My Emotion is My Data

"Your emotion is your data, trust it, act upon it."

I absolutely love this sentence just after hearing it in a podcast that I listened to early this morning.  

 
It is coming to the end of the summer, and I had enough time to listen to myself and notice the trends within myself. Especially, in the evenings when my son went to bed, it was “me time” which means the escape time to read, write and charge the soul before the winter. I know “winter is coming” or as recently called by Jerome Powell, “pain is coming” so that I did my best to understand my pain points and to serve for it. 

This content is created in a coffee-shop

 
What does Volkan feel and want? 
 
Let’s start with the fact that it might be so personal. Everybody is unique with their own dreams, desires, pains, problems, so on and so forth. As a father responsible for his family, the economic crisis in Turkey is a heavy load that I lift. I need to make financial plans, calculate their potential risks and benefits to create passive income against the increasing impacts of inflation. This can be sometimes so tiring, but it is a fact that I feel I need to deal with. Thanks God, I am working for a multinational company (Philip Morris International) but the life in Turkey is relatively hard for everyone. In order to increase my level of financial literacy, I spent some quality time reading and watching videos to learn from others’ learnings. Now I have new plans to fight against inflation but when you are responsible for not only yourself but the whole family you need to bear in mind this responsibility for every penny that you risk.  
 
Secondly, I found much more time to follow up how my son develops, what makes him motivated, what makes him unsatisfied and even tired throughout this summer. Working remotely enables me to work from away and this opens the summer houses of our families to stay. Within office hours spent at family houses, my son spends time on robotic coding, mainly learned (or we can say increased his level of proficiency in) robotic programming languages like Scratch, Thinkercad. He attended online courses, watched YouTube videos, and brought some products into life. As his parents, the time he spent on such activities is highly motivating for us. As a supporter of digitalization in my business life, seeing him spending time on such activities when he is just 8 years old makes me so “delighted”. On the other hand, seeing his interest and abilities makes me feel alarmed that I need to take further steps to support him towards this area. As his parents, we should provide the resources that he needs. Do I clearly know about it? I have some estimates, but I am not sure about them. Finding a low-budget Udemy course for Scratch or a free learning program by municipalities are what we have done so far but maybe he needs more in the upcoming period because the world is changing so quickly, and more professional support may be needed. I am not a hundred percent sure, but this also has financial costs like private school support. So far, I have heard that private schools have such coding classes, but government schools do not. And as you may guess, the prices of these private schools skyrocketed, and I don’t prefer it in his early ages but later may be too late for him. Spending the budget in these early years may open some new doors but what about the opportunity cost for future investments on him? 
 
The last feeling is about the next step in my career. Taking further steps in my career path always motivates me. Two years ago, I got the title: Finance Manager and working in Duty Free affiliate which was highly impacted by pandemic made me learn a lot. I am working with great people, and I love the people and company. On top of this, dreams never end. I keep on dreaming: hopefully, one day I will work in a foreign country with much more responsibility than today. In order to reach this objective, I am investing in myself. One of these investments is English conversation lessons in Rosetta Stone. In each one-to-one class, as an icebreaker, lecturer asks me the reason for attending the class and I describe my motivation towards working in a foreign country. I tell about the economic problems in Turkey and education opportunities for my son. I repeat this every lecture (Yes, I noticed that I repeated it once again) and working for it. On the other hand, I see that the number of international assignments decrease as remote work and digitalization enables us to do our responsibilities all around the world but who knows, maybe one day… The critical thing is being ready for that opportunity if it comes one day. 
 
I described my three major emotions above and how they make me think and act. At least, I had the chance to notice them, think about them and act about them. Let’s see what time will bring… Stay tuned for the updates and always follow up your feelings because they are your data. 

