Michelle Kilgour

I attribute my success to understanding and empathy that comes from my own lived experience. I've been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder since I was 4, an audio processing disorder when I was in college, along with anxiety, ADHD, and other mental health conditions. Over the years, I've developed coping skills, and I never heard that these were disabilities - it was always that this is kind of who you are, and we learn how to leverage those into strengths. I actually never even heard the word disability until I was in 10th grade. It was always associated to, like, some people wear glasses, some don't - it's just who you are. You can change it, you can manipulate it, but when you leverage it and it becomes a part of who you are, it makes you a better person. So I've always looked at my diagnoses and symptoms as just who I am, and how can I leverage them to make me a better individual. I've been there, I understand when people look at you and say you have a disability, and you're like, no, but how can I make it not necessarily a crutch, but more of an asset. This gives me self-confidence, knowing you can come from the bottom to the top, and then go back to the bottom, and knowing those things will always shift and change. Because of that, I'm very empathetic to where people are and really attentive to listening to what people say, because I'm looking for where they're excelling, even within their struggles. If I can focus on that and help them leverage those aspects of their life, I find that they do very well and can exceed where they were before they got sick. I excel at listening, understanding, reflection, asking questions when questions need to be asked, and helping individuals reframe perspectives that they're hearing that may not be necessarily great stories. I know that sometimes things happen, it sucks, and that's the best way to say it - it just sucks. But there's ways that we can evolve and develop from there too, and take those and help motivate them.

The best advice I've ever received is to remember to breathe. It came from a freshman college professor when I was taking 8 classes in one semester because I'm a little OCD and ambitious. They told me, just remember to breathe. It's a simple act that everyone does, and not many people think about it. But when things just get to be too much, remembering to breathe centers you, and you can kind of keep moving on. So, remembering to breathe is kind of like my mantra.

My advice is don't be afraid to move around and be inquisitive. To develop, you need to learn and understand everything, so staying in one place and mastering it is a great idea, but you're missing the whole picture - you're kind of in an isolated individual location. You don't necessarily have to jump company to company, but remember to move around, because the more you understand, the more valuable you are, and the more leverage you have when applying for positions that do appear interesting and more lucrative. More people know you as well, so it helps to network that way. The other thing I would recommend, especially for individuals who are starting to look at their career path, even before they go into college, is to really take some courses on financial literacy. It's funny, but financial literacy is such a main role in everything you do, from personal to professional. Understanding financial literacy will really help you in understanding business goals, help you understand how to negotiate raises, those networking opportunities. It'll help you with not having that added pressure, and knowing things are okay, so if you do want to take a step back to take a step forward, you can. And you know how that works. But if you don't understand financial literacy, it becomes very daunting to take a step into the unknown. Just make sure you understand financial literacy, no matter what age you are, but earlier is always excellent.

The biggest challenge is giving everyone their individual time that they deserve, while moving fast enough that you're hitting federal guidelines and deadlines. It's about giving them their individual time and making them feel like they're a person and not a number.

The values most important to me are not forgetting about your friends and family as things get difficult - don't push them away. Another critical value is to hold true to your own ethical beliefs. If something doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. So hold true to your own ethical beliefs, and don't start compromising on those, ever, no matter what they are.