Chase Your Own Carrot Transcript

More Elephant Intro

[00:00:38] Jason Rudman: Welcome to the latest edition of the More Elephant podcast in our continuing series on the changing nature of work. Before I let Rosa Sabater speak, here's what I want to tell you about Rosa Sabater!!!

So we've known each other for 20 years. She was my leader's leader's leader at American Express at one time. And I think it's true to say that if you asked people about their experience with Rosa there will still, 20 years later, be a level of reverence and admiration for who she is, how she shows up, and the empathetic style of her leadership.

I think it stays with the people that have been in her orbit for many, many years. And I know that because I spoke to a couple of people. It's also a truism that I still today, when I'm in a situation, will often think back and say, “What would Rosa do? How would Rosa approach this?” So, Rosa, welcome to the More Elephant Podcast. It's been 20 years in the making. I'm thrilled to be talking with you for the next 20, 30, 40 minutes, however long we stretch this out.

[00:01:46] Rosa Sabater: It's great to be here, number one. And number two, I can't think of anybody better to have this conversation with because, as you know, we're chatting a little bit before we started, and every conversation with Jason Rudman is a direct and honest conversation, and I think that's what the world needs. So hooray for More Elephant!

[00:02:02] Jason Rudman: Awesome well it's funny because one of the things on the Martellus site as we get into it is – “It started by listening as most good ideas do.”

So I feel you were More Elephant before I even created the brand and the platform. And we're going to get into that but before we do that, take us back. Would you spend a few minutes talking about the Rosa Sabater journey up to and including American Express?

[00:02:26] Rosa Sabater: Absolutely. So after business school, went and worked in a management consulting firm called Booz Allen and Hamilton and left there after about five years and joined American Express, largely because some little voice in the back of my head was telling me this is not what you're meant to be doing.

And by the way, every career change that I've ever made has been preceded by a little voice saying to me, “This is not what you're meant to be doing. This is not what you're meant to be doing.”

So there was a little voice in my head that was saying this is not what you're meant to be doing. And I went to American Express. I spent 17 years at American Express. And as you know, Jason, at American Express, you can have 17 careers in one.

[00:03:02] Jason Rudman: You do.

[00:03:03] Rosa Sabater: Which is lovely! So I worked in corporate strategic planning for a while. I spent a lot of time in marketing, particularly in marketing to small businesses. I spent a good portion of my career, which I thoroughly loved, in Operations, running some of American Express's service centers. Absolutely. I tell everyone all the time if you have to work for a large company, I would absolutely recommend American Express. It was a wonderful experience.

But for the last couple of years, I was getting that voice in my ear, and I kept ignoring it because if you look at my career on a piece of paper, it looked like everything was going swimmingly. I was getting promoted regularly. I was making a decent living.

I had managed to talk my boss into a very strange schedule at the time. This was now 15, 16 years ago, and I would leave when I wasn't traveling, and I traveled a great deal, I would leave work at 3 o'clock every day and then get back on the phone around 8 o'clock at night because I had teams in India, which meant that I could get home, pick my kids up at school because they were little, like yours right now, sort of hang out with them a little bit, put them to bed and start working.

So, on paper, I had the ideal job, and there was this little voice going on. And I remember talking to my husband one day at dinner, and I was just going on, and I was like, this person's annoying me, and this person's annoying me, and this person's annoying me, and this person's annoying me.

And he paused and he said, “You know. If everyone's annoying you, do you think that there's a chance that something might be going on with you?”

And I said to myself, that day, it's time to go for no good reason other than a new adventure was beckoning me.

[00:04:46] Jason Rudman: Well, I love that. There's so much to unpack there. And as I said, I started before that, you have the outline of up to American Express. With the Martellus idea, as you said, it started by listening, as most good ideas do.

So, you've just outlined that any of the main career changes and opportunities that you've created or have come your way have started with that voice in your head. So could you go a little deeper and by your own admission, great setup because, you know, again, 16, 17, 18 years ago, you actually were doing a hybrid job. We talk about the changing nature of work post-pandemic, but my goodness, I think you're a walking example of hybrid roles and remote work have existed forever.

so, you woke up, your husband said, “Hey, if there's all this annoyance around you, what's going on with you?” So the Martellus idea, if you would describe that and how you got that off the ground.

