Khushboo Shah

I would say the thing that has helped me really most through my journey is to be hardworking and to be honest. I think those are the two things that have brought me a lot of success.

I think for me, I would say it's been a lot about relationship building. Somebody told me recently that people don't remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel. I always thought that was really good advice for making sure you stay focused on saying enough to leave the right feeling and not getting too lost in the details, because people don't remember them. I thought that was the best advice I received.

I would say it is very hard for women to advocate for themselves often because we've been taught to support others more than we've been taught to support ourselves and take what we need. Sometimes it's very hard to also reinvent that, because that's how we are, and it's a lot of where we draw our strengths from that are different than strengths that people who haven't had the experience of being a woman would have had. So I believe instead of even trying to abandon it, the way I channel it is to support other women, because we know we don't support ourselves as well. So it's good to pay that forward, and I would always give that advice to everybody. Be supportive where you can, and also receive that support where you can.

Right now, I would say every industry is facing a level of change and challenge with data management and with management of the same processes you already do, but at new speeds and new velocities. All the challenges it brings when you have to manage things that you used to have maybe 2-3 weeks to go look at and review in detail, you have to take a lot more of a bigger amount of input, and then you also have to review it much faster because it's coming much faster. So I think we're all dealing with that. That velocity of new information, as well as the actual amount of it, is something we're all finding challenging. I would say that the more we can bring organization and understanding and acknowledgment of our processes to keep us anchored as we navigate through it, the better it'll be for all of us. I'm sure everyone's going to talk about artificial intelligence, and I'm no exception to it.

The values that are really important to me at work are being mission-oriented with work. I feel like not just thinking about the work as certain disparate tasks, but something that's actually leading up to a vision that you're going to achieve together. I feel like that's been something that's really helped me continue to feel like what I'm doing is important and see the bigger picture of it. That's a really big value I have, to be more mission-oriented and solution-oriented. In my personal life, I also expand that principle to thinking about how work is just one part of your whole life, and if there's a certain feeling you want to bring to the world, we all need to bring that. We're all making the world what it is together. We wouldn't be in all of this if we didn't each intentionally bring ourselves to it, so I just always want to be a person to someone else that I would want someone else to be to me. I try to extend that to my life as well, to try to think about what do I really want to put out there, and how do I want my daughter to feel tomorrow. Because I want to be the kind of person who would give her the feeling, or give anyone's child the feeling that I want for her.