Unlock Resilience: How to Know When to Stay & When to Go in Your Career

Hello, listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the Ally from Corporate Podcast. I am your host, Ally, and today we have special guest Natalia Bussard. Natalia, you are a program manager, currently studying and getting your doctorate, and you speak six languages and you're learning Arabic now. And I just think you are so amazing. And today I want to ask you about resilience in your career and how to know when to stick with something and how to know when to walk away from something. So welcome and thank you for joining us us.

Ali, thank you so much for invitation because I am excited to be here. I have now learned a lot about you and I love your podcast. So a little bit about myself, as you said. I'm the program manager at Simon Fraser University. I am responsible for the area of science, environment, and health sciences. And I get to work with fantastic people who are so loving what they're doing that they're still sticking with it, even in the difficult times that we are navigating right now. And that's change management of our processes of the whole university, basically. So it's a lot that we are navigating together. And I myself had to navigate various interests that I had throughout my life. And that is natural science is something given to me by my father, who was a forestry engineer. So I naturally developed love for nature and studied biology. But I also always loved languages, as you said. And it was my grandfather who said, you know as many languages as you speak, as many times you were a human being. That is a Slovak saying, or I should say Czechoslovakian saying from former President Masari, who used to say that a lot, and many people in our country know it. So I learned. First, I started with, of course, Slovak and Czech, then I added Russian. Then it was English for me, and later on Spanish and French. And as you said, I will be trying to learn Arabic as well.

Wow, that is so amazing. And anybody watching or listening probably knows how hard it is to learn a language, because most of us speak one language in the United States, unfortunately. And then as soon as we venture out to Europe, people speak multiple, multiple, multiple languages. And I've tried to learn Hebrew, I've tried to learn German, Spanish, and it is so not easy learning a language. And the things that you learn for one language might even not be true for the next language you learn. So I commend you. Do you ever find it difficult to kind of like, switch gears because you have your job, you have all these languages you speak, you have your research that you're doing for your doctorate. How do you Kind of like balance it all and just. I don't know. How do you do it all?

Well, it's a great question. It's just basically thinking about how to go about my day, so it's interesting. And how to prioritize first what I have to do. Of course, my work goes first. All those priorities that are at work, I prioritize as number one. And then if I have a moment, you know, I juggle among multiple things because I have a doctorate, as you said, if I have a dull moment or if I have a moment when I know that they're not crucial priorities, then I dive into that in that time. And then sometimes I have to just stop and go and pick up my daughter from school. School and go for figure skating with her. In the meantime, I can think about taking some reading with me and working on that. So basically working on it when I can. And sometimes days are long, but because it's fun, all of it is fun for me, then I don't take it as. As drudgery or something difficult, but something that I love to navigate.

Yeah, that's great. I love how you talked about priorities, because I made a video about this for social media this morning. But a lot of people find that life can be very stressful if their priorities are not clear and everything is a top priority. Like your daughter is a top priority. The school, the doctorate is a top priority. Your program manager job is a top priority. So not everything can be a top priority. So I love that you have talked, have, like, learned in your life how to prioritize things and what's most important. So that's really good. So tell me a little bit about your research. You were telling me last time we spoke, but you have a theory about languages, right?

Yes. As a small child already, I noticed my grandfather loving people who spoke multiple languages and looking up to them. So one of the people that stuck in my head was the actress Marlene Dietrich, a German actress who, of course, spoke German as a child, she was learning French. And then when she decided to leave fascist Germany to go into a free country of the United States, she learned English. And that was something my grandfather would not stop talking about. So then naturally, I was thinking as well, I would love to learn these languages, too. And I started noticing about other people, those who spoke more languages, that they were more patient with me, that they were kinder. I could stick around more and bug them more as a child, you know. So I developed a little theory in my head, and I started thinking, are these people truly more Open, more accepting of a difference of opinion. And it stuck with me. And when I was exploring the subjects later on, when I decided to do a doctoral program, at first I thought, I'm going to dig into leadership, leadership and minorities, this and that. And then I thought, like, oh, no, that's not totally really me. What has always been on my mind is this question, wow. So I develop a framework of transformative learning, adult learning theory in education, developed by Jack Mesero, an American educational adult theory expert. And then also the theory of plurilingualism, started initially by the European Union. And a lot of plurilingualists, of course, like Enrique Picardo, Angelica Galante and many others dedicate to this. And I married those two theories, so to speak, or looked through those lenses in my qualitative research of various individuals who. The condition for my research was to speak at least three languages, okay, Fluently, at least to some level, being able to express themselves. The fluent was not a condition. But I was lucky to find people who spoke actually more than three languages, and it happened to be fluently, at least in those three languages.

