EP73: RENAISSANCE with Sandra Chu, Executive Search Consultant and former NCAA Rowing Coach and All-Ivy League Student Athlete

About the Guest(s):

Sandra Chu is a former collegiate rowing coach turned higher education consultant with a storied and multi-faceted career trajectory. With over 22 years of coaching experience and notable achievements, including National, Regional, and League Coach of the Year honors, Sandra transitioned into her current role at WittKieffer, seeking more alignment with her skills and the broader mission of higher education. She holds an impressive academic background with a master's from NYU and a BA from Princeton, where she was an All-Ivy athlete.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of "Becoming UnDone," host Toby Brooks sits down with Sandra Chu, whose journey exemplifies the essence of transformation from a deeply invested athletic coach to a driven higher education consultant. Sandra shares her personal and professional evolution, revealing how critical life choices led her to reevaluate her identity, values, and career.

Sandra's story is nothing short of inspiring. Starting with her bold step into the world of collegiate rowing at Princeton, to her significant contributions as a rowing coach, and eventual transition into executive search, Sandra has continuously pivoted towards growth and fulfillment. This episode plunges into the narrative of someone who, despite considerable success and recognition, dared to redirect her professional compass amidst the onset of COVID-19 and personal introspection.

Key Takeaways:

• Sandra Chu reflects on her decision to leave collegiate coaching to focus on family and explore her potential in higher education consultancy.
• COVID-19 played a significant role in Sandra's career transition, providing her a time of reflection and re-evaluation of her professional identity.
• The episode highlights the importance of self-advocacy and the power to overcome imposter syndrome, a common barrier Sandra assists candidates with in her current role.
• Sandra shares her perspective on the ability to view beyond job titles and recognize the worth of skills in varying contexts, drawing parallels with her own career shift.
• Mentorship and seeing potential in others, a theme pervasive in Sandra's coaching career, remains an integral part of her approach as a consultant.

Notable Quotes:

• "What did we learn during COVID? We learned what was important to us. And what I learned was that there were many things that I did as a coach, which at the time when that ended and I was unemployed, felt like, oh shoot, I made this terrible mistake, and this was a big part of my identity. And Covid helped me understand that the identity was the skill."
• "I like to think of myself as someone who sees possibilities, unearths or surfaces those for the folks that I work with and intersect with, whether that was students that I mentored as athletes or with clients and candidates that I work with today."

Engage with this poignant episode to uncover the depth of Sandra Chu's life lessons in career transition and seizing one's potential against the odds. Join us in learning from her fascinating story, and don't forget to stay tuned for more episodes that unravel the intricacies of personal and professional growth on "Becoming UnDone."

Transcript

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One of the biggest reasons why I left coaching was because I was in service to daughters, fantastic daughters of other people. And every time I answered an emergency phone call and had to spend time sitting with an athlete at the ER until their parents could get there, was time that I wasn't making that same choice for my own daughter. And she grew up with the team. She went to her first regatta at four weeks old. She had great role models, but it wasn't safe as having your mom. What did we learn during COVID? We learned what was important to us. And what I learned was that there were many things that I did as a coach, which at the time when that ended and I was on a floor, I felt like, Oh shoot, I made a terrible mistake and this was a big part of my identity and COVID helped me understand that the identity was the skill. It was what I was delivering. It was how I was contributing to the overall mission of higher education that mattered. My name is Sandra Chu, and I am Undone. Hey, friend. I am glad you're here. Welcome to another episode of Becoming Undone, a podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. I'm Toby Brooks, a professor, learning scientist, and a lifelong learner. I've spent much of the last two decades working as an athletic trainer and a strength coach in the professional, college, and high school sports settings. And over the years, I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets high achievers apart and how failures that hurt in the moment can end up being exactly what we needed to help propel us down our path to success. Each week I invite new guests to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. I'd like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my roles at Texas Tech, but it's my attempt to apply what I've learned and what I'm learning and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers. This is your first episode, then welcome. I sincerely hope that you love it. I've had the good fortune of interviewing some incredible guests, so be sure to scroll back through and pick out some previous episodes of high achievers who didn't let failure or setback stand in the way of their eventual victories. And if you're a regular, I'm so thankful for you. I really appreciate you sticking with me through this process, and I know 2024 is going to be my best year yet. From early dreams as a laser tag specialist to recognition as an Ivy League athlete in college. Sandra Chu has never been one to choose the easy or the often traveled path. Her first career as a college rowing coach led to incredible success, but it was a yearning and a pull in a new direction that eventually led her to make the challenging but brave decision to point her boat in a new direction. