Clare Muscutt talks with Gemma Colby about her transformational career journey and overcoming self doubt.
Episode #408 Show Notes
Clare:
Hi, Gemma.
Gemma:
Hi, Clare.
Clare:
How are you doing today?
Gemma:
Really good. Thank you.
Clare:
Well, welcome to the Women in CX podcast.
Gemma:
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here
Clare:
And welcome to everybody listening along at home as well. So Gemma, we're gonna jump right in there and I'm gonna ask you the question that I ask all of our lovely guests, and that is how exactly did you find your way into CX and where you are today?
Gemma:
So it's one of those things that only when I look back, do I realize that I was just predestined to be here. It was, it's really interesting when you, when I piece back parts of my career. And when I was thinking about it, I went all the way back to how I found myself in my first job having left school, because in school I was right in the middle. I was not at the top of the class and not at the bottom. So nobody really cared what I wanted to do after school. So I left school and I thought, I don't, I don't know what's next? And so I found myself in a job and that first job, I knew I loved talking to people. I knew I loved that and I knew I loved helping people. And so the first job I got was being a receptionist and it was for a very small freight company in Cape Town.
Gemma:
I grew up in South Africa and within, I would say a couple of months of being there without even really thinking about it. I was changing things. I was making things better. I'd started recognising customers' telephone numbers and greeting them by name and doing things that made them feel really special. And the interesting part was my boss said to me, oh, we're gonna start up a customer services team. Do you wanna come and be part of it? We think you'd be great with the customers. And I was like, no, I don't think that's my thing, don't think that. So I said, no, I wasn't gonna do it. And then through companies being sold and changing and you know, I got moved to a company that bought the company I worked for and they put me into customer services. I had no say in the matter and it turned out I was really good at it and I really liked it.
Gemma:
I didn't like the company, so I moved, but, and then I moved to a company where I was for eight years also logistics. And in that time with them, I grew, so they were a really small company, but I got to see some of the best things around leadership from the people who ran the company, which was, you know, rolling your sleeves up and getting in there and loading trucks and taking parcels out to customers if, you know, if we were really close to a deadline and it was super important. So, you know, seeing that first hand and then growing with the company to the point that I set up their customer services department in Cape Town, and then after about two or three years of doing that, they said that they wanted to centralise all of the customer services provision into a national call centre based in Johannesburg.
Gemma:
And they asked me if I wanted to do it. I thought what? I don't know anything about that. But what I did know was their customers and as smart business leaders, they knew how important that was. And so I moved up to Johannesburg and spent 18 months setting up their call centre and recruiting and setting up all of those processes and learned so much. I look back on that time when I was, I was 25 and just doing it, I thought, I took everything I knew about what our customers needed and with the challenges of going from a very central, close-knit to a national operation, which came with its challenges, but it was a really rewarding time. And then I moved to the UK in 2008. So my family are originally from the UK. And so I knew at some point I would come here.
Gemma:
I thought it would just be for two years. It's been a little bit longer than that now. And I got my first job in housing and whilst I worked, this was at Southern Housing, and whilst I worked there, I got a role. It was a Continuous Systems Improvement Officer, which was a CSI officer. And so whilst the role title wasn't the main reason I applied for the job, I quite liked it. But that job, I say that that job changed my career, cause it really, it was the first time when I interviewed that I really backed myself. I went into an interview saying, I've read everything about this job. And I think I can do it. Although I'm not bringing a list of evidence that says I've done it all before, I've done pieces of it in different roles and I'd changed processes and I'd introduced new things, but I hadn't really led improvement in transformation projects.
Gemma:
But I had a boss who was absolutely incredible and he interviewed me and he was looking for somebody who thought in a certain way. And so that's how he structured the interview. And so he really put me through my paces in terms of seeing how I thought and how I would approach things. And as a result of that, he gave me the job and it was incredible. I spent about 18 months to two years working with him and two other colleagues in one of the best teams I've ever worked in where I learned so much. And I was just a sponge for two years, just absorbing everything from, you know, how to lead customer lead improvement and use insight and about systems thinking. And so many things that I've taken into the rest of my career and how to do the right thing for customers.
Gemma:
It was, it was absolutely incredible. So, about two years later, I moved on to another housing association, Catalyst Housing in west London into a more senior business improvement consultant role. I did that for a couple of years, again, everything, when I look at it, I think they all would've been called customer experience roles of some sort now. Yeah. If people were creating them, because that was really at the heart of it and the crux of the role and then after doing those types of roles for about four or five years, I thought, what happens if I, if I'd known everything I'd known, that I'd learned then when I'd been running the call centre, I think I would've done a very different job. And I thought, well, what happens if I take all that learning and do that now? And there was an opportunity at Catalyst to run their call centre.
