so surreal almost to see you walking up the escalators at Forbes Women because I knew exactly who you were as you came in.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (01:49.134)

Different hairstyle then, but

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (01:51.756)

Yeah, very different hairstyle, but same style. Same swag.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (01:55.182)

Yeah, there we go. So good to see you. Jack, this is gonna be a little bit revealing for you because some of this could be a little difficult to talk about, but you know, call call it out as as we go along and if any of it gets uncomfortable, just tell me to belt it. Yeah. Brilliant. So in twenty sixteen you had just landed what

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (02:13.538)

I will. I will. You’ve had my promise.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (02:21.534)

in all intents and purposes should have been one of the biggest deals of your life. You were bringing Reese Witherspoon as a keynote to Australia and New Zealand. What happened?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (02:33.112)

Actually the the what happened is such a big question. Essentially it failed. That’s the simple version. And if you listen to the headlines that went crazy, it was anywhere between a con artist living in a pizza off people’s money right through to a housewife who didn’t know what she was doing and everything in between. So securing Reese with a spoon for a series of

 

Conferences and she was gonna be keynote speaker and then drop in for lunch on the way home in Auckland and it was an incredible event that we took a long quite a long time to put together. And just winning Reese across to the contract was a process that took about seven months in itself. We were meant to be actually having this conference series go across Australia in July. When we announced it in February, the global media went ballistic.

 

And everybody was calling it Reese’s legally blonde move because nobody saw her as coming as a keynote speaker. It just wasn’t something people saw coming. And so because of that, on launch we got a lot of publicity, which meant that when it didn’t work, I got just as much publicity by the factor of probably ten. Right? So

 

DI GILLETT – Host (03:45.122)

So the bad news story was the bigger story than the good news story.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (03:49.41)

Hundred percent. And actually cancel culture on steroids, and I know we’re gonna p unpack this. It’s really interesting though, because of what happened when it fell apart, I quite often forget that I actually got her to sign a contract in the first place. Right? You know, and that in itself is a is an opportunity and a pitch and something that most people don’t get the opportunity for. So when it fell apart, when it was actually coming to the crunch point and I realized that we couldn’t go any further

 

There was a few things that happened. We had an agreement with Reese about how that would happen. We were to send a press release to her team for approval on one day. That same day I received notification to attend a court in Los Angeles the next day, which I couldn’t physically get there nor assemble a legal team. The result of that I wasn’t really sure what that was all about, but the result of that was actually a gag order, a global gag order, which was at Infinitem. And that was handed down by the Tuesday afternoon. So we actually

 

with a series of events that afternoon, we not only had to cancel the conference series and we had great partnerships in place with Murray Claire and Channel Seven and all sorts of places. We not only had to cancel the conference series, by Tuesday night the website actually had gone dark under really strict instructions. On the Wednesday, which was day three, my insurance brokers called and I was insured for everything. Like I was literally insured for the building to float off its pylons in Sydney Harbor.

 

Like it was the amount of insurance we hold was crazy. And my insurance brokers called and said, We can’t trigger the insurance. And I was like, what? Because that would have sold everything. And the way that Reese was exiting would have sold everything. But I had actually called to back up a bit, I had called frustration of contract and refused to pay the next $250,000 fee instalment. The key part of any of these events is the celebrities’ national media call.

 

Which is where you see them. Every television station, every radio station, everywhere you look, everywhere you breathe. And they’re also in the Spotify ads these days, right? And that you only need.01% of the website traffic from that sort of activity to sell out every event. But it kept delaying and delaying and delaying and also wasn’t meeting social media contract obligations. So I call frustration of contract, which is what it was, and refused to pay the next instalment. So when the insurers

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (06:13.386)

went to validate, their response was she failed fiduciary payment under the contract. And then the insurances response to that was, Well, that’s a breach of contract, so we can’t trigger your insurance. Because of the gag order, I couldn’t actually defend it without breaching the gag order. Talk was insane. Yeah. W I still remember getting the phone call from the broker and I just knew as I put the phone down the I

 

DI GILLETT – Host (06:31.246)

