Theresa Slater’s new book is a mixture of business and leadership advice, painfully candid memoir, and advice guide for success against all odds. And I mean, all odds. It’s gusty to open a book like The Language of Success with an admission so brutal. Yet in a quietly brilliant way, it only adds to Slater’s reliability as a guide through entrepreneurship. After all, if she could make it from virtually nothing to a successful businesswoman, anything is possible. “I became pregnant as a result of a rape at 15,” she writes matter-of-factly, at the beginning. “…I never told my parents about the rape. They assumed it was from a friendship with a 17-year-old boy I had just started seeing, a senior at my high school. Marriage to him was the answer to the embarrassment of my condition… All these things affected how I looked at myself and how I looked at the world.
While my peers were attending college and going to homecoming parties, I was maneuvering crisis after crisis. Always in survival mode and with zero sense of self or self-confidence. I felt less than, dumber than, a poor uneducated townie. My parents were not poor or uneducated. People loved and respected them. I had not come from the wrong side of the tracks. Circumstances had dictated where I was in life. Fortunately, outside of being in survival mode, I was constantly in self-improvement mode. How I pulled out of this existence is another story, but this part needs to be told so that anyone reading the following business advice tidbits understands how I looked at things and how I got from A to Z.”
As Slater demonstrates throughout the text, the personal and the professional bleed together. They form a crux from which growth on a personal and professional level can expand. Most of all, mastering one’s self and abilities amidst considerable trial and tribulation can lead to an empowerment other people dream about.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Language-Success-Interpreters-Entrepreneurial-Journey/dp/1637426208
Hardship and brutality are things I wouldn’t wish on anyone, yet sometimes the most remarkable people come from the worst circumstances. Slater’s ability to own her past as part of her present is what makes her commendable all by itself, but her ability to take those kinds of things and explain them as part of something bigger, a bigger trajectory leading to her being an authority on business and leadership advice, is part of the American Dream. The idea anyone, anywhere, seizing the moment and utilizing opportunity, has a shot to become something more.
“For women, this journey can take on many unique challenges,” Slater writes. “We will need family, friends, and professionals to come beside us. We will need to constantly educate ourselves, not only on leadership but on our industry, technology, the stock market, world affairs, and government policies, all of which affect us growing our businesses… There is no one book or MBA degree to teach you this. As you’ll read in this book, there were so many situations no one could have ever prepared me for. From walking in on someone supergluing their dentures to having one of my managers shoo mice out of the way so they wouldn’t interrupt a contract negotiation.
You can’t make this stuff up, but it is the real life of a business owner. For me, it was learning how to survive on my own at 15 and trying to calculate how to get enough food for the week, to having successes I could never have dreamed of. I knew what it was like to struggle. I honestly wasn’t prepared to handle successes. However, somehow out of all that survival via street smarts, decades later, came true success.”
Garth Thomas