I feel good if I am writing

Books (especially e-books) are my resources

Feedback in a Minibus

Recently, I witnessed an exemplary constructive feedback in the Bostancı-Kadıköy minibus. I was sitting next to the driver in the minibus, and as it was approaching the final stop, a passenger who was about to get off approached the captain in a low voice and said, "Butts and paper have been thrown in the back seats, have them cleaned at some appropriate time, okay?" he said and got off, wishing him a good day. It was a very good example of timely, constructive feedback.

Getting a Coaching on “Self-Doubt in Career” from Melissa Whiting

Recently I saw Melissa Whiting’s post in Linkedin, she was stating that there was a limited number of coaching places available to work with her. This coaching opportunity was for those who feel self-doubt is holding them back in their career, creativity, life or relationships. Melissa Whiting worked in Philip Morris International for more than 20 years and she was Vice President, Inclusion & Diversity (from Jan 2017 to Oct 2021) in her last assignment. Now she is a leadership, career and life coach, mentor, and gender equity & inclusion consultant. Upon seeing her post about coaching, I sent her a direct message and asked her availability. I was lucky and she accepted me.

This post by Melissa Whiting started the fire

Why did I ask for Coaching?

As Melissa mentioned in her post, the target group for this coaching offer was people who think that self-doubt is holding them back in their career. Am I one of those people? Maybe not a hundred percent but somehow yes. This is something related with my ambition towards a global role with wider responsibility outside of my country Turkey. Until now, I had the chance to work in global companies: PwC, General Motors and Philip Morris. When I was making a move to Philip Morris in 2013, I was expecting to have an international job opportunity, short term assignment (STA) or long term assignment (LTA). Unfortunately things did not go in line with my expectations since my experience was mainly based on statutory tax legislation in Turkey. Then I worked hard to learn more about transfer pricing, independent audit and financial reporting standards which will make me a candidate for positions in HQ which is located in Switzerland. I had dreams that my son would grow in a foreign company, learn foreign language (hopefully English) in childhood and we would have social network in which we could experience new cultures. While I was focused on my growth and making myself ready for the opportunities, the company’s strategy changed and the number of STA/LTA openings decreased. Despite this fall, there were still some opportunities and they were open in internal job postings site.

I know the direction I want to go but I can't go to that direction

I set up a reminder in 2016 and this was reminding me to check the job postings every Friday at 9:00 am. At first, I was only applying to Finance roles. Since there was no positive turn back to my applications, I enlarged the criteria while making applications, this time I did not limit myself with only Finance but also External Affairs and Global Communications roles in Europe. I stated my interest in yearly performance forms and meetings, but I even could not have an interview opportunity.

During this period, I got grades, moved to a different city and started to work with great people. I am on my own individual career journey, I am happy with what I have got but my interest in a global role in a foreign country is always a challenge for me that I want to experience. I am happy in my company PMI, and I find a meaning in it during the transformation journey of my company towards unsmoking the world. On the other hand, as I could not receive a call for an interview in the jobs I applied, this created a self doubt in my career. I was not receiving proper feedback after my applications, there was only generic mails so I invested more in myself. This situation led me to life-long-learning mentality. I spent more time for learning, receiving certifications, completing training programs. In order to increase my visibility, I shared more in social media, created blogs, youtube channel to show my progress, shared them in intranet site of my company but it did not work out. I changed the format of my CV, even got a training on CV update, added keywords, created job specific intention letters. Unfortunately, result did not change. Then I found myself caught up in comparison and judgment.  I have developed beliefs which were developed over time through the combination of my experiences, messages from others and societal and cultural conditioning. I even thought that being a non-EU citizen is a barrier for me (like additional workload to get work permit, etc.) which prevents me to reach the opportunities abroad. All these made me lose my confidence in myself. This was my main driver while I was asking Melissa for coaching. 

