WE TALK ABOUT OUR WALKS

We have worked for many years as crisis, career, and life coaches for colleagues, friends, and more formal clients. As a group, we have ourselves been through some rough waters and gained plenty of hard earned experience along the way.

BALANCING CAREER WITH HOME

Vips is one of these women “who wanted it all and got most of it”. She has had, more or less, balanced lives throughout her career.

Looking back at the first part of the life, our careers, and the challenges we have had in our private life, we realize that we do have things to offer to the generations coming after us.

We have developed a vast selection of tools, systems, and methodologies to keep our lives afloat. We have had to! Our lives have had their own turns and bumps … as most lives have. We certainly did not do everything right, and we did not excel all the time. However, if we were going to do this again, we know what we would have done different.

Vips has most of her life worked in fields where she was not among the gender majority present in the room. She has many friends and colleagues that today also pays it back by paying it forward. We have had to find our own identities and ways of meeting these types of challenges. We have, as individuals, developed different strategies. When we all look back, we all feel that we have had amazing lives and careers. Today, we feel we have succeeded in finding our own way of doing things. When we, as a group, look forward to the next three – four – five – six decades of our lives, even more exciting challenges are waiting. [Note: We are all past forty, however … life expectancy is going up!]

Vips is the one with the more seasoned perspectives [She is not old!]. She has more than 30 years of experience when it comes to balancing family life with career.  She has been blessed with two astonishing, amazing, successful, and outstanding living souls. Both are impressive individuals, well on their own path with university degrees and well functioning families and lives. And she has been blessed with a couple of wonderful grandchildren as well. Others in the group have younger children, we support each other with ideas and systems, and we are ready to support you as well if you are interested.

ADDING QUALITY IN LIFE

When considering two continents, Vips can count over 150 individuals who are among her closest friends. Our family life has included yearly scout camps with the kids, we have served as guest teachers in middle schools, and had a house that was always open for the school friends. The dinners at our table would often include international business partners from both our jobs and the discussions would range widely, inspiring our guests and whatever children that were dining in the house that day. We have traveled the world, driven through deserts in Israel, visited the Rocky Mountains, many more deserts, New York and Everglades in the US, been swimming with dolphins and diving coral reefs in the Red Sea and the Philippines, as well as visiting underwater caves in Sardinia. We have taken the train around in China, seen Beijing, Shanghai, the clay soldiers, walked on the wall and sailed on Yangtze. We have done it because we believed there was no better way to understand the world than to go there, see, feel, and smell by yourself holding a child’s hand all the way.

Traveling with children is different than traveling for business. We also have many tips and tricks stored in that pocket.

GOING OUT ON A LIMB

Due to economical circumstances at SSI in Denmark in 2009, all directors were asked to lay off 25% of the staff. Vips’ staff at time was a very small group, each with their own specific expert area, and the institute could not really do without any of them. She used that challenge as an opportunity to step up and step out into the unknown. She applied for a job in the U.S. that would offer more of what she loved from her different positions at SSI, and less administration and legal entanglements.

In her mid forties, she started a new life on a new continent, in the middle of a high desert in blazing sun, drought and strong storms, with the family left back in their comfortable, well known Danish surroundings. From being the lead and the director of departments at SSI, she left the GMP world and took on a strong technical role as a SME in the chemistry/biological/risk reduction/non-proliferation field. From having mostly served one company with her skills, she found herself working in all corners of the world, doing what she always had done, but in a very different scale. She has worked in countries that were heading into conflicts or just coming out of wars, where the political picture was very, very different than working in Scandinavia. She learned to rely on herself and solve her own problems. She learned about travel safety and to honor culture. Each evening she would go to bed, still alive, because she had done the preparation and homework well enough.

Sometimes such a career shift is hard. She needed help during some of these larger life changes. Friends stepped up and supported when they could. Very late she found her own life saving coach. If he had just been there earlier! Every hour that she spent having a person who was not close to her asking the hard questions were quantum leaps forward, getting out of the sticky stuff she had brought upon herself. The friends were often too polite to call out misconceptions. It takes somebody that is a little further away, with a streak of up front bluntness, to challenge the hard misconceptions. During that journey she met several other professionals with highly developed professional and personal survival skills. These are the group that stand behind Vipsit and offer mentorship and coaching.

Again, those who assisted us along our journeys were able to do so because they were ahead of us. We believe we can best pay it forward. Therefore, we offer to share our hard earned insights in how to get the wheels out of the mud, when there is only you and nobody else to help push.

SURVIVING IN GENERAL

Apart from Vipsit being a group who has learned to survive the professional life, we also count individuals who are some of the most skilled and recognized experts when it comes to hiking in nature, scaling the inside and outside of mountains, navigating through wilderness without a GPS, extreme weather, first aid in the field and in general surviving during unforeseen events. It all comes down to timely due diligence, risk assessments, having the right knowledge, preparing ahead of time, and bringing the right tools. Private life is not very different from professional life. We are happy to share.