Listen to the full interview:
1. Can you give the readers some insight into what you do?
“My company is Trafalgar Strategies. Running a business can sometimes feel like managing a chaotic tornado, and what we do is help business owners run their businesses smoothly and confidently, ensuring their business is going to thrive. Because in the end, that is what they need and want.”
2. Why is this work so important to you?
“I am passionate about the role small- and medium-sized companies play in the economies around the world globally. But as someone from the United States, I know I have some sort of affinity towards it because when I think back as a child and growing up, those were the people who made impacts in our communities, the people who went to the church when the steeple needed to be fixed, or other things like that. They were business owners in the local community who were on the boards of directors, who were contributing to the church and to the little league, and all those different things. So, I grew up with a very positive image of what business is.
However, when you begin to look at the statistics around business failure, within 10 years, 70% of businesses fail. Those numbers are startling. And so, for me, the passion is, I don’t really believe that you have to fail. You can run a business, and it can thrive, and you can contribute to your community and to the GDP of your nation and also be sane. And that is why I’m passionate about the work that I do.”
3. Has there been something in your past, business, or leadership experience that really made you recognize this is the area you want to be focusing on?
“When I first got into business, it wasn’t very difficult for me because I had a strong network. So, I kind of went into it just sort of like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ But when I got to about year three, I was like, ‘It’s time to scale.’ Because that’s what everyone says you’re supposed to do.
So, I decided to bring on this massive client, and I thought I’d done the work. I thought I really assessed the amount of work and what was going to be happening. I’d done a great scope of work, and I had my team. We obviously had other clients, but I was like, ‘This is going to work. This is going to be perfectly fine.’ Well, anyway, that did not work. Somehow, I did not assess some of the other elements that were going on in the organization. But I’d already built the contract for the amount, the number of teams, and the size of the team I was going to have. So, I couldn’t hire more. I was basically stretching my team to do more work. My customers were feeling like we weren’t giving them enough attention because here I was, trying to bandage this other big client. In the end, really for truth, nothing worked. For the original contract, while we were able to hit some of the markers, my team was upset with me. I basically spent way too much money on the conference. The profit wasn’t there, and I myself felt like a loser. A complete loser. I asked myself, ‘Why am I even in business?’
It took me a long time because I’m strategic. So, I’m doing the things to get the business back on the right footing, but I wasn’t seeing the results. I was emotionally feeling so guilty about the whole situation and beating myself up, to the point where I ended up actually going to a therapist and sort of saying, ‘Okay, what is going on here? I know what I’m doing, yet this is showing up this way.’
Eventually he was able to show me and tell me: ‘Kerry-Ann, you might be experiencing toxic shame.’
And I thought to myself, well, what is that?
By working together with my therapist, I realized it was because of my own backstory; I grew up in a religious home. My faith is still very important to me, but there were some elements around shame I had taken on that were not necessarily healthy. Because there were high expectations, as both of my parents have PhDs, there’s a high expectation around performance in my family. So basically, me not succeeding in that contract and then having the impact it did, I realized there was a root cause that I wasn’t aware of.”
4. Can you describe what toxic shame is?
“There’s shame, right? Or embarrassment. It’s okay to be embarrassed about a thing, right? It’s okay for me to sit there and say, ‘I overshot the mark on this one. Let’s go ahead and do a little fixing of the situation.’ But it’s not me saying, ‘I’m a bad entrepreneur or I’m a terrible business owner.’ It’s me saying, ‘Yeah, I made a terrible mistake. I need to go back and fix that,’ or I objectively look at the situation. But to bring it within oneself and think that I’m bad and rotten and go down the spiral? I‘m not a psychologist, but I will say this, that what I found in working through this and doing the work and now helping others become very aware of it, particularly the owners of businesses, is this idea that while our businesses are vitally important to us, our business is not us.”
5. How did you use somatic practices to get you through your toxic shame?
“So, what’s happening when we have those moments in business, when we feel like a failure or something has happened, it becomes more of a root cause issue. You’re not actually feeling it; it’s a feeling from a flashback of when you were younger, more vulnerable, and you were having that emotion. So, this is all within the nervous system, right? So, what you’re trying to do now is get yourself back to regulated. Tony Robbins sort of talks about this idea in his triad, right? Sort of, how do you create a peak state of what you think, what you’re saying, and what you’re feeling? What’s one thing you see? What are two things you feel? What are three things you can smell? It gets you grounded. But I like to pick three from one of the different categories.”
6. How has your faith supported your leadership and helped you show up in who you are?
“It evolves over time—how I am within my faith and how it shows up depending upon what’s happening in my life. Am I being consistent with my spiritual practices and all those different things? Sometimes I’m on top of it and if something happens, it’s really dry bones. But I will say this: I do believe I have a purpose in this world. I do believe I’m living out my purpose in my business and the things I’m doing. Yes, I’m all about building a massive company and having money, but I also know that what I am doing is good work. And it is work I know I was uniquely placed on the earth to do.
As a result, I think of how I show up sometimes, because sometimes I’m not always honest in my interactions with some clients. Sometimes, because I know it’s going to be a very difficult conversation, I just don’t have the energy and capacity to be completely honest. And I have found, any time I have not been completely honest, any time I’ve not been honest with a client, seeing how it plays out in the end, it’s never good because my business is important to me. How I run my business is very important to me, how my team feels about my business is very important, and I know that they feel the same way about their businesses. But when I am not honest about what I believe to be true based on my experience and what I’ve observed, I have seen it play out all the time negatively and the results never show up. And when I say honest, it could be me skirting the truth a little bit, ‘soft balling’ my opinion. And so, I have tried very hard to be as honest as I possibly can when it comes to the work I’m doing. And that’s from the very beginning to the very end of the engagement, so that when I walk away, I can feel good about what I’ve done. They may not want to renew a contract with me, but that’s okay because my values are what guide me and what keep me going, and a large part of my values is connected to my faith.”
Interviewer
Finka Jerkovic
Career Advancement Coach and Founder of Finka Inc.
With 25+ years in leadership and sales and the financial services industry, she has witnessed the power of recognizing and celebrating people’s unique strengths and differences (a.k.a Brilliant Differences™) within a workplace. When everyone’s unique talents are appreciated and people work together using them, that’s when the real magic of career and business growth happens. Fast forward 10 years. Finka has established programs that help mid-career professionals and leaders grow in their careers by tapping into the full potential of their personal brand, so they can clearly define their strengths, value their differences, and perform at their best.
Interviewee
Kerry-Ann Powell
Founder of Trafalgar Strategies
Kerry-Ann is a globally recognized business strategist, speaker and champion of small and medium sized businesses. Kerry-Ann’s varied experience of over 20 years as a Washington, DC attorney, lobbyist, and fundraiser positions her as an authority of what it takes to strategically succeed while confronting difficult obstacles. After raising $120 million to build the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial she launched her business strategy consulting firm, Trafalgar Strategies. She and her team advise business owners from various industries and countries on creating the strategies, systems, and mindsets to thrive in business and in life. Over the years, Kerry- Ann’s expertise and speaking have been sought after by international brands, organizations, and institutions, such as Working Women’s Magazine, Dallas Leadership Foundation, CIEE, Association of Fundraising Professionals, Mogul and Philanthropist Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation and more. Kerry-Ann is committed to spreading the gospel that running a small and medium-sized business is vital and important to our economies, yet it doesn’t have to feel like trying to manage a chaotic tornado. And business owners can run their businesses smoothly and feel confident that they will thrive. When not speaking, running her business and working with her clients, Kerry-Ann can be found traveling, practicing her Spanish, and enjoying a good meal with good people.
