#46 | Darine With Yvonne Robinson-Jackson on Best Strategy To Advance Your Career In 2023
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[00:00:00] Welcome to STANDOUT From The Crowd Podcast with your host Darine, where we take a look inside the word of leadership. You can find us live on LinkedIn and YouTube, or on your favorite podcasting platforms. You will discover the stories of some of the brightest leaders and entrepreneurs of our time who reveal the blueprint behind their success.
[00:00:19] Join us for a thought provoking and no BS conversation. You will get the inspiration and practical steps to become the leader you were meant to be. Are you ready? Let's go.
[00:00:33] Hard work doesn't pay off. I don't want to disappoint you, but this is a lie we have been told forever. Today we are talking about how to effectively climb the ladder and hard work is not the solution. Our STANDOUT guest today, Yvonne Robinson-Jackson, is an executive career coach. She helps career professionals get hired, get promoted, and achieve their career transformation.
[00:00:58] In record time, in record time, okay. With her ultimate career growth formula, she has helped thousands of ambitious mid to senior level career professionals in Canada and around the world get hired, and earns multiple six figures salary through her coaching and mentoring. I told you today's topic is juicy, so I hope you are ready.
[00:01:25] So please help me. Welcome, Yvonne. Hello, Yvonne. How are you doing? Hi, Darine . How are you? I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you for being here with us today. I love the work that you do, and what I appreciate, I admire a lot about you, is that you are effective, you get results for the people you work with, and you are just like, you do it with your heart.
[00:01:54] And I can say so because that's what you did with me. And I wanna thank you and I'm grateful. So climbing the ladder is a topic that is burning, right? For men and women, and it is even more challenging for us women, even more for women of color, right? So, to ensure that we all start with the same base, on the same line, what does the ladder is?
[00:02:20] When we say climb the ladder, what are we referring?
[00:02:25] So when you're talking about the ladder, you're talking about the steps that you're taking to grow your career. And I don't think of it as a ladder. It's more like a staircase, you know, a ladder, you go straight up and if you make a a wrong step, you fall right back to the ground, true.
[00:02:46] Okay, so when you think of a stair, It's more like, you know, you trip, you fall, you're not gonna go way back down to the ground like a ladder, but you probably go to a next step and you go to the next step and you keep going, making small steps until you get where you wanna go, because some people think you have to take massive action to get anything done, but sometimes it's small steps that you do consistently.
[00:03:11] It's consistent small steps that are, that is going to get many of us there, not the big massive action step, small actionable steps are going to take us there. So you were a Senior Director, you build a 15 year, career in the HR industry, and you were a Senior Director in one of the most reputable HR agencies in Canada.
[00:03:36] So how was your journey growing and advancing your career to becoming a Senior Director? Okay, so, , where do I start? Oh my goodness. I've career pivoted about eight times. Wow. And that is the reason why I say to everybody, it doesn't matter. You can career pivot any time, whether you are young, whether you are old, you know, there are some people who are very nervous.
[00:04:04] You know, I'm 40, I'm 50. Am I going to get there? I career pivoted at 50 into IT staffing, and I spent 15 years there. That means I had 15 more years before I retired. Wow. Not whether you are too young or you're too old, but what you need to do, you need to set goals. And that is the reason why my company is called Goal Inspired Career Coaching.
[00:04:30] Because what has happened there is that , when I knew I was go, I knew, always knew I was going to start a business, but I had such a great career at Mind Wire, the company is called Mind Wire Guys, you guys can go great. It is an, it's run by great people, lady called Amy McCarthy and Mark Bulldog. I hope they're here listening because they are two of the great leaders.
[00:04:54] And they're not very popular because they're probably not on social media. But these people are very great leaders. They are inspiring leaders. They promote from within, and that gave me an opportunity when I started in IT recruiting. As a matter of fact, Amy McCarthy, my leader, my vice president.
[00:05:19] She hired me 15 years ago before I, you know, I retired at 65, so I retired 15 years after. So when she hired me, I had no experience. Zero, zero. So how did you expect she hired you? I told you I'm good for career professionals because I've told you all I've seen . You gotta know how come you got hired for a great position, you had zero experience in?
