Navigating the Unexpected: Career Pivoting, Fertility Journeys, and Redefining Success - with Dina Silver Pokedoff

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:04  

Welcome to The Executive Coach for Moms Podcast where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leanna Laskey McGrath, former tech exec turned full time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:27  

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to welcome my guest, Dina Silver Pokedoff. She is joining me from the other side of Pennsylvania today. Dina is a driven and results-oriented senior brand and communications executive and an empowered female leader in the communications industry. Dina is currently Senior Vice President of Communications for Kuehne+Nagel in US and Canada, one of the world's leading logistics companies.  At Kuehne+Nagel, Dina is responsible for establishing, driving and executing the regional communication strategy. Dina has been recognized with Reagan's Top Women in communications, and PR News Top Women in PR. She is also on the executive committee of the Public Relations Society of America's corporate communications section. She's a mom and a triathlete, and I'm so excited to hear more about her story today. WelcomeDina. 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  1:22  

Hi, Leanna. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  1:26  

Oh, thanks so much for being here, Dina. I'm so excited to talk with you today. For everyone listening, for our summer series, what we're doing is we are having two part conversations with amazing guests. So Dina is going to tell us today a little bit about her career journey, and then next week, we're going to talk more about navigating career and motherhood and how she's done that successfully over the last 30 years. So to start off today, Dina, can you tell us a little bit about you through your words beyond the bio?

Dina Silver Pokedoff  1:55  

Sure, sure. I'd be happy to do that. And again, thank you so much for having me. This is one of my favorite topics about how to really help other women navigate their careers and being moms. So I'm really excited to be here and to share my story. So my background, as you said, I've been at this in the communications field now for about 30 years. It's a long time, and it may age me a little bit to be so blunt about how many years it is, but I'm proud I'm embracing my age and the wisdom that comes with it. So I've been at this for a long time. I started my career at one point I would have said I was an agency gal. I was working at public relations agencies representing a really wide range of both business to business and business to consumer kinds of clients. The agencies were based in and around the Philadelphia area, but the clients were all over, both local, national to the US and also international. And I got some fantastic experience in the agency space. And then I made the pivot to in-house, first working at a university that's also here in the Philadelphia area. It's called Lehigh University, really known for its engineering school. It's a university with multiple schools, and they wanted someone who could run the comms side of their shop like an agency. I did that there. I had multiple roles with it. When I was at Lehigh, I really loved being in the academic environment, but then I got a really lovely outreach to bring me in-house in corporate and to leverage my French language skills, which I had been a French and Political Science major. I didn't major in communications, so I joined a company called Saint-Gobain if you say it with a French accent, or Saint-Gobain if you say it with an American accent. And they hired me for my communications expertise, but that I spoke French fluently was icing on the cake, and I was there for about 10 years. I headed communications globally for a chemical company that was a spin off of Dow for a couple years, and now I find myself at Kuehne+Nagel. So I've had a pretty rich career, both in house and also on the agency side, as a consultant,

Leanna Laskey McGrath  4:01  

Yeah, I think what's so interesting about your story is that you didn't go to school for that.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  4:07  

No. And actually, I went to a small liberal arts college called Skidmore, which is up in Saratoga Springs, beautiful location, fantastic school. And their current motto, and I think it's still their current motto, is creative thought matters. I mean, because, really, I do believe that the liberal arts education teaches you how to think, critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and so, you know, I went into school thinking I was going to be a doctor. I went in pre med, and I ended up in a kind of a funny twist, ending up taking French and political science, and I completely fell in love with it. I studied abroad multiple times, and so the question becomes, when you study French and Political Science, what do you do with that? And I graduated in the midst of recession. I was also kind of a spoiled kid. I didn't really think I'd have to work hard at figuring it out. I thought, like everything in my life, it would fall in my lap. And when it didn't, it became like a hey, what do you do? So I did one of those. You may recall, or it might be before your time. There was a very popular program called What Color is your Parachute? I went to a career counselor, and we did a lot of heavy lifting of my values, my experience, and it was either go into law or go into communications. And I decided to give communications a full try. I volunteered as an intern, and I begged borrowed and stole to say, Hey, if you let me try out doing communications. It was at a small local nonprofit for a French organization called the Alliance Francaise. So using my French skills, but also trying to use my communication skills, or build my communication skills. And so from that, I grew a career, right? So I started by saying, Please, please, let me try this. And then, of course, through time, I gained hands on experience with people who knew communications. Then I moved into the agency space. 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  5:59  

