Name: Alaia Williams
Title: Systems Wizard & Community Builder
Contact: AlaiaWilliams.com
Company: At the Helm Podcast
What They Do: She spends the majority of her time helping people and other Business Centers, primarily to have the right systems, processes in place and helping them to become more efficient, effective, productive and connected. The other rest of her time she does a lot of community building.
Originally From: Los Angeles, CA
College: Azusa Pacific University
Field of Study: Major in Interpersonal & Organizational Communications with emphasis in Sociology and Psychology
Recommended Books:
- Your Network Is Your Net Worth by Porter Gale
- StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
- Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together by Pamela Slim
Listen to the interview:
A Few Notes From the Show:
- Founder of the At the Helm.
- For the last 8 years she has had a networking group in Los Angeles.
- About 4 years ago, she launched a women’s business conference and community called “At the helm”. It has expanded into an online Facebook group, podcast, etc.
- When she was in college, she wanted to be in the film industry, because she wanted to be a media critic.
- She switched to communications and started getting to know more about the non profit sector. She continues working on non profit projects, but it got expanded when she was in college.
- She dropped college, because she had a very difficult time in college for a variety of reasons. She studied for four years, but was still trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.
- She worked on Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Administrative Assistant.
- During college, she went through a time of her life that she was not sure how to manage her relationship, education, etc. So she develop empathy for those people who are disorganized in the long term, not just situationally like she was.
- She started to work to get her place in order and thought that she wanted to help other people and make it easier for them. She went to “craigslist” and started to reply to some posts, got her first couple of clients and that is how she started.
- When she realized how great she felt after getting all organized, she wanted to do the same for the rest of people.
- She stated that it is important to also find balance and be realistic with how organized you can be.
- Mental clutter manifests into physical clutter.
- If you are starting your career, Alaia mentions that building your community is very important. We are not really taught how to grow our network and community, how to interact with them and what that means. So she believes that is never too early to start cultivating your network.
- Ask for help in whatever way you want. Be encourage to ask for help when you need it, since is very important.
- She expressed that she feels like she has those little moments of unspoken wisdom all the time. She believes that life is a big rollercoaster, but entrepreneurship is a wilder, twister, taller version of that, so one day you can be at the highest of your career and next day be like “did I just touch rockbottom?”.
- There was a blog post from Ramit Sethi based on a Facebook post that someone had responded to. So someone had posted in some group: – “should I read this book or that book?”, and this person just answered “yes”. She asked “which one?” and he responded “Both”. She asked “Which one do I read first?” and the person answer: – “Whichever one is on the top of the page of Amazon when you open it” and that ended up leading into this post where he talks about not wasting your time on decisions that don’t matter. He also talked about how when someone asks him for a meeting, he has three places as possible options, so he never has to think about where he is going to meet, so you can put you energy towards decisions that do matter and are actually important.
- Don’t waste your energy on the decisions that don’t matter.
- I interviewed an entrepreneur that is in LA. who mentioned how you can have a company and everything looks well, and how he tries to keep the same tone when things are looking bad.
- She wishes she had a book on networking.
- In all of her college experience, one of the best things was to be exposed to the book “StrengthsFinder 2.0” by Tom Rath.
- She is a tech system wizard.
- A few tools that she would recommend for people who is starting to work on networking:
- Listen, people don’t listen. Get a good calendar, a good planner and put everything in there: the job interviews, the milestones, deadlines, etc.
- Analog planner, she even had the chance to design her own planner. You can also use a notebook, but make sure to use a tool where you can keep all your ideas organized. Something to capture those ideas.
- Technology might not be as flexible as pen and paper.
Love the show? Subscribe and get updates, podcast updates and articles designed to empower young professionals, just like you, sent directly to your inbox. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Ways to subscribe to the No More Reasonable Doubt podcast:
Click here to subscribe via iTunes.
Click here to subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed).
You can also subscribe via Stitcher, SoundCloud.
