Brooke DeVard, doesn’t believe in work-life balance. For the creator of the award-winning podcast “Naked Beauty”, the word that defines her career is “sacrifice.”
DeVard has hosted the podcast since 2016, launching it while working full-time in marketing at Viacom. At first, she handled every aspect herself.
“I’m uploading everything. I’m editing everything. I’m doing the cover art. I’m doing it all,” DeVard explains on the latest episode of “Nice Talk” with Marie Claire editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike.
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At that stage, balance was impossible. All of her free time went into the podcast.
“Sometimes—when you’re building something, especially—there’s a lot of sacrifice,” she says. “I feel like ‘sacrifice’ is the word that comes to mind for me more than ‘balance’. There are so many things I missed out on as I was building ‘Naked Beauty’ while having a full time job … parties, birthdays, but I’m like, I have to get this episode out on Monday, and I’m editing it myself.”
The trade-offs paid off. Today, she still hosts Naked Beauty, but with the support of a team.
“There was a lot of sacrifice, but what that sacrifice has done is it’s allowed me, now, nine years later, to be in a position to have a team and to have that support,” she explains. “So I think balance is a little bit of a myth, because I think when you are ambitious and you’re building things, I think it’s really hard to have balance. You’re not going to be able to get to the gym every day, eat a balanced meal, catch up with all your girlfriends, make sure you’re on top of all of your emails and texts, and have a great relationship with your partner. You just can’t do all of that.”
After Viacom, DeVard spent several years at Instagram before eventually making the podcast and content creation her full-time career. Most recently, she took on another major role: in June, she became chief content officer at Refinery29. (“Naked Beauty” is now part of the media company, too.) She’s also a mother of two children.
And while she calls balance a myth, DeVard did recently find a way to reset her focus—by taking a social media break earlier this year.
“I loved this period in my life. I talk about it like it was this, like, year sabbatical I took in Italy, and it was two months of my life. But I reflect on it so fondly. This December and January, I had offline … I highly recommend it to everyone.”
She took the break while on maternity leave, deleting apps from her phone to break the “muscle memory” of checking them.
“The first week was really hard. I felt like I missed it. I kept kind of opening my phone and going to check something, but very quickly I realized I’m not really missing anything, and I actually don’t really care.”
Her biggest takeaway: “We get very comfortable getting things pushed to us through an algorithm. And I think there’s an exercise a little bit in this of remembering your taste, remembering, like, what is the media you seek out, independent of it being fed to you?”
For more from DeVard—including her thoughts on plastic surgery and the beauty trends she’s loving right now—check out this week’s installment of “Nice Talk”” The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.
