Heidi Lewis-Ivey: Girl, you have spent your whole life hiding in plain sight. You are scared every single day. Why? Because I'm the only black woman; I'm from the projects; all of it.
Khalida DuBose: Hi ladies. For this episode, we're going to try something different.
Welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. I'm your host Khalida DuBose. This podcast is all about helping you increase your sales, overcome your mindset blocks, and giving you the practical information that you need for your business and your life. So far, we've had interviews with a lot of outstanding business women who are leading the way in the online space, but I've also used this platform to have different conversations about the challenges I see women face as they get started.
A lot of it is that internal, mental chatter that we all have, but some of it's definitely born out of lack of mentorship. So that's why I talked to someone who has experience in business and has overcome quite a bit on her journey to success.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: I didn't know anything about office politics, right? It's almost like if you, I love the show Project Runway. Right. Their motto is one day you're in, the next day you're out.
Well, basically it was the same thing. One day you're in, the next day you're out.
Khalida DuBose: That's today's guest Heidi Lewis-Ivey. She's an award winning author and a business executive with more than 30 years of experience in the financial industry.
She's also got a new book out titled "Black Girl Cry: What Black Women Need to Know to Amplify Their Voices." I talked to her about her story of climbing the corporate ladder, becoming a C-suite executive and the importance of mentorship.
And that's where I want to start, because I think mentorship is critical. But not all of us have somebody that we can call on in the workspace or in our businesses to guide us through the ins and outs of the office, building a business, or just being a sounding board for us.
And the politics of the office is always more complicated because of our gender, because we're women of color because we're black. Heidi has been through all of that. So I asked Heidi about her thoughts on mentorship and how that might help women of color.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: So I think a mentor in general, it would have been nice if that mentor was a woman of color, but a mentor in general would have been nice. And let me also say a sponsor, right.
Because a mentor will help you navigate, all the little minefields and help you see the blindspots. But a sponsor will speak your name in rooms and help to open doors for you.
I think if I had a mentor, it wouldn't have taken me so long, to get to an executive level.
It wouldn't have taken me so long of bad reviews because a attitude. Because my thing was, you know, what, if I'm mad, I'm just mad. But you can't do that in the workplace.
So a couple of years of that, and then, somebody to just tell me who's who and how to approach that person. As opposed to, making all sorts of mistakes. You know, my work was good, but sometimes attitude was everything. And other times it was not knowing who I was talking to.
Not knowing what to say in the right situations.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: Because I didn't have anybody that could show me, or teach me how to get there.
Khalida DuBose: So in these spaces, did you find that other people like your other colleagues who were, you know, roughly around the same level as you, they also had mentors?
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: So I was probably 22 years old at the time. But I found that the others already came into the workplace with knowledge of who people were because of their family backgrounds.
So a lot of people, that had come into the roles, had come in because their parents were friends of somebody or their parents were on boards with other people. So they already had a leg up. Where I did not have any of that. I mean, you're talking about the girl from the projects. Yeah, no, we didn't have, we didn't know anybody on boards of directors.
Khalida DuBose: Okay, so you didn't have any mentors. What did you do to compensate?
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: I had to go back to what I was taught at home. I used, my brilliance. Because again, I knew I was smart. I knew I could do the work. So what I started to do is develop relationships with people. And I'm really good at that. I would just walk up, I would ask my manager who's so-and-so, I'd see somebody on the floor or somebody that I knew that others said, you know, this was senior so-and-so and I would talk to them, even if it was just, hi, how are you passing in the hallway.
Just so people could get to know my name. So the first promotion I received, I received it because I realized that if I'm going to get promoted, then there's some things in my life I have to change. Number one, if I'm mad, I had to take a deep breath and get over it.
I can't act like Heidi from the projects on the trading floor.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: They can act like so-and-so from wherever.
I can't do that. So I had to go back to the lessons that I learned at home don't burn any bridges. And so I started to do that. I started because my manager said to me once, he said you know what, Heidi, I would really like to give you this role, but I need you to calm down. And so I'm glad he did that because that was a mentoring moment for me.
Khalida DuBose: Yeah.
And once I did that, I was able to get a promotion. So I went back to what I knew. And I started again to develop relationships with people. And I started asking questions. And then, I started volunteering for things, Because when you start to develop relationships with people, you start to learn things that other people don't know.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: And so I volunteered for projects. I can remember the first big project I volunteered for. It was huge. I'm going to date myself here, but, it, we, what we did was we implemented an entirely new software system, Or mainframe system at the time. And because I was really good at it, out of that came another promotion.
