Episode 120: Being Coachable: What It Takes To Provide And Receive Constructive Feedback With Melissa Pritchard
We can't know everything about ourselves. Sometimes, it takes others to point out the things we could improve. That is why when constructive feedback, done from the right place, is given, it molds us to become better versions of ourselves. Melissa Pritchard, Senior National Sales Manager for Avalara, has valued this in her life. Growing up as a gymnast, she learned how hard work and constructive feedback helped her as an Olympic hopeful and as a parent raising kids who played college sports and basketball professionally. She has also taken these lessons as a business leader, creating a culture of care for individual and team success. In this episode, Melissa sits down with Amy Vetter to share her journey and the lessons that shaped her as a leader. So follow along in their conversation to not miss out!
Show Notes:
We are honored that Avalara sponsored this episode. Learn more here: https://www.avalara.com/us/en/index.html
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Being Coachable: What It Takes To Provide And Receive Constructive Feedback With Melissa Pritchard
In this episode, I interviewed Melissa Pritchard, the Senior National Sales Manager for Avalara for Accountants channel. She manages a team of North American remote field-based sales executives. Melissa has worked in software for many years, starting her career at Thomson Reuters in legal and regulatory, then transitioning to Avalara a few years ago.
Melissa is recognized for her ability to put together elite-level sales teams. She came to Avalara with a unique set of insights, both professionally and personally. She attended college on a full-ride Division I gymnastics scholarship and has carried that level of athletic achievement, raising her kids as three of her four children all received Division I athletic scholarships for basketball, with two continuing to play professionally, one in the NBA, and one in the G League.
During this interview with Melissa, we've talked about her hard work and how she had to receive constructive feedback growing up as an athlete and what that has taught her as a parent and also in business to create a culture that cares about the individual personally, but also creates team success.
This episode is sponsored by Avalara. Did you know that 52% of accounting practitioners, large and small, still rely on spreadsheets and manual processes for sales tax compliance? Using Avalara's award-winning technology, you can move your accounting practice to the 21st century and start or grow a cash or tax-compliant service line. The Avalara for Accountants Automation platform helps accounting service providers of all sizes grow their service offerings with sales tax prep and filing, transfer pricing, tax research, business license management, and more.
Scale your practice efficiently with the award-winning automation that brings efficiency and accuracy to sales tax compliance while reducing risk for your practice and your client. To learn more, contact Avalara at Accountants@Avalara.com or visit them at Avalara.com/accountants. I hope that you enjoy this episode with Melissa. There are many great stories here for you to take into your leadership and businesses. Please like and share it with people that you know.
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Welcome to this episode. I am with Melissa Pritchard from Avalara. Melissa, thank you for being on. I would love for you to give a brief intro to our audience on who you are and what you do.
First off, thank you so much for having me again. My name's Melissa Pritchard. My position now is Senior National Sales Manager for a company called Avalara. I run the sales division, basically the accounting division. It's a new segment within Avalara, and we focus solely on accounting firms, law firms, and consulting, basically service providers. I was hired to build out a sales team from scratch in 2021.
It's awesome to know about that, and hopefully learn more about it as we get into it. We love getting to know our guests on this show from a personal standpoint before we get too much into business. Can you give us a little background on yourself, where you grew up, and what your parents did?
I was born in San Jose, California. My parents grew up in the Bay Area, and when I was two, we moved to Oregon. I consider myself an Oregonian. I pretty much have lived in Oregon on and off for many years, mainly in Bend and West Linn, Oregon. My parents moved us from the Bay to Oregon because my dad was a builder and my mom was in software and accounting. My dad wanted us to be able not to have the rat race of a big city. He wanted us to be in bed and be kids and explore. He wanted to build. He was mainly a plumbing contractor. We grew up running the woods in Bend, Oregon.
Did he buy a big plot of land? What did that look like moving there?
