Why being passionate is my greatest strength

I've always considered myself lucky in my career (even though I’ve been made redundant twice, nearly 3 times in fact) and feel that every job I’ve had has led me right to where I’m meant to be.

When I was at college I studied quite a mixed bag of courses - here goes; Media Studies, Philosophy, Dance and Accounting. Yes. You read that correctly. I failed Philosophy so I knew the philosopher route was out. Accounting and numbers (at the time!) wasn’t my strong point so I was relying on my creative talent in Dance and Media Studies. While they made me happy and soothed my creative soul, I couldn’t quite see my future. So, I decided to do a course in Business. When asked why I took this course all I could explain was that I wanted to be a business women. In fact, this is what I repeated to Gemma from The Contemporary PA when we first got talking. I envisaged myself as a business women, suited and booted, leading a team and being well known for what I did. I had no idea what that actually looked like going in to a career but I have stuck by this vision most of my life.

Jenny from the block

Moving forward a few years my career started to see focus. I basically owe this to Jennifer Lopez - that’s right Jenny from the block is my career guiding mentor. In 2001, The Wedding Planner came out and at that time (still to this day in fact) I loved Rom Coms. It is still one of my favourite films now. When I saw the opening scene where she’s directing a wedding with her head set on, pins hiding in her pants, telling people where to go, people asking her what to do; I could see the business women vision coming to light.

I knew I was going to be an events planner.

Events and/or weddings was something that not only looked cool and fun but played to my logistical nature.

At the time I was studying business management at university and thought it’s time to start thinking about life after uni. While I was at uni I saw an advert in my local newspaper for a little charity that wanted a full time events coordinator. At this point in my life I had a lot of gumption for a twenty something year old and also had a dad that taught me that you’ll never get anything without trying and asking. So I wrote to them saying I was a student, I had no experience in events, I couldn’t work full time but they should give me a job.

To my shock - they did!

(You’ll understand why hopefully by the end of this article!)

A career path was born

While in my final year of uni I concentrated my studies on marketing and actually did my dissertation on marketing within charities. I loved marketing and all the aspects of it. I loved how creative you can be and can still make a really good career out of it. It also dawned on me that no matter what you do in life it pretty much always involves some kind of marketing, especially now with social media so hopefully you would be set for life.

After starting this career path I then went on to work in a hotel, events agency, public sector with the NHS, corporate world with accountants and then coming back round full circle I recently worked for a charity.

So that brings us sort of to today and why I am now a Virtual Assistant. Firstly, it has been a long term goal of mine to own my own business. I even remember at one of my interviews they asked me where I saw myself in 5 years time and I openly said working for myself (turned out I worked for them for 7 years!). Secondly, and probably most vital, I also became a mummy. My husband and I had our first baby, George, last year.

So here I am……………

Why me?

“But after all this chatter Rachel, why should we hire you?”, I hear you say. Well the one thing that I haven’t talked a lot about but I did say earlier I would come back to is how passionate I am. Being passionate is part of my nature and is something I don’t think I will or can ever compromise on. Anything I do, especially work wise I will always be invested in 150%. I will always be passionate about the business I conduct and will be behind your business, ideas, concepts, clients, processes, whatever it is I'll be behind it just like you.