But I do think that if communications had been offered, I might have found it. It was not available at my school.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  6:06  

Okay.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  6:06  

 And this whole topic of communications as a major it really wasn't around, or at least not in my purview. It wasn't around. You know, all my family's friends, like if I looked around me, they were either teachers, doctors or lawyers, right? So I really didn't know what would be a for me. I had worked at a summer camp and had done some things there that kind of gave me like a sense for like, hey, if somebody would let me represent them, I think I could do a pretty good job at that. Did not really know what that entailed, and of course, I learned it as I went, right? 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  6:43  

Yeah. 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  6:43  

I kind of had to fight mine, fight and claw my way to get the experience, but the critical thinking skills that I got as part of a liberal arts education, I think, is what really made it work.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  6:54  

Yeah, that's so interesting. I also went to a small liberal arts college, West VirginiaWesleyan. I almost minored in communication, but I think I had to take one more public speaking class, and I hated it so much. I was like, No, I want to forego that.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  7:07  

I will say, you know, one thing that I think that, you know, the Public Relations Society of America has some really great, you know, trainings, opportunities, and one of them is to go for your accreditation. So after about seven or eight years of doing the work, I went back and got my accreditation to prove to myself that, like, Hey, I actually know what I'm doing, even though I learned it in the field, on the job from others and from just being scrappy in learning that I actually do know what I'm doing. And so I got my accreditation, and I'm very proud of that, because to me, that was my advanced degree. It was not so easy. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  7:45  

Yeah.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  7:46  

Both a written test and a panel where you had to present your your case studies of things you had done. It really was no joke. I did go back for my master's in journalism. I didn't finish. To my chagrin, life took over getting married and having children, but I did get a little more than halfway through the program, and maybe I should go back. But I do think that journalism and communications are so many similarities, obviously, that deep sense of curiosity that a journalist has, you have to really be discerning ask really good questions, and it's the same in the communications field.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  8:22  

Yeah, that's so cool. I just think that it's so interesting to hear other people's career paths, because so many times we think it has to be this, like, linear thing, and that ends up being what gets us stuck. I coach so many women in like, their 30s and 40s who are just at this point where they're like, I don't actually like what I'm doing, but I got a degree in it, and I have 20 plus years of experience in it, and so how do I just, like, burn it all down and start over? And how do I pivot? It's so important to remember that you don't necessarily need a degree in something if that's the thing that you're naturally good at if you went to camp and as a teenager and said, I could represent this camp, right? If there's something inside of you.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  9:06  

There was something in there. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  9:07  

Yeah.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  9:09  

I actually was very lucky to see. I went to a program at Penn, a women's executive program. And while we were at the executive program, Sheryl Sandberg came and spoke of lean in fame when she spoke, and she talked about, think about your career as a jungle gym, not a ladder. That resonated with me, because, you know, sometimes you do need to take a step to the side and maybe even a step back in title to pivot. And so when I moved from first agency to higher education, then higher education to corporate, that was the corporate team as they were interviewing me, they really took a long time to make that decision. I think they really had to think long and hard, like, would this person fit in in a corporate environment? And it was a lower title than where I was, even at the agency side, right and so lower meaning I went from like a vice president to a manager, okay, right? And so you have to look at it in terms of the scope of what it is. I was going from a, you know, a small agency to a 15,000 person organization for just the US and Canada for Saint-Gobain, right? So you have to really look at it in the full breadth of things, but put your ego a bit to the side to learn you know how to pivot, right? So that jungle gym, it's not always going to be straight up the ladder. It might be a little to the side. It might be maybe a step down the ladder. Air quotes, right? Like maybe taking a step back to be able to then really advance quickly, which is what happened. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  10:41  

Yeah, and so it sounds like you won all these awards. You're at the top of an organization. And so there was a lot of work involved in that. And did it seem like it was so much of you? Like, were you putting in a lot of you where, like, you were the career woman? Or are.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  10:59  

Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. You know, I've always had, even though I just told you the story, I really everything had fallen in my lap. I actually had a really good work ethic and sense of wanting to achieve, right, like a high, high achiever. And always, whether it was for, you know, the sports teams I was on, or for an academic setting, I really strove to be the best I could be. And so I really had big eyes from the very beginning, like, how am I going to get up? How am I going to grow? How am I going to keep moving forward in my career and not just rest on my laurels, right? Like, really push myself. And that came from having that drive, and it's an internal drive to want more for myself. So I will say, like, it's not like I ended up as the number one for the US and Canada, just by chance. I really built my career up to that, and then as I was building each step of my career, I got more crystal clear about, okay, what do I really want, do I want to be one member of a team, or do I want to lead a team? Do I want to be that number one and step forward to be the decision maker, or to be the driver? Or did I not? And I kept testing it in different ways, and I knew I really wanted it. I really wanted it. It did take a lot of drive, and I think that I put a lot of my heart and soul into it, a lot of blood, sweat and tears into my career. And I did it because it was what was driving me. I got a lot of both professional and personal pride out of that. It was important to me.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  12:38  

Yeah, so you kind of mentioned before you got married, had kids, so tell me more about that side of things. 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  12:45  

So that definitely was also a journey and it required a lot of grit and determination. I got married on what I considered the later side of life. I was in my my early 30s when I got married to, well, actually I got married once, and then I that was a mistake, a hiccup, and then I got out of that quickly, and then moved on and found the man who I am currently married to. But it was in my early 30s when all that was happening. And I definitely watched everyone around me having children, and, you know, navigating my friends, navigating their lives and having kids. And I knew I wanted children. I wanted a family, but it took me a little longer to find the right person. I did find the right person, and then wham bam, it did not happen the way I thought that it would in terms of starting a family, because it took some great science and help to allow me to go through the fertility journey. That was a long journey for me. 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  13:40  

I will say that as I was building my career, you know, I was in my early 30s, I was trying to both build my career, but also trying to build a family. And that was definitely challenging, right? Because I especially going through the fertility journey, a costly and time intensive. For anyone who's gone through that journey, or who's considering going through that journey. It's both emotional and physical. It's a lot on you and your body, and you're putting hormones in yourself, and you're trying to also stay sane and keep your keep the day to day work going and straight. So but it, I will say it is doable. If I can do it, anybody can do it, but it, it definitely took some, so as I said, grit and determination. I had to really want it, like many things in my life. I had to fight for it, like that. One again, I thought it would come easy, and it didn't. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  14:34  

Yeah, yeah. I remember our reproductive endocrinologist saying to me the first time I met her, and I came prepared with, you know, my laundry list of all these questions, I had everything written down and organized. And she said, if you're a really type A person, this is going to be really hard, because there's so much out of your control. So yeah, for me, it was like a big lesson in learning that I can put as much hard work into anything, and it may or may not end up working out. 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  15:01  

Exactly, exactly, and also how to pivot when it doesn't work out. Yeah, I give a lot of credit to some of the other bosses and women in my life. I'll never forget I had gone through multiple rounds of IVF. It was had failed, and I was really down and at my wit's end, and I had a boss, Debra Protchko, shout out to Deb, who said to me, like, Hey, have you considered going to a different doctor? And I was like, Huh, no, I actually hadn't thought of that, right? So it's just like, you know, going to a specialist who was able to determine, like, Oh, this is actually an egg issue. And so I went to a specialist who in OO sites, and they happened to be not around the corner, they were at least not a flight away, but they were a couple hours in the car and found the right specialist who could help me. In fact, when I got pregnant and we were driving back and forth to the doctor, we nicknamed the baby in utero, Miles, for all the miles and miles that we had driven to have the child. We didn't name him that ultimately, but we did have a good giggle about it.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  16:08  

Yeah. And so then it worked out?

Dina Silver Pokedoff  16:12  

It did. It did. I had a beautiful baby boy. His name is Benjamin. I also from that first round with the second doctor. I had what he coined my family in a freezer waiting for me for when I was ready to have my second child. And so we waited a little bit, and then, unfortunately, it did not work. And so we had to go back to the well, and I will say, with some additional science and some other what I'll say, like, not your conventional methods, I ended up with a daughter. I'll just be very blunt. It was a donor egg, you know, and that was only open to me because I had a friend who had done it, and she had shared with me her journey. So I'm, I'll just be very open that, you know, sometimes the journey can be different for everyone, right? I'm very lucky that the science and the technology was there, and I was able to make it happen thanks to science. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  17:06  

Yes. So you now have a 16 year old son and a daughter.

Dina Silver Pokedoff  17:11  

She's going to be 11 in the summer, 11. Okay, so five and a half years in between. So you can see it took some time.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  17:18  

Yeah. How did you manage that while you were building your career? It's a lot to juggle raising a family, but it's also a lot to juggle starting a family, and like you said, the hormones and the treatments and the roller coaster of every month, wondering and waiting and, you know, disappointment and things like that. So how did you manage all of that?

