Mentor Yourself With Sandra Ann Baptiste, Consultant and Trainer
Interviewee Name: Sandra Ann Baptiste, Consultant and Trainer
Company Name: Carigold Associates
To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Interview, while you are reading it, answer the following questions:
- Are their similarities between Sandra Ann Baptiste and yourself?
- In what ways can you use the information?
- In what ways would you respond differently from the interviewee?
- What are your five takeaways from the interview?
- After reading the interview, what is one concrete action you can take?
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Sandra Ann Baptiste: I’m a veteran communicator. I’m a former journalist with many years experience working internationally, including with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto and the Caribbean News Agency based in Barbados. I’m currently a business and communications consultant trainer, and I specialize in business skills training. I’m also still involved in writing. I have a monthly column in Caribbean Perspectives that focuses on issues affecting CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market). I spend a lot of my time working on projects for the Caribbean.
Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: For the 22 years that I was in media, I had no personal life. It was all about researching. When you’re covering CARICOM, you’re going to a meeting, you’re sent to Jamaica one day for an election, and Trinidad the next day for a Trade Ministers’ meeting, and then Antigua for something else, on a daily basis I had files in my bed reading the Caribbean Development Bank reports, reading national statistics, all that stuff so my whole life was focused around my career. There wasn’t much of a personal life. I had a little bit of that when I came to Canada, but don’t forget that I returned to Guyana to do consulting on investments.
My personal life is very difficult to integrate because I’m always on the computer researching, always in the newspaper checking something. So I’ve not had much of a personal life, which I’m trying to change.
Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: Movies and cooking are my two big things. I love to cook, but I’m a fanatic for movies. While the movies are going on, I’m reading a report or on the computer.
Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?
Sandra Ann Baptiste:
- The biggest thing for me is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
- Be kind and giving so if I have extra food I’ll give it to someone who needs it. If I have extra clothes or books, I believe in giving. I always believe it will come back, not necessarily to you, but to your children and family.
- Never give up on your dreams. When I was a young girl in high school in Guyana, I thought I’d like to be covering the Caribbean as a journalist. I was at the Guyana Broadcasting Service, and who would ever have thought that I would be in Barbados, being a global journalist, and being someone who is writing on the Caribbean and having the exposure to every single CARICOM country and having lived and worked in all of them, from Surinam to the Bahamas.
- You should be qualified in whatever field you want to be in. I went to university in my thirties. That was fine but I wasn’t going to give up on getting my credentials in journalism and international relations which was also my area of expertise.
- Always give back. I believe in life when you’re blessed you should always want to give back.
Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: I don’t have a process. I think about stuff and I write it down then I prioritize. In the middle of the night if I have an idea there is a book next to my bed and I write it down. The next day I put it on my computer. I may not go back to it for a month or even six months, but when I go back, I shape it and put in into a priority sequence on what I need to do to do this and what sequence do I need to do it.
Avil Beckford: How do you define success? And in your opinion what’s the formula for success?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: Success is very personal in terms of you achieving your goals and having whatever you achieve have an impact on others. So it’s not only about you achieving your goals. I would say the formula for success is to never give up on your dreams and have faith. I believe faith is instrumental, and I have said before I had a lot of challenges when I had to leave Guyana in the middle of the night and didn’t know where I was going because of journalists being threatened. I had faith that God was going to guide me and take me somewhere. I never thought I would end up in Barbados. You need to have faith and confidence, and try to achieve your goals and seek to be qualified in whatever you do because education is the key to people’s dreams. I truly believe that and I do not only mean formal education. You can self-educate, do stuff online, and be mentored by people. There are many ways to learn, but you have to have an interest in being educated to achieve your goals.
Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: There are two careers, one in media and the other in consulting. In the media, the steps I took were to be attached to the newspaper when I was in high school so I would get exposure. Once I left high school and I was hired, I tried to learn from the senior journalists that were there. When I was at Guyana Broadcasting I went to Barbados to take a six-month communications course. When I got into Barbados I went to the University of the West Indies because I was covering international affairs so I did international relations. I also gave back in Barbados because I was Chairman of the Education Committee of the Barbados Association of Journalism. I designed a certificate program in journalism, and coordinated it at the University of the West Indies. After that I did my Diploma in Journalism in the UK, and my Masters, and I also did many different courses on business and finance. I also had a lot of practical exposure that helped me.
