How long have you been an ISPI member?

I’ve been a member for just over 2 years. I first joined at the encouragement of my dear friend Kathryn Potter. By joining ISPI, I have had the chance to meet others in the same industry, learn further corporate training techniques and share my own unique twists for preparing successful corporate training.

The best thing about my ISPI involvement:

I’m going to sound like a broken record. My answer is likely the same as previous profiles. The people! That is simply the best part of my involvement with ISPI, bar none. I look forward to our dinner meetings. It gives me a chance to say ‘hello’ to friends and colleagues I don’t get to see as often as I’d like.

The second best thing about my involvement with ISPI is keeping abreast of latest training trends. I couldn’t do that without ISPI.

Most interesting performance improvement job/project? And why?

Being involved with training from a video media perspective, I get some very interesting performance improvement projects. I’m currently working on two right now. One is a sales training video. The other is a training video on how to apply make-up “the right way”. This one is a blast. The content comes from a make-up artist who worked for the film industry. I would have never imagined I would have gotten the opportunity to create a training video for such a fun topic.

Accomplishments I’m most proud of (personally and professionally):

This one is easy to answer. I am most proud of creating my own company. This is both a personal and professional accomplishment. Starting a business is perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. And I’m quite proud of myself for having dove in, as they say. Even with the accolades and praises from clients for my work, I still find it extremely challenging running my own video media production house. Success clearly does not mean the end of the challenge.

Something hardly anyone knows about me:

Well, it is no secret that I started my career as an actress, many years and many pounds ago. But very few know that one of my roles was that of a young University student in a Canadian TV soap opera called “Stress Point”. Each character had its own “stress point”. My character’s stress point was dealing with whether her very Christian parents could handle her being a surrogate mother for an infertile couple.

The funny part of this experience is that the short lived TV show got a second chance at life a few years later when it was rebroadcasted. I found out from a client of my (then) employer who asked me, “Is it true?” “Is what true?” I asked. “Are you really going to be a surrogate mother for that couple? And what are you studying at University?”

I don’t know why it was that he thought it was real and not a fiction TV show. Reality TV hadn’t even been “invented” yet. His face got red after I explained to him that my second job was that of acting and it was a fictitious show.

If there’s anything you’ve learned in life, it would be…

The only one who can make dreams come true is the person from which the dreams are coming.:) In other words, stop dreaming and start doing. Oh, and the other half of that life lesson is that dreams do come true! Not sometimes. Not maybe. But your real desires in life do come true if you work for them.

What makes you most happy.

I have an odd group for my immediate family. My dog and my niece live with me... Hmm... funny how I mentioned my dog first. Well, I love them both equally... I mean I love my niece more. LOL!! They both make me very happy. I’m also happier than I’ve ever been at work, doing what I do now: creating video media for training and promotion. It’s all that creative stuff that gets my juices going!!