Entrepreneur, author, and coach Andrea Heuston is one of the nation’s most respected voices when it comes to female empowerment in the workplace.
In 2019, Andrea wrote an article titled, “Never Apologize for Being a Strong Woman.” It touched a nerve, went massively viral, and set the stage for her work today.
Andrea is the host of the podcast “Lead Like a Woman.” She is on a mission to help 1 million women own their stage by April of 2031.
Her company, Artitudes, supports women in harnessing their strengths, amplifying their voices, and making a lasting impact in their industries and communities through speaker coaching, writing, creative visuals, and women in leadership issues.
Andrea’s strength comes from a series of adversities in her life. She chronicles them in her first book “Stronger on the Other Side: The Power to Choose.” The premise of the book is that we can’t control what happens to us, but we can decide how to respond. Andrea has faced infertility, the loss of a home to fire, and the loss of a close friend to cancer.
Her greatest challenge came after a surgery that went wrong and put her in a coma for almost three weeks in 2008. She nearly died, but when she woke up she realized the way she had been showing up for work needed to change. It was a life-changing epiphany.
Get ready to be inspired, challenged and learn what it means to lead like a woman.
Listen to the full episode here.
Resources from the episode:
- Meet Andrea and get to know her here.
- Check out the “Featured In” section on her website to read interviews with Andrea, listen to podcasts she’s been invited to, and read articles she’s written.
- Meet the Artitudes team and learn more about the work they’re doing here.
- Hear from strong women leaders and how they’re changing our world on Andrea’s podcast, Lead Like a Woman.
- Connect with Andrea Heuston on LinkedIn.
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Transcript
The following transcript is not certified. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. The information contained within this document is for general information purposes only.
Speakers: Andrea Heuston and Mark Wright
ANDREA HEUSTON 00:03
And I remember stepping into that room against what was my better instinct. My instinct said, run, don’t do this, run but I didn’t. And so, against my better instinct, I stepped into that room, and I said to myself, right outside that door, you have a place at this table. You would not be here if they didn’t believe in you and gave you this place at the table. And so, I rocked that and I, I gained a customer for life.
MARK WRIGHT 00:33
This is the BEATS WORKING show. We are on a mission to redeem work. The word, the place, and the way. I’m your host, Mark Wright. Join us at winning the game of work. Welcome to BEATS WORKING, on the show today, how to Lead Like a Woman, which happens to be the name of a podcast, created by entrepreneur, author, and coach Andrea Heuston. Finding her voice and her power, and also helping others do the same has been a lifelong endeavor for Andrea, whose grandmother was her first role model. In 2019, Andrea wrote an article titled, “Never Apologize for Being a Strong Woman.” It touched a nerve, it went massively viral, and it really set the stage for Andrea to become one of the country’s top voices for female empowerment in the workplace. I think one of Andrea’s greatest gifts is her ability to come back from setbacks. Her first book is called “Stronger On the Other Side: The Power to Choose.” So, the premise of the book is we can’t control what happens to us, but we can decide how to respond. The book chronicles a series of challenges, infertility. Her home burned down and she lost a close friend to cancer and the big one, after a surgery then went wrong, Andrea was in a coma for almost three weeks. In 2008, she nearly died, but when she woke up from the coma, she realized the way she’d been showing up for work needed to change. It was a life-changing epiphany. Get ready to be inspired, challenged, and learn what it means to lead like a woman. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Andrea Heuston. Andrea Houston, welcome to the BEATS WORKING podcast. I’ve been so looking forward to having you on the show. Welcome.
ANDREA HEUSTON 02:27
Thanks, Mark. Me too. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you.
MARK WRIGHT 02:31
So, one of the reasons I was looking forward to having you on the show is that, as you know, uh, our mission on this podcast is to redeem work. And it’s so clear as I look back at your body of work to this point, that you really are redeeming work by empowering women and giving, giving a full voice to everybody. Um, and so I would love to explore what led you to that path and as I was looking at, at some of your background, it sounds like your grandmother Jerry, was a huge inspiration as just a strong, powerful woman and female figure for you to model after, right? Tell me about her.
ANDREA HEUSTON 03:08
Absolutely. I love grandma Jerry and I gotta show you a picture, cuz she’s here with me every day. There she is. If you can see her grandma Jerry.
MARK WRIGHT 03:15
Oh, that’s sweet.
ANDREA HEUSTON 03:16
In her later years, where my friends used to say she looks like the typical grandma that you read about in books. So yeah, she, she was atypical though in that she was a fierce female leader herself. Uh, she was, born and raised in Eastern Washington, and a little fun fact here, she was adopted when she was a baby. Her mother died shortly after childbirth and her grandmother helped find a family, uh, to raise her. And so, this family, their fa, they were family friends with her family, and she had five or six siblings, and her father just couldn’t take care of her. He was a farmer, a landover owner. In fact, he owned the bottom half of Liberty Lake over by Spokane. Uh, so she moved with this other family and had no idea she was adopted until she was about seven years old. Uh, and at that time, kids in her neighborhood were making fun of her kids in her class cuz somebody had found out from somebody else. Uh, but she had also been playing with her siblings for all those years and continued to do so. So, she had a relationship with her siblings. She just didn’t know they were her siblings at first. But my grandmother, um, they moved around a lot. She graduated from Zilla High School, uh, in 1936, and she was born in 1920. So doing that math, she was only 16, but apparently that was common back then. They skipped grades, put ’em in at the age of four, things like that, especially farming families. So, for women, you had a couple choices of career. You could be a stenographer, you could be a secretary. Sorry. It’s a very noble profession. I’m sure we just have better names for it now or you could be a teacher. And a teacher was a very worthy career for a young lady at the time. So, she went to Central Washington Normal School, which is now Central Washington University. But at the time it was a normal school, and that meant it was a teaching college and that was all it was. So that’s in Ellensburg, Washington. My husband later graduated from Central Washington University a number of years later. Uh, but grandma, uh, matriculated at the age of 16. She shortly thereafter met a local boy who was part of a prominent family in the next town over Kittitas. Uh, and she married him fairly quickly. Uh, so she married him at 18, and they had their first son, my dad, at the age of 20, two years later, they had another son, my uncle Dale, when she was 22. And a few years later my grandfather ran off with his family’s domestic help. So, like I said, a prominent family in the tiny little town at Kittitas Washington. So, my grandma being the woman that she is, Uh, or was at the time, and later on she just pulled up her bootstraps and moved to Western Washington. So, she moved into the projects in West Seattle. It’s called High Point. It’s still there, but it’s a little different now, and she got a job at Boeing, so she started working at Boeing, um, early days I would say. And she ran the big computer rooms, and what I mean by a computer room is the computer took up the whole room and those rooms were the size of a factory or even an airplane hangar at the time. And so, she did that for almost 40 years. So, she used to bring the little punch cards home. Uh, for my brothers and I, they were about, you know, three by seven and they had these little square holes punched into ’em, and we never knew what they were until grandma explained it to us. She said that was how the computers read the code. We just liked to play with them. But she worked at Boeing until she retired, so she was there for over 40 years. Force of nature.
