The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Mentors’

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).

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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Today I present the first part of the interview with Jenny Pickles who has worked in the publishing industry for 15 years. As usual, look for the nuggets of brilliance, and be open to the bits that you can apply to your unique situation.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I have worked in the publishing industry since 1995, firstly at Emerald Group Publishing Ltd initially  in the Editorial department.  Here I was responsible for organizing the annual best paper awards for excellence and managing a suite of real estate and environmental scholarly journals. In 2000 I transferred to the Business Development department and took on responsibility for digital licensing, reprints and permissions.  Two years ago I was lucky enough to be offered the role of Associate Director of Global Rights at John Wiley & Sons in the UK. This involves responsibility for all secondary licensing of the many thousands of books and journals published by Wiley including translation rights, permissions and digital licensing.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Dealing with the many emails from external and internal customers, working with my staff who are based in both Oxford and Chichester and with our Global Rights colleagues who are based around the world.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Working every day with talented, enthusiastic and committed staff always motivates me to try harder myself, lead by example, and fully support my team. I like to encourage their ideas for improving the business, our business processes, our service levels and our productivity.  Additionally in a digital age the way in which knowledge is created and disseminated is constantly changing and developing, the consequent demands and expectations of our customers grows exponentially and this constantly challenges us to find ways to meet those demands and expectations. The job is never boring.

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

I would probably have got into the publishing industry much sooner than I did. I took the job initially because it was available at a time that a grant funded role at Bradford University came to an end, not because I had a burning desire to get into publishing.  However, I quickly found that I loved the job, the constant challenges and the dynamics of publishing. I feel that I would know much more now if I had been aware of this when I was much younger.

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

That partnering with respected organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Centre to develop an automated online permissions clearance service for our journals can not only vastly improve the service that we offer our customers and authors, but also cut down significantly on the time consuming manual elements of the job thus enhancing the Permissions team’s daily tasks and enabling them to spend more quality time evaluating the more complex and challenging requests we receive daily.

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

Definitely the opportunities afforded to increase readership of our authors’ work through both developing e-books and other digital, audio and mobile products in-house and at the same time partnering with external specialists in these formats to license our titles for inclusion in these services.

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

I would say the continued campaign for open access in the absence of viable alternative funding models, thus threatening the very industry which has provided refereed scholarship for centuries – we are trying to handle this issue by offering authors the option to pay an online open fee to make their final published refereed article’s openly accessible on our site. We are also planning to launch new entirely open access journals next year each of which will continue to receive the same rigorous review process to maintain quality, accuracy and high standards; the proliferation of piracy and online file sharing sites for which we are working with the Publishers Association, other industry groups and legal colleagues to tackle and thirdly, the proliferation of unauthorized, outdated and inaccurate information that the aforementioned can result in and which should not be relied on through casual searches on the internet.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Rights management and content licensing is not unique but it is important.  We publish a wide range of books and journals in the English language which are sold throughout the English speaking world. However many students and professionals around the world would not be able to benefit unless local publishers were able to translate and sell the books in their local markets.  The wide range of licenses and permissions requests to reuse published works negotiated daily, based on the rights granted to us by our authors, mean that the authors’ work get much more widely read and that they benefit from additional royalties from sales of their work in for example Russian or Spanish translation as well as primary sales in  English.  We are also able to negotiate special arrangements for developing countries to ensure that access is truly global.

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

Can’t really comment

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

We have been working on updating an internal IT system and this has involved selecting the most high priority issues and project managing these with IT and business colleagues  over the last year or so.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

Patience, patience, and more patience – and accepting that not everything can or maybe even should be automated.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

The owner of Emerald Group Publishing Ltd who agreed to allow be to participate in an in-house MBA program which was funded by the company. It was he who supported me and encouraged me to take as my dissertation the copyright implications of digital publishing – this in no small part contributed to the job I have now.

