Have you ever felt invisible in your workplace?

I just shared a video with my thoughts on how to deal with people who discriminate against you and how to still be much more successful than all of them. I recommend watching the video. I think in this particular case, you will get more out of a video (vs. from reading). Because this message from me is not just about words. Yet I know some people strictly prefer to read, so I have a written version for you below.

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I remember when I was working for a large management consulting firm, and it was very hard for me to get that opportunity and to move from being in the back office to being a consultant. And I remember being in a boardroom with many people and a senior lady, a few levels above me, looked at me and said to everyone around the boardroom table…

“I do not even listen to someone if they speak with an accent.”

At the time, I just recently immigrated for the first time, and I still struggled with English. Despite working very hard at it, my accent was very strong. I remember thinking, “This lady will be involved in my performance evaluations. She will be deciding if I deserve to be promoted. She will be deciding if I deserve to be on an important assignment. And this person, she was not even recognizing my presence. She was not even recognizing that I am a human being, just because I have an accent.”

And this is just one example.

Fortunately, some forms of discrimination are no longer as acceptable in our society, at least in United States, but discrimination based on someone’s accent is still widely acceptable.

The point is that, I didn’t let it stop me. I remember I was thinking, “Ok. I just really need to avoid working with this person. Thank you for showing me who you are so I can know that I should stay as far away from you as possible.”

And the good thing about consulting is that you can choose who you work with, so I ended up working with other people, on purpose staying away from her as far as I possibly could.

And I was promoted three times in two years. And then I immigrated and did my MBA, and I had a very successful corporate career. Shortly after that, I worked at a major bank, top 3 in Canada, managing a portfolio worth over a billion US dollars, then went back into consulting before deciding to build my company full-time.

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The thing is that you can be very successful. You can be incredibly successful in corporate life and in building your own business while having all kinds of things that people discriminate against.

When people look at me, there are multiple reasons why they discriminate against me. And I feel that all the time.

I have to work a few times as hard to get half as much.

But it makes you really strong.

And at some point, you become such a skilled professional that it’s very hard for anyone to ignore you anymore because you create something for the industry, at the industry level, that is very worthwhile, very valuable. Like, for example, as you know, our books are used as prescribed books at major universities.

Our programs are used by university professors, consulting partners from major firms and executives from major organizations like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, major banks around the world. Our podcast, Strategy Skills, is a top 5-10 career podcast in many countries around the world.

We have top thinkers like Harvard professors, executives from major tech companies, senior partners at major consulting firms, and thought leaders like Gary Hamel reaching out to us requesting to come as guests on the show.

It’s very hard to keep someone who is great down.

So, what you need to do is focus on getting results. Focus on mastery. Developing your skills. Being an incredible business professional (or whatever your area of expertise is). And when you walk into the room, you bring in all this knowledge and business experience. And you are able to see things that other people cannot see. You are able to find solutions for clients that other people cannot find. You are able to create works that other people cannot create.

And at some point, no one can ignore you anymore. 

In large organizations, great individuals rise to the top. Focus on getting results, mastering your skills, and becoming an outstanding business professional. When you walk into a room, you bring all your knowledge and experience with you. You will find solutions others cannot create, work others cannot replicate, and eventually, no one can ignore you.

“First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

That famous quote from Mahatma Gandhi.

So, you just need to focus on being an outstanding business professional, being an outstanding business owner, being an outstanding services and products provider for your clients. And, at some point, people will not be able to ignore you anymore.

They may start laughing at you, but then they will stop. At some point, they may even try to fight you, but then they will realize they cannot fight you.

And then you will win. You will get there.

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The thing is, along the way, people will discriminate against you. People will think badly of you. They will say bad things to your face. I remember being in meetings, and people would completely ignore me. It was as if I did not exist, as if I, as a human being, was completely worthless to them, just because of something I could not control, such as being female or speaking with an accent.

You will face those situations as well because we live in a world where there is a lot of workplace discrimination and a lot of unfair treatment. But that doesn’t mean these people can determine your worth.

Your worth is not determined by someone else’s ability to appreciate it.

So, never let anyone determine your worth. Only you can decide your worth.

You can decide today, this evening (or morning if it is morning for you), that even if you weren’t perfect in the past and maybe made some mistakes or are not as successful as you wanted to be up to this point, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to be an outstanding person, a master at what you do, or one of the best in the world.

You can start today.

And everyone reading (or watching) this is already an outstanding person, because otherwise, why would you be reading this?

You would be doing something that most people are doing. You wouldn’t be reading this.

So I admire you. I am inspired by you. I am honored to have you as part of my community. I am honored to speak to you right now, and “look into your eyes”, and share with you some of the experiences I went through because I think they could be helpful for you.

And I have dedicated my entire life to helping people realize their full potential. I literally remember when I was very sick. I was back in consulting after banking at the time, and I was on two full-time projects at the same time. It was so stressful that sometimes I felt like something would break inside. It would be a situation where I had another meeting in five minutes and had to be prepared but didn’t have time to prepare because I was on two projects at the same time. It’s hard to be a management consultant full-time on one project, but being on two projects full time, at the same time, was really hard. There are just not enough hours in the day, even if you reduce sleep hours to a bare minimum.

I remember sometimes I would feel something breaking inside of me. My nervous system was barely holding on. And at some point, one day, I woke up, and that was it, my body broke down.

I knew at that moment that I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing with my life. What I was supposed to do was focus on my ability to realize my full potential, and also help other people, helping you, to realize your full potential. To be the person you could be, be that person in this lifetime.

So I went full-on and decided that’s what I was going to do. That’s how I started building out StrategyTraining.com, with a team of amazing people and amazing mentors that are working with me as part of it.

We created something so powerful, and I’m so proud of it. If you’ve seen any of our programs, you know they are unlike anything else in the world. They not only give you insights that can stop everyone and make them pay attention to you, but they teach you how to develop those insights yourself. They teach you how to be that person in the room who is the most influential, who is the most insightful, who sees things others cannot, who thinks in different ways, and who can create outsized results for your clients.

I have dedicated my entire life to this now, and I am proud every day to know that this is what I’m doing with my life.

The point is, don’t let anyone stop you.

And if you want to get help, get mentorship, get very powerful training, you can get it on StrategyTraining.com. You can also get it through our Strategy Control Room Advanced, which is our reading library and other programs, such as our mentoring programs we have.

A place I would start would be Insider or Legacy membership on StrategyTraining.com and FIRMSconsulting and Kris Safarova YouTube channels.