Ep457: Neivia Justa – Don’t Accept a Job Out of Fear of Being Jobless

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community we know that to win in investing you must take risks, but to win big you've got to reduce it to join our community for free go to my worst investment ever.com and receive the risk reduction checklist I created from the lessons I've learned from all my guests also in the community. You can get a super special podcast listener discount on my six week valuation masterclass bootcamp. In the bootcamp, you learn how to value companies like a pro, and advance your career in finance, just go to my worst investment ever.com to join our community for free. Fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests. navia justa Navy. Are you ready to rock?

Neivia Justa 00:56
Yes, I am Andrew. Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 00:58
I'm excited to have you on in. I'm going to introduce you to the audience. And then maybe you can give us a little bit more about yourself. But let me introduce you navia. Justin is a journalist, entrepreneur, speaker, mentor, and teacher. He's founder and leader of justa causa, with 30 years of experience as an executive in communication, culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion in leadership positions at companies such as Timex maitre D, Goodyear, and Johnson and Johnson navia. Take a moment. And Phil, any further tidbits about your life?

Neivia Justa 01:36
Yes, Andrew, you told me you told a lot about me. And besides that, I am a mother, I have two teenagers, girls, teenager girls, when is 18 years old, just recently had her birthday. And the other one will be 16. next September 29. I have been married for 20 years with Eduardo, my husband, my only husband. And six years ago, I created to social media movements. Because I was it took me 45 years to realize that we are not properly represented we women in the marketplace, in companies in all kinds of power positions in society. And I created a movement that is named Where are the women, I post every day an image with an only man, mainly white man, just similar white men with a hashtag Where are the women. And the other one is sorority movement, because we are 52% of the population here in Brazil. And we are everywhere. But we are not visible. So I created the second movement that is here are the women or in proper English here that women are where I also post every day, an image with a whim a woman, one or two or main, but a lot of women leading successful story, women that I know or that I do not know. And I've been doing that since 2015 2016, five years ago. And that made a lot of people get conscious about the representativeness of women in society here in Brazil. And then I became this kind of as I name corporate influencer.

Andrew Stotz 03:54
That's really fascinating. And you know, it's a good lesson too. For the listener, you don't have to come up with something super complex. Yes, come up with an idea. And in this case, find a good picture that represents that idea. Or the opposite of that idea. And then be consistent and communicating that out to the world. where's the best place for people who are interested in what you're doing to follow you or follow those, the hashtag LinkedIn where the best place to reach you?

Neivia Justa 04:27
LinkedIn, LinkedIn is where the conversations flow and in get strong, I am the I'm there. But I'm also at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, but the conversation goes on on LinkedIn mostly. And I also created a newsletter that is in English, named diversity and inclusion. And I for now, I have almost 200,000 followers around On the globe where it's something I always get shocked when I see the numbers. I post an article about diversity and inclusion every 15 days. And that conversation goes on. Very, very strong there. And last year I created. It's not a podcast is a live program. Also on LinkedIn started on LinkedIn twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday at 4pm, Brazil time. Now, since last June, it has been on Facebook and YouTube as well. You can find it as leader comb navia. It's it means leader with Navy, but it's only in Portuguese. I had one English interview with orkut, the founder of the social network, and where I interview leaders, women and men every Tuesday and Friday, and we talk about purpose, culture, leadership, vulnerability, communications, trust everything that matters. For leaders. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Stotz 06:20
Sounds like you're very busy. Yeah, I tried

Neivia Justa 06:23
to, you know, this, this program was kind of a therapy for me during the week, because I had to keep my mind focused on something productive instead of paying attention to this tragedy around the globe. So I am a social person, I love people. And I loved I'm a lifelong learner. And I love to learn from people. And this was the way I could learn and keep learning from people I admired people I didn't meet yet. I didn't know. But it's it for now, today, exceptionally because yesterday, we had an internet problem here. I have my 108 guests, and they are mainly CEOs, board members, or C level executives, or enterpreneurs. So it has been quite a long and interesting journey.

