Katie Bellaschi

The biggest one is my family. My parents were phenomenal role models of hard work and intellectual curiosity and compassion for others and kindness. So really, my parents are the biggest thing. And then I think a lot of it goes back to my education, particularly at Notre Dame, where the focus is on educating the whole person.

There's no timeline or script for how to do life, professionally or personally. Everyone's process looks really different, so I think it's great to have huge goals and things that you're striving towards, but you might get reached out to about an opportunity that you never thought of. Like, that's how I ended up in this role, to be honest with you. I didn't think that I would end up here, and it's been a remarkable experience, and I've loved every minute of it, but it wasn't in my, you know, air quote, plan. So, I think that's a big one, is be open-minded. There's no timeline or script for how it's supposed to look.

I think the biggest one, and this definitely has come with time, is if you don't ask, you'll never know. So I think a lot of times, young women are afraid to raise their hand for new opportunities, or to sign up for something, or to apply for a job, and at the end of the day, the worst thing someone could say is no. So if you don't ask, and of course respectfully, and mindfully, but if you don't ask, you'll never know. So that's my favorite one. I think a lot of life, like, professionally and personally, is it's gonna be what you make it. So you get out of something what you put into it. If you put in a lot of time and effort and thought and care, you're gonna get that back. So it's that's another big thing. And then thirdly, I would say don't regret anything, but learn from it. So there's a learning to be had from every experience. Not every day is gonna be a home run, not every thing you raise your hand for is gonna be a slam dunk, but, like, there's a learning to be taken from all of those things.

The biggest challenge is that people are unpredictable, so, you know, I'm not producing a legal brief, or a data pack, or a financial model. Like, I'm really, people are the product, and you can't predict what someone's gonna do. So that's really the biggest challenge, is we have people who will pull out of our search processes, or who will go dark on us after we've built a relationship. Just human behavior is so unpredictable, so that's the biggest challenge, I would say. It's also the biggest opportunity, in that I think people are capable of so much of learning, of growth, of open-mindedness, of change, and so every day, there are surprises and things that happen in the business world that we can't expect, can't anticipate, but people are resilient, for the most part, and that's something that gives me a lot of hope and a lot of promise for the leaders of the next generation. I also think AI. Like, AI is totally changing the way of the world and the way that we all work, and there's so much opportunity to leverage AI and make our lives easier. I think there's a lot of panic and fear around, is my role gonna be replaced by AI? And so I think the opportunity is shifting that mindset and viewing artificial intelligence as a tool to help make us better, faster, more efficient, smarter, and thinking about not what can I do that a machine can't do, but thinking about how do I use what the machine can do to make what I, as a human, can do better.

Resilience is a huge one. Not as we kind of talked about before, but not every day is going to be perfect, and not everything's going to go according to plans. Then it's how do you get back up after you've made a mistake, or learned a hard lesson, and shake off the dirt and start over, so resilience, I think, is a huge one. Honesty is another really big one. A good quote that I once heard is that bad news doesn't get better with age, so if you make a mistake, or if something doesn't go according to plan, it's better to tackle it head-on and move on from there. It doesn't get better as you try to, you know, let it sit. Collaboration. There's so many smart people out there, and we all have so much to learn from each other, so I try to go into every conversation with an open mind, learn about where someone else is coming from, and then walk away from that conversation with a learning from it, or a takeaway. I think those are the big three for me, probably.