He didn't necessarily buy it. It was a lot more land than what we had had in California. I was so young. I have been back to our house in California, but everybody had at least an acre. He worked with other builders and would build out subdivisions and things like that. We would go along with him and help set finishes and learn what he did. I have two sisters. There are three girls. We were like the boys that he never had.
Did you like going to do that?
Yes. Since then, we've built houses. My husband and I have generally contracted a few houses and done remodels. I learned that I could do it, and I knew enough about it to do it myself. I appreciate learning that through him.
However, when you were little, you felt like you were being dragged there.
I was. It was always a family-type team environment where we used to cut wood. We'd stack the wood. It was a family unit working when we started new things. We didn't always have a lot of money, so we worked together to do things to make our life.
Did you find that each of you was better at certain things and knew who was going to work on what?
We generally learned that with hard work, you could accomplish anything. I don't know necessarily if we learned who was better at certain things. We learned that my parents worked super hard, and they built a great life for us, and through hard work, we could do the same.
Does your dad already know the builders there? Is that why he was able to build a career there?
No.
How did he make connections?
He started a company, and my mom, with her business-savvy, accounting background, and being able to stretch the dollar, was able to do the administrative side of that. She helped him launch. I don't know how he built it out. He's a very meticulous worker. People trusted him, and he's really honest. One of the biggest things is that he worked extra hours to make sure things were done right. It wasn't necessarily about getting more done to make more money. It was about doing it the right way. I feel that he had a following from that.
Did your mom have an accounting job before she left?
She was in software like those AS/400s. When we moved to Bend, there were two computers. One at the library and one at the mill. My mom got a job at the mill. She would work on the AS/400 and also do data entry and accounting. She took the two skillsets she had worked on when she was in Silicon Valley and tried to put them to use to make a living. That's why she ended up in the lumber products or forestry industry.
There are a couple of things for all of us we need to define. One is the mill. What does that mean?
In Bend, at the time, it was a lumber company. The mill takes the logs and turns them into different forms of wood and then sells their lumber packages to builders or different things. You can see the logs back when we were kids were coming down the river, and then they would go through the whole millwork process. It was a very large mill that's not even in existence now.
For the people reading that are not as old as us and who don't know what an AS/400 is, maybe you explain that a little bit.
The funny thing is I didn't even know what an AS/400 was. It's a big, huge computer system. I went on the weekends when my mom would work over and see these AS/400s. It's a massive computer system that I don't even know what it stands for, but she kept getting jobs as we moved to different places in Oregon, and they would have AS/400s. That background allowed her to continue because she was one of the only people that knew how to work with it.
What was she doing on it? Was she doing accounting?
She transitioned to a transportation director. She retired within the last few years. She was doing programming for load dispatches because they use rail cars and trucking, and you have to get rates to make sure you're in compliance. I feel like she was doing more of the programming side. She used her accounting background to make sure that people were compliant and that she was getting the most money for the company side.
An audit background was helping her. You now have seen what your dad does, and your mom's taking you to work. What were your thoughts when you went to your mom's work?
When I went to work with my mom, what I learned was that I wanted to do something in business, but I didn't know what. I didn't want to do anything in accounting, to be honest. I knew I wanted to run a business or lead a business. I wanted to make a nice living, but I had no idea how that was going to apply.
Also, on how you were going to get there. Did you have any hobbies that you enjoyed when you were young?
I was an elite gymnast. I started gymnastics when I was six. I was diagnosed with ADHD, and they wanted to put me on medications back in the day. My mom didn't want me to be on some medication. She decided to put me in gymnastics and Girl Scouts and track, anything to keep me busy. I excelled at gymnastics. By the time I was eleven, I was an elite gymnast, which is on the Olympic track. I moved away from home when I was eleven.
Where did you move to?
I moved to Eugene, which was about two and a half hours away, because they had several Olympic prospects training at that time there. I lived with a family that we met through our church. I would go home on the weekends. I basically trained. I only went to half day of school, trained 5 to 8 hours a day Monday through Friday, go home on the weekend, come back, and do it all over again.
