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OhHello - Elisa Udaskin
72 Plays2 years ago
Elisa is so excited to be a "Hello" mentor via OhHello.io. She is an accomplished brand marketer, social impact leader and collaborative, inspirational leader. Elisa's marketing career at Kraft Foods and Mondelez International spanned traditional brand strategy and management, innovation, customer relationship management and corporate partnerships in Canada, the US, Singapore and globally. She has spearheaded corporate initiatives partnering with nonprofit organizations throughout her career. Elisa is the author of the book Be A Mensch: Unleash Your Power to Be Kind and Help Others and also works as a nonprofit consultant. She is a mom to two fabulous young adults and an amazing Newfie, partner of a fishmonger and a balaboosta in her community.
Mom to two young adults and her Newfie Thomas, and partner to her fishmonger husband. Balaboosta - a caretaker and nurturer.
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Transcript
Introductions and Backgrounds
00:00:01
Speaker
Oh, come on, Charlie Brown. Oh, come on, Charlie Brown. Oh, hello, Lisa. Hello, Jeremy. How are you?
00:00:23
Speaker
I am great, I am great. I loved our catch-up session right beforehand. How are you? Who are you? Tell us a little bit about who I'm looking at, who I'm speaking with, who I was introduced to about a month ago. We hit it off, had such a lovely best friend conversation. Thought we went into a thing, it'd be a 15-minute introduction. We're on the phone for an hour of FaceTime.
00:00:50
Speaker
I know who you are. Why don't you tell our audience of, oh, hello, who I have the pleasure of speaking with. Thank you. Well, first of all, I want to thank you so much for inviting me to join you here. And I did. I felt like we had an instant connection, which was terrific. So who am I? There's so many answers. My name is Alicia Udaskin, and I don't know if you can tell that I have an accent. Some people might think I do. I'm Canadian. I'm from Toronto, and I live in New Jersey.
Career Journey at Kraft and Mondelez
00:01:19
Speaker
And I thought maybe we could start, I could tell you a bit about my career journey. We'll love to hear about your career journey, please. So as I said, I'm Canadian. And I started my career in Toronto with Craft Canada and Mondelez. And I am a type A all the way. And I had a very, very linear career trajectory and a plan.
00:01:47
Speaker
And so I always took all these different assignments and rules that were interesting and moving, you know, forward. I worked in, uh, in Kraft Canada in Toronto. Then the company moved myself and my family to the United States of America in New Jersey.
00:02:07
Speaker
And from here, I lived in Singapore and I led global team in Singapore for two years, and then came back to New Jersey. And all the way through my time at Kraft-Mondolese, the company bought Nabisco, bought Cadbury. I was able to be the brand manager on Oreo, work on chocolate.
00:02:26
Speaker
Come candy all those kind of fun things all the goodness all the goodness and all the way through I always was able to do something that was really for me which was
00:02:39
Speaker
helping others.
Transition to a Portfolio Career
00:02:40
Speaker
So I was always able to do other sort of side project initiatives of corporate initiatives that we did with the food banks, did it in Toronto, did it in Singapore and in the United States for the country, actually. So it was just a really, really terrific, terrific linear trajectory to the stars, I would say, right?
00:03:05
Speaker
And so after close to 20 areas, there was a restructuring at our company, like there is in all these. And I was like, me, me, me, me, me. Because I was ready for the next thing.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so the next thing was actually not what anybody really expected of me. But all I knew is I needed to pause and really wanted to think about what I wanted to do in phase two. And so the first thing I did was use those air miles that I had. And I went to Guatemala four times. I started volunteering, got on the board for the school for developmentally and physically challenged kids.
00:03:39
Speaker
And I started to get more involved in my community. I made the conscious decision to build what I call a portfolio career so that I could be more flexible to be around. My kids were just, my daughter was just getting into high school. I had always been the parent that was, you know, there, but like always on conference calls, always working, always traveling. And I made a decision that I wanted to be home and figure things out.
00:04:06
Speaker
So what I did was, again, I built this like portfolio career, which I call it. I did some nonprofit consulting. I built a website, a social enterprise called Caring Organizer, which unfortunately was passed away through COVID. Let's just put it that way. But it was an amazing experience. And I also became a first time author and wrote a book. All while also
00:04:34
Speaker
becoming a part-time barista working from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. so I could have that social interaction and do all that. So did that for a few years. My daughter's in college. My son is gay of college. My life stage changed again. And this is the kind of thing that I
00:04:52
Speaker
that I really recognize now. My lifestyle shakeout, I'm like, I'm ready to throw my hat back in that arena. So for a year, I became the CMO at a startup company and rolled up my sleeves, because it was a small nimble company, to basically not have all those gazillion resources at a Kraft Mondelez and learn how to do a lot myself.
