Interviewee Name: Traci Wells
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Traci Wells: Professionally I worked at Rogers for 15 years and was responsible for the management and development curriculum, which I loved. In the last two years, I’ve had a pretty massive life changing event which led me to make some changes in my professional and personal life. I suffered from a sudden cardiac arrest, my heart basically stopped and I was without a heart beat for almost four minutes. I was saved that day because of an AED (Automated External Defibrillator). The interesting thing about this event is there were no signs or symptoms. I had no problems with my health, or with my heart. Even after the event, I’m very fortunate there is no damage to my heart. I was in the hospital for 10 days and they tested everything they could. I’m one of those cases where they basically told me we’ll never know why it happened.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Traci Wells: Right now, it starts with some kind of physical activity. While I was at Rogers, I would definitely call myself a workaholic because all I did was work, that’s all I focused on. I had no personal life, no real Traci life. So once this happened, I waited for a year before I made any massive changes, then I decided it was time to try something new.
So my typical day before was going to work, work 10 hours. When I got home all I could do was eat dinner and go to bed. Now, my typical day is some type of physical activity, whether it's spinning or running or just doing some cardio. I do something every day. Right now because I'm not working full-time my days are quite different, so I’m not sure there is a typical day.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Traci Wells: well I had the best motivator of all with dying, or that's what the doctors call it, sudden cardiac death, and having an experience like that, I guess can do one of two things: it can motivate you to want to make some changes, or it can suppress you and bring you further into your isolated world, for me it was quite a motivator.
How do I keep myself motivated? Personally I'm a type of motivated person, but right now I'm very passionate about sharing my story with people to educate them around the importance of AEDs and how they can save lives. I can tell you that every day that I wake up I feel motivated to do something to ensure that I can continue to live this life because I know how quickly it can be taken away.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Traci Wells: You know we throw around “work balance” in the corporate world a lot and it never meant anything to me until this last couple of years. I think as a society we get involved in so many things and some of these things can take over our whole life. For me the job was really was all I thought about. So what would I do differently? I would definitely work to have that balance in my life from day one. So rather than spend all my energy and time on the career, what my next step was going to be, I still would have given that the focus, but I would have given as much focus on my own world.
I used the analogy that I was married to my job and it prevented me from getting married to anybody else. I didn't really allow myself to have another life, work was the only thing. I would definitely make a change. My priorities would have been different: health and mental health would have been my two key areas to focus on first and foremost. So now I’m doing it. I wish we had the opportunity for second chances to live differently. I was given the opportunity to have a second chance to live differently, it was at age 42 but now I'm making the most of it.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Traci Wells: I have a great relationship with Rogers still, but the biggest discovery is that as much as I was willing to give to them I would never have gotten it back. I got lots of great things from Rogers. I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense. So basically I gave them everything, and that was my choice, but when the rubber hit the road and I was leaving, it really struck home to me that all of my commitment to that organization, it would never be returned to me at level that I felt it should have because they were much more important to me than I was to them.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Traci Wells:
- The first threat would be falling back into that heavy career focus, and nothing else matters but my work and how I appear to others professionally. It's only been a year for me to revert back to the way things were.
- Another threat for me would be to not be able to live that passion, speaking to and educating others on the heart or AED.
- The third threat is the necessities of life, and what I mean by that, because I work as hard as I did, I created a good salary for myself, and this will be the first time in my life that I'm not getting a paycheque and there's some anxiety with that, and my fear is that I just jump back into a job because of financial issues and it isn't what I really want to do but I have to because the of money.
So those would be my biggest threats. What am I doing to prevent them? Even though I'm interviewing for all of those corporate jobs right now, I think that it's an important piece for me to do, each day I get closer to the realization that I do not want to go back to corporate 9-to-5 job. I’m being pushed in other directions, like doing more speaking engagements around the heart and AED. Also focusing on volunteer work, and working with partners that I used to work with at Rogers, whom I respect and value working with them on some consulting issues, or consulting opportunities so that I do not have to go back to the 9-to-5. I have a choice, so that is what I'm trying to create for myself now, choice.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Traci Wells: I don't know exactly what the services are that I'm providing yet. I'm creating this. I have started to build a website outlining where I’m speaking, some upcoming speaking events. I think what makes my story unique, is that the chances for survival for what I experienced was less than 5%. That puts a unique spin on the story that I'm sharing with others, and I think what really makes what I have to say to people about AED education, CPR education, what makes it really powerful for people, is that there was no warning signs with me which allows me to get people to understand that it can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. And what makes it really unique is that you have this person me, who survived this, has made some changes to her life as a result of it and realized that you don't have to have an event like I did to wake up and make some changes.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Traci Wells: So after this event had happened I went back to work much too quickly because I was so fearful that I was going to be looked at differently, that I would lose opportunities. I was still in that heavy work mindset. The first question that I asked to people when I woke up in the hospital was who was going to take my meeting that day? And that really struck home for me when I had some time to reflect. And I would say that one of the biggest challenges for me was acknowledging that it was time to make a change professionally.
I loved my organization, I loved the people, I was very well respected there, I could've still stayed another 20 years if I wanted to. But I felt that that would've been the easy way. I would say quitting my job after 15 years without having another job, there were huge lessons in that in multiple ways. One, I didn't see life after Rogers because it was such a big part of who I was, I couldn’t envision that there would be a life here outside of that. Within a few months of not working there any longer I started to see that there is life after Rogers, and that it's actually more satisfying.
