Best Buy: With Her in Mind

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As the WOLF Team was thinking about Women’s History Month and what different events we were going to plan we thought it would be great to highlight female leaders in our own company that we admire and ask them to write a Blog; Shari Ballard was one of those female leaders! I asked her the following questions;   1. Which historic woman do you most relate to and why? Or, which historic woman do you think was most influential and why? 2. Who is the woman in your life that has been most influential to you personally or professionally? 3. Have you ever had a female mentor? What was the most important thing you learned from her?  

Shari recommended doing it interview style so I was very excited to meet with her in person and hear her tell me firsthand about her experiences and thoughts. I should introduce myself as you will hear a few interjections from me … My name is Nicole Johnson, and I am the Communications and Event’s Manager on the WOLF Team.

This is part 2 of 3 of the interview; please check back next week for part 3!

*Please note there is also a voice recording of this same message below if you would like to listen to it vs. reading it. Click on the link below

Which modern day woman do you most admire and why?

SB: The one woman that I have paid a lot of attention to and have a lot of admiration for, but maybe not for the reason people think, and it’s certainly not admiration borne out of ... I don’t know her. 

So maybe like up close and personal my admiration would be very misplaced.  But it’s Hilary Clinton.  And the reason for it is, I think it would be a very difficult setup ... there’s a lot in the plotline I think.

Having aspirations of your own, being smart and gifted and talented and being married to somebody who has the same attributes. 

And then being in politics where you’re going to necessarily at some point probably, especially given the way Bill Clinton’s life went, to a degree, put some of your own aspirations in the backseat for awhile.  That in and of itself I think would be hard.  

The context of that, regardless of what party you believe in or what you think of Bill Clinton‘s presidency or not, I think would be outrageously difficult for anybody.

To then come out of it and probably in some ways be happy to say, we’re so done with all this.  And then want to take on your own aspirations again.  And I think to do it in a way that you have to have your own identity.  You’re not Bill Clinton’s wife. 

So I think there’s a lot in that about identity.  And I think there’s ... sometimes creating your own identity is difficult ... I think different people have a lot more stacked against them in trying to create their own identity.

Like somebody who is the child of a legacy.  I just finished reading Roseanne Cash’s memoir.  Her dad is Johnny Cash.  I love her music.

And one of the things I’ve been interested about with her is, my god, can you imagine, you’re Johnny Cash’s daughter and you like music.  I mean how the hell do you carve out your own identity and not have it lead with, she’s Johnny Cash’s daughter?

And to hear her ... and I’ve ... I don’t know her.  I’ve been in settings with her a number of times and read her book.  And she seems remarkably sane and balanced in being able to kind of openly talk about the difficulty of that, while at the same time really has carved out her own life and her own space.

And so I think ... and Hilary Clinton would be a similar example.  Where I think the circumstance of that would make it much more difficult for her to carve out and continue to carve out her own identity and her own purpose and her own contributions separate from that of her husband.

And in a field that’s just outrageously destructive and personal and requires I would think just outrageous levels of kind of personal resilience to get through that.  And then to see her carve out her own identity in doing that. 

And, again, independent of the politics of it, which people could weigh in on, but I think that’s really quite remarkable, especially on that kind of stage and all over the world and in context where I’m sure she’s up against people who have been in power forever and do the nice little head pat of, oh, you’re the ex-president’s wife.

And just the navigation of that, I admire it greatly.  And so I think those would be two examples of people I don’t know, so I’m not saying I admire them firsthand. 

But what I admire about both of them is taking on the challenge of your own identity in a context that is harder than what most of us deal with in our lifetime to do that. 

I think I’m kind of most attracted to people who, even when they don’t really have to, take on the work of carving out their own identity and trying to find their own purpose while honoring their legacy, but not being held hostage to it.  That’s how I would describe it.

So I think in both of those cases, they certainly honor the legacy that they’re in the middle of, but I think have in no way been held hostage to it, which I admire greatly.