Episode 132: Jeanniey Walden
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Women lawyers can learn from high-achieving women in a range of industries. Today, Jeanniey Walden, former CMO of DailyPay, and now CEO of LiftOff Enterprises and host of the national daytime TV show “LiftOff with Jeanniey Walden," provides some insights into branding. With host MC Sungaila, Jeanniey shares tips on building an authentic brand for yourself, public speaking, and the role of risk-taking in your career.
About Jeanniey Walden:
Jeanniey Walden is an award-winning Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer who transforms the way companies work to accelerate growth and brand impact. She is also a host on the national daytime TV show “LiftOff with Jeanniey Walden”.
A marketing-focused entrepreneur at heart Jeanniey has founded 6 companies and led global marketing initiatives across both fortune 500 companies and transformational start-ups. Most recently she was the CIMO of the unicorn fintech, DailyPay.
A recognized “Woman in Business,” Jeanniey is a sought-after public speaker and frequently shares her keen business insight on nationally syndicated and major market television and radio shows. Most recently, Jeanniey was named Top Marketer of the Year by the International Association of Top Professionals, a "Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology" from The Financial Technology Report, a "Woman of the Year" in the 17th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and one of the 10 prominent women role models in FinTech from around the world from Global FinTech.
In this episode, I have an amazing guest. A super dynamic and fearless guest, Jeanniey Walden, who is not a lawyer but has so much to share in terms of approach to her career. Also, the accomplishments reached so far in various Chief Marketing Officer, and C-Suite roles in a number of companies, and now jumping off for her own venture and hosting a television program. Jeanniey, welcome.
Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be on your show.
Thanks so much for being here. It’s so much inspiring in who you are and what you've accomplished that I think a lot of women in law can benefit from it. Whether that's learning about marketing and branding, which you know a lot about, and also, being comfortable with the zigs and the zags and a career. Also, go for it when an opportunity comes your way. I wanted to start first in terms of how did you get into and decide you wanted to focus on the marketing side of the business?
That is a crazy question. Probably not a crazy question, but here's my crazy answer. I went to school to be an elementary school teacher and I loved working with autistic kids. I got a Master's in teaching and a minor in sign language so that I could be an elementary school teacher focusing on autism. As the world had it when I graduated, there were no full-time teaching jobs. Unlike now where it's a much different scenario and I needed a full-time job. I needed something with benefits.
I ended up at JCPenney, which of all places was just the only place that was hiring at the time. I was a call center rep. I'm pretty competitive. I worked my way up to be a manager and I soon realized that all of the elements that you are taught to go into the field of education about inspiring others, thinking creatively, building teams, building consensus, and rallying troops are very applicable to marketing and to management and they make a difference.
All the elements you are taught in the education field apply to marketing.
I coined this term called AIR, which is being Authentic, Inspirational, and Relatable. I applied that to my role at JCPenney. I ended up seven years there in many different areas working my way up to a marketing executive role. I moved into the first executive marketing role for an ad agency when email marketing first started globally with Grey and then into a variety of different initiatives, including large companies like Mercer, smaller companies, and startups. I had five of my own businesses. I've even created a wearable tech company and through it all, I've been focusing on this concept of AIR and the belief that anything is possible, and if you find an opportunity to make the world a better place, you should pursue it.
How did you come up with AIR, to begin with? Most people are thinking about, “I'm going to do my particular job,” but you're talking about almost before there was a term for personal branding. You're essentially personal branding through that mechanism.
It started because of a smile that people say is nice. When you're eight years old and you get made fun of for having big teeth, it takes a lot in you. I believe that your personal branding and your personal brand and focus on authenticity start when you're younger and you have those life experiences. Throughout my younger years, whenever I felt like I didn't fit in or felt awkward, which I'm sure every single one of us felt at the same time and we didn't know it, I focused on being happy with who I was. That's where the authenticity came from.