[00:05:39] Rosa Sabater: Yeah, so I left Amex and I'm going to describe a process that is not for everyone because I think that I had the opportunity to not make any money for a year, and not everyone can do that.

But for me, I actually had to leave American Express to create enough space in my mind to reflect on what I wanted to do. For better or for worse, I am very linear, very goal-directed. I am very focused on the task that is in front of me. And I was not giving enough mind space to this little voice that's saying there's another new adventure, there's another new adventure. So, I had to stop working.

And in fact, one of our old leaders, Jason, actually talked me into taking a six-month sabbatical. I told everybody I quit. He's like, why don't you just take six months and think about it? Come back six months later and tell me I [you] really mean it. So we did that.

And I did what I call Eat, Pray, Love on the Upper West Side. So, I did not go to India, and I did not go to Bali, and I did not go to Italy. But I sat on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I started investing in listening. I started a regular meditation practice. I started taking care of my body in a new, different way.

I got very curious. I used to hate to network. I'm like, I am not a networker. I don't like it, it just was, it was an icky word for me, but I got very curious about what people did for work and how they felt about work.

And what happened during that year of Eat, Pray, Love, is, and you're going to know a lot of these people, I'm not going to use any other names. But there were a lot of people, mostly women, who would call me up and say, “Can I come talk to you?”

So, they would leave American Express at four o'clock in the afternoon. We'd meet, (I'm pointing to places you can't see) we’d meet at Doc's at 80th and Broadway. It's not there anymore. And they would say to me, to a person, “I want to work, but this is not working for me.”

And then we'd strategize. Okay, well let's, you can do this or you can do that. Maybe you can leave. You know, maybe you can…I remember talking to one person who was like, all I want is to have dinner with, she was going through a really difficult divorce, and all she wanted was to have dinner with her daughter every night, and she had a very demanding boss at American Express. And I remember saying to her, just do it, because if you don't do it, you're going to quit,

So there was this stream of women, we were having this conversation during Eat Pray Love, so that happened on one side of my life, On the other side of my life, I had a lot of executives across a whole bunch of companies coming to me and saying, boy, I wish you could help me with this, or I wish you could help me with that.

And I'm like, I don't want to do that. I don't feel like consulting. I don't want to do that. And then one day, over a glass of wine, which increasingly has become a cup of tea as I get older, but whatever.

[00:08:18] Jason Rudman: Maybe wine and tea.

[00:08:19] Rosa Sabater: I know I'm doing as much anymore. I was like, maybe I meant to put those two things together. They have these, and it literally just, I, Jason, it was just literally sitting in a blue chair in my living room, having a glass of wine, literally thinking about something else entirely, like you need to put these two things together.

You've got all these executives, senior executives, asking for my personal support on stuff I didn't want to do, and all these women coming to me and saying, there's got to be a better way. “I want to work, I want to feel fulfilled economically and professionally, but there's got to be a better way for me.”

And that night, it didn't have a name – at first, we were just calling it North Star - Martellus was born. And if I describe Martellus to clients, I would say it is a consulting firm comprised of seasoned marketing executives, all of whom are women. And they do project work, and they can fill in for staff if you have open positions. That's how I describe it to clients.

The way that we describe Martellus to ourselves is that we are a platform that enables us, us the 40 women at Martellus, to work how we work best. And we do it by sharing expenses, and we do it by sharing hassle. So, there's one website, and payroll and insurance, and registering and all the back office stuff.

We do it by generating work for each other, and we're just a community. Every single one of the women in Martellus is seasoned enough and has an extensive enough network to be doing this on their own. It is just much more fulfilling to do it together and to do it for each other.

[00:10:00] Jason Rudman: I love the description of the More Elephant moment. There's so much to unpack.

So my, for what it's worth, my Eat, Pray, Love moment was earlier this year, but unlike you, I actually went to Thailand because I struggle with how to meditate. I actually could not unwind enough to just sit for 20 minutes and just let the world do what it does, right?

But there's so much in what you said at the beginning, meditation, taking yourself, removing yourself so that you could create space for what's next. But I chuckled because you did it on the Upper West Side, and I went and wrote an elephant in Laos because it was a bucket list thing for me and it's elephants, right? So it was, there was a lot going on.

So 16, 17, it's nearly 20 years in the making, right? Martellus. So, what have been some of the triumphs? And what have been some of the challenges for the group of women that are part of Martellus? And then I also, the second part of that is for you, as not only a woman but also a minority founder, as a Latina - what have been some of the triumphs or some of the challenges as you've attempted to grow Martellus? From one, right, a person of one, Rosa Sabater, to 40 women in the collective.

[00:11:15] Rosa Sabater: So, I think for Martellus women overall, and then I'll talk about me specifically, it is remarkable to me that the two things that I'm going to talk about have been challenging to almost all of us.

And the first is defining what it is they love to do. I have many, many, many teachers, and one of my teachers is a woman named Nyla Berry, and she used to be the Dean of Students at Columbia. And she's just like a work, I have a work posse, by the way, get yourself a posse of advisors [that] would be another piece of advice I would get people, but.

[00:11:46] Jason Rudman: The hive, call it whatever you want, right? The beehive, we'll go with the beehive.

[00:11:50] Rosa Sabater: If you are an entrepreneur, you need a beehive because it doesn't happen naturally like it does in an office setting.

But women would come to me, and they would say, I'll get back to Nyla. I want to work like you and I'm like, Okay. So, the whole point of Martellus is, you get to the underlying premises - we do our best work when we do what we love. The way you get ahead is by doing things you love doing.

So, I'd have very seasoned women come to me well, I'd love to work with Martellus. Okay, well, what do you love doing, just to make sure that I can generate that kind of work for you? And they'd be like, well. I like to drive results. I'm like, that's not what you love. Those are American Express performance review categories.

So, we have just been conditioned to say, these are the things that we like, and haven't given enough thought to what am I having the most fun at work? So that's one, all the women struggle to articulate - when do I have the most fun at work? They either want to go really broad, “I can do everything” or “What does fun have to do with work?”

There was one woman that you and I both know very well, who was at a meeting with Nyla recently. And we were talking about this zone of genius, which is when your zone of joy and confidence overlap when what you're really good at, and what brings you lots of joy come together, that's your zone of genius.

And this woman, who you and I both love, was sitting with a group of people who had worked for her. And they kept saying to her, “You are so good at mentoring. That's what you got to do. That's what you got to do.” And she turned around at one point, and she's like, but I don't want to do it anymore. So just because she was really, really good at it doesn't mean it brought her a lot of joy. I think really knowing what you love to do with something that somehow we don't spend enough time thinking about was a challenge for women.

The other thing that was a challenge for women after they left, and started to work this way. And by the way, when you work at Martellus, you don't have a paycheck every couple of weeks guaranteed. You don't have health benefits guaranteed, right? So, it's a much riskier way to work. Even in that case, they had trouble maintaining their own boundaries.

You know, I had a woman call me and said, “Well, you know, I really can't work on Tuesdays because I'm taking my mom to chemo.” I'm like, then don't work on Tuesdays! The reason you've chosen to work this way is so you have flexibility, and there are other reasons as well. So don't work on Tuesdays.

But sometimes, we struggle to give ourselves permission to do it. So that's what I, I think every single woman who joins Martellus, I work with to help them articulate what is really fun for them at work and to help them articulate how they want to work so that they can stick to it.

Look, you're not going to stick to it a hundred percent of the time, but if you stick to it three-quarters of the time, you're good. So that's that.

[00:14:27] Jason Rudman: Rosa, do you think some of that is connected, I'm thinking back to where you started, which is somebody told you to take a six-month sabbatical, right?

To say, hey, just think on this, because your career had been corporate, corporate, corporate, and then you became an entrepreneur. Do you think part of that is because it's just such a learned behavior, right? That you actually have to show up, you have to clock in at nine, you have to finish at five, and you have to jump on email.

I've got to believe that some of the challenge is because we've all been doing that for such a long time that it's almost like as if you were in an accident, you had to learn to walk again, as an adult. I'm assuming that there's a lot embedded in that because it's been part of your lived experience for such a long time.

[00:15:07] Rosa Sabater: For many of us for 20 to 25 years, you, and by the way, if that way of working brings you joy, all in, lean all the way in.

So, I am not making a value judgment on one way of working versus another. But if you want to choose a non-traditional way of working, you've got to deprogram yourself. I had to deprogram me, you know.

Things that I try not to think about is vacation time versus work time. There should be rest in every day. And for me, it's best when there is work in every day. So I work seven days a week. And people are like, oh my god. I'm like, no, no, no. I like it. I like starting my Sundays with a cup of coffee and reflecting on what my week is going to look like.  You might not like it and that's fine.

So, these false, binary situations of work or home or weekend or weekday or work, that's the first thing I had to deprogram. My personal struggle and this gets very kind of heady, was, so again for the women in Martellus, sort of deprogramming from the rules and what do you really want to do? For me, this potentially could be an issue for others, I had to redefine who I was a little bit.

I remember a couple of months after I quit, going to San Francisco with my sister-in-law and her wife. And her wife is one of my best friends. Her name is Toni, and she is a Rosa rabbid fan. And I am sitting at dinner with my son, he's 10, and he looks at me and he says, and this is six months after I quit, “So Mom, what do you do all day long?”

And I think Toni could see my face just fall to the ground, and she just went in and sort of cut him off. First of all, he didn't mean anything by it. He was just asking a factual question born out of curiosity. But one of the things I had to deal with was going to the proverbial cocktail party - What do you do? And my identity was so wrapped up with this is what I do. This is what I do. This is what I do. So, I had to work through that.

[00:17:05] Jason Rudman: I'm smiling because, you know, as I shared with you, like I'm in that period of transition, right? I’m thinking through what I want to do next and whether that is continuing to build like an entrepreneurial outcome. And I have a 10-year-old, and we literally just had that – “So Daddy, how was your day? What did you do today?”

[00:17:23] Rosa Sabater: Exactly.

[00:17:23] Jason Rudman: And it's just when he knew that I was gone from like nine until five, and I would, I had meetings, we, I tend to talk to him, oh, we built this digital solution today to help A do B with C. And I took a bunch of stuff that's like data or code and here's what we're trying to solve for.

And then the conversation is “So what did you do today?” Well, I had some networking calls and, I recorded a podcast. It's just, you know, to your point, he looked at me and was like, well, that's very different.

All right. And I, I think it is getting very comfortable with self and knowing that you're on this journey of exploration and it's going to be okay. I think it's also that it's going to be okay.

[00:18:03] Rosa Sabater: Right. And that what you do, first of all, that question doesn't always have to be answered with what you do for money.

[00:18:10] Jason Rudman: That's right.

[00:18:11] Rosa Sabater: And who you are is not what you do. I love what I do. I spend my days doing things that bring me joy, but still, on that time, that year of Eat, Pray, Love, where I was able to separate who I was from what I did, not only helped me sort of emotionally as a human but also made it easier for me to make really important decisions.

Because I'm like, oh, we're just going to go this way. Because if that's the wrong way, it doesn't mean anything about me as a human. We just went the wrong way, and then we'll go the right way.

[00:18:39] Jason Rudman: Because again, I think if we take it back, you and I, I can't say this enough, our shared and our individual experiences at American Express, I think, defined us professionally. And we both, I think, reach back into that kernel of goodness frequently to figure out what to do.

But I do think that when you're growing your career, that overlap between who you are is what you do, can become all-encompassing, to your point, where you actually do lose yourself in who you work for and what you do every day, not what brings you joy. And it's just, it's fascinating.

[00:19:16] Rosa Sabater: And I do think ultimately it makes you a less productive worker.

[00:19:19] Jason Rudman: I think that's right. Yeah.

[00:19:20] Rosa Sabater: Because decisions become fraught. It's not about whether the credit card plastic should be green or red. Never choose red. But it's not at that color, it's all about, if I pick the wrong color, it means I am a bad executive and therefore not a worthy person. I'm like, whoa, that's just getting too, too crazy.

[00:19:41] Jason Rudman: Right. So, Martellus, the collective 40-strong group of women, expertly skilled. So,  on the corporate side or on the customer side, how does the customer experience somebody in the Martellus network? How does the relationship between the Martellus expert and the company or the outfit that they're doing the work, how does that come about? How does that work?

[00:20:08] Rosa Sabater: So, people come to us for two kinds of engagements. The first kind of engagement is ‘I have a discrete problem that I need to be solved, and I think that your team, either as an individual or often a group of people, have expertise to help get me over the hump.’

