Interview with Carolyn L Burke, Part II

Interviewee Name: Carolyn L Burke
Company Name: Integrity Incorporated and Iguana Books
Website: http://www.integrityincorporated.com/ http://iguanabooks.com

Interview with Carolyn L Burke, Part II

A few years ago, I interviewed Carolyn L Burke along with nine other interviewees with the intention of updating my book, Tales of People Who Get It. I did not update my book, and now I am writing a completely different book. One of the things that I am noticing with the invisible mentor interviews is that most of the information stays relevant because of the types of questions that I ask. I have known Carolyn for many years, and what I love most about her is her mind. Like me, she is a voracious reader, and I learn a lot from her. In the second part of Carolyn’s interview, she tells us that 80 percent is good enough, and to find a way to express ourselves so we can share our wisdom. That’s good advice.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Carolyn L Burke:

1. Going to engineering school woke me up.
2. Writing an online diary changed my life. I went from a very uptight, reserved person who couldn’t express thoughts or feelings easily at all, to someone who through exposure on the Internet, became comfortable to share and talk and listen. So for me that was very therapeutic. It was very explicit and I knew I was doing that.
3. I think from university right through to leaving my company, selling my company, was the third event that shaped my life because that was all one period. That was a huge event and a huge change in my life.

I look at those three things as sudden changes in my life.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Carolyn L Burke: Going backpacking in Central America by myself was probably the biggest accomplishment that I am proud of because it’s very scary.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Carolyn L Burke: Very strongly. One person in particular, Peter, was sort of a mentor in my twenties, but he helped me grow up. He helped me to get to know who I was. He was very empathetic and wise about how to be a healthy person, mentally aware and self-aware. He helped me through learning how I function as a person. I think had I not met him, I would have been one of those totally crazy people you see wandering around that cannot make reality work for them.

I couldn’t make reality work, and I needed someone to teach me about human society and communicating, quite a fundamental role, in not just my life, but to me he was just so important, so necessary. He was on his own journey, he was the sort of person who was always thinking who had a philosophy, a religion that he had to explain to people and share with them, and then he would move on and the people he’d been sharing with would come and stay.

I didn’t do that, I hope that I didn’t do that. He is still someone I bounce things off. He is mostly a hermit now, he has had enough of dealing that intimately with people helping them that way. I demanded that he teach me, it wasn’t a passive thing. I absolutely insisted that he knew how to do things that I needed to understand and became a good partner in life for years and years because I needed to learn.

The sad part about it was when I needed to practice what I’d learned of being my own person, I had to leave and that was the hardest thing I’d ever done, especially leaving him and trying everything out on my own.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Carolyn L Burke: To be honest with yourself.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Carolyn L Burke: I think I would give all the standard clichés: Know your dreams and live them, be true to yourself, and look after yourself so that you can look after others.

Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Carolyn L Burke: I keep them fairly separate, a few people crossover. When I started in business it was the opposite, all my friends got employed and we’d go out for dinner and still talk business and it would merge together. And that was fun but it has no scalability, I ran out of friends. So I learned how to keep them entirely separate and work professionally with clients and keep them in that business relationship and that’s worked really well because it allows you to have your own time, even to talk about it, to stay all business with the people you are working with. I discovered that’s really valuable.

Avil Beckford: What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

Carolyn L Burke: I have no regrets!

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Carolyn L Burke:

1. 80 percent is good enough and this is a recent one.
2. Live your dreams, there will always be more.
3. If you can figure it out, live without fear because it won’t get you anywhere. And if you are experiencing fear work through it anyway. Jump out of the plane even if you’re afraid of heights.
4. Learn to express yourself, whether it’s a personal art like writing or painting or business communication, public speaking or what. Find a way so your learnings can be shared.
5. And for business, recognize your enemies. Not everyone in business is on the up-and-up, be able to recognize the con artists.

Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

Carolyn L Burke: I love hanging out with friends, with people. I love traveling and I didn’t know that until I stopped working 20 hours a day. I love reading and I learned that I love writing as well. I research stuff, I learn about things.

Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Carolyn L Burke: I let things come in without criticism from two sources: I do a lot of reading and I allow things to come through my senses – feeling, listening. I read primarily academic literature, mostly science and math. After I take in information, I go and look at plants. I just stare at plants a lot because they have structures and patterns. There are genetic codes that give them a predestined shape and it determines where a leaf pops out or a flower bud and each plant structure is very different. And it helps my thoughts organize around that plant structure in different ways. So if I’m looking at a palm tree which is a simple structure, just lines going up into the sky versus a maple tree which has all these regular branches, my thoughts coalesce in different packs, so the plants will help me to find different relationships.

Avil Beckford: How do you define success?

Carolyn L Burke: I think there are two types of success. Most people seem to measure themselves against others, whether it’s their peers or siblings or role models. And if you are playing that game, success is very hard to achieve if someone came and told you, you got there so you have to recognize that you have achieved your goals. I think I have done a lot of that. The other kind of success is inside yourself. Do you like yourself? Do you love yourself? Are you happy? Do you have regrets? And I think this kind of success is more important and helps you balance. I think that I have the two, but it’s a process so tomorrow I may lose it again.