I thought, “If people don't like me if they don't like my smile, then they don't need to be friends with me or I don't need to work with them,” and we moved from there. I felt very strongly going into the business world that I was going to do it under my terms and I was going to be successful as me. I wasn't going to try and be one person at work and go home and be a different person. I'm not good at that. The authenticity came out. The inspiration has been with me. I think I was born that way. I was born trying to and being compelled to inspire others.
The relatability, I think I captured over the years. My first management job at JCPenney was in the collection division. Now, imagine you've got a JCPenney credit card in the early 1990s before the internet and you haven't paid it in six months because you lost your job. People were looking for you through the white pages and calling your cousin and trying to find you in different ways. It’s something called skip tracing.
I, in my early twenties, was assigned to manage a team of women who had been doing that for over 30 years. I was managing people who had been doing their job longer than I was alive and it was not a nice job to have. I thought, “How in the world am I going to be successful in this?” I sat down with these women on the first day and I said, “I don't know anything about collections or about credit card debt. You've been doing this longer than I've been alive. I'm not sure how I'm going to help you to be better, but we're going to figure it out.”
Over the years, I built great relationships with these women and they came back to me and said, “You were honest and relatable to all of us and we saw in you something that made us trust you.” That combined trust enabled us to work as a team and that stayed with me. The authenticity, the inspiration, and the relatability became the cornerstone for how I've built my career.
Whether it's my personal branding that I'm building or applying in a professional area for any type of marketing like business to business or business to consumer, who wants to see an ad that they can't relate to? Most likely, you bought a product because you've got earwax and you want that twisty thing that pulls it all out. If you can't relate to it, you're not going to buy it. The AIR concept applies to marketing very effectively as well.
When you're spelling it out like that, you're thinking, “They're all key building blocks to both working with people in a productive way and then also, in the marketing sense I would say persuading or influencing people to want your product, and become engaged with the company.” I also think that you are dealing with a difficult situation in that way. Being upfront with people about it and saying, “I'm aware that you all know way more than I have. You've been doing this a long time.” I think we call that EQ. There are IQ and EQ in terms of the emotional ability to be empathetic to others and to understand in a way that does relate well to other people.
I've found throughout my career that when you approach any initiative that way, especially in the legal profession, there's a whole network of a community of people that are willing to help you. If you don't act like you know every single answer and you come and find people that you can trust and say, “I'm good at this. Help me with this. How can we work together?” People step up and help you, especially in the earlier stages of your career because they want you to be successful. They want to feel like they've been able to do something good as well. It ends up being a benefit versus picking a hard-line approach or faking it until you make it and other aspects that come into play.
People do respond to genuineness in terms of your being open and authentic to them. Some people could take advantage of that. If you're newer and say, “You aren't experienced,” I can take advantage of that but I think it's in how you relate to people that you get everyone on the same team instead of being opposing each other. That's a special skill, Jeanie. I can see that in you. Not everyone would be as good at that, at bringing people together.
I took a handwriting analysis class number of years ago because I thought it would be fun. One of the things that they teach you in handwriting analysis is if the bottom line if there's a line and if your Ys and Zs and Js stretch way down, that means that you focus a lot on your history and your prior experiences to make your future decisions.
What was interesting about this handwriting analysis book is it taught you to look for traits in people's handwriting that you could then relate to so that when you're speaking to them and saying, “If their letters are spaced far apart, that means they like their personal space.” If you're building a relationship with them at work, you want to give them more personal space and not invite them to go out to lunch every single day or be one of the close talkers that you see on TV shows.
Even though the handwriting book was something that I wanted to do for fun, the analytical piece of it and understanding how to relate to other people helps you be more successful in the workplace. Also, personally as well, but in the workplace especially because everybody does seek to have that higher level of EQ. I can only imagine. I'm not a lawyer in a courtroom, but I've been in a courtroom as an expert witness for a variety of other reasons over the years. You have to be able to relate to everybody in that courtroom to be successful as well. I could see it working out well in the law profession as well.
As you said, trial lawyers relate to the jury, to the judge, to the client, to all of those things, and within the trial team also. All of that I think is where most it comes out but we're not always, as lawyers, taught to think about this in terms of our own team in the office. We all think that we can manage people fine without any management training or any of this kind of thing.
