Catalyst for Change – Business Women’s Conference
19 Jun 2014
Photos by Sheena Haywood Photography.
On Wednesday 16 May, 2014, I attended the Queenstown Chamber of Commerce’s Women’s Business Conference in Queenstown. This is the third year that the Chamber of Commerce has run this conference and again it was a sell out at an early stage. Over 250 businesswomen from around Queenstown attended. The MC for the day was Ali Mau a journalist, broadcaster and speaker in NZ familiar to us all.
The seven other speakers are all well-known NZ business women and social commentators hailing from diverse backgrounds. Overall the presentations were inspiring, interesting and relevant to any woman in NZ. It is not often that in one day attendees will be forced to confront social issues and realities; not usually talked or thought about, be in awe of women’s achievements and their paths and be inspired to make changes to their lives, while having a great many laughs and moments throughout.
Celia Lashlie
The first speaker was Celia Lashlie who I am sure is a person known to all NZers. The topic of Celia’s speech was “The lives being led by some women in NZ: What has it got to do with me?” Celia acknowledged at the outset of her presentation that the topic was “kinda heavy” however this wasn’t intended to make women feel guilty but rather to raise the “faces of the other women”. These other women she was referring to were the 5% of the prison population who she called “the forgotten women”.
We had become so “clever” she said that we think that there is an academic answer to everything but that really all we needed to do was to get people to tell their stories. If we let them do this, they could work through it. In her view women only changed when they finally understood that their decisions “mattered”. This was not to say that this understanding meant that what the women did was acceptable or explicable, in other words an excuse. But by “standing with them” we could make them “stand up”.
Andrea Thompson
Andrea Thompson the co-founder of Catapult (a company proving leadership development programmes) was next. Andrea is an ex-lawyer who found her niche outside the law in the training/motivational area. Andrea started her presentation with some startling statistics. Only 24% of people love their work yet on average yet most have 80,000 work hours in their lifetime. So we have workplaces full of negative people returning the next day.
It was simple to say that we know what we should do, however, the problem is knowing how we do this. Andrea says that there are rules for leading a life you love.
They are:
- Purpose
Find your purpose. This essentially is where passion and talent intersect.
- Master your mind set.
This means put aside feelings of being inadequate. These feeling could come from a number of places (although where they do come from is irrelevant). We also need to accept that while there may have been disappointments/bad things in the past, these things just happened and do not mean anything about us.
You are not the only one plagued by self- doubt. Each person needs to manage their own internal critic and Andrea provided an interesting example where, even she in her training role doubted herself, only to discover later on that the self-doubt was something she had created from a circumstance she wrongly interpreted.
- Design your life
Life is short and precious, think about what you are going to do with it.
- Seize the day
In this regard confidence is a myth. The risk of not trying is far greater than the risk of failing. We have two choices in life either be a player or a spectator. Players will win, fail, win, etc. This is how they succeed. A spectator merely stands on the side lines neither winning nor losing.
- Manage your moods
Your mood is contagious and effects you and others around you. I liked her phrase “Do not be a fun sucker”. Andrea said it was important that we realise the power of our mood.
- Lessons – Keep your promises
People who live their life with power and passion keep their promises.
Julie Chapman
Julie Chapman, the CEO and co-founder of KidsCan, was the third speaker. In 2008 Julie was recognised as a Sir Peter Blake emerging leader and was a 2010 finalist for the Kiwibank NZer of the year.
Julie gave us some insight into her reasons behind establishing KidsCan and what KidsCan does. Julie said her motivation to establish KidsCan came from her concern as to why children were not getting the most out of education and anecdotal stories she had heard about children not having the “basics” at school. It is obvious that children who do not have basics are prevented from participating at school and this affects their ability to learn and thrive. Simple things like shoes will prevent children from participating in activities like school trips and school sports.
Julie said she had an over whelming urge to throw in her job and help the children. At first, however, she carried on working and set up the charity in her spare time (in her garage). She initially managed to convince Guardian Trust and got seed funding of $40,000 from them. Guardian Trust has continued to support the organisation since.
The thing about KidsCan is that they have a no-blame philosophy. Regardless of what the parents/guardians do it’s not the children’s fault. In the last year the charity provided 32,000 meals per week to schools programmes, 50,000 raincoats, 20,000 shoes and 40,000 socks. Now the trust is branching into the health area and there was recent publicity about the head lice treatment and the process of essentially bringing back the friendly “nit nurse”.