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with poet, author, decorated college coach, and now successful executive search professional Sandra Chu in episode 73, Renaissance. This week our guest is, there's just no other word for it in looking at her bio, Sandra Chu is a Renaissance person. She has a varied background and high achievement in all respects. So Sandra, welcome to the show. Thank you, Sobe. It's such a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to engaging with you on your questions. And I know from chatting with you in the past that they're bound to be entertaining, at least to the two of us and hopefully also to your audience. Your bio is impressive. And I'm just going to rattle off these because in a lot of ways, there are things that on paper don't necessarily fit perfectly well together. But I think our conversation is going to point out how certain seasons in life very well can play into success later on. So you're a consultant with Whitkey for Executive Surge, principal of Two Tigers Consulting in Geneva, New York, 22 years of experience as a collegiate coach with stops at Princeton and Kansas State and others, nine NCAA championship appearances and rowing with two podium finishes. You're a published author and a poet. You've got a master's from NYU, a BA from Princeton, where you were an all Ivy athlete. So a little bit of a curve ball to you. What did you want to be growing up and what? Yeah, that's a great question. It's not on my CV anymore and it's not what I wanted to be when I grew up. My first job, one of my first jobs was a laser tag specialist. So perhaps I should have made the greatest hits list as well. I think growing up as a young kid, I came from a family of educators. So almost everybody in my immediate and extended family was a teacher of some kind, most of it in the New York State public school system. And I knew I did not want to be a teacher. So that was one thing. I started off wanting to be a cardiologist, bumped up against chemistry in my undergraduate career and did not have a good relationship with chemistry. So made some adjustments, went into psychology where I discovered that social psychology was probably my jam, but actually ended up focusing in neuropsych. And I think at the time, if say, social economics had existed, that's probably where I would have been found my best academic alignment. But what happened in college was that I happened to be a pretty successful member of the Princeton University Women's Rowing Program. And I would say, certainly, and I've said this to some of the students that I've intersected with at Princeton since graduating, that becoming a coxswain for the Women's Rowing Program enabled me to do all the things that I love doing now as a search consultant. And that is to connect people with what is possible in their lives, even if they don't believe it themselves. So, I like to think of myself as someone who sees possibilities, unearths or surfaces those for the folks that I work with today and help them to achieve perhaps what would be considered unrealized potential. And then I think there was never a box to put that calling into, right? I think I spent most of my career as a student athlete, as a mentoring coach. And I, even though I said I didn't want to be a teacher, I actually did teaching. I taught all levels, K-12, pre-K through college. So I've taught a great amount and it's always been about this idea of what's inside you that you're not recognizing, but I see and I truly believe in and I can help bring out to the outside so the rest of the world can appreciate too. And that's so powerful. I think good mentoring, whether it's modeled for us in a positive light or sometimes in its absence, we recognize that mentoring can play a key role and people speaking that life into us. So I guess before we get too far down the path, I wanna go back. You don't just end up at Princeton as a student athlete, just deciding to do that one day late in your senior year. Talk me through the process of that decision and that season of your life. Sure, yeah, and I think we'd have to go a little back further than that because, um, some of it is about where, where your family journey, um, so I'm a two and a half generation, Asian American, Chinese American, specifically, I come from a family that I was extremely loving, but had some challenges. My dad passed away when I was six years old, leaving my mom as a single parent who was a housewife and she would be in the mid sixties with not a pathway. So she went back to school. She raised myself and my sister on her own, went into education, ended up being one of the first Chinese superintendents in the public school system in New York State, finished her career there. And what I saw was that anything you wanted in life, you're going to have to work for and you're going to have to chase down. Nothing was going to be handed to you. And sometimes the things that you want in, when they seemed really far out of reach, it was the network around you that you had to lean on in order to get it. So I went to a high school that was large in the sense of where we grew up. It had 1600 students at the time. 25% of the students in that high school went on to four-year college. So just going to college is a little bit of an anomaly and not to throw any of the great educators that I worked with in that system under the bus. But when I did start exploring colleges, I felt like I wanted to go to an Ivy League school. My sister had just enrolled at Penn. There weren't a lot of students in the school that went on to Ivy League schools. I knew it was a great education, right? You don't have the access to knowing what institutions are out there. We didn't have that access then that we do now, put together my college list, which included free IVs, walked into the guidance counselor's office and was told that I should just give up and we would never go there. So I came home and I told my mom what happened and she said, oh honey, you don't ever need to speak to that lady again. So I didn't. And she, my mom, and I, we just pursued the things that seemed to make sense to us. A lot of that was down sheer luck because it was based on reputation. It wasn't actually based on the kind of terrible consideration that students take today and should take today to determine their collegiate paths and ended up with a list of three reaches and I don't know, something like 12 safety schools. I didn't understand what a