A little humility in that regard and being conscious of it the way you are would go a long way in terms of building the internal teams at the office. The team can then accomplish more for the client and for the firm and company overall. Tell me about your latest adventure and how that came about because you did mention that you've had some entrepreneurial experience yourself before as well as large corporate experience. Tell me about this particular entrepreneurial venture.
I'm a big believer in fate and I think it was fate that you and I met the way that we did because we were supposed to have this type of conversation reversed. I was supposed to be interviewing you a couple of months ago and as fate would have it, we're here together now, which is perfect timing for me to talk about my latest venture. I was offered the opportunity to host a brand new TV show called LiftOff with Jeanniey Walden.
We're going to talk about the lines, the intersection between your personal and professional life, and the four ways that you can bring your holistic and best self to everything that you're doing to drive the biggest successes. It's very cool and new. We're pulling all the pieces together to launch the first season in February or the beginning of March 2023.
I'm thrilled to have this opportunity, but it didn't come out. I wasn't applying for a TV show host job, although since the opportunity came, I did go and check out, “Can you actually apply for a TV host job?” A producer found me. It was like when you walked through the mall and someone is like, “Do you want to be a model?” It was like that, but it was an opportunity that came out of my authenticity and I am very passionate about public speaking. About inspiring others in my speaking and showing people that they can make the most out of whatever they're doing, whether it's personal or professional.
The producers saw that and said, “There's a real need for this. People are looking for great content that helps them with things that they don't even know that they don't know until they go through it. I was talking to a friend about all the layoffs that are happening at the tech companies, but also every company in general as companies look to become more operationally efficient and more profitable.
People are looking for content that can help them with things they don't even know about until they go through it.
Also, talking about what is it that you need to know if you lose your job about how to financially make ends meet. I don't mean how do you apply for unemployment or how do you do those things, but what's the right way to quit a job or to leave a job? If you're leaving a startup, is there a way to exercise the stock without having the funds to do it or do you have to leave it on the table? Things that you don't even ask yourself until it happens to you.
I love being able to now have a whole TV show that explores all of those areas and brings experts who have gone through this and done this. It helps all of us sit there and think, “I never thought about that. I should start doing this now because I might need it 6 months or 1 year down the road. I better call somebody and let them know I saw this cool segment on TV.” I'm thrilled that LiftOff with Jeanniey Walden will be coming to a TV near you.
I think it shows is open to opportunities and to things. You told me that this was something that you'd had in your mind that you'd be interested in doing if there was an opportunity and then being open to that. It's not a common route from where you were to this particular role, but knowing that you had that desire to do it and then being open to it. Third is being willing to take that leap because it is quite a leap of faith in yourself in so many different ways.
There's a lot in that. Especially in law, we're told there's a route to success. Success looks a certain way. I'm sure it's the same way in business to some degree, but the law is even more. You graduate the school, you take this job, you work with this firm and then you've got success but redefining what success is for you at various points in your career and deciding that there isn't only one path. I think there's something freeing and valuable from what you are doing now that a lot of law students and lawyers could benefit from. It’s having that type of thinking, being outside the box, and being open to opportunities that may not have been what you were thinking of at that moment.
I've always personally been a believer that when an opportunity is presented to you, you should take it because what's the worst that could happen? Something goes wrong with a TV show and I have to go back to marketing and get another chief marketing officer job. I've done that for the last few years so I know I can do it again. I'm good.
I'm not worried about that piece of it but what's fascinating to me is I love looking at the different generations in the workplace. For our generations, we were brought up, especially in more strict industries like the legal industry, you're brought up, “This is the way we've done it, this is the way we've always done it and this is the way you will do it,” and then COVID happened. It blew up everything.
I know a lot of court hearings are still on Zoom in certain places and a lot of younger kids that are graduating are finding they're making more money from three side gigs than they are going into one career and investing their time into it. There's a different way of doing things and it's not going to be that long. It's only going to be about a few years or so before all of these change agents, all the younger generations that have been brought up and been forced to have a different mindset in the way that they look at problems.
