The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Invisible Mentors’

Doreen Conrad has had a very successful career because someone believed in her. Someone saw her potential and took the time to let her know and offer her the encouragement she needed to change her career path? Have you had a similar experience? And, who in your life could you offer encouragement to? If you see potential in someone, it’s your responsibility to do whatever you can to assist them in unleashing that potential. All of us will benefit from that gesture of goodwill.

Treat Doreen Conrad’s interview, and all the interviews on The Invisible Mentor Blog like a workshop where you are there to learn. It doesn’t matter which industry you are in, or what your job function is, you never know what ideas you can transport from one sector to another, or one job function to another.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I’ve had quite a full career in the private sector, public sector and overseas in an international organization. I have learned very much, which I am now applying by working as a management consultant, having retired from the government and the United Nations.

What’s a typical day like for you?

A typical day for me now, as of two years ago, is working in my home-based office as a sole practitioner getting up in the morning, responding to emails, preparing proposals, working on projects and perhaps preparing to travel to deliver a workshop. It’s the first time in my entire career that I don’t have a boss or staff members to work with me. I’m on my own except for my business partners.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I’m always motivated because I have a positive attitude. Nothing is insurmountable. I have never stayed at a job where I was in the least bit unhappy. It was always about me enjoying what I was doing, and that’s a natural motivator.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I definitely would have put more emphasis on education. I grew up in an environment where I was not encouraged to have a career. I was encouraged to be a mother and secretary. Those were some of the choices available at the time, and I would definitely have looked at an international career much sooner than I did.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

I’ve discovered that there are certain things that I really don’t want to work on anymore. I really don’t want to do in-depth market research studies. I’d rather get a business partner to do that part of the work. To be motivated and happy, I need to continue to focus on the things that I know I am good at, and I must find other people, other partners, to contract out the parts that I am not happy doing.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Unquestionably it has to be the impact of information technology. Being in the service sector you are essentially selling a promise. You do not have anything tangible to show as a sample, and therefore technology has been incredible as its speed has increased and its cost has decreased, which now allows service providers to both market and deliver their services online without even needing to leave their home office. So definitely that has been a significant development in my industry.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

• One of the big threats is I have to travel for my business and with the threats of terrorism and the increased security, increased cost of checking bags, environmental fees, it’s becoming more and more onerous and I think it can be a threat to international business as time goes on. I find myself saying no to international travel more than I’m saying yes just because some of the hassles that are only going to get worse as time goes by.
• The second threat is that, if we get another global recession donor funds may dry up. Most of the work I do is funded by international donors and I’m seeing a lot of agencies and governments cutting back on their international trade budgets.
• The necessity to continue to market my services and to prove my credibility.

I’m traveling and not enjoying the experience as much, especially when I’m traveling nine hours to another time zone and have to deliver a workshop the next morning, so it becomes less and less fun as the years go by.  I had myself certified as an International Trade Professional, which gives me additional credibility, when I go out into the marketplace both here in Canada and abroad, so people see that I’m obviously qualified in the field. I’m working to ensure that my clients give me good word-of-mouth referrals because service business is garnered by word-of-mouth referrals so I’m asking all my clients if they are happy with service to tell others. I’m being more proactive with that.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

I don’t have that much competition particularly in my area which is the promotion of the export of services. No one is going around to other developing countries saying, “Okay accountants, lawyers, consultants, here is how you sell your intangible products. Here is how you market something people can’t see.” There are a lot of people in international trade and service but they are all working on policy, trade negotiation, free trade agreements and so on. But not too many people are looking at the business community to the specific challenges that they face. So that is definitely very unique for me, at the moment anyway.

What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Without question it has to be public speaking. One of the best ways to market your service is to stand up in front of an audience and be perceived as an expert in your field, and that involves understanding the audience and what they would or would not be interested in hearing. I go to dozens of conferences – I was just at two in the last two weeks alone – and you continually see people stand up, and deliver facts and figures that’s of no use to the audience.

I have trained myself in public speaking. I do it a lot and I volunteer to do it a lot. I even have a couple of slides that I use in my workshops to tell people what to do and what not to do when they are asked to give a presentation. One of my favourite slogan is, “Marketing is everything that you do,” and if you are marketing yourself, you are standing up in front of people. You have to be an excellent public speaker. So I think that people need to take a close look at improving their public speaking skills.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

I would say that on a couple of occasions, I have developed materials that I have shared with others at workshops and people have asked for the slides with all the information, so there is an intellectual property issue because others can easily use my materials. Now what I do instead of handing out my PowerPoint, to overcome this issue, is to prepare a short summary, which is an expansion of each point on the slide, and hand that out to the audience so it’s not enough information for someone to teach it or copy it, but is a leave behind for them.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

I have learned not to rush into things. Decide if something is right for you and is going to make you happy. Don’t take something on because you think you should or you want the work. Think about who is going to see what you are presenting. The competition is everywhere and so you need to think about your intellectual property, and how you can keep your specific material yours.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

My big break came when I was working in the private sector for several years mostly as a support person helping marketing managers at trade shows and things like that. The president of the company who was located many miles from the plant where I worked, noticed me. He said, “You know you’ve got great potential.”

No one ever told me that before. That was the hugest break that I got because he thought I could do more.

I said, “Do you think I could do more?” and he said, “I think you could do a marketing manager’s job, why don’t you go for it?”

I never ever would have thought about that unless someone had stepped up to the plate and said, “You’ve got that potential, I know you can do it.” He being the CEO of the company, the Chairman of the Board, aged seventy-something, telling me that, he must see something in me so I need to go after this and I think it changed my entire career.

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was in hiring an employee. It became obvious in a few weeks that it was mistake. Regrettably the interview process was not exhaustive because we were in a foreign country, and they didn’t fly people in for three or four day so you could get to know them in a work setting. But I think that was a mistake I made, I chose the wrong person. And I learned that you probably have to do more than the interviews and looking at the references because that doesn’t always show the true person. I was much more cautious after that, so I think that contributed to better recruiting and HR processes throughout.

