Unconventionally: The Timelessness of Dinah Salonga

Back in September, Dinah posted a video of herself on her Instagram account. After seeing her friends playing with a Bender board, a balancing exercise tool where a wooden oval plank rolls over a cylinder, she went ahead and bought a set online. In the video, Dinah, wearing pink drawstring pants and a cream shirt, excitedly steps on the board and promptly falls, rubbing her elbow while laughing hysterically on the floor. She writes in the caption,

“I don’t like reading manuals. I will try things out first and if things don’t work then I read the manual :).”

Dinah Salonga is the managing director of Yoga Plus Inc.
Living Life Version 3.0, she’s on a path to spiritual enlightenment and fulfilling her soul’s purpose.

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Dinah Salonga is a dream girl in every sense of the word. A tech innovator in her youth, she made a daring career shift in her 50s. Now, into her 60s, she’s living a literally idyllic life in the province after the pandemic rendered geography irrelevant. It’s the type of life—and her sense of ease—that many of us aspire to have.

Her Best-Laid Plan

She’s not a planner. She mentions this numerous times throughout our interview. The whole process of her packing up and uprooting her family from the capital to Ilocos took only three weeks—most of that to secure the necessary permits to travel during the enhanced community quarantine. And that move was prompted when someone told her of an available house in the province. 

“I’m not the type to plan. I know people who say, for example, ‘Oh, I want to be a CEO at the age of 30 or I want to make my first million when I’m 25’. I didn’t have any of those things,” Dina recalls. “I just went when an opportunity came.” 

It must have been a series of fortuitous events then because, as Dinah puts it, many of the major decisions she had in life presented themselves to her. 

“Whenever an opportunity presents itself, I give my best. That's when you uncover other opportunities that would come your way, like maybe becoming an entrepreneur or seeing a gap in some areas of your life or in other people's lives that would open another opportunity for you”

“I just went when an opportunity came. Like my first job, when I got accepted. I didn't know anything about the company. I didn't know anything about the job. All I knew was I had the job, which was important, right? That was our conditioning—you study, you find a job, you stay in the job for however long you want to and be good at it, make some money, be stable, and then you will be happy,” she adds. 

Reading these words back and you feel like there is a level of earnestness that belies her cheery personality. It’s the seriousness of someone who has it all figured out—or rather, someone who knows you don’t have to. You just have to…do.

Born Teacher

It comes as no surprise when Dinah tells me that she didn’t know what course to take for college. An aunt came up to her as she was filling up her applications and suggested statistics, which would be a prelude to a career as an actuarial scientist. While waiting for graduation, she earned a spot in the Computer Information Systems, the IT arm of power distribution company Meralco. 

In the ‘70s, there were very few options to get into the tech industry. In fact, there were only two and the CIS was one of them. The class was interesting, to say the least, a mix of different professions and age groups all entering a then mysterious field. “It didn’t really matter where you came from. If they felt you are trainable and you could be a programmer, then they accepted you,” Dinah explains.

This is how Dinah approaches opportunity: she’s trainable. As a non-planner, she has to be flexible.

“Being open and being adaptable is a very good virtue. You have to be able to adapt and be creative about any kind of situation”

Maybe it was something innate or the CIS program or a combination of various circumstances that contributed to this outlook. But Dinah herself attributes much of it to yoga. 

In 2005, Dinah, who was working as a director in an IT company, saw a yoga studio open one floor below her office. Back then she forced herself to engage in exercise to offset her love for eating. So, with a fitness center conveniently in their midst, she and a friend decided to try it out. 

“I literally like (almost) died in my first class, I almost died!” she describes. But she went back anyway  again and again until she got hooked. She canceled her gym membership soon after and committed herself to the ancient, meditative practice.

Yoga gave her such fulfillment that she began chatting with others in the class. “I would guide them if I see them struggling. At the end of the class, I would encourage them, give them some pointers. In client calls, I wound up talking about yoga more than my work,” Dinah recalls. “They would say that I look so peaceful or chill and then I would say that I do yoga.”

By 2010, Dinah realized that she could be a yoga instructor, so she jetted off to Thailand to train. Around the same time, she set up a yoga studio with friends. At 52, she was the oldest person in her class—which was the more demanding hot yoga practice. Amid her 20-something peers, she channeled a different kind of energy. 

“Mentally I was more prepared. Emotionally I was more prepared. Physically, it was a challenge. My other classmates who were younger. Physically, they could take the practice, but mentally and emotionally, they were really struggling.”

Her triumph over yoga demonstrated a lesson in discovering one’s personal journey. “What is it that I do? What is it that I want to do? What am I passionate about and is there something I can do about it?”

She saw the beauty in making a difference in people’s lives, whether it was the client or company itself or improving their bottom line or process. Dinah wanted to help provide solutions and transform others. “It was the same thing with yoga, but it was a different method. It’s essentially the same because you’re helping transform people from this kind of body to this kind of body, from this mindset to this mindset.”

And at some point, another realization hit: Dinah still didn’t have a dream job but she found her purpose. She was a teacher.

“A lot of the jobs that I have been into, whether it was in an informal or a formal capacity, was teaching… and I would coach,” she says. Her mother was a teacher so this epiphany didn’t come as a shock. It was just puzzle pieces fitting together at the right moment.

Start Any Time

Age is a strange paradox in Dinah’s life. While she discovered her passions later, her life began at a fast pace. As the eldest, no one would take care of her at home so her mom decided to bring her two-year-old to the school where she worked. Dinah sat at a desk in her mother’s class for a few years when another teacher suggested that the precocious five-year-old could start Grade 1 early.

Having memorized the textbooks, Dinah graduated at the top of her class. Despite being the youngest in her batch, she thrived in school up until she was in Grade 5 when she was unfortunately bullied by a teacher who had taken a dislike to Dinah and her mother.

Dinah began to feel so afraid of her teacher that she refused to take bathroom breaks. Eventually, she developed a kidney infection and stayed in a hospital. Her mother then suggested she take a break. Then, she transferred to an all-girls Catholic school in Pasig where she continued to excel.

