Meet Jeanna Hine

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

Hi Jeanna, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I was brought up to be adaptable and resilient in different situations. My family comes from an entrepreneurial background, and being resilient is one of the key ingredients to a successful business. Everyone knows how hard it is to start and maintain a successful business. It takes patience and hard work. Watching my family go through trial after trial and never give up was my biggest motivation, and it taught me everything I needed to know about resilience. I also immigrated to the United States when I was 14 years old not speaking a word of English. I went straight into an American High School without knowing anything about the culture, language, or even how the education system works. I started in ESL (English as a Second Language) and had to use a dictionary just to understand test prompts, but ended up graduating top of my class in four years with several AP classes under my belt. I can’t remember how many times I went home and just cried after school out of pure frustration because I couldn’t understand anything that was going on. But I stayed late after school with teachers, I made friends who helped me practice English, and I studied until I felt comfortable and was able to catch on in school. This experience taught me more about resilience than anything else in my life. And while it was tough, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am a proud half-Taiwanese half-American woman who was born and raised in Taiwan. I moved to the United States at the age of 14 with zero knowledge of the English language. For as long as I remember I’ve always been adopting, learning, and constantly growing myself. My professional career is two-fold. I have my creative side and my analytical side. Both are what I enjoy, and I’ve managed to be able to tap into both passions in my adulthood.

My creative side is dance. I have been training in various dance styles including Ballet, Jazz, Tap, Lyrical, Chinese, Hip-Hop, Salsa, Bachata, Ballroom, etc. since I was 6 years old. Dance has always been my passion, something that truly fills my cup in every way. When I was young I traveled and performed with one of the top dance academies in Taiwan. After moving to the United States, I set my sights on professional sports team dancing and was selected as an NBA Dancer for the Denver Nuggets for two seasons. I taught dance on and off as I was always performing/dancing with a team and had little time to teach with my full-time career in Revenue Management. However, now I teach Salsa and Bachata lessons at South Walton Dance Company in Freeport and Salsa Savvy Destin and I love it, it’s been a nice break from the intensive training I was always used to, but allows me to continue to shine in my passion and hopefully pass on that love for dance to many others!

My professional career is in Hospitality with a concentration in Revenue Management. I studied Hospitality Management in college and have stuck to my guns ever since. I went from a Manager In Training program right out of college, to a full-time Revenue Manager role, then Area Revenue Manager, Director of Revenue Management to now the Vice President of Revenue Management for By The Sea Resorts in Panama City Beach, FL. It was a long road with a lot of lessons navigating the corporate world, but I learned a lot and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. This career has allowed me to simultaneously pursue my dance passion and I am forever grateful.

I want people to know that it is not impossible to work a full-time job and still pursue what sets your soul on fire. You really CAN have it all. I’m not saying it doesn’t take a lot of work, and you’re not going to sacrifice some “fun” along the way. But it is worth it, and in the end, you will look at yourself in the mirror and be SO PROUD.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three most important qualities that impacted my professional journey are confidence, ambition, and honesty.

Confidence is so important because it is what gives you the drive to move forward and to do your best work no matter the circumstance. Confidence is hard to build but once you have it you will notice a world of difference in how you treat yourself and others. Self-confidence is something you give yourself, no one can give or take it away from you. You need to learn to believe in yourself and compete with only yourself.

Ambition is everything when you are trying to grow both personally and professionally. You need to want something enough to make the necessary sacrifices to be on top. Ambition goes hand in hand with passion and want when it comes to your job.
Ambition means you are not comfortable being comfortable, you constantly strive to move up and take the next challenge. My best advice is to learn to be uncomfortable in comfortable situations. Because growth only happens when there is room to improve.

Lastly, honesty. I always look at honesty in two different ways. One is honesty toward yourself. While having confidence and ambition is great, you also have to be honest with yourself about where your limits are, how you want to segment your life, and what is truly important. Your time is money, so where you spend your time matters, and you have to be honest with yourself about what is giving you meaningful returns and what is not. Passion is great but sometimes it requires sacrifices in areas that might not be worth sacrificing (ie. family, friendship, relationship).
The second part is honesty toward others. There is no other way to do this, if you feel you need to lie about something in your professional career, just don’t do it. It’ll cause you more headaches later down the road than it’s worth. Better to be honest about mess-ups when they first happen, this way you can have time to fix them and develop the best solution instead of wasting time trying to hide your problems and still having to fix them anyway.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
My parents are both entrepreneurs. They’ve dabbled in so many different businesses throughout the years and have always done well for themselves. Over the years they’ve taught me a lot on how to be successful in anything I do. And here are some of the things they’ve taught me. My parents taught me how to be resilient, hardworking, and dedicated, they also taught me to stand up for myself and my work. In the corporate world, losing sight of your self-worth and purpose is easy. You get lost in the monotony of it all and often are under-appreciated. If you don’t learn to fight for yourself and never get too comfortable, you will not move up. My parents always taught me not to be afraid to speak my mind and stand up for what’s right, even if it’s against a superior. Of course, this needs to be done in a way of respect, but they taught me that I have the right to voice my opinion when I feel wronged; and I should never be afraid to walk away from a situation that I don’t feel comfortable in. The most important lesson of all though, I would say, is to always have a backup plan. I have my own consulting firm because while I have 10 years of experience in my field, I am aware that life happens. I want to make sure that in the event I can no longer work under someone else I am fully prepared to continue my career on my terms.

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