Preface: One of the elective courses of the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA is “Selling Yourself and Your Ideas”. I expected it to be a class on Sales, with a heavy emphasis on communication. Instead, it turned out to be a weeklong study in the art of storytelling. On our last day (February 23, 2024), each student was called to give a 3-minute story presentation. This was mine.
I chose my profession from a place of fear: accounting, as recession-proof as it gets! I played it safe, in part, because my mother was an invalid: hers was a life of dreams denied and then abandoned. In 2012, she died, and with her countless untold stories. You see, my mother had yearned to write, but she’d been afraid, so she spend her life reading other people’s stories. Her legacy? A collection of thousands of books.
Meanwhile, my career as an accountant went from strength to strength. However, the stories inside of me threatened to bubble up and overflow. In 2015, I started a personal blog: a modest success, but it was my baby and it held many of my truths. Unfortunately, it also almost got me fired in 2018. So I chose my career over my voice, and I shut it down. The day I stopped writing, I maimed my soul.
I began sorting through my mother’s books during the pandemic. In October 2013, I launched a new blog to document my quest to read these books, thereby claiming my inheritance and integrating my mother’s stories into my own. It feels right, but rather than do the hard work consistently, I’ve hidden behind the heavy demands of work and this EMBA, finding excuses to neglect my voice – just like my mother did before me.
And then this week happened.
On Monday, Craig Wortmann taught us it isn’t stories or business, it is stories and business.
On Tuesday, thanks to Andrew Sykes, I learned I have a story that resonates.
On Wednesday, Tiana S. Clark convinced me that my story shouldn’t exclude parts of myself, it is all that I am; therefore I must honour this generational calling to art and self-expression.
So what now?
If storytelling is a discipline, this new blog is my discipline. I choose to reject this notion that I must divorce my career from my creativity: I chose both. So I share with you today junesvetlovsky.com. I am so excited to see where this journey takes me.
Please keep me accountable!
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