The Place: The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

The Cup: After 3 PM means I had tea – Chai Rooibos to be exact. Jackie had a hot tea latte.

The Background: My dear friend and former stranger, Cup 86, Ray Bard asked me if I’d read a book called Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics. We’d been having an on-going discussion about “super fans” of  The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller and Cup 77,  Jay Papasan which Ray’s company, Bard Press, published. He insisted I check out the book and then hinted that the author would be an interesting person to have coffee with a stranger. Bonus – she lives right here in Austin.

Picking a spot to meet was a snap, considering we are practically neighbors. And Ray was totally right. Although “interesting” doesn’t really do her justice. Jackie is an accidental author turned speaker, who has discovered a way to turn her own obsessions (Lady Gaga and drag queens as examples) into fascinating business and personal development books that teach powerful lessons in the most unsuspecting ways. We’ll get into her story in a moment, but first, a few:

Common Grounds:

1. What’s your guilty pleasure? Thin Mints cookies. I have two boxes in my freezer right now.
2. How did you make your first buck? I organized a neighborhood backyard carnival. We sold tickets, had a bunch of games set up and I was the fortune teller. I even had a scarf and a “crystal ball”.
3. What is the best place to eat in Austin? Uchi.
4. What is the best way to unwind? Wine and cheese over at House Wine.
5. What is the last, best movie you saw? Selma.
6. Who is your celebrity doppelgänger? People say I look like Tina Fey when I’m wearing my glasses. I also get Diane Keaton.
7. What’s the best book you’ve read recently? The Confidence Code, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
8. What’s a food you can’t live without? Greek yogurt.

Starting Out

Jackie grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, the daughter of a steel worker and a secretary. After earning a Computer Science degree, she moved to North Carolina to work as a programmer for IBM. Not long after starting there, Jackie realized she hated programming. Fortunately, IBM had a terrific program where they would send employees back to school at Duke or UNC to get retrained in Marketing. Jackie jumped at the chance to do something more creative.

For the next 11 years, Jackie worked in Marketing at IBM, before heading to Dallas for a job with a dot-com doing digital marketing. Most of us are familiar with the trajectory of many dot-com careers. The beginning of 2000 – we all heaved a collective sigh of relief that Y2K turned out to be no big whoop. The lyrics of Prince’s 1999 still ringing in our ears, and a sock puppet dog on the TV insisting we buy pet food off the internet – we were filled with optimism at what a new century would bring. And then came the big prick – and the bubble exploded. Many people lost their jobs, Jackie among them.

Lemons to Lemonade

When a former co-worker suggested they not put their future in the hands of another company, and instead hang their own shingle, Jackie agreed to take the leap. The pair started a marketing consultancy and in 2001 decided Chicago was the right city to find success.

Not dismayed by the fall of so many dot-coms, and believing the internet would prove powerful, Jackie and her partner focused their business on helping brands with word-of-mouth marketing, which they discovered was beginning to happen online. They were talking with companies about “viral” back when most of us thought that was something you needed chicken noodle soup to get over. So it’s no surprise they caught the attention of a publisher when they wrote an article for The Chicago Tribune about creating customer evangelists.

Accidental Author

Jackie says, “This never happens anymore, but we got an email from a publisher who said, ‘This sounds like great book.’ We said, ‘Really? Uh, yes. Sure it does!’ Luckily my partner was an ex-journalist so we got a book contract and wrote Creating Customer Evangelists. We started consulting and doing a lot of speaking and then wrote another book called Citizen Marketers about how anyone could write creative content on the web that could become marketing for something. It was right at the start of social media.”

In 2007, the pair was tired of the cold weather in Chicago and having spent some time in Dallas, they were familiar with Austin and decided it was the place to be. They spent two years building a business, but in 2009, when the recession hit, Jackie opted to go to work for a business consulting company. Two years later she left that company to work full-time on turning her Lady Gaga obsession into a book.