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

In accepting the job I have now I had to relocate away from my family and friends – I love and appreciate the job but I do miss not seeing my family as much as I would like to.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

My family and having my children, I have one daughter and four sons who are the greatest joy in life; the support and encouragement I received from my late husband who pushed me into going back to university as a mature student to study for my Masters degree in history and politics and taking up the challenge of the in house MBA which was done alongside my daily job – the hardest and most challenging thing I have ever done but which taught me most about opportunities to grow and progress in the workplace.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Raising my family.

How did mentors influence your life?

By encouraging me to look at life and achievements differently.

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

Set your goals and be prepared to pay the price in advance – this is a mantra that I have always followed. The mentor was one of the directors and co-owners of Emerald at the time, Barrie Pettman, a self made millionaire and I always thought the statement made a lot of sense. The price you pay may be financial in terms of the fees for a particular course of study or training you need to undertake, it might be the time you have to be prepared to invest in learning new skills or gaining the required qualifications to get where you want to be, it might be what you have to personally forego in other areas of your life in order to spend that time, or it might be the effort of identifying who you need to seek out who may be willing to offer you further help and guidance. Whatever the price, you need to research what it is first and decide if you are prepared to pay that price, then just do it.

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

I would pass on the advise that was given to me,(above) to have confidence in yourself – if you truly want to achieve something in your life, find out what you need to do in order to achieve it and if you are prepared to expend that effort in planning and working hard at it you can achieve your goal.  Conversely, there is no shame in admitting defeat if, having evaluated the possibilities and challenges of a particular objective you decide that it is not for you after all.

What are to takeaways from the interview? 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 side) by email or RSS Feed.

“I say that presidents of companies should be kicked out every five years or changed because we are only good in one or two areas not five or six or the full breadth of what a CEO does and I continue to believe that. There should be far more turnover of leadership in companies than there are today because people get stale,” says Kevin Shea. Part Two of this interview is packed with advice based on years of experience in the communications sector. After reading Kevin’s interview here are of few of my takeaways, what are your?

1. Listen and hear
2. Find and work with others who complement your skills
3. Going against the grain can have huge payoffs
4. Don’t give up on your dreams just because others tell you that you’ll fail
5. Interact with people from all age groups

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I was born in Montreal, and my family moved to Los Angeles when I was nine months old, and I’d like to say it was because I was having difficulty with two languages. My parents moved back to Canada, to Toronto when I was about 10. I grew up in Toronto and was involved as an actor when I was a kid and was always connected to the broadcasting television business. I knew that was the business that I wanted to get into. I went to York University and studied history, I’m not sure why I did that. After university I started my career in the cable industry.

Many years later I am now running my own company SheaChez Inc., have been for the past five years. I get involved in various start-up companies where I assist them with CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) licensing applications, which is a role I did with Sirius Satellite Radio. And I sit on a variety of different boards of private companies and I am chairman of what’s called the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC).

What’s a typical day like for you?

There is no typical day, because I’m self-employed, and as I said I do a lot of board work, my days are a mix of visiting companies I am involved with trying to set up strategic partnerships between companies that I know and companies that I’m involved with, lobbying government on various things and then working on a host of different projects. Quite honestly the overall content of what I do is somewhat similar but my days are dramatically different.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Because there is so much diversity in what I do, what I mean by that is, I’m on the board of Cookie Jar Entertainment for example, which is an animation company and they are involved in what I call the conventional broadcast production business, but I’m also involved in a lot of new media companies and just diversity alone keeps me very interested. I work with entrepreneurs from the age of 20 to 70. In the old broadcasting business there are still a lot of legends and in the new media business there a lot of young, smart people.

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

I’ve thought of that before, and in many respects I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had some fabulous jobs and I’ve had the privilege of starting and running YTV the kid’s network for seven or eight years. I was at GlobalTV in its best years, Atlantis before it was Alliance Atlantis where we launched Life Network. That was great grounding for me, but there was always a bit of entrepreneur in me that wanted me to do my own thing. Having the benefit of working in large corporations most of my career has now allowed me to take that and help companies along the way, which has been a real benefit.