Did you enjoy it?
I did. I wanted to go to the Olympics. For every young kid, that's their goal. I loved Mary Lou Retton. I wanted to do something like that. The reason my parents supported it so much is because I had written a letter to God saying that this was my path and I was going to get there. They just supported it. I was an elite gymnast until I was sixteen and came down one level to level ten, which is one level off of the Olympic track. I got a full scholarship for gymnastics at the University of Oklahoma. I did college gymnastics for four years. That's what happened with my gymnastics career.
There is a ton to unpack there because that's so unique. The first thing is moving away from your family at eleven. Were you scared?
I was scared, but I didn't know what I didn't know at the time. I was more excited about the opportunity and being around more elite-level athletes. I'd outgrown where I was, and they could see that I was getting stagnant. They knew that the best thing for me was to be able to move. It was hard on me and my parents because I was homesick. One of the things is since sixth grade, I went to a different school every year until I graduated.
There were times when I would move back home because my mom and dad transferred to Portland, which was a bigger city, and we had an Olympic-level coach there. I did move around a lot because there were different things that happened in gymnastics. There are a lot of eating disorders, and there are different types of abuse that happen. We have a very tight-knit family. At the time, I felt like I moved around probably because they could see different things were happening, and they weren't healthy for me. They were probably on the cutting edge of being too outspoken about what is healthy for my emotional development and all of those things. We were seeking to continue the Olympic track but in a healthy way. That was a challenge.
They would switch your school every year so that you weren't at that training camp?
It would depend. Sometimes the coaches leave. I had Russian and Romanian coaches. Sometimes there would be different things that had happened at different gyms that necessarily we didn't think were a good environment for me, so we would seek out a different coach.
Can you give an example of what that would be?
In gymnastics, there are a lot of eating disorders. There's also a lot of sexual abuse that happens. That happened quite a bit, but never to me, thank God. I believe it's because my parents were so involved. When you're on the Olympic track, what people forget is that sometimes you need to protect your kids. It's not about getting to the Olympics. People will look the other way because they don't want to be labeled. I did get labeled that way by my coaches because my parents were like, "This isn't acceptable, and it's not safe." At the time when I was growing up, I resented that, and now as a mother of four kids, I see the importance of it, and I'm thankful for it.
Constructive Feedback: People sometimes forget to protect the kids when they're on the Olympic track. It's not about getting to the Olympics.
They were watching what was going on, speaking up, and taking you in and out of that thing. Were you telling them what was happening, or they would pick it up?
I was telling them because the kids were telling me. I had my own eating disorders and things that they could see happening. I was talking less about different situations and not expanding. They could tell I was getting closed off in some ways. When my teammates would tell me, I did tell them because when you're on that kind of track, you're with your teammates for so many hours. You spend a lot of time together. I typically am an open book when it comes to my sisters and my mom and dad. I pretty much will tell them anything. If I hear certain things happening, I probably will tell them.
It is so important that you were doing that. Even if you didn't like it, you knew it was the right thing still. In the mindfulness world, a lot of times, we go against our gut, but you were going with it even though you didn't like it. There was something in you telling you that, "This is wrong. I need to talk to my parents." At the same time, you're like, "I wish I weren't telling them."
It's a weird position to be in because, at that time, it's your life's work to achieve certain goals. You realize when you're maybe ratting something out, or it can affect the end result.
There are so many things as far as focus, but also, when you're in a sport like that, how it could limit your opportunity if they think you're a problem. Even if you're getting good scores, they could decide not to put you on the team. They can manipulate things because it's not an individual sport. There's someone controlling whether you get in or not.
There's a great show, and I don't know if it's on Netflix, but I think it's Athlete A. It was a gymnast out of Oklahoma. I cried through the whole thing because it was like I was watching all the people I knew. That stuff happened.