In my consulting career, when I realized that I was going to GO-Invest, I did a lot of training in the UK in investment promotion. I did business management and international trade in Canada, and in the late 1990s once I realized that my passion was training, I decided to stay in Guyana and I did training for a year for a lot of the private sector companies. I set up my own training company, which I have now resuscitated because I haven’t done training for about 10 years. I have resuscitated my company Carigold Associates that does training – business skills training, leadership, trade show management, business communication, project management, performance management, tourism management and inventory management – specifically targeted at the Caribbean and a little bit here in Canada. In 2010 I completed my teacher training certificate for adults at Centennial College with honours. My goal has always been that whatever you do be qualified in it.
Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: Get qualified! Even when I had part-time contracts in Canada, many of those companies I worked for offered online training, and I did many courses, and I also went to Ryerson University to do project management and human resources management. When I’m doing consulting and training now, I am trained in the areas that I’m training people. It’s not just my own experience, I also have the credentials and I think that is important to have both the practical experience and the credentials to be respected and recognized in whatever field you’re in.
Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: That’s an interesting question because the people that I wanted to meet are people that I did meet. When I was a young journalist, the people I wanted to meet were Margaret Thatcher in the UK, India Gandhi, Eugenia Charles in Dominica, Fidel Castro and Pierre Trudeau, and I have met all those people.
I became very close to Eugenia Charles. She was someone I admired and I met her through my meetings covering Caribbean Heads of Government and became very good friends with her and used to visit her at her home in Dominica. When she came to Barbados to visit her brother, I would go there. I had a very high regard for this first female prime minister of the Caribbean who did a lot to enhance the economic development in Dominica. She was one of the outspoken people in CARICOM who tried to take it in a direction where it needed to re-examine itself, and she was one of those people who recognized what the weaknesses were and was never afraid to speak it.
She was also a very compassionate person, and I remember this because one of her biggest opponent in politics, Michael Douglas, was in hospital dying from cancer, and when I went to Dominica to visit her once, she said to me, “Are you going to visit Michael in hospital?” And I said, “Okay, sure,” because I knew him and felt bad. Here was a woman telling me to visit her biggest political opponent. She was a decent person and I really admired her.
The second person was Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi were not people whose policies I necessarily liked, but they were such dominant political figures. They are people who had guts to get to where they wanted to go politically, that I wanted to know if I would ever meet them. I met Mrs Thatcher twice. I met her in Zambia at a Heads of Government conference. Another mentor who I did not mention, Hubert Williams, who was another famous Caribbean journalist at the Guyana Graphic, and also in Barbados at the Caribbean News Agency, was present in Zambia when Mrs Thatcher and I at a commonwealth summit exchanged words because we were talking about apartheid and sanctions against the regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, and the whole Commonwealth was in favour and she was against. We had discussions at a press conference where I asked her several times and didn’t allow her to get off the hook as to why she was fundamentally opposing what everyone else in the Commonwealth wanted. We had that exchange and years later I met her at another Commonwealth Conference in India, and we talked again and she was so nice and charming that I reminded her of our exchange at the press conference.
Indira Gandhi had such an effect globally and on the people of India and a big effect on the Commonwealth. I met her at the Commonwealth Prime Minister’s conference in India. At Commonwealth Summits, the press is allowed to meet Heads of Government without interviewing them – just chatting at special receptions they have for this purpose so I met Mrs Gandhi there.
Fidel Castro I met in Guyana when he came down for an official visit to see Forbes Burnham. We exchanged only a few words and I got to shake his hands. He is not someone whose policies I agree with because I’m very anti-communist so I do not appreciate Fidel Castro’s policies. However he is a dominant figure who shaped world politics and had a tremendous influence on the people of Cuba, so I had always wanted to meet this individual. He was so tall and I had on a white sari that got mud on it at the Prime Minister’s residence in Guyana. I am shaking Fidel Castro’s hand and he was towering over me because I am pretty short, only 5 feet 4 inches and so that was it.