Dina Silver Pokedoff  17:41  

Well, I'll say that, you know, therapy is a beautiful thing. So lots of therapy, you know, for me, to help me, you know, work through my feelings about everything I was going through. I will say too that, you know, I had both the laser focus on my career and on the focus on building my family, but that was really where my focus was, right? Those two things were my key focus, and my body paid the price. I put on a ton of weight. I wasn't working out. I was like, you know, I was having other challenges because I was, you know, so focused on both my career and this fertility journey. But I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that you give a busy person something to do, and they'll get it done, right? So I don't mean to make light of it, but I was a very busy person, and I was able to prioritize the things that were most important to me, right? And those, those were the two. I mean, the two most important things to me was to to build my family and to grow my career, and depending on the day, one was more important than the other, it was interchangeable. They were both driving forces in my story. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  18:50  

So it sounds like a lot of clarity around priorities, which we'll talk a lot more about in our next episode. I think probably maybe lots of lessons learned from the journey to parenthood to then take into parenthood, it sounds like.

Speaker 1  19:07  

Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure we'll talk about this more in the second episode. But you know, as I'm trying to build the family from one child to a second child and also grow my career, the only way to do that is with extra help, right? So there were investments I had to make, not only in the fertility journey, but in the childcare journey as well be able to make that work.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  19:29  

Yeah. So one of the things that we talked about a little bit last time is you talked about how your career had been your whole identity, and you were really wrapped up in that, and at some point you made a conscious shift away from that. So can you tell us more about that? 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  19:48  

Sure. Well, one thing after I had both my children, is I began a health journey, and that became my new driving kind of force. Besides, you know, I'll call it the trio of career, family and personal health. I had been doing, as I know you are also on this journey as well as a Pelotoner. I got myself a Peloton as part of my health journey, and I became pretty addicted to the whole experience, the online community, building my friendship network through Peloton, and also my health through Peloton. And I had my user name, which was PR Savvy, very much tied to my career, you know what I've been doing. It's been a big part of who I am. I think I I might have also shared, I'll share here that my license plate was PR savvy, or I also had another license plate, PR Pro, my email address. I mean, you name it, PR was a big part of it. Now, when I used it for my leaderboard name for Peloton, I thought I was super clever by saying there was a double entendre of PR for public relations and PR for personal record. So I kind of was skirting the, you know, not fully, you know, I was kind of whitewashing it for myself. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  21:06  

And then I had a challenging situation with a career moment where, you know, the company made some decisions, and I found myself looking for a new job, and I decided during that period, like, hey, my whole world is wrapped up in and actually that coincided with COVID, so there was a lot going on at the moment, right? And I said to myself, like, I can't have my whole life be just about my career. And so I decided to make a conscious shift to change my leaderboard name, and instead have my leaderboard name reflect the kind of work I was doing in my health journey, which at that time was the Power Zone work. So Peloton has this, as you know, Leanna, it's a kind of training where you work out to your own you take a test so that you're, it's a Functional Threshold performance test, and you then set your zones to work towards you where you are in your own physical fitness. So my zone one and your zone one are not going to be the same, my zone five, your zone five, not the same. But it's I'm working to compete against myself. That really resonated with me in my training. And so I said that, you know, time to shift it up a bit and make that conscious shift to be more about who I am as a person, and not just who I am as a in my career. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  22:32  

So what did that look like for you?

Dina Silver Pokedoff  22:34  

Well, the most visible piece of it was the changing of my leaderboard.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  22:40  

Maybe I should say, what does that feel like for you? That's more what I'm interested in is like, how was that experience for you? 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  22:46  

Super empowering, I mean, a little scary. There's something about that experience that resonates with another time in my life, when I took a sabbatical from work after I had my first child. So after I had been and I was working at Lehigh. Lehigh offered a sabbatical for both academic staff and also professional staff. And so I had worked so hard to get pregnant, I was like, I'm gonna take a sabbatical. So I took that sabbatical. It was a six month sabbatical. I had to, you know, do all the paperwork and everything. I had to save up money because it wasn't fully paid during that period of time. There were some caveats that come with taking a sabbatical. So I really prepared myself, both from a professional standpoint, financially, et cetera, to take that six months to be home with my son, and then I was home with him, and I was like, this is like, actually, really, like, whoo. This is hard. Like, my whole I had been like, in such a routine of work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and this was a different kind of work, actually really hard. It was really, of course, fulfilling. Nothing, you know, I don't think anybody can prepare you for both the challenge and the fulfillment that comes with being a parent. But I remember being home that six months and feeling like, a little like, whoa. Like, who am I? What am I? So when that shift happened, and the company, you know, all of a sudden I didn't have a job, I found myself like, I, you know, because I had been pursued for every job I ever went. I've been recruited like, so first time in my career, I really found myself like, wait a minute, like, I'm so wrapped up. So it was kind of a similar feeling of like, your feet are not on the ground. You're like, whoo. What is happening? Who am I? 