The result is a somewhat surprising road map for how a business, for example Pepsi, could use an over-the-top performer like Gaga to learn how to attract and retain loyal fans. From the book jacket – “Love her or hate her, you can’t ignore Lady Gaga. And while not all businesses want to stand out the way she does, any business can win big by creating monster loyalty.” Monster Loyalty has lesson for businesses of all sizes, and Jackie now spends her time speaking and facilitating workshops to teach the principles from the book.

Long Live The Queen

The project Jackie is working on right now is full of even more surprises. Two words: Drag. Queens. Again, Jackie has taken an obsession – her word, not mine – and is turning it into a powerful message aimed chiefly at women. The message is clear: “Be more confident by tapping into your inner queen.”

Jackie cites the success and increasing popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race, now in it’s seventh season, and tells me the audience for the show is 50% women. It turns out, drag is becoming more mainstream and is enjoyed by fans of all demographics. While the majority of drag queens are male or transgendered, woman can be drag queens as well. I had no idea. And Jackie decided if she was going to write a book on the subject, she needed to walk the talk – in platform heels.

When I ask her about the greatest gift she ever got, she says, “I’ve been fascinated with drag queens for the last four years. I would go to all the shows in Austin and San Antonio and became friends with a guy who organizes all the shows. What you do when you get into drag is you try to find a “drag mother”, someone who’s going to take you in and mentor you. My friend told me I needed to connect with Kelly Kline. She’s had over 40 drag daughters over the last 20 years. She came over to my house, taught me make-up, all about wigs – she spent so much time with me because she believed in the project. She doesn’t have spare time. To me, that’s the greatest gift she could have ever given me. She’s an amazing woman.”

Later I ask Jackie what she’d focus on if she had a year to get really good at something and, maybe you’ve guessed it – her answer is drag. She explains that as a woman, she feels she has to be even better. She admits she doesn’t have the extra work of contouring her face to look more feminine. She doesn’t have to hide the stubble, wear padding to look more curvy or master the “tuck”, which frankly, just sounds painful. She has a clear advantage.

Getting Uncomfortable

Jackie admits the sensuality part of being a drag queen didn’t come naturally, so she took burlesque classes to help get her into character (named Lady Trinity in case you’re wondering). Jackie contends that the fastest way to get more confident is to get uncomfortable; to get out of a comfort zone. Jackie says, “It took me years to realize I was a performer. I thought I was a speaker and that my job was to educate. But then I realized I also needed to entertain. So I took improv.” Jackie says the experience was terrifying, and admits she almost quit. But she hung in there and the training changed the way she delivered her talks and made her much more comfortable going off script, getting into the audience – and it made her a whole lot funnier.

Burlesque classes produced the same results. Jackie tells me the day the class learned to twirl pasties, she distinctly recalls thinking, “If I can get through this – doing drag is nothing!”

It could be argued that doing drag really is nothing. That it’s something we all do everyday. Jackie shares a quote from RuPaul. “You were born naked, and everything else is drag.” She adds, “A lot of people don’t realize they’re in control of their persona. They choose how they dress, how they wear their hair.” She goes on to admit we tend to conform to what we perceive society wants us to look like, and recalls her IBM days where she wore a suit and pantyhose to work every day – to sit at a computer and do programming. She doesn’t fault people for this, but plans to use the drag philosophies and techniques to help empower women to find the powerful, fierce queen inside and to give her the chance to shine.

Confidence Crisis

Jackie and I spend some time talking about the rise of women and how, though we have certainly come a long way, the journey is far from over. The authors of the book Jackie mentioned earlier, The Confidence Code, also wrote a piece in The Atlantic called The Confidence Gap, discussing this topic in terms of nature and nurture. As we learn that confidence is just as important as competence, could a lack of confidence be the thing holding women back from receiving the same promotions, positions and pay? And if so, can woman become more confident? Can we ever be as confident as men – considering the biological differences that exist?

Jackie promises her book and subsequent workshops will not only talk about the “whys” of the confidence conundrum, but will go a step further to address the “hows”. How someone can be as confident as possible in any situation. How creating a persona might hold the keys to tapping into the confidence that’s already within. And how getting way out of a comfort zone has unexpected repercussions and creates greater confidence in other areas of our lives.

