Vanessa Galvan

I'm fortunate to love what I do. A lot of people say that, but I truly feel I'm in that kind of environment where I love what I do, I feel like I am contributing personally to people, and I can continue doing it with my eyes closed even if nobody paid me for it. Even more so than that, I just like the fact that in my role, I have this variation of working with people all over the world. Literally, on a regular basis, I may be talking in the morning to somebody in Europe, then going through all of North America, Latin America, and then at the end of the day, talk to somebody in India, or Tokyo, or any other location like that. That, for me, has always been a dream of mine. I always wanted something, whatever that was, that allowed me to interact with people all over the world, and I'm fortunate that I'm in that position now.

The best advice I received came from my dad, who was very instrumental in helping me have clarity on what I want to accomplish. It was not about how big the dream was, but how you could divide it into different buckets to make it happen. And the concept that time is not a variable was super important - because some big dreams also take a long time, and that may discourage people. So he always said that time was relative. It really depended on how big your dream was, and that was super important for me.

This field is quite difficult for women and for professionals in general. The safety field is one that everybody questions, nobody wants to do, everybody thinks like they're doing something extra, and you have to be very sure about you and what you know as a professional. If you believe that you are sure about your professional conclusions, if you know that there is a motivation to do it, that's a very important step in driving change. When you are unsure, when you don't know, that's when most professionals fail, because it's very easy in this profession to have people make you doubt yourself, even when you are sure that what you have or that your guidance is correct. There will always be somebody there to say that it is not, or to try to steer you in the wrong direction, and that, for a safety professional could be risky, because you end up having gaps in your program that could result in an injury or a serious fatality for somebody, so you can't really allow that. But it starts with being really determined, being really sure about yourself and knowing yourself. Once you do that, and once you know that, I think that builds your character, and it makes you a stronger person. I know that kind of advice is very popular for most professions, but in the field of safety, it's much more critical, because if you compare it with finance, the numbers are there, everybody understands the numbers, you can see if you added 2 and 2 and it came out to be 4 or 5. With safety, a lot of it is considered vague. It's hard to be certain of predicting the future, and a lot of professionals struggle with that.

Engagement - engagement from the general population, but also engagement from leadership. There's a lot of people that think that just by throwing more money at something, that that's going to resolve the issue, and it may for several things, but not for safety. For safety, you really need the personal connection. There's never shortcuts. You need to put in the time. And a lot of leaders don't see it that way, and that is concerning. I think that's one of the main problems, that there's all of these doctorate degrees, business degrees, but none of them include an aspect of safety, and especially in clarifying for professionals of all kinds, that safety is part of their responsibility, especially at a higher level of leadership.

I think having this true idea of compromise, and especially for this profession, you need to be committed to the responsibility. So that's perhaps the most important thing for me - responsibility and commitment.