The diplomat’s daughter

Natalia Albert’s life reads like an international best-seller – laced with adventure, adversity and sheer determination. The Wellington-based expat Mexican has come from nothing to teach women to excel in a business world still filled with inconsistencies in gender equality. This is her inspiring story.

By Glenn Baker.

Natalia Albert knows all about upheaval. It’s been the story of her life. Born in Mexico City, the only child of a single mum, a career diplomat, her early life was shaped through her mother’s extensive overseas postings. Home was Vancouver, Chicago, New York, with the occasional break back to Mexico. Fluent in both English and Spanish, it was little wonder a teenage Natalia suffered from an identity crisis.

Dyslexia would prove to be another challenge – and having to start over so many times in different cities stamped its mark on a young Natalia’s survival mechanism.
“It was critical in developing my flexibility in thinking,” she admits, “and therefore my decision-making.”

It moulded her work ethic early on too. “I had to do way more than my class peers just to scrape through my grades.”

Constantly coping with new schools meant becoming very creative mentally and emotionally, as well as resilient. Spending so much time alone meant Natalia struggled to develop lasting relationships; life was potentially scary yet boring, she says, and it forced her to grow up quickly.

To complicate matters, Natalia’s mother married four times. For Natalia there was no bonding with her first three step-dads or any of her step-siblings. She took her paternal father to court in Mexico to prove paternity – but despite a positive DNA test, the judge, a friend of her father, dismissed the evidence as inconclusive.

“I had therapy and special tutoring at all ages to help me cope,” she says. Being a diplomat’s daughter and living the lifestyle meant there were many perks and everything was paid for.

Although she was away from home a lot, Natalia says her mum was very loving. Fortunately her fourth husband, a Swiss diplomat, was ‘a keeper’. The couple now live
in Madagascar.

Having experienced the quality of life in North American cities, Natalia found it extremely difficult adjusting to life back in sprawling Mexico City, with its teeming 22-plus million inhabitants.

But good fortune was about to smile down on her.

Prior to moving to Madagascar, Natalia’s mother and husband were based in Wellington, and he was happy to sponsor his new step-daughter down from Mexico to explore New Zealand and get established here.

Natalia remembers arriving in Wellington on Christmas week, 2011 and finding the place “dead”.

“Mum and I walked from the Beehive, up Lambton Quay to the end of Courtney Place, and I asked her ‘is this it?

We just walked for 40 minutes – where is everybody?’

“There was a freezing southerly; it certainly took me a while to get my head around the weather.”

It took the 29-year-old some time to adjust completely, but once she decided to immigrate for good to live in the capital, she fell in love with it. Now she never wants
to leave.

“It’s the jewel in the crown. I’ve lived in cities all over the world and I don’t think Wellingtonians appreciate just how incomparable the harbour city really is.

“It’s what every city should feel and look like; everything works like clockwork, it’s as good as it gets on this planet. I write about it a lot in my blogs.”

Life in Utopia
Taking a lesson from her childhood, Natalia embraced the local culture, but admits her new life has been “a rocky road”. In her twenties she had accumulated significant senior management experience with various hotel chains around the world, but in Wellington that experience counted for nothing.

Her first job she’d rather forget – it involved washing dishes and driving her boss around the city. “Not exactly what I signed up for.”

That job was followed by an entry-level position at the Hotel Museum “where I ended up folding napkins for eight hours a day”.

“Having to start all over again was an emotional shock,” she says. It was time to think outside the box and get started on the goals she set when she came to New Zealand, including a specific financial goal she wanted to achieve by her 40th birthday, “that didn’t involve selling my soul to the devil.”

Natalia remembered how poor she had been when one of her mum’s ex’s took off with all their money, leaving them in debt. “It was a dark and scary place and I promised I’d never do that to myself.”

She took up temping to pay back her step-dad and clear her debts. Then she set some annual financial targets for herself – meeting them “like clockwork”. Her ten year goal was ticked off after just three.

Now she was working as a project manager for the government, and studying part-time for a BA.

“But I needed to prove to Wellingtonians that I could do something worthwhile beyond photocopying and washing dishes. So I started a not-for-profit.

“That was an important move; it was the key to my professional success here in Wellington.”

It was also a test of her mental flexibility and creative ability – raising funds for a worthwhile charity by getting women to walk long distances.