And then once I've developed those relationships, I've maintained those relationships over the years. My second manager, to this day, I have a relationship with him. I ended up working with him again around 2005. I knew he was still at the company, so I called him. And we were just talking, and he said, and I knew by this time, I'd learned how to negotiate my own, job offer.
And walked into the role as an assistant vice president. And a year later was, promoted to vice president, and I was running multi-million dollar lines of businesses in the United States and in the UK.
No college degree.
The manager that I had in that role, I had worked with him a few years before, and in negotiating the offer, I said, listen, I've got all these years of experience, but this is what I want.
And I received that. So the first one of the first managers, when I got to this company, went back to this particular company. He was still there. So I called him.I told him I was going to be in London and he said, cool, I'm going to be in London too. So let's have lunch. And we met in London and had lunch. But what came out of that, I got an introduction to the senior leadership, over the line of businesses that I was trying to inject a new product into.
And so again, developing relationships.
Khalida DuBose: In just a moment, we're going to explore why Heidi decided to go to college after more than two decades in the workforce. We're also going to look at how fear shaped the earlier part of her career and how her creativity has helped her overcome it.
Khalida DuBose: Hi friends, just taking a quick break here to say thank you for being a listener of the Black Girl Business Bar podcast, and a member of this growing community. I launched this podcast because I want it women of color, just like you to know that they have a place to go where community is priority and.
For practical tips, advice and mentorship outside of this podcast, one of the most powerful ways I help women just like you is through one-to-one coaching and mentorship. My program savvy sales for solopreneurs is designed to take you from making inconsistent sales or no sales at all to crushing sales and getting fully booked in your business.
This coaching experience will be personal, empowering. And takes a holistic view of the challenges of you as a woman of color face in the online space. I believe having strong sales foundations and sustainable momentum are two key factors in having a successful business in the online space. And I found for myself and my clients, the fastest way to get there is through one-to-one coaching and mentoring.
So, if you want to start building your bank account by signing clients regularly, get in touch with me at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com or visit my website at khalidadubose.com forward slash coaching. The links will be in the show notes. All right, let's get back to the show.
What's interesting. At least to me is that Heidi wasn't a college graduate when she started in the financial industry. She mentioned that to me a few times, but she was able to still be successful. So I was curious why she chose to get her degree.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: Because now it was, for me, it was a goal. It wasn't that I needed it.
but it was a goal. Now let me say something here. I want to walk back a little bit because I want to bring up this particular point and I know I shared it with you. In between all of these roles, I decided. that I wanted to get into technology.
and there was a small boutique technology firm here in Boston that was like really, disruptive. And so I went for the interview. Interview went great I'm sitting in the recruiter's office. And he says to me, Heidi, you're the smartest person I've met. You're comfortable in your skin. I was not, not at all.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: Everything that people saw about me, the smart go getter young woman. I was scared every single day. Right. And he said to me, and in my mind, I'm going, oh, I got this job. I got this job. And he says something to me. He says, but I can't make you an offer because you need to be degreed. In that moment, what I thought was really? Why bring me in here and take me through all of these steps only to tell me that you can't make me an offer.
Khalida DuBose: That was a defining moment for Heidi.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: The thought in the moment was girl, you have spent your whole life hiding in plain sight. You are scared every single day. Why? Because I'm the only black woman; I'm from the projects; all of it.
I don't know that I can continue to bear the weight of the responsibility that I was carrying from my family, all of it in, in, in the space of about a 10 minute walk to the train.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: My priority wasn't going to school at that moment. My priority was you have to do something about you. And it was then that I started to do the work on the inside of me, so that I wasn't doing what I call the hiding in plain sight, because the truth is nobody knew that I was from the projects.
Nobody knew that. No one, I never thought I never spoke about my background. I talked about my family. to a certain degree, right? Nobody knew that, I had a brother that was on drugs and whatever else was going on, nobody knew any of that sort of thing. And so I did the work on me. So when I got the job as the vice president, I decided after a couple of years to go back to school, at that point, it was a goal.
It wasn't necessary. I did that for me. Still being the, the first person in my family at 47 years old to graduate college.