Dina Silver Pokedoff  24:30  

So I liken it to the two experiences very similar. It felt very disconcerning, scary, but also very empowering at the same time, you know, they say, you know, with sometimes the worst comes the basic you know, like, you have to, kind of, like, learn how to switch it in your mind. Like, okay, this actually an opportunity, the opportunity to be home with a son, like, even if I'm, like, not getting any sleep and I'm losing my mind, or when. Lost my job, like, this is an opportunity to really get crystal clear. Like, what do I want out of the next step of my career? What am I looking for? What are my deal breakers? And it really helped me kind of hone in, as I said earlier, about like, I know I want to be that number one. I'm ready. Feel ready for it, right? And I'm gonna not just look at every opportunity that shows up in a good enough position. I'm very lucky to be in that position, financially, et cetera, to say, All right, I can take a breath, and I can do the hard work to be clear on it. I worked with a career coach. I did do some freelance work on the side during that period as well, just to calm everyone down, because I'm sure you may have this experience with your significant other. There was also some fear there, like, Okay, what's going to happen here with our family? How long is this going to last? It allowed me to be more discerning in the selection of the next opportunity.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  25:59  

Yeah, well, I see that all the time with transitioning to motherhood, where it's like this huge identity shift. It's like, who am I? What I was doing before isn't necessarily gonna work. It's that idea of kind of what got me here won't get me there, because the way that I was working before, wow, I have to rethink how I do all of that and what my relationship is with work. Because if I was pouring close to 100% of myself into my work, and now I might not have that to give anymore, because so much of it also needs to go to this little human that I have, and how do I do it? And so I think that that is similar in a layoff, whenever you've been pouring so much of yourself into it, and then suddenly there's a situation where you know, you're like, Whoa. What is happening here? You know, this was where I was putting all my energy. And now, what do I do? And to your point, there are different ways to react to it, but I think the opportunity there is to find clarity. Is to ask yourself, what do I want here? And I think similarly, whenever you know, there's a new baby, like, what do I want here? How do I want to show up as a mother? How do I want to show up at work now? How do I want to shift this? And I think it's so important to take those steps back, to check in with ourselves and figure out, what do I want out of this?

Dina Silver Pokedoff  27:15  

Absolutely. And I mean, it's not like when you have a child, you're still not. It's not that you're not giving 100% because you probably are going to be giving 100% and then some. It's more about how you tackle it, how you set boundaries, how you prioritize, how you get it done when it really has to get done, right? I'm sure you've had many working mother who have shared their story of, okay, well, I'll pause when it's time, you know, at the day, so I can focus on my family. Get the dinner on the table, get the Tubby done, get the child to sleep, and then if there's a deadline, and, like, back on that computer and get it done. So that you know that neither you know sacrifice is hurting for it.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  28:00  

Yeah. Well, that's a perfect prelude into our second part. So thank you, Dina, so much for having this conversation today. I know everyone is going to love hearing this conversation, and for everyone who's listening, please tune in next week to hear part two of Dina's story and conversation. We're going to talk more and dive a lot deeper into navigating career and motherhood and learn from Dina about how she's done that over the past 30 years. So thank you Dina, and thank you so much to everyone for tuning in. We'll see you next week. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  28:37  

If you're loving what you're learning on this podcast, I'd love to invite you to check out The Executive Mom Reset. It's my six month coaching program for ambitious, success driven, career focused women who are ready to stop surviving and start thriving. Together, we'll tackle the stress, guilt and overwhelm that come with being a high achieving executive mom. You'll learn how to set boundaries, prioritize what truly matters, and build the confidence to show up powerfully at work, at home, and for yourself. Head on over to coachleanna.com right now to schedule a free discovery call. We'll spend an hour talking about where you are now, what you want to create, and how I can help you get there, because every woman deserves to live the life of her dreams. Let's create yours together.