Gemma:
It's a small call centre in their Ealing office, in west London. But it was, I did that job for three years and it was a fascinating time because taking what you know in theory and putting it into practice, which is what we expect a lot of our operational managers to do while running an operation, is really challenging. It was one of the most rewarding three years I've spent, it was tough. And we made a real difference to our residents there. When I took over the team, they used to congratulate themselves for taking a hundred calls a day. That would be their measure of success. And it wouldn't really be about what experience the customer had had. And so we went on a significant transformation in those three years to really think about that. And about two years into it, one of the members of our residents group, the person who led the group, she came in and she said to me, residents have been saying it's really different calling here.
Gemma:
And she says, I don't know what you're doing. Just keep doing it. And I thought, yes, that's exactly what you need to be hearing in terms of making a difference. So that was incredible. I did that until the end of 2015 and then thought I did miss doing the improvement project, strategic work. And I thought it was time to move back to that. And cause I knew I could do both. I wasn't sure which I wanted to carry on, in terms of my career, doing. And I finished that stint knowing that it was, I got so much from it, but it was wasn't where my passion lay. And so then I moved to Yell knowing that from the time I'd spent, what it looked like to lead an operation and how to really get everybody on board with it. So I felt I had a really good foundation for supporting and coaching those leaders as well as working in projects to really get the best outcome for both the people and the team as well as customers.
Gemma:
So I started at Yell and when I worked there, I moved, my role there was to, again, would've been a customer experience role, no doubt, if it had been, if we'd been in the time we are now. And the role was to look at all of our customer service journeys and make those better. So I worked really closely with the person that headed up that operation to be getting the right measures in place, the right, listening to customers in the right way. But Yell was in a very different place then to what it is today. It was not as focused on the customer. So, as we wanted, it was very much, you know, I got known as being the person who was the voice of the customer, but then I was a bit of a lone voice. Whereas now, you know, it's everybody, it's much wider.
Gemma:
It's really integrated into our culture now, which I think has been incredible, but that's really what we've done in the last three years, I would say, or two to three years. So how I eventually have landed up having CX in my title was in early 2020. So just as COVID started, I got appointed into the Head of Customer Experience position. I started on the 1st of February and moved to working from home in March. It was my dream job doing it in a way I just wasn't really prepared for which was being remote and isolated from people. But it meant that it was as the team got created. So I set up the customer experience team and it got created as a result of some leadership changes that happened the back end of 2019 into 2020.
Gemma:
So the team was created and it was our job to improve the end-to-end customer experience through insight and driving excellent digital experiences and that's, my team's focus is broadly the same. We're refining it. And we're looking at how we do that better, but it's always an evolution. And then I would say the other key thing in terms of how finding my way to CX and giving it a label for me was finding Women in CX. So at the start of last year, so 2021, I was having an annual review with my boss and we had a really big conversation about, you know, how I needed to think about customer experience and how, and where it sat in the marketplace and go and have a look and see what it looked like outside of Yell.
Gemma:
And I stumbled across a webinar that you were on. And you were talking about the Women in CX community launching, and I thought, whatever happens, I have to be part of that. I don't even know anything more. Just so much of what you said resonated. And I thought, okay, let's go and see more about this. And then I registered and came along on International Women's Day and then as a result of that became one of the beta founding members, which, just to see the community and how it's grown. It's just been incredible. And I've got so much, so much out of it as well. It's been great.
Clare:
Oh, I don't know what I would've done without you. Thinking back, it's just over a year now, isn't it? That we've all been together. But so much of your story resonates with me, I think, you know, starting on the frontline in operations, so you, as a receptionist, I actually started in hospitality. I was a waitress but that operational grounding, the reality of what it's actually like to work on the frontline. I think it's one of the most advantageous things that stood me in good stead throughout my career as were the operational management roles. So, you know, you in contact centres, me in general management, you know, actually running the job, sorry, running the operation and, you know, that similar recognition that at the time that I think the point you said was about, you know, teams congratulate themselves for the number of calls they took and the impact that actually things like KPIs have on what we focus on in operations and having come kind of full circle to, you know, kind of being in the support centres and customer experience and understanding why that is.