What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

The one time in my life when I was bitterly disappointed was when there was a re-organization where I worked, and years of work had been decided by new management to be changed and moved into somewhere else. I didn’t understand the changes and was quite disappointed. So, if you don’t want to experience change you need to work in an environment where you are not going to be facing major change.

As soon as you work in any large organization, the management team is going to change, the shareholders are going to change, the directors are going to change so there is always going to be change. If you are averse to change and want to stay on one path and not participate in change then you should put yourself in an environment where there is not going to be changes.

Now that I’m my own boss there isn’t going to be a lot of change. I put myself in a position where I’m a sole practitioner and very few environmental factors are going to change the way that I work now.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

I had to make the decision twice to move away from my home town and family for work. Fortunately, my husband was extremely supportive and able to move with me on both occasions, one not so far away, and the other overseas. They were major decisions which involved giving up jobs, material things including a house. It impacted my life but it was the best decision I made on both occasions. I think I had some gut feeling that it was the best thing to do and why not, why stay at the same thing. Part of me was saying why upset the apple cart, everything is fine and we are happy. The other side was pulling at me for the adventure and the change, and the new challenges that would come my way.

Those two decisions to move away from family were difficult ones, but in the end were positively the right thing to do.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

• I would be remiss if I didn’t say my husband of 37 years because he was always supportive. When I was 27 years old and hardly ever been outside of Canada, I said, “My company has asked me to deliver a tender to Finland, what do you think?” And instead of balking at the idea, he said, “You might as well go. I’ll probably never take you to Finland.” From that day forward he has been very supportive of me building my career, so that was a major influence and he is such an enabler for making it happen for me.
• The business travel to Finland showed me that someone entrusted me with a very important document, and I do believe that that was an event which helped to shape my life because it gave me confidence in myself and I knew that I could do much more.
• That mentor I mentioned before that told me thought I had more potential and could do much more. He gave me the impetus to push and do more, to train myself more. One of the things I’d like to share is that I started to work for people who I thought could teach me. When I went for a job interview, I was in essence interviewing them to see if I could learn from them and whenever I heard them express things in a really unique and professional way I made notes. I copied them and their mannerisms, and I learned so much from mentors and bosses.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

I believe it’s the two jobs I had where I was asked to set something up from nothing. I was given some resources and people to get started, but all the strategic planning, the implementation, the execution, the impact these had on thousands of people around the world really gave me great satisfaction. Those two accomplishments told me that I had a skill and could go in and set things up from nothing and make them work. I felt that was a real accomplishment in my work.

How did mentors influence your life?

They encouraged me. If I took mentors out of my life, the people who continually told me that I could do more and I should, in the absence of that I would have stayed where I was. I sensed I would have if there wasn’t any push, so that was key.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

You can do it! I’d go home and think about it and think, “Really?” In my disbelief the Chairman of the Board said, “You could be president of this company some day.” And that was pretty heavy for me in my twenties. I went home and thought about that which opened all kinds of doors in my mind.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Through referrals from contacts, I mentor many young women who are recent university graduates. People say to me, “Just sit and talk to them because you’ve had a fulsome career in three unique areas and maybe you could give them advice on how to get started.” I think the core message that I would pass on to your readers is to: think things through, don’t rush into things and really look at what can be done instead of what cannot be done and believe that anything is possible, take risks, because there is always a way.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Last week we talked about how to use The Invisible Mentor interviews to get the most from them. Please refer to How to Use Interviews for Self-Improvement and Another Way to Use Interviews for Self Improvement. As I was writing those blog posts, it suddenly occurred to me that the interviews I present here are really workshops that you attend nearly every week, for your professional development.

Christina Ioannidis – Your Invisible Mentor

Henry Ford once said, “Failure is the only opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

Christina’s first business aqua failed and she had to start over from scratch. I’m very impressed with Christina because she spoke openly and candidly about what she went through when her first business failed. As a society, especially in the West, we are socialized not to talk about failure, but the biggest lessons and learnings come from failure as you will see in the interview. At the end of Part One of the interview (or workshop) you’ll:

• Get incredible insights into a passionate woman who failed forward to success
• Learn about what can happen when you have too much stress in your life
• See a linchpin in action. Remember a few of the characteristics of a linchpin are to be ahead of the curve and anticipate the needs of your clients and customers before they do, and give it to them. Please see Review of Linchpin by Seth Godin
• Learn that you have to be clear and honest with people when you ask them to mentor you. The same thing applies when you contact someone in your networks. Please refer to Review of The Skinny on Networking by Jim Randel

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Christina Ioannidis: I am a Greek-Venezuelan who lives in London. My passion in life is to support other people and inspire individuals to do what they are passionate about, and that’s what I do on a professional and daily basis. I am the founder and CEO of Aquitude.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Christina Ioannidis: I don’t really have a typical day. A typical day might look like, get up in the morning, go to the gym or run. Afterwards I have breakfast, then either I leave the house and go for meetings usually back-to-back, followed by my training courses, or I stay in the office and work around building or designing the courses that I deliver. In the evenings, practically 90 percent of the time I am networking or going out to networking events.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Christina Ioannidis: I think I motivate myself by thinking about how I’m going to break the market, or how I’m going to make something out of nothing. My motivation is knowing that I’ve started something completely new and that it’s going to be successful, so I motivate myself by having a goal and seeing whether or not I get there.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Christina Ioannidis: Henry Ford once said, “Failure is the only opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

