So taking a step back, if there's someone who is new in their HR journey or just as a professional, what exactly is a board member and like what service do they provide in this committee of people?

Yeah.

So I think the first thing to understand about boards are that there's a difference between being a public company board member and a private company board member.

And there are huge differences.

Now, there could be really big private companies.

We totally get it.

But when you're a public company board member, there's a lot of responsibility that comes with that.

about you should be thrilled and having a big brand obviously to your point the networking of it all even with elf for example where they are obviously championing that not just in your product but even in the initiatives that they're doing i think that's fab

there

we go.

So I went to my 30-year high school reunion.

And for whatever reason, I've been assigned the task because I was senior class president, as you can imagine, the eager beaver that I was.

I was senior class president, and so I've had this honor of doing our reunions every decade, okay? So organized it and got to Denver, which is where I grew up.

And I hadn't seen people in 10, 20, 30 years, right? So...

In my profession, my natural instinct is to go up to people and ask about them because that's what I've been trained to do professionally.

It really is a Game of Thrones, right? So what are the unwritten rules of office politics and does everyone need to play the game?

Yeah

...

I always say for my midlife or my mid-career professionals or even senior-level professionals, there's this whole second arc, and I think that is much more around building your, what I call the portfolio career.

So it's like you have all of this experience, you have all of these skills.

Now let's reframe that into how you can monetize those skills in this new market, and you don't have to do it for one employer.

You know, so the rise of fractional advisory consulting, and now AI can help you be the era of a company of one.

AI can enable you to do that.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

I think AI is amazing.

I use every AI tool on the planet.

So your first draft thinking, you should definitely put into AI and say, "Hey, this is all my stuff.

You know, put something together for me." Again, it's your first draft.

It may not capture the essence.

There are...

Right.

What advice would you give to a woman on how to effectively negotiate for the pay rate she deserves?

Yeah.

So this is probably my number one question of all time.

First of all, you don't have to be a great negotiator.

You just have to be really prepared.

And so what I mean by that is you need three numbers.

You need to know what the market pays for that role that you're going for.

it.

Okay.

I think AI is amazing.

I use every AI tool on the planet.

So your first draft thinking, you should definitely put into AI and say, "Hey, this is all my stuff.

You know, put something together for me." Again, it's your first draft.

It may not capture the essence.

There are...

Right.

What advice would you give to a woman on how to effectively negotiate for the pay rate she deserves?

Yeah.

So this is probably my number one question of all time.

First of all, you don't have to be a great negotiator.

You just have to be really prepared.

And so what I mean by that is you need three numbers.

You need to know what the market pays for that role that you're going for.

it.

Okay.

I think AI is amazing.

I use every AI tool on the planet.

So your first draft thinking, you should definitely put into AI and say, "Hey, this is all my stuff.

You know, put something together for me." Again, it's your first draft.

It may not capture the essence.

There are...

Right.

What advice would you give to a woman on how to effectively negotiate for the pay rate she deserves?

Yeah.

So this is probably my number one question of all time.

First of all, you don't have to be a great negotiator.

You just have to be really prepared.

Okay.

And so what I mean by that is you need three numbers.

it

What advice would you give to a woman on how to effectively negotiate for the pay rate she deserves?

Yeah.

So this is probably my number one question of all time.

First of all, you don't have to be a great negotiator.

You just have to be really prepared.

And so what I mean by that is you need three numbers.

You need to know what the market pays for that role that you're going for.

it.

Okay.

I think AI is amazing.

I use every AI tool on the planet.

So your first draft thinking, you should definitely put into AI and say, "Hey, this is all my stuff.

You know, put something together for me." Again, it's your first draft.

It may not capture the essence.

There are...

Right.

Okay.

I think AI is amazing.

I use every AI tool on the planet.

So your first draft thinking, you should definitely put into AI and say, "Hey, this is all my stuff.

You know, put something together for me." Again, it's your first draft.

It may not capture the essence.

There are...

Right.

it

and all the resumes is now in a sea of sameness.

