The past year has been an eye-opening journey for me…emotionally, mentally, and physically.
In 2023, I reached a new apex in my career. The financial goals I have achieved broke the ceiling of any thought I’ve ever known was possible for someone like me. I have been able to prove my independence as a single mother of four. My children are thriving and generally happy and content, well that is most days at least (chuckle). Being able to sit amongst many men at work, men who are incredibly intelligent, powerful and have very different upbringings, credentials and backgrounds compared to me, it's an incredible feeling. It motivates me. Being an outlier lights a fire in me and pushes me forward to see what else I can accomplish. After all, I made it this far, so I will keep going until someone tells me no or something happens that stops me.
I believe in timing, and today this quote came across my desk for a reason, “The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.” Thank you, Mr. Tony Robbins for this Friday inspiration. So what is impossible? I suppose everything is until we start. Knowing I am an outlier fuels me at times but also has held me back too. I can talk myself out of something that I deserve. Over the last year, I have begun to get out of my way more and throw more gasoline on my fire. I found a spark not too long ago and I haven't done much the last few years to keep that lit because I have been so intensely prioritizing everyone but myself. I will accept the challenges of more responsibility and then show you how I can balance grade school homework, batting practices, sport holiday parties, concerts and hiking adventures, happy hours with girlfriends, and evening basketball games on top of my day job of driving architecture modernization for commerce systems in the cloud compute arena.
Bring it. I am not going to say no to you.
I come from a “blue-collar” upbringing, of which I am very proud of. The values from how I was raised and my good-ol' Cleveland roots keep me authentic and grounded in my life today. Graduating from college was a goal my parents impressed upon my brother and I at an early age…and maybe that was because they didn’t have this opportunity and so they were committed to us to have this option. Life after college was not really discussed – likely because none of us knew what that world looked like. I remember my mom always told me I can do whatever I want and whatever I put my mind to. I was not familiar with the “white-collar" opportunities because we didn’t live in that world. The only job I ever remember being in awe of was being a pediatrician. That was white collar to me – the doctors even wore those white jackets as they walked into those small, cold, office rooms where I sat in fear thinking every visit would result in a shot! They always had the answers to why we were there. Now that was what "white collar" was in my head – literally and figuratively.
I was a frequent flier at the doctor’s office in Euclid, Ohio…my badge of honor in my youth was being a strep throat warrior and swimmer’s ear fanatic. By age 10, I was scoring penicillin shots on the regular. Because of my regular exposure to the pediatric office, I developed a vision that I would one day be a pediatrician. Doctors needed college degrees and so I thought, this is what I will do. I wanted to solve people’s problems. I wanted to be significant, and I wanted to feel valued. I wanted to have all the answers. I loved helping people. And I wanted to live a life where money was never a problem. And that was my dream and I would continue to be focused on this dream for the next 10 years.
This past summer, the little girl in me was reminded of a different dream she had for a very brief moment. This memory was lost on me until that day. As I was leaving the parking garage and walking the streets of Seattle to work one morning, I was reminded of a vision I once had, where I was older and walking the big city streets in a fancy pair of high heels, in some far distance place, in some glamorous, metallic, and shiny downtown area. It was so futuristic feeling and so far away from anything I thought would ever happen. I made it to NYC at 22 but I am sure this little girl, 4th grade vision was inspired by all magazine pictures and TV movies. This memory was lost on me until that day. It stems from a grade school project, where we had to write a paper about a dream we had of our “future self.” We had to present it and I remember sharing with the class that I will become a business lady in a big city one day. That assignment was tied to Martin Luther King and the connection to dreams.
The crazy thing is that I only really remembered wanting to be a doctor. This little girl "boss lady" memory hit me hard that morning, and stopped me on the street. I remembered that grade school assignment so vividly all of sudden, from some 30 years ago. What makes this powerful is knowing that for most of the spring and early summer last year, I was experiencing heavy homesickness and starting to question the things in my life, their value and my priorities. I was looking for answers in my life that I was doubting and believing at the same time. I was lost a bit you can say and maybe floating around on some auto-pilot program.