MARK WRIGHT 006:57
Wow. Well, and as a, as a single mom, I mean, I think, I think just in, up until recently, you know, maybe this stigma of being a single mom has, has lessened, but wow, back then that, that was really a stigma, wasn’t it?
ANDREA HEUSTON 07:11
It really was. Uh, part of the saving grace is she’d been married had she not been married. That would’ve been even worse. But she had her, um, first husband’s last name and the boys had that last name as well. My grandmother later remarried to the grandfather that I knew who was a casket maker, instantly casket maker, um, who was quite a bit older than she was. In fact, his daughter from his first marriage. Well, his wife had died. Uh, she was 15 years younger than my grandma Jerry. So, my grandma took on a daughter who was a teenager at the time, who wanted nothing to do with her. They later became really close friends. Uh, but she stayed married to my grandfather until he passed away. Uh, and then after he died, she started traveling more with Boeing and she did a stint in, in Virginia, and I think she worked in Florida for a while and then came back here as well. So,
MARK WRIGHT 08:05
Wow. So, for the record, when I first went to college at Western, before I transferred to WSU, we actually registered for classes using computer push cards. I mean, so
ANDREA HEUSTON 08:18
Remember the days, Mark. Remember the days.
MARK WRIGHT 08:21
I remember it all. Awesome.
ANDREA HEUSTON 08:24
That’s funny.
MARK WRIGHT 08:25
Um, so, so was there a particular story about your grandmother or just her example that just made you feel like, it’s cool to be a strong female.
ANDREA HEUSTON 08:36
You know, a lot of it was her example. I mean, she was fierce, and she was a fierce mother as well. And I’m sure that may have been hard for my uncle and my dad to some degree. My dad grew up in an era. I mean, he was born in 1940. He grew up in an era where women were not worth as much as men, and that has carried forward as a theme in his life. But it was never a theme in my grandmother’s life. So, my grandmother was always one of my biggest fans and my biggest supporters. So, when I decided to start my own business years later, she’s the one who believed in me, and she gave me my first loan to start my business. Now, granted, I had to give her exactly what the money was for, and she charged me 8% interest at the time. Thanks grandma but I had her paid back in six months.
MARK WRIGHT 09:24
Wow. That is so cool.
ANDREA HEUSTON 09:26
Yeah, she’s amazing.
MARK WRIGHT 09:27
I love that you have a picture of your grandmother on your desk. Um, as I was doing some homework on you, I just cracked up when I saw this statement. You, you were interviewed by someone and, and the, you had to finish the sentence. I’m famous for being, being kicked out of the Girl Scouts in the fourth grade for saying quote “My way is better.”
ANDREA HEUSTON 09:48
That’s right. Yeah.
MARK WRIGHT 09:50
I’ve gotta hear this backstory.
ANDREA HEUSTON 09:52
Yeah. I’ve always been a little bit fierce myself and mouthy. So mouthy, but also shy, which is interesting. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. I was the bookish kid. I called myself a nerd, but my older brother has always been, great at coming to my defense. He called myself a brain not, or called me a brain, not a nerd. So, I had been in brownies since first grade. We’d lived in Canada when and I was in kindergarten, kindergarten cuz my father taught at the University of Victoria. And so when we came back, uh, and we went to the elementary school near us. I met all the kids in first grade, so one of the things my mom did is she put me in brownies in girl Scouts, and first grade was great. Second grade, third grade, no problem. Fourth grade we became what’s called juniors. And so, we went from the little brownie uniform, the brown one, to a green uniform. We were now juniors, and I was not a big fan of the leader, the troop leader. She was my favorite person. Uh, and no offense to her, now, we won’t name names, but her daughter was also in our troop, and so her daughter was the favorite child. Um, and that was a little hard for all of us, I think, and we had Girl Scout cookie sales, and I was a good salesperson. I was great. I would walk on, knock on the door and somebody would say, we want a box of thin mints, and I’d say, you know what? Those are gonna go fast. You probably want at least three. So, I’d sell more. I was good at this. It was fun. And in our, uh, troop leadership that year, this, uh, troop leader decided with the code troop leader that we were gonna split all the sales from the troop evenly among the girls so that everyone would get a prize. Now that didn’t sit well with me, didn’t sit well with me at all because I’d sold the most boxes that year. And so, when it came to that, I argued, and I was not happy about it. And I said, no, every single girl should get to be responsible for or awarded for the amount that they sold themselves. And if your daughter didn’t sell any, then she didn’t sell any. So I was absolutely about what was fair and not fair and well, that troop leader who was in my mom and dad’s bridge group had a discussion with my mom and they decided that I was no longer allowed, and that’s okay. I’ve never been a great joiner. So being kicked outta Girl Scouts wasn’t that big of a pain for me. It did kind of erase my entire social circle at the time, but I, I got by.