Khalida DuBose: Okay, let me stop right here and say what Heidi did was a power move. You have to have some serious presence of mind to decide that you're going to work on yourself rather than cop to the idea that you need more expertise, which is something that a lot of black and brown women struggle with.
So instead she focused on her creativity. She wrote her first book in 2017 titled, "Can I Rest Awhile?" That won the 2018 American fiction award. And that led to her latest project, "Black Girl Cry," which came out October 26.
In it, she addresses trauma that she and other black women face in the workplace, while also offering us notes of healing. It's a nice cap to her career, which by any measure was successful.
But it also begs the question when she looks back, what was her feeling about how her career unfolded?
It took me a long time to say I've been successful because of all of the trauma. And all of the fear. I can look back now and say, know what, you're the girl from the projects that made good. You're the girl from the projects that was sitting at the table making multi-million dollar deals in cultures and environments that the project said you should have never seen. It was even to the point where I never even told people what I did. I never told people I was a vice president. Never. If it was said it was because somebody already knew and they told my story. I never even told my own story. And so looking back, it's like, wow, you spent so much time being afraid and not celebrating the accomplishment.
Khalida DuBose: So tell me, about how you felt when you actually did start to celebrate those accomplishments? Because this is something that I talk to my audience about, and I'm going to start talking to them a lot more about, because it's just something that I'm realizing, especially with women of color, this is a huge gap for us.
And so I encourage people that I work with to,let's go back, let's go back and remember the things that we did. Lately I've been doing this for myself. It makes me feel light. It makes me feel tickled inside. Sometimes I giggle to myself. So I want to know, like when you started owning these and owning your own story and remembering the things you did, how did it make you you feel?
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: Emotional at first, it was very emotional because I realized that through all of it, I did that.
Not only did I do it, I did it on my own. Of course I had to reach back into, the lessons that I learned at home, but I did this by myself. And it was then that I started, like you said, to feel light. Once the emotion of it was gone, I felt like I could breathe then. That I didn't have to be on all the time.
Khalida DuBose: Can you share like a lesson or two with us from the book that,would help Black women?
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: So for me, like I was saying, one of the things I learned is that I'm good enough. I'm good enough. I don't have to be afraid. And I've also learned in learning that I'm good enough that my past doesn't dictate my future. So what I grew up in the projects?
Okay. And? We lived there. I didn't have a project mentality.
I didn't have that, whatever that mentality is, I didn't have that because that's not what I was taught. I was taught that I could be any and anything I wanted to be.
Khalida DuBose: Right.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: And so I had to lean into that and, recognize that. I had to go back to that when I started doing my own heart work.
Secondly, I realized that if I'm good enough, and then if I'm in the room, then I deserve to be here. I put the work in and I deserve to be here. In realizing that, the question now becomes, what am I saying, number one about who I am, and number two about what I want to manifest in my life.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: You know, and whether you believe biblical scripture and whatever, but the scripture says that as a man think is so is he. So if my mindset is I don't belong here, then guess what? I don't belong here.
The last part to that was my past was a stepping stone. Everything I learned in my past is the reason that I'm here now.
Because when I look back, I learned resiliency. It may have hurt. I may have cried, but I'm still here. I learned how to overcome in the face of obstacles most people would've given up and walked away. But I also learned that I have a responsibility to turn around and teach somebody else.
I'm not allowed to, be in the room and learn all the lessons that I've learned and not turn around and teach another woman. I have that responsibility. And so those are the things that are in my chapter.
Khalida DuBose: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. So I want to ask you one question before, we start to wrap up. If you could go back to the girl who started, who was in the room as the only person of color, who is scared to her core, what piece of advice would you give?
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: That I had absolutely no reason to be scared. I didn't need to be scared. I didn't have to hide. Everything about me was enough. I didn't have to be afraid.
Khalida DuBose: And I think that advice can go for all of us, every single one of us, every single one of us.
Thank you so much sharing your story with us, Heidi. I really appreciate it.
Heidi Lewis-Ivey: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Khalida DuBose: All right, friends. Thank you so much for hanging out with us and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast, and an extra special thank you to Heidi for joining us today her story and her experience with us. If you haven't already hit that follow or subscribe button, so you never miss an episode.
If today's episode was helpful or you had any aha moments, I would love it if you would share it with us and our audience by rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. Or by reaching out to me at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com, we're dropping episodes every Tuesday and we can't wait to see you back then.
