How rejection made Julie Plec an undeniable leader

• Has anybody figured out how to do this gracefully? This is getting deep.

I am Julie Plec. I'm a writer, producer, director, showrunner, and all around Jolly Good Time. I can answer the first part of this, but I don't know about the second. I think it's just from birth. My entire career as a writer has been spent with me feeling and fundamentally believing that I am not a writer. I took this one writing class in college, just one. The teacher had a very specific method and it made no sense to me, and the process was so painful. And I thought, "Well, that was terrible. I never want to do that again."

And every single time I sit down to start writing, I go through that feeling, which is that, "I am not good at this. This is not going to be good. People are not going to like it. And this one massive success I had is just all a fluke." But I am a writer, so, I had to really shift my way of looking at my own insecurity about my own abilities because no matter what I feel on the inside about what I'm capable of, I mean, who hasn't?

I think viewing something as a blessing, that part of the sentence, is the hardest part of life. I'd been working professionally for about six years. I had moved up out of the assistant realm into executive and producing capacity. And at the end of the season, feedback came my way from the higher-ups that my involvement had been disruptive. I was characterized coming out of that experience by at least one person as a I remember hearing that for the first time and thinking, "Well, my God, these people don't get me at all."

I had worked so hard and I had been so deeply invested in it, and that was so crushing to hear. That feedback resulted in me being blacklisted, and it set back my confidence by about a decade. And then time goes by, and the job comes back, and the confidence tries to come back, and the leadership comes back and you start to see other younger people in the same situation I was in.

And you realize that does read as entitlement. It does read as inexperience. And so I was finally able to look back and say, "All right, like now let's look at it through the real lens of season and experience." When I was finally able to take responsibility for my own part in it, it gave me more strength as a leader. And also, humility is incredibly important when you are in a position of power. And that little bump in my career gave me a cold bucket of ice water of humility.

Death. But—not the act of being dead. It's a little bit of a pathological fear, to be honest. And it's probably done quite a lot to prevent me from doing like normal, natural things like getting married and having children. As a writer, I love to tell stories about loss and grief.

• "I'm so sorry that you've lost so many people. - I still have you." -

And as you get to the end of your time on this Earth, what are you most afraid of? I think the answer is—I am most afraid of my insecurities have somehow convinced me that I need to do something and I need to do it so well, it needs to be perfect. And when I'm not perfect, it is this self-punishment of I'm yelling at myself, I'm disappointed in myself.

I am critical of myself, and I have really, really noticed that that is the single thing that I can point to holding me back. I've always tried to figure out the genesis of this belief, and to be honest, I have taken it all the way back to like one of my first memories as a 4-year-old kid. I was taking a swimming lesson and a teacher said to me, "Hey, can you just jump in and then turn around and swim?"

And so, I jumped off the side of the pool, and while I was in the air, I did a little like ballet turn. And when I emerged from underwater, they were laughing at me. And I remember in that moment as a 4-year-old being so insecure and embarrassed that I had misinterpreted the instruction and had done it wrong.

Many years later, as I'm sort of re-litigating this moment, somebody said to me, "Do you actually think that those girls were laughing at you because you did it wrong? Why don’t you, like your adult—you go visit that scene and watch it through your adult eyes?" And I said, "Oh! They thought it was really cute. The girls weren't laughing at me, they were laughing with me."

And it is my base, core limiting belief that I am doing it all wrong. What my goal is, is to now find a way to forgive myself for that and to love myself in spite of that. And that is this really amazing journey that I've been on that I highly recommend.