We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful S. Nalani Ai-Dipalma. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with S. Nalani below.
Nalani, 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 guess I’ve always had to be resilient, looking back it never seemed like a choice. I am the oldest child of 6 in a family who was far from well off. I didn’t know when I was young that my environment wasn’t the greatest, that was just my normal. I was affected by things I couldn’t fully understand or recognize as hardship till I became an adult and parent myself, like addiction, generational trauma, and poverty. As a teen I met my husband and we’ve been married for 14 years. Marriage and motherhood have obviously been a huge factor in building my resilience for obvious reasons. Being married is hard already but being married to someone in the military has a whole other set of obstacles. Moving away from my home, Hawaii, was so hard. Going through huge life changes without family near was rough. Nothing prepares you for how strong you need to be when your 2-year-old has to say goodbye to their daddy for months at a time during deployment. But probably my toughest lesson in resilience so far has been my husband getting sick. He has Crohn’s disease and was medically retired, which is how we got to be back home on Maui. He got sick and we’ve had a few very scary years trying to navigate this difficult time of our lives. Going through so much change and hardship while watching someone you love be sick and in pain is brutal, mentally, emotionally and physically. But it’s not like you can just give up when it’s someone you love. You cry a little (or a lot), figure it out and push through.
I own a business now and I don’t think I would have had the courage to jump right into being an entrepreneur if I didn’t know how much hardship and heartache I was capable of overcoming. Everything that I’ve been through has taught me that resilience requires softness as much as it requires strength. Learning to give myself and others grace during difficult times and remembering what I’m grateful for is how I keep myself going.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I’m Nalani, I’m a small business owner, we provide cleaning services for residential and commercial properties on Maui. More importantly I’m a mommy and wife. I’m from Hawaii but moved away years ago with my husband when he joined the USCG. Our little family of 4 started while my husband was in the Coast Guard, and we have been moving around the US for the last 12 years. During that time, I was a full-time homeschooling mom and I loved our little adventurous life. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but I’m so grateful for that time of our lives, we got to see and experience so many new things. Sadly, my husband got diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and was medically retired from the military last year. Although it has been a difficult journey, we are so unbelievably happy to be back home in Hawaii and surrounded by family again. We are getting settled into our life back on Maui and it has been so wonderfully chaotic.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Well, I think 3 things that have helped me so far are my work ethic, my ability to adapt, and being teachable. I have always had a strong work ethic and a bit of perfectionism which has made me a great cleaner, almost to a fault. I think I tend to overwork myself, but I also prefer a “get it done and do it well” mindset over a “good enough” or “that’s fine” standard of work. Spending extra time and effort on a job so I know it is done right and done well is worth it to me, in everything, not just cleaning. My ability to adapt has also been a strong suit for me. It goes without saying that you need adaptability to make any business work. Yes, you must be prepared, but also be prepared to roll with the punches if you’re going to go into business for yourself. Things are going to happen that you couldn’t foresee and having an elasticity to your endurance when the unexpected occurs can make all the difference. By far my strongest quality in life and business would have to be my ability to be teachable. People don’t like change, being wrong or being told something they think or believe is incorrect. Much like being adaptable, being teachable requires being open to things changing, only more so in the way we think. A while ago someone asked if I wanted to be happy or be right and that altered my thinking drastically. It made me realize all the knowledge I was missing out on receiving because I thought I knew better. Being able to see things from someone else’s perspective and learn from that will always give you an advantage in life. Do it on purpose and with intention.
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?
I think you need to know which weaknesses to overcome, but also which ones simply need managing. I personally struggle with all office work, taxes, paperwork, accounting, deadlines, etc. I can choose to spend all my time working on that weakness or I can accept that there is someone out there that can do that for me 100x better than I ever could. Deciphering what internal struggles to tackle has a steep learning curve I think we overlook which is that we feel like if we can’t do everything ourselves, we are failing. Understanding that you are still doing a great job even if you need help or can’t manage certain tasks is more important than having no weaknesses. If we didn’t have weaknesses our strengths wouldn’t matter much. So, grow your strengths, but also grow your network. Surround yourself with people who do things you can’t, lean on them and learn from them.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nalani.ai?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