Andrew Stotz 07:25
Amazing. Well, I it made me think of a couple of things. The first one is that I grew up with two sisters. And my mother and my mother's you know, a very strong, I wouldn't say that she's she's strong in her mind in what she wanted for me and her kids. And my dad, my parents were married for 59 years. So they had a really great, we had a great, a great life. And when my father passed away, I brought my mother to live with me. So she'll be listening to this podcast. Hi, mom. And I know that your mom is 99 years old. That's my grandma, your grandma, your grandmother, 99 years old. Amazing. So I always kind of grew up with women, I never grew up like with guys, maybe I see some of my friends that were raised with their brothers. And you know the difference, they're pretty significant. And I guess I was more aware maybe the second thing that I was going to share was it here in Thailand. One interesting thing is that in the financial industry where I've worked, the ratio of women to men is almost equal. And in Finally, in leadership, Thailand has tremendous female leaders, I think it's something you may even want to look at and get some of these female leaders, you know, into your community because just by you know, for whatever reasons, there's a lots of ideas about why it is. But many companies here are run by women. And I've had many women bosses as I went through my career, and that is very different from other places in Asia or India or China or those places. So it really stands out. And now one of the things that we're women are not represented in Thailand, is in politics. And some people say that's because they're really smart, and they rather run businesses then try to run the politics.

Neivia Justa 09:18
So yeah, you here in Brazil, we have a very different scenario. We're under represented in politics and in business.

Andrew Stotz 09:28
So and then the last thing is that I used to be the president of CFA society here in Thailand. And again, we had you know, almost a 5050 representation in the group which was fantastic. But CFA Institute out of the US talked about, you know, doing more to get more women into the world of finance. So when I left my post as a president of CFA society here in Thailand, I started a I have a course called the valuation masterclass where I teach people How to do valuation. And basically, I created the women in valuation scholarship. And I'm now giving out more than a million dollars worth of courses to women who want to build up their skills in the area of valuation, how do you value a company? And how do you build that skill so that you can go to any company and say, I know how to do this. And I can prove that I know how to do this. And therefore, I thought to myself, a lot of companies and a lot of places are talking about, you know, diversity and inclusion. I thought, I can basically if I went to a city, say, San Paolo as an example, and I said, let's say take five companies there that said, we do want more women in the finance industry in our company, I can literally go to them and say, let's reach out, let's offer the scholarship, let's get them in, and let's get them trained. And then let's get them into the jobs. And that was my way of saying, how do we put it into action, rather than just talk about it? And so that's, that's a little thing that I've done over the years that you just made me think about. So now it's not

Neivia Justa 11:08
legal at all. It's big. It's huge.

Andrew Stotz 11:11
Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah, I. So maybe someday, we can also get it out to your audience to say, if they're interested in learning, you know, it's tough, I do a boot camp, it's really tough. But for those people that want to build skills in valuation, I know how to help them. So now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment, thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story.

Neivia Justa 11:40
Great, so let's let's go. In 2015, I used to work for Goodyear, and I was the head the director for Communications and Public Relations for Latin American. And suddenly, Goodyear decided to move the head office to Akron, Ohio, the Latin America had office and I had to not only communicate leader communications, it was a tough communication for all the team because not everyone would be invited to move. Some of them would had to be fired. And it was a tough moment. But then, for my surprise, I was invited to move to Akron, Ohio. And for almost six months, I had to think about that, knowing that I didn't want to move to Akron, Ohio. But my husband asked me to think about it because he had the dream to live in the US. When I was 17. I lived in England in Cambridge, as an exchange program, student, and so I didn't have that dream. And I had already my girls in my mind, we would narrow our universe because we live in somehow somehow is the biggest, one of the biggest cities in Latin America, one of the biggest in the world. My girls were born here. And with all my respect, Akron is a very small city.

Andrew Stotz 13:31
I can attest to that. Having grown up right outside of Akron, it's not the place you really want to go. Yeah.