safety school was cause I never went back to talk to that nice woman. But, and pretty much gone into everywhere and have to make a choice. And I chose Princeton because I knew it was a place that would challenge me academically. It was going to be very different socially. It was a place that I felt would be able to give me opportunities that I would never have elsewhere, including all the other schools on my list. And it wasn't Penn, which perhaps was the biggest driver. I had decided to stop following my incredibly brilliant and wonderful older sister and make a path of my own. So that's how I ended up there. And then to end up on the rowing team, we didn't have rowing. I was a tennis player in high school and I was not anywhere close to being good enough to play in college. And my mom and I, in all of the conversations we had about Princeton, she made an offhand remark, Oh, maybe you'll go to Princeton and maybe you'll row. We didn't know what rowing was. It was just the iconic image of Princeton student. And when I got on campus, I was like, Oh, maybe I'll row. I'm five feet tall. I weighed less than a hundred pounds when I went to school. I was not rowing. There was no way that I was going to be a rower. And I didn't understand the role of the coxswain, who is the quarterback of the boat, the strategist, the coach, the motivator, the psychologist in the boat. And when I went out to the coaches and asked, because they do an on-campus recruiting, they just stand outside, they have a little piece of white tape on the wall of the doorway that you walk through for registration. If you're above the tape, they talk to you, if you're under the tape, they don't talk to you. I was well under that tape. They didn't want to talk to me, but I rounded back to the table and I went up to the coach and I said, hey, could a person row if they've never rowed before? And he just started laughing at me. And that was, it was really a humbling moment because here I was somewhat of a pretender I had a lot of doubts about whether I actually belonged on the prison campus and The first person I dealt and I'm interacting with is laughing coming here That was not a good feeling and I said to him I just looked at him and I waited for him to stop laughing and he said honey. You're too small to row And I was like, okay. All right. I'll see you later. I start to walk away. He goes, but you could have this other job because toxins need to be small. And at that time they needed to be less than a hundred pounds. So I did that perfectly. My roommate who had been assigned to me was a product of a private school education. She had her best friend and her roommate in high school had been recruited to row at Princeton. Was a member of the junior national team at the time, got recruited to go to Princeton. She came over to visit to say hi that night. And she's like, oh my God, you're tiny, you're perfect. She said that and she wrote. This is a powerful and pivotal moment in Sandra's life. And it's not exaggeration to say that the interaction altered her life's direction for the next 20 years. I'm picturing this tiny freshman making her way on a new campus, summoning the courage that it probably took to ask this collegiate coach about participating in a sport she'd only read about, only to be nearly laughed out of the room. It seems tragic. For most, that would have been a devastating blow. But Sandra stood her ground. She wasn't big enough to pull the oar, but she was skilled and small enough to captain those who could. She eventually finds her place as the coxswain, or as she graciously translated for those of us a bit less familiar with rowing, the quarterback of the boat. Soon after, she got her shot and discovered she not only loved it, she was good. So that's how I ended up becoming a student athlete at Princeton, and I wouldn't have had that opportunity had my coach not laughed at me. He ended up being a great supporter. I owe an entire career to that laughter, and so I'm very grateful for that interaction. I think it's important to point out, we were talking off camera before the start and in your humility, you said, I don't really know how my story fits with the theme of your show, but in the first 10 minutes here, you've pointed out to what could have created a chip on your shoulder, a guidance counselor who told you you couldn't, I'm going to show you, a coach who laughed at you. I definitely sense that within your spirit, you are, you're a high achiever. And if someone doubts you, you're going to prove them wrong. So certainly that, that career at Princeton started as a student athlete and then transitioned into coaching. So talk me through that process and how you got involved as a collegiate coach. Yeah. So after Princeton, I did work in their admissions office for two years. That kind of a first job is really it's trial by fire. It was very long days during recruiting season. I think we were all at our dusts from about 7 a.m. to midnight every day from September through decision time. So it was a really good application of hard work and understanding. At that time in the office, they hired, gosh, I think they hired close to 12 new admissions officers in the same year. All of us had been either recently graduated from Princeton or other undergraduate institutions. And I was the only person who had a collegiate career in rowing. And there was, there is, still exists a very high, high performing, really wonderful community rowing club that rows out of the Princeton boathouse, but is run by the community. It's not run by anybody at the university. I missed rowing. I loved my team career and I loved teaching people about this sport that had given me so much. And so when my colleagues said, we want to learn how to row, I said, okay, let's go check out this community club. And that's how I wandered back there. And so in the community club, because I was an experienced constant and nobody joins adult rowing in order to drive the boat. You join adult rowing because you want to pull on the oar. Cause that's what you do on TV. That's what you do in the Olympics. That's what, if you go to the movies to watch, waste the boat, which everybody should go watch. And I found there that my role as a mentor to people who were learning the sport was very fulfilling. And from that