[00:05:46] And I think it's important to talk about it because often time, and especially for us women, we hold ourselves back from pivoting, from applying to roles because we feel like we are not qualifed hundred percent. And there are studies out there that says that when we, women, they don't qualify a hundred percent, they don't apply for a role.
[00:06:11] When actually for men, it's different. They will look at 40% of qualification and then they will apply if they feel like they fit 40%. So, why is that we feel like we need to have a hundred percent of the requirement. And what did you do to show up with 0% of the requirements? Ok, so I, and got the job, I got 0%.
[00:06:34] Okay. But I did not score zero. Okay, tell call me in for an interview because guess what my resume was in the company's what we call applicant tracking system. And the reason why I would like to say that is because people always talk about your resume is gonna fall through, it's gonna kick it out. No, I've used it for 15 years, so there's no bot kicking out your resume.
[00:06:56] And I'm so passionate about that because I've used an applicant tracking system for 15 years. So to tell my story there. Applied for a job within the company and when they were looking for a technical recruiter, I had some technical background, a little bit of technical background, because when I came from Jamaica, I career pivoted to IT because when I came here I was, uh, a professor at the university in Jamaica before I came here.
[00:07:23] You see that pivot? I mean, I came here on Queen College and I studied IT and pivoted straight to it in 2000. So you know, things always change guys. Things always change. IT was booming in 2000. It changed on me Darine, it changed. That's when Nortel and all those companies went down. I had to pivot. I only had around two, three years of experience.
[00:07:48] But anyway, I pivot. I got the job. So she called me for an interview. I said to her, I have never done this before, but I can work hard. I showed my passion. I showed, my confidence because as you can see, I learned from a little girl. I used to do a little, I used to go on stage and recite little songs, sing the songs and stories.
[00:08:09] So I was not afraid to sit down before her and tell her I can work hard because I know I can work hard. So if you know what you can do, you know what, you know what, you know if you go show up to a job interview. I'm not sure I'm gonna get it because I don't have the experience. I'm lacking in this and I'm lacking in that they're not gonna hide you.
[00:08:30] Yeah, because you are wearing your feelings on your sleeve. The energy that you're putting forward in that interview, the energy that you're putting, I was putting forward to Amy, was saying, hire me because you have a problem to solve and I can solve it for you, even though I have never done it before, because you know what I said to her?
[00:08:52] I used to manage companies and I hired people. Now this is two different things. This is not recruiting. Recruiting and managing and hiring people are different things, but I was able to transfer the knowledge, talk about transferable skills. I was able to transfer my knowledge and my experience to this job. I was able in an interview to express my knowledge and experience and I said to her, hire me.
[00:09:23] You see job? You know what she told me? She saw in the first three months you might place about two, three people because you're learning. Darine in the first two weeks I placed four and it escalated from there. I started, I can tell everybody on here how much I made. I was just $42,000. They were paying me for my basic, by the end of the year, I was at a six figure salary by the end of the year,
[00:09:50] Wow. That's what we want to achieve.
[00:09:52] I'm teaching my daughter the same thing. My daughter escalating right now because I teach her what I knew. Exactly. And I like what you're saying because, and often say hard work doesn't pay off, but here is the nuance and you mentioned that very clearly. Hard work alone doesn't pay off, if you keep your heads down and keep working hard in your corner, hoping that your work will speaks for itself and then do the promotion for you so people see it, it won't work.
[00:10:28] And I love what you said. Say hey! I told her I was willing to work hard, but you pitch yourself. You promoted yourself, you promoted your past experience, your transferrable, you were able to identify your transferrable skills, and that's what you pushed forward, right? And that's what people need to know and to understand and need to do.
[00:10:49] Right? Hard work alone doesn't pay off. You have to be able to put yourself in front of the right people, but also promote yourself and showcase confidence because people feel your vibes. That's another element that you mentioned here. You wear your emotions and people feel your emotions. So if you enter the room or the zoom room now, not wearing confidence, people will feel it and the messages that they will send is say, Hmm, there is something weird or fishy or something like this there. So girl, I know you are coaching your daughter how to do it, and in the little time that we have spent together, you have made also a great impact on me so I can't wait to share another success stories when I'm ready, when the time comes. But now back to... what would you say was your biggest challenge? You had ambitions from day one, right? You know, you pivoted, but then you can pivot and still have ambition. You can do whatever you want one day and the other day, but still aim for the best, right? So what was the biggest challenge that you faced while growing your career?