Yeah.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (06:42.466)

this was gonna be horrific because I knew in that moment I was gonna have to send the company under and I just got in the car and drove and just drove and drove and drove until I ended up on the top of a mountain behind the Gold Coast. Just sitting there thinking, what am going to do? And so then I realized I had no choice. So on the way back down the mountain, I called receivers, I got back to the office and packed up files, let staff go and I moved really quickly to wind it up, which was the responsible thing to do.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (07:09.656)

You said you called all of these people, but did you come to that decision yourself or did you bounce off the decision to call this off somebody in in your personal network?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (07:25.27)

So I knew so I had a previous C suite background. So I’ve been a CEO in mining services, a CEO in traffic control, I’ve been a general manager of a twenty-four million dollar labor hire company. I was an industrial relations negotiator. I knew what responsible looked like. Right. And responsible looked like not trying to hold on when there’s nothing you can do. But what then happened that was really interesting was I

 

DI GILLETT – Host (07:42.434)

Yeah.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (07:52.36)

bought the receivers in, they w came in on the Thursday. I asked them to keep the notices till the Friday ’cause the Thursday was my elder son’s birthday and I didn’t want it attached to that for his sake. and especially because as an adult he’s gone into law so I’m grateful I had that that foresight to do that.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (08:10.208)

I wonder whether that played a role.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (08:12.972)

No, he was always very that driven. but and then on the Friday, what happened when the li the notices went live and we’re hoping because it was five PM on a Friday, and it’s ten years ago, so it wasn’t quite a twenty four hours news cycle then, we were hoping that it would damp the media st firestorm.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (08:30.7)

And social media had just landed.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (08:33.218)

Yeah, social media was really just starting to Yeah. And it just went ballistic. And what happened was it was there was three things that happened. Was I had the gag order, I couldn’t speak about what led to the breakdown. I had put the company into receivership, which I didn’t realise when I put it in, removes you fully a spokesperson. So you sign a deed with a federal government that you will never ever speak about the affairs of the company again. Gag order from A-list Celebrity.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (08:36.482)

Just starting to ramp.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (09:00.724)

agreement with the federal government to never comment on the affairs of company because it’s gone into receivership. And in that and also the third thing that happened was my agent told me to go and hide, told me to go and book into a place under a f under a different name until it all blew over. So that meant that in the immediate 72 hours after that Friday was there was no comment on the events, no comment on the company, and I was nowhere to be found.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (09:29.492)

And and you’re left to look like a complete charlatan on the basis of no comment?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (09:34.638)

Yeah. And there wasn’t even no comment. There was zero comment. Nothing. And so there was a void that they just raced to fill. Right. And it was actual it felt like betrayal though. And not because like how could they do this? But every time the national media call had been delayed, Australian media had been with me trying to get things to work. So, you know, I remember sitting in the office of Adwina McCann in Vogue, Sydney, on the phone to Anna Wentur in New York.

 

trying to get their contacts to get this national media call to happen. You know, every time it got delayed, ’cause a float a day would get floated and would start locking things in and then it would just kind of disappear.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (10:14.998)

What do you think really happened? I mean we’re ten years on. Have you have you got a true answer to that?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (10:20.95)

There is and it’s really interesting that you asked that. So there’s two things. Number one, there’s a period of time that she actually didn’t know media and we fell into that. So I think

 

DI GILLETT – Host (10:31.208)

Something happened in her world.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (10:33.452)

Yeah. the second thing is though, is one of the things I had to realise very quickly was I might never understand or know why and I had to let go of needing to know why. So instead of knowing needing I changed the question from why to what’s the one thing I need to do next? And I just let go of ever needing to know why.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (10:51.768)

So as a female potentially feeling let down by another female, is is that how you feel or do you look at it through the the lens of what you touched on briefly a few moments ago, that something was going on in her world and sometimes we just can’t assume to know what somebody’s dealing with and it was one of those moments?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (11:19.798)

mature version of me now says absolutely like it was a more about that understanding that we never know, we can’t assume, be generous in our assumptions. That’s taken me probably seven or last ten years to get to that point. My immediate response was it was literally betrayal, and it was also a lot of grief because I’d lost what I felt was I felt like I couldn’t go back to my C-suite career because this disaster was 73 pages on Google at one point.