Wow, that's fascinating. I would agree with you on your theory that people who speak multiple languages have more of an open mind. I've done a lot of traveling, like I said, I've attempted to learn multiple languages in the past. And I think when you learn a language, the culture of that country that speaks that language bleeds into the language and you get to know the culture and some of the mannerisms, some of the traditions through language, and it opens your mind. It's almost like traveling to that country, learning the language and speaking with people. So I would definitely agree with that. People are more open minded when they learn new languages because you're opening yourself up to different cultures.

You are so right about mentioning culture, Ali. It is a big phenomenon in forming our relationship with that language because language and culture are interconnected. And so there is that aspect of interculturality that is developing in the people who then are able to look at things not just from one point of view, but from different points of view. They are able to, as we say, or some of the experts say, that they are able to put themselves into other people's shoes, right? So they are becoming more empathetic. And that's what actually my participants have been talking about, that they've noticed about themselves. More perseverance, more ability to play with the language, becoming more creative, becoming also more forgiving of themselves in terms of making mistakes, not being afraid of failing so much and so this just, there's just this basis for the ability to experiment and be more open to that allows people to perhaps become more successful in various aspects of their lives, I would say.

Yeah. You know, it also is, I think it's interesting when you're learning a new language to try and be. Make a joke in that language when you try. So it's easy to be humorous and funny and make a joke in your own native language. But when you're learning a new language and you're trying to tell a joke or you're trying to make a sarcastic remark, sometimes it doesn't come off right. Sometimes it doesn't translate or people look at you like, what do you mean? And so it's just like learning how to have a new type of humor in a new language is also fun. So for people that are listening that, that maybe know what a PhD is or maybe don't know what a doctorate is. Is there a difference? And how long does a doctorate take?

So PhD, doctorate, I would call them synonyms.

Okay.

It really very much depends on how much time you are able to dedicate to it. Okay. So the presumption is it will take you three years. However, the reality is that many people take longer sometimes. It's especially in science, as you would know as a scientist, that it's out.

Of control if you can't rush science.

Right, right. Yeah. Can't rush times. Experiments don't work out within the time frame as it was planned. We had Covid interruption as well, which disrupted many people doing research. And also in my particular case, it would be that it's full time work plus dedicating to the doctorate. So sometimes different priorities came into play and I had to set it aside for a while and return back to it. And also the levels of motivation fluctuate sometimes. Also the feedback that you get from your supervisors may make you feel like, okay, I'm just done with this. Many of my colleagues met with this and then they have to recouple themselves again and find more energy and get back to it. Because if you've dedicated to it already five or six years and you're pushing on to year seven, then you don't want to be one of the people that call themselves abd all but dissertation.

Right.

So yeah, I think it's important to pull oneself together and really bring it to a successful ending.

Good. So do you have an end date for yours?

Yes, I have an end date for myself. I hope it is the end of this year. I wasn't more ambitious than that. Because I can see already now, with the vacation coming into play, that a lot of supervisors, including mine, have some personal plans that will affect how fast I would like to move on things.

Yeah, that's great. So what I'm hearing from you is that you know what your priorities are. You've set a goal for yourself with an end date in mind for this huge thing you've been working on for almost a decade. It sounds like you had to have a lot of resilience to continue down this path for so long. And you and I, you know, we spoke before about both of us being job hoppers in our careers. So what. What makes you stick with something versus deciding that it's time to let something go? How do you. How do you decide whether something's worth sticking to?

That is such a great question, and there's not a simple answer to it. But I would say that recently, at least for the last 10 years, I stuck in my positions. One of them was Quantum Matter Institute. What made me stick with this job was an excellent group of people where I got to work with the scientists that realized, because of the scientific director, the top director of the institutes, that people in administration are equally important as the scientists because they propel scientists to get along with their science uninterrupted, thanks to the administration people. And so he put us all into equality. And that worked so marvelously, that everybody respected everybody in such a way that it made just a wonderful workplace. And so I was truly excited to stay there. It was the university that of course, contributed to my doctoral studies. It was right on campus. It was great working environment. So that was one thing. And the other case also right now, working at Simon Fraser University, it is such a fantastic group of people that despite the fact that we're navigating a lot of insecurity, changing times, not knowing often what is at the end of the road because we're reinventing it as we go, but the fact that we're working on something exciting, that we are reestablishing new processes leading to a new way of building workplace learning, is something that makes me want to stick, to be part of that big change, to contribute to that. So it's the ability to be a part of something bigger.

