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Letters to Myself

About a month ago, I awoke with a new idea of something I wanted to accomplish. This has been a trend my entire life. In high school, I said “I want to be a singer”. And so I did. It took a while to figure out where my voice fit in the tone spectrum (that doesn’t typically happen for natural born singers), but once I did, I sang with my high school’s top all female show choir.  In college, I woke up and said “I want to live in Ireland”. Two weeks after graduation I was living in Cork.  I promptly found work, made friends, and became ingrained in Irish culture.  And now I look back and realize I had one of the richest experiences of my life. At my first job, I said “I want to be a leader”, and in some ways have achieved that, it’s a skill you must continue to hone your entire career and I accept that challenge.

Recently I decided that I wanted to write a blog. I feel I have a lot to say about leadership, management, business process, etc. drawn from the experiences of my own journey. I’ll be sharing these lessons in short, quick reads over the next few months. My mindset when writing them will be bold and maybe even be out of my comfort zone. To describe this process, I’ll use a word that has become our own work mantra: Audeam. This word derived from Latin meaning, “may I dare”, “may I venture”, “may I risk” has become everyday use for our team and me.  It is in those times that we allow ourselves to dare, venture, and risk that we learn the most and where readers will benefit the most. My goal is to start a dialog. What are the actions you’ve taken to make your goals more achievable? Is there anything that helped move the needle that one inch enabling outcomes to go a mile? Did your approach to conversations lead to more growth than you’d ever imagine from teams and individuals? That is the part I’m most excited about.

It’s precisely those experiences that have impacted my thoughts and ideas the most this past year; a year where I’ve had the opportunity to be a key part in continuing to build and grow a company that brings immense value to clients and its team members. There have already been countless lessons learned that I wish I knew many moons ago! Therefore, my goal in writing this blog series is for leaders and aspiring leaders to hear some of the most critical actions I took (about 365 days too late) that have shaped me and the organization I support in unique, valuable, and growth-inspiring ways. Some advice and tidbits of knowledge may not do it for you, and that’s OK but my hope is that some of them do.

Stay tuned for my first piece later this week, and Audeam!

-Mary B