Steely Fan

What’s something people might be surprised to learn about Jackie? Well, besides the whole drag thing? She tells me it’s probably the fact that she’s a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan and runs the Steelers Fan Club in Austin. In case you’re wondering, they meet at Coffee With A Stranger Cup 75, Doug Guller’s Bikini’s Sports Bar and Grill to watch the games. Jackie pulls up her pant leg and reveals a fairly large Steelers tattoo on her ankle to prove her hard-core fanaticism. I’m convinced.

Breathe In, Breathe Out

I ask Jackie about a ritual, habit or practice she does daily that she feels contributes to her overall success, well-being or happiness. She shares a new practice she’s recently started to help her sleep better. Jackie says, “I am not a meditator. The thought of sitting for 20 minutes and doing nothing makes me want to vomit.” But she does care about the quality of her sleep, and recently read an article on a mediation/breathing technique to help achieve better sleep. She explains it’s simply breathing in for four counts, holding the breath for seven counts and releasing the breath for eight counts. You do this four times in a row, or however long you need, and bam! You’re sawing logs and off to dreamland. Jackie says it really works.

Jackie’s ideal day starts with walking her toy poodle Bela. She says after that she’d meet friends for brunch then take the party poolside where she and friends would laugh, have some drinks and snacks and listen to music. That evening after dinner, they’d all go to a drag show. Sounds fun. Sprinkle in a little work and answering emails and Jackie says she gets to live this perfect day frequently.

You’re Amazing

If given 30 seconds to make s speech to the world, Jackie’s message is something she learned from Lady Gaga and the drag queens she’s befriended. Jackie says, “Be who you really are and don’t be afraid to showcase all the fabulousness that’s you, because who you are is amazing, and everyone should know it.”

Hard to argue with that. And yet for many of us, it’s also hard to embrace it. This week I met with a client, in her 60s, to talk about selling her house. As we sat in her living room, we got on the topic of where she grew up and all the Austin neighborhoods she’d lived in. I learned that she had two much older sisters, and she got quite emotional when she talked about how different their lives turned out than hers. Her sisters didn’t go to college. They got married and started families, and not necessarily because they wanted to. My client however, got a degree and had a career and feels grateful that she had the opportunities that her sister did not.

Long and Winding Road

I thought about her and the raw emotion that surfaced during our visit as I sat down to write this. We have come so far. On the issues of race, sexuality and gender, looking back 50 years, 20 years, even 10 years, we can see evidence of a marked progression toward equality. And yet – women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns in a comparable position, gay couples are still fighting for the right to marry, and issues of race pepper the headlines of the evening news. We’ve made progress, but we’ve got a long road ahead.

Discomfort. Not something we get excited about. No one wakes up and says, “Today, I hope to be extremely uncomfortable. And if I can be vulnerable, uncertain and scared too…well even better!” We hate feeling like that. And we work very hard to exist in the bubble we’ve created that insulates us from those feelings. We surround ourselves with people like us, who believe the same things, dress the same way and who ultimately reinforce that who we are is okay. We are good. We are the same.

And it’s true, we are good. But we aren’t the same. And though we think it’s better to be the same, it’s that belief that makes us uncomfortable with people who “aren’t like us”. And it’s that belief that makes us put pantyhose and a skirt on when we’d really rather not. Or not put them on when we’d really like to. Progress begins when people decide to ask questions, talk to each other and open their hearts and minds, despite the discomfort.

The road ahead is long and uncomfortable. But discomfort is the only way forward. As Jackie learned, when you embrace the discomfort, you realize it’s only temporary. You do the terrifying thing and suddenly you’re on the other side and you’re different. You’re courageous and you’re more confident. You’ve had the tough conversation. You’ve found your inner queen and let her have her say. You’ve mastered twirling the pasties, and suddenly nothing else seems that scary anymore.

To learn more about Jackie, visit her website, follow her on Twitter and follow her on Facebook.

If you enjoyed this interview, “Like” the Coffee With A Stranger Project Facebook page and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming interviews with new strangers and other fun stuff. If there’s someone in Austin you think I need to have coffee with, let me know and I’ll do my best to sweet talk them into having coffee with a stranger.