Meet Brandi Nicole Ayers

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brandi Ayers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brandi, 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?

I love this question because a lot of times, resiliency is misunderstood and misrepresented. People love to say they’re resilient because it sounds good, but they don’t actually know what it means or what it takes to be resilient. The thick and thin of it is, you don’t know you’re resilient until you have to be. Meaning, until things go south and resilience helps you deal those things; you don’t even really know that you’re resilient. It reminds me of something my Grandma used to say. She said “If we never had problems, we’d never call on God and then we’d never know just how good God is.” The first time she told me that was right before my first presentation at P&G. I was a Co-op on a quest to get a full-time offer, officially become a Proctoid and build a career that would set me up for life. Part of my role as a Recruiter was to facilitate a portion of a training to a room full of Researchers and Scientists about how to go to colleges and attract students. Mind you, I had worked with most of the people in the room, in small groups or 1:1, but had never spoken to all of them in a room at once. BaBY…I…was…terrified! I stood in that hallway outside of the conference room shaking like a leaf ! To keep myself from either passing out or running out of the building, I called the only person who could get my spirit in the right place, my Grandma. I did, she said what she said about depending on God, I prayed and got up there to speak when it was my turn. And guess what? As soon as I stepped behind that podium and introduced myself, all that anxiety went away. That day, resilience was on full display but I would have never known I was resilient had I not been put in that situation.

But you know what? Now that we’re talking about it, I think what’s also important is understanding what personality traits, innate or learned, we must possess in order to be resilient. A few of my resiliency traits are strength, confidence, flexibility, and emotional awareness.. Without going down on a rabbit hole on this question, let me explain.

Strength, is a trait I was born with but also learned from observing my mother. Growing up, I watched her role model strength raising me and my sister after our parents divorced; which was pretty much our entire lives since they divorced when we were infants. I knew we didn’t have much because we didn’t have the same luxuries as other kids like cars, the newest on-trend clothes, and things like that but the thing about it is, she never complained or showed signs of weakness. She was the epitome of drawing strength from within. So, I knew how to apply the strength she showed us to my own life when I became a single mom at 19. I knew I had to be strong to raise my daughter and I had to be strong to put myself through college while working full-time. Later, when I found myself young, black and gifted but experiencing imposter syndrome in Corporate America, it was that mimicked strength that fueled my resilience to succeed. The list goes on and on but you get the point.

Confidence is also a trait that I was born with but also taught to leverage. I’m an Aries, so I’m naturally confident but teachings and coaching from my mother amplified it. She taught us to be comfortable in our own skin. To stand tall, walk with our heads high and to know our worth no matter what. The “confidence teachings” helped fuel the resilience I needed to walk into rooms against all odds saying to myself “I can do this. I am intelligent. I am worthy. I belong here. I am beautiful. I am loved. I am supported.” Again, I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

I think the last but one of the most important resiliency trait I have is emotional awareness, which is essentially the ability to understand my own emotions and how to manage them. It definitely wasn’t something I was born with. It was something I had to learn… the hard way. I say that because early in my career, whenever I was dealing with something in my personal life whether it was my marriage, my kids or my grandmother being sick; I would take those emotions of confusion, hurt, angst, or indecisiveness to work with me. Because I didn’t know how to manage my emotions; my productivity, ability to focus, and my ability to connect with others suffered. I was in an emotional fog for years that kept me from being the best version of myself. To be honest, there was little resiliency happening at that point in my life. Avoidance and dependency on unhealthy vices were getting me through. I had to get to a point in my life, which wasn’t until I was almost 40, where I learned how my emotions affected me and how I needed to control them to be resilient. I learned how to address my emotions and to compartmentalize when I needed to instead of letting my emotions drown me. That’s not to say I stopped addressing “big black elephants” in the room. It just means I learned how to let them sit there and ignore them until it was the right time to address them. Doing this increased my resilience ten fold.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’ve really been blessed with the opportunity to find symmetry between who I am and what I do. I say that because I’m a natural caregiver who always wants to help people be or get better. My career in HR allows me to leverage my gifts, learned skills and experiences to do that. In this season of my career, I’m doing a number of different things. Full-time, I work in Global Leadership Development for a tech consulting company called Avanade, which is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft. In this role, I manage leadership development trainings that are focused on coaching, psychological safety, emotional intelligence, facilitating difficult conversations as well as leading through ambiguity and change. The trainings are facilitated across Europe, North America, Brazil, Australia, Japan, China and Southeast Asia. I also lead broader HR projects like vendor management, organizational change management and mentoring.