 

it was like eleven hundred trolling messages in my inboxes at its peak. every day. so a long time I remember saying to someone, for the first time ever, I understand why people take their lives in this scenario. And not that I was

 

DI GILLETT – Host (11:54.934)

Yeah, that’s a lot

 

DI GILLETT – Host (12:04.622)

Thinking that way.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (12:06.198)

That I could fe it was so relentless Di. It was so relentless.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (12:10.503)

It’s overwhelming. It’s just it there you can see no out.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (12:14.936)

I’m generous in my assumptions now, but at the time it was very much the way that I kind of say it simply, it was so off brand to me of who she is and how she stands up in the world. It it that was the bit that really got me was even if there had been a challenge, did you actually have to wipe me out? and that’s the bit that I found really hard to reconcile.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (12:34.595)

Yeah. Right.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (12:39.202)

Because she has been and I and and by no means are we here to interrogate the values or or what Reese stands for, but she has been incredibly successful since that window of time being the champion of women producing content, great content. Great content that champions great great females. Can you watch any of it?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (13:05.46)

So for a while I couldn’t and my youngest daughter actually got all Reese with a Spoon movies banned from her boarding house.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (13:13.07)

It was a family response.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (13:15.474)

Yeah, there was a very firm family response. But also and I guess because getting to that place where, you know, the baseline the biggest lesson I take out of all of this is being generous in our assumptions. You may never know what’s going on for Santa

 

Yeah, we have to be. We can never actually fully know.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (13:35.318)

I need to remind myself every time I abuse somebody when I’m driving, actually, Jacqueline, that, you know, the person who just drove in front of me may be distracted for genuine reason.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (13:47.444)

Maybe. So I don’t know.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (13:50.74)

I know it.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (13:53.166)

But it’s also I you cannot it’s an undeniable talent. It is incredible advocacy for women female generated content. I mean we were at Forbes Women. Bruna Bruna Papadrea was on that. She’d had a massive partnership in there. so you cannot and this is why I also go back to I have to be generous in my assumptions, not just for my sake, but also because

 

If you look at before, so I chose her because of her women’s advocacy, right? It wasn’t just, he’s a a list. We had criteria around what we were choosing. So I chose her for her women’s advocacy and for her willingness to step up. And the tagline of our entire event series came from one of her speeches, which was, What would happen if the world were full of brave and ambitious women? Right. And so that was the reason we chose her. And when you look at what she’s

 

continued to do that’s exactly but there is a gap and we just happen to fall into that gap for whatever reason.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (14:55.566)

That would have made a great press release if you could have finished that in terms of why it fell over. But Yeah. I I’m starting to play through how that might read. But

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (15:05.994)

Yeah.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (15:07.886)

So let’s let’s just get into cancel culture for a moment because I think there’s two sides to this. There’s there’s the professional entity that gets a line drawn through it and and the business goes. But there’s the personal investment in your integrity, your reputation that you have spent decades building. Can you share with us how

 

those two parts felt one one personally and and secondly professionally because I’m sure one will be emotionally driven and one will be fiscally driven, but how would you describe the two?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (15:47.308)

Yeah. Look, it’s interesting as well because, you know, I’m only just really working my way out of the total financial hangover because I didn’t personally go bankrupt. So I took on a lot because I didn’t want to personally go bankrupt and not because I have any moral compass as such, but I just didn’t want to surrender my passport. I didn’t want to give up my passport. So I’m still ten years later only just working it out and just into the last parts of resolving all of that financially.

 

from a professional perspective, council culture is dramatic because and in the current zeitgeist of social media, you don’t even have to do anything incredibly horrendous or large scale for people to have brands destroyed, right? And businesses destroyed. So and if you are a f still founder owned or if you are the CEO who treats it like a founder owned,

 

It is absolutely professional. You have to keep your eye and there’s there’s a couple of lessons, key lessons that I’ve come up with since, you know, in reviewing and reflecting. But you actually have to keep an eye on the health of the business. And the health of the business can’t be maintained. You have to step into logical decisions. Everything from a professional’s perspective has to become logic and task. Logic and task. It’s like this never ending dance of logic and task. How do

 

DI GILLETT – Host (17:04.846)

How you get there though when it’s feeling incredibly personal, Jacqueline? It’s your business.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (17:10.156)

It’s yeah, so what I found I had to do and I have a I have an entire way that I approach things which actually came out of s a major event that happened for me in two thousand and four. And it’s literally close the door to the outside world is number one. But you when you’re in the middle of it, you have to find a window to do that, because you can’t just do that and hope it all goes away, right? So what I do is I always go, where’s gonna be my opportunity? Is it in a week, three weeks, three months, to actually close the door against the outside world?