Perhaps it was this rush that encouraged her to slow down. “I’ve proven that you can do anything and be anything regardless of your age,” she says, explaining how she’s not so much an advocate as she is a living embodiment that age doesn’t matter. 

“This is something I like to play out. You can live a healthy, productive, meaningful life, particularly as you age. As we age, we have more knowledge, and hopefully, that knowledge transforms or translates into wisdom that can be shared with younger people”

Another thing Dinah has been mulling over is how she can learn pole dancing. She had intended to learn the art for her 60th and surprise her friends with a performance, but things didn’t pan out. She hasn’t dismissed the idea yet.

“What can I do to help older people age in a healthy way? Typically, at this age, people are thinking about maintenance medicine and lifestyle-related issues, but what about those who are healthy and productive?” she wonders. “What would life be for them? How can they enjoy it? Can they find a community? Can they be of service?”

At the end of September, Dina posted a photo of herself in an orange exercise set, doing the Warrior pose over two boulders. In the caption, she writes: “It’s never too late to start learning something new.” She continues by enumerating all the privileges she’s received after becoming a hot yoga teacher at 52.

“Don’t let anything stop you from trying something new. Especially your age.”

While many people her age are starting to settle down and retire, Dinah is building a retreat center in Ilocos, where guests can relax, heal, and discover themselves.

For someone who doesn’t like to plan, Dinah sure knows how to make her dreams come true.

Follow Dinah on
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Watch this space for news and updates!

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Watch the full video interview with Dinah
LIVE at 3pm on Saturday, October 23
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.

Unconventionally: The Many First Moves of Niña Terol

Niña Terol is a startup—if you could say that about a person. She is full of grit, always a work in progress, passion-fueled, and raring to go. She sums up 20 years of accomplishments into a few choice words: communicator, connector, changemaker, and creative catalyst. In that time frame, she’s gone from journalism to government to education to innovation.

Niña is the Chief Marketing Officer of Talino Venture Labs
and the Founder of Girl, Make the First Move.

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“I had gone through a lot of different sectors, a lot of different fields,” Niña begins. “And maybe the older generation might say, ‘Oh, you're such a millennial, you can’t stay long enough in one job. You like to jump.’”

To those presumptions, she answers: “I do like to jump.”

Currently, Niña is Chief Marketing Officer and entrepreneur-in-residence of startup builder Talino Venture Labs, creator of the online community Mindful Manila, and founder of newly established online community ‘Girl, Make the First Move’. To say that she has her finger in many pies is an understatement. There is no appropriate idiom yet for what she is, but she has that covered, too.

“I’ve always seen my career as a tool belt, like an arsenal of things I want to learn,” Niña explains. “At each point in my career, it was about what I wanted to learn next. What did I want to do next? What did I want to get exposed to next so that I can build that up in my arsenal? It’s been an amazing adventure and at each point, I was picking up a new skill.”

The Big Experiment

Niña is the first to admit that she is a work in progress. Like a startup, she considers herself an unfinished product, perpetually in beta mode and continuously evolving. “I mean, the version of me you first met a few years ago is so different from the version of me now,” she says.

After a major life transformation seven years ago, Niña decided to view her life as an active experiment. “I like doing a life SWOT. If I were a business entity, what are my skills? What are my weaknesses? What are my opportunities? That’s how I take stock of my skill set and I continue to do this now.”

She stresses the importance of self-reflection, observation, recommendation, and iteration. In the midst of a life crisis in 2014 , Niña confesses that she had to confront her ugliest sides and realized that she needed to do a lot of work on herself. “I had to really step back and do the life SWOT.”

The good comes with the bad, that much is known, but whenever girls come up to Niña to ask how to be like her, she would still shake her head, not wishing for anyone to go through the issues she’s had to surmount to get to where she is now. Challenges, she says matter-of-factly, are part of the daily grind. Difficulties come and some are worse than others. But how you deal with them is what matters, she advises.

Her mother’s COVID-19 diagnosis, for example, was a wakeup call and Niña’s mind went through the grim motions of imagining a life without her mom. In the end, she accepted that she was going to be devastated, but she would get through it somehow — no matter how hard it would be.

“You grow your resilience muscles with each difficulty that happens,” she observes. “When the larger adversities come, you’ll be in a better place to handle them. The challenges don’t get easier, but your muscles get stronger — and you’re able to lift your burdens in a more graceful way.”

Build And Learn

Some time ago, Niña got accepted to a master’s degree in innovation in the U.K. One of her friends, Camille Escudero, asked her: “Are you really going to move away to another country to study and read books? Be in a classroom for one or two years? Shouldn’t you just innovate? If you’re studying innovation just go ahead and innovate already!”

So, when she didn’t receive a scholarship, Niña decided to take matters into her own hands: “I knew the curriculum. I knew what I wanted to study. I decided that I was going to DIY my master’s degree.”

It is this can-do attitude, this sheer determination to create that pushed Niña from a budding career in communication to enterprise. “A part of me was yearning to be a part of the action. I wanted to build solutions,” she explains.

Since venturing into startup development, Niña discovered so many things about herself, such as an appreciation for numbers and a love for pitching to investors. Working in an environment with a never-ending exposure to new ideas, Niña leverages on her ability to adapt and grow.

“There are times where you’re afraid to do something because you don’t know how. But this is where the power of partnerships and collaborations come in.”

Surrounded by people in varying fields, Niña realized that she, as well as others, was never going to be an expert at everything. “But if you work with other people who have different or complementary skill sets, then you’ll become more confident. You learn from them and they learn from you. I’ve become so much sharper.”

Make the First Move

With not enough on her plate as is, Niña googled how women made the first moves. She was appalled that the results were mostly about dating. “Seriously, is that the only thing we can make first moves on?” she exclaims. 

The premise behind her new platform ‘Girl, Make the First Move’ is to provoke, challenge, and inspire. She noticed that women had many aspirations but just as many, if not more, reasons that hold them back, from physical to cultural restraints.