[00:12:08] Okay, the biggest challenge that I faced, Ah, wow. You know, that one is gonna hit me now because I don't see anything that ever happened to me as a really challenge, as a real challenge. Hmm, right. As an immigrant, when you're in Canada, what I learned is that the Canadian experience was different from the Jamaican experience.
[00:12:37] and I, and, and as you said, I know, I thought, because, you know, you didn't gimme questions before, so I had to think a little bit. But I'm gonna tell you something. What immigrants need to know, if there's any immigrant right here, right now, you're going to a foreign country. They're not just gonna hire in management right away.
[00:12:54] And a lot of people complain. Sometimes you have to start again. You have to start over from the ground up, but because you have the experience and everything, you're gonna escalate. I'm telling you. Don't think that you're going to start at the top. No, are you going to start where you were when you were in your country?
[00:13:10] Listen, I was a lecturer. I had an MBA already when I came here, I already had that, but that's not it. Because this is a different country and people are say, oh, they have to have Canadian experience. Maybe because the culture is different. I had to learn a little bit of difference about the Canadian culture.
[00:13:30] Jamaicans tend to say things, see things in black and white. That's how we grew up. We grew up with a different, We were enslaved. And that is why when you're working with people, you have to know your staff. You have to know everybody you're working with because everybody has a different story. And because of the way you developed, the way you grew up, some of that come across when you are working with people.
[00:13:54] if I work with you, if I work with my friend, and I hope Robert Barry's listening to us. My friend Robert from the States, he's a black person from the States. They have a different experience. So when I came here, I realized that I was too, I, there's some of things that I say that would come off negative.
[00:14:14] This is not Canada, you know, Canada, if you, you know, if you brush the other day, brush the guy in this, a super, a guy in the supermarket brushed me and instead of him saying, excuse me, I'm sorry. I said, I'm sorry. I'm just saying that to say Canadians are very polite. They don't really see things in black and white.
[00:14:37] They see the gray. When I grew up, when I came here, we saw things in black and white, right? Either big or you're small, you know, you're either slim or you're fat. You know, that kind of. , that's how we saw things. It's a black or it's a white. Canadians are not like that. They're able to see the gray areas, so sometimes you can come off a little bit negative, you can appear a little bit negative, and I used to hear a couple people say that a couple times and Darine, you know what I did?
[00:15:05] I said to myself, if more than one persons are saying it, maybe I need to do a checkup from the neck up. I started thinking about that because I want to get into management. Nobody is going to make you manage anybody or giving you the opportunity if they think you don't have positive vibrations, as I would say in Jamaica.
[00:15:29] Right? Bob Marley's positive vibrations, right? You have to send off the energy. Positive vibrations a team spirit, right? The energy to say that we can work together and collaborate. So when I heard it a few times, I did my checkup from the neck up and I changed my behavior. A lot of times when you're having issues in an organization, if you hear one person say, well, maybe not so bad because maybe that person just don't like you.
[00:15:59] They probably just don't like how you walk or how, like how you talk or how, like how you dress. But if you hear more than one person saying it, start doing a checkup, doing an in, do an internal analysis. I call it your personal SWOT analysis. What the strength and weakness are you say, is it a weakness? Is there something in my background that made me see things in black and white?
[00:16:21] And that's what I did. And I'm telling you, because you're a recruiter, you cannot afford when you see stuff happening and say, I can't find somebody for this because this opportunity is not. I couldn't say that anymore. I had to see every opportunity as great. I had to inspire people because you cannot be a leader without inspiring the people around you to know that you know, everything's gonna be all right.
[00:16:46] Everything can be achieved if you put in some hard work. And I'm just gonna go back a little bit, when you said about hard work, people think you should not work hard. There's no entrepreneur, there's nobody won't listen to those things. There are only memes on the internet. You have to work hard and you have to work smart.