 

And what do I need to do to be able to close that door responsibly? Right. So when I was driving back down that mountain, and I guess because of my previous experience, I already had a project plan forming in my head by the time I walked back into the office. Right. And so it’s about becoming completely task oriented and ticking it off, like physically ticking it off.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (18:01.193)

Yeah sort of thing.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (18:06.388)

So what happens in a lot of these high stress scenarios is we’re just moving through, but we’re not actually moving through anything. It’s like more like crisis management and putting out fires. And you still gotta put out the fires, but actually if you create a project plan around it and just move through it. And if you feel like the emotion is getting too much, break state. Get out of that office, walk the c coffee, go to the ground, go to the beach, have a wine, don’t have more than one wine. See it’s tempting to have a bottle.

 

but just do something that changes state and come back to it. Something that allows the emotion out. So if it’s screaming into a pillow, running on a treadmill, but something that just gets the adrenaline emotional out and then go back to it. Right? And that way you can kind of keep it. And I also found by identifying a window where I could close the door to the outside world, it’s kind of like the emotional side of me could arrest because it knew it was gonna get looked after. Sounds quite bizarre, but it was it really

 

It allowed you to rest.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (19:06.434)

Yeah, I get it and and whilst the what I’m gonna touch on now is completely different, there are there are elements that that are so so similar. In in two thousand and five when my sister in law was tragically killed as part of the the cycling accident in German that Germany that took out the Australian cycling team and my brother said to me, Can you organise a funeral? He asked me that at the airport

 

flying out to Germany to bring home her body. And I said, Of course I can. That ended up being two state memorial services. Interestingly, to the same point, you go to task which allows you to park the emotion. Now whether that’s healthy or not, because you’re putting it aside for another day, but I think there is nothing more focusing than a spreadsheet.

 

That is the list of things that you need to go through and if you can work through that in a structured way, you can park emotion for a period of time. So in any form of grief, whatever’s brought it on, being held accountable to a spreadsheet feels to be manageable to me. It feels it takes out that emotion.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (20:28.104)

And it’s also important because people will say to you it’s not healthy to put the emotion aside. I’m not talking about putting it aside and leaving it there. I’m talking about putting it aside and having a very defined point of return. Right? And that it just changes everything. And it ties into so many different things around the world. So, you know, they found that people with PTSD, ex military, if they gave them a dog to look after, they got better.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (20:39.138)

That’s right.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (20:56.214)

Yeah. Responsive.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (20:57.358)

Focus on something else. Right. And so there’s so many studies around the world of various iterations of that. And I didn’t know that at the time, but I realized it’s the same principle. Right. And so and you also, you know, one of the things I talk about is you can’t abdicate decision making. So some days I literally was on the floor, my brain was on fire, and I would have lawyers or whatever asking me to make decisions and I’d be saying, I can’t, I I just can’t even process. And they’d like

 

Thankfully my barrister was amazing and he would say, Jacqueline, you know I need your actual instruction. And he would sit on the phone long enough for me to actually work it out. So it wasn’t like I was it wasn’t like I was bypassing the impact. Like my some days I remember going to my doctor and saying, I think I’m going mad because I think my brain is actually burning inside my head. And he said, It is. The level of stress you’ve got, your brain will literally be on fire and we’re gonna have to calm it down. Wow. so you know, so

 

All of these things are real and true, but you can’t just abdicate decision making. So all the things that I still have to deal with over the last few years that are now finally coming to a close are because I couldn’t I did abdicate some of the decision making. And it always bites you. So you can’t abdicate decision making no matter what state you’re in. So you have to do the responsible thing.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (22:13.644)