“Girl, Make the First Move aims to be an online community, platform, and space, a movement where we can encourage and empower women and girls of all ages, whether you’re a seven-year-old who wants to try things or 70 and you feel like you’re not done yet and you want to do something new.”

Barely two weeks old, Niña already put things in motion — the proverbial first move — hosting her pilot Clubhouse forum last July 3. She invited speakers from different backgrounds and from different parts of the globe, all revealing their experiences of making the first move. Stories ranged from breaking free of traditional cultural norms to creating your own path where there are no role models and paving the way for other women to share their journeys.

According to Niña, first moves can manifest in so many ways but women don’t often know where to start.

“What I’ve learned from this forum is that it’s not about big moves. It can be micro moves. Sometimes, it’s about saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to say ‘no’ to more things so I can say ‘yes’ to the right things.’”

But in a decade where female empowerment seems to have come out guns blazing, do women need to be told to make the first move? For Niña, it’s more a gentle reminder. She’s not in the business, for example, of forcing people into fields that are still male-dominated, like construction or security, but she encourages women to not box themselves out of it.

“We're not looking to flip it around and say no, there should be more women,” Niña explains. “They don’t have to join these fields if they don’t want to, but they should feel like they can.”

In this big push toward equal opportunity, Niña warns against toxic feminism. “I would never advocate for hostility toward men. It’s about women in themselves taking initiative,” she says,  expressing her gratitude for the male mentors and bosses who encouraged her to break her limits and shoved her to making her first moves.

“I really give credit to a lot of men who have been secure enough to not close the door…those who lifted the lid off the glass ceiling.

Girl, Make the First Move is as much about women taking initiative as it is about others being supportive about creating a space that is safe for girls and women to thrive.”

With the success of her first event, Niña has so many plans for ‘Girl, Make the First Move’. She’s planning to hold more forums, launch a podcast, and open the platform to a wider audience.

As her initiative sets out to change the lives of women and girls everywhere, I have no doubt that this new adventure will result in the next iteration of Nina Terol.

Follow Girl, Make the First Move on
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Watch this space for news and updates on Girl, Make the First Move!

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Watch the full video interview with Niña
LIVE on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.

You DO have time! Time management tips and hacks with Gina and Dar

Written by Sasha Uy Lim Mariposa

Dar Ty-Nilo is the kind of woman you want to be when you grow up. She is a mom, an entrepreneur, a community builder, and the brains behind the highly successful Belle du Jour planner series. Her entire enterprise is pretty much to purvey tools to help you pull yourself together. Even when she speaks, her pragmatic advice exudes bubbly confidence. She just looks like she has it all figured out.

Of course, she denies this with the practicality of a woman whose life is maintained by a schedule. Behind the smiling veneer though, she’s a self-professed crammer, an occasional procrastinator, and she eats only one kind of food for two weeks. But this self-awareness is the first step to being more productive and handling your goals better.

Darlyn Ty-Nilo is the President and Managing Director · ‎Viviamo!, Inc.

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Dar was recently invited by Gina Romeo, Connected Women founder, Unconventionally podcast host, and confessed productivity nerd, to discuss—and dispel—time management myths in a Zoom session entitled “You DO Have Time!,” meant for every one of us who've procrastinated and made excuses. 

“Everyone constantly says ‘I’m too busy and I don’t have time’,” began Gina. “It’s true. But time is such a precious resource. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, you still only have the same 24 hours in your day.”

“Time feels very elusive. [People think] that it is abstract and we can’t hold it,” added Dar. “But technically, it’s very tangible. You have 24 hours in the day. You can have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds per minute. You can monitor it.”

Time is so tangible that the first hack to efficiency is to audit it. Gina recalled how, in the past, her business coach asked her to do a time audit because she always used her hectic work to justify all the things she couldn’t do. Examining what and where she spent time on the most allowed her to reevaluate her methods. “If you don't know where you're spending your money, then you won't be able to budget, right? Managing time [is like] managing money.”

“I read somewhere that you can say you're a professional if you can audit yourself without beating yourself up,” inputted Dar.

Get you free time tracker tool here

Stay Curious

It seems like strange advice: be curious about time management. But it’s not about finding the best planner or calendar or work platform. Time management is about looking inward. For instance, if you’ve been postponing a project for weeks, perhaps the issue is no longer about the task at hand. 

“It's actually a signal that something's wrong,” explained Dar. “You can ask yourself why you are not getting this done without beating yourself up. Is there something about this task that overwhelms me? Is it not clear?”

Dar observed that while most of us have a measure of who we are, we don’t take an active enough role in trying to understand why: What makes us tick? What makes us do things? What motivates us to do certain tasks? 

“Be curious about the circumstances or environment that brings out the best in you,” she added. As she and Gina skimmed through the Zoom questions, Dar emphasized how every piece of counsel should be taken with context. Cramming, for example, is usually considered negative, but some thrive on pressure. Moreover, creatives aren’t able to schedule when inspiration would strike.

“If urgency, which is cramming, creates the best in you, then you just have to design a situation that would create that urgency,” she said.

Focus Management

One of the most common time management myths is the usefulness of multitasking. For women, especially, the ability to multitask has been a matter of pride. But how productive is it really?

For Gina, doing too much all at once drains her energy. “Maybe multitasking in the old days when we didn't have a lot of technology was okay. But now there are so many things happening, we're bombarded with information, all day long.” Instead of going over minute details simultaneously, she prefers ‘deep work,’ which is work performed in a conducive environment with absolutely no distractions. She turns off all her notifications and even unrelated tabs on her browser. 

What works for her is to create time blocks—dividing her weeks and days into batches and a particular task is delegated for each batch: Monday is for finance, Tuesday is for projects, Wednesday is for community. Lunch and dinner are intended for family catchups. Early afternoons are for checking emails. Then 10 p.m. is her personal time.

By categorizing her focus, she’s able to perform harder and better. 

