The Sparkle

We will spend 80,000 hours in our lifetime at work.

If my math is right, I’ve spent close to 50,000 of those already over the last 20 years in the corporate world, so I took an inventory. An inventory of my life and what those 50,000 hours had earned me.

I didn’t like the answer.

Here’s what I had: Financial Success, Career Success, Lots of ‘Things’

Here’s what I didn’t have: Happiness, Peace, Health, Strong Friendships

Here’s why: My job always won.

Whenever there was a choice to be made between spending time with my family/friends/myself or spending time on something the job needed, the job won. All because I was chasing success and what I thought I wanted. The problem was, my definition of success was all off.

#"Success"

Success for me was: 1) Job Title and Scope and 2) Money.

(By the way, these are the exact ones we in HR tell you not to focus on or say when you get the 'what motivates you' question in an interview. But for me and for my personality type, it was the truth).

Financial Success

Ok great, check. This is the one we think we are solving for when we are 20 years old and our whole life is ahead of us, or at least we think it is.

My dad died suddenly of a heart attack when I was in college, he was 53.

He was taken way too soon, and I’d give everything I have for more time with him now. He worked so hard and never got time to really enjoy life and I'm sure he would have spent his time differently had he known he only had a precious 53 years.

So, I’m mad at myself for having fallen for this trap, even though I swore at the age of 21, after he passed, that I wouldn’t.

Yes, we all need money, but we overestimate how much we really need. We chase it and when we get a little, we want a little more. When we get a little more, then we want a lot more. It doesn’t matter what your income level is, you never think you have enough.

You think you can never have enough to put in that nest egg, or never enough to buy all the things you think can make you happy.

The reality is, things are short-term, things are just…things. We know this intellectually (things can’t make you happy), but the message somehow doesn’t sink in. We just keep focusing on them, even though they all one day end up sold to another buyer or at the goodwill.

So, time is my currency now. It’s the most precious commodity we have, and I guard and spend it as if I’ll never get another minute, because one day I won’t.

Career Success

This is the one I craved my whole life.

I’m an introvert, I grew up in a one stoplight country town and despite my best attempts, I’m not funny or witty, was never very popular in school, and I don’t have any special or interesting skills (unless the ability to get the not so coveted ‘super speeder’ designation from the city of Atlanta counts).

What I have always been though, is pretty smart and willing to put in the work. So, I thought if I worked hard and did well in my career, I would be happy.

So, I did it. I climbed to the top of the ladder and all my wildest career dreams came true.

Great, right?

Not so fast.

For a type A, ambitious driver personality like mine, the corporate life becomes all-consuming, and I had forgotten who I was, and most importantly who I could be.

For us Type As, you only have one speed in that type of environment and its full octane all the time.

I had lost myself in the never ending whack-a-mole of fires to put out, goals to hit, 1:1s to schedule, dinners to mingle at, flights to catch, meetings, zooms and town halls to attend, presentations to give, roundtables to do, politics to navigate, weekend calls to take and emails to respond to. The introvert in me was exhausted at the end of every day trying to project so much extroversion. And the over-achiever in me physically did not know how or just could not, dial back my workload. I didn't have a framework for that, I had to be 110% in all the time.

Add to that the overlay of being in HR and all that came with it over the last few years, and I had become someone I didn’t recognize. I was impatient, overly punchy, cynical, had lost the creative joyous sparkle I once had, was physically burnt out and my health was paying the price.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am still beyond grateful.

I had a Mach 5, hair on fire, invigorating, wildly entertaining and blessed run in the corporate world and I have no regrets. It’s made me who I am today and given me the confidence now to pursue my dreams. ?I have incredible memories, a network of friends and colleagues I’ll cherish forever, a lifetime supply of branded corporate notebooks, memories from around the world from amazing travels and the feeling of satisfaction from having climbed many corporate mountains with incredible people, but it was time.

#'ItIsTime

There is a part in The Lion King where Mufasa says to Simba, “it is time, you are more than you have become.” ?It was time for me. Time to breathe, time to give space and time to friends and family I had been neglecting for years, time to think, time to pray, time to take care of myself, time to play, time to tinker with my big ideas and time to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

So, as many of you know, last year I decided to take a break from my corporate HR life and pursue some of the 100 different entrepreneurial ideas that make my brain sparkle.

We all have that notebook of big ideas, right?

So, here I am, one year later and I can honestly say I’ve never been happier and never been healthier. I’m in the zone and not sure I’ve ever had this level of energy and brain on fire feeling in the last 20 years. Maybe I was made to be an entrepreneur all along.

So, here’s a quick preview of current and coming attractions of things I’m working on.