So back to this I think it’s a toxic raids council culture. Was there points along that journey where you thought this is actually going to be the end of my career? I can’t come back from this.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (22:27.586)

Yeah. And frequently and recently. For a long time, for about five or six years, the Korea Mao used me as clickbait. So anything that had my name attached to it that they could sensationalise and put Reese’s photo with and create clickbait. And I

 

DI GILLETT – Host (22:42.434)

A slow on a slow story day that’d they’d pull it out again.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (22:46.026)

And that would reinvigorate it all in the public arena. and it was really interesting because there was a meeting with the APEC head of legal counsel for the Korea Mail, and you know, this is all off the record, and they’ll probably tell me that this is too on the record. I don’t care. They basically said, and the reason why I got that high up that the meeting got that high up was because they knew they were borderline.

 

And basically the outcome of that conversation was, yeah, we admit it’s probably incorrect, but sue us. And the really interesting thing was that was actually the moment I started to turn around because that was when I went, I’ve been waiting for the media and the public opinion zone to understand my side of the story. You know, and particularly because they’ve been so involved in trying to get this national media call done. I’d spent so much time unconsciously needing them to say, we do know the story.

 

And when that happened in that meeting, there was so much freedom for me in that because I suddenly went, They don’t give a rip about the truth. Why am I burning all my energy? And so I pulled back then from actually needing that to happen to move forward. It also happens now with, you know, because I have a habit. I mean, I know you’re really direct as well. I have a habit of calling people on their shit. And and when I do

 

DI GILLETT – Host (24:07.402)

Never Jack, no

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (24:11.458)

Be a little bit similar there. Just a touch. But when I do do that, if someone doesn’t like it, they will re-invigorate conversations about, but remember who she is? And so it it’s more it’s not even that I’m doing something wrong. It’s when I call people on their staff, they will divert attention and then I’m suddenly the one who’s wrong.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (24:12.951)

Yeah yeah yeah.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (24:31.394)

Bit like putting your head up to be a politician really though if there’s any issue. I mean I I there is a photo of me in two thousand six standing in Dallas holding a magnum in a adventure store and and pointing it and I do always say, you know, that was the moment my potential political career went out the window. ‘Cause it’s it is out there in public.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (24:54.126)

Absolutely. So yeah, so it’s just one of those things where and because I have really, you know, the irony is I’ve spent the last ten years teaching people how to find their voice and I haven’t had my own voice. And I guess it’s been I built things that mean I don’t have to justify, talk to, you know, discuss get over kind of thing. So it’s kind of like I’ve built almost like a parallel track to the life I thought I was gonna have.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (25:23.982)

Well I’m talking with Jacqueline Brooker, internationally recognized authority on communication, influence and the power of the spoken word and coming up why we need to plan for the failure as much as we need to plan for the success.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (25:50.006)

If you’re loving the Power of Women podcast, be sure to jump on to our YouTube channel and hit that subscribe button to ensure you never miss an episode.

 

Well Jacqueline, you put it in simple speak when we spoke in the lead up to this recording. You said the truth is if your voice is public facing, don’t avoid it. Fucking train for it. Yeah. That seems like a pretty good spot to pick up the conversation. How do we train for it?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (26:25.76)

Yeah, so to give it full context as well is, you know, I see this great, I guess, dampening of spirit and conversation and voice because what if I say the right wrong thing? What if I say the right thing and get misjudged for it anyway? What if this goes viral for all the wrong reasons? What if it, you know, dilutes our shareholder value? What if it damages our brand? And what we’re seeing, especially ’cause in Australia you’ve got tall poppy as well, right? So what we’re seeing is people not speaking when they should.

 

People not speaking authentically, if all the world is crying out that they are, innovation slows, decision slows. We make decisions that we shouldn’t be making because we’re afraid to make the right decision because of how it will look in public. And you know, to some extent we’ve seen this play out with, you know, elite levels of sport, politics, government, whatever it is, right? But what if if you’ve got a public facing voice, what if instead of trying to avoid it

 

You just accepted that part of the pattern and the rhythm of this world we now live in was that if you have any kind of public-facing voice and any kind of opinion, that at some point you’re going to get canceled. Right? That at some point you’re going to get taken out. And if you did that, instead of trying to be better and better and better and better behaved and smaller and smaller and smaller in the box, if you actually trained for it and had a strategy to move through it.