point, that's where I got interested in coaching as a career. I, from admissions, I did go into some teaching positions on the high school level and also was the associate director of admissions at a local private school, just down the block from the university and when the unpaid intern, intern coaching position opened at my alma mater, I applied for it and quit my full-time well-paying job with benefits to go take an unpaid position. I work six jobs to keep myself afloat. I have a partner who is my husband, huge supporter, love him to death, who was like, sure, go ahead, pay your job, this stuff's really good. My mother stuttered a couple of times and I told her what I was doing and she's okay, honey, I love you. And so that's how it started. I did one year internship with Princeton University and then went, it's a one year, it's a one year gig. So went out and got my first permanent position or full-time position at Kansas State, worked there for three years and then decided I really wanted to be a head coach. I took the steps to do that and ended up at a small Division III school, Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges, and spent 18 years there building a program and taking it as far as I could before I stood down. Yeah. So highly decorated as a coach, according to your bio, National Regional League Coach of the Year honors, 22 years total as a coach. Talk me through the transition out of coaching into, sounds like you went from that largely into the role similar to what you do today, whether or not that was your current firm or not. But when did you know it was time to step out of that coaching season and into this season? Yeah, so I think there's a lot of things that influenced that decision. And I think I'm most thankful to Hobart and Willingsmith Colleges for being a small liberal arts institution that had to run lean. And that meant that I was given all kinds of opportunities to play outside my lane of athletics. So one of the things that I like to, when I introduce myself to my clients and search committees is to say, I used to be a rowing coach, but while I was a rowing coach, I did very strange things on my campus. For example, I co-chaired middle states re-accreditation committees. And people just look at me and they're like, what? I got to teach. I got to help develop global study abroad programs. I worked on and stood up student-athlete academic success programs. And I just had this wonderful opportunity to engage the community in all places. And I joked with my boss when he was hiring me, I said, I have functional literacy in Spanish. Obviously I'm a native English speaker, but my true talent is I speak faculty, staff, student, administrator, and board fluently, because I got to play in all of those places. So in the last few years of my tenure at Hobart and William Smith, I was doing a lot of different things outside of athletics and finding that they were very rewarding and realizing that some of the skills and talents I brought to the table, particularly I would say in diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging space for underrepresented groups in higher education, but also just for women in general, women's leadership in general, were underutilized. I had, as a coach, depending on the size of your team, you have a lot of influence over a couple dozen kids. Maybe you graduate in rowing seven to 12 kids at a time, and those are really rewarding and really valuable, but I also felt that there were a lot of students on campus that I wasn't able to offer any assistance to. And so I wanted a bigger role. Beyond students, I felt because I was running, in addition to being coached, I was running a consulting firm for leadership studies. I felt like I had something to offer to institutions, but particularly to leaders in higher education. I felt like we were missing some things in that process. So I decided that I wanted to step away from our clinics and I wanted to see if I could give this thing a go. I had a sense that I would like it. I had a sense that I could be good at it. And at the time, each of us was experiencing some financial distress and they were offering separation packages. We had early retirement packages for people. I had a significant birthday and I more than met the number of minimum years for staff members to take a package. So I decided to take it. And I did that in January of 2020. We did not know what was around the corner and I did time my separation a little bit with the talent of my team. So we hadn't been to the national championship in a little while. I had a group of individuals at that time who were stellar. And I felt that not only could we go, but we had a good chance of being on the podium that year. So that's what we were working towards. We were laying down the numbers on paper and all the water that all led that day. We were at the boathouse, we were loading up the trailer to head downtown for spring break and my AD called, she's bringing him back home, like come back to campus. So then we spent the next five hours cleaning the boathouse, packing up the boats and crying because that's when I announced to the team that I'd be stepping down. And it was a hard thing to do. I was leaving for purely personal reasons of my own, but I know that my departure landed on some of the students as a little bit of abandonment and a little bit of personal, it felt personal to them, but I was leaving them personally. And I think that was the hardest part of departing. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I think we all have this kind of shared trauma event. And I remember I was a faculty member and I was watching the Big 12 basketball tournament and our team was warming up. They were in Kansas City and during warm ups, they pulled them off the floor and Big 12 tournaments canceled. And as a professor, I have students who are at that event and I have athletic training students looking to do internships all over the country. And I can remember one in particular got very heated. She said, why won't you let me go to Seattle? I said, I'll let you go. I might not be able to get you back. There was so much uncertainty in that time. And so it sounds like your timeline got sped up considerably faster than you would wanted it. And let that play out. So talk me through that transition. I didn't realize the timing when I knew you'd stepped away from college coach. I didn't realize that it coincided precisely. Yeah. Yeah. So I re- I re- did my position until the end of May. So my departure date was June 1st. So I was able to do the best we could as all coaches were doing at the time, trying to keep the team together, trying to keep the training during COVID when they were at home. Learned a lot about Zoom, which has been very helpful in my current job. And just trying to support these amazing women through that transition. At the same time, my institution was trying to figure out what do they do to all kinds of financial pressures. And during, right before I left, they actually made a decision to compress the coaching staff across men's and women's rowing. And they eliminated a few positions. They changed the way that was structured and it was really hard because we couldn't, uh, we didn't have the temporal ability to communicate that to the team in a way that I would have wanted to communicate it to them because of COVID and so I think that was pretty difficult and it definitely, it wasn't the exit ramp that I thought I was going to have. I had about six months of financial stability that I was planning on using to transition into search and then the world shut down and of course, hearing those words come out of my mouth, it seems very insensitive to those people for whom, for whom didn't have a cushion. So in many ways, I was incredibly fortunate to be working from home, to be able to support my daughter who went into remote learning at the time as a middle school student. My husband is also in higher education. He was able to work from home. So certainly not a pity party for Sandra Chu, not in any way, shape or form. We were very fortunate at that time, but it was different. It wasn't what I thought was going to happen. So the whole next year I spent cobbling together, consulting jobs. I did some, like a laser tech specialist, I did some really weird things in that year, one of them was helping to facilitate, coordinate and produce a K-12 symposium on the impact of COVID on K-12 education for superintendents and principals across the globe. Worked with, got a chance to work with actually television producers in New York City and had, yeah, it was very strange to be doing things like that. Did some private consulting as well. And then spent the rest of my time trying to build the skills that I would need as a higher education consultant, took a lot of informational interviews until Whit Kiefer and I intersected and they found value in the roles that I held on my campus and said, great, we're ready. 2021. Higher education search just boomed because there had been so many people who stepped down during COVID and so many places needed new leaders. So. Something you touched on that I want to go back to. I think there's a really complex set of emotions that surrounds COVID. And I'm like you, part of you feels guilty almost because people were dying and there was unprecedented stress and strain, particularly in the healthcare industries, a lot of the service industries. But I look back on that season and that was time I got to, I had a daughter who was a junior in high school and a son who was in eighth grade at the time. And yeah, we lost some things. We missed out on spring sports and my daughter was in the arts, but we watched all the Marvel movies together and we spent time as a family doing book studies and there were just opportunities that created for our family that never would have happened. And so I guess what did that season in the midst of your massive transition, this huge pivot from two decades of coaching into building something new, what was the biggest lesson you learned from that season of your life? Yeah, I think, I think as you said, like there were opportunities for us to hit that reset slow down button. One of the biggest reasons why I left coaching was because I was in service to daughters, fantastic daughters of other people. And every time I answered an emergency phone call and had to spend and wanted to and went to spend time sitting with an athlete at the ER until their parents could get there, for example, was time that I wasn't making that same choice for my own daughter. And she grew up with the team. She went to her first regatta at four weeks old. She knows how to drop a course. She was on a rigged boat. She can strap boats down to a trailer. She knows course strategy and racing strategy. She's been to many leadership meetings with the team. They raised her. She had great role models, but it wasn't, it wasn't the same as having your mom. And so being able to make that decision to leave coaching in order to invest more in her and in my husband as well was the right thing to do for me at the time. I think COVID amplified that ability. Like I went from, oh, I'll pick her up after school to, oh, I'm homeschooled, they went in. But I think that was a great opportunity. And I think what I learned was that whatever situation, I don't know if I really learned it or it just was an opportunity to re-experience it because I think this is the way I've always conducted my life is like, the situation you're in is the situation you're in. If you don't like the situation and you gotta do something to change it, you have to impact it in some way, you have to bring in resources or look for new ways to pivot yourself, your identity, your skillset. And I think that's what COVID did for me. Like it wasn't gonna be an easy path to this new career. So what was I gonna do about it? Lot of networking, a lot of networking, a lot of conversations, a lot of time to work on my skillset but it amplified the need to say, the situation is what you have and how you address it and how you move through it and how you continue to seek ways to improve yourself and be excellent at the end of that situation, go to bed is the key to having the next step of success or just even the next step in general. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but I can remember moments of clarity during that time where I thought this is it. This is the pace I want to live at. I've been doing too much and I've found myself checking myself. Like I look at my schedule and I'll be like, this is not the lesson COVID taught you, like you're slipping right back into those old habits. What do you think that transition has meant for you in your current role? What do your days look like today? I think one of the reasons why I've been really successful as a new consultant is because I was a coach and coaches are used to working very long days. We don't really have time off. You don't get to tell a student athlete, Oh, you're in crisis. Can I get back to you at 9am tomorrow morning when I come back on the clock? And I think my ability just to take on a lot and get a lot done in a small amount of time to very high quality has been the way that I've wanted to conduct my career as a consultant and it's working out well. So the days are long. I typically open my calendar to meetings at 8 AM and then I go as late as I need to go. I live in New York, so lots of times I'm on East Coast time and my candidates and clients are too, and sometimes they're just not. I recently concluded a search in Utter. It says it's snowing. When I was logging in at 2.45 AM to run some like final and standard. I was laughing, but I wasn't making laugh crying at that moment in time. So we do what we have to do to deliver the experience that we want our clients and candidates to have. And I think my stint in athletics taught me that. Yeah. And you have an injury, you have an illness, you have papers to, you have whatever you have as a student athlete, but you also have a race and you also have practice. And you like, it's a little bit, but the parallel is there, right? How do you strengthen muscles? You break them down a little bit and then you build them back. And I think that's what athletics did for my professional muscle. So I think that's one thing that I learned, I think to bounce a little bit back towards what did we learn during COVID, we learned what was important to us. And what I learned was that there were many things that I did as a coach, which at the time when that ended and I was on a flight, felt like, oh shoot, I made this terrible mistake. And this was a big part of my identity. And COVID helped me understand that the identity was the skill. It was what I was delivering, it was how I was contributing to the overall mission of higher education that matter. And I think that's what I retain today. I think you alluded to training a muscle. I've often said that athletics was the heaviest lift of my life and working 60, 70 hour weeks taught me that I could do it, but it also made everything, quote unquote, normal, feel like a part-time job. So I fill that with a podcast or other thing. And so I definitely relate to the fact that athletics shows us what we're capable of. For me, it wasn't necessarily sustainable, but it's helped me prioritize. It's helped me understand that I am capable probably of a lot more than I would have recognized had I never entered that space. Yeah, yeah. So you went from coaching elite athletes to coaching and recruiting high-level executive talent these days. What do you think those years of coaching 18 to 22-year-old young women taught you that parlays over into your success today? Yeah, some of them, some of the things are really similar and particularly working with a female population in this particular society. One of the biggest hurdles that I think I hope my candidates get over is imposter syndrome. Obviously, as I said in the beginning of this podcast, I experienced it myself as a student at Princeton and certainly continue to experience it in certain spaces today. And understanding, being able to see and view and maybe understand somebody's hesitancy to put their name in as a candidate, regardless of gender or identity. That's a secret power, I think. And being able to help coach somebody through that so that they can chase, I call it the things to your heart rule that I have with my candidates, right? If the opportunity sinks to your heart, like you should apply because the only guarantee I have for you is you're not going to get the job if you don't apply. That's the only guarantee that I can give you as a consultant. I don't know how well you're going to progress. I can tell you that some people have more chances or fewer chances than others, but if you don't apply, I can't help you. And I think that's a major carryover, helping people see beyond their own personal doubts into what is possible. And then giving them the tools, the structure, the language to represent themselves and their materials so that they can make that case for themselves so that you have that self-advocacy. So self-advocacy would be another part of that. I think that it's helpful for all of us to remember that everyone is doing something for the first time and so I enjoy actually working with candidates who are in this process for the first time and helping them to see that it's not a right and it's not exactly a privilege either but there are supports baked into the CERC system that a lot of people don't know to ask for. And I think you've probably experienced this as a candidate yourself. There's a consultant out there who said, yeah, I'll take a look at your cover letter before you send it in. Or they looked at it when you did send it in and then they sent it back and said, this isn't going to work. I do that. I do that at Fairmount as well. And I think that helping people to see the best of themselves, because I think as humans, especially the ones who are humble and have that humility, don't always see the ways in which they are a rock star and they need to amplify that. It's somehow in the process. And so I think that's a big thing that I take away because 18 to 21 year olds are really not good at that. They're always like, no, somebody else is better than me. So helping people to see, no, you actually are great. Right. Let's amplify that and get that out out front. That's powerful. And I want to commend you. You absolutely have that unique ability in your position to be encouraging, to be helpful. Many people look at the job market today and they say it's a job seekers market. Every place is hiring. And that's largely true in the vast majority of service industries. They can't hire enough people to staff the Walmart. My wife went to pick up groceries three times and they said, we can't hire people. They're having troubles. Higher education is a much