Author, podcast host and cultural expert Jess Weiner, Photo by Michael Becker
Imagine rewriting your dominant story.
That’s one of the missions that cultural expert, bestselling author and brand consultant Jess Weiner takes on with her new podcast, Dominant Stories, which debuted on Shondaland Audio (on the iHeart Podcast Network) in October.
The podcast, Dominant Stories, is a conversation series that helps reclaim and rewrite the stories we’ve been told about our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities, and the ones that dominate our inner monologue, and as a result, our actions.
The show stemmed from Weiner’s personal and professional mission to help people challenge the external and internal voices holding them back from living the life they desire and deserve. Through witty, deep and curious conversations with celebrated guests — including award-winning television producer, screenwriter and author Shonda Rhimes (in the episode that aired Wednesday, December 8) — Weiner aims to unpack, challenge and change these Dominant Stories, and encourages audience members to do the same.
To put it in Shondaland terms (essentially, the compelling universe the prolific television writer created), Weiner can be considered a ‘Gladiator,’ the term made famous in Scandal (Weiner is considered a brand’s secret weapon, as a trusted advisor and strategic partner in culture-changing moments for companies such as Unilever, Mattel and Disney.)
Weiner has built a career as an ‘advo-consultant’ (as she’s referred to by Fast Company, who has named her one of the “Most Creative People”) for brands like Disney, Nike, Mattel, and Unilever, determined to flip the script on gender bias and predetermined cultural beauty ‘norms’ – and changing how these global brands create a narrative around gender.
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More specifically, Weiner advises companies on how to create products that both cater to, and empower women and girls. Through her multimillion-dollar consultancy firm, Talk to Jess, she has worked with Mattel to create more inclusive Barbie dolls (an integral part of Barbie’s evolution) and with Dove as part of its “Real Beauty” campaign.
Simply put: Weiner and her team help Fortune 500 companies become more inclusive and culturally fluent. She can be considered a ‘translator’ in this realm: “I’m a culture and trend translator for the clients I work with. I’m able to come in and contextualize and translate what’s happening in business terms — being able to study people, humanize people, and communicate around those issues. I don’t think I realized what a business asset that would be, but it’s literally been the backbone of my career.”
A key part of Weiner’s philosophy and formula around how she thinks stems from her days of studying improvisation, in college. Weiner founded a theatre group during her college days at Penn State.
Here’s the unlock: it all starts with ‘Yes, and…’
“The ‘yes, and’ principle is something I played with as a theatre person, but it’s actually an incredible business technique,” Weiner shares.
“My background in improv theater and playwriting served me incredibly well as a business strategist and brand consultant. The foundation of how I work with companies is on the improv principle of ‘yes, and….’, which is the notion of being additive,” Weiner continues. “So if you and I were doing a scene and I came in and I said, ‘The sky is purple.’ And you said, ‘No, it’s not’, the scene ends. There’s nowhere to go. You’ve just negated everything. But if I come in and I say, ‘the sky is purple.’ And you say ‘yes, and it’s raining’. The scene continues and expands and grows. I do the same thing when I come in to work with Disney or Mattel, or anybody. If I come in and say ‘no’ to everything they’ve done, the conversation ends. But if I come in and I say, ‘Yes, girls love pink and sparkly things, and they love science, politics and kicking soccer balls,’ things expand.”
How does this translate into strategic decisions?
“Boys can be into trucks and they can have emotional intelligence,” Weiner explains. “It’s interesting when it comes to gender stereotypes, and when it comes to physical appearance related bias. Part of the reason I like working with marketing, advertising, entertainment, and content, is because they are the largest distributors of messages around the world. But audiences are becoming more sophisticated, and asking brands to question things more and more.”
Applying ‘yes and…’ instead of ‘or’ is a technique that can transform a brand’s thinking, attitude, POV, and messaging, from the product conception and development stages, all the way to marketing.
Weiner has spent more than 25 years inspiring and guiding brands to change what gender means to them and how they communicate it to the world.
This principle was applied to Weiner’s work with Disney, among many others.
“We wanted to expand the way princesses were perceived by a new generation of mothers,” Weiner shares. “There doesn’t have to be either or, especially with kids. We sometimes want to compartmentalize folks, and that’s what stops us from being seen. So the ‘yes, and…’ principal is how I unlock helping companies see, hear and understand people, by recognizing that people are more than one thing. Marketing wise, we’ve often put everybody in tight demographic buckets. We don’t look beyond race, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc. — no, I’m all those things blended together. I’m a human being.”
A key part of Weiner’s career has been about listening to the whispers of intuition and the sparks in her career that have led to her starting new projects, committing to the impact she’s currently making, and the through line that unites all of her work: Helping people feel seen, heard and understood.
“My entire career has been unintended awesomeness,” Weiner shares. Even back when she was working as a sales associate at a clothing retailer after graduating from college, Weiner was inspired to change what body diversity looks like: “When I worked in that mall, at the end of my fourth day, I thought to myself — my career is not going to be in trying to sell folks clothes, my career is going to be in trying to get companies to make clothes that fit more bodies. I understood this from having grown up in a curvier body, and seeing how clothes were designed at the time. And I could relate to it. My focus was, who says we can’t expand this? Who is in charge of this store? I was always interested in systemic change. My career has been this curiosity and driver of trying to figure out who is the gatekeeper, who makes the decisions and how do we invoke change from the inside.”
Part of invoking change from the inside is seeing the shades of grey and saying yes — something Rhimes can relate to, as she discusses in the Dominant Stories podcast episode with Weiner.
In the conversation with Rhimes, Weiner and the visionary behind today’s most groundbreaking TV shows (such as Grey’s Anatomy and Bridgerton) discuss rewriting beauty on screen, one of the many things Rhimes is credited with when she cast female talent on the iconic drama Grey’s Anatomy that didn’t look like the ‘traditional’ characters we had seen up until then.
And Rhimes’ bestselling book, Year of Yes, is a call to action to say ‘yes’ more and more, even when our default response might have been ‘no’, based on things like fear and imposter syndrome. Rhimes leaned into ‘yes’ and it led to her living all the experiences that she wouldn’t have enjoyed if she allowed fear to stand in her way. It’s about saying yes to projects and events, without the excuse of “I have too much work to do,” which otherwise kept Rhimes from living her life to the fullest.
Rhimes learned to confront the dominant stories she had — all these stories that end up running our lives, which we don’t face.
The truth is, yes, we can have too much work to do, and we can still make time for the things that fuel us. We can be terrified, and we can take the risks that propel us out of our comfort zones.
We can see the shades of grey and be all the things: confident and nervous, excited and terrified, able and anxious.
When we see ourselves as all the things and shed the dominant stories that might have hindered our progress or ability to take risks, we can see that every person truly is the star of their own story.
The truth, we are all in a perpetual state of rewriting, as Weiner so eloquently puts it:
“I’m so grateful that this is a place for me to process along with everybody else, how we can change stories. We’re all in a period of editing and rewriting. I’m hoping for myself and for others, in the classes that I teach and the companies that I work with, that we remember to be as intentional as possible in this next story. How do we invite more people in? How do we create more compassion and emotional intelligence and kindness? How do we have grace and space for courageous conversations? Those are the ways we can create the next chapter.”