In June 2023, this memory came out of somewhere in my mind and I connected it to what I was doing at that very moment. It was an incredibly powerful connection from my past to exactly what I was living. I was at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Union (if you are unfamiliar with downtown Seattle, this is a few blocks away from the world-famous Pike Place Market in the heart of downtown Seattle). I stood still on that corner for a few minutes and just took everything around me in. I was overwhelmed with energy. I teared up and it became quite an emotional discovery for me. Another quick, surreal experience. I still feel the slight burning in my feet as my bony toes held up my weight and balanced all of me in my stilettos. I don’t wear heels often anymore since most of my workdays are in pj's and slippers at home. That moment hit me hard…burning toes and all. I remember feeling a lot of energy and validation of who I was. Being able to validate myself and not rely on the validation of others is something I am working on more. This moment started my emotional journey. And I still think I am on it?...
I have conquered mountains in the last year and proven to myself at 41, I could be healthier, stronger, and more physically fit than I have ever been. I mean, I have been eating flowers for crying out loud! Much in my physical world paints a story of my success. But truthfully, my mental and emotional journey has become more active and noisier than at any point in my life. I kid at times with mid-life crisis jokes but maybe there is some realness to approaching midlife and beginning to see things differently and starting to explore new goals, priorities and the desire to explore new dreams.
Someone who has become a very important person in my life recently shared with me that we spend the first half of our lives focusing on money and time. And then at some point, things begin to shift and it’s no longer about the money and the time. It becomes more about the magic in life and what you can do with your time and money to create the magic.
When I went away to college, I had a plan…and I experienced some challenges personally that changed this plan. I faced hard realities about who I was and who I wasn't. I made new commitments and released old commitments so I could grow and become a better version of myself. I have always wanted to achieve, and I was realizing that I needed to grow more to achieve more. Being in a new environment opened my eyes up to a bigger world too. I was scared. My knees were wobbly but I didn't let anyone around me see them wobble. Things were emotionally and mentally overwhelming and I became very homesick. I didn't want to live away from home for longer than the four years that my undergraduate program required. For that sole reason, I took a dream of being a doctor and changed it in an instant. I did not want to go to medical school and be gone from home for 8+ years. Hell no. Absolutely not. I wasn’t sure I was going to survive the four in front of me and dropping out of college with a pre-med degree was not going to afford me anything useful, so I knew I needed to think fast and make a change. I did be somewhat strategic and picked what I believed to be the best major in Miami's business school.
During the first few months of my freshman year, I researched the average starting salary of all business majors that graduated from Miami from 1998 through 2000. And that exercise led me to my major – Management Information Systems. It had on average, the highest paying job offers and the "big-four" auditing companies (at that time) were scooping up Miami University MIS graduates left and right. MIS majors were getting the jobs and they were getting high-paying offers upon graduation.
In these first few college months, I was on my own completely, I was in a new world, and I needed to figure out how to to get through this new world and how I can do it in the most successful way. So I completed a variety of meetings with the counselors and career center staff to figure out how this all worked. I also interviewed a few MIS juniors and seniors on the class curriculum to figure out what I was up against. I felt like a total freshman dork but I figured, I don't care, these upperclassmen will never see me again. So I channeled my freshman dork vibes and interviewed anyone that cared to take time to talk to me. You also know that everyone enjoys talking about who they are and when someone is listening and admiring, a person typically doesn't have a problem talking. So honestly, it wasn't hard to find students to talk to about things. Haha!
I took advance math and science in high school and skipped every business class my high school offered, so I really had to figure out what I was getting into because I was very unfamiliar with the academic content. As I floundered around Miami in September and October of 2000, looking for answers, trying to figure out if this change was right, I did take notice of a stigma between MIS degrees and CS (computer science) degrees. Their was a perceived social value difference. And I was leaning towards MIS, which was the "lesser" of the two and so this bothered me. I am wired to over-achieve, so why in the hell would I pick the second best? I took notice of the big corporations and their preference of business degrees. There was just more volume of jobs for business degrees over CS degrees. But if I wanted to be marketable to more technical roles in Corp America and compete with the few CS roles they were hiring for, then I would need to know how to code and develop software on top of my business education. So I knew that my electives needed to be in the Engineering school and I needed to take as many CS courses I could. So I skipped adding fillers to my semesters...I was taking coding classes instead of tennis, the art of cinema, and wine-making 101. I am not kidding, I was on a mission in the first 3 months of college and by Thanksgiving 2000, I developed a new plan for the 3 years of coursework, committed to a new major for the upcoming semester, and changed a decade long dream.
Voila. Done. New life plan complete. I’ll be home in three years now and I’ll have a high-paying job at a very large company that had locations in Cleveland, Ohio.