I started my life from scratch again when I lost my business. If I were to start again as a youngster in my career, what I would do very differently would be to not expect other people to recognize my achievements, but to always be positive about what I have done myself and tell others about it, and network like crazy. When I lost my jobs and my businesses, I naturally networked but I didn’t realize that I had to do it 10 times more than I had originally done it. If I were starting my professional life again or my companies again, I would probably have a little bit more cash in the bank. To start something it always takes a lot longer to make money out of it than one thinks.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Christina Ioannidis: Technology! For me, in the past year I’ve realized how important technology is for businesses. Even though I worked in technology 10 years ago I took it for granted how important it was to help people build connections. Social media and social networks have enabled people to get together via technology. The other product that we use, virtual conferencing is another piece of technology that is so powerful to bring people together. So for me, I think this has been the one single most powerful kind of enlightenment around how you can bring people globally together in one virtual physical space. And technology can do that.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Christina Ioannidis: The credit crunch. While the credit crunch has been a big crisis for everyone because everyone was affected in some way, the good thing is that it has brought questioning of everything, all the foundation of business. I actually think that this is going to help us advance faster to create better businesses even though we have taken a step back economically.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Christina Ioannidis: Self-doubt: I’m not a naturally doubtful person as you’ve probably gathered. I’m a high risk-taker, go crazy do kind of person. But my biggest risk would be falling prey to self-doubt, to start wondering if I can do things, which I have done in the past due to stress. Just before I lost my previous business, I suffered from depression quite badly because of stress. I don’t have any issues, but because of stress I was depressed, and what’s amazing is that I woke up one day and said, “Stop crying! You’re not going to achieve anything by crying. The only one who is going to get you out of the mess you’re in is yourself and that’s it.” My biggest threat would be if that happened again, which is not likely to.

To my business, as I’ve learned the biggest threat is doing stuff too quickly and spending too much money. My biggest mistake in a previous entrepreneurial endeavor was taking on too much financial risk. I don’t think that will happen again because I’m a little bit more intelligent now.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Christina Ioannidis: Precisely because it’s a service and it’s all about how you make people feel. The uniqueness is the delivery. I tend to deliver most of the content, and the associates that I have, are chosen on how good they are at making people feel positive about themselves. Whatever I do with either of my businesses, whether it’s consulting to a company, or coaching someone, they have to leave in a better condition than when they came in contact with us. The way the service is delivered, we are always making sure that our clients are happy and feel good about themselves.

The use of technology: We are always using cutting edge technology to deliver something that no one else has done.

Ideas: One thing I do quite naturally now is to always think about what could be a commercial proposition that would be beneficial for our customers. A lot of companies become complacent and they don’t do that. Once they have got a client, they just deliver the same-old, same-old. For me it’s always about being ahead of the curve and thinking ahead about what that client might need.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Christina Ioannidis: A lot of people in my field go in and talk using very big words, make big presentations, charge a lot of money, but ultimately the business doesn’t actually change, it’s fundamentally the same. The client has just paid them loads of money for a big presentation and long words. What we do, and what I like doing, is talking through the “crap” and saying it as it is, and being effective in that way. The way we work is about being realistic and always measuring what we do with concrete feedback and adapting the product or service to the strategy based on that feedback. A lot of companies don`t necessarily do that.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

Christina Ioannidis: There is no bigger challenge than what I went through with aqua. (This will make an interesting story for you and your readers. The day I setup my first entrepreneurial venture, the exact date, was the date I met my future husband, so there was an omen there, and we got married this year, on exactly the same date by chance, so some things are meant to happen.)

When I setup aqua in 2003, I was venturing into something completely unknown to me, and I was following my heart, blindly following my heart. And, I wasn’t listening to anyone, and I thought anyone who had any criticisms to what I was offering, just didn’t understand me, and didn’t understand the business, so I pursued creating it, growing it, going crazy taking out a retail outlet in Mayfair, taking out the risk which I personally signed for. Anyone in business will tell you that’s a no-no. But I was also convinced that it was going to work, I didn’t see any stumbling blocks, I just went for it.

After we had been trading in the premises for a year I was consequently told that the business was trading insolvently. Basically I couldn’t afford to pay all the suppliers that I had, and I was forced to close it, and consequently lose the business. I started to realize the big mistakes that I made along the way.

My big mistake was that I was too confident and thought the people who weren’t understanding the service, and were criticizing me, simply didn’t understand what I was trying to do. But they were giving me hints of what I was doing wrong, but I refused to listen to them.

Avil Beckford: What lessons did you learn in the process?

Christina Ioannidis: Lesson number one: Listen, you have two ears and one mouth, and that’s for a reason. Try and read between the lines even if you do not like what people are telling you.

Lesson number two: Beware of very extreme risks because there are other implications that come with it. When your business is declared insolvent, the directors of the business are automatically – because that’s the way the rules are in the UK – investigated for fraud, which makes sense, and I understand it from the England Revenue perspective. But when you’ve just lost everything, and then you are investigated personally, all your bank statements for the past three years, and you have to say where monies came from and where they went, and you are so emotionally destroyed, let’s say it’s just very difficult to manage that. So be aware of the implications of what you are getting yourself into. This is one of the romances of entrepreneurship, people think it’s so romantic being the director of a business, but you have legal responsibilities. I could have gone to jail if I had been told that I was trading insolvently and carried on trading. I didn’t know that.

These have been my biggest failures and my biggest learnings.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Christina Ioannidis: I’ve worked very hard to get to where I’ve wanted to be, but I think my biggest break came from someone I met while I had my previous business. We met me at a networking event, and we really liked each other. She was another professional woman and was inspired by what I was doing. She entrusted me to do a program for women around impact and gravitas (about being feminine but also professional) in business. I did a course for her female staff and it was a life line for me because I still had that retail outlet at the time, and that was significant amount of money that helped the business for a long time. She gave me a major break! She became a stakeholder to the business and was always coming to events and supporting me in any way that she could – as a customer and client.