 

We would see people actually living boldly, actually living fiercely, actually saying what they should be saying and making the decisions they should be making. But instead, we just keep bundling ourselves into a smaller and smaller box, like a little pretzel inside that’s losing all of its dough inside and shrinking up because we’re afraid of what might happen. Now, the reason why I’m really passionate about this is when I was starting to speak about cancel culture.

 

I was doing all this research on cancer culture. There’s not actually a lot of research. Yeah. Bonafide research is really little. But some of that I did find, and I think it was out of Princeton, was the the incidence of being cancelled outweighs the event of being cancelled by thirty-one to one. We’re operating in a state of fear for something that doesn’t even actually freaking exist. Now, don’t get me wrong, personal experience. It hurts, it’s debilitating, it’s taking a lot of

 

DI GILLETT – Host (28:22.8)

Is that right?

 

DI GILLETT – Host (28:44.59)

It’s a lot of stress though, Jacqueline. So it feels so the prevalence feels greater than that.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (28:50.722)

The present but so the the precedence feels greater. So it’s been around since the dawn of time. We’ve been getting cancelled since the dawn of time through family, businesses, communities, all of that sort of stuff. the scarlet letter is cancellation, right? Having to parade with the scarlet letter on her back and her chest. What we have is it’s actually coming from the dawn of time because we are hardwired to need to belong. And the tribal primeval part of us.

 

is if I don’t belong to a tribe, I die because I can’t survive on my own in the environment. So we are hardwired this way. And it’s actually also neuroscience based. So from a neuroscience based, I’ve just lost the terminology for at the moment, but there’s a part of our brain to keep us safe that will amplify perceived threat. Right? So the minute there’s a perceived threat, which this is a very big threat, but it actually amplifies threat. Right? So we are actually

 

responding to an amplification that media does and that we do, right? And the crazy thing is this, is that when I went looking for because all can stories of cancel culture have the person has to run away, reinvent, come up with something else.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (30:03.694)

As your agent said, go and go and lock yourself away.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (30:07.288)

So the whole thing is run and reinvent, and that’s actually a lie, because the reason why I couldn’t find people who recovered from being cancelled is because then we call it a comeback story. Right? And it’s as like it’s as far back again as the dawn of time. Even so, for example, Winston Churchill recognized as one of the greatest prime ministers of the time and you know, helped England win the war and all that sort of stuff. But before that, he got exiled from Parliament, kicked out of London.

 

For three and a half years ’cause he wouldn’t shut up about this lunatic in Hitler and they all thought he was overreacting. Yeah. So he lost all of his social standing, he lost all of his employment, wasn’t was personal on Grata throughout London. But now he’s but the comeback story is the story that survives. Not the fact that he was kicked out. Florence Nightingale was cancelled by her family because she dared to work. Her family didn’t speak to her till till the day she died. Because she dared to work. They were from a well to do family. Right? So we have all of this

 

Stuff beating down on our chest about cancel culture, the only way out is run and reinvent, the only way out is to, you know, totally be someone different and get out of sight and da da da but that’s actually bullshit. Right? Steve Jobes, exiled from

 

DI GILLETT – Host (31:16.99)

Same, out of that’s right. That’s right. His failed failed garage venture and and came back as the the biggest success story ever.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (31:26.274)

Yeah, so we are misplacing the the whole run and revent reinvent thing, which is media driven, is actually a lie.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (31:35.704)

So Jacqueline, if I try and put a name on what I perceive to be the tool yourself for failure that that we’re gonna get into, is it similar to a crisis management strategy for yourself?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (31:55.008)

It is. And that’s and it comes for me, it comes out of so there’s a few things when I was doing all the research, so I went further. And a lot of the the way that you need to recover is actually understanding the stages of grief because you’ve lost a future you once imagined. there’s a really interesting research from Princeton around PTSD and military people. and so f the people who are seen as resilient.