And what I'm really hoping employers end up doing is obviously there's human in the loop but what i want candidates to do is really look at their resume and have ai be their first draft thinking but on the resume when you have outcomes and objectives that you're listing these three lightning facts about metrics and things like that we know that your proven track record is on paper and that's what's going to get you past the ats systems it's going to get a human to read and for me to say hey in sex six seconds What does this person do? What are they all about? I want to interview them.

So I think not relying so much on AI from like a final draft, but a first draft thinking is fine.

And I'm hoping that employers also think about how are we going to use these tools to filter out some of this slop and get to the real crux of

Yeah.

Look, and I think that there's also Zoom fatigue, right? It's a trigger word for some people.

Exactly.

Mm.

Exit versus move is a very different play, right? So I'll give you an example.

Um, when people are just internally focused and they're saying, "I'm gonna climb the ladder.

I wanna go from senior manager to director to VP," they are just focused on that.

What they're not doing is building their external branding in the market.

So now they have no leverage, right? So if you start, let's say, posting on LinkedIn, you start being a thought leader, you start going on these panels, you start doing all of this stuff externally, you're building brand equity, not only for the logo you work for, but for yourself.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so then the, the, the other part of it it is, um, a bit more strategic.

This might be the one that breaks everything's back, but the odds are against that.

I think there's too many people that will not let that happen.

But I'll say something provocative here.

I actually don't think you can future-proof a job anymore because jobs change too quickly.

But what I will say is you can future-proof... your ability to stay valuable as things change.

The real skill, you're asking me, if I'm looking around corners, it's less about predicting the future and it's more about recognizing the value is shifting before the role forces you to.

So if I'm sitting in my seat right now and I'm thinking, wow, I'm doing all of this manual stuff or I have all of these workflows that are a little bit more mundane, staying on top of that and saying, where can I automate and where can I place? I want people to operate at the top of their license.

I know people, no shortage of people, youngsters, college kids, people in their 20s and 30s have reached out to me saying, how do I stop treading water? How do I grab something that's actionable? What are the first steps that you do? How do you get out of this rut?

This might be the one that breaks everything's back, but the odds are against that.

I think there's too many people that will not let that happen.

But I'll say something provocative here.

I actually don't think you can future-proof a job anymore because jobs change too quickly.

But what I will say is you can future-proof... your ability to stay valuable as things change.

The real skill, you're asking me, if I'm looking around corners, it's less about predicting the future and it's more about recognizing the value is shifting before the role forces you to.

So if I'm sitting in my seat right now and I'm thinking, wow, I'm doing all of this manual stuff or I have all of these workflows that are a little bit more mundane, staying on top of that and saying, where can I automate and where can I place? I want people to operate at the top of their license.

I know people, no shortage of people, youngsters, college kids, people in their 20s and 30s have reached out to me saying, how do I stop treading water? How do I grab something that's actionable? What are the first steps that you do? How do you get out of this rut? Yeah.

So how do you see the future of how this is going to play out with obviously AI and robotics just advancing so fast?

So I live in the world of data and AI from a search, executive search perspective.

So, you know, a lot of times even I get a lot of pushbacks saying, you know, you're the reason why all of this stuff is happening.

You're putting these AI officers in these seats and all of this stuff.

I think, first of all, I know the company that you're talking about when companies say that they laid off 4 000 people because of ai it's almost never purely ai but let me tell you what's happening in this market because i did a video about this recently and kind of connecting the dots here there's a few things at the leadership level ai is being discussed ad nauseum i also think a lot of people don't understand ai in depth There's a lot of low hanging fruit, which, you know, most CEOs and boards want to take advantage of, but they don't know how.

So I call this sort of level one, level two, level three thinking.

Level one is have your employees experiment with this stuff, whether it's chat, whether it's, you know, Gemini, whether it's Claude, whatever it is.

all,

in a nutshell.

I think your experience is, while it's unique, there's pattern recognition, right? My job is to recognize patterns and patterns.

And as I was listening to your story, you just happened to get an earlier start than everybody else.

The stuff that you experienced in terms of your auditioning and this and that, it's the same as people coming out of college and interviewing.

We're auditioning, right? We're auditioning for that job, that first job, that second job, that third job.

People are still auditioning, right? Once you're mid-career, et cetera.

And I think the brilliant part of what you said, which I think, again, like every story is relatable, right? I grew up in the motel business.

Yes.