It’s in line with what productivity experts have been advocating — that time management isn’t so much about managing time as it is about managing attention. Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania once wrote: “There are a limited number of hours in the day, and focusing on time management just makes us more aware of how many of those hours we waste.”

“Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes,” he said. 

To do this, Gina and Dar recommended the Eisenhower matrix, a productivity framework that helps you divide your to-do list based on importance and then applying the four rules of action (do, plan, delegate, and eliminate) to each one. 

Maintain Boundaries

The difficulty with maintaining a schedule is there are other factors involved. People are asking for approvals, children are knocking for snacks, sudden pressing emails arrive, emergency meetings are called. 

For Dar, managing the work environment is crucial to managing your time. “Since there are things outside our control, we need to set up structures that will create boundaries.” 

Gina’s time blocks, for example, help her regulate non-urgent tasks. Her sons know not to ask what time lunch is because it’s become clockwork at home. 

“It's about you making sure that people don't control your schedule, you still control your time. If you get this empowered with your schedule, after a while, you wouldn't want to go through life like you don't have that sense of control,” Gina said. “That's when we feel depressed and anxious because we feel a lot of things are outside our control.”

Letting others in on your system is also necessary for them to be aware where the boundaries are. 

Gina also suggested reducing decisions to hack effectiveness. Going back to your time audit and evaluating which ones take precedence, her recommendation is to not spend too much effort on those at the bottom of the hierarchy. For her, it’s clothing. Having three tops, she said, makes it faster for her to get dressed every morning.

When it comes to meal plans, she also has a foolproof scheme that not only eliminates a barrage of “what’s for dinner?” queries, but also complaints. Each day is pre-assigned a specific category: chicken on Tuesday, fried foods on Friday, takeout on Sunday. “I also delegated meal planning to each of the adult family members. This takes the responsibility from me and I don’t have to listen to everyone complaining that they don’t like the food.”

“Save your brain power,” she added. “For the not-so-important decisions, just be decisive. You’re not going to die. No one’s going to get hurt.”

Cut Yourself Some Slack

Whether it’s because of social media or just the digital landscape we’re in, there is an obsession with — not to mention pressure over — personal productivity. That if we’re not doing anything, we’re not getting things done. It’s even more intense now that the line between work and home has been blurred. 

“There’s a lot of guilt and, as women, probably more. We are amazing at guilting ourselves about managing our time better,” said Gina. “Being productive for me is not about being productive doing work or doing something productive every single minute of your day.”

She stressed how important it was to find time to do things we enjoy doing, even if they’re wasteful.

With the burden of being locked down, Gina highlighted the value of taking breaks. “It's hard enough working from home and doing all the things, finding all the energy that you need to get through the day.

“We have to forgive ourselves for not being 100%,” added Dar. “That self-judgment weighs us down and it's harder to get back up.”

Time management, focus management, however you want to call it, there’s no secret formula. The best advice is to figure yourself out. Even Dar, whose shorthand objective is to peddle pretty stationery, has a loftier ambition — she wants women to learn how to create better habits, whether or not they’re using her planners or planners at all, and become goal-oriented.

“The value of the planner is being able to ground you on paper to figure out what you want to do, what you want to accomplish this year,” she said. “Ideally, maybe it can help you project in the next three years, five years, and more so that you can assign your day-to-day life based on the bigger dream that you have.”

Indeed, being productive isn’t about ticking off a to-do list. It’s about living life to the fullest.

Follow Dar on LinkedIn:
Darlyn Sandra Ty-Nilo

Check out the
Belle de Jour Power Planner

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Watch the full video of You DO Have Time!
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.

Unconventionally: The Language of Heather Hansen

Unjustified as it may seem, the fact is, there is power in speaking the English language. Many of us see it as a sign of education, prestige, and privilege. In places where it is not the native tongue, it’s often used as an affirmation of superiority. People who speak flawless English are generally treated with a different level of respect or awe. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s how you say it. In English.

This impression is something that Heather Hansen wants to change.

Heather is a global communication consultant,
founder of the Global Speech Academy, author, and TEDx speaker.

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She was born and raised in California, immersed herself in the German language as a teenager, and followed her boyfriend to Denmark, where she learned Danish.

“I went there to do a Master's in Linguistics, but was really only there to be with my boyfriend,” she laughs. 

The boyfriend became her husband and they relocated to Singapore for his job in 2006. Eight years later, she and her family moved back to Denmark before returning to Singapore in 2018. 

It might have been the early exposure to diverse places and even more diverse languages, or it could just be an innate curiosity for cultural nuances that propelled Heather towards her current career. Perhaps, however, she was always meant to shatter boundaries. In college, she even designed her own major to focus on language and society. For her master’s thesis, she intended to study the use of English on the Internet, except that one shortsighted professor rejected it as “garbage.”

Listening to Heather discuss the effects of language is fascinating in itself, maybe because it’s something most of us don’t even think about. How we treat language, however, speaks volumes of our tastes, inclinations, and perspectives. 

Muted Language

The standard definition of ‘muted’ is the inability to speak, or the absence of speech. As humans, we have the ability to whisper, shout, yodel, and talk. But Heather has picked up on something so obvious, yet profound, that the transition to digital has further underlined.

“You’re on mute!” has been the catchphrase of video calls and Zoom meetings, after all. According to Heather, this seemingly trivial phrase reveals a much deeper insight into how people communicate. 

“What we need right now is to hear people’s voices and the virtual age has silenced so many people. It makes it easier for those who don’t have the confidence to just turn off the camera and mute their mic and hide in the background. It’s going to take a lot of work for us as individuals and as organizations to make sure our people are unmuted and that we are contributing and making an impact in the world.”

Moreover, COVID-19, she believes, has also muted people in their careers, families, friendships, and relationships.

But being muted isn’t always about the speaker. Heather recalls a time when a PhD researcher from Iran went to Denmark to attend a conference. “He tells me, there will be someone speaking who doesn’t have English as a native language. Maybe they’re from India, maybe they’re from the Middle East, maybe they’re from Asia. It could be some of the most brilliant research ever, and there will be people leaving the room, native [English] speakers in the hallways saying that they couldn’t understand a word they said.” 