Some might say it’s a little crazy as goals go, but Natalia had walked 900 kilometres across Spain in 2004 and understood the value of walking long distances.
So she set a goal to enrol 100 women to walk 100 kilometres for Oxfam Trailwalker.

What followed even surprised Natalia. The five women she knew at that time in Wellington turned up at the first monthly training walk. Over subsequent months the numbers grew – along with Natalia’s networks and reputation – and a total of 40 women enrolled. It was a world record for the event.

Two years later it was time for a new venture; time to acquire skills for building teams and generating money.

Pivotal moves
Still working full-time and studying part-time, Natalia signed up for a licence to run an annual TEDxWomen event in Wellington. “It was another pivotal move in my career,” she says. “This took multi-tasking to a quantum level, but I always kept my goals in mind. There was logic to my madness.”

TEDxWomen proved a hit. Over four years the “community event” helped Natalia develop the skills she needed, but the nature of the licence meant she wasn’t generating money for herself. Her government project work wasn’t exactly firing her up either.

“Long term it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

So what was the next step to reaching her financial goals? “It involved getting a brand, building a team, generating money, including money for myself.”

This time she didn’t start from scratch. She had already experienced the Jness personal development programme for women when she was in Mexico, as well as Executive Success Programmes (ESP) – a programme that provides personal and professional development employing American scientist Keith Raniere’s Rational Inquiry methodology.

“This breakthrough in human performance technology is designed to help people discover, develop and utilise more of their untapped potential,” explains Natalia. “It’s an intensive business and goal focused 16-day programme for men and women taken by leading CEOs and entrepreneurs around the world.

“They completely changed the way I did things. This goal-setting tactic I have? It’s all thanks to those programmes,” she says.

Following intense research, Natalia bought the licence for New Zealand and Australia in August 2015, quit her day job, and is now working full-time to get Jness and ESP off the ground, while maintaining her involvement with TEDxWomen (the next is scheduled for October). She has the support of mentors and friends, as well as partner Mike – a successful Wellington-based architect who’s been particularly helpful in helping Natalia understand the ‘Kiwi psyche’.

The New Zealand pilot for Jness will take place in August, while the ESP programme pilot happens on June 29th. The goal is to open Wellington, Auckland, Melbourne and Sydney for both programmes over the next three years. The initial pilots, which lean heavily on overseas expertise, will test the waters.

From personal experience Natalia knows these programmes work, she has her track record since arriving in New Zealand to prove it. She’s passionate about their potential for achieving results in this country.

Gender inequality
Natalia finds the subject of gender inequality in business fascinating and describes New Zealand as “super progressive, ten times better than Latin America, but there are still inconsistencies”. Coming from Mexico, where women face widespread discrimination and female entrepreneurs are “socially punished”, she’s aware that it’s much easier to be proactive on the subject here – challenging and disrupting the status quo, which, she believes, “sometimes looks like a very white male Western heterosexual way of doing, thinking and acting.”

Gender equality happens all over the world; New Zealand is no exception,” she adds, citing boardrooms, meetings and conferences as examples where men far outnumber women participants. She’s keen to start a conversation about gender discrimination in New Zealand business, which, although often subtle to the extent of unnoticed, nevertheless exists. She has stories to share that highlight men’s underlying patronising, condescending attitudes; comments to women that would never be made to male colleagues. “Discrimination has many layers and many ways of filtering through.”

Women make successful business owners but they must understand what it takes to succeed, says Natalia. “You need to be resilient and have a very clear goal. If your goal isn’t clear you’ll let peoples’ opinion mess with your head. You have to own it; get feedback, bite the bullet and keep going.”

While men may muddle their way through, Natalia believes women find business ownership a tougher proposition – emotional, unsettling and frustrating.
“But ultimately it’s really, really satisfying,” she says. “It’s doable too – if I can do it, anybody can do it.”

Her advice, and her example, for women business owners is to be yourself; don’t sacrifice who you really are. “Don’t transform yourself within the context of your business just for the sake of the business and then go home to be yourself. You can be assertive; you can act and be feminine; you can be emotional and honest and still be a businesswoman.”

As for Natalia’s business plans, she’s realistic about the future. “If my two new projects don’t work out at least I have the confidence and skill to go and find something else. I know where my path lies.”

That path for this diplomat’s daughter may have been a long and winding one, but you sense that she has finally sighted the final destination.