That went well!

In the olden days, when I presented my work internally, every meeting was followed by a sotto voce postmortem. We creatives would huddle together and relive the meeting, bemoaning that our best work would likely never be seen by the client because The Chocolate Covered Spider overstepped her boundaries and killed it during the internal review. My boss, who always prefers maintaining calm to quality, would back Spidey up. We'd feel bruised and helpless.

Today was the first day of a new chapter. We presented creative to The New Girl. She was exhausting ... lots of questions, lots of blab, lots of enthusiasm ... but even though the meeting was overlong, it was positive.. She had criticisms, she had opinions. That's to be expected, that's her job. But she's a collaborator, not a dictator. "What do you all think? I don't want to make the final decision."

We no longer felt dominated. We felt like part of a team. That's so much better.

This job feels almost new again.