Kimberley Rodden

I attribute my success to continuous learning and self-growth, and understanding that the times I've been most stuck in my life, I stopped learning. I really believe in how much reading helps us, and learning, and just always that self-growth. I've worked with many mentors over the last two years, including recently working with a guy named Steve Klein, a public speaker, and we're working through a life success plan. He talks a lot about how we need to brainwash ourselves because our brains get conditioned by negativity - when people are negative, when they're depressed, they condition their brains that way. It's all about mindset. Mindset determines how you do something, and how you do something a lot of times determines where you land. You have to work at that because the world is set up to have us be negative - social media, all the negative algorithms get the most views. Mindset is probably the number one thing that I actually even want my kid to work on right now. I also believe that relationships and experience beat education in my field, and building those relationships will get you further than education alone.

Just always make time for yourself and self-growth, because the more you're able to grow internally, the more you can help that family, the more you can help those kids, and the more time that I really believe that you can generate back for yourselves.

I feel like accounting has so many opportunities because it's so closely linked to the operations of businesses and other systems. Things that you learn and you see along the way, like marketing, advertising, all of those things go into budgets, which you deal very closely with. So you start learning things about marketing and advertising, and social media, and just business management in general, because you have to know the operations to be able to help control the finances. I've had opportunities to help manage country music artists, or help companies with their marketing, or social media, or just giving ideas there, and sometimes that's a little bit more fun. It just opens up all those opportunities, and you're almost getting paid to be able to see what does and doesn't work with other people - what fails, and what isn't working, and the money that they're putting into that. As far as challenges, I think it's a very high-stress industry in general because it has so much to do with people's money. Another challenge is that I love to help people and I always want to give more than maybe what they're paying for, so the scope creep is real - really keeping it down and not getting up to those extreme hours because I'm giving so much for free. It's about continuing to always look at the processes and refine every single process, because once the process is what it needs to be, it's just rinse and repeat.