Clare:
I think it makes us such better customer experience leaders because we've been there and we have that insight and empathy into why things are the way that they are. And something else that you said, you know, like not just thinking about the customer and the business and what we try to do, but the consideration we have for all of the humans around us and the people on the employee side. I think that for me, is something that I developed through having big teams at the frontline and in operations that I think if I'd not had that, and I'd just gone into the support centre and gradually managed bigger corporate management teams. So, everything's so different, you know, like my management experience with frontline experience, we were literally running around on our feet all day. It's such a different world, isn't it?
Clare:
Or like taking calls all day in your sense. But I was really interested in the route that you came through with business improvement too, and hearing something I hear a lot of Women in CX talk about, actually the feeling of I've just arrived at CX because I now have it in my job title. And then when they're surrounded by women in CX in the community and we all kind of figure out and I see the light bulb moment where everyone's like, oh my God, I've been doing this for years. I just didn't have it in my title.
Gemma:
Well, it was the first time I wrote. So, you know, I've been setting myself these challenges to step outside of my comfort zone. So, you know, whether it's right, you know, doing an interview with CXM or whether it's doing different things, one of the things I, you know, when I sat down and worked it out, I went, I've been doing this type of work even in operational roles for years. I couldn't agree with you more about the advantages of having worked frontline and then led those teams. I learned so much about how to lead change in that contact centre, yes, it was a small contact centre and, you know, but it came with so many learnings about how you needed to bring people on the journey with you and how much they have the ability to really day to day impact your customer experience.
Gemma:
And often we forget how important it is to make those people realise how important they are. Yes. And so listening to them and it's one of the things at Yell for us now in the last few years, we've really created very authentic forums to talk and hear from, and it's not unknown that my boss will pick, or any of us really, but, you know, particularly my boss will pick up the phone and talk to one of our frontline consultants and really hear what's going on. And so that is, you know, when I ran a call centre, I was three rows of desks away to hear that, it's not quite as easy to do, but whether that's through doing cross functional call listening sessions now, or messaging transcript reviews, where you go into the session, really genuinely only having it be about the experience and not about, it's uncomfortable when your team's being reviewed. But if you create the right culture and the right feeling in that meeting, it's about genuine improvement and everybody knows what needs to change. It's just giving the space to talk about it.
Clare:
Yeah, absolutely love that. I like going into bigger and bigger corporates in the support centre management team, kind of getting up to the senior level and realising like how differently people who hadn't had operational experience saw employees at the frontline and quite often talked about them as like a resource or an expense, or, you know, something somewhere along a set of recommendations and it would just be like, staff need to be such and such, but that not really having any meaning to them or saying we need to roll out some kind of change program, but there was nothing about how we were going to invest in employee engagement around this change. and to me, it was just second nature, but actually realising for a lot of people, it isn't. I think we've got a lot in common here, Gemma.
Gemma:
There is, there is a lot, and yes, I, I think about it daily. It's definitely shaped how I think as a leader.
Clare:
Love it, love it. So, obviously incredible career. What was one particular challenge you've had to overcome to become the woman you are today?
Gemma:
So I would say the one that comes to mind for me to share is that I would say overcoming, I think I've made significant strides and I'm very proud of this. So to even be able to talk about it and recognise it quite simply is belief in myself. So often in the past, my starting point has been to believe that everyone around me is more experienced and more knowledgeable than I am. And it's only a matter of time before they realise I have no idea what I'm doing. I can joke about it now, but that's a real thing and Women in CX has been quite a, I remember a point, it was one of our very first sessions that we did was around Imposter Syndrome and I remember looking at it and I'd heard about it and I'd read about it and stuff.
Gemma:
We just had this session and there was something shared on social media afterwards and I shared it across my network. And I just thought, let's talk about this. I'm learning different ways of positioning and I know there's been some great articles shared recently about it. That is slightly shifting my thinking around how much of it is about the world around us that makes us feel that way. And how much of it is ourselves and so I think that's a very interesting conversation starter, and I'm starting to have that with my teams, but I think that starting point being somebody's better than me at this can be a real shadow and a bit of a burden to carry because you're setting yourself a number of hurdles to get through before you actually get to show what you can do.
Gemma:
So, I have been working on that quite a lot over the last year. And I think some of the things I've done to make the progress that I have is, you know, coach and be coached, mentor and be mentored. Those things are incredibly powerful. And I think doing stuff outside of my comfort zone and realizing that when I did them, there's always learning, but that's great, but it's not terrible and it's not a disaster and okay, good. All right, let's keep going. And I think having that sort of growth mindset as well makes a big difference in terms of moving through it.