This nonchalance around language expectations is a form of being muted, she explains.

“These people's voices are not being heard. Their research isn't being heard because they speak in a way that doesn't meet the expectation of the listener.”

Heather’s next book, the aptly titled Unmuted, influenced by the pandemic, discusses this issue further. What was initially planned to be a sequel to her earlier work Powerful People Skills, she decided that people need a reminder to find their voices and listen to others. 

In her book, she answers the question “How can we be more conscious, confident, and connected communicators?”.

Undertones of Discrimination

It is well-known that Margaret Thatcher had elocution lessons to lower her voice — advice that supposedly helped her win the election in 1979. According to studies, voters preferred lower-pitched voices, relating them to leadership, honesty, and dominance. Back then, the trailblazing Prime Minister was in an arena surrounded by men. 

How someone speaks often influences our assumptions about a person. When we hear a certain accent, we unconsciously or consciously make judgments about their background, and even about their education or social status. But there lies the problem.

“The biggest challenge in the area in which I work is that accentism is probably the last invisible, unspoken discrimination that we’re facing. And people don’t realise it exists.” 

In fact, there's an entire industry dedicated to reducing accents.

“People are there to try to change your voice, bringing your octave down so you can sound more authoritative and powerful because our unconscious bias is that a male voice has power and authority.”

She remembers one of her friends, a consultant, telling her about talking several times to the Vice President of a company on the phone. When they finally met in person, the Vice President's initial reaction was: “Oh I didn’t realize you were Black. You didn’t sound Black on the phone.”

“There is an expectation that someone who is Black sounds a certain way and these are deeply ingrained biases,” she adds. In her line of work, Heather has had to deal with clients asking her to mend their speech so they could land a promotion, as well as human resources coming to her to “fix” a person, saying “Oh, we have an acting CFO, we want to make him CFO, but he’s really difficult to understand.” 

“Certain accents will always be seen as higher prestige, more educated, more trustworthy. There’s a reason why over 85% of the companies on Fortune 500 feature CEOs that are native English speakers.”

Heather believes that this partiality ties into racial issues, white privilege “A lot of this just goes all the way back to the privilege of being born into English, and the unconscious biases that the loudest person in the room is the one who’s heard, the most eloquent speaker must be a leader,” she says. “We know that’s not true. We just want to hear accents that meet our expectations.”

Connection, Not Perfection

While grammar, spelling, syntax — a system created to help people understand each other, is all based on correctness, Heather's TedX talk is focused on how to speak “bad English”.

And she isn’t telling people to picket their English teachers.

“Of course we need to work on our language skills so that we are intelligible. But that does not mean we have to erase our accents. We can have an accent and still be intelligible. It’s not just my American accent that people are able to understand in the world.”

Heather emphasizes that communication is a two-way street, and comprehension is just as much about the speaker as it is about the listener. She observes that people spend so much time and effort trying to make their speech perfect when they should be focusing on something else: connection.

“Perfection is not necessary, it is slowing us down, you need to get those messages out there. As long as your receiver can understand the message, the receiver also needs to be forgiving. Creating that connection and relationship through language. It's a tool for us to connect and collaborate and communicate.”

“It’s about expanding the way you see the world,” she adds. “When you understand people who are different from you, in essence, you are expanding your entire outlook and perception of the world.” 

Heather is convinced that this is the root of peace and understanding —  and her vision is of the possibility we could create if we just listened a little better.

Heather is a mother to two young girls who, like all of us, are navigating the world of language and communication. Growing up in Singapore, they hear all kinds of accents and language and they often come home from school with different inflections. How does she handle that? She lets it slide.

After all, she can understand them perfectly.

Follow Heather on LinkedIn:
Heather Hansen

Watch Heather's TEDx Talk
2 Billion Voices: How to speak bad English perfectly

Watch this space for news and updates on Heather’s upcoming book “Unmuted”.

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Watch the full video interview with Heather
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.

Unconventionally: The Life-Saving Mission of Qin Yunquan

Qin Yunquan was not born to fight. 

If her parents had her way, she would probably be doing something else, maybe something safe in an office. In fact, the 31-year-old put herself on a path towards the relatively harmless field of medicine.

“Being a doctor was my first choice,” she recalls. “Unfortunately, I’m not a great academic person so I couldn’t qualify for medical school.”

But perhaps she chose medicine subconsciously because it feels like the only concrete profession where she could express what she really wanted to do: Yunquan wanted to save lives.

“I thought by being a doctor I could save lives… I guess saving lives was something I just wanted to do,” she says.

Yunquan is the CEO and co-founder of Kapap Academy
and recipient of the Queen’s Young Leaders Award.

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This episode contains topics which may be sensitive to some readers.

When she was 19, she chanced upon an article about self-defense. As a petite university freshman, in many ways Qin was quite vulnerable. “I thought that given my size, any man could just take me down,” she says.

“I wanted to learn something to keep myself safe, but I also wanted to be very practical and realistic.”

She attended her first lesson at Kapap Academy where she met her teacher and eventual mentor. Yunquan was amazed at how the techniques of the Israeli defense system allowed her to floor people who were much bigger and stronger. “That convinced me that that was the training I wanted to go for. And then from then on I signed up to be a student. That was the start of my journey.” 

As it turned out, the first life she would save is her own. Around that time, she had been struggling with anorexia for a few years. But her Kapap coach Master Teo Yew Chye had shown her a much higher purpose to help others.

Now, Yunquan is the CEO and co-founder of Kapap Academy — a position she’s held since 2015 — where she and Master Teo developed their own defensive discipline called Modern Street Combatives.

The Science of Defense

It’s easy to believe that Yunquan likes to pick a fight. She is, after all, trained in wushu and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu; she is also a decorated wrestler. But fighting isn’t the same as fighting back. Based on the tenets of self-defense, the mild-mannered Yunquan does her best to avoid physical confrontation. And she advises others to do the same.