different animal and the, the wasteland of LinkedIn jobs, I can tell you how difficult it is to stir any kind of interest in your capabilities and I think if there's anything I've learned from this process, it's that it might not be the role for me. It might not be the perfect fit, but what can I learn from this process that might make me better suited for the next role? And I think it's pretty clear. Your story is unique among your colleagues. I have not encountered a lot of search executives that have your VITA. How do you think your journey has shaped you most in your current role? I think it gives me the opportunity to speak to candidates who are trying to figure out, like, I think candidates approach the conversation, the initial conversation with me, the exploratory conversation about the role, and they ask typically two questions. What's the timeline? And what are they really looking for? Or what is the profile of the person that they're looking for? And I don't think that's necessarily the right question to ask, right? Because what if you don't fit the profile? And so I use my own personal journey to explain, like, nobody would expect a collegiate rowing coach to become a higher education search consultant. It just, yes, an athletics director, certainly somebody who's higher up in the administrative echelon, but a male manager in athletics, probably not. And yet, Whit Kiefer was able to see the skills behind my title and to take me holistically as a person and believe in that and then nurture that. And that's where I go with candidates who are wondering if there's an alignment to say, look beyond your title. What do you actually do? My title was rowing coach. I coach rowing. That's what I do. But I had to look beyond that. I had to be able to make the case for the ability to motivate, to recruit, to structure pedagogical approaches to building physical skills, mental skills, emotional skills, to build the maturity of an athlete and bring that into my practice. And so I definitely see my position as coach first, probably, and recruiter second. And I liked what you said about helping people get ready for the next role, whether it's the role that I'm recruiting for. I never see an interaction with a candidate as the last interaction I'm going to have, even when I claimed them. There might be something down the road and if I can help them get ready for that, then that's certainly a privilege. Yeah. I just saw this week that I believe the president of Harvard has either stepped down or was removed. There are so many landmines in the higher education landscape now. What you say can be canceled. What you don't say can be canceled. And I was talking to my daughter about this and we were talking about the Israel Palestine and not to get political, just to recognize it for what it is. I said, I can't imagine how hard it must have been to land that role as the president of Harvard and the accomplishment. And if you look at the years leading up to that, like this is an entire lifetime of work that led up to being placed in that position. It just gets wiped away. And you realize in an instant just how perilous some of these positions are. And I don't know what the average tenure of a college president is. I've heard five years or less in some instances with hundreds or even thousands of hours in the process to get someone across that finish line. And so for that to just be wiped away because of something you either said or something you didn't say, to me, there's a real tragedy there and that's not to take either side, but I just, I told her, I said, I'm on the front end of this. And in looking for future opportunities, I realized just how difficult it can be to create those opportunities to get that initial conversation and then to get there, it's something else. Yeah, I think the challenge for leaders in general, but particularly in higher education leadership is that we are in a society, we are a society right now that has incredibly enormous scrutiny and incredibly small grace. And, um, I I'm guessing we're similar ages back when we were starting our careers or when we were in high school or college or whatever, like you could say a whole bunch of stuff that didn't end up on Twitter. And I think it, it made it possible for people to make mistakes. That any one of us, there is not an individual on the globe who can look back at their entire life's work and say, I have never had to have that lesson where I wasn't compassionate or I wasn't a hundred percent intellectually the smartest person in the room. Like it's just not possible. And that's how we learn and grow as individuals. And you know it from your background in athletics, like how many athletes have you worked with where you're like, Oh my gosh, what did you just do? Right. Whether that's in a social situation or an athletic situation. And it is that importance. And I've heard it from many of the guests on your show to say, what did you learn at that moment and how would you do it differently going forward? But for many of our leaders right now, there isn't a grace opportunity to say this person could change or this person, they made an error. And I think higher education is at a very precarious moment in time. And, and that's part of what makes my job rewarding is finding the leaders who can navigate that moment and help push education, higher education forward to make a better global society and to solve the myriad of really complex issues that are facing us as a global civilization. And that's what's exciting to me as well. That is exciting. I don't want to gloss over something you mentioned earlier as we wrap this up. You were raised in a single-parent home. You lost your dad early. If you could go back in time and speak a word of encouragement or inspiration into young 6-, 7-year-old Sandra, you could look her right in the eyes, what would you tell her? I don't know. I think, again, you know that I'm wired a little bit. As I mentioned before, the situation is what it is. We see it too as parents, and I'm sure you've seen this as well, the space that a child occupies before they get to the life experience or maturity level where they actually see how their behaviors or consequences land, like outside themselves. Like they have this very internal lens. I don't know when that