Unconventional Career Advice | Christine Bailey | TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells

guess what when I was 16 at school I was told that something I wanted to do was only for stupid girls luckily I had the support of a great teacher who made it made it happen for me anyway and that took me on a path of recognizing how important it is to be inspired and have great mentors and I'll tell you a bit more about that story later I've been lucky to have had five great mentors in my career in life and they are John Lennon Tom Hanks Steve Jobs William James and Grace Hopper and I bet you are now thinking how come she's got such friends in high places well actually I've never met them and they have no idea that they've been my mentors but it's their words in a form of quotes that have inspired me so I'm now going to share my five favorite quotes hanzaki loves a good quote by the way yes I love a good quote so I'm now going to share my five favorite quotes with you and explain to you you know why they've inspired me so I'm going to start with the first one from John Lennon its life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans now one of my favorite phrases is have a direction don't have a plan because if you have a plan they have a habit of not working out whereas if you have a direction your brain will take you on a path and find ways that you couldn't have imagined possible to get you where you want to be and this has happened to me a few times in my career and the first one was when I was at university and we did something I'm gonna show my age here now who's heard of the milk ground you remember that it was like a careers fair that you went to and you know different companies would encourage you to go and work for them well I was really lucky because I always knew I wanted to be in marketing marketing is what I wanted to do and when you start out you think the creme de la creme of marketing is in fast-moving consumer goods and that and upon charm for chocolate took me to the Mars stand and I said I'm studying German and Business Studies I really want to work in marketing and I'd like to go and work in Germany and he shook his head he said no you can't do that I said why not and he said well first you have to get a job in the UK he said you have to earn your stripes you have to do really well if you're lucky you then might apply for a position in Germany and if it all works out in extreme cases you might get a posting to Germany and I thought well that's not working for me and as it turned out I got sponsored by a Swiss German company at university I got a placement working in their export department in my year off so while my my friends were all bumming around at University I managed to get gainful employment in the export department and I made some contacts there who were working at Hewlett Packard so I went back to university for my final year and I graduated and over the weekend I moved to Germany and I started work in marketing in Germany with hewlett-packard now when I had that conversation with the person the man at the the mast and I had no idea that was going to be the plan but it perfectly matched my direction and it happened again when I was going to do the doctorate and I was having dinner with a marketing professor who I'd become friends with we've been working together and she said to me you should do a doctorate in marketing and I said no I don't want to do that because in order to get a DBA which is a doctor of Business Administration you have to have an MBA and I don't want to be bothered with all that other business stuff operations finance what I've you know I just want to do marketing and she said to me well you don't have to have an mba to do a DBA I said how come and she said well first of all you need a marketing professor who wants to sponsor your area of research and then you need to do a whole ton of extra exams but it'll be a breeze you can do it and I thought okay and I sort of pushed it to the back of my mind and then I was having a conversation with my boss at the time he was a great coach and he said to me what's your direction and I said well I've always dreamed of being a marketing director and he said you are a marketing director I was like yes FairPoint I was 31 I thought I kind of need and he said to me you need a new direction so I thought he's right I need a new direction so I thought what's going to be my direction now not that why I absolutely love marketing I'm gonna stay in marketing but I'm gonna be a marketing guru I'm gonna be a world-renowned marketing guru I thought how do I get to be marketing guru I thought I know I'll write a book and I thought well what am I gonna write a book about I need some content suddenly there's the voice do the doctorate do the doctorate and of course the other voice starts up again we've overcome the objection that you need an MBA to do a DBA but now the voice is going now the voice is saying you can't afford it and you get the battle of the voices which one's going to win but if the brain is set the direction it will always find a way and it's always going to have the stronger voice and as it turned out I got head hunted by a firm and they said to me what's it going to take to make you come and work for us and I said I'd like to do a doctorate and they said come and work for us you work for a year and then you can go down to work here three days a week and we'll sponsor the doctorate yes so I went back and I said to my boss I'm terribly sorry I'm going to resign and he said you're not resigning and we're sitting here until we find out a way to make you stay he said do you need more money and I said well money's great but what I'd really like to do as a doctor he said that's good he said we'll fund it and I'm thinking stupid me and that's another piece of advice is if you don't ask you don't get so anyway in case you'll think it was plain sailing from here it wasn't and that brings me to my next quote from Tom Hanks it's supposed to be hard if it were easy everyone could do it and this got me through my toughest emotional mental challenge which was doing my doctorate you can't imagine how hard it is to sit in front of a blank computer screen knowing that in four years time you've got to produce an eighty thousand word thesis and I also didn't imagine how hard it was going to be doing a job that I have been doing in five days a week suddenly to be able to having to do it in four days a week and then studying on a Friday and a weekends it was relentless most people who start a Doctorate don't finish them I was absolutely termit beaded I was absolutely determined I was not going to be one of them and then something happened the company that I was working for got acquired by a much bigger company and they already had a marketing director and I got made redundant so faced with the prospect of no job and no sponsorship it was really tempting to give up on the doctorate and that's when I hear the voice again not of Tom Hanks but of the quote that saying it's supposed to be hard if it was easy everyone could do it and I thought there's got to be a way there's got to be a way to get through this and I thought what if I could find a way to pay the bills get a bit of consulting work use my networking contacts and go down to Woking maybe two or three days a week really enjoy the time doing the doctorate and accelerate it and finish it in three years and set of four and that's what I did and this quote also got me through my toughest physical challenge which was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and I was climbing in a group of really long-legged Dutch people and by the end of the first day they've completely left me for dust and I'm sitting there thinking at the end of the first day I'm thinking crikey I'm not going to make this but I actually had this thought it looked really flat in the brochures sorry I don't know what I was thinking of because it is a mountain and something keek Rocky I'm not gonna make this and luckily I had a fantastic guide and he said to me he said there's no prizes for coming first all