ABOUT TRISHA TYLER
Those of us with any business-world authority obviously have a decision to make. I’ve made mine. And I make it easier for senior leaders to make theirs too.
Oddly enough, consulting in the human capital, insurance and risk arena is my old stomping ground. I held various leadership roles managing P&L, one of them in the belly of a massive, Fortune 200 conglomerate managing a $250M business. It wasn’t my grand plan to spend decades in the field. Except right out of college, with my beloved philosophy degree in hand, I needed a paycheck, so I quickly seized what was NOT my dream job. But 5 years in — I realized it was my career.
Resourcefulness is a relentless push to have an imperfect situation turn out. And it might be the most efficient way to discover what you're actually built for.
I rose through the ranks quickly by creating centers of action where there stagnation before. Over the years, I honed an ability to construct plans around big ideas, align stakeholders around the same solution, build qualified teams, ultimately make other people money, as well as myself, providing me the assets to do what I really love which was, to my mother’s dismay, swim with hammerhead sharks…and whales and piranhas and the multitude of lifeforms that live underwater and that you really can’t comprehend, nature channel or not, until you’ve put yourself on their turf.
You can watch a whale shark swimming on a screen. Or you can physically slip into their world, hover out of your element in an endless foreign darkness and truly witness the oncoming presence of an animal 40ft long gliding towards you. There is a stark, visceral difference between pseudo-fathoming a concept from the familiarity of your living room vs. living out the experience where it’s actually going down.
Inertia just isn’t possible once you’ve had your mind blown. And an altered perspective creates a lot of energy that must be put somewhere and to good use.
I dive all over the world as an ocean conservationist, some of my earliest experiences being in the Galapagos. I’ve done shark research and data capturing, educating and volunteering in aquariums around the country. I helped found a ocean conservation nonprofit. I’ve taken thousands of underwater photographs and hundreds of hours of underwater video footage. And that’s just in my free time.
In the midst of the pandemic, I left my decades-long insurance career for the education I needed to be part of humanity’s timely, dare I say exciting, mass reinvention. An EMBA from UCLA focused on finance and corporate governance, a thesis on sustainability as a business commitment, and a Chief Sustainability Officer Program from MIT. The work I do now applies a knowledgeable sustainability lens to the work I’ve done professionally for decades.
Which is, in short, to take ideas out of the imagination and place them into terrain where big ambitions are reached. This is how you supply the real adventure - the one MOST people want to participate in.