Avil Beckford: In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Carolyn L Burke: My success is based on self-awareness. I know who I am, how I react and what my capabilities are, and that allows me to pursue everything vigorously, the things that matter when they come up and I can do so with passion. And I have done so for most of my life. And that leads to success when you put one foot in front of the other over and over again you get somewhere. Unless you’re accident prone, that process works with passion and a little bit of persistence, you’ll get somewhere. To be able to do that, you have to be clear inside, and not bothered by your own demons. That’s where I start, with self-awareness, and I don’t think everyone does. A lot of people put that aside and focus on persistence and I don’t ever advocate that because I don’t think you can be a happy person using that process.

Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Carolyn L Burke: I partnered well and I never pursued my own goals, I always pursued partner’s goals. I put my energy toward theirs so that I would have a team. And that’s very effective.

Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Carolyn L Burke: I don’t think there is a pithy piece of advice that would work well.

• Have good people in your corner, whether it’s people who are financing your initiatives or partnering with you to do the work for clients.
• Charge for what you do.
• Recognize the value in what you’re doing.

Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Carolyn L Burke: I have the sense that I would be able to talk to anyone who is living that I’d like to meet so I will pick dead ones.

1. Bertrand Russell: He is the father of modern logic and I would talk to him about logic and philosophy and the conversation would hopefully go all over the place. I would probably ask him to be an academic mentor or thesis advisor, someone who I could go to with questions and ideas and get direction from.
2. I would probably look up a great-great-great-great-grandmother or grandfather just to find out who they were. Probably one from my mom’s side and one from my dad’s side. They are Eastern European and British and I’d want to see who they were as people and talk to them. I want to find out how I’m genetically programmed, why my mom did certain things, who were my dad’s people, I don’t know.
3. Philip K. Dick: He was an author of science fiction and he wrote short stories and novels that led to Paycheck, Minority Reports, Bladerunner and a whole series of movies that came out in the last 10, 15 years. In his time, he was a miserable man, was unhappy, a drunk, married three times and he would write a novel in a weekend. During his life they were penned dystopias and no one liked them. He is my favourite author, he is brilliant and the ideas fly fast and furious and there is always a negative tone which gives the characters a background to rise through. Probably 20 years ago I fell in love with him but he was already dead, so it’s ridiculous. I’d like to meet him and find out if he is a creep or is amazing.
4. Inventors just after the Dark Ages. How about Gutenberg with his printing press? I don’t really have a preference, but he comes to mind. I think it was an interesting period in history and it was moderately easy to invent something and something impactful and I would love to find out a little more about what their thinking was.

Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

Carolyn L Burke:

• At different stages of my life, different books impacted me. In school, I read a book called The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel by Herman Hess. It affected me radically because I was in transition with school. This book had perfected academia inside it, you got to meet all the different parts of this school, the people and their thinking, and it helped me to see the progress that I was pursuing and helped me to understand the end game and go, “Oh, I’d enjoy that and then I would live that one single thread in life and I’d be an expert, maybe I don’t want to do that.” It helped me to let go, but I read it a lot and that’s rare for me to read the same book over. That impacted my life and my decisions.
• The book I did my Master’s Thesis on impacted my understanding of the world and gave me a Gestalt shift of understanding and that was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus: Logical-Philosophical Treatise and that book taught me how to see, and it’s about logic and that’s not where he was going, he was trying to detangle the metaphors that we use to try and understand things. But we do that so much, and do it to understand new things, and maybe we do it sometimes when we shouldn’t. So this book was about when metaphors go bad, and very specifically he was talking about the mind. It was a study of philosophy and his point, which doesn’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t studied it, is that we use all the metaphors of the physical world to try and understand something that is not physical, the mind, and so my favourite quote from his is that, “It’s not that the mind is a nothing, but it’s not a something.” And he was trying to get at the way we embed metaphors into our communications so fundamentally that we don’t see it there, we don’t see our basic assumption about how we understand something, and he was trying to detangle that particular assumption.

Avil Beckford: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Carolyn L Burke:

• The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Volumes 1 thru 8 Complete), which is volumes.
• The Art Of War
• I would take a textbook on developing codes.
• I would also take a how-to book on surviving on a deserted island, and that’s very practical.

I don’t re-read books so this is an unanswerable question. So I would want to take reference books, perhaps one on how to build huts, environmental conservation. Now thinking about it, I think I would take a pen and five blank books.

Avil Beckford: What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

Carolyn L Burke: I would not take any, I would not use electronics on my deserted island.

Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?

Carolyn L Burke: It’s very basic and it’s that I am alive and so are you and the trees and the plants. It’s amazing, it’s miraculous.

Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?

Carolyn L Burke: I think traveling helps because it keeps me away from everything, and it refreshes my perspective.

Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for?

Carolyn L Burke: I think that as a species, I would wish that we had a little more adventure in us. I would put a little more adventure into our hearts.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..

Carolyn L Burke: I’m happy when a plan is actualized. I’m happy when a thing comes together in any part of life.

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Author Bio: Avil Beckford, an expert interviewer, entrepreneur and published author is passionate about books and professional development, and that’s why she founded The Invisible Mentor and the Virtual Literary World Tour to give you your ideal mentors virtually in the palm of your hands by offering book reviews and book summaries, biographies of wise people and interviews of successful people. Connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.

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