ARE Media CEO Jane Huxley’s leadership career has taken her from tech to music and publishing, often starting in leadership positions on the cusp of massive industry upheavals affecting the organisations she took on.
But it was a simple lesson she learnt twenty years ago that Huxley believes has ultimately supported her in getting through the difficult conservations, settling down her inner imposter, and enabling her to take on new roles and industries.
That lesson came from a frank conversation with a former boss, and it led her to start writing one key, three-word mantra at the top of every page in her notebook: It’s not personal.
While Huxley is an advocate for bringing authenticity and everything she has to work, she says this mantra has supported her in keeping take better control of the situation. She says stepping away from the idea that every comment was personal has enabled her to better deal with difficult meetings and respond to difficult news.
Huxley shared this advice during her keynote session for Women’s Agenda’s new video app series, The Keynotes.
As CEO of ARE Media, Jane Huxley leads a company that publishes around 89 per cent of Australia’s consumer women’s magazines, as well as numerous digital assets, communities, distribution services and other media platforms.
Her rise to the top of one of the country’s largest media businesses didn’t follow typical terrain. Rather, she started her career as a technical support engineer at Microsoft in 1989, supporting a product called DOS 5.0 — which she says will love some people laughing and others scratching their heads wondering what she could be talking about.
Through 16 years at Microsoft, she moved from the technical team to channel, sales, marketing, international development and all through the business. Later, she left for Vodafone, stepped away from her career to have two children, and then went on to start at Fairfax Digital and become CEO, before running the internet music business Pandora in Australia, and then later Spotify. She took the role at ARE Media during the height of COVID.
Huxley’s had an extraordinary career through digital media to legacy media, and leading major businesses in Australia when they were still essential like startups as they arrived here, and contending with massive industry upheaval.
But she says there is one key lesson that she learned 20 years ago at Microsoft that she says has supported her through all of it.
She recalls running a large piece of the organisation and role on the leadership team back then, during what was a really tough period for Microsoft. But hearing things like “we need to trim costs” and “we’re going to miss the quarterly budget,” Huxley found herself instead hearing that “this is your fail”.
“If only you’d done this, if only you had done that,” she would hear at the leadership table — despite such words not actually being said.
During one such difficult meeting, Huxley returned to her office extremely upset.
“It’s a really interesting thing that happens where the imposter comes into the room because it unhelpfully translates everything that happens around the table. And the voice that you choose to hear at times is that voice and not actually listening to what’s going on,” she says.
“So there was one particular moment where I had a difficult time in a meeting and I left that meeting and I felt very upset.”
“I’d gone back to my office and I’d sat at my desk, and closed my door. So I’m sitting at my desk and I’m crying. I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, this I’m hopeless. I shouldn’t be here’.
“And the door flings open, and it’s my CEO. And I turn to him with my panda eyes and the tears rolling down my face, and he just looked at me and said, ‘Hux, you know, you’ve got a lot of potential, but unless you sort that out, you’re in the last job you’re going to have’… Which is brilliant to hear when you’re already upset.”
But Huxley’s boss went on to say he wanted to help, that he’d support her in finding a coach because he believed that she was going places and had a lot to give.
“So to cut a long story short, he paired me with a coach, and I went on and worked with her for about 12 weeks. And this was the lesson that I learned: that I was taking everything personally. I wasn’t listening to what was going on in the room.”
So from there, at every meeting, she would take out her notebook to a new page and write at the top:
“It’s not personal”.
“When I found myself reacting emotionally, I would look down at that page and I would repeat to myself like a mantra: It’s not personal, it’s not personal, it’s not personal,” Huxley says.
“Now, what I had been doing was I was coming from the heart. I needed to come from the head. ‘It’s not personal’ was a mantra that allowed me to move from my heart to my head. The thing in the middle is your mouth. This is what you control.”
Huxley said it took about six months of constantly repeating the words to enable herself to move from the heart to the head. But she says she remains unapologetic about bringing her heart to work, and she does so every day in the job. Over time, she says she’s been able to stop reacting immediately with emotion, carry the emotion to her head, find more clarity and space for thought, and ultimately be in a better position to address the issue.
She said it’s a process she’s still learning every week in her current job and continues to develop constantly.
“But learning how not to take things personally was the single lesson in which I built my entire career.”
Jane Huxley shares more on this learning process in The Keynotes, the new Women’s Agenda app sharing “Mini Keynote” sessions and insights on leadership, equity, current affairs, climate and so much more. Learn more here. You can join our mailing list to learn more about the latest videos and ideas shared here.