When I lost that business, she became the first client of acquitude, so she brought me into Accenture, the company she was working for, to do some training. She is one of the most important people on the planet to me because she gave me those breaks.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Christina Ioannidis: See answer above about losing my business.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Christina Ioannidis: My biggest disappointment in life has come from other people. I have fallen out a number of times with individuals in business because I’m the type of person who will take risks, and there is so much glamour associated with what I tend to get involved in, that other people love to come on board. However, when push comes to shove, if I’ve taken all the risks, it means that I’m also the one who is going to lose everything. In the past, what I’ve found is that, what a lot of people happen to do – and I’ve lost friends over this – is to come in and say they’ll do something. I pay them and then I don’t get what is expected, and this has been true on a number of occasions. My learning has been – and that’s why I do what I do now in terms of communications with other people, and helping them to build good relationships with their colleagues and teams – is to always make sure you have an agreement up front with your expectations and their expectations. And a lot of it has to do with personality type because we project our personalities on to other people, and we expect other people to behave as we would. Everyone does that so we need to understand them even more than we understand ourselves, so we know how they are thinking. I think that this is my biggest learning.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Christina Ioannidis: My toughest decision is what I am going through now, and it’s a personal decision. I find business decisions are easier to make than my personal ones. My toughest decision is where to live because my parents are live in Greece, I live in London, but I am married to an Australian man, so we have three very distinct geographies that we could be in but I don’t want to be too far from my parents because they are now at an elderly age. This is my hardest decision at the moment. I probably spend more time thinking about this than anything else.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Christina Ioannidis: My grandmother and in knowing her. My grandmother was the epitome of femininity and intelligence. She was a poor Venezuelan woman, absolutely beautiful who brought up magnificent daughters on her own. And that’s why I admired her! She did some things that most would not be able to do. And not only that, she was very advanced for her time. She grew up at the beginning of the 20^th century and did a lot of cutting edge things. Women were not liberated then, and even though her social environment was restricted, she did so much, and both of her daughters became internationally renowned in their fields. My mother became an international pianist, performing globally, and my aunt won the national award for microbiology for science in Venezuela. So both of them became eminencies in their fields, and they are women. That’s why I feel so much passion about supporting women, and I think it comes from her. She fed this to my mother who is my second biggest inspiration. My mother travelled the whole world in the sixties. At 16 she went to live in New York for five years in a row, then she went to Vienna and to Italy where she met a Greek man, my father. She lived in Greece and was practically the first Venezuelan living in Greece, so she was always living in very different environments, but adapting to them.

It was a momentous time when my grandmother passed away in 2003. And the way she passed away, I’m convinced it was her wish for me to start aqua. I’m convinced it was her wish that I would do jewelry because she passionately loved jewelry. I think that’s what got me into my entrepreneurial journey. Her death shocked me so much, that if my career was going straight, it bounced me to the right.

The name of my businesses aquitude (present) and aqua, which I lost is significant. My grandmother’s initials were AQ. If you ever saw the logo of the first company, the a and the q were very pronounced and the u and a were much smaller. I always keep a and q in my company names. Now it’s aquitude and I want people to have her attitude in life.

I couldn’t have done what I’m doing if I hadn’t been made redundant. The first I was made redundant, I managed better than I did the second time because Nortel Networks was a fabulous company to work for, they were very good. The person who made me redundant told me in very nice terms in a very nice way. I felt bad that the company was suffering, but I knew that I would find something else. But the second redundancy was bad because they treated us very badly. I left feeling bitter and I hated that, which was worse for me because I was in a bad state of mind.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Christina Ioannidis: I’m very proud of what I did with aqua. I still have people who were clients say to me, “You should do it again,” and my response, “Yes, but not with my money.” It was a beautiful shop and the service was great, the designers were fantastic. Yes there were a lot of challenges, but I am very proud of how I created that experience out of nothing.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Christina Ioannidis: Big time. First of all, going back to your question about my biggest break, I didn’t know about mentors in the formal sense when I was starting my career. When I started my first job, I was in a very high profile international graduate program for a company called Allied Domecq Spirits. Only Mexicans or Spanish people know about this brand Domecq. Domecq was the biggest spirits company that came out of Mexico, and they had all the sherries in Spain as well. It was owned by a very prominent Latin family, and a British Distillery bought the business and it became Allied Domecq.

I worked for them in a fantastic graduate training program, where they spent millions of dollars on us. They took us on helicopter rides to Wales and to meetings in Hungary and just traveling the planet as graduates.

One of the stakeholders in the graduate program, who was a European president, asked to meet with everyone of the graduates, and I was the last one to meet with him because I was living in Spain at the time and I had to go to the UK to meet him. When I met him,  I asked if he would be my mentor. I was 25 at the time. This guy is at the top of the business, so it takes a little bit of guts, and I am that way. I was thinking that the worse thing that could happen is that he would say no. He was delighted, he smiled and said, “I’m so happy that you asked me, of course I would be delighted.”

He became my mentor, and we agreed that it was going to be an informal conversation, an email here and there, nothing too formal, no hours spent because the guy was busy. He was very instructive in me moving from Spain from sales, then financial and then move me into marketing in Greece. Now there is one thing that Greeks do beautifully, and that’s to have fun. I worked in Athens as a result of him proposing it.

This is a great example of what a mentor can do, and even though we think they won’t have the time, they make the time because they are people and they want to help people. They will help you if you are honest about what you want from them. I had told him I would like him to be there for me as a sounding board, and if there was anything interesting happening in the company that he thought I could embrace I would be happy to consider it. I was very keen.

He was a very important mentor, and ever since I have had my career, I have always had individuals, and they may not have known this, but they were actually my mentor without the formal M. They are the people who I would call up and say I’m doing this, what do you think? and most of the time I didn’t listen, and that’s why the first business didn’t quite work out. They’ve been there, and now I have a range of people who I call my Board of Directors, or my mentoring mesh of individuals, and each one plays an instructive role. I have been quite strategic in who I choose because I know they could be sponsors in those areas I’m interested in and likely to be critical to shape my advancement either for the business or for myself.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Christina Ioannidis: I tend to be someone who is very spontaneous. I am Greek-Venezuelan and I love life. A consistent message was the need to question a bit more, to analyze a bit more before acting. I’m the kind of person who will come up with a brilliant idea, I’m convinced it’s going to work, I go out and start working and I don’t stop talking to people about it without actually having dotted the “i’s” and cross the “t’s”. So if someone asked me a question that I didn’t know the answer to, obviously I haven’t thought things through, so that’s something that came out consistently. So now I’m a little bit more focused on how I put stuff on the table, or actually tell people about it.