I believe in PMI's smoke-free future vision and I work towards it

What Melissa Made me to Discover

On the day of our coaching session, I was extremely excited. As I am not used to one-to-one meetings with VPs, the meeting made me feel “excitement”. I shared this feeling with Melissa in the opening of the call and she told that she was no more a VP to make me calm. I told her about my ambition, my efforts towards reaching my ambition and how it made me feel after all these applications. I called my current mood as “self-doubt in career”. This was not a doubt in my current role but a doubt in the way towards my dream job. I know that coaching starts with a goal and my goal was having confidence in myself within my career journey so that I can have a global role in a foreign country.

Melissa asked me some key questions to gain clarity about my goal. Within the coaching session and after that session, I am thinking about my answers to these questions. The main questions are:

• Why is this goal important for me?
• What can I control for achieving my goal?
• How can I still grow without thinking about my goal?

These are all great questions that made me think deep. During the coaching session, the most powerful recommendation was accepting that I can’t control what the company decides. I recently read from an article in Forbes stating that “We often want to control our environment. Or we may want control over the outcome of every situation. But the more you try to control everything around you, the more anxious you’ll feel.“ (2 Psychological Tricks That Will Help You Stop Worrying About Things You Can’t Control (forbes.com)) The main message of that article was “when you stop worrying about things you can’t control, you’ll have more time and energy to devote to the things you do have control over. And this can be key to reaching your greatest potential.” Now this makes much more sense and I concentrate more on my growth mindset, preparing to be fit when the opportunity comes, and keep looking forward the best opportunities to make my dream come true.

What is Next?

I have a son and I work hard to provide him the best options within my standards. Working abroad will not only be a challenge for me to develop my skills but also open the way for my son’s foreign language learning and become a world citizen. I will go on imagining what will be different in my life when I am assigned to my dream job.

I asked Melissa about her experiences when she was in roles outside of her own country. She told me that these assignments in abroad made her understand differences, see diversity, be humble and curious, listen and learn from other people and gain satisfaction from various experiences. In short, these are also what I look for, therefore hearing her experiences once again let me understand that my expectations are in line with her real time experiences.

Being connected to our dreams is one of the best ways we have to find a connection to our deeper, wiser selves. Therefore, I write in bold that I have an ambition to work abroad for my company PMI with my family, overcome the challenges with a growth mindset, be a life long learner in this journey and enjoy the career path with my family. This time, I am not only telling my dream to my manager or writing it down to my performance form but stating it to the whole world who will somehow read this content.

Thank to Melissa for providing me this coaching opportunity, she made me ask the right questions, think about the answers and re-invent my motivation towards my ambition.

An Awesome Coaching Session - Thanks to Melissa

PMI Sustainability Report and Turkey

Philip Morris International Inc. joined the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) in 2015. By doing so PMI committed to embed its Ten Principles into the strategy, culture and daily work of the company, and I am pleased to work for this company which provides such a commitment. On September 12, PMI published its sustainability report, communicating its progress in respect to the United Nations Global Compact Principles.

Besides, as a Turkish citizen, it is nice to hear an example case from Turkey in terms of strengthening our sustainability fundamentals in this report.

An example of “farm economics, mechanization and innovation” comes from Turkey. In Turkey’s oriental tobacco growing, labor is not only the main cost, but it is also the bottleneck limiting the volume that each farmer can produce, due to the labor intensive preparation of the small Oriental leaves for curing. The “vento” machine technology allows farmers to harvest Oriental tobacco leaves in bulk by enabling the curing preparation in a cotton net tube instead of the traditional practices whereby tobacco leaves need to be carefully aligned during harvesting so they can be individually sown on a string for curing.

These machines enable the farmer to make an estimated labor saving of 25 labor days/ha and allows farmers to harvest larger volumes, thereby significantly increasing income. With PMI’s technical and financial support, around 1,700 farmers, representing 27% of PMI’s volume sourced in Turkey, were using “vento” machines by the end of 2016. In 2017, we expect to source over 40% of our tobacco in Turkey to be cured using this technology.

As a PM Turkey employee, I proudly share the full report:

https://www.pmi.com/resources/docs/default-source/pmi-sustainability/ungc_report_2016_.pdf