They solve for solutions, survive pandemics, and get through recessions are going to change the way that things we knew work and create different opportunities and paths. There was no reason not to get in front of that and look for opportunities to look for change and create better ways of doing things because that's how our world expands.
Back when there were horse-drawn carriages and the Model T Ford came out, no one was thinking that that was going to be the way of the world but here we are. Elon Musk is sending people all over to a variety of planets. Nobody ever thought who'd own Twitter and here we are. You should always take advantage of the opportunities given to you because the worst thing that could happen to you is you're left in the same spot you are now. If this is not that bad, then you're going back to something that's not that bad but what are you leaving on the table if you didn't at least try it?
That’s such a great attitude. That is something that's not fostered in law school for sure. I don't know about business school, but not about law school. That's where I like to feature those in law who are doing things that are unusual, have different pathways, and use their law degrees in different ways. Just like you're using your marketing knowledge in a different way and bringing that dimension to your new project as well.
Thank you. I think what you're doing with this show is so inspirational for anybody in your field and I've watched a number of the episodes even though I'm not in your field and I love that there's so much to take away. There are so many insights that can be applied to everybody who's tuning in. It's great. Kudos to you.
Thank you to all the wonderful, amazing, and accomplished women like you who are willing to be guests and are willing to share their sometimes hard-earned lessons with the next generation. It's really helpful. I wanted to ask you, putting on your marketing hat again, we talked about personal branding a little bit. I was wondering if you could tease that out a little bit because it's a new concept in the legal realm. We know about our law firms. We're in private practice.
Our law firms certainly have brands and marketing, but I think we're at the cusp of individual lawyers' understanding. Within that firm, there's also a need for your own brand and your thinking about what is that makes me special to clients and to others in the company. What kind of tips would you give to those who are embarking on that concept even of personal branding? What should they be thinking about when they're thinking, “What would I do to personally brand myself?”
First, I would say that if you're not thinking about your personal and professional brand, you should be. Even though you don't need it, you are going to need it at some point in time and you need to start building it right now. What that means is you need to think about what makes you special. In my case, I am authentic or inspiring people.
The inspiration piece drives me. What is it about you? Are you the most diligent or the hardest worker? Are you the person that is the problem solver? Are you great with people? Can you get to the truth faster than anybody else? What is it about you that makes you stand out as a professional? It might be the fact that you're able to juggle a business call while you're making a grilled cheese sandwich for your children at the same time. Who knows? It doesn't matter what it is. Everybody has their superhero power.
The second thing is to determine where and how you want to build your brand. LinkedIn from a professional standpoint is certainly a great place to start. A lot of people will start to create a presence on LinkedIn and they don't know how. The easiest way to get started is to open up a blog account on Medium.com.
Medium.com is free. You can write your own blogs about whatever you want. Medium is searched by Google and it's ranked much more broadly than LinkedIn. LinkedIn is ranked within LinkedIn but Medium is ranked outside of it. You want to start writing maybe once a month even like recaps or things that you found interesting and then share that link on your LinkedIn profile so people start to understand a little bit about who you are, how you think, and what your personal initiatives are.
You then set some goals on the more personal social networks. Facebook to me is always about true friends and family. Instagram is a more pictorial view that shows that you're balanced. Unless your superhero trait is that you are a 24/7 by 365 workaholic and that's all you do, show a little bit about who you are. Back when I was starting my career, telling anybody that I was married or had children was something I would never say for fear that in the boardroom people would think less of me because I was a mom. They'd try to figure out how old I was and that would turn into another piece.
However, in this world, that visibility to show that you are a real person and that you are being authentic trumps everything else. If you're not talking about, “This is me and I drive this little Volkswagen bug even though I don't need to because I've had this car since I was eighteen and I'm not going to trade it in.” That says something about you and it means that people can trust you. You always want to build trust when you're building your personal brand.
