Pamela S. Ellis, PhD

I would say it's due to my love for learning. I'm a lifelong learner, and I'm continually reading and experiencing conversations with people from all walks of life. I'm very open to information, so I think that's probably what my successes are all about. I'm very curious about the community that I'm in and larger communities as well. I'm interested in what's happening in my local community, my nation, and also other parts of the world. I consider myself a global citizen, so I try to keep up with what's happening everywhere.

I think the best advice I've received is to not allow distractions to deter me from achieving goals. You have to clarify your objectives, and you have to do that continually throughout each day, week, and year. What are your priorities? You can't allow distractions to take over your day. You have to plan and strategically decide about what is important for each day, week, month, and year. So it's a ranking order that you need to have in your head and in front of you. You have to inform everyone that's around you, your family, that this is what is needed to be done, and you just go ahead and you make sure you do all the things that's on your checklist weekly.

I would say that we have unique challenges as women. Those challenges - right now I'm working on a program for women that's coming up March the 20th. The program is basically highlighting that women have to make sure that they're taking care of their family, they're paying for college, and they are working towards business ownership. They're also more responsible for their family when it comes to caregiving. We know this is true based on statistics. So we have those unique challenges, and we have to find ways that we can work in this system so that we can understand how to overcome those challenges and be able to live the life that we are deserving of. We have to understand what the challenges are in order to address the challenges successfully. For women in general, it's 84% of what a man can earn in terms of their salaries, and for Black women it's 64%. Those are concerns - there's wealth gaps and salary gaps that we're experiencing. I think that we have to understand what the challenges are in order to address the challenges successfully.

I believe that it's always important to be able to build in your industry, and so that would be the challenge and the opportunity, both - to build teams that work together to achieve our mission and our vision. We want to eradicate financial illiteracy. I'm with the Wealth Wave organization, and so that is our challenge, and we work together to build successful systems. The opportunity is to make genuine connections with individuals and families and businesses so that they would have the trust to learn from each one of the professionals that are in our industry. It all comes down to the fact that people can learn from you if they trust you, and they can get all of the benefits that are available with a professional rather than try to get information and make decisions without a professional. We are licensed in our industry, we're highly regulated, but still people don't know about information because they never talk to a financial planner, advisor, and they make a lot of mistakes and then they suffer the consequences. It's the opportunity and the challenge - it's just to overcome the jaded public relations that people have about anyone teaching them anything. People are closed to people giving them information often, and they're not learning, so it's a big deal.

I would say the values would be those that I have stated on my website, LS PhD Services. They would be integrity, lifelong learning - that's really important to me - and empathy. Being able to connect with people in these different areas.