MARK WRIGHT 12:22
I think that story is just so awesome. Well, on so many levels. It’s like you were not going to stand for the injustice. That, it’s cuz in life you get rewarded for what you do, right?
ANDREA HEUSTON 12:35
That’s right. Exactly. Still that way. Although my mom used the line on me once, that it’s Andrea, it’s about equity, not equality, and you are just so much more capable. I’m like, no, wait a minute. No, wait a minute. I disagree.
MARK WRIGHT 12:53
I wanna talk about, uh, how, I think how you formed your company attitude is really an interesting story because you basically got phased out of a job, right? And then got asked to come back and, and you created a company almost overnight. You talked about here your grandmother lent the money. So, tell, tell us what Artitudes is and how you got started.
ANDREA HEUSTON 13:15
Ah, so Artitudes has morphed over the years. When we started, we were graphic design, desktop publishing, uh, instructional design, things like that. Anything I knew how to do, uh, however, as we morphed over the years and the needs of our clients changed, we have become a firm that really creates confident speakers. So, we work with our clients and they’re usually in the C-suite level of the Fortune 500 companies, lots of tech. But we work with these clients to create confidence and that means, we help them with their messaging, their stage presence, we create the content for them. We write the scripts and all of the graphics that surround them on that stage, be it one-on-one or one on 50,000 to help them get their message across with impact. And so, when we started, I have, I was 24, so I’m just gonna say that again. I was 24 when I started my first business. Um, that was over 28 years ago, and I had been working since I was 17 at an engineering firm in Kirkland where I had started as an intern when I returned from being an exchange student in Denmark. I did that for the summer and then I only needed one class at high school to graduate cuz I had all my requirements fulfilled. And so, I chose to go to the high school and then I would go to work for a full day. They hired me full-time after my internship. Uh, and then I would go to Bellevue College at night, BCC at the time. Uh, and so I had started and I loved what I was doing in this graphic design department. I was called a technical illustrator, and as the years went by, I eventually became the lead of this team. So, I was the team lead and I had seven other designers working in my department in various skills. Uh, and one day my boss called me into his office, and he said, hey, we’ve been purchased by a French firm and we need to phase your team out, so you’re gonna lay them off today. And I went, what? Yeah, again, I was 24 this day. I was 24. And so, uh, he sat with me for the very first one and we laid that person off together, and then I did the other six on my own. I remember going home that evening, sitting on the couch of my apartment, and crying, and I was distressed. I’d never done anything like this before and it really hurt to do this to people I cared about. And the next day I went to work, and that boss called me into his office and he laid me off, and I swear to God, I never saw coming it. It was not even something I thought about and I should have. In hindsight, but you only know what you want. No, and I was 24 years old, two days later, as I was licking my wounds and realizing I had a pretty good severance package and could sit for a while, they called me. So this boss called me back and he said, we made a mistake. We need you to come back with one of your team members because we need to roll out the brand change from the new head company in France. So, I said, let me get back to you, and I drove myself to Olympia, the state capital, and I got myself a business license because you remember, this is before the internet. So I got myself, my business license and I came back and I called him back the next day and said, hey, I’m coming back and I’m bringing one of my team members with me, but you’ll be paying me through my new company, Artitude Slam Design, and so that’s how we get, we got started. A lot of the instructional designers and some of the marketing department, uh, who had been laid off went to this little, tiny software company in Redmond called Microsoft, and they had five buildings at the time. That’s it. Five. Okay. So that tells you how long ago it was, and my phone started ringing cuz they learned that I had hung out my own shingle. So that’s how the company was born and grew.
MARK WRIGHT 16:58
So, Andrea, in the early days of your business, what were some of the big lessons that you learned in terms of how to do business and maybe more importantly, how not to do business?
ANDREA HEUSTON 17:08
So, I learned a lot and most of by trial and error, I, I didn’t know what, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a mentor at the time. All I knew is that I needed to earn money, cuz I was the breadwinner of the family. My husband had gone back to school. I needed to, you know, win the bread, as we say, bring home the bacon. So, I looked for the clients I wanted to work with. I didn’t fire clients at the time. I took on any project I could and would and it, it worked for a long time. And then I ended up in the training department. Uh, at Microsoft working on projects for them, and I had a desk for a while, which was super crazy at the time, but back then as a vendor or a contractor, you got a desk and a computer. So, I just went to work every day. I had other clients that I would service and work on in the evenings or on weekends, uh, and a lot of times I’d bring that candle at both ends, just trying to make those ends meet. And I also worked in other departments around Microsoft, so they didn’t like that. That client was not thrilled that I was working with other clients. And I remember saying, you know, that I, I can’t keep this position, I can’t do this because I’m in the games group here doing, uh, you know, the books that came with the, the manuals and the packaging, and we even. Uh, won an award for one that I worked on called Asheons Call. Really old game, but I did all the maps, created all the maps, Andrew and everything else, and I won an award for that. And I didn’t wanna give those up cuz those were fun and creative and the department that I was sitting at a desk and was doing something not fun and creative. So that was one of my lessons. Is take the things that set me on fire, take the things that made me happy to do that I wanted to do all day long. Another lesson for me early on in that career was when I had moved from the training department, um, I had also been in contact with the head of the events presentation group, is what it was called at the time. He picked me up because I’d been working on training decks for a long time. And I had started to work with this team as a contractor and I was backstage one day, uh, working on an event, and I was placed with this brand-new executive who was the head of the enterprise sales division, which is really where the money comes in. I gotta be honest, that’s where the money, it’s not through consumers, it’s through the enterprise. So, I was working with this guy, brand new. He’d been there maybe two weeks and he decided he liked me. And he was one of those clients and one of those people who’s, first of all, he’s English and he liked you or he or he didn’t like you, and there was no in between but he liked me. Yeah. And so, I was still pretty young. He called me one day and said, I would like you to come in and whiteboard out, uh, your ideas for our presentation for this big, huge presentation. And I said, all right, who’s in the room? And he told me who was in the room and to a person. They were all older white men, no offense. Older white men, men. I was 25. So, at that point, for me, I was intimidated. And I remember walking down that long hallway towards that conference room where I knew I was gonna go inside. I was wearing a suit. I was wearing a suit. Okay. It was a skirt suit, still a suit because I believed I had to act and be like, man, in order to get these people to like me. And I remember stepping into that room against, What was my better instinct? My instinct said, run, don’t do this, run. But I didn’t. And so, against my better instinct, I stepped into that room, and I said to myself, right outside that door, you have a place at this table. You would not be here if they didn’t believe in you and gave you this place at this table. And so I rocked that and I, I gained a customer for life basically. And I also got to meet a lot of other clients through that. So, you know, lots of mistakes, lots of trial and error. Lots of do I do this? I do remember also having a client, I just couldn’t fire cuz they gave me lots of work. But they would call me at 4:00 AM until finally I realized, you know, my sleep is more important than this client. So, you know, you learn by doing right me, it takes me some lessons. Many lessons sometimes, but I’ve learned and there’s still lots to learn. Mark.
