Amanda Sohan

I attribute my success to my faith, which plays a central role in how I navigate challenges at work. When everyone is coming at me with a million things at the same time, I really consult God at almost every turn. It's the what-would-Jesus-do kind of situation for me in a lot of respects. My faith teaches me to breathe and slow down when things get overwhelming. I tell younger people entering the field that when everyone's coming at you, you need to take a moment, breathe, and say a little prayer or whatever it is you do. Then things will become clearer, and you'll know exactly what you need to prioritize in the moment and what you can leave for later. Experience has taught me this, but my faith is really at the foundation of it all. There's no substitute for experience, but faith gives me the clarity and peace to use that experience wisely.

The best career advice I ever received actually came from my ex-husband, and we're really good friends to this day. About 10 years ago, I was struggling with whether to share my processes with another EA who had asked me about my conferencing procedures. I had this whole booklet that I had collected over the years and honed into this process that was just so on point, and I didn't want to give it to her. I was afraid that because it made me feel unique and I had put so much hard work into it, I would just be giving her the keys to the kingdom for free, and it would diminish me somehow. My ex-husband told me absolutely not, share it right away. He said the same way she asked me is how I should be asking others, and that we should create this sort of collaboration because we're a community, and we should be sharing things because it only makes me better and makes them better. I thought about that, called her back, and shared my process. Ever since then, I've thought differently about collaboration and sharing knowledge, and I think it's absolutely great. I've been doing that ever since.

I've been so surprised by the young ladies entering this field because they're so smart and so in touch with technology today. They're really able to leverage it to make their processes so much less cumbersome than my generation did. They use less paper, it's more digital, and they're very quick thinking. But what I find is that there's no substitute for experience. Experience teaches you to breathe when there are a million things coming at you at the same time. It teaches you to slow down. My faith has a lot to do with that - I really consult God at almost every turn. So I would tell them that when everyone's coming at you, take a moment, breathe, and whatever it is you do, whether you say it to yourself or say a little prayer, things will become clearer. You'll understand exactly what you need to prioritize in the moment and what you can leave for later when you have the time. That's probably the best thing I could say to the new people coming up. Also, don't hold back information - if you have valuable input, share it. Create collaboration with your peers because you're a community, and sharing only makes everyone better.

I think the challenges in my particular role as an EA are probably the different types of personalities that you're faced with and finding the sweet spot for each MD and each team. They've all got their own way of doing things, their own processes of thinking and execution, and I think it's really important to listen to what exactly they want. Sometimes they don't even know what they want, especially if they've never had an assistant before. So you listen to what they think they want and then translate that into action. There's a bit of push and pull in the beginning, but then you assimilate into their rhythm and they somewhat assimilate into yours. It is a two-way street, and that's one of the biggest challenges of my job throughout every single different firm I've worked with. Now, I think the challenge on the horizon is AI. We're trying to figure out how to integrate that into what we do without having it take over what we do. That's a bit of a challenge, but I will say that for my team, they prefer the human touch. At this point in time, having me as their liaison between the client and themselves, that personal touch, that warmth, answering the telephone still, seating people into meetings and scheduling things - that's still very important, at least to my team presently.

I think authenticity is probably the biggest value in both my work and personal life. I think people can sense when you're just sort of putting on a personality rather than exuding your own, and I think that's off-putting. I'm a very warm person, and in every job I've ever been placed in, there are some firms and executives that are much more formal, especially in the beginning. But I say to myself, I can turn the volume up or down depending on how they respond to it, but most of the time they prefer more warmth than anything else. They prefer more authenticity, more just being able to talk to them regularly, not putting them on a pedestal. For my personal life, my culture is West Indian, so that warmth that is part of my culture has really transcended my career path. It's really been the crux of what makes me unique in my field, and I think people respond really well to that. Beyond authenticity, trust and integrity are also essential values that guide everything I do.