happens or whether or not there's a way to expedite or speed up that process. I do know that again, not, I'm never a person who's going to have my own pity party and I lost my dad, but my family and community network was so strong, right? I had uncles who stepped in. I had an incredible role model in my mom. You talked about 60, 70 hour weeks in athletics. I don't remember my mom sleeping when I was growing up. Like it just wasn't an option. Between going to school, getting her degree, doing a student teaching, raising two girls, um, her first, her first job, I think she commuted an hour in each direction. And we had neighbors to step in to help with getting us off to school too. We had relatives who spent summers with us while my mom took extra classes. And I think if I could say anything to our younger selves, both myself and my sister, was to perhaps have that maturity to appreciate what that network does, did at the, in the moment, to be able to say thank you in the moment versus the thank yous that we're saying now as adults, um, which are still valuable. Sometimes you just wish, right? You just wish your own kid would be like, Hey, thanks for doing this. You're thanking you. Thanks for packing my lunch. My daughter is full of gratitude. So I'm lucky for that. But yeah, I think it's that ability as a young kid to realize that bad things happen, but there are good things also happening as well. Sage advice. I got two left for you and I ask these of all my guests. The first one is a little bit of an oddball. I love music and the emotions that it can represent that sometimes words can't. So if we were to watch a montage of your life, what song would you pick to play in the background and why? Yeah, I knew you were going to ask this question. I have a lot of, I discussed it with my family and they were like, oh, you don't know it? You should practice. So one of the things I think is I like some singers that my daughter rolls her eyes out. And one of those singers is Sia. She doesn't really roll her eyes to Sia, but I think Unstoppable is probably the song that I resonate with the most. You just, you keep going and you're powerful. Whatever position you're in, there's something inside you that has the power to succeed, has the power to surprise people, has the power to continually seek out personal excellence. I think that is probably the song that would define me. I love it, it's fitting. Last one, what for Sandra Chu remains undone? Yeah, I don't know, I think there are things that you wish that you could do better. I think there are things that obviously people should have goals. I believe in goals. But I also think, as you said in the introduction of this podcast, like some of the things that are undone are just things where you just need to, you just need to be continuously learning, right? So of course I would love to be a much better skier than I am. I started learning how to ski in my forties. So you can imagine that that's been a little bit of a challenging journey. I, I was pursuing the life of a poet before I had decided to become a rowing coach. And I don't know if that's undone because I don't really think I have the talent in that area. But of course you always wonder, was there some kind of publication that I didn't get to pursue? But I also know that in order to pursue some things, you can't pursue others. So I'm willing to give up on that. At one point, maybe five or eight years ago, I liked to sing. I didn't know if I was like annoying in singing along with things. So I took some voice lessons and I do like to sing. My husband was learning how to play the guitar and maybe there's an opportunity for us to sometimes sing and play publicly. But I think that's pretty far down the road. But those are pursuits that are frivolous. I feel like if there are things that aren't done, they're coming. Yeah. No. How can listeners connect with you? Yeah. So I'm like, there, there is a category of big undone-ness in Sandra Chu's life, it's social media. I am not good at it. I don't enjoy it. I find that it takes up time from things that I really need to be doing to be successful as a mom and as a professional. So I'm really bad at that. So I actually don't, I don't have any, I have social media, but it's not a good place. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Sandra J Chu. You can also find me at WIC-EFER through our consultants page. My email is s2 at wic-efer.com. That's two T's and two F's in that. So it's pretty easy to do a Google search and find me. I also do some mentoring in the athletics coaching space, almost exclusively for rowing coaches, but I welcome any coaches who want to reach out and connect. I would love to do that. And of course, some of my space involves folks who don't always have the clearest, easiest path in athletics or in higher education. So I encourage folks to reach out to me that way too. That's great. Sandra, it's been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for stopping by today. Yeah, appreciate it too, Toby. Thanks so much for reaching out and inviting me. Unexpected invitation, but so glad that you made it and that I took advantage of it as well. Yep, for sure. My name is Sandra Chu. I am a higher education consultant at Wake Heifer and I am Undone. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash EP seven three to see the notes links and images related to today's guest Sandra Chu. I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout so if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by tell me about it. Surf on over to undone podcast.com click that contact tab in the top menu and drop me a note. Coming up I've got some incredible guests including coach and former pro athlete, Marshall Roberts. I'll also check in with former Texas Tech Masked Rider, Ashley Adams, and have a conversation with Kansas State Athletic Trainer, Jared Alluwek. So stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone is a Nitro-Hype creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod. And follow me at TobyJBrooks on X, Instagram, and TikTok. Check out my link tree at linktr.ee slash TobyJBrooks. Listen, subscribe, and please leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. From my heart to yours, thank you. Until next time, everybody, keep getting better. you