The other person I wanted to meet, and it wasn’t the best circumstances, was Pierre Trudeau. Pierre Trudeau was someone I admired because he did so much for the Caribbean and I covered a lot of Canada-Caribbean relations as a journalist and knew how much aid the Caribbean had received from Pierre Trudeau. He built our schools, and airports. He was a very pro-Caribbean guy. I met him in St. Lucia for a meeting between Caribbean leaders and himself, and I went to St. Lucia to cover it. He was having a hard time with the Canadian press because he was breaking up from his wife Margaret Trudeau and he was very bitter with the press so when we approached him in St. Lucia he was not very accommodating I would say. That was very disappointing, but I still have the highest regard, and was very happy to come face-to-face with him.
Those are people I wanted to meet that I have met, and a sixth person would be Jimmy Carter who I met at the Guyana elections. He is another person who I had a tremendous respect for and wanted to meet. I met him in 1992 when I was at the BBC covering the Guyana elections.
Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: The book is called Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
by Joel Osteen. It gives you seven steps to live at your full potential, but the whole book is about having faith and a relationship with God to live your dreams and how to overcome negativity and have confidence in yourself. Every couple of years when I go through a difficult spell, I will go back to that book and it’s such an amazing book.
Avil Beckford: You are one of the 10 finalists on the reality show, So, How Would You Spend Your Time? Each finalist is placed on separate deserted islands for two years. You have a basic hut on the island and all the tools for survival; you just have to be imaginative and inventive when using them. You are allowed to take five books, one movie and one music CD, and whatever else you take has to fit in one suitcase and a travel on case. What would you take with you and how would you spend the two years? T he prize is worth your while and at this stage in the game there really aren’t any losers among the 10 finalists, since each are guaranteed at least $2 million?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: If I’m on an island I must have my music. I come from a background of family that has the oldest record store in the Caribbean for nearly 40 years so I’ve grown up in music. My mother used to bring a lot of the major artists in the Caribbean to Guyana, and we have DJs that still play out so I have always been involved in music. I’m a DJ so I play at family functions. Music is the biggest thing that I would have to have with me. I’m into the Bee Gees (The Ultimate Bee Gees
), Michael Jackson and a lot of seventies and eighties music.
I would take lots of movies. My favourite movie is Cleopatra
and I love to death Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. And for the books, three authors I’d like to have are James Patterson (Women's Murder Club Box Set, Volume 1 (The Women's Murder Club)
), Mary Higgins Clark (Anastasia Syndrome Gift Set Prepack
) and Jeffrey Deaver (Carte Blanche (007 James Bond)
) because I’m into thrillers.
Two Years
I would spend the time writing a book on my life experiences and do some introspection and meditation.
Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: That my life has so much variety to it. On a day-to-day basis it’s so interesting because I’m dealing with so many different things. Take today for example, I dealing with preparing for the Canada-Caribbean Business so I ‘m research Canada-Caribbean trade, I’m writing a training program for trade show management for teaching online, and I’m also working on a training package for training in Guyana and I’m also working on my column in Caribbean Perspectives. So my day is doing a variety of things so it’s never boring.
Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: I’m a very spiritual person so I pray a lot. I meditate. I nurture my soul by reminding myself how blessed I am, why I am here and why I have the skills that I have. I try to be thankful all the time and ask for guidance. I’m a staunched Catholic.
Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for?
Sandra Ann Baptiste: The only wish I have is to always be living in a warm climate.
Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..
Sandra Ann Baptiste: I can make others happy. If I can put a smile on somebody’s face it’s a big thing for me. Little things mean a lot to me. For example if I go to the supermarket and I put 25 cents in the cart, I never ever retrieve it, I always wait until someone else is coming in the supermarket and I give it to them and say “Would you like a free cart.” The little things that you do for people are the things I count.
Cleopatra (1963) trailer Elizabeth Taylor
Cannot view this video? Click here. Uploaded by dameelizabethtaylor on May 28, 2009
Bee Gees – Too Much Heaven (Video)
Cannot view this video? Click here. Uploaded by beegeestv on Oct 26, 2009
Michael Jackson – The Way You Make Me Feel
Cannot view this video? Click here. Uploaded by michaeljacksonVEVO on Oct 2, 2009
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