226: Rachel Mushahwar | Making Your Vision of Impact a Reality

05/05/22 • 33 min

Thank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts!

“You don’t have to be amazing. You don’t have to put on this face like everything is great, and make it sound like it’s easy. You just have to keep going. Crawling is fine, because eventually you’ll get back up.” - Rachel Mushahwar

Are you a female leader who feels compelled to make a broader impact? We all have visions for what we want in life, but what do we do to create them and bring them into reality? Today’s Finding Brave guest has a burning desire to fulfill her mission to make the world a much better place than how she found it, but her journey hasn’t been without its challenges or struggles. In this episode, she shares her remarkable story and how as an executive for the world’s largest online retailer, she has set out to create high-performing work environments where all employees feel represented, respected, valued and empowered.

Rachel Mushahwar is the Head of North America Partner Sales at Amazon Web Services, leading an organization that leverages Partners to accelerate growth, drive innovation, and shape the future using AWS technology.

She has 25 years of experience developing, implementing and selling technology, working at companies including Intel Corporation, PetSmart, DHL and American Express, among others. She got her start as an award-winning engineer in heavy highway construction, igniting a passion to utilize technology to make things simpler and change outcomes in a meaningful way.

From there she went on to pursue computer programming and began an enterprise IT journey that took her around the world building data centers. Along the way, she realized her skillset was better suited to solving customer problems than writing code, and she pivoted to leading billion-dollar sales and marketing organizations, developing the vision and strategy to ensure her companies’ technology kept pace with evolving market and organizational demands.

Rachel is deeply committed to inclusivity, diversity and equity, and believes in creating high-performing work environments where all employees feel represented, respected, valued and empowered.

She is an active supporter of STEM education programs and an advocate for providing the next-up generations with opportunities to build the future we all want to live in.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Rachel shares what it’s really like to balance raising 4 children with having a fast-paced career, and as you’ll hear, inspiration isn’t enough to make your visions a reality. She is someone who boldly chose not to pursue a life that is for someone else, and in the process, is successfully manifesting her best future self.

To learn more about today's guest, visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelmushahwar/

Thank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts!

Rachel is deeply committed to inclusivity, diversity and equity, and believes in creating high-performing work environments where all employees feel represented, respected, valued and empowered.

She is an active supporter of STEM education programs and an advocate for providing the next-up generations with opportunities to build the future we all want to live in.

To learn more about today's guest, visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelmushahwar/

Previous Episode

225: Michelle Segar | Making Lasting Improvements In Eating and Exercise

Thank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts!

“We have been told to [eat and exercise] a certain way and you do it right or not at all. It is that mindset that really derails people, and The Joy Choice is the antidote to that.” - Michelle Segar

Most of the healthy eating and exercise programs, plans, and strategies that we’ve been taught as “correct” simply do not work in the noisy, busy, and always-changing world we find ourselves in right now. Today’s Finding Brave guest believes that it’s time for a new story of behavior change, and this time, one with a happy ending!

Michelle Segar is an award-winning scientist at the University of Michigan with nearly thirty years studying how to help people adopt healthy behaviors in ways that can survive the complexity and unpredictability of the real world. In her latest book, The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise, Michelle explains that much of what we've been taught about changing our behavior is simplistic, outdated and misguided for many of us. She shares a fresh, joyful, brain-based solution that breaks the rules of behavior change so we can finally change our behavior for good.

If your life tends to be chaotic, you need behavioral change strategies that can work with this reality rather than against it, and I love that what Michelle shares is not only based in scientific research but is also practical and doable and can be applied to our everyday lives. Today’s episode serves as a short masterclass on how to adopt a new framework around eating and exercise, to finally change our behaviors for good!

To learn about today's guest, visit: https://michellesegar.com/

Next Episode

227: Amy E. Herman | Perfect the Fine Art of Problem Solving

Thank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts!

“I show them a work of art, something they have never seen before, and get them to tell me what they see. I then pull it together in a way that they can take that back to their work with them.” - Amy E. HermanWhen the subject of problem-solving comes to mind, fine art may not be the first thing that you think of. However, today’s Finding Brave guest works with leaders around the globe and across many professions using the analysis of works of art to help them solve problems they are facing, from minor annoyances to intractable dilemmas.

Amy E. Herman is President and Founder of the Art of Perception, a world-renowned speaker, and the author of Fixed: How to Perfect The Fine Art of Problem Solving. She is a recovering lawyer and art historian who combined the practical aspects of each of those disciplines—legal analysis and visual analysis--to create her company, the Art of Perception, over 20 years ago. She has trained individuals in all branches of the military, the FBI, the New York Police Department, intelligence officers, officials at NATO, and Fortune 500 companies to look at works of art to become better observers, communicators, and problem solvers.

Her program has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The CBS Evening News, and Smithsonian Magazine, among others. Her TED talk, A Lesson On Looking, has over 840,000 views to date. Her first book, Visual Intelligence, published May 2016 was featured on both the New York Times and Washington Post bestsellers' lists and her upcoming (young adult) book, smART: Use Your Eyes to Boost Your Brain, is due out September 2022.

I’m so excited for you to learn, alongside me, from Amy about how analyzing works of art can improve observation, perception, and communication skills and facilitate better problem-solving. If you take the opportunity to use art to see things in different ways using different perspectives and it helps you to address problems in your own life differently, please do let us know! We would love to hear about your experience.

To learn more about today's guest, visit: https://artfulperception.com/