Judith Manigault

I attribute my success to my relationship with God, which is everything to me and drives all the parts of my life and work. I'm a person of prayer who looks to God for answers, and I believe that we work and we pray - we do both. It's not that you pray and don't work or move, you have to move, you have to be consistent, you have to go to the next level, and I've seen God give me instructions for how to get there. For example, when we were trying to find a distributor, the Lord kept me in the book of Joshua, the story about the priests crossing the Jordan, and how when the feet of the priests touched the edge of the water, that's when the waters began to part. It hit me that unless I picked up that phone and did the research and found out who the distributors were and called them myself, my feet needed to hit the water. Nothing was going to happen, and that's exactly what I did, and the water opened up for me. Beyond my faith, it's been hard work and determination. You have to be willing to put the hours in, be willing to make the sacrifice, and do what needs to be done. I make it my business to know what's happening in my industry - I proudly own every possible magazine, whether it's men, women, foreign magazines, and I look at everything. I need to see and understand what the trends are. You have to really make your industry a study. I also believe in problem solving and being wired to think of things in a particular way, like how do we solve this thing? There's also been some ingenuity - the t-shirts were a great thing, and we had to figure out how to pivot and expand. I don't take it for granted that I'm able to get up and do the things that God has given me to do. I believe it's a gift, and I want to be as proactive and treat it well.

The best career advice I've ever received is to keep going. There have been times when you want to give up, when the terrain is hard and sometimes it's difficult to see how you can get from point A to point B. That advice actually always comes from my husband. He sees when I've hit a wall, and he says, 'What are you going to do?' And I say, 'I don't know.' He says, 'This is what you're going to do, you're going to keep going. Because if you keep going, then you'll figure out the solution to the problem. You'll get there.' Another piece of advice that really helped me came from a good friend of mine who's a wonderful illustrator. Early on, she said to me, 'You should know how to do everything that everyone who's under you does. Everything, from taking a photo to writing.' Not from the space that you're going to do all these things, because you will hire people who are working with you or for you, but because then you will recognize what excellence looks like. You will know for yourself, so no one can just slip something to you and you're not aware, you're not versed in it, you're not schooled in it. You will recognize what a great image looks like, what a great recipe is, because you have spent time in each and every one of these disciplines. You've had the conversations with the people, perhaps done them yourself. That advice has really, really helped me.

My advice to young women entering the publishing industry is to find good mentors - people who are not afraid to share what they've learned. Do every job. Learn about photography, learn about publishing, learn about food, learn about all of it. Be curious. Spend time reading and observing, because all of that is going to inform the work that you actually produce when the time comes. I also encourage people to go ahead and do it. I think sometimes people are waiting to have all their ducks in a row and everything perfectly lined, and that they'll have this magic wand, but sometimes you have to start right where you are. Really believe in yourself. Hopefully you're believing in God, and then you believe in yourself. If you continue to take the steps and you continue to move forward, you will figure it out. In the beginning, I had neighbors who were helping me to edit, and I had two close neighbors who would read the stuff and help me to edit and teach me a little bit about editing, whatever they knew, until I began to get a hold of it. It's a wonderful journey.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is continuing to educate the public. There are a lot of people who still don't know about us, so part of what we do is educate and tell them and teach them and show them. I've had so many people reach out to me who have told me that they were reading the magazine and did not realize it was a faith magazine, because the way it's put together, it just looks like a regular magazine. It's just really well done. Until you read something and it just hits you, like 'Oh my god, yeah.' We've had to be very, very smart about how we do what we do, because you say a Christian or a faith-based magazine and people have a certain reaction - they get turned off. I tell them, 'You have seen those around, but no, you haven't seen this one. This one is on a whole different level.' What we found is that sometimes you find our magazine in the faith section at Barnes & Noble, but you also find it in the food section or the fashion section, depending on what location, where in the country, who's actually unpacking it and evaluating it, and what they are actually looking at and what they took from it. I love that because it actually takes us out of the box where you're expected to be. Because we cover so many subjects and we really try to cover them well, you can spot it just anywhere. You really can. You have to do a little searching sometimes, but it's there.

My relationship with God is everything to me. It drives all the parts of my life and work. I don't know that it's a popular thing, but I'm a person of prayer. I am a person who looks to God for answers. I do believe that we work and we pray - we do both. It's not that you pray and you don't work or move. You have to move, you have to be consistent, you have to go to the next level, and I've seen God give me instructions for how to get there. My value system really revolves around doing good to people. I believe that what you put out into the world is what comes back to you. Absolutely. I believe that you deal in truth. You have to. I believe that we are a sum of our experiences, and my experiences might be different from yours and the next person, but there is a common space, and that is love. When you can meet in that common place, then you can get things done. You can move forward as a group. I believe in forgiveness. Sometimes you just have to forgive and let it go. It may not mean that you keep that person close to you, because you have to be protective also of what you're building and what God has given you. You have to show faithfulness over what's in your hand. But it means also that you understand where they might have made the wrong turn, or maybe where you made the wrong turn, and so you don't hold it against them and hopefully they don't hold it against you, and you can move on in life. I don't take it for granted that I'm able to get up and do the things that God has given me to do. I don't take that for granted. I believe it's a gift, and I want to be as proactive and treat it well. There's a story in the Bible about the talents - some were given one talent, some were given five talents, and some were given ten talents. Whatever the amount of talents that you're being given, you should parlay them. They should grow. You should be able to look at your life five years from now and see improvement, increase. You shouldn't be in the same place.