MARK WRIGHT 21:29
What a great thing to tell yourself at such a young age. I don’t know that any of us at, you know, in our mid-twenties would, would have that self-confidence to just. You really did just state the truth back to yourself to get you ready for that moment. I love that. That’s such a great story, Andrea. You’ve written a couple of books. The first one is “Stronger On the Other Side: The Power to Choose.” The other one, which I love, the title “Lead Like A Woman: Tales From the Trenches.” Um, let’s start with the “Stronger On the Other Side: book. The first one that you wrote, you’ve been open about challenges that you faced in your life. And to the extent that you’re comfortable, I’d love to hear about some of the challenges that have shaped you into who you are today.
ANDREA HEUSTON 21:10
Absolutely. And just so you know, if third book was published last fall, it’s called “Lead Like A Woman: Audacity.” So, the lead like a woman series is a five-book series two are out. There’s two more coming.
MARK WRIGHT 22:21
Wow. Congratulations.
ANDREA HEUSTON 22:22
Thanks. But “Stronger On The Other Side” was a book I was never going to write, never wanted to write, never planned to write, was not going to write. I had started interviewing women about seven years before, so when I was about 43 and I was interviewing them about their stories of trials, tribulations, and how they got stronger and how they, those made them stronger. And so, I had some fascinating ones. I, I had a woman who was a photographer of stillborn babies. Amazing stories. Oh, amazing stories. She was facing cancer for the third time. I had a woman who was selling her company to Target, and one of the target executives raped her in the hallway. I, there’s so many stories of how these women became stronger because of what they faced, and I was with a group of women in 2020, it was March of 2020, right before the world shut down because Seattle was ground zero for Covid. And we were talking about what we wanted to do, what were things we wanted to do next. And the question was asked to me, uh, and I said, first and foremost, I want to have a podcast. I’ve always wanted one, and I’ve had one now for, that was March. I started it in May of that year, so it’s over three years old now. Uh, the other was writing a book and I told ’em what I wanted to write about. And now these women had learned a bit about me, and they said, one of them particularly said, that’s not what you’re gonna write about. You’re gonna write your story. And I said, nobody wants to hear my story. Nobody. And she said, yes, they do. I’m gonna hook you up with a ghost writer. So, my first book was ghost written with many, many hours of interviews. Let’s just say it was like therapy in a good way. Um, and we decided we would write my book and I still never thought anyone would want it. I never thought anyone would want to read it. Um, I’ve been surprised, happily so, but stronger on the other side, the power to choose is about all the things I’ve gone through in my life that have made me stronger on the other side. But the power to choose part is really the fact that the universe kicks me in the ass every so often, and I have to choose my own reaction because I say every day is a good day, it, it doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain or sadness or something like that. It means that I choose to have a good day. Every day somebody cuts me off in traffic, oh, did they have a bad morning? I wonder what’s going on in their life. It’s not about me, it’s about them. And so, for me, I, I’ll give you the quick overview of the book, but I believe I was born other, and that is a term I use because I was a girl and my father, despite his fierce mother, uh, my father, is a sexist, frankly, he is not a big fan of women. Um, I had lunch with him just recently where he was talking about the dumb broad who cut him off in traffic. I’m like, how do you know? He goes, well, all the bad drivers are women. I’m like, no, and I literally said, why do you hate women Dad? Because that’s how finally, I’m at a point in my fifties where I can say those words, but when I was a kid, I didn’t realize that I was born other. It was just later on because I have a brother on either side of me. I’m right sandwiched in the middle, and I, my brothers have strong voice is too to, they have their own skills, but I had a very loud voice within my family and I was constantly told that wasn’t what was supposed to be. I grew up in a very right wing conservative Christian household, and the church and the church example basically showed me that women could be mothers and wives and maybe teachers. Oh, and wait. Stewardess, not flight attendants back then, but stewardess. And so that wasn’t my path, and I didn’t realize it until I went to Europe as an exchange. Genetic changed my life. So that’s the first part of the book. But the other parts of the book go through my trials and tribulations in my life. And the first and foremost was infertility and the fact that we could not have children. Uh, we just couldn’t. They would, they didn’t come through us. They came to us. And so, we tried for years through infertility treatments because my belief in myself that was still from childhood was, this is the one thing I’m supposed to be able to do as a woman, and it took me a long time to not call myself defective, but it, it’s happened and, and we adopted the most beautiful boys and who are now 22 in 15 days and graduating from high school on Friday. So, they are now adults. But then my next trial was I was in a coma. Uh, for almost three weeks in 2008, I had had a surgery in 2007, uh, that later went wrong, essentially. So, a series of health things happened, and I had to have emergency surgery and I aspirated on the operating table. And then I got something called ARDS, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. That affects hundreds of thousands of people, but it’s not talked about cuz it’s usually a secondary effect. So, a lot of people who died from Covid were actually dying from ARDS. What happens is your lungs, every little sack in your lung fill with fluid, and so you can’t breathe. You are essentially drowning in your own body. And so, they didn’t think I was gonna live. They told my husband three times to say goodbye, including the day of that surgery. They also didn’t know how long I’d