Jess Campbell has always known that the best work comes from the most honest place. She grew up in a Jamaican household, surrounded by music she couldn’t quite name yet, was told to be a lawyer, but was quietly certain that wasn’t her path. Jess knew that storytelling was in her blood.

She found her way to agency world, to IBM, to Fantasy Interactive, and eventually to a project that stopped everyone who touched it in their tracks: the Slavery and Freedom exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture for the Smithsonian. It was a monumental moment in her career, and for everyone else on the team. And somewhere in that experience she understood, for the first time with complete clarity, exactly what she was put here to do.

This is the season finale, and it feels like one. We talk about what it costs to always care this much, about unlearning perfectionism one messy launch at a time, and about the solo trips she took as a younger woman that she only now recognises as the coming of age story she was writing for herself.

We talk about boredom as a creative discipline, about what AI cannot automate, and about why the most important practice you can build is the one that gets you out of your own head and back to yourself. There is also a candle on the desk with something her Nana told her written on the lid. It is one of those things that has stayed with me long after we stopped recording.

If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes.

Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com and book a call.

I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Want to support Awaiting Approval?

Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show.

And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp

Terri Williams trained as a radio broadcaster, ended up writing buggy buying guides for Argos at twenty as a non-parent trying to imagine what a parent would want to know, and has spent the twenty years since growing alongside digital in a way that very few people can claim. She has been the person with the plan when everyone else had opinions, the translator between engineers and end users, and the one asking why when everyone else was already moving on. She is now Lead Martech Product Owner at Vodafone Business, and she has get shit done written on her notepad. That is not a metaphor.

What comes through most in this conversation is how completely Terri gives herself to her work, and what that costs, and what it gives back. We talk about the CMS launch during COVID that she and her team poured two years of effort into in ten months, only to watch it get pulled at the last minute, and what she did the moment it happened. We talk about the difference between adapting and just surviving, about what it means to be an empath in a role that requires you to hold the line, and about why change is not something that happens to you but something you either lean into or get left behind by. There is also a two-year-old who says thank you, a degree in the downstairs toilet, and a house that is no longer a white box.

If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes.Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com and book a call.I’d genuinely love to hear from you.Want to support Awaiting Approval?Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show.And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp

After going to Australia in his early twenties - because Alan Wicker said, through the magic of Sunday evening television, that it was the most optimistic place on Earth - Guy Vickerstaff was called by a place called home. He came back to Scotland and eventually found his way into advertising the long way round, via market research, a direct marketing client, and a junior typographer role where he quietly decided he could do better than what he was seeing and just started doing it. He is now Creative Director at Bright Signals in Edinburgh, still has a Pilot V7 on his desk, and still believes the industry is a wonderful place to be, which in the current climate is either mildly delusional or infectious.

What this conversation keeps coming back to is care. Care about the work, care about the people making it, care about what goes out into the world with your name on it. We talk about the Bright Storm, the process Guy has built for unlocking ideas from unexpected people, about the Detect Breast Cancer Early campaign that he describes as one of the proudest moments of his whole career, and about the Scottish bullshit detector, which is highly attuned, nationally. We also talk about unlearning the pressure to always have the right answer, and what it actually gives a team when their leader is willing to say, honestly, I just don’t know.

If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes.

Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com and book a call.

I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Want to support Awaiting Approval?

Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show.

And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp