D'Lynn Healey

I would say naivety, if I was to be fully transparent. I just didn't know what I was up against, and I just was drawn to different things and followed that step by step. Sometimes I got myself in positions where I didn't really have a choice - I had to stay where I was working and I had to do it. And to the point about the TikTok generation, if you believe you have to take care of your kids to the point where they have choices, sometimes you're taking them away from a little bit of grit. They can get through it. So early on, I was naive, and then I had to go through the phase where I realized I can't control the hamsters in your head or what you think or who you share your stories with. In my field in particular, there's a lot of gossip - the boys love to swap war stories, so you're kind of always on the outside looking in. But then you just have to outwork them, and that sucks, but that's the only way that it's done. You have to do better, and you have to earn your stripes, because they are definitely not handed to you. You just have to keep pushing and do better, and then finally you get some street cred, and just when you think you're over it and everyone is on your team, then it turns out nope, gotta start over. But yeah, it's all part of it. You just gotta keep pushing.

I always tell people who are interns or new hires that it's a great time in your career because no matter what you do, you're gonna learn something that will help you later on. No matter how simple the task seems, like maybe you're just filing and this is no fun, but later when you're managing people and they say this is going to take a long time to file, you know exactly what they mean and you maybe come up with a better way to file. That's the beauty of being starting out - everything you do adds value to what you can bring to the table later. You really don't want to step right into that corner office - that's actually the worst case scenario for your career, because if you get in over your head, it does nothing for anybody. Working your way up and learning as you go is the best way to do it. And you have to remember that sometimes it's not about you. You feel like someone's out to get you and things like that, and you've just gotta be careful that you don't default to thinking that it's a male-female thing. Sometimes it really doesn't have anything to do with you, or maybe it's something else, and if you get yourself thinking about it too much, then you're not doing anybody any favors. Sometimes you gotta just block it out and keep moving.

Construction is a super volatile business, and it's not like tech where things happen real quick and you're hot and you're not. It's a slow, clogging climb. The generation just a titch before mine was when the husband went to work and the mom was at home, and the man had complete autonomy as to when he came to work and when he left. That just doesn't really work that much anymore, and so it's finding ways to do work that requires more than just a 40-hour work week, or sometimes requires you to do things outside of work, but making it so that it's still feasible to be a partner. That's kind of my goal - to just build the company nice and strong.