Today we’d like to introduce you to Renée Blasky.
Hi Renée, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Have you ever wondered what event made the most impact on your life and without it, your life would be completely different?
I have had two such events: the first at the age of 14 when my family moved from Bloomington, MN to Hong Kong and secondly when I started building a coaching business working with solopreneurs, helping them build their businesses by overcoming their obstacles.
The move to Hong Kong opened my eyes to a whole new world. Having only lived in MN up to that point, it was a culture shock arriving in a place with such a different culture, smells, food, and sights, not to mention being a minority for the first time, not speaking the language and going to a school where I had to wear a uniform! The two-year experience my freshman and sophomore years of high school changed my life completely. It’s when I discovered the “American Way” was not the only way; there are many ways of doing things with great results.
After moving back to Bloomington, I again faced a bit of culture shock. It was a harder transition moving back than it was moving to Hong Kong. My whole outlook on the world had changed. My old friends had moved on with their lives and it seemed I no longer belonged.
The second event took place in my 50’s when I was on a consulting assignment in Rwanda where I was appointed the Investment Advisor to the National Social Security Fund to help them build a better investment portfolio to meet their objectives. I had been running my own consulting firm based in Nairobi, Kenya working with small and medium sized companies. I helped them to design growth strategies and to obtain equity and debt injections by creating business plans, undertaking due diligence, and establishing financial models to project the viability of projects. Consulting assignments involved companies doing business in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
As is often the case in your 50’s I asked myself, what else can I do. I was looking to do something different and to also build an online training business so I could do more traveling. I was getting itchy feet. It was then I started down the journey of becoming a business coach to work with solopreneurs. In particular, I wanted to work with women entrepreneurs to help empower them so they have the ability to make big decisions without having to worry about financial independence (my “Why” is based on my mother’s story and seeing too many ex-pat women lose their self-identity when they moved abroad with their partners, giving up their career paths.)
It was during this period, I went through a personal transformation that made me a better business coach and entrepreneur. (See challenges)
I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a Bachelor’s Degree with a double major; economics and East Asian Studies (1982) which included 2.5 years of intensive Mandarin courses. I had started learning Mandarin in Hong Kong so it seemed logical to continue at UW. By the time I graduated, I could read classical literature and write pretty well. At times, I even dreamed in Mandarin. Today however, I probably sound like a one-year-old when speaking Mandarin.
At the age of 25, my then-husband and I moved to Singapore (we were introduced to each other while I was at Madison due to our common love of Asia). I started my career in the investment field as an equity analyst covering the Singapore and Malaysia stock markets, and obtained the “gold standard” certification, becoming a Chartered Financial Analysts®, (CFA) in 1990. It was while we were in Singapore we purchased a 45 foot ketch sailboat and started planning our dream of sailing around the world. After living and working on the boat for four years in Singapore, we picked up the anchor and sailed to Phuket, Thailand.
During a two-year period, we sailed from Singapore to Malaysia, Thailand, back to Singapore to put the boat in dry dock for some repairs, and then back up the Malacca Straits to go back to Thailand. After three months each in Malaysia and Thailand we made the big leap to “Ocean Cruising”; sailing with no land in sight.
I was petrified at first but by the time we were arriving in Sri Lanka, it became my favorite type of sailing. Being on watch at night was spectacular with all the stars, watching the moon rise and set over the horizon and hearing and seeing the dolphins play at the bow.
After 3 weeks in Sri Lanka we headed to Chagos archipelago, a part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. We spent 3 month there with about 20 other boats waiting for the trade winds to change. Our days were spent scuba diving with sharks in search of lobster, and other delicious sea creatures, doing projects on the boat, and socializing.
When the wind changed it was time to depart to continue the adventure towards Africa. Our plan was to go to Madagascar but a huge storm with 50 – 60 knots of wind and 50 foot seas caused us to go to Mayotte instead as we needed to fix some damage to the transmission. It was during that storm that I was properly “tested”. It really taught me about how you can handle a lot more than you think. (You can learn more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWXrhUAtFEs and https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/pnlpm1vn).
We finally made it to Kenya where I fell in love with the area. After spending a year on the coast I was recruited to take a job in Nairobi as a corporate finance analyst. At first, I was denied a work permit despite being the only CFA Charterholder between Cairo and Johannesburg, because I was married and “Didn’t need the job”. Thankfully I was able to successfully challenge this ruling to obtain a work permit. After a tumultuous three years due to some unethical business practices undertaken by my boss and a subsequent boss, I started my own consulting business in 1997.
In 2016 I started down the path of becoming a business coach working primarily with women start up entrepreneurs. I was actually taking marketing courses to start an online training program for equity analysts when I was approached by a woman I had recently met at a dinner party to be her business coach. When she asked me to be her coach, I responded, “I’m not a business coach.” Her response was, “Yes you are, you just don’t realize it yet!” Three days later in a session with my business coach, he asked, “Why aren’t you making greater progress on getting your equity training course up and running?” I responded, “I’m bored with it. I want something different.” It was at that point that he mentioned how well I interacted with all the women in his marketing classes and how I contributed just as much as he did. He then went on to proclaim, “You’re a business coach!”
And so the journey began…..
After living in Kenya for 27 years, I left in September of 2019 to return to Bloomington, MN to help look after my aging mother.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Switching from being a financial consultant to a business coach wasn’t easy. My first business was built on referrals and word of mouth. I had built a reputation such that companies sought me out. When I went into coaching, individuals didn’t know me and those that did still thought of me as “CFA Kenya”. They didn’t associate me as a coach.