If you focus on identifying your superhero traits, being able to share some of your thoughts in whatever areas you value, and then establishing a sense of trust through more visible social networks, it goes a long way. At work, what I'll tell you is we were talking before the interview that I am divorced and I ended up becoming great friends with my divorce attorney. She's one of the most fabulous women I've ever met my entire life and I think you should call her and have her on the show.
She had her practice for a while and I was shocked when she asked me to write a Google review about my experiences with her because I thought, “That's interesting, a divorce attorney asking for a Google review.” I did it because she was amazing. We had a great experience working together. I wrote a heartfelt review about everything that I thought. A couple of months later I get this email from Google saying, “I want to let you know your review has had 5,000 views.”
I thought, “That's crazy.” I called her and I said, “I'm thinking I helped build your client profile and build your client base here for a little while but I hadn't thought of how impactful traditional business-related social reviews can be for people in the legal industry.” I don't know because I'm not in that industry, but I would say if there are places like that where you can reach out and get those reviews and that validation to build that professional trust score, you definitely should.
That was such a great synopsis of the different components of the personal brand and how it shows up online in social media and otherwise. I think people get focused on particular content and we have to be 100% accurate. We shouldn't be giving legal advice and all of that. I think of that venue as being another opportunity to meet and connect with people. You wouldn't walk up to someone at a cocktail party and start talking about the law with them. You wouldn't do the same thing on LinkedIn or some other social media. It's more about connecting with people as people and as professionals.
One of the things I did love about the beginning of the pandemic was when we were all quarantined and before people started putting the fake backgrounds and everything else up as I enjoyed talking to people. I'm a huge face-to-face person, but I enjoyed talking to people and being able to see beyond their profession. I'm in the corporate office now and it added another dimension to whoever you were working with. Peer, fellow employee, partner, prospect, or client, it didn't matter.
It gave you something else and a different way to connect with them. When I was in my last role, we had a sales guy whose wife just had a baby and there was one call that I was on with him. The wife was like, “Please take the baby,” and in the middle of the call, he walked out. Everybody saw the baby and within five minutes and they were like, “We'll work with you.” I called him after. I'm like, “You bring that baby on every single call from now on. I don’t if your wife needs to hand the baby off every single time or whatever but people are like, “I'm like you. I went to that college or that university. You have a dog too or I can't believe you have a parrot that's sitting on your head.”
It made a difference. Again, I love having the face-to-face and I'm glad that we're beyond that, but still the Zoom calls do give you that chance to talk about yourself more as my name, my title, and the company that I work for. Especially as women, it’s something we tend to do, “I'm Jennifer and I'm the blah at XYZ company.” It'd be also weird to be like, “I'm Mary, a mother of seven.” That'd be weird too, but I think there's a different way to approach it.
There's a relatability component that you've mentioned, but there can also be too much information. We have to have that balance between too much personal information and being relatable as a human. I think that's one of the things from the pandemic of being from home and having everyone be at their home and seeing more about their family life, their personality, and how they decorate. All of these different things that you would never otherwise get to see.
It reminds everyone also that we are all human beings in different roles, and in different positions, but there's a commonality to our humanity and it's a nice reminder of that from the Zoom calls and the pandemic. I appreciate your talking about the personal branding part. That was super good. What about in terms of obviously now you like to speak and you're going to be a host of your own program? What kinds of tips would you give to those who might be interested in public speaking and how could they be better at that? What might they do to improve their performance in that regard?
It depends on how much you are interested in public speaking and what you're willing to commit. I would say the best thing that I ever did was when I was a teenager, I was in a musical theater class and we had an improv teacher. I would say if you can, if you want to be a great public speaker, take an improv class where if something is thrown out and you're told to do it the best you can and everybody's in the same boat, you appreciate it.
If you want to be a great public speaker, take an improv class.
The second thing I would say is to find something that you love speaking about. Give yourself a time limit and make yourself fit a speech into that unreasonable time limit because that makes you think very succinctly about what you're going to say and you learn how to think differently about the phrases that you are going to bring to the table when you have the opportunity to speak publicly.