I eventually grew out of my homesickness and ended up graduating Suma Cum Laude and was the 2004 Richard T. Farmer School of Business Class Representative. The graduation ceremony was actually quite amazing…my parents and brother got preferential seating (front row) in Miami University’s Millet Hall arena. Millet Hall holds 9,000 people and that day, for our Business School graduation, it was jam packed with students and families and friends of the business school graduating class. There were even people in the nose bleeds - and they had standing room only sections in the arena hallways and conference rooms where they were broadcasting the stage over the media devices everywhere. It was crazy.
I was part of the ceremony processional and I was able to sit on stage with the rest of the faculty. I was the only student on stage...with all the "old wise men" and women (of course) that run the Business School. A handful of students were selected for this and then we had to be interviewed by the College President and all these fancy title owners of the business school and then write a speech prompt and share it. I still can't believe to this day they selected me! I didn't expect any of it. I got a call on my apartment phone from the Dean of Students and they asked me to come talk to the President about being a graduation speaker. I was so confused. I said, I never applied for this, I don't understand. HAHA! I just kept moving forward and going along with things and they suggested and asked of me. I med the President, and he said the faculty voted on graduating students and my name was suggested by multiple professors which is rare. I was being evaluated along with a few other students. He asked me if I could produce some thoughts on a speech and bring it back for consideration. So I thought about a theme - and the word "choices" came to my mind. And I spent that week writing an introduction to a speech on choices. I think you can already guess that I was selected. And so I developed the rest of the content to write my University business school speech - on the choices we all made during our four years at Miami. I took about a month to write. And then I had the honor to deliver this graduation speech to my business school peers and the some 9,000 strangers who were in attendance. It was incredible. It was surreal. I was not a legacy of the Miami system (because I was the first to attend college from my household) and I graduated high school with 99 people so I think I can say I was a small-town girl. What I was doing was not something I had ever dreamed I could do. See you later doctor dream! I found something much more magical.
As you probably guessed, I never returned home to Cleveland after graduating. Instead, I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for a job with General Electric and then eventually my career moved my family and I to Seattle, Washington, a decade later, for my next gig at Microsoft.
That is how I became an engineer…I was homesick and I didn’t want to leave Cleveland, Ohio, so I chased a new dream, with intentions to bring me back to Cleveland.
It's humorous that I am presently living in arguably the farthest city (“in the lower 48”) from my hometown now.
I have never really felt homesickness again until this last year. I haven’t felt these emotions since that difficult first semester in 2000. I made a huge change in college. And I don’t regret it in the least. I am now juggling quite a few more responsibilities now than when I was 18. My abilities to make a change, take on something new, or chase some new magic, will require a bit more strategy now. And maybe it doesn't require any sacrifice of what I am doing now. Maybe this new magic comes from me doing more of what makes me happy. I have the time, and I have the money. Now I want the magic.
As I work on myself emotionally and mentally, I am realizing I need to make more choices for myself. To find that magic, I really need to sit with myself and face who I am. For the last 20 years, I have been just progressing forward on the Lisa Owen roadmap. I haven’t really stopped and tried to figure out anything - the roadmap was clear. It also made sense in my head. So keep going Lisa!
I am realizing I am living that dream now I am beginning to face the question of "now what?" I am discovering I don’t have a plan beyond this point. What I do next will be tied to what makes me happy. I am not going to shape some new roadmap based on what someone wants of me. I know it's not really my dream to just keep doing what I am doing? I know I can get paid a little more, and work a little harder doing what I am already doing, but is that dream-worthy? I know how to answer that question.
Now let's be clear, I am happy with my career, and I will always work hard and continue competing in that arena. I think? I will continue my commitments as a mother and help my children reach their potential. My children are my legacy, not the code I deploy at work.
I have started to spend time trying to figure out the magic I want in my life. The magic I want to create in this world. Maybe this magic connects to being a mother or maybe an engineer or maybe being a woman?…it’s still unclear to me. I think my answer lies in the continued progress of my emotional and mental investments. I really enjoy spending time with people. I am also finding out that spending time with myself is the hardest relationship I have ever had. And I can't divorce or break up with myself. Yikes!
Dr. King had a dream. I had dreams and I am realizing that I am living a life now that completed those little girl dreams. And now what's next for me? And when and why did I stop dreaming?
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