[00:17:05] But how you're going to work smart is that you're gonna put in the work and use the tools to make you work smarter. Like ChatGPT, everybody talking about that a tool that can help you to save some time and work smarter. So that's what you have to. Yeah, I have started using, uh, chatGPT and trust me, it is a life-changing experience because it is saving me a lot of time.
[00:17:33] So yes, work hard, hard work is important, but if you don't leverage the tool to make it work for you in a smart way, then this. useless. Exactly. So now you are the CEO of Goal Inspire career Coaching, right? What excites you the most about the work that you do? Okay, I'm helping people, Darine I go on LinkedIn every day, and I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and I see the pain. When somebody reaches out to me and ask me for help.
[00:18:09] I see the pain. The problem is I can't help everybody for free. That is , the other thing too, is when people have a little skin in the game, they will take action and they will respect it more. But I put out a lot of free content out there on LinkedIn. If you look at, my newsletters that I put out on LinkedIn, when I put that on LinkedIn every day I say LinkedIn should be thanking me , because when I'm done,, two nights ago I put one out and it took me quite I finished at 12 o'clock at night. Wow. I was writing that newsletter because I wanted it to be impactful. My newsletters are like blueprints. You can study them alone and uplevel your career game. So Darine, when I put up, put a video on YouTube, goal inspired career coaching it's a blueprint. When I give you something from my website, goalinspiredcareercoaching.com. Right now I have a resume framework because I don't talk about templates. Templates are nothing, nobody give you a template is not good for you because you're just copy pasting, copy pasting. I give you a framework with ideas and the blueprint is step by step way to do things because guess what? I told you I was a teacher and everything I do, I do it like teaching. That's why I don't do resume writing. I don't offer resume writing because when you write a resume for somebody, I believe in customization. But so I teach them how to do it because of my background as a teacher and also when anybody work with me.
[00:19:53] I don't leave them until they get their transformation because I'm not going on LinkedIn and after you, somebody pays me their money, I go on LinkedIn and you still don't have a job. So what I do, I work with them until they get their transformation. And you might ask, so even how can you afford to do that? Because I get results, irresistible offer. If I'm working with you for three months and you don't find a job, something is wrong. If you are looking for a job for a year or six months and you can't find a job, something is wrong with what you are doing, it should not take you so long. Even if your career pivoting in 180, new career new industry shouldn't take.
[00:20:37] So what is the most common mistake that you see people doing that prevents them from reaching their career goal? Okay, so for reaching their career goals, one of the most, there are a lot of things that they're doing. So one of them is that they don't have a goal, they don't have a plan. They don't, they just, you know, just winging it.
[00:21:01] That means if you don't know where you are going and a road can take you there and it's not gonna take you there fast, if you don't decide that this is what I want in my career, you know, you might say, I wanna be, I want to be a scientist doing X, Y, and Z, right? You might not get, do that exact same thing, but because you are following a path, you know where your activities and your energy flows, that's where your story's gonna go. So you have to be intentional about what I want in life. Right? When I wanted to, I was already in IT recruiting, right. But I knew I wanted more. So, you know what I did in my organization? I was helping people, I was helping writing because of course I'm using my transfer skills.
[00:21:53] I know how to write curriculum, I know how to write, you know work instructions . So I used that and I was writing the work instructions for the recruiters to follow when they hire new people. So if I'm giving you something, what is the problem that the company has to solve? If you are giving the company to the answer to solve the problem, they're not gonna fire you.
[00:22:17] They're gonna pay you more. They're gonna promote you. They're gonna find a job for you because every company has a problem to solve. I don't know if I'm answering your question because I'm just keep talking. No, you're, and I'm listening with attention and you know, actually that took me back to the conversation that took me back to the conversation we were having, uh, just before the show.
[00:22:40] We were talking about mentorship and the importance of mentorship in helping you, you know, get into a senior, senior roles and what we were seeing, what we were discussing about Yvonne and I is. We didn't know as immigrants when we moved to Canada. I moved to Canada 10 years ago. Yvonne moved to Canada 20 years ago.