That must be hard.
It's so great to see how far we've come. That part is exciting.
You mentioned you had an eating disorder from this. I love that you wrote down this letter to God, which is like a plan. It would be like putting a strategic plan together. At eleven years old, you said, "This is how I'm going to achieve my goal," so you had this in your head. How did that feel every year when you're going back to that vision and letter you had versus what was happening on a daily basis? Did it take the joy away from it? Were you still as determined? What was happening to you?
I love gymnastics, and I like winning and achieving my goals. I believe that that initial letter was a roadmap. I've been through a lot of sports psychology training, and I'm a big goal-setter. For me, it's by having a plan, speaking it into fruition, and putting it out into the world those things that I want to accomplish, but also how to accomplish them and being honest with yourself if you're doing those things. That started when I was eleven. Some of the things that I learned from my parents was I could accomplish anything I wanted to do with hard work.
Constructive Feedback: I could accomplish anything I wanted to do with hard work.
"If you believe that you can do it, we're going to support you to do it. It's going to take a lot of hard work. It's not going to happen overnight." Those are the things that I learned the most from them. I probably translated those beliefs and goal-setting. That's probably why I was as successful because, at the time, I was a taller gymnast. I'm 5'4", and my teammates were 4'11".
I was on the heavier side. I was much more powerful than most of my teammates, but I didn't have the looks they were looking for in the '90s. They wanted a more weighty type of gymnast, and I was more compact and powerful. That's changed now because the skills are harder, and you need to be more powerful. I learned how to use my strengths and mental toughness to overcome or achieve my goals.
I don't mean not to cheat along the way to push these other things aside. There's so much at the time with even performance drugs that were happening in sports, and you're talking about the eating disorders, all those types of things. The fact that your parents helped you to navigate all of that is important, and you were able to speak up. That's a big deal for a girl in middle school to speak up. They gave you that confidence.
Leadership skills, being honest about the situation, and knowing it's going to be okay is something they implemented. All three of us are very strong-willed and confident, and that is from them.
When did you know you weren't going to the Olympics? How did that feel?
When I was sixteen, I knew that. It's hard to make it. I was on that national track and had a great career, but I knew I wasn't going to fit the mold they wanted. I was getting burned out. Because I had only gone to school for half day, I didn't have a high school friend. I never dated a guy. I was a little socially awkward because I was in the gym so much, but I wanted to have more life balance. That's why I decided, "Let's just focus on getting a scholarship and take it down a notch."
That is a big transition from where you're in a bubble, how you may have defined yourself, and then transitioning into college. You went to a big college, made friends, and started to find yourself differently. How did you go about that process?
It was an interesting transition because I had other Olympians that were my teammates at Oklahoma. All of us were socially awkward together because we didn't have real true high school experiences. It's by being around all the other sports and those sports recognizing that we are also an athlete because most of the time at high school, people don't know gymnastics.
They don't know anything about them. To be part of the student-athlete and that whole process was a fun transition, dating, parties, and balancing school, all of those things. Our freshman year, because there were four of us, was a crash course, but once we figured out being a part of the university, it was great. I'm thankful that I went to Oklahoma. It allowed me to grow as a complete person and see what else is out there, but still compete at a high level.
Did you reset a vision at that point once you weren't going to the Olympics?
It was about doing what I could to help the team because gymnastics is an individual sport. When you are now a college athlete, you're looking at, "How do I contribute to the best of your ability to help the team win? What does that look like?" That part was the most fun because it takes some pressure off yourself. It's still the same way. There are six athletes who go up, and you can drop a score. You don't have to do the all-around. I wasn't an all-around-er, but I felt it was all about the team and not necessarily an individual. I liked the aspect of taking each other's strengths and getting the best result.
Constructive Feedback: Gymnastics is an individual sport. When you are a college athlete, you're looking at how to contribute to the best of your ability to help the team win.
