Alondra Medina

I attribute my success to my mom, who was my mentor and taught me everything about being a professional. She was a personal accountant, businesswoman, and single mom who sustained 4 kids, and watching her work my whole life was inspiring. When she became hospitalized, I lived in the hospital with her for 3 months while still in college. She told me to get my CAM license and get into property management, saying she had so much faith in me and knew I would do great in this field. She took me shopping for professional clothes and taught me how to speak to people and carry myself from a very young age. All those little things - helping her in her office as a little girl, erasing files, organizing papers - eventually mounted up to this big respect for organization and preparedness. Her best lesson was to not let my circumstances overcome me or dictate my behavior, to not let anyone or anything dictate my behavior except for myself. That sense of staying focused and determined, of never letting anything break you even when it hurts you enough to slow you down - that's what she taught me. When the center of my world collapsed, I had to take inspiration from her on how to keep pushing. I wanted to become her mentor in return, to show her that the student had become the master and make her proud.

The world is your oyster. I would tell her that this industry - hospitality and business - is very empowering for women because we bring something men don't have the same sense of: compassion for people, attention to detail, and appreciation for experiences. All of those deeply maternal things that us women have, whether you're a mother or not - we are so detail-oriented and organizational. These are things that as women you're just expected to have, and they're almost overlooked because if every woman is like that, it's the minimum qualification. But I'm a firm believer that an exceptional man is just an average woman, and in this industry, that really shows. It's natural for us to care, to want to organize and fix and get things together. I would tell any woman that if they believe that they can do it, they've already done it, and they just need to stick it through till the end. You're not supposed to see how capable you are, you're supposed to find it out. The danger and fear is how they keep us away, how they keep us locked up. Once you let it go, you realize you are just as capable, just as strong, just as worthy, just as intelligent, or more than anyone, man or woman. You're always so much more capable than you'll ever see. I would tell them to own it - if you just walk in with your resume, someone really might hear you out. Someone needs to tell you to believe in yourself.

The biggest challenge in hospitality and business right now is the selfishness and lack of compassion that's driving us down. The need to capitalize the most you can off of people and suck them dry without any actual compassion for their experience, their memories, their problems - without any consideration for who they are, and just looking at the numerical aspect - that's what's hurting companies. You can definitely see where the downfalls of women's absences have affected the businesses. This is an industry that is collapsing before us. Businesses and corporations all have these very big problems and struggles that need change, that need innovation that I feel like only women bring. We fight for purposes greater than ourselves, and if you have those qualifications, if you're fighting for something that's greater than yourself, you're always going to be successful.