In fact, she makes it clear that martial arts, where you fight for sport in a controlled setting where an opponent is chosen for you based on competencies, is an entirely different field.

“More likely than not, in the area of self-defense, you probably have your odds stacked against you. And despite that, you have to fight your way out of that situation. For one, there are no rules, right? In my area of self-defense, there are no rules to respect.”

In university, Yunquan decided to study bioengineering — a safe compromise that could lead her back to medicine eventually. However, her knowledge proved to be beneficial to self-defense instead.

“When I teach, it’s not about technique, it’s about understanding the human anatomy. But if you’re thinking about poking someone’s eye or kicking someone’s groin, that’s not it either.”

“One important thing I want people to understand is that it’s not just about the physical aspect of it,” she emphasizes. In Modern Street Combatives, they’ve come up with three rings of defense: understanding predatory behavior (such as assessing the context), de-escalating the situation (such as walking away), and protecting oneself (where fighting is the last resort).

She talks about drugs and date rape as an example. If you can’t really tell whether this person is good or bad, you take a sip of the drink, and you’ve been drugged, it doesn’t matter what kind of self-defense or martial art you know, she explains.

“It’s better to be street smart. You need to know this little bit of psychology before you get into a fight. If you’re not mentally ready to handle the dangers ahead of you or in front of you, you may not be able to tell your body to do what it’s supposed to do”.

Saving the Vulnerable

Being a woman in a male-dominated arena, Yunquan has had more than her fair share of raised eyebrows: male students who come into the Academy only to realise that a diminutive woman was going to teach them how to kick ass.

But it’s a familiar story for most women, even in the 21st century. Despite some breakthroughs, we continue to live in a world where men feel they are largely in control — whether it’s as simple as doubting a female instructor or something much more grim.

Yunquan’s goal is to inspire other women to take charge of their own lives, the way self-defense helped her manage her own personal issues. Self-defense, according to her, is very empowering.

In Singapore, Yunquan spends much of her time in shelters for women and children who have been in abusive relationships. “I think self defense is very important for them because some of them are single mothers. They have left a very abusive husband, but they're still fearful for their life because they never know whether the husbands might come back to get them or not.”

Many of her other students are women who travel frequently.

“They've seen things and it was just a matter of luck that they didn't get into more trouble than they did. The harrowing experience is what drives them to learn, just in case they encounter something like that again.”

When the pandemic ravaged the world, including Singapore, Yunquan’s practical teaching methods had to be put on hold. And as everyone turned to technology to endure, Yunquan set her energies on developing a personal safety app called Angel Wings.

The app, she explains, comes with a companion device that may be attached to one’s person. In case of an attack and the device is hit, whether by the offender or the victim herself, an alert is sent to family, friends, or even the authorities. 

“So, at the very least somebody knows they're in trouble, they can come to the victim ASAP while the victim, on their own accord, is going to use physical defense to survive the street attack or the attack by their partners,” she says.

“I think not every domestic or abuse victim has this network of people they can reach out to, so they can reach out, for example, to a shelter for abuse victims.” 

Yunquan’s aim is to create more support for victims to leave their partners.

Speaking Out

In 2017, Yunquan was selected to receive the Queen’s Young Leaders Award, the first recipient from the field of martial arts and self-defense. Since 2014, this honour has been given to exceptional young people between the ages of 18 and 29 from every Commonwealth nation “who are leading the way in transforming their own lives and the lives of those around them.” 

She spent nine days in London, attending leadership and youth seminars that would help her pursue her work. On the 10th day, she met Queen Elizabeth herself. The experience, she recalls, was a blur of excitement and incorrect curtsying but she managed to recall what the monarch said to her.

“I think she said something like, ‘Good job, well done…and keep doing what you’re doing because I think the world needs more people like you.”

It was never the soft-spoken Yunquan’s intention to shift the spotlight on her achievements, but attention is inevitable to those who do well.

“I’ve always been a very low profile person. I chose to be one. But I do realise that there’s an important mission for me and therefore, it’s my duty to make this mission known to people.”

She says this with breathtaking humility. “And if that means being in the spotlight, if that means I’m the spokesperson, then so be it.”

What is that mission exactly? Saving lives. It’s what she was born to do.

Follow Yunquan on LinkedIn:
Qin Yunquan

Watch this space for news and updates on Yunquan’s
upcoming app Angel Wings.

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Watch the full video interview with Yunquan
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.

Unconventionally: The Many Voices of Andrea T. Edwards

The events that brought Andrea Edwards to where she is today stem from a series of very deliberate choices.

The Australian ‘digital conversationalist’ is a woman of many voices: a musician, a content marketing expert, a PR consultant, a blogger, a motivational speaker, an author, a mum and wife and an entrepreneur.
It’s a list that can go on forever. 

She couldn’t have known that a person from the army would come recruiting during band practice at university. She couldn’t have known that her stint in the army would lead her to public relations.
She couldn’t have known that she would be running the comms of Aerospace Technologies in Australia at 23. She didn’t plan for any of these to happen, but she did them anyway.

Andrea T. Edwards is The Digital Conversationalist, a change agent, provocateur, passionate communicator and social leader.

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Andrea is one of those enviable radicals who fully accepts that life is all about taking risks and diving into the unknown. And over the past several years, she has made a name for herself by guiding others to do the same.

“My childhood best friend died when we were 24 and I made a commitment that I would never live with regrets… If I want it, I am going to step out there and do it. No one is going to stop me.

The only person that can stop you is yourself and yes, it’s scary, but it’s scarier to stay unhappy or get stuck feeling like you can’t do what you want to do. That, for me, is unhappiness.”

Listening to Andrea, she is the type of woman many of us dream of being — fully in control, no-nonsense yet intriguingly irreverent, spontaneous yet practical in her logic (“If we can’t afford our house anymore, then we’ll move to a smaller house. If everything changes, we’ll make different decisions”). She is a fascinating example of a person who lives life the way it was truly meant to be lived — without regret and with a refreshingly light-hearted acceptance of the possibility of failure.