I'm guessing that's something you use now. How do you use that in your current role?
When I was building out this team, we weren't sure what this was going to look like because we have what we now call an enterprise team. We have a long-tail team. That enterprise in our world is top 400 accounts for accounting firms. Our long-tail team is basically anything else like, "What skillset are we going to be looking for in individuals for those two roles?" Our team's also a little bit different because they do account management as well as new sales. They're landing and expanding and continuing to build that.
When I was initially hired, I was looking for people who had done both roles and were highly successful as hunters, but then I needed them also to be good teachers. I needed to see who would have more accounting background, who would have more negotiation skills, and who would have a better technology background. I hired three different people in the enterprise, and they became senior managers. Depending on their skillsets, I partnered them up with my newbies, the long-tail. They're generally less experienced sales individuals. Depending on the thing that needs to be developed on the team, we rely on who has that strength, and it's worked out well.
It was an interesting observation. I would love to know your take on it, having been an elite athlete. I went to a speaker training. It was about a few years ago at this point. I've been a speaker for many years. I had never gone to training, so I wanted to take my speaking to the next level. There was an Olympic athlete there that was a runner. Everybody's working on their speeches. We'd have these masterclasses, and she went up. You only take a very small piece of your speech.
It might be like five minutes of speech. The instructor is breaking it down and having you keep working on things in different ways, and the whole audience is watching it happen, seeing did it turn out better or whatever. There was a point where he stopped giving her advice and turned to all of us to notice how coachable she was.
Many of us are professionals, and we're here to hit these benchmarks, so when we get that advice or critique, we get defensive. He's a runner or someone you're talking to that's an athlete. The difference being their coach is that they listen so hard because, to them, it's not a critique. It's like, "I could get half a second better. I could get one second better." They're looking at it from a totally different perspective, and it hit me that day what a difference of perspective that is. Do you feel like you have that mindset from being an athlete and how you've taken that into business?
Definitely. My leader at Avalara is also my leader at Thomson Reuters. I love direct feedback. I feel like I'm always looking at myself as being very moldable. Anything that's going to help me be more successful, I don't take as a negative. That's true. In sports, everything's verbal, so I'm listening and making changes as they're talking to me. It could be in the middle of a trick. Constructive feedback, to me, I look at it as a way to help me or my team win. I don't think of it as a negative at all. I have pretty thick skin. Maybe sometimes I should be looking at it from a different lens, but I look at it as whoever's giving me the feedback, my heart should be in the right place. What can I take out of that in a positive way to make myself better? We do that as parents too.
Can you give an example?
I have four kids. Three of them have played college basketball. One's in the NBA. When I graduated from Oklahoma, my thesis was on advanced sports training. My husband played tight end at Oklahoma. When we got married, we were like, "What are we going to athletes that had only basically been competitive athletes but not had jobs? How are we going to translate that into our next thing?" My thesis was on advanced sports training.
I ended up getting pregnant pretty young, at 22. We're trying to figure out what we are going to do with our lives and how we are going to make money. When Payton was 4 or 5, we started this training program. It was speed and agility. It was a bunch of kids in the neighborhood, and they got so skilled that Terry started coaching them in baseball, football, and basketball. It got to the point where we had 300 kids in our program. We were a Nike program that was funded for basketball specifically. Even though my husband played football in college, he was also heavily recruited for basketball, and Payton was a multi-sport athlete.
Payton's the one that plays for the Boston Celtics. He's the foundation of what got our sports program going. I was more on the administrative side of that business and coordinating facilities and travel because I started working another job, too, as that business was growing. To go back to being coachable, a big thing that we still harp on or talk about a lot is taking the feedback that we get from different things that we've experienced with Payton, Lexie, and Anthony on how we make the most of that and what they are trying to say. Whether it's your brand, enhancing your body to be more agile, or something school-related, what can you take from that feedback and be better?