Avil Beckford: As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Christina Ioannidis: Be strategic! Always think through what you want, and how you want others to help you, so they don’t become your crutch. A lot of people think that a mentor is a crutch, is someone they can call up twice a month and run all their problems and let them make a decision. A mentor is not that. A mentor is someone who will enlighten you with a perspective to your problem, but you ultimately have to be the person who makes the decision. And that’s why being strategic is important because if you think about what they can offer you in terms of advice, and it’s targeted, then they will definitely help you to make a better decision.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

About Christina Ioannidis:

Christina Ioannidis (www.christinaioannidis.com) is an international speaker, consultant and seasoned entrepreneur.

A Venezuelan – Greek, she is the founder and CEO of Aquitude (www.aquitude.com) , a leading Organizational, People and Market Development consultancy. Aquitude’s client list include FTSE 100 companies such as Shell, Barclays, Accenture, Mercer, Detica , PA Consulting, among others.

Christina is also sought-after speaker and she delivers interactive and engaging keynotes at conferences worldwide. She is a thought leader in the subjects of gender-savvy leadership and talent management, employee and customer engagement, effective product development and marketing, as well as innovation and intrapreneurship. She has been invited to comment on Sky News, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Evening Standard, The Guardian, among others.

Christina is the author of “Your Loss: How to Win Back Your Female Talent” (www.yourlossbook.com).

The interviews on this blog are content rich, and there are times when important information goes unnoticed because there is just so much of it. I have extracted 10 tips based on the responses to the question, “As an invisible mentor, what advice do you have for my readers?” And remember that an invisible mentor is simply a unique leader you can learn from by observing them from a distance. I bring invisible mentors to you, so that you don’t have to search for them.

“Keep wishing, keep being positive about the dreams that you have because your dreams are attainable, you just have to keep going and don’t take no for an answer.” Robin Craig

“I wish I had someone I looked up to who would have been my mentor, because success is highly improbably without the willing cooperation of others.  My advice is to build a supportive network and seek mentors you admire who can help you travel the paths they have taken.” Alex Todd

“Be yourself, be truthful. Stick to your values and beliefs and it’s okay to say no sometimes.” Paul Copcutt

“Trust yourself that what you are doing is going to work, put yourself out there and show people that you care and build relationships. Stick to what you are doing and don’t give up when things aren’t going well.” Nathalie Lussier

“Setup a system to organize your work, immediately. I am not talking about a productivity system or anything complicated like that (though those can be useful for some people) what I mean is a systematic process for achieving your long term goals.

Entrepreneurs tend to get stuck on either the “big picture” or the small details, both of which are myopic viewpoints by themselves. To get anything done you need to be able to have a grasp of the actionable steps that have to be accomplished in order to achieve your goal. These steps need to be real and concrete for you. You should write them down and check them off as you accomplish them. Not only that but every so often you should look back at the list and see how far you have progressed, what you are getting stuck on and just how off the rails you’ve gone since the last time you looked. The more times you revisit, tweak and refine that list of steps the better off you will be.” Steve Spalding

“Find your passion and purpose.  I believe we were all empowered with a gift to give to the world.  I’d like to emphasize the words gift and give.  When we give of ourselves and our talents freely to others, amazing things occur.  This doesn’t mean what you always do is free, but find ways to give back.  It not only makes you feel good but also those you affect.  When you wrap the concept of giving around what it is you have a passion for, you find moments of joy that are truly amazing and almost unexplainable.  If you don’t feel you have found a purpose or passion, begin that search now!” Michael McCleary

“Nurture the people who give to you, always give back. Also, someone I spoke to recently said that one of his mottos was ‘you can’t have two faces’. Treat everyone with equal respect. That is so true.” Gina McAdam

“Realize that what gets everyone up in the mornings is one of four motivations or a combination them: money, power, self preservation and romance, which includes all the arts, and everything associated with the arts. These are the motivators, and put more emphasis on the self preservation and romance side, and less on the money and power side. You’ll be a happier person.” Duke Redbird

“Be yourself, develop your skills and do not take no for an answer. There is always a way. I have had quite a privileged life and I have to realize that some people don’t, so you have to embrace others and encourage them. I have always been supportive of my children and grandchildren and encouraged them in what they did and I believe that I still do that.” Lois Fallis

“Go for the grande, especially if your readers are women because a lot of us don’t think big enough. They may think let’s open up a coffee shop, let’s not create another Starbucks. Think bigger even if you don’t create another Starbucks, what if you end up with a chain of three or four coffee shops? Women need to think better and bigger, and I think that’s one piece of advice that I’d give to almost any woman that I meet.

For everyone else, I would say know your network, and know who you can turn to for really good advice. I think sometimes we build close networks of people who are vested in the outcomes of whatever we do, and we surround ourselves with people. So if your best friend doesn’t want you to get, or take that promotion, that’s not necessarily helpful information, you need to find people who will be able to give you good advice that’s in your best interest and not theirs.

Build a network of core people you can trust to help you build your business life and it turns out that they generally help you with your personal life as well.” Diane Danielson

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Image Credit: Google via Apture

Sylvia Lafair – Your Invisible Mentor

Company:  (CEOinc) Creative Energy Options, Inc

Website: http://www.ceoptions.com/

Grow, learn and be of service, that’s Sylvia Lafair’s raison d’etre. Conducting interviews is an enjoyable, yet humbling experience. For me, I am always reminded of how little I know, and how much I can learn from the interviewees. In hearing Sylvia Lafair’s story, I realize as usual how much we can learn and apply if we stop and digest what she has to say. She operates her business with high integrity and is not afraid to walk away from work that does not align with her values. The people I gravitate toward, and the people I present to you, realize that life isn’t just about them. We are all part of something much bigger.

As you read Sylvia’s story, think about the similarities between you and her. What are five lessons that you can learn from her.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I am a searcher and an adventurer, and have a PhD to prove that I search academically in clinical psychology. I became a family therapist who then morphed into an executive coach and conflict management expert in the business world. I’m married and have two grown daughters and a couple of grand kids. Life is good.