I love that. So the two things that are making you stick with something are the mission and the purpose. When it aligns with your values, you want to keep going. And then also the group, the community.

Yeah, that's absolutely correct.

Cool. And you are one of the most active members of my community. And I love that. And I wanted to thank you on here. I love every contribution you have to all of our challenges and debates. I've really been enjoying your being a member of the community, so thank you.

Thank you as well, Ali, because the community is such a fantastic community place, such a refreshing ball of energy for me. I joined it because of you, because I admired the freshness that you brought into the field of career coaching. Because as I mentioned to you before, this was not an unknown field. And mostly in discussions, podcasts, I hear things that I've heard before. But with you, you brought technical tools, you brought new ways of presenting yourself, new ways of branding, which really made me feel, oh, I would love to speak to this woman more. I would love to learn more about her. And so when you opened your community, I was pulled into it. And it's just every day you bring topics that are extremely interesting to be engaged in. So hence, I've been so engaged.

Oh, I love that. So is there anything that you would like to see in the community that you haven't seen yet? Maybe like a resource or a guest speaker in a certain industry or a theme, you know, how we do the themes for every week. Like this week is balance. Next week is going to be LinkedIn. Is there anything that you would love to see in there that you haven't seen yet?

I would like to see perfect progression in a career. Like what that looks like, what that would look like.

I'm writing this down. Tell me more.

It's just, you know, as we're saying, what to share with your boss, how to gain the trust of your boss, but there's so many variables in this. I feel that just today we had a discussion like that in our team meeting where one of our leaders mentioned that she was waiting for her boss to notice her excellence, and it never happened. And so she said that you have to take that initiative and you have to go and speak to the boss. But then again, there's that variable. Not always it's going to be met with understanding and even with that person really cheering for you and wishing you the best. Because we both, I believe, encountered bosses that also wanted to push us down and put us in the place where we belong in their point of view. So it's such a fine line, and it's such an almost, I would say I have developed this diplomacy to feel what the situation with that particular boss is at that time and navigate it that way. So sometimes it means you stuck, you're stuck, and you hit the wall. And the only Way to progress is to change an organization.

Yep.

So no matter how much more you're going to contribute in that organization, that's what they imagine for you. That's how far you can go.

Yep.

So, yeah.

Okay. So I wrote this down. So career progression. And it sounds like how to deal with difficult personalities at work or how to maybe if you're an introvert, but your boss doesn't know what you're doing all day, how to showcase your work instead of waiting for them to notice how excellent you are and then how to gain trust also.

Yes. And even more so if we could have a perfect scenario, how to do it so you can progress as fast as possible. Because, you know, in my mind, it's. I come from executive recruiter background. So there we always had a candidates, and that meant you were going with your three to five years of experience into the next job, which was higher and then higher, higher, etc. But many people move differently. They move laterally or. Or they go downward so that they can get up again and so on. But in my mind, that was not the perfect way. I wanted to go the right way.

We all do. Who wants to go laterally?

Yeah.

Or backwards.

So, yeah, that was what I wanted to maybe explore in our community. How to do it best so that we can go upwards and not laterally.

Yeah. Because sometimes laterally can be kind of a detour to where we wanted to go. And it prolongs the ultimate goal.

Absolutely. It can be a dead end, but people will not say it openly because they benefit a lot from people who move laterally. That's.

That's another thing that I want to talk about in the community someday is how to recognize other people's hidden agendas and how to still navigate in your career. That'd be another good one, too. I have see this if you're watching on YouTube. I have a whole list here of.

Ideas, never short of ideas. That's very prolific.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, gosh. Well, this was really fun. Thank you so much for joining us. I feel like I learned a lot. I still have so many questions for you about how to learn a language. I'm really trying to grasp German so I can speak with my husband's family in Switzerland, then maybe learn Swiss German so I can talk to you about that later. But you are fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Ali. It was fun to be here with you today.

Yes. Cool. How can people get a hold of you if they have any questions for you?

Please LinkedIn with me on LinkedIn. That is my best and preferred way. I think it's so easy to navigate LinkedIn and just easy to hop on, send a message. Fantastic. So Natalia Buzard on LinkedIn is the easiest way.

Sounds good. Well, thank you, Natalia, and thank you everybody for tuning in. I will see you, Natalia, in the Community and hopefully others listening. Feel free to join. We'd love to have you. And I will see you in the next episode. Bye.

Bye.