Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jerry Fu. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Jerry, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
My resilience came from an ongoing sequence of challenges, each one with increasingly higher stakes. When I finally got a job I was excited about, I was fired from it 11 months later. Then I stumbled into a job where four of my paychecks bounced while filling prescriptions from crooked doctors. Though my friends helped me get a job with a more legitimate company, they could only afford to pay me 8 hours per week. Even after I was promoted to a manager position after 7 months from hire date, I was written up a year later for not disciplining or dismissing problematic employees. These challenges were not just in my professional life, however. Two days into my term as a church class director, I was informed I had to confront a new visitor for sexually harassing women in the class. I also had to evict a roommate three years after that. The turning point was when I realized the cost of inaction was worse than trying and failing, and that problems don’t go away just by avoiding them.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Leadership saved my pharmacy career. I was first invited to facilitate a pharmacy leadership development seminar in 2012, which gave me the confidence to take on a manager position. That experience led to more job opportunities, but the companies I worked for would still fail after one or two years. I realized that I wanted to help leaders the way I wish I had been helped – but it took a pandemic to inspire me to take serious action about starting my coaching company.
I help leaders become more visible, vocal, and valuable through speaking, coaching, and facilitating. Clients get to experience a myriad of curious questions and relevant stories in any of these services. I love taking clients from self-doubt to self-assurance, confident they can take on whatever challenges they encounter in their personal and professional journeys. If they want a starting point, they can purchase a copy of a book I published a chapter in: Secrets of Next-Level Entrepreneurs.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. A Growth Mindset- i.e., believe in your ability to improve. Until I thought I could become an effective leader and that I was just as capable of the work as anyone else to get there, I couldn’t expect anything to change. 2. A Designer’s Approach to Life – Embrace the iterative nature of life and recognize that stability is not about obtaining every favorable circumstance. Rather, embrace learning how to experiment with various areas of your life and see what you discover.
3. Replace excuses with results – find a way to get the job done. If you can’t, show evidence you exhausted all your resources before asking for help.
If I had to give advice to beginners, I would invite them to embrace failure as a resource and not a stigma. I hope they seek out challenges and learn from them quickly, so they can keep any perceived shame from interfering with their personal growth.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
Decisive, by Chip and Dan Heath. Developing an effective method of decision making helps keep you on track with bigger goals and perspective, preventing distractions from interfering with your intended path. Widening options frees you from the trap of “either/or.” “Ooching” allows you to do small-scale testing and prevent wasting excessive time and resources to learn important lessons. Attaining distance keeps short-term emotions from getting the best of our judgment, Doing a pre-mortem helps us anticipate challenges so we can better prepare for them or prevent them entirely.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.adaptingleaders.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-e-fu-pharmd-acc-53710187/
