How Did I Help Today?
My professional passion is service, service to others—cleverbridge’s corporate clients, internal stakeholders, my team, or my community. I am a problem solver by nature, and there are few things I derive more joy from than making other people’s lives easier.
I have always been a people pleaser, so to speak. As I began my career and started to see the less than positive impact being a woman can have on one’s career, I began to view that side of me negatively. Was I falling into some gender norm? Was I sacrificing my own ambition for someone else’s? Was I losing my voice?
But the older I get, the more I find that I feel like my truest self when I am serving others. And candidly, I do my best work then, as well. When I am devoted to the causes and people I work with and for, there is nothing I cannot accomplish. I genuinely care about people. That is my strength, not my weakness. And if caring for and nurturing people and relationships is viewed as “typically female,” then so be it—I embrace that too. Because at the end of the day, life isn’t about the work you do per se, but the impact that work has on individuals and society as a whole
I am constantly asking myself: How did I help today? How did I make something better? How did I improve something? How did I make someone’s day brighter? If I can pinpoint one thing that made something better on any given day, then that day is a success. I suppose Maya Angelou got it right when she said, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