Constructive Feedback: What can you take from that feedback and be better?
I've been listening to a podcast myself lately. It seems to be a theme now in a lot of podcasts about parenting, even older children, about not bringing your own trauma into parenting, but also where you have to work on yourself in order to make sure that you don't pour that into another child. Especially both of you being elite athletes and knowing the rigor you are under, how do you translate that into how you want to parent? That must be a hard thing to do, or you start realizing you're going into old habits.
I always joke that by my 5th or 6th kid, if I kept having them, they would probably be perfect. We still joke about the things that we started and the way that we worked with the kids. It was always with the right intention. I will say we're very lucky. We got into USA basketball and this NBA parenting classes for both Payton and Lexie. We learned a lot with the sports psychologist about how to parent better. It was amazing the things that the kids would say that they wanted from us, which were the eye contact and the thumbs-up way to go.
We learned not to give feedback at all after a game. We would text each other and then delete it just so we could talk about it but not say anything to them. We then ask them like, "How did you feel it went? What do you think went well? What do you think you could have done better?" Also, we try to support them in those things. That didn't happen overnight. We could see it was getting more competitive that we had to have space at home because Terry trained the kids all the way until they went to college. There was some separation. It was probably harder on him than it was on me because I wasn't the coach. To be able to put dad head-on versus coach, we got better over time.
I have another friend that's a speaker. He speaks to coaches, but that's what he talks about. It's a lot of football coaches a lot of times. He talks about it like, "You're the other dad. You're the person they're with from a parenting place, so much more than their family sometimes." What they need is positive reinforcement because so much when we were younger was very negative reinforcement.
It's a big shift, and I love that whole thing where you're deleting text so you can get it out. You needed to say what you needed to say, but it doesn't need to go to them. It doesn't need them to color whatever they think about it. Being able to give people space to process and answer those questions is so important for them to give them boundaries. Do you find you do that in the workplace?
Yes, I do. What I do now is when I see certain things happening, I try to circle up after certain sales calls or meetings to say, "What do you think went well? What was your perception? What was good? What wasn't so good? What could we have done better?" I let them give me their feedback. I then ask them, "Do you want my feedback?" I don't necessarily jump in and give it. I want them to come to me.
I will give constructive along the way or depending on where they're at and their level of learning. Sometimes I'll chime in on a call if I feel like they might be going off the rails or things. I try to create a safe environment for my team to know that they can trust me and that I have their best interests and want them to achieve great things. I only achieve great things if they do. They have to know that I care about them and that they're more than just them working for me at Avalara but as a person, what are their goals for their family? What do they want to do with their life? Why did they choose this position? How do I support that for them?
It's so important. My violin teacher, when I grew up, would always say, "If you're no good, I'm no good. That's the way it is." Before I went into an audition, I'd be like, "Okay," but it's true. You forget it's all of you how you're evaluated. It's not just you as a person, especially when you're in leadership. There are so many great lessons on this. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It's quite a story. I'd like to end with some rapid-fire questions. Pick a category of family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
I would say health.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with my health.
A more consistent workout schedule.
Things or actions I do have that I want to keep.
That I know how to have a consistent schedule and know the things to do. It's more so just because I travel so much between Boston and Florida and between the kids' games and finding consistency in my work and travel for them. That's a challenge, but I know what I need to do. It's trying to balance that.
Do you still have that business?
No, but my daughter plays basketball in Santa Clara, which is in California. Payton's in Boston. We have a place in Boston. Anthony is playing in the G League for the Dallas Mavericks. It's between all the kids in different places, and then I travel for work. In the health aspect, trying to find consistency for me has always been a challenge because I'm very driven at work, and I want to see my kids. The workout becomes the back burner. We moved to Florida in 2021. I've been able to find some time to do that, and I'm enjoying it. It helped my mental health tremendously.
What part of Florida are you in?
We're in a place called Babcock Ranch, which is near Fort Myers. We moved into a golf community here.