been without oxygen on the operating table, so they were afraid of brain damage. So, I’m happy to be here every day. Every day, but then in 2014, my house burned down. Uh, yeah. So, I was at our beach house with my two boys. We had bought a shack on the beach. It was a shack in Ocean Shores. Uh, we bought it when my youngest wasn’t even two yet, and he will be 19 soon. So, it’s been 17 years this year and I had, we’d gotten home. It was an August day. I always spent August with the boys there. I’d put a DuraFlame log on the fire. Lit the fire, the flu was open. I did know that. Uh, but put my kids to bed. They brushed their teeth, went to bed, and then I heard a noise, like a jet engine landing on the roof, and somebody drove up our driveway honking, you have a chimney fire. And so I took the water from the fridge, the Brita water filter at the time, and dumped it on that log and went, ah, we’re good now. Nope. So, I ran outside, and I looked up at the roof. And so, I, it’s a three-story house and I, so I walked down the path to look and down the driveway to look and we were fine. And I finally got ahold of my husband who was playing poker at his best friend’s house. And incidentally, his best friend is married to my oldest friend on earth. So, I finally called her and said, Mandy, I need to talk to Eric. Uh, so I finally got to talk to him. He goes, go outside again. So, I went outside and there was a dinner platter, size flames. Coming from the roof, and it was a cedar shake shingle roof, and it was all inflames within about a half an hour. So, I got my kids outta bed and we ran outside and for some reason though, I called 911. They didn’t realize the homeowner was there. Five alarm fire. We had fire trucks from four different cities come through and I couldn’t get the car out cuz we were blocked. So, we just stood in the neighbor’s yard and watched it burn. For over two hours until they finally discovered we were there. And then the final chapter, the final section, is really about grief and how you deal with grief, and the fact that my grandmother had died right when I needed her most. My house had just burned down. And so that was hard for me. And then one of my employees, long-term employee, who had worked for me for almost nine years, uh, died of cancer quite suddenly. He left the office on January 4th to get better and died on March 26th, leaving three small children under 10. Yeah, and he was not just an employee. He was a friend for years and my neighbor four doors down. So, it was really brutal. So yeah, that’s the first book. That’s the befores and after. And the fact that I have the power to choose my own reaction to anything that life throws my way.
MARK WRIGHT 30:31
Well, let me back up just a little in that story. When your dad and I think all of our parents probably said things that made us go, hmm, I want that sounds a little off. What, what, you know, cuz when you’re a kid, you, you, most of the time you idolize your parents and then you start to see like, like my own kids do that. You know, I’m flawed. We’re all flawed. At what point? Yeah, I mean it’s kinda like the, it’s kinda like the stories of, um, alcoholic parents. Uh, they’re children I think go one of two ways. One way is that they see what alcohol does and they don’t touch a drop for their lives the other and sometimes they go the other way, and the genetics are strong, and they fall into drinking too much. But I think when you saw your dad treating women that way and, and you must have experienced it, many, many examples over the years. At what point did you realize that that was him and, and you didn’t have to buy into that?
ANDREA HEUSTON 31:30
Oh, that was actually after I came back from Europe as an exchange student. I had the absolute honor and the gift of being selected as a Rotary Exchange student, uh, for the 1987 – 88 year. So, I went to Denmark. I’d chosen France by the way, because I was taking French in high school and loved French, it was a natural at languages, but I got my second choice, which was Scandinavia because of my allergies apparently. So, I, I don’t know how that worked back then, but I got Scandinavia, so I cried when I got Denmark. Uh, but it turned out to be the most pivotal year of my entire life. So I was honored to live with four different families while I was there. It’s the way the exchange program works is that it’s usually three, but I had a family that didn’t work out, but one of them became my family and they still are. And I learned that it was okay to have opinions. It was okay to think differently. It was okay to believe differently, and different societies honored women, different societies. They uplifted them instead. So, Iceland was part of the Danish crown for many, many years, and Iceland in 1975 had the first all women walkout from work. In 1975, all women walked off their jobs for equality. And it was a, a big theme in Scandinavia and especially in Denmark. And so, I realized that I had a voice. I was 16, but I got a voice. I’d never had a voice before, ever. Not one that was listened to by the people who I believed were important to me. And when I came back, my father willed to this day and even said it last Friday, worst decision he ever made was letting me go to Denmark because, and I, I think the quote last Friday just to share, cuz I did a LinkedIn post about it, was the worst thing that ever happened to our family was letting you go to Denmark as exchange student. We had no idea how much your personality would’ve changed or would change. Now, to be fair, I think my personality would’ve changed at some point anyway. I would’ve learned these things, but I learned them by living there. And, oh, I don’t know whether to laugh. Oh, you can laugh. I laugh now, Mark. It’s not big deal. Not a big deal. I love who I am. I like who I am. And if they don’t, they don’t, and that’s okay. I don’t have to have them like me. Yeah. They’re family. So, yeah.
MARK WRIGHT 33:51
So, let’s talk about, you told me, you told me after the coma. Um, a profound thing happened to you that you learned about yourself and how you had been running your business. And that is, you learned you didn’t have to do everything yourself. Um, that must have been, that must have been an eye opener. I mean, did it feel like a punch in the gut at the time, or did it feel like, wow, this is a relief because I finally get.