Clare:
A hundred percent agree. And this is something that, again, really resonates with me and I'm sure it does a lot of women out there too, but with the conversations that I have on such a regular basis, in one-to-one conversations when I'm onboarding women into the community, it seems to be something that everybody feels, particularly women, but we don't talk about, or it feels like there's something wrong with us. The fact that we don't have the self belief that we should have, and to pick up on a couple of points that you said there, I think I'm always continuously surprised when women meet me and they think because of what I've achieved and what I do, that somehow I've got all the answers and I'm this supremely confident being. And then when I say, you know, actually before I go on stage and speak, I'm actually thinking I'm gonna be sick because I'm so nervous.
Clare:
And that, you know, starting a business has been the most petrifying thing I've ever done because I constantly feel like I don't know what I'm doing and that I shouldn't be here and I shouldn't be, you know? But when you listen to the words, it's like what I should be doing or believing that something out there has all the answers and we don't, but gradually learning, actually when I do tune into myself, my own thoughts, my intuition, it's actually the best decisions I make and I feel most comfortable about them. It's when I'm distracted by the shoulds and coulds and what other people tell me or society's pressuring me to be like as a female leader or role model, but that's when I start to panic and think I'm not doing things right.
Clare:
So the one thing that you said, you know, there's the thread that was going on in our community that Claire Fry posted about questioning, you know, is Imposter Syndrome even a thing because we're constantly told we have Imposter Syndrome because it's something that women particularly experience yet. Actually, when you look at it, it's the situations that we're frequently in, where we are different to people. So say for example, a male dominated environment or a meeting full of men, or I know we are really changing the status quo here, but I used to have it all the time. I'd be speaking at an event and be sitting on a panel and I'd just be surrounded by middle aged, white guys. And there's me, you know, with my heels on and long red hair, the only woman and I would literally feel like, oh, everybody, you know, around me, they're the authorities, they know more than me. Like I felt different, but actually, maybe it wasn't me. It was the fact that... So that difference is engendered. So what are your thoughts on that? You said you're thinking and moved on. Where have you got to?
Gemma:
It has, so where have I got to on it? Is that I, when I read that article and I have shared it a couple times, I'm trying, you know, having conversations about this with my team as well, because you know, when we've spoken about it, some of the stuff resonated with them. One of my best friends, as soon as I read that article, I thought this, she is so successful and one of the most authentic, wonderful, emotionally intelligent leaders I've ever known. I met her when I worked in housing many years ago. And I just thought about how hard she's had to fight against a lot of those, you don't look like what traditional success looks like. And she said so much of it resonated with her. And I suppose my thinking is that I think there's still some stuff in me that I need to be mindful of and think about, but one of the things I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about over the last year or so is that if you're measuring yourself against a traditional version of success, so growing up for me, it was a middle aged man that, you know, you had the senior role and you knew all the answers and all of those things and anybody that challenged that only challenged it successfully if you became more like that person.
Clare:
Got you, yeah.
Gemma:
Think of like power suits and you know, so I grew up in South Africa where traditional African-wear was bright and colourful, but you saw people being successful because they suddenly were adopting a suit rather than coming in as their true self. So I think the Imposter Syndrome that we've been labelling a lot in this, you know, in this period is actually because we haven't been calling out that what we are really trying to challenge and be uncomfortable because that's the nature of transformation, is that success doesn't look like we've always thought it looks and we have to redefine it.
Clare:
Yeah. And specifically a white, middle aged man. It doesn't look like that yet...
Gemma:
In some cases it may do, and in other cases it needs to look different and that needs to all be okay rather than being a one size fits all.
Clare:
Well, I thought it was fascinating that the kind of deeper layer or level to that is the systemic stuff, isn't it. So for example, patriarchy or white supremacism and as an intersectional feminist community, you know, us appreciating and understanding that it's only really our gender that might be a barrier, whereas women that are from different races or sexual orientations or different abilities like Neurodivergence, or otherwise, or even age, it gets harder and harder and harder the further away you are from the traditional mould of what someone's supposed to look like. And I shared in the community and for listeners, I'll put a link to the post that I found on Instagram, but I think this, the notion of like white feminism has really come up for me recently as well.
