AEE 1988: How to Turn Life Obstacles into Career Success with Corporate Executive Victoria Pelletier

This is an All Ears English Podcast episode 1988. How to turn life obstacles into career success with corporate executive Victoria Peltier. Welcome to the All Ears English Podcast downloaded more than 200 million times. We believe in connection, not perfection. With your American host, Lindsey McMahon and today's featured guest coming to you from Denver, Colorado, USA. And to get your transcripts delivered by email every week, go to alllearsenglish.com forward slash subscribe. On today's episode, I interview Victoria Peltier, managing director at Accenture and award-winning business leader. Victoria has reached the highest level of success as a corporate executive, but she overcame enormous life challenges to get there. Today, she'll tell us three things that we can do to overcome our own challenges to become the successful professionals that we want to be. Listen in today. Hello, Victoria. Welcome to All Ears English. How are you today? I'm awesome. Thanks for having me here. Oh, I'm so excited. I love interviewing guests on our show and I'm just going to introduce you for a second here to our listeners. So listeners today, I have Victoria Peltier on the show. Victoria is a 20 year corporate executive, 20 year plus corporate executive and board director who is currently a managing director at Accenture and has worked at the leadership level for IBM and American Express. She was nicknamed a 2022 top 30 most influential business leader in tech by CIO look. And she's been nicknamed the turnaround queen by former colleagues and employers because she inspires and empowers her team and clients to change their mindsets to go ahead and drive growth for business, leadership and culture. Welcome to the show again, Victoria. It's quite a bio. We have a lot of things to talk about here today. You've done a lot of great things in the corporate world and then she achieved an incredible level of corporate success. We're going to talk today about this idea of turning things around. So it starts with your story of things that you went through as as a kid growing up adversity overcoming adversity. What is your story? Where did you start in the world to eventually get to where you are today? What can you share with us? Well, what I'll tell you first, Lindsay is probably 10 years ago. I would not have shared the story this oddly, but the reality is as I was coaching and mentoring others and trying to get them to understand how to achieve and overcome obstacles, I couldn't I realize I couldn't do that authentically if I didn't share my own story. Yeah. And so the turnaround queen does start as the turnaround child. So I'm born to a drug addicted teenage mother who was exceptionally abusive to me and was in and out of the child welfare system. I am however, one of the fortunate ones who was adopted and you know, to parents who loved me very much, but so some economically were a little lower on the scale and my dad was a school janitor and my mom was secretary. And at one point, I think I was 11 or 12. My mom said, Tori, you need to do better than us. And she meant, you know, pursue my education and make sure vocationally I was achieving more. But that is why if you want to, you know, Simon Cinex. Yeah, I start with why this, this is mine. She never had to say that to me because I was determined I would be better than biology or circumstance and at the time I thought it was about proving to the world that I was better than all of that. And so I knew I was going to drive super hard. And that's, that's my why. And that's where I've been so driven from a career and subsequently little less about career and more about the broader impact that I want to have. Oh, I love it. I love it. It's important to have that why we talk about this on the show a lot for our listeners. You know, I think our listeners are really going to be able to relate today. We all have our own personal struggles and our listeners have an additional challenge of doing business in English in a second language, which is quite challenging, but it is so important to have that why. So I want to kind of dig into your story a little bit more and ask you a few more questions. But I would love if you have for our listeners today, Victoria, three tips on how to turn things around. How do what did you do? Like what were the key things? If you can think back the three key things that you did that let you achieve this incredible level of corporate success, you know, leadership level at IBM, Accenture, AMX, these are huge global companies. How did you get there and how can our listeners do it too? Well, the first thing somewhat related to that story of having this great adversity was learning how to have what I call a healthy level of resilience. I wouldn't say I was always healthy, you know, building up walls, protecting myself from getting hurt. That's not the healthy version. So learning how to do that and being really grounded in self awareness when I had an emotion or a reaction or action to something. So that would be one. How to deal with that much healthier way and process some of those things. And just by the way, take one step, you know, one foot in front of the other and making progress towards whatever goal or objective I had. So that would be one. I love that. Yeah, let me stop you right there. So how did you get there? So a healthy level of resilience. Resilience is a huge phrase that I think definitely comes up in when we're talking about success. Anyone who's achieved any level of success in any aspect of life is resilient. How did you learn that skill to be resilient? Was that something that was that you trained yourself on or did it just come through having these experiences? I mean, do we have to have such difficult experiences to eventually achieve that? What do you think? What are your thoughts there? I think it's a combination of a couple of things. And so much like nature and nurture. So I think there's some kind of a DNA in me that has allowed me to be my best friend is nicknamed me Turtle. You know, I can shoulder a lot, but I'm quite marshmallow inside and all soft, right? Yeah. So that's a bit of the DNA. I've just built that way. But I do think it's like a muscle also. I had to learn some things. And there were a couple pivotal moments for me. One on the personal front around relationships and I remember a partner that I had said, you know, you need to let me in. You need to bring down your walls. So that one, I learned I had a nickname of the Iron Maiden and I was shocked. Like kind of crushed me going back to the turtle. I'm like, I'll soften marshmallow. I cry at the humantic side. But I wasn't showing up that way. I thought I needed to wear this mask. Because I was fearful and insecure and a little bit of imposter syndrome. I was also young. I was the only woman. I'm part of the LGBT community. So there was all these reasons I thought I had to show up a certain way. And so I had to unlearn. I had to lean into something that made me really uncomfortable and that was being vulnerable. That was sharing my story and showing up in a much more authentic way. So all of those have contributed to this better way of being resilient and handling challenges that come my way. I love it. It is really interesting when we start to understand how people see us from the outside. When