Outside of my full-time job, I run my own professional business and career coaching practice. As the Principle Coach, I provide 1:1 career coaching to professionals who are at different points of their careers, from college students to seasoned professionals. The services I provide focus not only on what my clients do professionally but also who they are as individuals. I serve the whole person, understanding their journeys, strengths, weaknesses and interests to develop employment branding materials that provide holistic views of what they can offer companies. This is part of what sets my employment brand materials apart from other Career Coaches. I create resumes, executive/professional summaries, cover letters, career maps and more. I also provide general small business coaching related to strategic planning, operations, branding, and marketing. Separately, I contract my services to companies for coaching related projects. In this capacity, I’ve worked with Korn Ferry, Wilmington College, Cincinnati State and Inspiration at Work. I know it seems like a lot but I also volunteer for student professional development programs at colleges including Georgia State and Spelman College. I actually have taught career readiness to Sophomores at Spelman College through a nonprofit organization called Braven for the past 3 years. Recently, I transitioned from teaching as a Leadership Coach to being a Coaching Partner, which means I’m now responsible for observing, assessing and evaluating other Leadership Coaches. I just recently started this new volunteer role in Fall 2024 but I’m loving it already and can see how much of an impact I’ve had. Again, it’s another opportunity for me to leverage my journey to help others.

In terms of what’s coming, I’m working on becoming a Certified Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Practitioner, a Licensed Professional Career Coach and more well versed in the concept of Positive Intelligence. Becoming certified on these topics will add more tools to my coaching tool belt to increase my coaching effectiveness even more. I’m also looking forward to the release of a recent podcast episode I did with Cincinnati State called Future Proof. Coincidentally, the episode was all about my time at Cincinnati State and how my resiliency fueled my success there. So be on the lookout for that to release! It’ll definitely inspire you! Shoot, retelling my story inspired me to keep going in this season of my own life!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Whew, choosing three qualities that have impacted my journey is tough but if I have to choose I’d say the top three are agility, communication and relationship building.

I can’t stress enough how important agility is. We have to be able to go with the flow and change direction when needed. Especially when things are out of our control. If we don’t, we’ll miss out on opportunities. Period. Personally, lack of agility cost me a few opportunities that could have accelerated my career. There was one situation in particular that I really regret but that taught me the lesson on agility. Early in my career, the department I was working in at the time was undergoing restructure. I was invited to sit on the change leadership team that would decide how the department would be reorganized and how the change would be executed. Sounds like an amazing opportunity right? Well, it WAS but I didn’t see it that way. Instead of being agile and accepting the change, I fought it with everything in my body. I was so stuck on the old way of working, that I clouded my own judgement. I ended up resigning from the team and inadvertently killed any chance I had of being promoted. In the meantime, my “high potential performing” nemesis approached the opportunity the way I SHOULD have and was eventually recommended for promotion ahead of me. The lesson learned? Keep your stubbornness at bay and be open.

Being agile also means being open to learning new skills quickly when presented with new opportunities. As the old folks used to say, “You can’t be no one trick pony.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to master skills and become an expert but it’s equally important to pivot quickly to learn something new. I found myself in this position when I was presented with the opportunity to help with the global program I now oversee at Avanade. Despite all my years of experience in HR, I had never worked globally. There was so much for me to learn! My manager lived in London and could talk through countries in Europe like we talk about states in the U.S. I was so confused! Honey, LOST! I had to take it back to grade school to upskill myself. I went to Office Max, bought one of those large maps teachers used back in the day, taped it to the wall in my office and studied it! It was a steep learning curve for me, but I needed to do it to excel in my new role. I did and within a year, my program trained over 1000 leaders globally and I became one of the most well respected HR professionals at the company. This past year, I was awarded and named “The Brilliant Beacon whose super power is agility” by my peers. The lesson here? Remember you don’t know it all and keep learning.