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

I think the most profound discovery is how dramatically changed the broadcasting and communications sector is becoming. It is literally changing every day, and for many it’s very difficult to keep up with. It’s dramatically altered almost every aspect of the broad communications sector whether that’s newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. I mean it’s in a real state of flux. Even advertising is going through its own dramatic changes as it tries to keep up and understand all the change, and in the mean time consumers are very quick adapters, particularly Canadian consumers and they just want more, more, more. I guess the other profound discovery is that we’ve almost moved back 40 years sort of pre-cable and pre-online where the expectation is you buy the device, for example a TV, you put up an antenna and everything is free, and today’s consumer is also expecting everything online to be free and we both know that free isn’t going to pay for it, so that’s a discovery. It’s the reality of today.

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

I don’t know if there has been a single advance, but I think that for all of us, and when I say us I mean those who grew up in the traditional, conventional broadcasting business, understanding the impact that these new distribution technology advances are like night and day and is still very much a struggle for a lot of executives to figure out where this business is going. Today I spend the bulk of my time and effort in the new media business not the old media business and it’s been a dramatic shift. It’s not well understood and we don’t know with certainty where it’s going.

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

1. Keeping current, particularly as someone who is a consultant and advisor you have to know what’s going on, so I find myself spending more time with younger people because they have a better handle on where things are going
2. We saw last year what impact the economy had on investments and in Canada the sources of investments in new start-ups in the communications business is difficult, there aren’t a lot of people investing in that.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

My big break came when Phil Lind at Rogers hired me to come in and run Cable Satellite Network way back when, and put me into Rogers a much bigger company than I was with in a leadership role. He remains both a close business associate and key mentor of mine. When I moved around in Rogers, Colin Watson who was my boss was an incredibly supportive and smart guy, so I would say it was a big break getting into Rogers at that time

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

In my early days at Rogers when I was running this organization called Cable Satellite Network, and this was before we had specialty networks in Canada, the only thing we had was live coverage of the House of Commons, no Toronto Sports Network (TSN) or Newsworld. I had worked on a couple of applications for TV Ontario (TVO), one was called Galaxy to start a national children’s channel. This was before YTV and we kept being turned down by the CRTC and it was very disheartening because it seemed like such an obvious thing because we had TV Ontario that was a core strategic partner which was the first time that a broadcast and cable company had come together, which was my doing because I was the one who put that partnership together. I learned that we were before our time. The CRTC had no policies, they have never licensed a specialty channel, and the moment they licensed TSN and MuchMusic, which were the first two and they weren’t specialty channels back then, they were paid TV channels that almost went bankrupt and changed to specialty. It was when we all realized that it was time to put together a kid’s specialty channel and YTV was born. Now YTV was a controversial license because it had cable companies as shareholders and producers as shareholders, we didn’t have a broadcaster. TVO didn’t participate this time. I learned that you have to wait in this country [Canada] until they are ready, and secondly you have to be patient, and don’t stop because someone says no doesn’t mean that you go away forever. It took us six years to get an YTV license. It was called something different in different applications but in the end it was worth it.

The failure was Galaxy and the lesson is, do not give up and sometimes you are a bit premature.

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

Maybe not going out on my own earlier and starting my own cable networks. There is nothing that I can really point to be honest.

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

I was at Global TV and had been there for six or seven years as president, they had just bought the newspapers, whether I had a premonition, I realized that this acquisition of the newspaper was going to dramatically change how the company was going to be in the future. I thought about this for a few weeks, talked to a few friends and associates, and to resign from a big job at that point to go and do my own thing was one of the biggest decisions that I`d ever made. And you leave from having assistants, flying all over, all sorts of expenses being covered, stock options, to do your own thing is a big decision. I look back and say thank God I did it for a lot of reasons, given unfortunately what has happened to CanWest today, and I’m not saying that I predicted it. I look back and say I did the right thing even though I didn’t have all that information at the time.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. Being born since it wouldn’t matter otherwise
2. Having four great sisters who are my best friends and I mean that, and they have been very influential in my life
3. Having two wonderful children

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Starting YTV. I look back at my career and it took a long time to get the license, everybody said it would be a failure and would be off the air and bankrupt in six months and when I left after seven years it was probably one of the most progressive cable networks in the country.