The trust is often criticised as an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff because it is not fixing the problem. However Julie said the trust took the approach of stepping in when most needed. In addition, as they had been doing this for 9 years, they were now in a position of young adults coming back to them and telling them how much KidsCan helped them. Julie knows “for sure” she has contributed to getting many children to where they are today given the help in the early years.
In relation to the funds that are ultimately spent on charitable purposes Julie said that; for example, in the telethon in 2009, 80 cents out of each dollar went to the children. While the telethon was a great fundraiser it unfortunately had many critics who raised the issue of funds not being appropriately applied for charitable purposes. While the criticisms ultimately proved unfounded, with the release of the financial figures, for KidsCan it did provide some set-backs. However as outlined earlier the trust is going from strength to strength in helping children where needed. The trust now operates in 405 schools in NZ and is continuing to grow. There are schools waiting to go on the trust books to be provided with these material basics for their children.
Finally Julie said that, for her, having a mentor was particularly helpful. The great thing she said in having a mentor was that the mentor told her both what she wants to hear but also what she needed to hear.
Kathyrn Wilson
The fourth speaker was the Shoe Aficionado, Kathryn Wilson. Kathryn Wilson is undoubtedly NZ’s premier footwear designer. Her path to this position was fascinating and inspiring. It was exhausting just to listen to what she has done and how. Kathryn outlined her path from being a passionate “graduate with big dreams” to becoming an influential business woman with an expanding shoe empire.
Kathryn told us that she wanted to be a shoe designer from the start and the fact that she couldn’t study shoes in NZ “was a hard one”. This didn’t deter her as, in design school, she persuaded her supervisors to allow her to focus on shoe fashion wherever possible. She was granted a scholarship in her second year of university to the United Kingdom where she went to Nottingham. Again in the fashion school there they let her focus on shoes. She said that the United Kingdom opened her eyes and she came back to NZ “busting to go”. Initially the shoes were a part time business for her while she worked in a fashion house in NZ. Now she is 11 years into the business and her shoes are in demand. Under her main label she has always insisted on limited the number of shoes in any design as she placed herself in her consumers’ shoes. She always wanted to be “the person at the party” with different shoes so didn’t want her customers to be at the party and everyone have the same shoes. This means that her premier line of shoes are limited edition and she also has a more casual line and shoes for children. Kathryn has been supported throughout by AMP and the initial AMP scholarship she was granted enabled her to set up her business.
Kathryn spoke about the many initiatives over the last 3 years she had been involved in. What most of you would be familiar is “the shoe box” that started its life at the Britomart Centre, moved to Wellington briefly and then became a fixture in the Container Mall for a year in Christchurch. In addition Kathryn changed the way the industry runs fashion shows in NZ. She opened her shows to the public and integrated with social media.
In Kathryn’s business she has an advisory board where she has 4 people who give her advice and guidance but do not have the same constraints/responsibilities as being on a board of directors.
One thing that came through from Kathryn’s presentation is that she is the ultimate enthusiast with big ideas but has had the ability to motivate and persuade those around her to allow her, and fund her, to put those ideas into place. To date and I suspect into the future these initiatives have been successful and welcomed by consumers.
Amanda Mortimer
Amanda Mortimer was the fifth speaker and she is a speaker/life coach and author of the book “This is it. This is your life. Live it”. As well as running her business Amanda has been involved in many charitable initiatives as she ran and biked in endurance events in various parts of the world.
The interesting question that Amanda posed at the beginning of her presentation was “What would you do if each night you had $86,400 put in your bank account but at midnight that amount went back to zero?” She said how would you spend it? Everyone agreed that you would spend it on stuff you found quite interesting. Then Amanda said there were 86,400 seconds in a day. At the end of the day they are gone. How do we spend those seconds? This was certainly a statistic that made one think about how one spends each day and the wasted parts of it.
The next thing that Amanda spoke about was “curve balls and virus busters”. As she said, with curve balls the important thing was how we catch that ball and what do we do with it. Everyone in life is going to get curve balls but how we dealt with these was up to us. Amanda also said that the curve balls are sent to you to allow you to grow and went through a personal journey of hers with us and showed how she managed a difficult situation by not letting the difficult situation define her or scare her.