Neivia Justa 13:39
And it's so cool. So I was quite sure I would not be happy there. I would get a social mental health issues, I would be depressed, I would fire I would kill my husband. So I knew I didn't want to go there. But I tried to convince myself that I would be happy there. But then my boss, he kind of gave up waiting for me. And he said, Well, you have to choose. And I remember it was September 15. June 12. It was Valentine's Day here in Brazil. When I had my meeting with my boss, and I told him that I was not going to to occur, I refuse the offer. And then I had to come home and say to my husband that I was not going to we were not moving to the US. And I had up problem. Relationship problem. For one month. My husband didn't talk to me and it was so bad. That might we did we hadn't we had no plans for holidays in July because we didn't know what was going to happen. And then my eldest girl said, one day to me, Mom, we want to go to grandmother's house in Fortaleza, it's the northeast part of Brazil went out where I was born. And I said, but we don't have tickets. We didn't plan anything. It she looked at me and said, You and I need to talk. And we are here to kind of make it a mess. So we sent them and we had our tough conversation. And for quite a moment, it was okay. But then it came the time when I had to live the company, and that was submit September to October. And that was when I had the worst investment of my life, because I didn't want to be unemployed. Because I didn't want the husband to say to me, you see, if we had moved to Akron, this was not going to happen. So I took the first job that appeared in front of me. And I committed all the errors, all the mistakes that a person can, can make. I went to the interview process, wanting that to be successful. And I didn't pay attention to all the details that were telling me that it was a mistake. I remember I was interviewed for my bus. And he was such a tough man. And he was so rude with the HR director, that was a woman. And I just thought, No, that's okay. It won't happen to me. And then he made some questions, strange questions, but then I was so focused on not being unemployed, that I didn't pay attention to that. And what happened, I was offered the job, I accepted the job. I exchanged it, as we say, here in Brazil, six for six, because the salary was quite the same, the benefits were lower, but that was okay, because I was not going to be unemployed. And the less than three months, because it was the most sexist company I ever worked for. There were nine directors, seven or eight men, and there was me and the other the HR director. That was a woman. We had no toilets. In the floor, where we worked, we work in a huge room with a huge table. And there was only a men's toilet there. And the CEO, he used to scream. So all of the directors in and with the HR director, he was like torture, you know, he was like a Hitler. He had a mental torture game with her. And that was the most awful thing I saw in my life. And I didn't want to go to that place and that was October. So I had to be there for Christmas and New Year's Eve and when I came back after that, and Year holidays, I was fired for my because he Yeah, he tried to do the same thing with me the torture the psychological game with me as he did with the the HR director, and then I said, Listen, you won't do that with me. Nobody does that with me. So if you're ever going to scream with me, I will leave you screaming alone by yourself because not even my dad Ever screamed at me. So you're not allowed to do that. So as I faced him, and he tried all the time to kind of make me feel bad may make me feel worse than I was making me feel less than I was. So I said, No, this is not a place for me. And so that was my worst investment. Ever.

Andrew Stotz 20:26
What did your husband say when you said, I've been fired?

Neivia Justa 20:31
He said, Okay, I saw your suffering, no problem at all. I think he realized that I did it, just because I did it work. I never told in such words to him. But he knew that and he knew that I was in pain, because every year to work near very close to the office where I was. So some days, we could have a lunch together. And when I told him everything that was happening, he was so shocked that he, I think he wanted me to be fired.

Andrew Stotz 21:09
So how would you summarize the lessons that you learn from this experience,

Neivia Justa 21:15
don't accept any job, just because you are you have the fear to be an employed, understand the purpose of the company you will work for, try to talk to people that have worked there, or do still work there. And mainly, mainly, I always say that in I used to say that, but I could, I made them steak by myself. Look at the leader that you're going to work for how he or she behaves, how he or she thinks, how he or she treats people. Because you're not you don't get you don't ask to be fired for a company, but by the leader that you work for, you want to run out of the company, because you have a terrible person that leads you or a boss, there is a difference between a boss and a leader. Yeah, so I never did that. Again, that was a great lesson. It was a hard, hurtful lesson. But I think I had to go over that to be stronger. And to because it was after that, that I created my social media movements, that I became aware of the situation that we women still suffer in the marketplace. So it was something painful, that I don't want anyone to go over. But it made me stronger. And it made me more conscious about what I had to do. From that moment on.