How did mentors influence your life?

In many ways, and I seek out mentors and they continue to advise me. Somebody told me when I was young that you cannot be an expert in everything, you just can’t, and to concentrate more on your strength than your weaknesses and fill the gaps with people around you that actually complement your areas of weakness. I know where I am good and not so good so I’m always conscious of this advice. I say that presidents of companies should be kicked out every five years or changed because we are only good in one or two areas not five or six or the full breadth of what a CEO does and I continue to believe that. There should be far more turnover of leadership in companies than there are today because people get stale.

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

Make sure that one of your capacity is the capacity to listen because most times people do not listen to what you’re trying to advance because the only thing they have on their mind is what they are trying to advance, and you can tell that there are certain people who are not listening. And it’s almost as if you have to say, ‘hang on a second, I want to make sure that it’s not that you just understand this, but I want to make sure that you are hearing it.’ That’s been valuable personal advice in terms of dealing with people because at the end of the day a company is only as good as the people are.

Which resources (books, movies, training etc.) did your mentors recommend to you?

Everybody has their latest favourite book. It provides them with intelligence or a clue from an operating standpoint that they didn’t have before to see the world in a different way so if I read everyone of those books I`d never be able to leave the house, so I do a lot of scan reading.

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

Keep an eye out for, and try to follow the capacity in which the individual has been able to implement change. I come back to where we started this conversation, and that is unless you can adapt really quickly in this day and age to change, and fully understand that change is happening all around you, so today’s best leaders are those who can actually implement change and that’s not easy because to implement change you have to have buy in, understanding and a collective will and good folks are the ones that today have that capacity and that`s something we all need.

What are your thoughts on this interview? What was expected and what was unexpected?  What are 10 takeaways? How can you apply this information? 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 Mentorand subscribe (top on the right side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

Today I present Donna Whitney, and as usual there are many lessons to learn. Her response to the question, “Tell me a bit about yourself” was quite long, but weaves a very interesting tale that we can all learn from. One potent lesson for me after reading it was, if it doesn’t feel right, walk away, don’t compromise your values. I have to think about how to present it so I’ll do that for tomorrow. From the information presented in this interview, what are five takeaways? How can you use the information in your situation?

What’s a typical day like for you?

There is no such thing as a typical day for me, I wish there was. Because our business is very much an entrepreneurial start-up within a really large organization, we are everything. I am sales and marketing and distribution, and finance. Of course I do not do all those things without the support of the right parts of the organization, but really, we do most of the heavy lifting ourselves.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I don’t know that it’s a conscious thing for me. I absolutely love what I do, and when I don’t love what I do, I end up changing what I do so that I love it. It’s never been the same thing one day to the next. I seem to change my job title every 18 months.

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

I think that I would be kinder. I think there are a lot of people in my working experience that I could have shown a lot more grace to, especially in the early years when you are struggling to make your mark you get a sense that everything matters so much. In the grand scheme of things, 10 years from now you aren’t going to remember the offences you had to bear. I would have turned my cheek a lot more and be a lot more forgiving.

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

I’ve discovered Grooveshark and I really quite enjoy it. It’s an online radio that allows you to stream music for free.

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

Probably IPTV and the introduction of new entrants that make it possible for people to do things in a different way. That helps my team because that is the niche in which we play in. So every part of the traditional Rogers business is being assaulted by new competitors and new ways for people to do the same things.

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

1. The first threat would be the larger organization taking over our entrepreneurial start-up because then it wouldn’t be a start-up. If we were to be ingested by the larger organization then it would be much more difficult for us to do things the way we now do them.
2. The inability to deliver on all the opportunities that we have, and this threat has to be managed by making sure that we have the appropriate processes and people in place to do what needs to get done.
3. The third threat would be taking on too much all at once because there is an awful lot that can be done and ought to be done so it’s a question of timing.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Everything! I think what’s truly unique about what we do is that we do it within such a large organization in such a small way. It really is the best place to be in the company.

