#LifeLessons - Paula Jacobson

NAME: Paula Jacobson

AGE: 42

INSTAGRAM HANDLE: @pauliej/@dothemostsocial

JOB TITLE: Founder – People & Impact Agency

By day, Paula owns a People & Impact Agency called Do the Most. She helps businesses make their work more meaningful by providing talent services; from hiring, retention and employee engagement, to implementing impactful programmes and policies. Paula has a background in bartending, air hostessing, customer service, HR and her favourite thing to do - recruitment, with her most recent and previous role being head of people & culture at Dubai-based, global mega-brand; Huda Beauty.

By night (or weekend), Paula is a runner, surfer, boxer, bibliophile, movie buff and Netflix-lover. Her simple life pleasures include getting lost in a novel, lazy lunches with friends, and doing anything in or beside the ocean. She's also an ocean campaigner, spending her spare time with fellow advocates working on events and initiatives for conservation.

Paula is a dog-parent to two chihuahuas (rescues - both named after Harry Potter characters), and she shares a Notion page with her partner that contains a bucket list of travel destinations including Madagascar and the Orient Express. Paula is also a member of MEPRA Sustainability Committee, has a degree from University of Birmingham & UCLA, and is a qualified Reiki and NLP practitioner. She shops vintage, is a skincare junkie, and has just started taking HRT.

Let's discover Paula's 3 biggest #LifeLessons:

#LIFELESSON – 1

You’re born with all your eggs. When I was 23, I was cabin crew with Virgin Atlantic, on a routine night-stop to New York. At the hotel, me and a few of the crew were up bright and early, getting ready to visit the Empire State Building, when I was rushed with crippling abdominal pain in a scruffy yellow taxi, to Lenox Hill Emergency Room in the Upper East side. After 2 days in a busy, noisy ER, after numerous scans and ultrasounds, doctors discovered two huge cysts – one on each ovary (1 was the size of a grapefruit and had been causing my tubes to twist). Cut to 2 months later, post-surgery (to remove said cysts and a large part of both ovaries), I was told by a fertility specialist that my egg reserve was significantly depleted. My chances of having children had reduced to 15%, because most of the ovarian tissue had been removed, and with that, most of my eggs. I don’t know about you, but I was never taught that we are born with all the eggs we will ever have, in our bodies. Since then, I have shared this fact with several intelligent, educated women, and none of them knew this. It certainly prompted me to learn more about my own body.

#LIFELESSON – 2

If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. If you don’t know which course of action to take, or which decision to make, sometimes it’s best to stop, take a breath, and surrender. Most decisions in life involve more than one person. Often, clarity emerges when we make space for others to contribute and play a more significant role in the decision-making process. If the path is not clear to us, it’s ok to stop and allow things to unfold around us.

For most of my life I used to try to control situations, outcomes, and people. I would fixate on needing to know what would happen next, trying to influence the outcome, getting annoyed with people when they didn’t do as I wanted them to, and wanting things to happen now. There have been situations where I have tried to force and push things forward, and they either did happen, but went wrong, or they didn’t happen at all. In the end, I learned that if I just stopped and let things be, that something would happen. It may not have been the thing I wanted to happen, but it came naturally, and that felt better than getting anything by forcing it.

#LIFELESSON – 3

50% of something is better than 100% of nothing. This one came from my Mum, who was also a big fan of negotiating, getting discounts, and joining loyalty schemes! Put this in the context of business. Recently, someone approached me to start a business with me, and my instinctive reaction to proposals like this is: NO! I don’t want to get into a partnership where there’d be a complex division of assets and financials, or; drama. Then I realised, the difference with this proposition is the person – she’s the kind of person I’d want to work with. We share values, work ethic, and our ultimate objective is to make the world a better place. Plus, if I start a new business/revenue stream where there was none before, I’d be getting 50% of something I didn’t previously have. Another context: imagine you’re a landlord with a beautiful one bedroom apartment. Would you rather have the place sit empty while you wait for a high rental income, or get a lower offer from a tenant who is willing and ready?