00:05:12
Speaker
We just recently went through a restructuring. And so now I am going back to building what is that portfolio career again for me, starting with some nonprofit consulting, the mentorship, coaching, things like that. So that's basically me.
Redefining Identity and Community Leadership
00:05:28
Speaker
Amazing. In a nutshell, how would you define yourself?
00:05:32
Speaker
I mean, that's so much like you have such a robust experience of being a global marketer working across a philanthropist, a global marketer, a startup builder, a mom, a wife, with all of those different hats that you're wearing. And for those not watching us right now, I just did a hat motion of moving your hat in a different direction. How would you define yourself? Would it be just being
00:06:02
Speaker
a social impact leader, would it be a marketer, a little bit of all of those? You know, that's really interesting because after I left Mondelez, I was actually on an airplane coming back on a business trip in business class. And I thought to myself, I had kind of an identity crisis and I thought,
00:06:21
Speaker
Who am I? And how, if, if I was to talk to the person beside me, cause in business class you usually don't, which I learned, what would I say to them about who I am? And I always would have said, I'm a marketer. I'm a business leader. I global blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But over the past few years, um, you know, I think that what defines me the most is being a nurturer, being someone who
00:06:47
Speaker
can hopefully inspire others to be their best selves in everything I do. And that is still within the context of a large company, a small company, because I really believe in servant leadership going both ways, right? And adapting. And so I think that my identity now is more about community leader,
00:07:12
Speaker
community impact, social impact, things like that. But you don't have to volunteer at a specific organization. It's just being a mensch, a good person. And helping people, because of my personality, always understanding objectives and get to results. So I guess that's how I would sort of define myself now.
00:07:32
Speaker
In Yiddish we call it a balabusta, which is like a nurturer, a caregiver, and just sort of all through my whole life, but it starts with me as opposed to what my job was and my title was. I love that. So essentially what you're going to be giving back to our Oh Hello community, so to other mentees as a mentor within our ecosystem, what I'm hearing you say, Elisa, you're going to be giving you an empath, you're agile, you have the ability to
00:08:02
Speaker
to listen and help people, help curate and craft where they help them, like just cheer them up, boost them up based on your experiences of innovation and change. And not always just knowing that career paths are not always going to be linear per se. Cool, cool. What excites you the most about mentorship? What excites you about, oh, hello. When you have the opportunity to give back, like if you look
00:08:32
Speaker
You have two children, well, adult children-ish when they're in college, the big-ish. But looking back, what would you tell yourself if you were their age, if you were at two different Big 10 schools right now? So several questions right there. Yeah. What would you tell yourself? What would you tell your kids? What would you tell your 30-year-old self, your 25-year-old self?
00:09:01
Speaker
So I think what excites me the most about this initiative and Oh, hello and mentorship is really to help people unleash what's inside them, unleash their potential, unleash their happiness, unleash their best way to achieve what they want, what they want to do. And, you know, not everyone out there have
00:09:21
Speaker
Formal or informal mentors. They might be shy they might be you know nervous about because there's Vulnerability that comes along with that when you want to ask someone for help Okay, and you may not want to go to the people that you know because there may be things that you haven't you've acknowledged maybe at the tipping point for yourself, but I
00:09:39
Speaker
you haven't felt comfortable because you're just not sure how people will think. Similar to me, what are people going to think about me, the way I used to be, and then who I am now, what I'm doing, and you're afraid of judgment. So what I absolutely love about this Oh Hello community and initiative is the opportunity to pair people up with a mentor where they can just be open without the judgment and be able to just really explore and speak without worrying about what other people think.
Career Adaptability and Mentorship
00:10:09
Speaker
You know, I think it's beautiful absolutely beautiful So your second question Chuck shall I continue these you're in a role. What would I say? I Could say a lot of things to my kids I don't think you they just came in coming out of Teenagership so you don't want to know what I'm you can imagine what I've been saying about other things What I would say is
00:10:34
Speaker
about to my younger people's kids, to other people's kids, or, you know, to young people, as well as mid-stage career as well. What I have learned a lot is that it is so good and always is good to have objectives, right? A vision and objectives, but you have to recognize and allow yourself to not be linear.
00:10:59
Speaker
It's okay if you want to be linear and that works for people, but guess what happens? Life. Life happens. And through life, whether you're single, you have a partner, you're married, there's going to be different times where you have children where
00:11:17
Speaker
you need to be adaptable and recognize that where you thought you should be, especially if we're talking about careers, may need to change a little bit. And you need to be able to be flexible to do what you need to do. I would say, you know, one of my mottos is nothing is beneath me. And if it's in the direction of achieving your goals, what you need in your life at that moment, nothing should be beneath you. And then the last piece of
00:11:47
Speaker
advice I guess that or mantras that I have is whenever I took a role and I wish that I had done this to myself, I wish someone had helped me along this as well, was that I have taken roles where my title became lower on the next role.