The third thing that I would say is to start reaching out and see who's looking for speakers. The Chamber of Commerce will always look for speakers in your area. There are different volunteer and local organizations that are always looking for speakers. If you have your heart set on it, you speak everywhere you can. Go to your kid's school and be a speaker for the day. Speaking in front of a group of 8 or 9-year-olds will give you a lesson that you'll never forget for sure and an appreciation for anybody that's in the education industry.
Also, join different groups and clubs that can be free and practice. People will start to refer you and you can stand up there. It's so much fun to be able to look out in the audience and see somebody smiling, nodding their head, and to have somebody come up to you afterwards and say, I never thought about this before. You gave me a different perspective. It’s at least what drives me and that's why I love speaking. That's why I love bringing information to people because there's an opportunity to make someone else's life better.
As lawyers, especially those in the courtroom, we're doing a lot of speaking, but I think that in a public speaking role, it's a little bit different than what we would be doing in a courtroom but I think one informs the other. I took a lot of creative writing classes many years ago. Different kinds of short stories, creative nonfiction, and a bunch of them. My work in that regard informs now my legal writing.
I try to incorporate good writing as good writing. I incorporate those in things that I do and I think of public speaking that way. Being more comfortable and standing up, being concise about what you're conveying, and relating to people. All of those things are helpful if you're making your case in court too. It's helpful to have that and be able to operate in a bunch of different realms.
As crazy as it sounds, especially for courtroom speaking or other types of speaking where you have to be extremely buttoned up, the other two things that I like to suggest to people is there's an app called Elevate. It's a memory app. It's games. You play five games a day and it helps you improve your memory so that you don't get dementia or Alzheimer's but it also helps you improve your appreciation of words and language to make things more concise.
You leverage different words to understand what different word choices are and there's a gamify which is great. The second thing is, I mentioned my minors in sign language. Take a sign language class at a community college or somewhere else because sign language, unlike French or Italian, or Spanish, is a different language because if you signed every single word, we would be here for a very long time for me to say, “Hello, how are you doing today?”
In sign language you are taught to think about the time, “Is it this day? Is it now? Is it yesterday? Is it tomorrow?” The topic, the action, and the object. Typically, in a sign language class, one of the midterms or finals is you have to sign the morning rush hour commute on the radio and you have to hear all these words. You have to hear, “There's a backup on the 405 that goes all the way back to the I-5 and there's a Ford Bronco,” and all this other stuff. You have to turn it into time, topic, action or object while somebody's talking.
The processing of that and the need to make it succinct helps you be prepared. When you're standing in front of an audience, you're able to speak in a more succinct way that's effective because you're getting your message across. Time, topic, action, and object. If you don't want to take sign language, try and think in that process and it'll help you out.
When preparing for a speech, turn whatever you're talking about into a time, topic, action, and object.
Having different ways to stretch your mind and think about things in a different way, that's certainly what it does. It is putting the building blocks together in a different way and being conscious of them. When you were speaking right now, I was thinking about how it's so interesting all of our different talents and skills and how they come together. I thought, “Your teaching part, you're very good at laying things out and teaching as you go in this conversation also.”
What you're saying the sign language brought to you as well, what you learned from that, and how you're applying it in different ways is another example of how all of the different skills and experiences we come with along the way all wrap up together to make us truly unique. There are certain things that are perfect for us because all of those experiences beforehand may not have made sense at the time. Looking back you're like, “This made use of all of my various skills.” It's just another good example of that. All the different things that we come to and the skills that we gain and how they combine in one person to bring something special to the world.
I saw this post on LinkedIn. I don't know who posted it so I apologize. I can't give them credit right now. It said, “This is how much I learned from the classroom. This is how much I learned from success in business. This is how much I learned from making mistakes.” I think every opportunity is a chance to learn, but when you make mistakes and everybody makes a lot of mistakes, especially early on and it doesn't stop, have the opportunity to learn from that and apply it differently to make the future even better. There's an opportunity everywhere.
