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Meet Trailblazer Danielle Shoots

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Danielle Shoots.

Danielle, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
My story starts at age 16 when I walked into a hospital as a teenager and came out a mom to the sweetest baby boy. Being a teen mom is at the root of my journey and is a piece of everything I do as an executive, a business owner or any other title I may carry. My son gave me focus, a reason to keep going when I wanted to quit and most importantly, he helped me understand the importance of gratitude. My life has been so blessed and I seek to give it back every day.

I became a CFO for the first time at age 26. I had a team of 27 and had no idea what I was doing as a leader. After messing it up for four to six months, I realized that if I didn’t start leading from a place that felt authentic to me, I was going to fail. I asked my team to help me grow, I started to willingly admit when I didn’t have the answer in rooms full of far more experienced people. I started to ask people that worked for me to give me feedback and to coach me and stopped pretending that my place on the org chart meant I was supposed to stop learning. Through a near-disastrous go at my first executive role, I learned what leadership truly was and I also learned how much I love it. I was the youngest CFO in the State Health Department’s history and a few years later, I became one of the youngest Vice President’s in a fortune fifty company.

As a young, black, female executive walking into rooms where people’s mouths visibly dropped when they meet me is a daily battle in knowing myself, knowing my worth and fighting imposter syndrome. I have learned that conforming to what everyone else is instead of showing up as my authentic self was never the answer for career success because the exhaustion of inauthenticity that so many women and people of color feel pressured to carry into the workplace is eventually career limiting. I realized very early in my career that leadership was going to require me to know myself so that I could be strong enough for my team and most importantly, strong enough for myself.  Knowing who you are allows you to tell people before they can decide for you and my career has been successful because I don’t leave a lot of room for people to fill in the gaps with their own stories. I share myself as a leader and as a human and what I find is that when you share yourself, people of all types will find seething they relate to in you and will become your advocate. I was fortunate to lead teams at an early age and to learn these lessons. Most people go their whole career and never solve this puzzle for themselves. Inspired by this gap in leadership training, I launched the Daily Boss Up in 2018. The Daily Boss Up is a digital service that provides daily leadership and life tips, tricks, and coaching via text message. The subscription-based model is meant to help leaders (both with and without actual people management responsibility) to take time each day to learn themselves, to be inspired, to document their journey and if nothing else, just to pause and reflect.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
My journey has been anything but smooth. Just like every woman I know, I have lost some major battles and won some wars. What is true for all of us is that we have likely conquered some real life shit that is more difficult than anything we will experience at work. As women, we often climb one mountain and then set our sights on the next without taking time to celebrate our victories. What I tell young women is that you already have the grit you need to be exactly what you want to be, you just aren’t giving yourself credit for it. On my hardest days where I am experiencing discrimination in the workplace or when I feel like I am failing as a parent or when I can’t find the hours to be a good friend or spouse, I remind myself that while might be experiencing some tough days, I will never be sixteen and pregnant again. Everything that happens pails in comparison to that. When I remind myself of how hard that was and that I somehow made it though, the current struggles become surmountable. We all that story inside of us. At very early ages, we have overcome so much and we just need to remind ourselves how far we come and how badass we must have been to get through what we have. Most of us have the tools we need and we have to figure out what they are and sharpen them every day.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about The Daily Boss Up – what should we know?
The Daily Boss Up a digital startup that provides a daily dose of leadership coaching for leaders at all stages in their career. Members of the Daily Boss Up receive daily text messages that contain tips, tricks, and inspiration for growth as leaders both in life and career. The monthly subscription service is priced at $7.99 a month, a price point meant to be inclusive of anyone who wants to grow. We often get people leadership training months AFTER we hand them a team of people. I believe leadership is knowing ourselves, wanting to be the best version of ourselves and sharing ourselves for the benefit of others. We can start this coaching on day one or even better, in high school and college. I imagine a world where so many fewer people go home and talk about their bad bosses because when we know ourselves and share ourselves for the benefit of others, people want to work for us. I hope to build a legacy of Talent Magnets for the price of a couple of lattes a month. Anything I can do to share what I have learned so that the next trailblazers have it a little easier, I will do. I am a walking, talking example of how to turn the hardest things that happen to us into the fuel for what ignites us. I should have been a statistic and through mentorship, hard work and a beautiful network, the statistics I get to talk about look a lot different. I am grateful every day and can’t wait to see where the journey takes me next.

Do you feel like there was something about the experiences you had growing up that played an outsized role in setting you up for success later in life?
I think our experiences starting at a very early age shape our success. I don’t believe that there are specific experiences that one would need to experience in order to become successful. What I believe makes us successful is how we frame those experiences and how we let them affect who we are. I have been through so much including a chaotic upbringing, my parent’s divorce, and teen pregnancy. Learning to embrace the difficulties of life, the mistakes we have made and to let go of the shame we may carry attached to life’s bumps is the key to using your experiences to become successful. It’s not the experiences but what we do with them. Do we use them to become stronger, wiser and to build the grit we need to accomplish our goals or do we use them as the reason we can’t?

Pricing:

  • $7.99- Monthly Subscription for daily leadership coaching, leadership vlogs, and blogs and journal prompts to create a career journal for growth

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Blake Jackson www.blackson.co Instagram @effortlessvisuals

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