Last week at Virtual Coffee Chats with Luis, we had Book Week, where Luis discussed what books were awesome for all those working remotely and managing virtual teams. This week, we are embracing a different kind of week: Debts & Lessons!
Debts & Lessons week is inspired by Marcus Aurelius’ chapters of his book Meditation, highlighting why gratitude is so important. And nowadays, we tend to forget to thank people who have helped us in one way or another, especially in a remote workspace.
Luis’s first shoutout goes to Sabina Nawaz, a former guest of the DistantJob podcast. She’s a CEO, keynote speaker, and leadership writer. She’s the Founder and CEO of Nawaz consulting, and she previously worked as Director of HR for Microsoft.
Stay tuned for the upcoming debts & lessons videos!
Luis:
This week in Virtual Coffee Chat, I’m going to take a page out of a book that’s several thousands of years old and do that in lessons week. This is Virtual Coffee Chats with Luis. Last week, we did book week here at Virtual Coffee Chat, where I talked about a book per day, about books that I think are awesome for anyone doing remote work. That brought me to one of my favorite books. What brought me to think about one of my favorite books that’s not about remote work, but it’s Marcus Aurelius’s Meditation.
Book one, the way the book starts is what some translators refer to book one. The other one’s referred to as Debts and Lessons, where Marcus Aurelius thanks everyone who had a hand in making him the man that he is. I thought that not too many people work on gratitude these days and not specially in the remote work space. I wanted to give it a try, so this week in Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis, you’re going to have the Debts and Lessons week. What I’m going to do this week is once per day, I’m going to choose a person whose work has influenced greatly, my thinking and my strategy as a remote manager, as a remote leader. I’m going to hopefully shine a bit of my small spotlight on to them.
Without further ado, who am I thanking first? The person that I’m thanking today is Sabina Nawaz. Sabina Nawaz was a podcast guest of mine. She’s the head at Nawaz Consulting where she is a CEO coach, a keynote speaker and a leadership writer. She works one-on-one with executives, coaching them in areas of leadership, organizational systems, and career planning. Previously, she was the senior director of human resources at Microsoft.
This lady… Well, first of all, I recommend that you search right here on YouTube for Sabina Nawaz Ted because she gave an incredible Ted Talk. This lady has an incredible onstage, on screen even presence, but the thing that Sabina has that influenced me the most is that she really, really cares. She takes time. She talked with me once, once, and then we’ve exchanged messages, et cetera, but face-to-face, we’ve talked once and yet she is the person who has introduced me to more podcasts guests for my podcast ever. She just decided that she wanted to help out and she did. She’s probably 20 times busier than I am, but she still found the time when I was starting out to lend a hand and she was incredibly helpful.
Although, I had a lot of good takeaways from my conversation with her, you can look for Sabina Nawaz in the DistantJob podcast for that hour long conversation. That was what really got to me, that she doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk. She is truly the embodiment of a servant leader. I have to say she’s also a really good writer. She has a weekly newsletter that I fully recommend that you subscribe to because usually when I get stuff in my inbox, I automatically press archive and I feel bad about ever giving my email to people because I never read their stuff. With Sabina, I always read her stuff. It really is amazing the quality of the right thing that she puts out. I really recommend you give her a follow, grab a cup of coffee and look her up on LinkedIn. That’s where I follow her. I’m sure she has other social channels. I’ll ask my team to put them in the show notes, but where I follow her is on LinkedIn. She always has great quality content. She is an absolute gem of a person.
Sabina, thank you so much for the insights you’ve given me, for the help you’ve given me, and for all the help you’re giving people doing remote leadership over the years. Thank you. Thank you as well for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, please press subscribe, like, share. If you’re hungry for more interesting things about remote work, go to thinkremote.com Subscribe to the newsletter there. It’s actually quite good as well. I’m proud of the newsletter and you can get some goodies if you subscribe during our launch month. Go ahead, try that and I’ll have more people to thank and to recommend over this week. This is debts and lessons week, so tune in again tomorrow and find out who am I going to talk about?
