There’s a line I keep coming back to, and it’s mine, not Nita’s, but she’s the reason it surfaced: I’ve never really cared if people liked me. I do care if people respect me. That’s the whole conversation, really, if you want it in one sentence. Nita has built three careers running in parallel: city land agent, broker-owner, Red Cross volunteer. When I asked her how she manages all of it, she didn’t give me a productivity answer. She gave me an ethics answer. Seventeen codes she teaches new realtors, and the one she keeps coming back to isn’t the technical stuff. It’s communication. It’s the duty to the person in front of you, not just the deal. She said it reminded her of an attorney, and then almost apologized for the comparison — but she was right to make it. The people who take their work seriously enough to teach ethics to strangers are usually the same people who show up fully, in every room, including the fitting room. Because here’s the part of the episode I keep circling back to: the fifty pounds. Nita talked about her body changing — not once, but twice, in opposite directions, over the last few years. Muscle, then loss, then a different kind of muscle, then fifty pounds gone at her heaviest. And she said something that a lot of women say to us quietly, almost like a confession: she had to rebuild her wardrobe from the ground up, starting with shoes. We hear versions of this constantly at the store. Menopause. GLP-1s. A decade of loyal clients whose bodies have moved in directions they didn’t plan for, standing in the fitting room a little unsure of who’s looking back at them. What struck me is that Nita didn’t treat the rebuild as a loss. She treated it as information. New body, new rules…except the real lesson wasn’t new rules at all. It was throwing the old ones out entirely. She told me she used to believe she couldn’t wear high-waisted anything. Turns out that was never true. It was a rule she’d inherited from a version of herself that didn’t exist anymore, and she was still obeying it out of habit. I think about this every time someone tells me they don’t do above-the-knee, or they don’t do color, or they don’t do sleeveless. Sometimes that’s a genuine preference. More often it’s a rule that outlived the reason for it. The other thing Nita gave me, almost offhand, was about her husband Sam and a t-shirt. Not a special t-shirt — just one he’d had for years, that still looked exactly like the day he bought it, that somehow still made people ask where he got it. That’s not luck. That’s construction. That’s the whole argument I keep making about cost, quietly proven by a man who has never once heard me make it. And then there’s the mannequin. Nita told me — more than once, with real conviction — that she’s walked into other stores and told the staff, your mannequin did its job, you should give it a raise. She buys because something in a window stopped her. Not the folded version on a table. The dressed version, the one that shows her what she can’t picture on a hanger alone. I think about this every time we style a window. The clothes on a body are an argument. The clothes on a table are just facts. Nita’s a land agent and a broker and a volunteer with a masters degree she’s finishing alongside her son’s bachelor’s, and somehow the throughline of talking to her wasn’t ambition. It was ease. The confidence of someone who has stopped asking whether she’s allowed to take up the space she’s already standing in. So throw out the rule. See what happens. — Lindsay This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lindsaynixx.substack.com