Clare:
Like this 'boss babe' thing. I think I would use the hashtag 'boss babe' in the past, and I'd never thought anything of it and not realised just kind of how damaging that notion of what a successful woman is supposed to look like and be like, and, you know, the kind of glamorisation of female leadership over actually our ability to lead and our capability and our core competencies. I just find it fascinating and the more I'm learning about it, the more I'm diving into it, the more I'm questioning my ethos around stuff as well. And the only other thing that comes to mind for me, really one of the many other things that I've just mentioned, is also my own battle with perfectionism.
Clare:
You know, you say like, there's some things about yourself that need to change. It's not just society. I really realise that that is the thing that holds me back because I hold myself to a ridiculous standard. And sometimes moments of indecision or fear of making a leap or doing something or getting out of the comfort zone or taking a chance is because I'm so petrified of not doing it perfectly. And what will become of me if I don't. But living in a start-up world for the last pretty much 18 months has kind of trained me out of that because there is no such thing as perfect when you are bootstrapping your way to create something sustainable for the long term, without taking investment and stuff. But it's been the experience of, like you said, you know, trying something and finding out it wasn't that bad, or it didn't go so terribly that it's been the same for me.
Clare:
Like having to let go of the perfectionism and just do things in a really agile bootstrappy way has shown me, actually, you can still get the job done really well and actually, sometimes the results are even better when you don't do perfect, but I think you're right, it's having that growth mindset and taking on challenges that teach you about yourself, that actually you do have the skills and capabilities within you. But Gemma, I have to point out that you said in your introduction part around your career journey, you were the woman, you were the girl actually at the time, you were much younger, who went for a job with no experience and said, I know I can do this job.
Gemma:
I'm the person, I can do this.
Clare:
So, she's in there and she's been there the whole time.
Gemma:
Very interesting points. Yeah. There's definitely something that I think does drive me to like, it's not that it's never good enough. So for me, I think perfection is of the things that does get in the way. Because I think perfection is one of the things that stalls progress. I think you can land up standing still rather than moving forward when you're trying for things to be perfect. So I think if you've got a mindset of iteration, you'll be amazed where you land up and you're right. That sort of, I do have that, my brain is going right after, how can it be different? How can we do even when I was, you know, answering the phone and answering a customer by name so they felt special, you know, that was something that nobody told me to do. It was just a very natural, oh, I can make this a bit better. You know, at Yell we've been talking about marginal gains recently and how, yeah. That sort of just keeps going.
Clare:
Compound effect.
Gemma:
Exactly and so, you know, I think the other part, I would say in terms of, yes, you're absolutely right. There was something in me that made me walk into an interview and say, I'm gonna really front up here that I think I'm the right person for this job and we'll talk about that. And, obviously I was not quite that confident when I did it, but my boss would say the thing that sold him on it I think probably comes down to my curiosity, which is, I think one of my superpowers, Is I sat there and at the end of the interview, when asked, do you have any questions? And I literally just pulled out a folder. And then he said, I basically interviewed them back around the job and what they wanted out of it and all of these things. And he just said that he was sold already, but that was the moment that really sealed the deal for him.
Clare:
Yeah, I do fundamentally believe that we are all born with innate confidence and it's just what chips away at us over time, but you should definitely take comfort and, you know, the growth I've seen in you personally, even in just the last year has been incredible, but I think you should always just remind yourself of the Gemma who went into that job interview and did that because that's who you are.
Gemma:
Yes. I'm gonna own that.
Clare:
So, you know, the last year has been amazing for you in terms of seeing you win CX Leader of the Year, Yell has won loads of awards. There's been so many accolades, I guess kind of just cutting to the chase really, what do you think it takes to become a great CX leader in today's increasingly complex environments? Tell us about your perspective on that.
Gemma:
So, I think the things that come to mind in terms of what's really helped us in that. So, I think definitely from an award perspective, what Yell has done is the senior leadership have really made it very clear how important the customer is, and we're making all of those changes driven by what does work and make a difference for our customers. And then my role is to make that work from a customer experience and lead that conversation and, you know, I think, for me, it's about being really clear on the business objective and the strategic direction of the business. I think a CX leader's role is to see, if this is a word, the interconnectedness of your organisation and how so, and like very often it's, I can't remember who said it, it would've been at one of the Women in CX webinars that just seeing how all those things fit together is often something a CX leader does, but doesn't recognise.
