Risk, Confident & Creativity

What I would love to do is actually ask each of you, and I'll perhaps start with Nancy, if you can share a little bit of your backstory just to give the audience some context as to what's brought you to where you are now.

Thank you for the opportunity to be on your program. It's exciting and empowering too to be with Karen. So this is great. Let's see, Polished. Polished is a professional development and leadership practice. It focuses on soft skills, your people skills, your interpersonal skills. I like to call them your smart skills. And as we know, soft skills are critically important, not only to our personal lives, but to our professional lives. It helps us really advance in our career when we feel confident and have all the acumen that we need to succeed. And so when I started Polished almost 10 years ago, I worked in the corporate space. I had a great team as a beginner and then grew in my career. But I noticed all throughout my career the lack of soft skills in people. When you have those lack of soft skills, those people skills or those smart skills, you can really take a backseat to growth. You can have excellent technical skills, which are critically important. You know, we need our doctors and attorneys and all kinds of professions. But if we can't articulate with self-awareness and passion and empathy and different skill sets that really mold into one's person, we will lag behind. Having been in leadership positions in the corporate space, I've noticed a lack of those soft skills. Always wanting to start my business, I took the leap. You will appreciate this. I took risk. My only regret is I didn't do it sooner. So I love to advance people in their career. I love to help them see what their, their capabilities are, the limitless successes that we all have the potential to achieve. And so that's what brought me to starting Polished.

Thank you. And Karen, if I can ask you the same question, can you share a little bit of your backstory with us and you'll see where these ladies overlap?

Absolutely. I'm really excited to be here with you and Nancy today, because obviously we all have a lot in common. And Nancy, you know, I had so Similar experiences. I had a long corporate career, and I was climbing that corporate ladder, climbing the corporate ladder, hopefully with some soft skills, maybe not as many as I have now. One day, I I saw sort of the goal in sight, right? To get to executive vice president, to get on the board of the company, and you know it was in sight. And I thought, oh, I'm so excited! I really want to get this job because it was sort of the culmination of. Everything that I had been working for all my career. But there was something inside of me that also said, but do you really want the job? Isn't there something more for me? Isn't there a way that I can share more of my skills and talents and experiences in a way that helps, you know, transform other people's lives? Not that I wasn't doing some of that, obviously, in my corporate job, but I just felt like I needed to expand beyond the walls of that corporate environment. And so I also took a leap. I took the risk to leave my very comfortable, well-paying corporate job and go out on my own. And my goal was really to help women make that connection, you know, get that dissonance that I felt, you know, that between someone on this corporate track and yes, I'm successful and yes, I'm doing all the right things and I'm getting the right things, but Somehow something is missing and there's a disconnect. And I really wanted to help women bridge that disconnect. So I started by writing a book. It started out as a nonfiction book, but became actually a fiction book, which is my first book, Discovering Power, here behind me. And the sequel to that is just about to come out in, in a couple of weeks. So I'm excited about that too.