ANDREA HEUSTON 34:15
It felt like a gift Mark. It felt like an absolute gift. So, I’d had a business coach who’d been telling me this all along. In fact, he showed me this diagram with a CEO sits in the middle and all the departments go around and the CEO touches everything until you become a real CEO and you move out of the middle, and you move into one or two of the quadrants. Not, that wasn’t a quadrant. They were pie shaped, one or two of the pie pieces cuz they were way more than four. Uh, and I just didn’t get it. And so, before my coma, I touched 85% of the projects that came into the office. I knew the payroll numbers. I knew how many hours people had worked on what project. I knew the clients. I knew everything about it. And the gift that happened for me is that I was away from my business for eight months. In 2008, eight months, because when I got outta my coma, I was in a wheelchair. For six weeks and then I was, I was with a walker, and I couldn’t even stay awake more than six hours at a time until probably November or December of that year, and my coma was in June.
MARK WRIGHT 35:17
Wow. Cuz your brain, your brain was just wiped out.
ANDREA HEUSTON 35:20
Absolutely. Wiped out.
MARK WRIGHT 35:22
Well, I have to ask you did. Were you aware of anything when, when you were in the coma? Or did it, was it just like going to sleep and waking?
ANDREA HEUSTON 35:28
No. So really interesting side story here. Um, I have dreams that I had while I was in the coma. There’s three of them specifically, and I still have them periodically when I’m stressed. Really interesting. Same dreams. One, I’m on a helicopter landing pad and it’s cold and just really interesting. Um, another one I am rolling my kids’ stroller through a maze in the pitch black dark. And then the third one, and there’s way more detail, but the third one, do you know that that right at the fair called the zipper where all the change falls outta your pocket? I’m on the zipper and it will never stop. So really interesting. They’re all anxiety dreams, so whenever I’m really anxious I have ’em and I don’t have ’em more than about once a year, one or two of them. But I’m always like, why am I still having this dream? But the thing I remember most and, and I, it wasn’t, I would say a memory, but it’s a realization about three weeks after coming home from the hospital, I’d have these songs in my head and songs that I didn’t necessarily listen to all the time. Like I had Lionel Richie in my head, or I would have a song by Kenny Rogers in my head, or, you know, things that weren’t necessarily things I had on repeat. And I finally said to my husband, did you sing me this song? He goes, yeah, I sang you that song all the time. And then I’d say, did you sing me this song? Yeah, sang you that song all the time. He said, I sang every single day, multiple songs too, because it would bring my blood pressure in. And so those songs were there. They were in my head. So whatever people say about people in a coma, not being able to hear you, not being able to recognize that you’re there. Um, it’s wrong. They, they know. I knew. I just didn’t know. I knew until later on when I would hear these songs in my head like, why, why is this song in my head? Oh, my husband sang it to me.
MARK WRIGHT 37:25
That’s awesome. What a beautiful story. A turning point in your career. Andrea came when you wrote an article that went viral. The, the article was called Never Apologize for Being a Woman. Set up the background to what led you to write that article and why you think it blew up the way it did in such a good way.
ANDREA HEUSTON 37:42
I’m gonna correct you first. It is never apologized for being a strong woman. Aha.
MARK WRIGHT 37:51
Big difference Mark.
ANDREA HEUSTON 37:52
Actually, there, there is a difference there, and I say that because it was super important at the time. I sat in a coffee shop in Belltown writing an article. It was December 10th, uh, 2019. And the quote, I always used a quote, or I used a statement from my article and my article statement that time was strong women don’t have attitude, they have standards and boundaries. And this article is about the eight things, basically the eight things that I believe strong woman brings to all of her encounters. And it went viral. And I, when I say viral, it went crazy viral. I got a call in January, less than a month later from uh, News Four in Chicago, and the reporter said, do you realize. First of all, how’d they find me? Oh, reporters have their ways, but do you realize you have one of the top 10 most read pieces of media for all of 2019? And I said, what are you talking about? And she said, and you’re the. Only LinkedIn article there. At the time, it had over 8 million impressions because, and I said, I argued with her, I said, no, it hasn’t, doesn’t have that many on LinkedIn. She goes, no, no, no. It has been tweeted, it’s been Facebooked, it’s been on the news already. It is all over the world, and it was a gift. It was an absolute gift because I gave this gift to other people, but it was a gift to me cuz I went, whoa, I do have a voice. And I’m gonna use it more. So, my voice is for women, my voice is about being gritty, tenacious, and passionate. And yeah, men have those traits as well, but women, women have those in spades. They’re in their DNA. Yeah, that started my voice for women. Not that I didn’t think I already had it, but that it just went crazy after that. I actually created a t-shirt with that on it. Uh, that said, strong women don’t have attitude, they have standards and boundaries, and I’ve seen it three times on other people. Once at SEATAC Airport, I was like, I don’t know you, but oh gosh, can I have my picture with you?
MARK WRIGHT 40:04
And I love the, uh, the eight qualities that you laid out. Uh, of, of a strong woman. She stands up for herself, invests in herself, has boundaries, celebrates other women, knows her worth, doesn’t rely on others’ opinions about her life, is confident and decides to be strong. I think that is just so amazing and affirming. Did, did that set the stage for your podcast lead like a woman? Is that, did that lead you to start the podcast?
ANDREA HEUSTON 40:28
So, it didn’t lead me to start the podcast. I’d wanted to have a podcast for a while. I just didn’t know which way I was gonna take it. What it did is it set the stage. So, I realized right then that women leaders are important to this world. I did a lot of research into it, uh, and a friend of mine who’s a branding expert, she doesn’t like that I say lead like a woman. She wants me to say lead as a woman, and I said, alliteration is my thing. We’re going with lead like a woman. Uh, but it set that stage because so many women need to hear that they don’t believe it. They, they grow up in circumstances such as mine or even worse, and they don’t believe that they can stand up for themselves, that they can choose to be confident every day, even when you don’t feel confident. Choose confidence. That is my story about walking into that, uh, big conference room when I was 25 years old. I chose to be confident. So yeah, it’s just been a theme.