Gemma:
And I think that's quite important to recognise because then you are able to use it to then further reinforce great stakeholder relationships. I think that's something I took from that operational leadership time, whether that's right at the frontline or whether it's with your other peers, whatever that looks like, because if you have those great relationships, you see how it all fits together and you tell the story then you bring in the customer to that. It's quite a powerful combination. And I think ultimately, and this is for any leader, but I would say in particular, for me, it's been something that I often am given feedback on is my growth mindset. I realise that, you know, my job is to not necessarily know the answers, but to ask the questions and my curiosity and surrounding myself with different opinions, coaching, mentoring, all of that good stuff. I think all of that just ladders up to always wanting to be better and see how things can improve. So I think if you do that with your company's direction in mind and what your customers need and how the business works together with people, I think that can be quite powerful.
Clare:
Yeah. So scribbling down some of the things that you'd mentioned there. So yeah, I think kind of that commercial awareness, that customer experience really only is a means to a business end. I think what we see quite a lot of the time is customer experience for customer experience's sake, and people getting really frustrated with why is nobody listening to me or why, you know, aren't, they letting me do this big project that's going ti cost us a fortune, but they haven't kind of lead it back to what is the organisational goal? And objective that me doing what I do can help to fulfil and positioning it in that way. You mentioned systems thinking, essentially that's what it is, isn't it? And naturally being systems thinkers, even though we might not recognise it, seeing how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, how organisational structures show a path of who we need to influence and how, but doing that very intuitively rather than necessarily having to think about it.
Clare:
And then when someone says, oh, that's a real skill, systems level thinking, isn't it. Like, woo. But storytelling, I think is another thing that you called out there, you know, being able to take data and customer insight or feedback, and be able to show why it is so important that we put customers more centrally in the conversations that we're having or being able to see it from that perspective. And I absolutely agree with you, having a growth mindset, because I think there were a few years in my career, I thought I knew it all and I wasn't massively successful at customer experience, but I took that approach. But when I started to be open to learning and learning from other people, learning from different divisions and departments and trying to understand as much as I could about finance and marketing and digital, and kind of bringing that all back in and then going again with how customer experience could help achieve a business objective.
Clare:
I was my most successful and absolutely coaching is one of the best investments I ever made in my own development. I didn't have enough of that when I was on the business side, I don't think I ever got a coaching session. I was fortunate on a few occasions to have a line manager that had coaching skills, but never did any formal coaching and what I see as mentoring now in comparison to what I had when I was on the business side, it's completely different, isn't it? You get assigned somebody in a more senior role and they're supposed to lead and guide you. But when it's within an organisational framework, it's still very much, the agenda is about that organisation and not about you as an individual. Go on, challenge me.
Gemma:
So, I was going to say I've had a… my mentoring within Yell particularly has been different. There's an element of it being about Yell, but actually it's very much been around me.
Clare:
That's great. It was just my experience wasn't that.
Clare:
But maybe that's like part of, you said this transformational journey that the organisation and the leadership's been on, has resulted in the outcomes for things like coaching and mentoring within your organisation being so different. Because, it is, you know, not just saying that we're being more human centred or more customer centered or more people centred, in the last couple of years you've been through a journey where you're actually doing it and taking those actions. I think it does change the frame of reference for that. Well that was awesome but we've run out of time sadly.
Clare:
I know I could talk to you all day. I really could. So yeah, the final question is what piece of advice would you give to our listeners out there? What would you say to other women in CX?
Gemma:
I think I would say... It comes back to something you said, which is learning to trust you. And I think the biggest advice I would give and what I'm really focused on is about understanding me and what inspires me or energises me and what drains me and working out how I, you know, do less that drains me, but I'll bookend it with stuff that energises me. So it's taken quite a strategic approach to how you keep your resilience and your energy and how you keep growing as a person. But it's me focused in order to be that leader for others as well.
Clare:
I absolutely love that, and it just fell into place for me in that last couple of sentences that you said, if we don't trust ourselves, how can we ever believe in ourselves? So, for whatever we want to achieve in our lives as individuals or leaders, it has to start with me and believing in myself will come as a result of investing in myself, trusting myself. And yeah. I love that, Gemma. Oh, what a nice note to end on. Well, thanks so much for being here today for being the most amazing founding member of the Women in CX community.
Gemma:
Thanks for having me.
Clare:
And just everything that you've done for me and the rest of the community over the last year, it's been an absolute pleasure having you.
Gemma:
Oh, thank you.
Clare:
And thank you to everybody who listened along as well at home. So that's it, everybody. We'll see you all next time. Bye for now.