[00:23:08] And so we're talking about, you know, being an immigrant and when you are an immigrant in a country, like you are so focused on finding a job, paying the bills, and trying to understand how to build your life, right? Because you start from scratch that you don't think. First of all, you don't know what you don't know and mentorship that's not something that was part of the conversation or the culture back home in my case. But then I moved to Canada and I'm focusing on trying to survive first. Right? And then because you don't know what you don't know and because you focus on building your life, you don't realize that there are information that you need to look for.
[00:23:47] You don't realize that there are people that you need to start networking with. I discovered networking when I moved to Canada. I even didn't know that was a thing, right? Because I moved here young. So how do you see the role of mentorship with people who wanna get. into senior leadership roles because I feel when we talk about mentorship, we talk, we think more about youngster, you know, when they wanna get started, they need the mentor.
[00:24:17] But I do believe mentorship is powerful all the way all along your career. So what's your insight on this? Absolutely, and before I even talk about mentorship, I'm just gonna run, I'm just gonna list, because today we are talking about winning strategies for executive career advancement, right? And I only mentioned goal setting.
[00:24:37] That was just number one, because, but let, and I'm glad we talk about networking, so let me just run through 10 of them and maybe one day in the future we can talk about some more. So guys, get your pen and paper because I'm a teacher. Okay, so we talked about goal setting, networking and relationship building.
[00:24:55] I had as number two and I'm so happy that you touched on it and I'm gonna come back around it. I'm just gonna list, because we're not gonna talk about them in detail today. I'm gonna stop at networking and relationship building, collaboration and teamwork over competition, right? That's one. Effective communication skills that is so very important.
[00:25:13] Emotional intelligence. One day you and I are gonna have to talk about emotional intelligence because that is why certain companies are not run properly because the people themselves leaving the company are leading the company, do not have, do they do not have the emotional intelligence to lead anybody because you have to have it first before you can lead people, right? Resilience, you know, a lot of immigrants are very resilient. I grew up poor, okay? I grew up on a farm with about nine kids, and the saying says, if you are born, poor is your fault, but if you die poor, it's not your fault, if you are born poor, it's not your fault. But if a die poor is your fault, there's so many opportunities out there.
[00:25:57] Okay, so resilience, personal branding, I know that's a big part of you, but that is so important and time management, continuous learning and mentorship. So let us reverse engineer this and get back to networking and relationship building. You and I knew nothing about that. You and I were grow, maybe we grew up in a place where they say kids, children must be seen and not heard.
[00:26:26] Did you hear that? I heard that a lot. A lot. So by the time you come to a country like this, you are still feeling, because it's your lived experience that children must be seen and not heard. And most black people too, because, I dunno, they used to tell us that, go to the back. So when you go into an organization to work, you feel that you should still be in, you still think that you should, because guess what? It's something that it's within. You know, it's an experience. It's something that's really, that you have to unlearn and nobody helps you to unlearn it, and you don't realize that's the reason why you're not speaking up at the office. You don't realize that's the reason why when you go to events, you can't even look into people's eyes.
[00:27:17] You don't realize that you should be putting up your hand for plum plum projects at work so that you can get promoted. You don't realize that you can ask for the promotion. You don't realize that you can negotiate your salary, and especially the fact that you're a woman and you were beaten down and maybe you were in a relationship where your husband was telling you the things that you know you're not good enough, or people when you were growing up telling you were not good enough.
[00:27:46] Collaboration and relationship building. Networking and relationship building, network. We think networking is just going on LinkedIn, clicking, click with this, connect with this, connect with that. If that's what you're doing on LinkedIn, that's not gonna take you anywhere. That's not networking to build relationship.
[00:28:04] And that is why even if those people who are in LinkedIn right now, what they all, what they need to do and know to do is know how to communicate. I teach people that. Executives how to communicate on LinkedIn, how to get into the dms and communicate or look for the people they would like to work with are like-minded people to get opportunities.
[00:28:26] I tell them what to say because not everybody knows what to say. This is not their zone of genius. It is mine. They have their zone of genius, your IT tech specialist or whatever, you know, and building all these big business. But they do not know how to communicate to build a relationship on places like True.