Virus are the things that people will do or say to us which affect the way we lead our lives. If they are negative she called them “viruses of the mind”. I think it fair to say that most of us have been in this situation where we spend time with people who are negative and critical and it is difficult to not let that affect the way we feel about ourselves or deal with others. This is not to say that one is not supportive of friends in difficulties or suffering depression rather that we do not take another person’s negativity and let it affect the way be behave. Even when people make negative comments/observations/predictions she said “do not engage but kept on your path”. You do this by not letting these viruses in, in her words “busting them”.
Amanda said that “I am” were the two most powerful words today. There are powerful in that what you put in front of them shapes your reality and this reality (underpinned by our belief systems) drives our behaviour. She explained quite an interesting experiment where people were asked to say whether or not they we unlucky or lucky. In the experiment they showed that the so called “lucky ones” were expecting more positive things from their environment and this meant that they were able to observe and take more positive things from the environment than those that thought they were unlucky so expected nothing.
Lindy Nelson
Lindy Nelson was our next speaker. Surprising for me as a complete townie Lindy’s presentation on her pathway from town girl, who marries a farmer, to founding the Agri Womens Development Trust and being the Next businesswoman of the year and finalist in the Westpac Woman in Influence Awards in 2013 was fascinating. Lindy’s experiences and views on changing and creating opportunities for women in the agriculture sector are relevant to women in all areas.
Lindy’s focus is creating change at an individual level and in providing resources to support those individuals. In her view that if one focuses on the larger picture one is often held back by the enormity of the task. It is different however, if one focuses on the individual.
As with any area of business and life women bring a different perspective to decision making and need to be involved. New involvement brings new thinking and decisions on economical and environment matters that are sound and safe. The statistics she pointed out are that 50% of ownership and management of farms is in the hands of women yet only 6% of leadership in the sector is in the hands of women.
Lindy took the approach of saying that in terms of the agricultural sector all decisions, plans and future prospects should be decided with 100% or our talent, not 50%. A good way of looking at it for leadership/decision making is all areas!
Aside from her involvement in the agricultural sector Lindy was one of the prime movers behind the reorganisation of the Waiarapa District Health Board and the building of the new hospital there. While Lindy did not go into details I suspect her involvement in this would have been another interesting story.
Alison Mau
Alison Mau also spent some time talking to us about life in the media. Alison busted a few myths about life in the media and unfortunately burst a lot of our bubbles in this regard. Her story showed us that as an employee in the media it is not glamorous and its hard work. Things can change at any moment and, particularly for women as they get older, it becomes more difficult for them to maintain their position. Certainly, she acknowledged there is good money to be made for those in the media while at their peak but the future was always uncertain.
Thankfully she saw that sexist attitudes in broadcasting were starting to subside and it was certainly a better place to be now than it was 20 years ago. For women there were still many issues but with the support of mentors and senior colleagues it was becoming easier for women to make it in broadcasting.
Lisa O'Neill
The final speaker for the day was the fabulous Lisa O’Neill. Lisa is a stylist, a media presenter, editor, author, mother and inspiring speaker. Some would call her a human dynamo and are in amazement of her enthusiasm and go get them attitude.
Lisa’s presentation was on “Having a dream: How do you turn your dream into reality”. Lisa posed the question of “What were you put on this earth to do?”. Her view is that if you have a dream, you have the power to do it otherwise you would not have the dream. Dreams do not come as one big thing but often they come as little things. It is not just a matter of doing something small every day and hoping for best. She said there were three questions.
- What I want?
- What I love?
- What I believe?
Lisa gave many examples in her life of dreams that she had and how she had achieved them. One example is her passion for magazines. As a child she initially got them from the library. Once she was able to afford them she brought them. Now she has been offered the position of beauty editor at the NZ Womens Weekly. She freely admitted that the NZ Womens Weekly was going to change for the better given her input.
The thing about Lisa’s presentations is that it is often hard to write an article on them because one is too busy laughing to write notes. You’re not laughing though because of lame jokes or trivial matters but because of Lisa’s startling frankness on some matters. Things that that little boy might be said if the message in the “emperor’s new clothes” were morphed into different environments/time periods.
The overwhelming thing that does come out after any of Lisa’s presentations is that you think: Yes I too can do that and be fabulous at it as well!
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