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

If you say that my field is large telecom, one of the things that large telecoms do incredibly poorly is being responsive and flexible to customers. If you’re saying that it’s people who do the things we do and are doing them poorly, it’s that we capitalize on the fact that we have a huge brand, and it really helps to open doors when you are carrying a Rogers business card. And a lot of those smaller companies don’t have that advantage.

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

There are always technology challenges. There is always a problem that needs to be solved, and I have been blessed with an amazing team that looks at issues as opportunities. And I don’t say that to be cliché in any way, shape or form, they truly do see things that way. I think another major challenge that any group faces is to maintain a healthy culture, and that has a lot to do with establishing boundaries up front and we’ve done that, we’ve sat down as a team and talked about our personal values and our values as a team.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

1. From a technology standpoint, one thing that we’ve learned is that it needs testing before you sell it. We’ve had a few hiccups where things seemed to make sense and not defy the laws of physics in principle, but in practice things never go as they appear. So rigorous testing and making sure that you build a demo lab is a must. It’s also important to have your customers as partners so that you can do that learning together. There should be a degree of agility and responsiveness by both partners to adjust to the things that happen along the way.
2. The more important one is establishing that team trust and integrity, and that’s been key for our overall success.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

My big break came from David Robinson for sure. And that was the break from marketing traditional “I’m going to create this piece of collateral or view this marketing brief” to the switch to technology, to engineering. And really David Robinson was a huge proponent, advocate and supporter of me in those early years, especially when I don’t have an engineering ring, and I certainly don’t intend to. My guys are engineers and I think there has to be a bridge with those with marketing and that kind of skill set meshing with the people with technology because there is such value in marrying those two things together. I would have been a propeller head by interest but not by design, and Robinson took me under his wings and knew that about me but brought me in anyway, and gave me the biggest opportunity of my career so far.

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

The biggest failure that I’ve ever had and it wasn’t a monumental thing, had a lot to do with being more gracious in certain circumstances. I remember this one time I had a client that just drove me over a fence, this person was like nails on a chalk board and I could have been a lot more professional, but I let it get to me one day and I lost my temper. For the long-term repercussion I’m sure that no one remembers it but me, but it left such a profound impact on me to realize that, it was just work and I should let it go. I think what I took away from that is the ability to take myself a lot less seriously.

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

It would probably be how the music industry treated people back in the eighties. The experience has made me more sensitive to the diversity of people coming into circumstances and trying to appreciate where they are coming from.

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

I think it is having to let someone go, pulling the trigger when you have to fire them. I’ve had to do that now on a couple of occasions and I think one thing I’ve learned from those decisions is to make them slowly, cautiously and transparently so that when you are approaching that time in someone’s career, you let them know what’s coming down the pipe as soon as you can.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

1. My experience in the music industry
2. Moving to Toronto
3. The move from marketing to engineering

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

My ability to make sour dough bread, it’s kind of an art form.

How did mentors influence your life?

During different parts of your life you have different mentors for different purposes. I think that I’ve learned a lot of grace and maturity from the spiritual leaders and giants in my life. I am a huge fan of John MacArthur, and R C Sproul. From a work perspective, I think some of the giants in the company, the women that I have the pleasure and honour of working with really teach me a lot about the strength of women within this corporate environment because there are so few at the upper echelon levels.

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

Speak less and listen more.

Which resources (books, movies, training etc.) did your mentors recommend to you?

The Tipping Point was a very good book. I had a mentor Maxine Armstrong – who I still consider to be a mentor – who was a great wealth of reading resources, so I’d have to say that that was a big one. In Moments of Magic the message was consistent and my mentor at Tronica referred that book to me. One of the members of my team recommended that I read Hoops which was by Greg Jackson the basketball coach. That was a really good book.

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

Be patient with yourself and listen to really hear, not just to absorb the information, but to understand it. It’s an entirely different thing from hearing a message and understanding the message. I think that too often people rush past the information so that they can contribute their own thoughts. It’s not about being heard, it rarely is about people hearing you, it’s what you hear from others that matters.

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