you have to do is get to the top he said you just need to put one foot in front of the other I thought okay I'll go with this so anyway the next morning we get up and he said remember I'm setting the pace you follow me just one foot in front of the other so off he said he's walking like this I'm think he's having a laugh I thought we're never going to climb the mountain climbing at this pace but you know what after one hour we've caught up with the Dutch people who were sitting down taking a break by lunchtime were you've overtaken them and do you know we were the only two people who got to the top of the mountain in that group that week gradually people fell off because of altitude sickness because of exhaustion and because of adverse weather conditions and actually the last 8 hours was just horrific we were climbing in like minus 20 blizzards and all I kept thinking off was just put one foot in front of the other that and singing all kinds of crazy songs in my head like ain't no mountain high enough and on a tower repeat but anyway I got to the top and the point about this piece of advice is most achievement comes from hard work but often we set ourselves too big a goal and it's it just seems unachievable if we think about it in its entirety Isaac for me doing the doctorate or climbing the mountain but if you break it down into bite-size chunks and just put one foot in front of the other you'll find it's an awful lot easier of course it helps if you're passionate about what you do and that brings me on to my next quote from Steve Jobs the only way to do great work is to love what you do you have to love what you do life is way too short to do a job that you don't love or to work with people that you don't like it does absolute wonders for your psyche and a chief HR officer recently said you need to have three conditions that's for three conditions to be successful it to really thrive at work she said you need to feel passionate about what you do you need to feel safe and you need to feel that your boss and your co-workers or your team have got your back and if you don't it's time to start dreaming again I don't know how many people have heard of them Tony Robbins he's an american motivational speak and life coach and he runs these programs and the boss that I mentioned earlier that was a great coach he dragged as I say he lived ragas along to this weekend at the Excel Centre 10,000 people you know you get to walk over the hot coals so you do that in bare feet you know the firewalk I thought I was going to go up in flames luckily I didn't but um he taught me to dream again you know he taught me to set a new direction and I just have to share one bizarre moment he Tony Robbins is trying to teach us to be leaders and he had us all copying him and we've got 10,000 people at the XL Center going I am a leader I will not follow I am a leader I will not follow mom's I'm standing there thinking am I the only one getting the irony of this I guess the point is you have to dream again and you also have to feel that you make a difference and that brings me on to my next quote from William James who was an American philosopher and psychologist in the 19th and 20th centuries and he said act as if what you do makes a difference it does now I'm not the classic type of female that does well in a corporate alpha-male environment I'm very softly spoken you probably can't tell now cuz I've got a microphone microphone on but I really struggle to be heard in a noisy room I'm never going to be that loud opinionated person who always wants to make sure that their voice is heard I'm a thinker and a reflector and I listen well and when I say something I like to think that it really counts I'm also really good at networking and I'm really good at working with other people and collaborating and because I don't have a big ego and I really want to help other people achieve their dreams then people want to work for me and I was asked a couple of years ago if I would become the leader of connected women at Cisco and connected women is a group of volunteers aimed acquiring developing retaining and celebrating talented women at Cisco and when I was first asked to take on this challenge I thought I said to them I'm not the classic type of woman that does well at Cisco you really don't want me leading your network and they said that's exactly why we want you leading you're leading this network and I couldn't imagine just how much fun I would have I'm leading this network over the last couple of years I've met the most amazing and inspirational people men and women and it's taught me to find my voice in other ways so I've always been a reader I've always been a writer and of course with the you know the advancement now of social media I've become quite active on social media so I've got six and a half thousand followers on Twitter and I started blogging and actually now I'm a regular contributor to Forbes to the young to the women's section and it was through that connection as the reason why I'm standing here today because the team you know read one of the blog's I'd written on Forbes or numb unconscious bias so it's all about knowing your own strengths and playing to them and making that part of your personal brand so think now about you know what are your strengths how do you make a difference and how can you make that part of your personal brand now sometimes it does pay to go outside of your comfort zone and that brings me to my final and favorite quote from Grace Hopper who was a u.s. Navy admiral and she said it's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission now if we go back to what I said at the beginning when I was at school when I was 16 something I wanted to do was only for stupid girls it was a typing class a typing class was only for stupid girls who were doing two a-levels instead of three luckily the teacher who ran the class was also my economics teacher and I was rather good at economics and she said to me we won't ask permission we'll beg forgiveness when you passed the exam and actually the headmistress was so delighted delighted with my economics results she didn't even realize that I'd taken the typing exam it turned out to be one of the most useful skills I've ever learned because not only did I get paid work in the local hospital during the school holidays but I can touch type at speed on the computer keyboard how useful is that and this quote has served me well throughout my career because I'm quite a rule follower so this one's quite a challenge for me to not always ask for permission but in this fast-paced environment we don't always have the time to stop and ask for permission sometimes we just need to get on and do it take a risk and then take the consequences so that's my my challenge to you is to do something that you haven't got permission to do just take a risk go on and do it what's the worst that can happen don't quote me on that one so those are my five favorite quotes that have served me really well my so I'm just going to conclude with a reminder of my unconventional career advice the first one is have a clear direction don't have a plan because your brain has a great way to find a path and take you and to do things that you couldn't possibly have imagined when things get tough just take one step at a time break things down into bite-size chunks don't try and eat the elephant you know just think of that mountain and one step at a time third one is love what you do it's so important life is short just do something that you're passionate about believe that you make a difference think about the elements that make up your personal brand think about what you're good at play to your strengths and make it part of your personal brand and the last one is and I'm challenging you to do this in the next week take action now and ask for forgiveness later thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 142,457

Rating: 4.8236175 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Business, Career, Education, Women, Women in business

Id: 6Y1gAK46oyo

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 21 2016