I guess the big aha for me is unless you take a chance, and some people would call this a risk and I know that everybody can't make the decisions that I did but without that you cannot see what opportunities could be because you’re so engrossed in that world that's all you can see and relate to. But when you're away from it for a little while, it's like there's this whole other world out there that you did not have any energy to see.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Traci Wells: My big break was probably my second year at Rogers. I started out at Rogers on the phone collecting money and it wasn't something that I liked at all. Call-center jobs are tough, but I saw the potential of Rogers because it was such a large organization. Anyway I was on the phone for about a year and a half and I had continued to see these accounts that would go to collections that didn't need to.
It was a different issue than they didn't want to pay. I did the tracking and determined that it was a customer service issue that was leading them to collections. I wrote up a document that outlined what I found and made some recommendations on what we could do and decided to meet with the director of the department at the time to share my findings. Her name was Helga, she was one of the first women leaders that I got exposed to and she was quite inspiring to me.
From that meeting where I showed her what I had discovered, that led to an opportunity to go off the phones and to investigate the situation a little bit more and with that opportunity I never went back to the phones. She recommended me to be part of a project to bring in a new billing system and that's where I got into training and development, and fell in love with it. I still speak with her, and we’re actually having lunch next month.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Traci Wells: That's a tough one. About five years into my work at Rogers, I was recruited by another department in the organization, and I was a manager at the time, the first time I had been a manager, and this new position was going to take away that manager role, but it was going to open me up to this whole new side of the business that I hadn't been exposed to.
And failure was not to see the opportunity in that. The idea to stay in the role because I had manager title, and that made me feel very good. I think I lost out on a phenomenal opportunity to get a whole different side of exposure to the business because of the title and that was a really huge learning for me.
The lessons from that was the next opportunity that came I was a senior manager at the time and I was offered this position that had no direct reports, but from that first experience I realized that it was not always about going up the ladder, sometimes you have to slide across to get to that next rung. In the beginning I didn't understand that.
Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?
Traci Wells: I'd say that my biggest disappointment is that that I do not have a loving relationship with a partner. Because I focused so much time on my career I never had time for that. So what am I doing about that now? I'm on a few dating sites and I always used to joke with my girlfriends that I'd never meet my next man on my couch, yet that's where I tend to me that right now, on my couch through online dating sites.
While I was working I had no time or energy for anything else and now that I'm not a workaholic like I was, it allows me to be more open to these things. I couldn't remember the last time I had a date, within two months of me leaving Rogers had a date with somebody which was a big deal to most people in my life because it wasn't something I had even cared about in a long time.
But now I'm 42 I'm not married and never had kids. I didn't have a huge desire to have kids, but I do think about being alone and when I talked about leaving my job I thought well, “they're not going to be with me when I'm 55 so I need to build a life for myself.”
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Traci Wells: Deciding to leave Rogers was one of the toughest decisions I've ever had to make in my life.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Traci Wells:
- I was raised by single mother and did not know my father, and about five years ago I decided I wanted to know my father and went looking for him. I sit here today with the best relationship with a father figure that I've ever had and didn't realize how important it was. So meeting my father five years ago was major.
- Suffering from cardiac death was the second event that shaped my life.
- I've always had weight issues, I've always been overweight. So when I was 22 I decided that I would have breast reduction and I put all my hopes and dreams into this breast reduction in the way would change my life, in the way people looked at me. And it didn't, it was highly disappointing with the changes that I thought were going to come as a result of that. I didn't realize that I needed to do much more than the changes. It was like I had this idea that the surgery was going to change my life. Is this too personal?
Avil Beckford: No that’s fine. It's interesting that you’re saying this because there is a book called Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz a cosmetic surgeon. He conducted all these cosmetic surgeries and he noticed that with some people their outlook after the surgery was better and with some there was no change and it came back to the kind of self image you have of yourself.
Traci Wells: That makes a lot of sense. I had and still do not have the best image of myself but much better than I used to. But to your point I have always felt that this surgery was going to change my life, when I realized that it was my head that had to change my life. It depressed me and it took me a while to get back into a place where I wanted to make changes again.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Traci Wells: I'd have to say that it was a recent accomplishment which is taking control of my health in a way that I have never in my life done. I am making dates with people to go running. I get up about six o'clock in the morning to go spinning with my cousin. These are not things I would have ever done in the past, so I’m extremely proud of myself which encourages me to keep going. The fact that I have maintained this track for almost year now is a huge accomplishment to me.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Traci Wells: Oh goodness, in so many ways. I can remember a mentor in high school, Mr. Raymond. I didn't consider him to be a mentor back then, but as I reflect that was exactly what he was. From that moment I understood that the people around you can influence the way you look at life, and it made me take a look at the people around me to make sure that they were influencing me in a positive way versus a negative way.
And I think mentors do that for you, obviously they let you see to the possibilities. I have been extremely fortunate in my life because of the work that I do, learning and development. It's all around mentorship and communication and connecting with people. I have built aspects of that into learning programs. Every one that went to one of my classes have a learning partner which oftentimes turned into mentors for them.
Even my mother, she was a very successful single mother. I was the only child but she was able to make a phenomenal life for us at a time when everything was fighting against her. She married a black man and had a biracial child in the sixties and none of those things got in her way to prevent her from accomplishing the things she wanted to. So it gave me the same kind of drive.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Traci Wells: That you can do anything you put your mind to.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Traci Wells: Don't wait to live the life that you deserve. Because of what happened to me what I say to everybody right now is that I wish I could bottle the learnings and perspective that I have had because of this experience. Not everybody is going to get a life-and-death experience to change their life, or to signal to them that at the time to change their life. I wish I could give everybody the experiences that I’ve had, without them having to die.
You cannot help but look at life differently after something like that happens to you, and it's unfortunate that you have to have something traumatic. And with a lot of people it's like this, you have to have something traumatic happen to make a change. I just would want people to do it before an event happens that forces them to.
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