Andrea transitions seamlessly between easy-going charm and fierce intensity. She exudes a kind of in-control, action-driven, forward-thinking mindset — a combination of natural temperament reinforced by profound experiences.

Uncommon Courage 

Last year, on her 50th birthday, her sister described her as courageous, citing it as one of her most admirable traits. It was only then, confronted by that revelation, that Andrea realised just how fearless she was and always has been.

“As Brené Brown says, ‘you get courageous by being courageous’… it’s like a muscle or a habit that you develop.”

“I’m not scared to take the big steps and I can’t ever remember being scared to take them,” she said, recalling how dauntless she had been even as a young girl.

Too often she would be hired by companies to empower employees and she would be faced with the same predicament: everyone was too afraid to make a mistake.

“So many leaders that I’ve worked with, they just don’t have any courage, they don’t want to make mistakes, they don’t want to be embarrassed, they don’t want to look foolish, and so they make the whole team risk-averse.”

In Asia, where failure is not easily taken at face value, Andrea would constantly prompt her team to take risks.

“My tip: if you want to do something companies have never done before, do it in silence. Don’t tell people what you’re doing, don’t ask for permission, go ahead and do it, especially if you believe in it.”

This was usually met with hesitation. Shifting gears, she told them that if anything went wrong, she would take the fall.

“As soon as I knew that they could take risks without punishment, it was brilliant, it was beautiful. I just watched them flower because when a person is given this opportunity to go and try something that they feel so passionately about and they’re supported, it’s incredible.

It completely transforms their entire personality and it changes the trajectory of their life.”

“Trust in your own counsel,” she said. This is something she discusses deeply in her upcoming book, aptly titled Uncommon Courage. 

Andrea revels in uncertainty. Nowadays, it’s an invaluable quality described as the adaptability quotient, or the ability to manage and adjust to unexpected changes. “You've just got to do it. You've just got to take a chance, see where it takes you. Life becomes more of a ride… life’s more fun when people don’t know what’s coming next.”

Andrea often casually blurts out little nuggets of wisdom like this and it doesn’t come across as cheesy or clichéd because her sincerity is palpable.

At her age, she says, she’s past the point of nonsense and she likes to get straight to the point. 

“I think the most important thing is you can’t sit in fear. Don’t worry about what you can’t do. Don’t worry about what’s being taken away from you. We've got to back ourselves. If nobody else is going to do it, we've got to back ourselves.”

Without borders

One thing that constantly keeps her on her toes is traveling. In her 20s, she went to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. A blonde twenty-something traveling alone. “Boy did I get a lot of attention”, she mused.

She went on to travel to Nepal, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, and China to name a few. “Travel was what really changed me. It absolutely fundamentally changed me… I don’t think everyone needs to travel to open their mind, but it was certainly good for me. I was constantly out of my comfort zone.”

“Every step of the way, I was exposed to the beauty of the human spirit. When you’re by yourself, you’ve got to be vulnerable. You’ve got to accept help whether it’s from fellow travelers or local people.”

It’s an experience that has shaped her conviction about the world. “Whenever I hear the divisive rhetoric, especially around faith, that goes on around the world, it just doesn’t match with the reality on the ground,” she began.

“The vast majority of people are amazing, they’re beautiful. We all want the same thing: a house over our head, to be able to feed our family, to educate our children. This is a universal thing across humanity.”

Even in the army, she was fascinated with people from a diverse set of backgrounds united under one roof. 

“There’s a very, very small percentage of people dividing us,” she declared. “We’ve just got to wake up to the fact that we are constantly letting a small minority dominate the global narrative.”

She takes the #MeToo movement as an example. At the height of the controversy, she hosted a panel for the financial services sector in Singapore. Many of the attendees were men who revealed that they were now scared to take a female colleague out of lunch. “That’s not good for women… and it’s not good for men either,” she said.

“The vast majority of people are not sleazebags.”

“If you look at the world like a big circle, on the outer edges of that circle are the extremes on both sides, but everybody else, we’re pretty good. We’re pretty decent people. We take care of each other. We do our best,” she explained. “What we’ve always allowed throughout history and we’ve really seen in social media are the two extremes dominate the entire conversation, so we build a world and policies and societal norms and what’s acceptable around the extreme edges.”

And in a culture where social media drives reality, those extremes are magnified.

“We have a choice to lead the world into a positive direction and change how we live, how we do business and we build a better world where it’s more equitable and it’s more sustainable.”

Without the bollocks

Andrea is on a mission and she’s in it for the long haul, fully committed to bringing out the audacity and purpose in everyone. One of the themes she constantly repeats is intention. Intent, she believes, is what separates social leaders from the rest of the noise that is littered on social media. 

“I’m actually quite an intense person with what I do because I really, really believe in what I’m doing. But I’m not doing it for me. I’m not doing it for ego. I really believe in the message that I’m sharing in the world.”

“Be really intentional in what you’re doing,” she advised. Being a social leader, she clarified, is about leading others and opening conversations.

“It’s not about you. It’s not about your business. It’s not about anything else. It’s about your audience, and it’s about putting a message out there in the world that is going to help them learn, grow, change, or even laugh.”

“The only way we can change society is within our own societies,” she continued. “Don’t be on your deathbed regretting what you didn’t do… Identify what you want to do and take the first step towards it. Keep taking more steps and then just enjoy the ride, but don’t be scared of tough times.”

Even her latest book, which she describes as the “scariest book I’ve ever written,” was challenging. She’s been thinking about it for ten years and working on it for three.

Writing — the fact that she can sit down and unscramble her thoughts — has always been cathartic for Andrea.

“When you write something that you’re thinking about, you have to go do deeper research and you have to have other points of view, so it actually helped me consolidate my thinking and it helped me calm my mind down.”

“I just kind of feel like we need to find our own individual peace of mind and it starts within us,” she said. “When that finally happens, everyone can come together and do what they need to move this world forward”.