What’s a typical day like for you?

It’s interesting, on a typical day, I have to fight my initial reaction when I get up to go right to the computer. It is so addicting to me to sit down, so I take a few minutes to have a cup of tea and do some deep breathing, and then I go to the computer. In the morning I like to do some blogging and checking out what’s going on, on the news, and it’s sort of a meditation for me. I love to write, and since I finished writing my book Don’t Bring it to Work, last year, I have found other ways to write, and blogging is one of them. I usually get up at 6:30 am and by 7:00 I’m at the computer.

Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 my staff comes in. During the day, I’m in meetings, on coaching calls, conference calls and doing a lot of planning. That’s when I’m at the Retreat Center, and we also have groups that come up here for team building and conflict management. We have our leadership program, which is called Total Leadership Connections, which is one of the joys of my life. It’s another form of a child that was birth from my ideas, and is now almost 10 years old, so that’s a typical day for me at the country place.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Years ago I made the decision that I’m here to grow, learn, and be of service, and so every day when I wake up, I spend time centering myself for the day wondering what opportunities and who will show up in my life, and what I can do to make the best difference that I possibly can, in any way I can. I know that may sound a little “pollyannaish,” but that’s what I believe.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

When I started out, the business world was not as open to women as it is now. And it was not a world that I was particularly interested in. I had always wanted to understand the working of the human mind, so psychology was always there, but there are so many more opportunities now in terms of leadership psychology and business psychology. I think I would have moved into that arena earlier than clinical psychology and family therapy, which is where I spent a lot of years of my life.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

It’s one that comes and circles back all the time, and it has to do with the more I let go, the more I get, and the more I don’t worry about the outcome, the more that magic happens, and if not magic, at least I get some good fertilizer to grow beautiful flowers in, and it will eventually works out in a perfect way if I just do my part and not try to control every thing.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

The change came when I left family therapy and the world of psychology to go into the business world. I think it has happened and is happening as we speak, there is a growing momentum for people in the business world to understand that relationships are at the core. Without relationships, it doesn’t matter what your product is, it will fall off the face of the earth if you do not really manifest and work on both internal relationships in your own organization, your own personal relationships in your own life, and relationships with colleagues and customers. So it’s circling back to more and more people getting to see that a) we are all connected and b) that relationships do make a major difference.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

The economy is challenging for everybody, and it has made people pull in and say we can’t invest in team building, and we can’t invest in conflict transformation, so initially that has been a tremendous threat.

The environment is another threat to all of us and so we are very conscious. Recently we had a meeting, and someone was handing out a booklet they had produced internally, and the first comment was “I wonder how many trees felt their end point from that.” So I think the threats are bigger than they used to be. What’s happening in the south with British Petroleum and the oil spill is becoming a bigger threat, as well as eating properly and health. Those are the big threats and they affect me because I am in the people part of the business world.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

One of the things we’ve discovered is that we’ve been living with the illusion that we can separate who we are at home from who we are at work, and it has created some real destruction. The Bernard Madoffs of the world, at home were living a different life than they were at work. What we do is help people become whole and see we aren’t meant to be different, we are meant to be aligned and show integrity, and who we are is who we are. We offer that in our programs, we offer that in the book I’ve written, Don’t Bring it to Work, which really drills down into that concept that we really need to become aligned with our selves and that’s who we take to work.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

The major challenge with work is to bring some fairly new concepts into the workplace without scaring people, and one of the situations, which comes to mind as we’re talking is a man who was in an HR nightmare at work. I was called in to work with his team. He kept on talking about one of the women who was one of the first who went to HR, and he was going on and on and on. And one of the things I know is that if you are that upset over something, if your buttons are that pushed, you better look further back in your life to see what else is going on, so I said to him, “Can you tell me about your relationship as you were growing up at home?” He looked at me and said, “That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard and I really should throw you out of my office.”

I sat at the edge of the chair wondering if I was going to stay or leave. I made the decision that I was either going to go where I knew the deeper work I was doing had to go, or I’d rather leave, so I said, “You don’t have to tell me your whole life story, just tell me one or two things.” I picked his father since it seemed like the most logical place and he looked at me and said, “I mean it Sylvia, I want to throw you out of the office.” And I said, “That’s your choice. I told you when I first came in that this work was going in a different arena and it’s okay if you don’t want to go there, but you’ll have to find someone else to help you out of this mess with HR.”

We looked at each other, eyeball to eyeball, for what seemed like a month but was maybe a minute, and then he finally said, “Okay, I haven’t seen my father in 25 years and I thought he was an absolute bastard.” I asked him why and he said, “He was self-serving, only thought about himself and caused lots of problems.” That was all, I didn’t say another word. Way later in the conversation, things settled down and we went back to business talk if you will. I asked him to tell me about this Roberta girl that drove him so crazy. And surprise, surprise, he said, “She’s self-serving, only thinks about herself and causes lots of problems.” I didn’t say anything to him then, but I think he was fighting a dual battle with the gal at work and with his father.

Out of that conversation, he was able to make peace with this woman, and the team became amazingly successful. He called me one day and said, “I think I would like to meet my father again. As I said, I haven’t seen him in 25 years, and I don’t know where he is.” I said, “If the intention is there, maybe you’ll have a chance to meet him.” Two days later he called and said that he was pretty shook up because his aunt called him to say his dad had called and said he was in a nursing home in Las Vegas dying, and wanted to see his son before he died.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

1. I didn’t want to get thrown out of this man’s office, but I was willing to. I learned deeply not to sell myself out.
2. I’d rather eat beans from a can than the best dinner at the fanciest restaurant if it would mean selling out my beliefs and integrity.
3. I either teach what I believe, or believe what I teach, or I may as well go be a gas station attendant and not talk to anyone about anything.

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

My biggest failure, and I grapple with it all the time is having gotten divorced – even though I am married to a really great man – from a man who is the father of my children. I look back and what I now know is that I didn’t own my part in what was going on in the relationship. We had married young, I was 23 when I got married, and 25 when I had my first daughter, and 28 when I had my second daughter, so by 30 I was already through with that area of my life. I blamed my ex-husband for things that weren’t going the way I wanted them to go in our relationship.