#'WhatsHappening

Current Offerings

HR Consulting – this is probably the expected one. I’ve been blessed to have worked at and led HR at some of the best companies in the world and I’ve learned from some of the best in the business and I’m forever grateful.

Big thanks to some of the best leaders and mentors you could ever have for believing in me and showing me what great looks like in HR – Adam Holton, Marty Manning, Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, Annette Ellison, Sylvain Newton, Sandy Sullivan, Charlene Grabowski, Bill Wood and Krish Shankar just to name a few.

So, I’m happy to share my learnings and help others now achieve big HR impact in their organizations.

My company name is Gracion Group: https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/gracion.group ?

I love all things HR, but I’m focusing on what I enjoy most and think I can add the most value in.

Highlights: ?Executive Assessments, High Potential Development, HR Functional/Org Assessments, Talent Strategies, Leadership Development Strategies, Succession Planning, Team Development, Personal Executive Compensation Consultation.

Attached is a quick overview of the company and offerings and I’d be honored to chat if you have a need you think I can help with.

The Customer Connection (or as I call affectionately call it, The Customer Decoder Ring).

This one may be unexpected to some, but if you know me well, you know I love all things personality and it’s not such a surprise.

I’ve been hooked on reading and interpreting personalities for 20 years, with a huge shout out to Linda and David Belle Isle and their Incolor Insight tool, it was the tool that hooked me so quickly all those years ago and is still by far the best personality assessment tool out there in my view.

I love studying people…studying how they behave, why they say what they say or make the decisions they make. It kept the HR leader in me up many nights and I developed a knack for reading people quickly. While we are all unique, we are also pretty predictable as humans, and we follow patterns.

For fun, and to help our sales teams, I often turned my knowledge of those patterns into customer intelligence and sales strategies. For example – how you sell me, a Type A, introverted, ‘red’ personality, is very different than how you sell my good friend Tammi, a very extroverted ‘yellow’ personality.

And yet, salesperson after salesperson would sell to me all day long using their own personality preferences and never picked up the clues about my personality and how I wanted to be sold to. I got an endless stream of dinner invites, long meetings, software demo invitations, etc. and they never worked with me. The salesperson that came in and gave me a quick, direct pitch, with upfront pricing and was sensitive about my time, often won my business.

So, I’ve created this brand and it’s all about customer intelligence and teaching anyone in B2B sales how to read their customer. How to quickly code their personality type and how to handle every phase of the deal cycle from prospecting to pitching, negotiating, closing, words that work, potential deal killers, landmines, selling angles that work and tons more, all tailored to the 4 major personality types. It’s a cheat sheet, a decoder ring, and I promise it will win you more deals and your customers will thank you.

There is an online course, a team training version and a done for you version where I do a full analysis of your customer and give you a detailed download and recommended sales strategy.

Learn lots more about it below and an overview is also attached.

Website:?www.thecustomerconnection.net ?????? (Feel free to sign up for the newsletter for powerful weekly tips)

LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/the-customer-connection ? (Click Follow to stay connected)

Future Brands

Hack the Ladder – so this will be a fun one. I haven’t launched it yet, so stay tuned, but think along the lines of the Suzy Orman of corporate career navigation as a reference point. This brand will have a blog, books, maybe a podcast, online courses, mastermind groups, etc. all to help people go further faster in their careers. I want to help people find their personal blue flame at work. I want them to spend those 80,000 hours doing things that make them sparkle and teach them all the tips to navigate what can be a very confusing corporate world. Basically, it’s all the things I wanted to say from the HR chair but never could.

Corporate Refugee – A future brand, but I’m learning a ton about how to replace my corporate income with the online solopreneur/entrepreneur world.?We all have passions; we all have expertise and something to share with the world that people will buy. I want to figure all the ins and outs of this world out and then share it with anyone who is interested in life outside of the corporate world.?I’m taking tons of notes and making a playbook as a I go, so more to come as I learn and get further into it.

Look Up – This one is a 180 from the rest and I’ve debated about sharing it since this is more of a business platform, but this one means the most to me. It’s a blog I’ll be starting about Jesus and Heaven. I am passionate about sharing my faith but in a way that isn’t awkward, political or in your face. If it were up to me, I’d spend most of my time here.

We get so consumed and focused on all the things of this world and in the context of eternity, these 80-ish years we’ll spend here on Earth are literally just the pre-game warm-up. There is so. much. more. More time, more joy, more love, more peace. But you have to know where to look for the roadmap, you have to…Look Up. ?

#'YourSparkle

Ok, that’s it. Thanks for indulging me. I don’t talk about myself often, but this all just came flowing out, I think it was time.?

Reach out to me if any of this sparks your interest or even if it doesn’t and you think they are terrible ideas, that’s good to know too!

Until next time – go find what makes your brain and heart sparkle, you won’t regret it.

~Robin