From writing books to blogging about social leadership to openly sharing her parenting journey to changing the thought processes of major corporations, Andrea has done quite a lot, but in her own words, it’s just a “bit” to get people in the right frame of mind.

“We should all do our bit within our own societies. Each and every one, locally. Make an impact. If you change one person, it’s worth it. You only got to reach one person to matter.”

Her 12-year old blog “Without the Bollocks”, where she first started “embracing her own voice”, is about to be retired.

“My voice is growing. I’m becoming more and more courageous with my voice. I suppose I’m at the point now where I’m really bringing all of the parts of my voice together because I want to fight for a better future for everyone.”

Despite how far she’s come, there’s no doubt that Andrea herself believes she’s far from done. She’s dropped the pebble into the water, and I’m expecting waves.

Follow Andrea on LinkedIn:
andreatedwards

Andrea’s new book Uncommon Courage is coming soon!
Watch this space for announcements.

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Watch the full video interview with Andrea
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page

Unconventionally Camille Escudero: The Not-So-Dark Journey

Camille Escudero does not want to talk about herself.

Even when she divulges details of her personal healing or the anxiety moving back in with her mother, the conversation eventually ends with anything but her.

For a woman of her creativity and candor, Camille is remarkably closed off, barely visible on the internet and intensely curated in the few channels where you might find her. But she has realised the power of talking—publicly, that is. And so, despite her uncanny ability for deflection and natural tendency to self-deprecate, she is speaking up.

And she has a lot to say.

Camille is the founder of Lily of the Valley, a practical and innovative lingerie label that’s currently addressing the unspoken yet desperate needs of women.

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It is underwear that is sexy, but primarily practical, having made a name for itself for its “period panty.” Lily of the Valley is as poignant as it can get: the name is meant to represent the female reproductive system.

“At that time, we thought “lily”, which was the flower, was sort of representative of the reproductive system of a woman,” she explains. “The valley,” she hesitates, “the valley is like…down there.”

Her pause is indicative of how many women, particularly Filipino women, continue to feel about topics that go beneath the lace and nylon, but Camille herself has already taken the first steps to change that.

“I want to be provocative. I want to empower people,” she says with the conviction of someone who knows exactly what do to: she needs to put herself out there. “For so long, I didn’t want to show myself, but others have told me that it’s good to put a face to the brand because people connect to people and not products.”

“It is a good thing to talk about yourself and let people know about the good thing that you do. It allows other people to do the same and it makes it okay to do it. It proves that you are doing something good and significant — I mean, me. I am,” she cringes slightly and corrects herself. “I am amazing, I am remarkable.”

The Return Journey

Camille was programmed by her mother to be a doctor. She went to a science high school and took a pre-med bachelor’s degree. In her third year of university, however, she decided to listen to her own voice and quit, enrolling herself to a more tech-oriented college. “My mom didn’t speak to me for two months!” she reveals. Her father, incidentally, worked in the software industry.

But despite the teenage rebelliousness and many other diversions, she still wound up back on her mother’s path—and back home. After capitalizing on the BPO boom and a variety of careers, the death of her father in 2010 prompted her to stop and restart.

“I moved back home into my mom’s house after 10 years of being on my own. That was a huge adjustment. Lots of learning, relearning, and unlearning.”

The same confusion followed her at work, especially considering she’d been the boss for a long time. In her mother’s company she felt crowded to the point that she questioned her own value.

It wasn’t a sudden breakthrough or a magic mantra that pulled Camille out of her slump. She admits she needed a lot of help, beginning with the acceptance that she needed it.

“For a few years, I was going to healing sessions with different healers,” she says, adding that she took it especially seriously in 2018. She felt so burdened by her personal struggles that she had trouble sleeping at night.  “I went on a path of self-discovery and healing myself and improving my relationship with my mom and my family, which eventually helped me improve my relationships with the people around me”.

Lily of the Valley

Despite the allegories offered by lilies of the valley to intimates, Camille was surprised to learn that the small woodland flower is extremely poisonous. It all seems to fit, however.

‘Well, it’s power,” she says matter-of-factly. “Women have power within themselves.”

After years of giving delicate underwear as gifts, Camille received a request from a friend to make period panties. She set off researching about this utilitarian innovation, interviewing hundreds of women who all encountered period-related woes.

“There are so many things that women experience during their period and we just don’t talk about them or we solve them on our own because that’s how resourceful women are. We just endure,” she observes.

The period panty was born, and Lily of the Valley officially launched in 2014. The product was great — niche but with an immediate clientele, and just the right kind of originality that travels quickly through social media lines.

It was a product with tons of potential, but the things didn’t go according to plan. While she poured her efforts into manufacturing, marketing the product was difficult. Bazaars weren’t worth the back-breaking exertion and online shops, like Zalora and Lazada, weren’t as effective at the time. And timing is everything.

But 2020 is a different time and she is a different Camille. Apart from better market readiness, she’s also coming into her own.

“There was that timing within myself. There were internal struggles and internal programming that was blocking my ability to take that business further and maybe take myself further. I feel that I needed that time to learn more about how to become a better businessperson and how to become a better brand spokesperson.”

But Lily of the Valley is as much a movement as it is a product.

In 2021, Camille is organising online forums to normalise menstruation. Her goal is for women to stop whispering when they’re asking for a pad or menstrual cycles the way people talk about breakfast or hair color. “It can be a superpower, thinking about our menstruation and managing our lives better by knowing about it, having a premenstrual strategy versus premenstrual syndrome.”

“It’s really positivizing menstruation, even with your dads, even with your bosses,” she adds.

There are many things Camille can speak of — from the overuse of the term ‘sustainability’ to her so-called dark days, but hers is a life that can’t be encapsulated in an hour. But that’s okay. She’s still talking.

Follow Camille on Instagram:
@camille_escudero


Check out Lily of the Valley in IG @my_lilies and shop at www.mylilies.me
Get 15% off with LOVXGINA15 for minimum P1000

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Watch the full video interview with Camille
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page