I know everyone thinks about that. What they say about startups fail fast so you can iterate quickly. I think that's something hard for people in law to embrace because our job is to like not to make a mistake and to watch out for other people's risks. It can be hard to internalize that, but at the same time, that's when you stumble or have a hard time, that's when you find out how strong you are and that's how you grow.
Those things will happen despite every effort you can make. You don't come out doing things perfectly. Experience teaches you that as well as school. To have that long-term view of it, instead of being, “I made this mistake. It's all over.” Now, just pick yourself up and keep moving forward. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and some great nuggets for people.
Also, for anyone, but particularly lawyers because we don't get to hear this kind of thing too often in their professional lives and for law students to be thinking about as they're entering into their law careers. I appreciate you taking the time in the midst of the launch of your new show and all of that to come to visit with me on the show and share it with the audience. I usually conclude with some lightning-round questions. My first one is, what skill would you like to have but don't?
Creative design for PowerPoint presentations. I'm horrible at them.
That’s a very specific thing. That sounds like it might've come up lately.
No, it's my life. I'll have the best idea and someone will say, “Could you drop that up for me?” I'm spending hours trying to visually showcase what's in my head. I'm also bad at looking at an empty room and saying, “This could be this.”
I was going to say, I think that's something definitely that some people have. They can see that. I'm in the category of, if you could give me a few options, I could probably tell you which one I like but I couldn't come up with it from scratch. I think that's a whole different part of the brain. My mom's like that.
You and I cannot go into empty rooms together and be like, “This could be.” No.
I’m like, “Could you give me a few hints and then I can select. I have some good taste, but it's something about that whole visualizing from scratch in purely the design and visual world,” but no. I can tell you if it doesn't work if I see it so it's a different skill. That would be a cool one to have. Who is your hero in real life?
My daughter. I have five kids between my husband and me. My youngest daughter was adopted from Russia. English was a second language to her when we adopted her. She was two. She had no verbal skills, in Russian or English at all. She came to America adopted with alcohol effects, English as a second language, and a whole bunch of challenges. Now, she is one of the few women at the citadel in the military college in South Carolina on her way to become, as she says it, a CEO. She is one of the most inspirational people that you will ever meet.
She has this great knack to give advice and she's accomplished so much. Not only am I so proud of her as I am with all my kids, so shout out to the other children too. When she was born at five and a half months, she was 1.5 pounds. She was tied to a board and put in a pot of warm water for three days and fed goats milk until they could get her in the hospital and she lived.
When we adopted her, the doctor said, “This girl is so strong. She walks out. A truck runs over, she's going to pick the truck up and throw it.” She is unstoppable. Even on my worst day when I'm questioning, “Can I do this? How can I do this?” I looked at everything that she's accomplished and how amazing she's become. I’m reinvigorated.
That is one of the most amazing stories I've heard, especially in response to that question. That is remarkable. I do think that there's a miracle aspect to all of that, for sure, but there's also, how early on our personality and the will to move forward.
We are stronger than we think we are and we can accomplish more than we know. She's a true testament to that.
I'm glad I asked you that question. That was an amazing answer and insight into your family's life. The next question is, if you were to have a dinner party, who would you invite as your dinner guests? It could be more than one person and they do not need to be currently with us. It could be historical figures too.
I would invite everybody because that's the kind of person. I am having a big dinner party. Who wants to come?” You have to be fun though. I don't know that I could give you specific names because I am truly fascinated with every single person that I meet. I would say if I was having a dinner party because I live in New Jersey right near New York City and I’m always in New York City, I would invite all the families that don't have homes so that they could have a nice meal.
That is beautiful. A truly unique answer. It’s not one that I've heard before. The last question is what is your motto if you have one?
Always create AIR. Be Authentic, Inspirational, and Relatable. It would never go wrong. Be fearless.
You definitely live that. I think sometimes we have mottos and we're like, “We're hoping to get to that point,” but that encapsulates your approach to so many things. Thank you so much for sharing and joining the show. I appreciate it, Jeanniey.
Thank you so much for having me on. It has been so wonderful speaking with you and getting to know you. I'm so glad that I have a new friend. Thank you.
Thank you.