Spotlight: Lisa Nelson

Lisa Nelson has a beautiful laugh. It’s one of the first things I noticed about her upon our meeting seven years ago and I’m reminded of that now as I hear it over the phone this morning. Like everyone else, we are not able to be in each other’s physical presence, but she has a positive energy that you can feel, even through the phone. This might be due to the fact that she is an energy healer. And it might be that she became an energy healer because of this ability. Either way, I settle into my home office chair, pushing the record button for our interview and am grateful to have this opportunity to talk with such an inspirational woman.

Our before-mentioned meeting happened during a job interview. It was a very unique interview, for an interesting position, that turned into a lasting mutual respect and friendship. The two of us were at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan. I was the interviewee and she was the operations manager of a transcription company. We were joined by the only one of us who was a member of the private club, an older gentleman who owned the transcription business. We were seated in plush leather chairs, in one of the club’s many opulent mahogany and red damask rooms. It appeared as if our odd group was simply having a nice little evening get together, instead of conducting a job interview. And this was probably due to the fact that the interviewer didn’t usually make it into the City, and since he had to for this, why not enjoy it?

I had just started a transcription business, and like many businesses, the income wasn’t initially steady. So I decided to work nights for someone else as I sloughed through the extensive, largely unpaid work, that I needed to do to start up. The evening job was a position as a transcriptionist for a very well known hedge fund there in New York City. Discretion was the most important part of the job, and therefore of course they needed to meet me in person and suss out if I was trustworthy. Apparently, I was deemed to be so, because I was hired that evening. Largely, I am sure, because I stuck with a seltzer rather than the cocktail that was offered me.

I only needed the position for a few months to get on my feet, and two years later I was running my own transcription company when Lisa and I came together again. She had gone back to freelancing as a transcriber, and she brought a fascinating documentary project to me and my business. During the ensuing five years she became a contractor for my company, a huge support system and a close friend. As I came to know more about her I learned, not at all to my surprise, that prior to running the day to day operations of a transcription company, she had worked for a global investment banking firm on Wall Street. What did surprise me is she also had worked in music production for years before that, interacting with such legends such as George Clinton and the groups, Kool and the Gang and Baha Men. Her life has been multi faceted, and I soon found out that beyond being an incredibly talented violinist and writer, she is the proud mother to two beautiful, successful women.

This is the accomplishment that I became most interested in, as I found out that she had raised them completely on her own since they were aged one and five. As she was, for many of those years, the sole provider for her daughters, she had to work long hours, and consequently, had to hire a nanny to watch her girls. She quickly noticed what so many working mothers do; a significant portion of her salary was going to cover the cost of childcare, transportation to her job, lunches and her work wardrobe. To top it off, she didn’t have the joys of seeing many of her daughters first moments, and her daughters barely recognized her. She knew she had to change something, and so, she made a very unconventional choice at the time, and became an early adopter of remote working. One of her many skills was transcription, and she set up a home office working around her children’s school and sport schedules. This meant that she often worked late into the night and was up before dawn.

I learned that happiness is job one, if you don’t take care of yourself, it doesn’t work. So I made up adventures for myself and my daughters to explore the city, and I was lucky to enjoy the time with them.

Her daughters are now grown women, Ruby, 26, is currently in the MD/PhD Neuroscience program at Carnegie Mellon and her daughter Selah is only 22 and just graduated with her bachelors and masters degrees from Northwestern University. Getting them to this point certainly wasn’t easy, and as many single mothers experience, it was often isolating and at the expense of not only a life of her own, but her health. She is now a huge proponent of self care, noting that truly the best thing you can do for your children, as a mother, is to take care of yourself. But, if she had to do it all over again, she would. She was able to support herself and her children, even if the going was incredibly tough at times. And she was there for the good and the bad with her daughters, becoming the home that many of the school kids went to in the afternoons, baking cookies and playing video games while Lisa worked. But she also learned, the hard way, that no man is an island. Her advice to single mothers today would be to ensure that they take advantage of their network. Create a support system and utilize it. Her biggest piece of advice? Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

She knows that she and her daughters wouldn’t be where they are today if it wasn’t for the multiple women that she leaned on over the years for advice, comfort and mutual commiseration. She didn’t always have that level of support, and therefore knows the difference. She also knows that working remotely allowed her to spend more time with her daughters than she ever would have otherwise; even if it wasn’t always easy. She was the inspiration for the creation of Enable Mothers and she will be working with us as the Head of Operations. Her goal in working with Enable Mothers is to provide single mothers a network of support, allowing them to enjoy the beauty of their children’s childhoods, while maintaining the dignity of supporting themselves.

And she reminds me as we get off the phone, another peal of silvery laughter ringing in my ears, that the most important thing for all of us to do is to find the joy in our situations, and to keep laughing.