So, for example, this is a very tactical example. A card provider signed on a new partner and wanted to figure out what is the best way to market through all those new partner channels. And there are 17 Martellus experts who can tell them in 8 to 10 weeks, okay, use these channels.

So, we put a team of two people on there - a performance marketing person and a brand person together. Eight to 10 weeks, come up with a marketing plan that was actually going to drive results in the market. So that's a very discreet engagement. So I would say if you have something discreet like that, where you're like, I don't fully have that expertise in-house, that's one place people engage us.

The second place people engage us is what I call staffing augmentation or staffing support. So if I have an open job, an open CMO, and while I look for the right person, I want somebody to help me out on an interim basis, we do that. If I have a new leader, we've been brought in to work side-by-side with the new leader so that they can develop their 90-day marketing plan. If people go on maternity leave.

So, it is not a discreet project per se, although we always strive to, even if you engage us for one of these staffing augmentation sorts of engagements, being very clear on deliverables is important, but it's not unique. It is an ongoing staffing need that we are helping fill in the near term.

So those are the two ways people engage us, and people all the time ask why Martellus versus, and I tell them all the time, if you want to know what the payments industry is going to look like in 2030, you should go hire McKinsey because I got no idea. You want to hire someone who is extremely expert at something because they've done it before in a large corporation, then you come to me. We are practical business people. That's how I distinguish it. Does that make sense?

[00:22:13] Jason Rudman: It does. It does. And by definition, right, the word that came into my, as I was listening to you do it, it's by definition, agile, right? There's a level of flexibility and agility that I think Martellus provides, which meets the moment, whether that be the staffing augmentation that could be 90 days into 180 days, or whether it's a discrete 8 to 10 week…it's almost like design thinking on steroids, right? I've got an issue, I've got an 8 to, it's a sprint, I need you to prototype some things, and we're going to test some things, and we're going to measure the heck out of it.

[00:22:44] Rosa Sabater: And you don't have to pay a lot of tuition, so, in the sense that we bring people who've done it before, who have the expertise, so you don't have to pay to bring us up to speed, right?

So we're all about immediate return and knowledge transfer. I think the other thing that every single woman in Martellus likes to do is work side-by-side with wherever the client is so that by the end of the engagement, they know more than they did when we started. So, we don't go off and write decks. I'm done with the decks!

[00:23:09] Jason Rudman: Knowledge transfer, right? Good old-fashioned knowledge transfer.

So started the collective leaving Amex. Is there anything in your mind that the pandemic has taught us? Because again, where we started is, and I mean this really sincerely, you were ahead of your time in terms of, you know, where we are from a remote, hybrid changing nature of work.

You started by listening. That's where the idea started. People had a yearning, these women had a yearning over a decade ago to work differently, to accomplish, as you and I talked about in our previous conversation, balance is an accordion, right? And so, as you said, you work seven days a week. Some other people are like, I want to work Monday through Thursday. I want to finish at three o'clock on a Thursday because I want a long weekend.

I've got to believe that there are lessons in the pandemic though, right? That were perhaps not realized when you started, anything that you share that was like, Oh, that's an aha moment, right? I've been doing this for over a decade. We've been supporting the changing nature of work. And then a pandemic comes along.

[00:24:13] Rosa Sabater: I think the pandemic showed us a couple of things.

Number one, there's more than one way to work and work well. So, I remember at American Express when I was working as service, we wanted to try this experiment about home-based servicing, but we couldn't figure out how to do it. But boy, we really wish we could do it because if we did, we could tap into all these people who couldn't figure out how to do it. Doria Camaraza figured out how to do it. She ran Florida for Amex during the pandemic in like two weeks.

[00:24:43] Jason Rudman: Lots of companies did, by the way. Right? Everybody moved their workforce in a couple of weeks.

[00:24:46] Rosa Sabater: Everybody moved their workforce. So, and I just don't know their names. I happen to know Doria. So, there's more than one way to work and work well. So, I think if you didn't know that before and you, you should know that now.

I think the other thing. And this is really interesting to me, and it's, I was toying whether I said this or not because it sounds a little against the patriarchy kind of Barbie movie thing, but

[00:25:10] Jason Rudman: We'll go there, though, Rosa. Let's go there.