MARK WRIGHT 41:27
So, I, I, it reminds me of, uh, one of the big sporting companies did a play on that, that, you know, derogatory saying, you know, play like…
ANDREA HEUSTON 41:34
I love that. I love Nike. Nike.
MARK WRIGHT 41:37
And it was so, oh yeah, yeah. It was so cool how they turned that, that, you know term on its head. Um, so when you say lead like a woman, I’d love to just have you lay out what that looks like. I mean, what, what you’re trying to, to teach through all of your, your podcast episodes.
ANDREA HEUSTON 41:53
Yes. So, what I want women to understand is you don’t have to lead like men. You don’t need to take on their traits. And that’s what I did for years and years and years, because I thought that’s what I had to do. I had to wear a suit, I had to be bossy, uh, because I didn’t understand the difference between a boss and a leader back then. Instead, I thought, I, I gotta be bossy for people to follow me or to listen to me. But what I want women to understand is that we have traits that men don’t have or men have them, but not to the same degree. Just like men have traits that women don’t have or don’t have them in the same balance. And what I mean by that is that like empathy is one, men can be empathetic, but honestly women are more empathetic. Uh, Cambridge, university of Cambridge has done a study about it and women outscore men on cognitive empathy in every single situation. And that really just means putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. So that ability to lead from somebody else’s point of view is absolutely priceless to companies. Strong communication. Women are better communicators than men. Now, not every woman, no, not every man is a bad communicator. I am painting with a broad brush to make a point, but really strong communication. Women know how to talk. We do, but we’re really good at finding a balance between handing out, you know, necessary information or requirements and giving a team enough freedom to create a solution, whereas, b, basically we’re not micromanagers as a general, general rule. So yeah, there’s other ones there too. But really the leadership traits that women bring to the table are different than what men bring. Because? Because of biology, because of biology but also history.
MARK WRIGHT 43:45
Yeah. And I want to encourage people listening right now, uh, go back to in the first five episodes of this podcast, Dr. John Medina. Brain scientist does a brilliant job of laying out the science behind what Andrea is saying right now about the science. That, that the more women you have on your team, the more successful your team is gonna be at work. So that is proven. It is scientifically hard stop. We don’t need to talk anymore whether that’s true or not. Um, I want to be respectful of your time. Um, let’s talk briefly about your Lead Like a Woman Tales from the Trenches book. So, it’s a compilation of 10 tales right of, of really inspiring room. And you, you started talking about it. Give me one little snippet of a story of one of the women featured in that book that just blew in your mind when, when you, when you started writing.
ANDREA HEUSTON 44:32
That’s an easy one for me. So good friend of mine, Dr. Kristen Kale, she has built and sold three businesses and the second one is over 15 million. I mean, she’s just done this and she’s good at it. She knows what she’s doing, trial and error, but her story is about the word no. She was told no all the time. She calls it notivation. So not motivation, but notivation. Because basically they said things like, oh, you can’t do that. You’re dyslexic. You’re too dumb. You can’t play professional sports. You’re a girl. You can’t run a company like in the insurance business. That’s a man’s word. You can’t. No. And she has created something called motivation out of it. So that word no propels her to go further, farther, faster, and stronger. And I love her story. I love the fact that she talks about, uh, her brother’s. Illness and how it, it’s like something out of a novel. But her brother was very ill with, uh, particular kind of cancer, and only she could save him is what it came down to. It was a bone marrow transplant and only she could save him, and she was five. And so, people, they told her no, they, I mean, they told her no. And she at that age knew her mind well enough to say yes. And so, she really, at the age of five, helped make that happen. So, she’s got all these stories of resilience through people telling her she couldn’t do something. She, she has this attitude in life of what, okay, I’m gonna prove you wrong now. And she does every time she played professional basketball in Europe before we had professional basketball in the US for women. Yeah, she’s pretty amazing.
MARK WRIGHT 46:08
Um, tell me about, uh, entrepreneurs’ organization. You’ve been in that organization EO. We have some mutual friends. We do in that group, we, how did you get connected to EO back in the day? And it really seems like what, what I know about that organization is just a really high-level group of entrepreneurs, a global organization. Um, and it’s really inspiring in terms of teaching and motivating and supporting each other.
ANDREA HEUSTON 46:42
Absolutely. I’ve learned more from my fellow EOers than anyone else. In the world, I feel, uh, it’s a peer group, a peer group of business owners that have a certain level of revenue. Now there’s 17,000 members worldwide now. It’s an incredible international, uh, organization. You get the chance to meet people internationally. Now, I had three good friends in different parts of my life. I had a friend of mine who had a business across the street from mine. So, we had met that way. Oh, we’re both business owners, let’s chat. And then I had a friend of mine I had met through a rotary and B, the 40 under 40 years and years ago. And so, we’d been friends a long time. Well, he was also an EO. In fact, you know him well, my friend Eric Slaybaugh. Shout out to Slaybaugh. Yeah. And then I had nothing. He was awesome and a good friend. Uh, and then I had a third friend who owned another company in the Seattle area, and we partnered on work for Microsoft. So, these three people all mentioned EO to me within probably six weeks’ time, all at once. And I’d known them for varying lengths of time, and I went, huh, maybe I should check this out. So, I checked it out and I learned a bit about it, and I was referred in by both those three people. One was Jeff Anderson. Uh, he owned is Aqua Trophy at the time. He is now one of the founders of Evergreen Markets. Which, by the way, we did all the design for, uh, the other is Eric Slaybaugh, like I said, and then the third, uh, she is so dear. She is no longer running business. She is well and truly retired. My friend Lynn Parker, she used to be one of the partners of Parker La Play, so these people all think they must have talked or something, I don’t know. But they were like, Andrea needs to do this. So, I learned a bit more about it, did my own research cuz I am a Gen Xer and please don’t tell me things. I want to learn them myself. And then I decided to join. So, I interviewed and was accepted. Now I’m gonna tell you a little secret Mark. I hated it. I hated it so much. The first year I quit after the first year. Quit. I’m like, I’m gone. I’m done. I had been in for 10 years now the EO portal says nine. It’s wrong because they’re not counting that first year that I was in years ago. Uh, it took me about three years to come back and those same people talking at me going, you need this. And one of ’em, Lynn Parker finally said to me, cuz I was fed up with some of the stuff that was happening there. And I, I looked at like a dating club and then my first forum, uh, experience wasn’t good. This group appears. It wasn’t good because we were all brand new. We had no idea what we were doing, none of us. And so Lynn said to me, Andrea, take what you need. You don’t have to take it all. If you need form, take form. If you want events, take events. If you want learning, take learning. You don’t have to do all the parts. And I went, oh okay, so I went back and now recently, a couple years ago I left, uh, the Seattle chapter and I’ve been instrumental in helping spearhead and start a brand new chapter, which is a regional chapter, and I sit on the board of that one. It’s called the US West Region, and it’s a great chapter. So, we are all virtual, but we meet once or twice a year in person. It’s a lot of fun.
