Jeny Melamed

For me, I think it's the mentorship. I got a hand up from folks who did this before me, and doing the same for other people - I really believe in giving back, and that's always been the most meaningful part, whether it was for profit or philanthropy. I've built my entire consulting practice by word of mouth for decades. I never produced my website because it never became a necessity, which I think is such a compliment when someone refers you. Working for a temp agency through college to help pay for my education gave me a chance to dabble in a lot of different fields while doing similar things, and it gave me a sense of what was similar across the board regardless of what industry you're working with. I realized early on that psychology is not just about therapy, it really does guide communication in general - anytime you have two people in contact with one another, all of that is playing in. I found that my two degrees in International Relations and Communications really fit together well in understanding different cultures and the baseline of being able to communicate with people across the board.

Read. Read, read, research, read, read some more, read different sides of the story. Understand where we've been, and the history of things. It is truly, on the international relations side, very hard to understand how far back some of our international biases go, and why we do the things we do, and why people believe the things that they believe. Even to my own children, I try and explain to them that a lot of what they see now in the modern geopolitical world is a reaction to things that happened in World War II. It's hard for them to follow, and I have to take them step-by-step through a lot of those things that created change, and why that change came into effect, and how that effect is continuing to affect everything now.

I think I probably join anybody who puts a pen to paper in saying AI. It's probably almost cliche now. It does regurgitate work that's out there, without the ability to understand nuances, which I think is where the facts are. Social media certainly has reduced attention spans. Even for those of us who don't want to be a victim of that, we have become a victim of that because you're creating marketing materials in a world of social media, and people don't have that attention span. So it is reality. Those are the challenges. It does go back to nuances - we're all about nuances, and so it's about learning nuances and having the ability to communicate them to an audience that's willing to understand them and appreciate how that makes us unique.

I really believe in giving back, and that's always been the most meaningful part, whether it was for profit or philanthropy. I find mentoring to be hugely gratifying. I am looking at leaving the world a better place for my own children - I have twin 26-year-olds, and I am very supportive of their emerging careers, and my nieces and nephews and all of them. I do see what I do in each of their futures. Ongoing education is humongous for me, so that never ends - whenever there is even a little bit of downtime, it's a lot of reading, psychology, neurology updates and journals and things like that as to the way we think and the way our brain is mapped. For me, it's all about nuances - we're all about nuances, and so it's about learning nuances and having the ability to communicate them to an audience that's willing to understand them and appreciate how that makes us unique.