Andrew Stotz 23:14
Maybe I'm going to summarize some things that I took away from your story. And I'm going to come at it from a little bit different angle. You know, I remember talking to my father many years ago and saying, talking to him about JFK assassination. And I was saying, you know, I've been reading these books that, you know, it may not have been Lee Harvey Oswald, it could have been someone else, even within the government. And my dad said, Come on, somebody would speak up, somebody would speak up. Well, later, different people did speak up, but those voices were kept down. But then I couldn't really argue with that. Because I do think I grew up in a way where you speak up when something's not right. So I watched the movie, a documentary called the most dangerous man in America. And that was what Richard Nixon called daniel ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers. back during the Vietnam War era era, another pentagon papers were written by staff within the Pentagon and other organizations that were related, the detail all of the bad deeds that the US did in Vietnam, all of the lying deceit, everything that they did, that was bad. And basically, Daniel Ellsberg broke that out, he got that, and he brought it out to the world. And what Daniel Ellsberg said in the movie, is somebody asked him, Why didn't you know why didn't someone speak out? He says, No. 1000 men mainly knew the contents of that document. And not one of them spoke up. Yeah. And so I came, you know, I was taught by my parents, you never let someone mystery you You stand up for yourself. And, and, and so I always thought that people would stand up. You know, and even during this time that we're through this pandemic, where, you know, there's questionable things happening by media, by, by some doctors by different, you know, this question. And people are terrified to step stand up. Because nowadays, when you stand up, you can be completely ruined by this social media or media mob that can come after you. So the consequences are even higher. So I was brought up in an era where I, or let's say, you no way to stand up for yourself and stand up for what's right. And I encourage the listeners out there to take, you know, take strength, from navia story, to stand up for yourself and stand up for what's right. But I also now know that it's getting harder and harder to do that. Governments in particularly the US government, tries to encourage companies to have whistleblower policies. But when the government whistleblowers come out, they try to destroy them. And it's just it's so much more complicated right now. But I think my biggest takeaway is that most people don't stand up because of the cost to themselves, and their family, or whatever. And I just want to say that your story is inspiring for both men and women out there. If you're in a situation where you're being mistreated, you're not being valued for who you are, and what you are. Take this as a motivation to think about how do I begin the process of standing up for myself, and you don't have to confront someone, you may decide I'm going to walk away, you may decide to confront them, you may decide to do whatever you're going to do, but use this as some energy to stand up for who you are, and what you stand for. And there's lots of jerks out there. And it's not even sometimes it could be sexism, sometimes it could be racism, sometimes it just be a lot of idiots out there saying stupid things to other people. That, you know, you may attribute it to something, but truthfully, it's just a bad person. So that's kind of my takeaway, anything you would add to that?

Neivia Justa 27:12
No, that's it. That's it. And I think that even when I say, try to talk to people inside the organization, they are not the best people to tell you the true story. Talk to people outside of the organization, people that decided to leave while they were fired, because they will tell you the true story. Because when you're inside a company, maybe you have to tell the company's employer branding. And then that is not the real story. So and if you want to, if you learn to stand out for yourself, you get stronger. And you know, what is that you don't negotiate? It's self consciousness process, you have to understand what is value for you, and what is a negotiable.

Andrew Stotz 28:13
So based upon what you learn from this story, and what you continue to learn, what one action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Neivia Justa 28:24
Pay it when you when you look for a job, as I said, pay attention to the people that are working for that company. Because companies are made by people. And those people are the ones that build the culture. And if it's a healthy culture, it's made by healthy people, people that respect people, people that loves people, and people that want to collaborate and to work and to serve for people.

Andrew Stotz 29:01
Great advice. All right. Last question. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Neivia Justa 29:09
I have been, I have been having this. Number one, though, for the last five years, Andrew is that I want to connect and to help develop leaders, true leaders that love people, and they that want to assume their responsibility to change the reality to make our society in our world more fair, more equal, and more sustainable. So this is my goal. For the coming years. It has been my goal for the last five years. And I'm continually doing that because I want to leave the world a better place for my girls. I want they I know they deserve it. And we can do it even as you said, If any one of us do, what is possible what is available for us, we can change the world because change starts within us. It's not the other way.

Andrew Stotz 30:15
Lots of great wisdom there well listeners there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. My number one goal for the next 12 months is to help you my listener reduce risk and increase return in your life. To achieve this, I've created our community at my worst investment ever. And when you join, you get that special discount to my six week valuation masterclass boot camp. Maybe as we conclude, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience,

Neivia Justa 30:52
I just want to say thank you for the opportunity of being here with you, of learning about you and your wonderful work. And I also want to invite you to be my guest at leader with navia. So we're going to talk because I have it sold out for this 2012 or 21. But you're going to be my guest, my first guest for 2022. And I want to ask the audience, if you want to follow me, just sign up for my newsletter on LinkedIn diversity and inclusion, you're gonna have a lot of great free content there. antastic

Andrew Stotz 31:38
and we'll have all the links in the show notes, ladies and gentlemen. So just click on them and go there. I know I'll be there. And that is a wrap ladies and gentlemen on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our wealth and our health. Fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast hose Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.