By this time I was 29 and loving my job as the VP of Sales & Marketing in Romania and Connex was exceeding all expectations. Within three years, we had hired over 2500 employees and our customer base was growing exponentially by the hundreds of thousands. Our earnings were about four times higher than would be considered profitable and we were starting to stand out not just within Romania, but internationally. Telesystem had its bid team on the ground in Prague, Czechia (formally the Czech…

Once we were launched and had our company’s phones into the hands of a large portion of the country, there was still no slowing down for us at Connex. We were always trying to think of new ways to market ourselves and expand our offerings in Romania. We saw all of the potential of moving into this country in transition, where people were craving anything coming in from the West. After we had crossed the country with our cell phone launches, we rolled out product…

Two years into our operations in Romania, we had experienced more success than we could ever imagine. We were not only growing steadily and able to offer new products and services at a lightning rate, but also my team and I were able to be as creative and innovative as possible to keep pushing the envelope of new opportunities for us and Connex. After expanding in obvious areas, other telecom services, and supporting products, I came up with an idea that many would have thought…

After our opening days of launching the first cellular phone plans in Romania, we did our best to celebrate with our team and reward our local colleagues for all of their hard work and success. I wanted a memorable event to celebrate our official launch. We hosted a Gala event at the People’s Palace, which involved prominent Romanians, government officials, and local and international dignitaries. In attendance were Ambassadors of Canada and the USA (Mr. Gilles Duguay and Mr. Alfred Moses, respectively), the President of…

Some Romanian journalists had radical approaches to doing business. A nasty chap named Radu wrote negative articles about our company and demanded we advertise in his journals or else he would escalate his derogatory comments. This extortion approach was more commonplace than you might think. Al, who was our CEO, decided to visit him and told him that if he continued, we would never advertise with his weeklies. If he wanted our business, he’d have to learn more about Connex and visit us to see…

In Romania, I started out as the VP of Marketing. One of our first tasks was to prepare to pitch our strategy to advertising firms to select the local creative agency we would work with on the company’s launch. I felt a sense of trepidation, as I had little experience in this specific undertaking. While I assumed that things wouldn’t be as difficult as they were in China, there were still several  challenges when building a national campaign like this one in Romania. I wanted…

As we were leaving Changsha, I had hope for what our next adventure would bring, but had no idea how different it would all be. Before moving overseas, I went into this job knowing very little about what to expect. When I first heard about the opportunity to relocate, I must confess that I had to look at a world map to even find Romania! Once our company was on the shortlist for one of two GSM mobile licenses in Romania, Al and I met…

Before diving into more travel stories, I wanted to tell you all a little about why I decided to share this series. I expected that writing about this stage of my life would see me revisiting some of the greatest highs and lows of my life. But I have learned just how much we miss while experiencing a moment and how we can see our events completely differently when we look back on them. I miss all the adventure and people I got to know…

I’m back, reflecting on India! Al always described India as brutally exotic. There exists unbelievable richness and tradition against a backdrop of a very disproportionate number of poor people. In the mid-90s, it felt like 1-2% of the people were extremely well off and the vast majority were poor to extremely poor. We didn’t see a middle class there in the same way that it exists in North America. When you saw a wedding, it was fabulous, with painted elephants, women in beautiful saris, and…

The operation in China was developing slowly, due to our local partner’s frequent and purposeful obstacles, or to put it nicely, they were uncomfortable with this new venture and would not agree to anything lest they offend the ‘powers’ in Beijing. At the time, the Internet was in its infancy so dial up was the only option. I had limited ways to connect to my own family or culture. We had TV but it was all Chinese propaganda. I felt I was slowly going into…

While we knew things were never going to be easy in China, even the more experienced members of our team were surprised with how many roadblocks and surprises we were dealing with. Nevertheless, we all continued to work hard and try to find any roads forward. As the months moved along, my small team and I developed a business strategy on our own for how we should launch our new telecom company and presented it to the notorious Ms. S and her team. Weeks went…

It was a lonely existence for me in China. We only had a dial up connection and couldn’t often talk to friends and family back in Canada. Plus, as mentioned in previous letters, there was no community of English-speaking people in Changsha at the time outside of the members of our own team. So, while I had my colleagues, we could not spend all of our time together inside and outside of work. One day while walking through the market, I did the most sensible…

Going from Canada to Changsha in the mid-90s was a culture shock for our team in almost every way. We were not only in a place where most of us knew little to none of the local language and were experiencing different food and culture, but we also needed to learn quickly what it meant to live under China’s communist rule. There is no protection there for citizens and laws are not in place to protect the individual, but instead the government and those in…

I graduated from McMaster University with a BA in Humanities, a concentration that no longer exists. It was basically a general arts degree. I knew I wanted to get into business, but without a degree in Commerce or industry connections, who would take a chance on me? I knew job hunting was going to be hopeless. My grades were also very sub par. School never came easily to me. If it were not for my friends I probably would have quit. To this day, I…