 

Who don’t go, so you know, there’s three outcomes from Princeton research from these military people have been in high high pressure places. So some people n are never the same again, and that’s what we see as PTSD. Some people kind of take a hiccup, but then life returns to normal. And some people go like almost like underground and then reemerge 10 to 12 months later, seemingly stronger for the experience. And that’s what we call resilient. What is really interesting is

 

Princeton, Harvard, so many of the big organizations have identified that the true like recovery and resilience is at least ten to twelve months. Right? It’s not fast. So number one is this is not going to be overnight. Right? You are not going to bounce back.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (33:06.814)

And there will be days where you’ll get the wobbles along the way, without question.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (33:11.49)

The other thing is, and this comes from Harvard research, but also some advice I got from someone in those last weeks who was one of Queensland’s biggest entrepreneurs at the time. And the Harvard research says you must have a staunch acceptance of reality. And what this guy said to me when I sat down with him in the last couple of weeks at Stampadico, and I said to him, This is where I’m at. And he said, What’s the worst case scenario? And I said, Well, frickin’ bankruptcy and receivership.

 

And he’s like, Great. I’m like, what do you mean, great? He said, go make a plan for it. I’m like, what? He said, go make a plan for it. He said then put it in the bottom drawer, plan for the worst and work for the best. He said, But if you don’t make a plan for it and get on paper and get out of your head, you can’t work for the best. So it was so that was why I also had a really clear idea of what I needed to do when I came down the mountain. So those things and then the SAS, so going back to military influences again, the SAS train

 

DI GILLETT – Host (33:53.058)

Yeah. Great advice.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (34:07.928)

for things that they can never forecast. Right? In arenas they’ve never set foot in, with people they’ve never been able to prototype or profile. Right? And yet most SAS forces are extraordinarily brilliant at what they do. Right? And it’s never what they expected.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (34:12.151)

That’s right.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (34:28.236)

But that is a plan for plan for the worst scenario.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (34:31.118)

Plan for the worst case scenario. So out of that, if we were to train for it in advance, it’s like having your own crisis management plan. And I believe narrative risk is going to become the the next risk factor for corporate and C-suite. Right? We’re not actually thinking most corporates, most C-suite leaders can’t speak in normal circumstances, let alone under fire. Right? So you need a narrative risk plan, you need a crisis management plan personally.

 

And you need to know what it is that you’re going to have to do. And some of it is you actually need to know your values. Like what hill will you die on? Who are you when all that’s taken away? And it’s really confronting. But there’s some things you need to do. Like you need to, first of all, accept that you will lose control of the narrative. So many people screw it up because they’re still trying to control the narrative. Like just accept it’s gone. Right? It’s gone. Stop trying to control it. And a lot of the

 

corporate communication screw ups we see at the moment they’re still trying to control the narrative when narrative’s already gone.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (35:34.156)

Yep, we see it every day in the press.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (35:36.256)

So you’re gonna have to stop controlling the stop trying to control the narrative, just accept you’ve lost control of it. You’re also going to actually have to, as I said, not abdicate decision making, right? You cannot abdicate decision making. The other thing that I realized when I was talking about that incident with the Corey Mail was I walked out of there and realized you have to decide your own truth, which comes down to values and comes down to knowledge.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (35:57.73)

Which comes down to values.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (36:02.572)

The other thing is actually there’s two other things that I think are really important with like what’s your plan. Number one is just accept it’s gonna happen, right? Like don’t go, if I do this and this, it should never happen. Just go at some point it’s gonna happen, even if I am perfectly well behaved, right? That’s number one. The second thing is when I say close the door to the outside world, know who your people are, who is gonna roar out of the trenches with you. Cause I met a woman in Sydney at that Forbes Women event that

 

Not at that event, that trip. Who, if she had been my agent, we would have roared out of the trenches. Instead, my person told me to go and book in somewhere under a different name. Right? So have an inner circle that’s not only tight, but they’ll roar out of the fucking trenches with you. Right? And then the other thing is, is don’t try to do wholesale buyback. And what I mean by that is don’t try to

 

DI GILLETT – Host (36:43.102)

Mm.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (36:58.1)

Go back to where you were or get the level of acceptance that you had. Start identifying where you can build small pockets of trust.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (37:06.6)

Mm. Yeah, there’s no there’s no point in trying to replicate what you just lost. Yeah. Create it, build it differently.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (37:13.656)

Yeah, build it differently. But the the the if we train for it, it’s like we know who are the people who are all out of the trenches. We know what the worst case the plan for the worst case scenario is, and we’ve got an action plan around it so we can go straight into task while we deal with the other, right? And we also know how to close the doors to the outside world and just make it small and create small pockets of trust. But the most important thing, and the only reason why I’m still standing of any nature at the moment.