[00:25:12] Rosa Sabater: We're going there. The way we work today is relatively new, right? So, corporations didn't start until sort of the 1900s. I mean, in the scheme of human life, they're relatively new. And the rules were made by men for men. When the rules were made, the only people were, and I'm not implying any negative intent, the fact is that when the rules were made, the only people working were men, and they made the rules for other men, right?

And I used to term men loosely, you know, so not people who were responsible for taking care of their elders or taking care of kids or, you know, who had responsibilities outside the workplace. So, when I first started working in the corporate environment, people would say, well, if they told me the rules, I would know what to do.

And what I've slowly come to realize is the rules were not made for people like me. So even if I know the rules, it's not going to work for me. So that's the second thing that I think sort of the pandemic brought home to me.

My hope is that we use this inflection point to create more inclusion in our work styles. It happening in some companies. And I see a wholesale industry sticking their heads in the, in the sand.

[00:26:18] Jason Rudman: A company not to be named, right, has effectively abolished half-day Fridays, right? So, we talked about this before, because I think you and I were riffing.

Look, my husband and I are raising two kids. It's actually not set up for me either. We're of an age where before it was kids, and now it's, you know, we had kids later in life, right? So 10- and 7-year-old and aging parents. So, the primary caregiver model has evolved.

And I think what we're both saying is that the general nature of work within corporations has not evolved to create that level of flexibility and balance. That enables people to do great work but also work in a way that works for them as much as it does the corporation.

[00:27:05] Rosa Sabater: And it hasn't evolved even though the workforce has evolved. You and I are not the traditional workers of the 1950s, right?

[00:27:14] Jason Rudman: We are not.

[00:27:15] Rosa Sabater: I think we're going to have to drag some companies with us, and that leads me to my third big learning, which is, I think we all have much more agency than we think to create work that works for us.

Now, there are practicalities, as I say that. I want to pay for my children's education. That's something I want to do. So, I don't want to be naive about. The real practical needs people have. That being said, I think we take ourselves out of the driver's seat way too much. During the pandemic, we all kind of cobbled together what we could, and we're like, wait, I can cobble this, now, it was really hard.

[00:27:54] Jason Rudman: But great things came out of that though, right? Yes, really hard. But when you're confronted with a complex issue, it's actually amazing the solutions that you come up with, right?

I think of what you were saying. Daria is an example of many organizations saying we cannot deal with remote service and when we're forced to deal with remote service, we actually figure out how to do it and we create a different experience for the front-line employees of actually doing it that on some level is much more beneficial to them in an environment where childcare wasn't available when places were locked down.

So, the household, I'll be a little trite here, right? Men had to pull their finger out, And do probably more generally of looking after the kids than they probably were doing before.

[00:28:40] Rosa Sabater: And as well as looking after the kids, I say the non-primary household runners. My husband was dying my hair. He has never done that. Never. He hasn't done it since, but you know,

[00:28:50] Jason Rudman: Is that because you won't let him? Or, now because you have more time, I don't know where to go with that.

[00:28:55] Rosa Sabater: I think Alexis is a more expert.

[00:28:57] Jason Rudman: I like it. He's like, I know my swim lanes.

[00:29:01] Rosa Sabater: Yeah, the first time, he did a good job; the second time, the hair came out kind of purple, which didn't really matter as we weren't seeing anybody anyway.

But to your point, I think we all had to take on roles that we didn't traditionally take on, which forced us to sort of think about, hmm, this can be done differently. My hope is that we, many, more of us learn from it than try to just go back to the way things were exactly before.

[00:29:24] Jason Rudman: In talking with people, I do think that More Elephant moment, I mean, there's a lot of listening going on as we were dealing with a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, that to your point, I think, has shaped people differently.

And then, at the same time, I do think that there's a backsliding on the commitments. I mean, you and I could probably go down a list of experiences we have with people in our network, whereby, you know, three days a week is now four days a week. I think, when women leaders leave, the loss is multiplied.  The data would tell us that women are now accelerating their leaving the workforce, which causes me to think, that for all of the great intent that you and I described, that we've learned some things and we want to practice something differently, we're falling back on old habits and I think in some regard going backward.

[00:30:16] Rosa Sabater: I think there's a little bit of a backlash, honestly.

The two ‘number one things’ that people can do to put themselves in the driver's seat of their career. Number one is what I tell people, chase your own carrot. You're chasing a carrot down some sort of track. That's fine. Just make sure it's your own carrot. It's not the carrot that your society, your company, your husband, your dad. Number one, chase your own carrot.