We are about to get started with a series that is all about my career of working internationally in telecommunications. I was lucky enough to do this alongside my incredible husband, Al Tolstoy. So, before we head to China, Romania and the Czech Republic, I thought I would tell you the story of Al and me. We met in Canada in 1992. More accurately, that was the first time I noticed him across a meeting room. I had just started to work for Bell Mobility…

I used to believe in order to live a full life a person needed to have purpose. I spent time, money, energy, trying to figure out with desperation what my purpose was. For most of my adult life, I believed my purpose on this earth was to help people in corporate settings think differently and see the world through a different lens – a less judgmental and kinder lens that celebrates and accepts what makes us different.  When I found myself without a career at…

Last week, I started telling you about my lifetime of living with anxiety. If you have not read the first part yet, you can find it here. When I first started struggling with my mental health, it was barely something that anyone talked about. I think we were all taught the way to deal with trauma or bad thoughts of any kind was to push them down and try to forget about them. After having radiation for my cancer, this was no longer a viable…

If anxiety were a person, it would be Putin. It desperately tries to convince us that they are always right and powerful. It constantly fights to gain control and goes to war with the good joyous parts of us. And if it manages to shut out the rest of the world, the world that gives us perspective and acknowledges us, it holds the greatest threat of succeeding. Looking back on my life, I was constantly looking for answers from friends, family, and doctors on why…

The one truth I know for certain is we are all going to die. We have all heard that joke that the only two certain things in life are death and taxes, but it feels like less of a joke the more you really think about it. I am trying to control my death. I take over 40 pills a day to prove it. I dedicate the majority of my waking time to living a high quality life. What makes a life worth living? This…

Failure is just a matter of perspective and I know this to be the truth. Even by their definitions, it is quite easy to see how this is true. Failure: lack of success Perspective: a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view. Success and the measure of it is something that is different for every person and we can each change our opinion of it many times throughout our lives.  For example, Madonna was the biggest success in music at…

I am grateful for my cancer meds everyday. I am grateful that I live in a place where they are accessible to me. I am grateful that my family hasn’t been bankrupted to keep me alive. I am grateful for the pain relief they are able to give me. I am grateful even if I still can’t live a normal life, doing the things I once did.  But cancer medication also comes with challenges. Each of my 50+ pills per day has its own benefits…

I have always been a daydreamer, thinking about my future life. For years, when I was a child, I would go through the Sears catalogues with my best friend Marla and we would pick out the furniture we were going to get when we moved into our own apartment together. We had decided we would find a place just like Mary’s apartment on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, complete with a cool shag carpet. By the time I was six, my mother was constantly telling…

Over the past three years, as I have learned to live with cancer and have had thousands of lessons about life along the way, one of the things that comes up often is vulnerability. I have talked about it before – how in the beginning I needed to come to terms with people being a part of and discussing my body and its functions more than is the norm. But once that flood gate was opened, so too was I open to explore all sides…

As someone who has lived with stage 4 cancer for the past three years (at least),I have a complicated relationship with my bed. It has become one of my greatest sources of comfort, as something welcoming that I can go back to when I am in pain, when I am sad, or when I just need some quiet from the world.  But it has also become a symbol of some of the shame that I feel living with a chronic illness. I am not capable…

When the book The Secret came out in 2006, it was a huge buzz and everyone around me seemed to try asking the universe for what they wanted. It all seemed like such a simple and easy solution to getting what you really want and directing the focus of your life and actions. Egotistically, all I seemed to want at that time was a fast-paced exciting career, to continue being in love with my husband, to be a good mother and have a great relationship…

When I was still living in the Czech Republic and working for Oskar, I had a stroke on December 6th. This was a huge health crisis and was made even worse by being far from my parents and siblings. But one of the things that I remember worrying most about was that I didn’t get my Christmas shopping done and was going to show up to celebrations without gifts for some people. This fear wasn’t born out of nothing. I have always worried about the…

I am excited for the holidays but it can also be a tricky time. One wrong action or word from one person to another can almost ruin the celebration. The lead up to the big day or days can be so exhausting as you prepare and finish up the work that you might never feel like you are able to relax and enjoy any of it. You might even find that you get through the holidays more stressed out than when it all started. We…

I am a spiritual person. I believe we are made up of energy and we control our own energy and whether we release positive or negative vibes. I believe most of us are full of about 80% positive energy, which encourages us to be kind, generous, empathetic and put good into the world and 20% negative energy, which is usually the result of fear, disappointment, loneliness and our past traumas and is more reactionary and can cause us to hurt others, hurt ourselves or self…

Vulnerability is something that you can’t dismiss when you are living with a chronic illness. It becomes impossible to hide pain or weakness or escape the full range of emotions that are inevitably going to sweep over you again and again. I think that we all know that there is power in being vulnerable, even if we’re afraid to tap into it. We see the benefits to opening ourselves up to love and the sense of freedom and comfort that can come from being completely…

How could anyone be optimistic all the time? Overly-positive people used to irritate me. I saw them as inauthentic, as if they were making a conscious effort to be sunny just to shame my complaining, depression or failure to see the good side. The more negative I became, the more I told myself that I was simply far more truthful and real than they were. Then, after three years of battling cancer, I hit a wall – a large cement one that no amount of resilience could push me through.…