I’m remarried, he’ remarried, he sees our children and grandchildren and so do I. It’s pleasant but there has always been a sadness for me that we couldn’t make it work.

What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

That’s a hard one because I think what I just said was the biggest disappointment, but not to have it re-occur again, is one of the things I have learned is to be pretty honest in my present relationship, and we’ve been together for 25 years. I learned that telling the truth is not spilling your guts, that it’s a very disciplined art form, and in every relationship it’s the foundation of what we have to do, and how we have to live. I’ve learned how to practice truth telling sentences. And, this is what we teach in our leadership program. It is about telling the truth as the foundation of the core of all relationships.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

One of the decisions that I had to make was to totally release the Personal Growth Center that we had in suburban Philadelphia and take that step to work only in the workplace. The Personal Growth Center was very fulfilling, and we had a lot of people we had trained working with us, and we would bring in lots of well known people in the fields of health and healing to teach in our center. My husband and I who was my partner, made the decision that we would be more effective and touch more lives if we closed. It was literally a beautiful Center. We simply closed it. We gave away a lot of the things that were there. We had a beautiful bookstore, we gave most of the books away. We began to build up the retreat center in the mountains to use mainly for leadership programs and corporate groups. It was a big leap of faith, and it was a good move. I was following what was next, from my heart.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

The first is interesting. I was not supposed to be born. My mother had one of her kidneys removed when my brother was born and she was told not to have anymore children. So as the story went, she didn’t want to have only one child so she sort of went obstetrician shopping and several obstetricians told her she shouldn’t have another kid, and then one said this is between you, me and God. She came home and told my father that the doctor had said it was fine and that’s how I was born. And it’s interesting because very early on I had this itch that I couldn’t scratch, that I would always want to challenge what was going on, and I was always looking for something that was different. That’s why we have people do what is called a Sankofa map, it’s a map of your history and generational history. You know it wasn’t such an easy thing in those days to have a child with one kidney, I still think it isn’t that easy, but if she was willing to take a risk then I wasn’t meant to sit around eating the bon bons so to speak. That had a tremendous impact on me.

My father died suddenly of a heart attack when I was 14. He came home from work one day and said, “I’m done,” and we didn’t know how done he was until in the night he had a heart attack and died. He was in a family business with his two brothers and it was fiscally sound but emotionally bankrupt. My passion for working in the workplace is so other kids wouldn’t have to go through what I went through because there is so much tension at work.

The third event was the power of what happened when I got the divorce which is something I didn’t want, but it was another form of death. But I learned that if we can tell the truth, we can transform our lives in much more powerful ways. I had a teacher once who said to me, there is birth and death and they impact us in such core ways, and much of the rest is like sandwich filling.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

At the moment I think it is my book Don’t Bring it to Work. It was sitting in me for twenty-something years. People often said that I should write a book, and I would say yes, I oughta write a book and I didn’t. I was in the doing stage of things. We can make tons of excuses, and I tend to be fairly extroverted in my personality so I love being with people, and writing a book means closing the door, and it’s you and the computer and your good thoughts so it took me about a year to pull the ideas together, and it took me two and a half months to sit and write it. The pulling together of the ideas was a bit difficult, but the writing of the book was pure joy. Other than birthing my two daughters, I found writing the book was just a delight.

How did mentors influence your life?

Very critically. When I was in training in the family therapy field, I was very fortunate that in Philadelphia there were all the key people who were helping to create this new field of family therapy. Though it wasn’t so new, they were helping to make it a more important field. Most of them were my teachers and some of them became mentors. I was a good student and loved learning so they took me on and taught me the subtleties. You can get a lot of the easier stuff sitting and being lectured to, but the subtle stuff, it’s really great if you have someone who can be there saying, “What would happen if you said this instead of that, and next time say this instead of that?” That’s been really delightful for me, and I’ve also found mentors in people who were no longer alive who had written books which impacted me deeply. They were mentors for me also.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

To stay true to myself.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

I would pay it forward and say to stay true to yourself. If we sell out to the luxuries of life, we will lose a deeper part of who we are.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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C. Hope Clark – Your Invisible Mentor This Week

As usual, the interview is packed with lots of solid information for you to use. Hope is a writer and has an ezine, FundsforWriters, which she distributes weekly. For Part One of the interview, there are five great ideas that I have pulled out, after you have read the interview, what are your five great ideas?

5 Great Ideas from C. Hope Clark’s Interview

1. The more consistent and productive you are, the more motivated you get
2. Rushing anything before it’s ready is fool’s folly
3. With a serious well thought out plan and mindset, you can stop the train wreck you’re on and head in a different direction
4. Do the best you can at the job you are given and people will respect you
5. Stay hungry, to improve all aspects of your life

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I write nonfiction for others and fiction for me. I hope one day to cross the bridge where each works for the other side. I adore the outdoors. When I lived three years in Phoenix, one of the first things I did upon returning to my beloved South was to hug a tree. Seriously. I’m married to a retired federal agent, and security/safety is huge in my house. I have two sons, two stepsons, a grandson and granddaughter (Yea, tell me I look too young. I love hearing that – that’s just the photography, trust me. You should see me in person. The years have left their mark here and there.) When I built my house, I told the contractor he had two main goals – place my writing room so it had the best view of the lake . . . and build my husband’s walk-in-safe exactly as he wanted. I said safety was key already, didn’t I? We live on the banks of Lake Murray in South Carolina.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Sleep until 9-10 AM. I’m a night person. Hubby fixes my breakfast. A few chores, maybe emails for an hour or two (I receive 300-400 per day), then something outdoors, if possible, especially if the day is nice. I have to get my daily dose of Vitamin D. I at least feed and greet my chickens – one rooster, 14 hens and a couple of babies. By 5-6 pm, I’m back at the computer working on FundsforWriters. Break for dinner, maybe a mystery/cop show or two with hubby (I adore mysteries), then back to the computer – by then writing on the novel until 2 AM. I love writing in the middle of the night, when no one is looking and I can think with the world silent, leaving me to my thoughts.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I don’t get caught up in this “muse” business. Neither do I believe in writer’s block. Motivation, to me, is nothing more than being consistent. The more consistent and productive I am, the more motivated I get. So on those days when I’m dragging, I continue to drag my behind to the computer and work. The results are just as satisfying as when I’m positive and perky. Frankly, once you write something to completion, you really can’t tell what you wrote on a good day and what you wrote on a sluggish day. So the point it to just show up.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Not marry my first husband? LOL. Seriously. I would take my efforts at writing more seriously. It’s probably normal for younger people to second guess their abilities, but I would have written more, sooner, and younger. I would have traveled this writing road harder with more purpose, because only after you’ve traveled it long and hard do you improve. It’s not a skill set you’re born with, regardless of what people think. All the great writers spent their lives putting words on paper in quiet rooms for years before anyone knew their names. And they took their writing seriously early in their lives.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