The second thing is get yourself some options. You know, I think that you should always be looking at, be curious about how other people work and think about, you know, boy, if I didn't go this way, I could also go that way or that way or that way or that way.

If you know what you're chasing and sort of open, widen the beam. My friend, Jill is a gymnast, and she always says, you got to, in your mind, you got to widen the beam. The balance beam is not this big, it's THIS big, and when you wind the beam, you end up finding the places where you really fit.

[00:31:17] Jason Rudman: You mentioned curiosity a few times, right?

You went on a curiosity journey. I think curiosity is all about listening, and the tagline of More Elephant is listen, learn, live better. I think you've perfectly described what thought leadership for today's world is all about, which is, by listening, you can tap into some great ideas, create them if you're an entrepreneur, make them happen as an intrapreneur, or band together, right, as you've described on the Maretllus collective, to just create joy and create things that you can be incredibly proud of.

[00:31:53] Rosa Sabater: And boy, what an example for our, you know, mine are 26 and 24 years or yours are, what, 10 and eight.

[00:31:58] Jason Rudman: 10 and 7….-teen! To your point, if you would recap for us, you were saying what a great example for our kids.

[00:32:06] Rosa Sabater: Yeah, it was funny because…so Martellus, as you know, it's all about women working how they work best. I also started a networking group called Next.

It's about 500 women. We're all thinking about what is next for them at work, not just a particular job or a particular company, but what they want work to be in the next phase of their life. And I had my daughter open one of the sessions because I was running late from a client meeting. So, I had her run over and start checking people in and all that kind of stuff for one of our events.

And she came over as the event was starting, she's like, “Can I stay?” And there were women talking about different career paths and all sorts of things. And at the end of the session, my daughter comes to me. She's 20 at the time. And she's like, two things, Mom.

Number one, work doesn't have to suck. And number two, this idea that women don't support other women is a myth. I said, okay, my work with you is done!

[00:33:04] Jason Rudman: My work is done, right? You know, as a girl dad, right? And I think, raising a daughter that presents black as well, which I think that's a whole separate conversation around societal pressure, and while society says not only as a woman, you can aspire to do, but as a black woman, what you can aspire to do.

I always say, you know, when anybody asks, I say, you know, how do you approach her? And I say, look, the guardrails are really, really wide. You know, she can be anything she can put her mind to. My only job is to stop her hitting the third rail.

[00:33:37] Rosa Sabater: Correct.

[00:33:37] Jason Rudman: And if she hits the third rail, I dust her off, we have a conversation, and I put her right back out there again and say, bang against those guardrails, they're really, really wide. I love that.

I was going to ask you what you're proud of, but I think I got from your daughter's response, that there's an element of pride there because you, you know, from me to you, you did good! That's just an awesome response from your daughter as to how she feels about her place in the world and that she can accomplish anything and have a group of women that are going to be there for her, to support her in that effort.

[00:34:12] Rosa Sabater: My hope is to model, I had a wonderful, fulfilling career. My hope is to model a way of being for her that will help her have an even healthier and more joyful relationship with work than I did. That is my hope.

[00:34:28] Jason Rudman: And for her to be confident enough to define it on her terms.

[00:34:32] Rosa Sabater: And know that she has agency. She can do it.

[00:34:36] Jason Rudman: I'm uplifted by this conversation, so I'm going invite you back. We'll, we'll figure out what we want to talk about next. Finally, how do people learn more about Rosa Sabater and the Martellus Group?

[00:34:47] Rosa Sabater: We are at www.martellusgroup.com, or just email me at rsabater@martellagroup.com. Always happy to talk about Martellus, but also all very happy to talk to anyone about how they can find joy at work, men or women.

[00:35:04] Jason Rudman: Well, listen, I'm going to call you. We'll have a separate conversation because I feel there's a Martellus group network for, you know, me, right? I think we should have that conversation.

Rosa, thank you. Really, really appreciate the time. This was awesome.

[00:35:18] Rosa Sabater: And know that you are always part of the beehive over here.

[00:35:21] Jason Rudman: Hey, Beehive, whatever. I'm going with Beyonce because... She's flavor du jour right now.  We're going to co-opt the Beehive.

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