sometimes it is completely different from how we see ourselves fascinating. So all of these factors. So it's not just any one thing. It's a combination, as you said, it's a combination of kind of the learning and the DNA, what's already inherent inside of you, which created that healthy resilience. I love it. So that is kind of the first tip for our listeners here is develop that healthy resilience, or have models, have people that can reflect back what they see, but also have a good sense of being in touch with yourself. Victoria and knowing who you are. Yeah. Yeah. One hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. What would be the second thing that our listeners could think about if they want to overcome their own adversity? What do you think? I think adversity, whether it's an obstacle or a challenge put in front of us, I think we have the opportunity. We often tell people you are the CEO of brand U. And so you take charge completely. Do not put whether it's your career. Let's just focus on career for a second. Do not put that in the hands of someone else. So if you aren't successful in achieving the role that you want, or getting that next job at a certain company, then I say that it's an opportunity to look really inwardly around that. And also talk to others. And so this is where the importance of networking and having mentors from a variety of different places is really important. But that comes down to our own commitment to ensuring our skills are really relevant. And we are high performing in those skills. And it's really interesting. I've seen over these last couple of decades, the shelf life of skills shrinking dramatically. Like when you think about technology and how the future of work looks like now, not just where it's getting done, but by whom and how. Yes. Oh, fascinating. I love it. And so these skills that we're building, so it sounds like you're saying, you know, don't wait for, for example, your employer to teach you something or force you to learn something on the job. We're out there gaining those skills, understanding what our gaps are. Is that right? Absolutely. I think you need to make yourself relevant. Learn the skills that are appropriate to be successful in your current role. And Lindsay, I'll tell you one of the most important things I think is when you start in any role or organization is be really clear in understanding how success is measured. What does success look like? How will my performance review be, you know, formulated at the end of the year and making sure that you're aligning your skills and performance specifically to those? One, and that's for future and for now today, but also the relevancy for future. So being connected to where's the business moving? What kind of skills might I need in the future? And how do I develop those without waiting for them to your point for someone to drag you along to those training courses? Yeah, it's so good. I think often we have a tendency to kind of, you know, often you'll ask someone, how did you get your job? You say, I fell into it. I don't love that answer because it kind of it signifies a sense of, you know, passivity in our career, just kind of move this way. And I fell into it, right? Even if we're not working for ourselves, there's still a certain level of control we can take over where we're going. That's exactly what you're talking about here, Victoria. So good. So learn the skills we need, figure out what they are. And I love what you said at the end, make sure you understand how success is being measured. It might be pretty different from what you think, right? Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Is there a fine? I mean, we've already gotten tons of value here. This is fantastic. Is there a final tip or listeners should keep in mind of how they could overcome their own difficulties, whether it's language or another scenario in life? Anything else? I think there's an incredible opportunity to pivot and recognize that it's okay for us to make change. So whether that's someone who's a new immigrant to the country and is learning a different language, they might have to do some different things as they gain work experience and go forward. I think a lot about this as I talk to people around personal branding. Yes. I needed to pivot. I was known as the Iron Maiden and that was not the kind of leader I would want to work for. It actually wasn't who I was, but clearly that was people's perception. So when overcoming that obstacle, I needed to pivot. I needed to do something very different to rebuild my brand in the way in which I wanted people to know who I was. I think that personal brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. Yes. So I think your listeners should recognize that when there's adversity and whether it's this new situation they're stepping in or in my instance where I had to pivot and make a change in terms of the way I was being perceived, that again, I built a plan around that. I needed to be recognized who my audience was, make sure that the message was resonating with them. I was consistent and I was showing up not only with the advent of online in LinkedIn, and I'm an early LinkedIn adopter, you can show up online. But my kids will joke, I need to start saying, IRL in real life. There's a way you need to show up as well. So I would tell your listeners that they can pivot, they can make a change, they can be really strategically intentional about what that change is based upon adversity or new circumstances that they're dealing with. Yeah. So we're never locked in to being defined by what people see us as. It may not be true if we decide that's not how we want to be seen. We can always pivot and I love that word. So reflective of how technology pivots nowadays and how we can in our careers in the way that we're seeing if we, as you said, you set up a plan for success, you knew exactly what you were going to do and how you were going to do it. This is awesome. Well, this is a really nice sneak peek. I feel like our listeners would love to hear more from you, Victoria, of what you're doing. It sounds like you're doing a little bit of public speaking. Can you tell our listeners where to find you online to learn more? Yeah. Well, I've been really intentional around my branding. So you could Google me and I'm the majority of the first many pages that come up. But the best way, honestly, is through either personal website, which is Victoria dash peltier.com. It can take them to any other social platform that they wish and public, you know, all that content I publish tends to go there and get pushed out. Perfect. I love it. Well, thank you for coming on the show today. Our episodes are nice and short, but this is, I feel like we've gotten a ton of value and advice. I think our listeners are definitely going to be inspired to look at their, you know, their scenario, what challenges they have ahead of us. And we all have those challenges and how can we turn things around and have an incredible career of success. Congratulations on what you've done in your career. Thanks, Lindsay. Thanks for having me on. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to all ears English. Would you like to know your English level? Take our two minute quiz. Go to all ears English dot com forward slash fluency score. And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything. See you next time. ♪♪♪♪♪...