[00:28:54] That's very true. And guess what, I know that I could go out for a whole day with my Ted Talk, so I'm going back over to you. We're gonna, we're gonna organize, I'm sure we're gonna organize a series or something so we can talk more in depth about it. But then let's get back and then we're gonna go, we are going to conclude on this point, but, uh, let's get back maybe to the importance of mentorship when you are already in the workplace and that you are targeting senior leadership roles.
[00:29:22] How can you approach mentorship, and how do you get it done? Yes. Okay. It's very, it's not easy. It's very difficult because a coach is, different from coaching, right? A mentor is somebody who's gonna take you under their wings, somebody who's gonna be prepared to take you under their wings. But you can do something when you get into the organization.
[00:29:44] When you just start the job, the first thing that you should do, you should make sh ensure, try to develop a good relationship with your boss, the person who's leading. Try to develop relationships with people at your level above you and below you don't only think it's the person's above you, but within your level and below you try to put your hand up.
[00:30:07] I said to my daughter, the first job she got after she got her PhD, thank God she got it. Three weeks after she got her PhD, she landed in a company, and I know that the last time she was looking for a job, it took her one day, not one day, one hour. Wow. Because she was already learning how to network and build the relationships.
[00:30:28] So when something happened, she knew who to call. Who you gonna call? Not the Ghostbuster, right? She gonna call the people who you have been building the relationship with. So the mentorship within the organization is gonna be a trusted person. Somebody, and you know, you can, when you go into the organization, try to build relationships.
[00:30:49] And you know like take somebody for coffee. Listen, you can take your boss for lunch and pay for it. Oh, that's a big one here. That's the first time I hear it and I love the idea. And you know why you can do that? You can take the vice president for lunch and pay for it, and you offer to pay for it. And they're gonna say, oh, I'm paying for it because I'm gonna pay for it on my company card.
[00:31:12] And the reason why you wanna do that, listen, it is going to be, can you imagine sitting down with your VP or somebody just to have a conversation? It's like learning. You could not pay for that. And that is why when you pay a hundred dollars for the lunch is almost like getting $2,000 off mentorship, they're gonna learn about you.
[00:31:34] Yeah. People like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. And if you're nobody in the organization and not talking to anybody and not doing this kind of business, they don't get the opportunity to know, like, and trust you. They don't get the opportunity to know how you grew up. They don't get the opportunities to know little things about you that you would like them to know that can enhance your career for you to be the best in your career and where you wanna.
[00:32:01] Amen. That was powerful, that was very powerful. And, I hope for those of you, again, watching the live, the replay or listening to this episode, that you feel inspired and that you understand that it doesn't have to be massive actions or huge steps, but it has to be strategic in the little things that you do on a daily basis.
[00:32:29] And Yvonne if you feel stuck in your career, and if you feel like you are not sure about what should be your next move, what, how you should approach it Yvonne is clearly, definitely the person you wanna get in touch with. So even for the people who would like to get to know more about how you can help them, how can they con contact you?
[00:32:49] All right. This is very easy guys. I'm digital, I have a digital business card. If you putting your browser meetcoachyvonne.com, it will take you to my digital business card, and on the card is on my social spaces and click on it, send you everywhere, YouTube, LinkedIn, and everywhere. It has a link for my website.
[00:33:13] It has my email, so the best way to do it is give you my digital business card so you can know about me and check out where I, where I teach, right? I'm even on clubhouse. I'm growing on Clubhouse. I have over 6,000 followers on Clubhouse right now, right? So I'm not only on LinkedIn and I have my YouTube, but if you go meetcoachyvonne.com, it's easier to remember than the name of my company, which is goalinspiredcareercoaching.com. You see how that is long, so I give you a quick way to get there, meetcoachyvonne.com. Thank you Yvonne and actually I'm going to ask, the team, the STANDOUT Team to put the comment to put the link in the comment meetcoachyvonne.com.
[00:34:09] So for those of you, for the people interested, you will just have to click on the link. So Yvonne, wow, what a convo. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your generosity. We have learned a lot. Every time we talk, I learned so much from you, so thank you for that, and that's it. You stay safe.
[00:34:28] You take care, and for, those of you, watching the STANDOUT Podcast, I will see you next week Wednesday for another live episode. So thank you everyone. You take care and you stay safe. Bye-bye everyone.