Things or actions I don't have that I don't want with my health.
I don't have any physical ailments like diabetes, heart conditions, or anything. I'm healthy, so I want to keep it that way.
The last one is things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
Maybe I like wine too much. I don't know if I would want to give it up, but I know it's probably not the best for me.
There are so many great takeaways from this conversation. Is there anything you want that we didn't say or you want to reiterate that you want people to walk away from this conversation?
The biggest thing is that anything you put your mind to and want to work, if you're able to be consistent and work hard, you can achieve great things in anything. If somebody was to look back to where I started and the different successes I've had as an athlete myself, raising what I believe as successful kids and also having a successful career, it all has come down to self-belief, goal setting, and working hard.
Constructive Feedback: A successful career comes down to self-belief, goal-setting, and hard work.
Thank you so much for being on the show. I can't wait to share your interview with all of our audience.
Thank you so much for having me.
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Now, for my Mindful Moments with my interview with Melissa. We had so many things to unpack in this interview, and I don't think I even probably got to a lot of the stuff I had swimming in my head. It's good to step back and pause from these interviews because there was so much there and so many lessons that she had to share. One of them was with her parents. Her parents took this risk to move to another state without any relationships there and start a new business, stepping back and realizing what their skill sets are and how they could work hard as a team to be able to accomplish their goals of moving out of California into a bigger space and being more in nature.
That is how Melissa grew up. She talked so much about her family working together and this lesson of hard work and how when you work hard, you can accomplish anything. She saw her parents working hard to be able to create the life that they wanted for themselves, but also for their family. We talked about her observations of her parents working with them, seeing them at work, and having the opportunity to do that.
Seeing that, it translated into what her biggest interests were, what her hobbies were, and her hobby was being an elite gymnast. She was so determined to be able to accomplish her goals and become an Olympian. We talked about this letter that she wrote to God about how she was going to do it and how she was going to get there, and her mom seeing what she wrote and her vision and believing in her.
The important thing is that when we have that support, that belief system behind us, we can believe that we can do anything. She demonstrated that with her parents over and over in the stories that she talked about. She talked about how she had been diagnosed with ADHD at six, and her parents choosing not to put her on medication and caveat that with anyone that goes through any kind of thing like this has to make a personal decision on what's right, what's not right, the severity of it, and chemically, what you need to do to make sure that you are whole.
Not everything that she said here is going to work if you choose not to take medication for it. Everyone chooses their own path in these things. What her mom did instead was keep her busy, put her in gymnastics, Girl Scouts, and everything else so that she could find what could capture her attention. At eleven years old, she moved to become an Olympian. She moved to Eugene so that she could train with Olympian trainers.
She practiced 5 to 8 hours a day. She went only to school for half a day. This became a transformational thing because not only was it something for her to focus on, and it was a passion of hers. Her parents supported her to do that, but she had to move away from home. She had to rely on herself even when she was homesick and that this was the right decision for her, which was a big decision at eleven years old and live with another family.
The other thing was that she was experiencing, watching, and observing things that she had never seen before with eating disorders and sexual abuse that might have been happening at the training center. One of the things that popped back in from her parents again was that they were not willing to be quiet, and they were not willing to allow her to be alone in this and that they were validating what she was seeing.
They were helping her in any way where they might have seen signs of an eating disorder, what might have been distress for her, or when she got closed off. It talks about vigilance and how important that is when we care about the people around us. That could be our children, friends, family, parents, or whoever that is. We don't stay silent even when it's unpopular. There are times to always step back and observe what the right response is rather than a trigger response. When we step back and observe and say, "No, we need to stand up. We need to have a voice," that also teaches the people that we are having a voice for that they matter. An important lesson is that we personally see each person and that they matter.