00:12:07
Speaker
Okay, the title compensation was the same data. I took that role because it was going into a new area of business that I knew that I was going to add tools to my toolbox. And that was going to really excite me. And guess what happened? Well, it could probably guess is that I was in it for like six months and then got the title back and kept on growing.
00:12:28
Speaker
So, you know, when I was going through things like this at that time, it was like, Am I taking a step back when people on LinkedIn see my title has changed or things like that, even though I know it's okay, and it's what I want to do. And so what I would say is it the hardest thing is thinking about what all those people out there you think are thinking about, but guess what?
00:12:49
Speaker
They're not you. There you don't have your risk, but they're not living your life. And so if it is in the direction of where you need to go, where you're at your stage, or adding tools to your toolbox, you just go for it. Awesome. So well said. Love those mantras.
00:13:06
Speaker
knowing that you have a call in a few minutes that you have to get to, I want to be conscious of just other nuggets that you can give to our community. Who is a mentor or who are a couple mentors have had a profound impact on your personal and or professional life. And then also combine that with a cause that's near and dear to your heart as a Canadian, as a New Jerseyian.
00:13:34
Speaker
as a marketer, as a mom, as a servant leader. Okay. So when I think of role models or mentors, okay. Um, I would say role models, mom and dad. Okay. So my dad, I mean, it has been so immensely helpful to be really cognizant of my dad's own journey. He was a senior finance exec. Okay. Came from nothing.
00:14:05
Speaker
built himself up to a senior finance exec and his company was taken over and then he did what he needed to do and he changed careers. He became a general manager of a company, stopped doing the finance only and then even when he was
00:14:24
Speaker
getting into retirement, he started driving cars at one of the car dealerships to drive people back and forth, and he absolutely loved it. His stories are he's sitting in the car waiting for the guy to, he was sitting in his car, he's an avid reader, my dad. So he'd get a little knock on the door, Stanley.
00:14:39
Speaker
your rides ready and he would go and drive people and he would always tell me I met this wonderful woman who reminded me of you or I met this person this nothing was beneath my dad is beneath my dad I should say he's now fully retired and just always just doing what you need to do okay my mom
00:14:58
Speaker
in terms of other, you know, values about helping others always. And it doesn't need to be a specific, although she did with volunteer with specific organizations, it's that everyday kindness, that everyday kindness. And that's where the empathy comes in. When you're working to understand when you're having a conflict with someone at work, or you're just feeling really yucky, you take a second and put yourself in their shoes. It's not about you.
00:15:27
Speaker
perhaps have empathy for them, whether it's your boss, your boss's boss, you think they might be on a pedestal and invincible, but guess what? They're humans and they have bad days too. I agree with you on that. I just have two more because I... So that would be more about role models, I guess, in terms of mentors and is definitely a friend of mine, Liz Sporn. A few years ago when I decided to just start my own website and my own social
00:15:56
Speaker
website to help people. My friend Liz was ahead of me in the journey and I had only just met her and she was so gracious and so generous with teaching me and sharing with me all the different tools from HubSpot to Canva to all of those things because remember I said I came from a huge organization had a really nice healthy budget and had all these people doing things all of a sudden and I'm doing these things myself
00:16:23
Speaker
And having a mentor who is so generous with understanding and listening
00:16:31
Speaker
to the business challenges I was having and coming up with some really good concrete tips and valuable. That's Liz. And then the final person, listen, there are so many more, but in the interest of time, I will give you one more. My friend, because these are different types that I'm trying to describe of types of people that is really beneficial to have in your life, is my other friend Nisa, Nisa Crongold. And so she's an HR professional executive and now she is a coach.
00:16:59
Speaker
And whenever throughout my career, throughout the past, I guess, 15 years, I would have a sticky situation at work. I didn't want to necessarily speak to someone in the company. And I was able to describe the situation and she would play things back to me. And that was so helpful for me to get my thoughts together and get calm
Gratitude and Community Involvement
00:17:24
Speaker
again.
00:17:24
Speaker
So those mentors and role models have been really a gift to me. Amazing. Elisa, we're so excited to have you as part of our Oh Hello community. We're excited to have you as a mentor. Your experiences are amazing and just want to thank you for your time for being here. Did you want me to say the organizations, Jeremy? I do. Real quick, if you want to do a real quick. International Rescue Committee and Simon Wiesenthal.
00:17:54
Speaker
Love it. Revity. That was amazing. That was awesome. Yes. It was in our notes. I wanted you to. Thank you for saying that. Elisa, we appreciate you. Thank you for being here. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you. We appreciate you. Here, everybody. Thanks, man, for listening. Hello, podcast. Thank you for listening. Yeah, thanks a lot.