 

is is words. Like learn how to use your freaking words. Right? You know, like people go

 

Also but also you can’t create trust if you don’t know how to use words. Right? And you can’t articulate and the what happened with the media for me was the absence of my words.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (38:05.634)

Yeah. And also the wrong the wrong agent who who said don’t don’t use any versus here are the most powerful ones you could use.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (38:14.348)

Yeah. Right. So it’s it’s language. It’s like articulating where you were, articulating what’s going on, articulating where you’re going. it’s the words you use against yourself. Cause if you can’t meet yourself with grace, those words are pretty brutal. Yep. Right? And it’s all the things that go with language and the intersection of it and linguistics and words. Like people say to me, you I’m not sure I want to be a professional speaker. I’m like, it’s not about being a professional speaker on the stage and in bright lights like learn how to use your words.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (38:42.402)

So are you stronger today for the experienced Jacqueline?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (38:49.08)

think I’m stronger in who I am, but it took a while.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (38:52.77)

Yep. I didn’t say whether you’re wealthier or financially more stable.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (39:02.57)

Okay, so it has rained you in a little. Yeah. And that might not be a bad thing ’cause maybe you were too gung ho.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (39:11.608)

And maybe I was. But the but the edge that gave me my edge in my career is not one that I really have anymore. And by that I mean as a negotiator, as somebody who came up with these really mind-blowing things. I miss it. It doesn’t hurt anymore. and I also think, you know, I sometimes say to my own clients, if you find yourself thinking, I miss that.

 

Then you should smile because it still exists. So I think I just haven’t actually unpacked it again. Well, mind you, some days some days I can feel it coming roaring back in.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (39:43.638)

Well I was I was gonna say to you and I think I’m probably about a decade older than you. You never lose it and I guarantee you the decade later you won’t give a shit and you’ll just say it.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (39:56.066)

very close to that now. There we go. But yeah, but it’s but for a long time that’s what I missed. I was I was definitely not as bold and really risk averse for the first time in my life.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (40:06.974)

Mm. Mm mm. Yeah. So we can’t say that these experiences don’t don’t have have impact. They they certainly certainly do. But if I was to ask you as a a closing statement, have you rebuilt? Yes or no? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Do you have a a link to a toolbox that

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (40:27.318)

And it’s possible.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (40:34.459)

we can point listeners to around this this personal crisis management plan?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (40:41.684)

Yeah, so it’s not so much the personal crisis management plan, but it’s the things you need to do with your internal voice. So it is called the confident voice, but don’t let that trick you. It’s for everybody. And it’s about the things to take control of the inner critic, because the best laid plans will never work if you don’t know how to dance with the inner critic.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (41:00.128)

Yeah, beautiful. Well we’ll include all of that in the in the show notes, Jack, because that that’s a good place to to have it. And the name of your business is?

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (41:10.796)

The business of speaking.

 

DI GILLETT – Host (41:12.408)

The business of speaking. Brilliant. Well, Jacqueline, thank you for sharing a moment that I would suggest most people would rather forget and turning it into a strategy for the rest of us to use. So thank you for doing that. And look, that’s the difference between surviving a fall and building something out of it. And you’ve certainly built something out of it. And I have to say, what a perfect conversation to close out season three of the Power of Women podcast.

 

Yeah, last episode in the season and we’ve been chipping it away at this for for the last three years and and we really are building something quite powerful. So to every guest, you included, who’s joined me, thank you. And to everyone listening, sharing forwarding episodes to a friend, this podcast exists because of you and it grows because of you. So thank you to each and every one of you. And season four is already taking shape and if

 

This season has taught me anything. Women supporting women is the standard we continue to carry into what comes next. Until next time.

 

JACQUELINE BROOKER – Guest (42:19.437)

Amazing.