Her parents taught her that. Even though we all know as middle schoolers, having your parents be outspoken can be hard, when you realize that they're doing the right thing, that's also the thing that she's been able to carry on in her life. We talked about how her intuition is what allowed her to realize that she needed to keep telling her parents what was going on, even though it was unpopular for her to keep doing that.
The other thing she realized through this experience was that she could achieve anything she put her mind to and that she wasn't the stereotypical gymnast. She was taller than most. She was more compact and powerful, but instead of tearing herself down over those things or feeling less than, she used those strengths to create that mental toughness that she needed and have the confidence to speak up and be honest and know that she would be okay.
These are big lessons and a lot of growing up at a young age. At sixteen, she realized that she wasn't going to go to the Olympics and needed to make a shift. That's when she started transitioning and working toward getting a scholarship, where she got a Division I scholarship as an Olympian. What she realized was she didn't have social skill. She hadn't been in a school with friends and boyfriends and so forth. All of that was awkward for her to transition into that, but it was a necessary piece of her upbringing to be able to go through that and to talk to other students that were athletes and understand what was normal, what wasn't normal, and so forth.
She had to have this new vision in the college of what it was going to take to win as a college team, which was very different from focusing on yourself as an Olympian. What she decided to do was focus on the team rather than herself personally to take that pressure off herself, make it all about the team, and make sure that you're taking everybody's strengths to get the best result. We've talked about how that is translated into the business world for her, of looking at her teams and finding where everybody's strengths are, how to get the best result, and when different people have a gap, bring the person that has that strength to help coach them and mentor them and so forth.
The other thing we talked about that we think is unique about athletes is getting feedback and not taking it as negative. This translated in so many ways. When she got feedback as an athlete, her viewpoint of it is, "This a way to help me win and make myself better," rather than looking at it as a negative. I know I'm guilty of this. I can get a bunch of positive responses, and then one negative thing I see, I focus on that.
With athletes, they're trying to get a tiny bit better and better. When we're going through change management, keeping that mindset is so important. The other thing she talked about was learning how to take feedback as a parent. Also, realizing that we don't always know what we're doing or we're perfect. We have got to take feedback as we go and know that we have the right intention, but on how we accomplish that for our children as well.
One of the things you talked about was that she and her husband changed the way they went about after a basketball game their kids played in. Instead of talking to the kids about how they felt or giving them feedback, they would text their feedback back and forth to one another and delete their messages. I loved that. It got it out of the system so that they could get present and calm, step back, and then ask their kids, "How do you think that game went? What went well? What could have been better?"
It will allow them to come up with their own answers and be able to process them themselves. She's been able to take that same skill into the workplace and the teams she works for and makes sure that they know she is there for them personally. She is trying to help them in their careers and that it's important that people receive that feedback in the right way. She opens the door for them to ask for feedback so that they're coming to make themselves better and make sure that the team is better overall.
Her takeaway is so much about hard work and success, coming from having that vision to create great things, but also having that self-belief in yourself, creating those goals, and being consistent so that you get there. I hope that you enjoyed this interview. I thought there were so many great lessons to take away and think about how you can apply that to your life.
I want to thank Avalara for sponsoring this episode. If you're interested in learning more about their sales tax automation, you can contact them at Accountants@Avalara.com or visit them at Avalara.com/accounts. I hope you like and share this episode with the people that could use these lessons as well in their life.
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About Melissa Pritchard
Melissa is the National Sales Manager for the Avalara for Accountants channel. She manages a team of North American remote field-based Sales Executives. Melissa has worked in software for over 25 years, starting her career at Thomson Reuters in Legal and Regulatory and then transitioning to Avalara almost 2 years ago. Melissa is recognized for her ability to put together elite level sales teams. She came to Avalara with a unique set of insights, both professionally and personally. She attended college on a full-ride Division 1 gymnastics scholarship and has carried that level of athletic achievement raising her kids, as three of her four children all received Division 1 athletic scholarships for basketball, with two continuing to play professionally, one in the NBA and one in the G-league.