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Each month, WISE selects a member of the community to share their sales knowledge and story. We are excited to announce Nirvanna Lildharrie as our April 2023 Member of the Month!
Nirvanna is currently working as Account Executive Team Lead at Column and joined the WISE community in 2022.
How and when do you fit self-reflection into your routine?
In terms of how I self-reflect and build that into my daily routine, there's a couple things I do. First, I keep a journal. I've been keeping a journal since I was 12 years old. I’m one of those people who thinks in a narrative and my thoughts are verbal. So sometimes it helps to turn that monologue into a dialogue, and just talk to myself by putting pen to paper, and gain clarity into what I'm thinking and how I'm feeling.
The other thing that I like to do is I use tarot cards to work through problems sometimes and I really enjoy the symbology. I find that it helps me think about my problems abstractly and adds poetry to the situation, so I really do enjoy those as well.
I love posting on LinkedIn every single day. When I do post on LinkedIn, I am usually drawing insights and actionable ideas from what I'm learning in my day-to-day and trying to share that, and it's provided a lot of visibility into my work. Sometimes people will reach out and they'll be like, hey, here's an opportunity for you. Like being on a podcast or something like that so that can be really nice, and I highly encourage other people to do that.
The last thing that I do is I see a therapist every other week and I think that's just really helpful for processing everything that I'm going through and just feeling more proactive rather than reactive about my feelings.
Spring is finally here! What're you looking forward to doing?
Super excited that it's spring! The thing that I am most excited for is that I'm training for my first half marathon. Running is a hobby that I picked up as an adult just to feel more in control of my own health, and with that I am starting to run more than I've ever run in my training. I don't know if I can run a half marathon yet. I don't know if my body can do that, but you know, it's fun to find out. So, I am going to take it one run at a time, one step at a time, and hopefully I actually do that.
How has the WISE community helped you navigate career changes?
The WISE community has been super helpful for me in terms of me navigating my career journey that I've been on recently. I got into my first sales manager role within a year ago. There was a study by McKinsey called the women in the workplace study where they talked about the discrepancy between men and women in leadership, not actually, being a glass ceiling but a broken wrong.
The hardest promotion for a woman to get is from individual contributor to manager and I felt that firsthand. I was asking to be a manager over and over internally, but I kept getting turned down. Even though I was a consistently overperforming account executive. Then I quit my job to find a manager position full time. I asked about over 200 people to make me a manager, and they all said I was not qualified.
At Column, I've had the ability to lead both the business development and the account executive department, and I've built outbound strategies from the ground up. I've built sales processes, onboarding strategies, training curriculums, and I'm doing all these things that I am somehow not qualified to do on paper.
It's just been so great to have these women in WISE in my corner to help me work through any problem, to make recommendations for training programs, books, and just talk to what I'm going through in the day-to-day, so thank you all so much for your responses to me in the Slack channel, for joining my fireside chat and coming to me with your career struggles and listening to mine and giving advice.
Join Nirvanna and the WISE Community to utilize all the WISE membership benefits to push your career to the next level by applying here.