That self-publishing is a serious option with the explosion of ebooks. I’m normally NOT an advocate of self-publishing. I still tell new writers to avoid it until they’ve walked that long road I mentioned earlier . . . until they understand the publishing business. If they haven’t done either, then they need to leave the publishing business to the professionals and stick to traditional publishing. On a personal note, I’ve discovered/decided that my children need to struggle and fall on their knees so they can learn how to pick themselves up and become stronger people. I think every parent makes that discovery . . . or else they spend their lives in misery watching what they can’t control.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

I’d like to say print-on-demand, but I think that predates five years. It was the first step in shaking the foundations of the big publishing houses because it put smaller presses on a more equal standing. But recently it’s been Amazon. I’ve learned you either hate or love Amazon, but you can’t deny that they stay on point in developing the reading world. They have single-handedly, in my opinion, thrust ebooks into the forefront of the writing business. Yes, there are others who followed, but if Amazon hadn’t jumped in in a big way, the others wouldn’t have done as much. Amazon gave ebooks dignity.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Three threats, in my opinion:

1. My age. Some may say I’m still young, others not so much, but I constantly feel I’m in a race with time to publish. That said, however, I clash with myself about the concern, because rushing anything before it’s ready is a fool’s folly.
2. The phenomenal changes occurring with social media. I study the changes and do lots of reading in attempt to keep up.
3. Peace of mind. I’ve worked hard to become very happy with my lot in life. At the same time I am competitive. So I have this constant struggle to live a simple life without overindulging in my career. I love my life, and I don’t want to sabotage it with the extreme busy-ness so many others seem to get lost in.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Frankly, I not so sure. LOL What I do know is that when I’m honest with my readers, they respond positively. They also like my conversational tone. I like to write in first-person, as if having coffee with a friend. But as with a close friend, I also speak frankly with a bit of a scolding edge, just enough so that the person realizes I’m saying this in a constructive manner. Readers adore that tone even more! But something else that makes a difference is the fact I am consistent. Every Friday, the newsletters go out. I meet deadlines. I try to research the material used, and keep it fresh. For ten years I’ve missed two deadlines: one when traveling in Europe, the other when moving my household cross-country. I believe readers appreciate it when I keep their interests first.

What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Respect others. Respect their interest, their level in their own professional (whether newbie or seasoned), their questions, their efforts, even their time. I respond to all emails . . . all.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

I worked 25 years with a federal agency, ultimately reaching the rank of second in the state. However, I had the challenge of being the only woman amongst my peers most of the time. I hated the animosity, the vying for power. While I was good at it, it took a toll on me. So I created a three-year plan to get my finances in order and request an early retirement (dropping my income about sixty percent) so I could write for a living. I’d already been writing part-time and earning a few dollars at it. FundsforWriters was only a couple years old, but Writer’s Digest had already recognized it in its 101 Best Websites for Writers. That recognition was jaw-dropping to me and served as a tremendous catalyst. With a family on board with my decision to leave the bureaucracy, I leaped into writing and FundsforWriters. Even told the kids that I’d fund their college as long as I could, but if things got tight, they had to find ways to take up the slack. I’m proud to say that FundsforWriters covered both sons’ college tuition.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

With a serious, well-thought out plan and mindset, you can stop the train wreck you’re on and head in a different direction.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

That’s hard. I’ve never relied upon others and rarely sought advice. I’m a believer in doing lots of research and making informed decisions, rather than relying upon someone else. I will say that my current husband taught me to take chances and added a whole new dimension to my world.

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Being a fairly competitive individual, in my old life (pre-writing) I dared to step too far in my efforts to make a name for myself. I had to step-back (reassigned to another office) and analyze myself. I sought to identify the mistakes while holding onto the standards I believed in. A peer taught me this: Do the best you can at the job you are given and people will respect you – even in the midst of controversy. Best advice I ever received. I not only weathered that point in my life, but I also rose above it, achieving a promotion I never expected. We have to be honest with ourselves in order to improve.

What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Divorce. The second time around, my husband (also divorced) and I entered into our relationship with plans on how to avoid repeating history. Respect is huge in this house, as it should be.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Again, the divorce. It kicked me on my butt even though I initiated it. Suddenly life was so far off-track I never thought it’d return to any sense of normalcy. But I told myself to take it one day at a time and that a year from now life would be better. And it was. I know today not to panic when life takes a negative detour.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. Meeting my husband…shaped me on so many levels.
2. Becoming a mother…made me think outside of myself.
3. Daring to leave the nine-to-five to court my own self-employment.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Outside of family, reaching ten years of history with FundsforWriters, each year being recognized by Writer’s Digest Magazine. I flaunt that everywhere.

How did mentors influence your life?

Mentors gave me self-esteem, made me study my own strengths and capitalize on them.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Be true to yourself and respect others. Stay hungry to improve in all aspects of your life.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Be true to yourself and respect others. How could I give any other advice when it’s been so good for me? When it isn’t all about you, you touch more people, make more sales, become more successful, fill-in-the-blank. It’s just a potent formula.

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