MARK WRIGHT 49:54
That’s awesome. Um, as we are starting to wrap things up, Andrea, I understand you just launched, uh, online speakers course. Is that right?
ANDREA HEUSTON 50:02
Well, I’ve launched a couple things, that online speakers course was, uh, launched a couple months ago, but last Friday, Mark, I launched a brand new business. Yeah.
MARK WRIGHT 50:12
What is it?
ANDREA HEUSTON 50:13
It’s called Lead Like A Woman Speak Her. So, Speak Her h-e-r at the end. And it is an online speaker’s portal. It is not a speaker’s bureau. Let me make that real clear. Uh, I don’t believe as much in speaker’s bureaus, cuz they take a lot and they don’t give a lot frankly, at Lead Like A Woman speak Her, we give. We are not taking money to find you speaking gigs, rather people can find you. But our mission is to support women in harnessing their strengths, amplifying their voices, and making a lasting impact in their industries and communities. And we’re doing that through tools, resources, classes, influential leaders, all sorts of things. It’s a, it’s a subscription platform and there’s five different levels. My fourth, the fourth level is my favorite. It’s called She’s Illuminating, and it’s where you get to create and apply for TED Talks and that. I just think it’s such a brilliant way to share your message with other people as through TED Talks. So yeah, check it out.
MARK WRIGHT 51:14
Yeah, that’s awesome. Always, always creating Andrea, what to in your mind? What hasn’t felt like work? I mean, what has given you the most joy in your working life?
ANDREA HEUSTON 51:26
You know, it’s hard for me to say this out loud because first I love strategy. Anytime I get to sit down with a client and strategize, it doesn’t feel like work cuz we’re just throwing ideas out. I was actually strategizing with my brother last night. Not that he’s a client, uh, but he has been the manager of the Tractor Tavern in Ballard and he’s been there for 20-20. Yeah. 22 years, but it’s their 30th anniversary next year. We were strategizing on how to present this to the public, so strategy is my favorite, but one of the things like the most joy from doing is coaching speakers. I love watching them come from, I am so scared, I don’t wanna get up on that stage. I’m one of those people that would rather die because eight outta 10 people would rather die than public speak. Um, I get so much joy from watching it go from that to, hey world, this is my message. Here’s the gift I’m giving you as my audience. And it, it just makes me happy. I love doing it and I’m really good at it.
MARK WRIGHT 52:25
What’s the biggest mistake that people make? Uh, when it comes to public speaking.
ANDREA HEUSTON 52:30
I would say the number one biggest mistake they make is not knowing who their audience is. Because if you don’t know who you’re talking to, you’re never gonna reach ’em. Once you know who’s in their audience, in your audience, you can tell them a story. You can create that resonance. You can build a bridge between you and them where the your message will then have impact. The other big mistake, and I gotta say this, the other big mistake is believing that people are judging you. Because you know what? Those people in that audience, they’re sitting there going, oh my God, I’m so glad they can do that cuz I can’t. They think you’re a superhero. They do not judge you for standing up there. Yeah.
MARK WRIGHT 53:10
Yeah, yeah. That’s great. So, Andrea, this has been so much fun. I, I would love for you to talk directly to maybe an up and coming female leader. Maybe, maybe someone who’s mid-career as well. But what advice would you give to, to that female leader that, that you wish maybe someone had told you really early in your career. It sounds like you were pretty dialed in early on. I’ll have to say.
ANDREA HEUSTON 53:36
Well, I would say one thing that I’ve struggled with all my life is imposter syndrome. And I wanna tell you, women out there, whether you’re at the beginning of your career, just learning where your passion meets your purpose or if you’re midway through your career and you’re trying to figure out, a, what’s next? B, am I good at this? C, am I making impact? My favorite quote, and I don’t know if it’s even a quote, but it’s something I refer back to every day and I share with my speakers, is it’s none of my business what other people think of me. I’m gonna repeat that and then I’m gonna explain. It’s none of my business what other people think of me, because that’s their problem, not mine. It’s theirs. You can’t control what they think, so it isn’t any of your business, and remember that, do you? Do you be you and you’ll be all you need to be.
MARK WRIGHT 54:28
Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic. Andrea, this has been so much fun. We’ll put links to where people can find you in the show notes. But, uh, I’m just so inspired by your life and your work and your ability to just take whatever comes your way and, and make it something.
ANDREA HEUSTON 54:42
I’m a work in progress, Mark. But thank you and thanks for having me on BEATS WORKING. It’s been such a fun conversation.
MARK WRIGHT 54:49
Alright, take care. I’m Mark Wright. Thanks for listening to BEATS WORKING, part of the WORKP2P family. New episodes drop every Monday. And if you’ve enjoyed the conversation, subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Special thanks to show producer and web editor Tamar Medford. In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from our Contributors Corner and Sidekick Sessions. Join us next week for another episode of BEATS WORKING, where we are winning the game of work.