Communication has also been important because my ability to talk to people and convey information, verbally and in written form, has set me a part from my peers. I always say “I can talk to the wall” HAHA. I get that from my dad. We’re just innately the type of people who can talk to anybody, about anything, at any time. I’ve leveraged this quality on my journey not only by conveying information but also to advocate from myself. My advice here is to speak up for yourself. If you have an idea, share it. If you don’t like your role, tell someone who can help you find something else. If you have a dream but need help, ask for it. If you know what you want, advocate for yourself. My grandma always said “closed mouths don’t get fed”. Haha! Can you tell I miss her? Yeah, she taught me a lot. Even though I lost her in 2020, she’ll be a guiding light in my life forever.

What was the last one? Oh yeah, relationship building. Have you ever heard the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Mmmhm, well part of that is very true. I mean, you can’t be dumb as a door knob out here trying to be successful, so you definitely need to know something about what you’re doing but who you know carries A LOT of weight. Especially in the workplace. Build and nurture authentic relationships; not just ones that will serve you. Get to know people, their passions, their aspirations and their personal interests. These types of relationships help you to grow. Many times, they also give you a voice in rooms you don’t otherwise have access to. It’s even more important to nurture relationships with family and friends. Please never forget this…you can NOT navigate your journey alone! No matter how far up the totem pole you get, no matter how high your salary is, no matter how expensive your home is; relationships are everything. Relationships fill your cup so you can pour out to others. Never be too busy to call, text or visit “your people”. Don’t get so caught up in climbing the professional ladder that you forget about the people who helped you get there or forget about the people who are supporting you to say there. You can get another job, but you can’t replace the people who mean the most to you.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

Oh, this one is easy to answer. I think we have to go all in on our strengths AND invest in improving areas where we aren’t strong AND build new skills. What’s important to remember here is that leveraging strengths gives us competitive advantage because we already have skills in our tool belts to excel in specific areas, but improving areas or learning new things is different. Learning new skills can make us more effective in our current roles but can also strategically position us for the next role. I call this building Career Capital with skill building blocks. It’s about focusing on building new skills to reach a certain goal, not solely being focused on the goal. It’s about understanding that each experience leads to another, which leads to another, and another; collectively qualifying us for the goal we’ve been trying to reach all along.

What’s interesting is, I think most people know they need to work on improving in certain areas or need to focus on learning new things but choose not to because they don’t feel comfortable admitting they’re not good at something or want to avoid the vulnerability that comes with learning something new. Honestly, I struggled with this early in my career because I thought I needed to be perfect. I thought I needed to know everything to continue to standout. If I didn’t know how to do something, I did what we call “faked the funk”. After bumping my head a few times, I realized ignoring my opportunity areas was counterproductive to my growth, both personally and professionally. I realized I’d continue to excel only if I knew when to throw my hand up and say “I don’t know how to do this, but I want to learn”. We all have to remember that doing this shows strength, not weakness.

Keep in mind, learning new things doesn’t have to be learning something significantly different from what we already know. We don’t have to go from learning Recruiting skills to learning the skills needed to be Chemical Engineers. It just doesn’t have to be that extreme…and 9 times out of 10, we don’t even have the foundational skills needed to make those types of leaps. We have to find a happy medium and learn new skills that accentuate what we current know how to do. Here’s an example. In my role as a Recruiter for P&G, I was responsible for training non-HR professionals to attract, source and interview talent from top schools across the country. Over the course of 10 years, training became one of my strengths but I had little to no experience facilitating training virtually. Not so coincidentally, my 1st role after P&G was being a Virtual Training Manager for Macy’s Inc. In that role, I had to leverage what I knew about training while being open to learning a completely new way of doing it. It didn’t take long for me to master it, but I had to buckle down and learn it, which added a new skill to my HR tool belt, strategically preparing me for even more opportunities in the future. Merely relying on my strengths related to training in-person could have been detrimental to my career. Moral of the story? Don’t just rely on your strengths; keep learning to develop new ones.

That last thing I’ll say about this is, don’t be afraid to use different types of resources to improve or build new skills. There is so much information at our disposal. We don’t HAVE to go back to school to up-skill. Look into certification programs, take on new projects at work, volunteer, listen to podcasts, read books or blogs, watch YouTube, or find a mentor. Any of it can aid your professional development.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brandiayers.com
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/brandi-ayers