As a result, I had to learn how to do marketing and sales and establish a new network. Being an introvert, this was not easy but I was able to get the hang of it. Once I learned a few tips, it was much easier and I even looked forward to these events.
I’ve always associated sales with cheesy and hard core salespeople – something I did not want to be. So having to enrollment conversations was not easy for me. I became anxious and attached to the outcomes, which made it even harder. Over the years, I looked at my mindset and undertook lots of training to understand and appreciate how to make sales ethically without all the hard sales tactics I don’t like. I teach this to my entrepreneurs as well.
Many of the women in my niche market had very low risk tolerances so inviting them to look at entrepreneurship as an alternative to giving up their careers didn’t always work. They were scared and didn’t think they could do it, coming up with lots of excuses as to why it wouldn’t work, rather than figuring out, “How can it work”.
As a risk taker myself this was hard because I wanted their dream more than they did.
I’ve learned adventure in our personal lives can often times make us better entrepreneurs and employees. This is based on my experiences of preparing and sailing an ocean on a 45 foot sailboat from Singapore to Kenya and other adventures including skydiving, scuba diving with sharks, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, etc.
I’ve learned:
How having the courage to face risk gives us rewards throughout our lives.
Why taking a chance and making a mistake is better than not taking the chance at all.
Why your attitude toward taking chances can limit or expand your personal and professional growth
Why we avoid taking risks
What supports risk taking and
What we gain from taking chances
I’ve become a certified trainer in Susan Jeffers, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” as well as Marci Shimoff’s “Happy For No Reason” and conduct webinars and workshops on the same.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I Love Helping Women Thrive!
While undergoing my new journey to becoming a business coach, I discovered I love to help women thrive by helping them develop their business/career and life skills. Over the years, I have met many women who had big dreams but who also struggled to strategize, plan and implement goals. They also had trouble being productive and staying focused. These same women faced challenges finding balance in their work and home life and as a result, became stressed out and burned out. They were often on the verge of giving up on their dreams.
Having started and run two “solo” businesses myself and having worked with other women entrepreneurs and women investment professionals as either a coach or mentor, I recognize 80% of our success is in our heads. Our mindset determines whether we succeed or fail. I have two specific coaching programs for entrepreneurs: Build Your Brilliant Business and “Charge Your Attitude”.
The Build Your Brilliant Business is a 12 month 1:1 coaching program to help new entrepreneurs set goals and strategies to start creating a thriving business, with weekly coaching calls to help them get unstuck, implement a marketing and sales plan, get a different perspective from someone who has been there and to cheer them on when they can’t do it themselves. It also includes the “Charge Your Attitude” program.
The “Charge Your Attitude” program helps my clients understand how their judgments and limiting beliefs are negatively impacting their performance. Through this program, they identify specific saboteurs interfering with their mental fitness and learn how they are messing with their performance and relationships. Through the embedded Positive Intelligence program they are given tools to intercept and counter their Saboteurs so they can operate from a sage perspective, resulting in a happier and more fulfilled life.
The “Get Results without the Overwhelm” group program was developed with the female entrepreneur in mind. This program helps them go from lacking clarity, being stuck and wanting to give up to knowing their motivational “why”, having focus, being able to get unstuck when it happens and understanding how they are likely sabotaging themselves. It also contains an accountability system so my clients move closer to their dreams each week. They become the CEOs they want to become along with being part of a great community of like-minded souls!
The “Help Her Stay” program is targeted towards women investment professionals and their employers. Over the years, it has concerned me that women investment professionals don’t make it to the top as often as men do. But research has shown diversity within the investment firm, and the investment committee enhances performance returns, reduces risk and lessens trading costs. What this means is profits can be higher by up to 3% each year for those firms who have diversity as opposed to those still clinging to the “Old Boys Club”. Firms with greater diversity also have the ability to attract women professionals who are reported to be under represented in client demographics despite having more than US$500,000 worth of assets on average.
This means there is a lost opportunity here for all sides; the firms, the female investment professionals and the female clients (as well as the male clients of female professionals). And the solution may be as simple as providing more support for female investment professionals to help them stay in the industry.
In the “Help Her Stay” program (which also incorporates the “Charge Your Attitude” program), women are able to understand who or what’s getting in their way and the steps to lesson the damage, why stress is causing more damage than they realize, and how to communicate better to be heard, and seen as a valued professional. They also develop strong relationships skills so as to increase team performance and overall well-being at work and at home. The result is they are able to minimize their stress, enhance their performance, build a better cohesive team, gain overall wellness and greatly enrich their relationships so they do not become overwhelmed, burdened and continually spinning their wheels to a state of exhaustion and burnout.
Why is this important? They fall in love with their careers again and stay! So this provides wins for the woman investment professional, their employers and their clients! This can all lead to lower hiring costs due to lower staff turnover, higher sales, better performance and higher profits.
All services are conducted virtually so I work with clients based all over the world.
Any big plans?
I’m looking forward to holding more in-person events for women entrepreneurs; seminars, workshops and even retreats where women can gain empowerment, meet other women and know they are not alone. Nothing gives me more pleasure to help women achieve their dreams and to be a role models for their daughters and granddaughters. The Ripple Effect is contagious.
I want to do more of this virtually as well.
Plans in the works are to write a book (or two) that has been in my head for quite some time based on the entrepreneurial lessons learned through taking risks in my personal life.
Other ideas are percolating so stay tuned!
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://reneeblasky.com
- Instagram: theleapnetwork
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeapCoaching
- Youtube: Renée Blasky
Image Credits
Renée Blasky
Lynn Lauman
