Unconventionally: The Many Voices of Andrea T. Edwards
The events that brought Andrea Edwards to where she is today stem from a series of very deliberate choices.
The Australian ‘digital conversationalist’ is a woman of many voices: a musician, a content marketing expert, a PR consultant, a blogger, a motivational speaker, an author, a mum and wife and an entrepreneur.
It’s a list that can go on forever.
She couldn’t have known that a person from the army would come recruiting during band practice at university. She couldn’t have known that her stint in the army would lead her to public relations.
She couldn’t have known that she would be running the comms of Aerospace Technologies in Australia at 23. She didn’t plan for any of these to happen, but she did them anyway.
Andrea T. Edwards is The Digital Conversationalist, a change agent, provocateur, passionate communicator and social leader.
Andrea is one of those enviable radicals who fully accepts that life is all about taking risks and diving into the unknown. And over the past several years, she has made a name for herself by guiding others to do the same.
“My childhood best friend died when we were 24 and I made a commitment that I would never live with regrets… If I want it, I am going to step out there and do it. No one is going to stop me.
The only person that can stop you is yourself and yes, it’s scary, but it’s scarier to stay unhappy or get stuck feeling like you can’t do what you want to do. That, for me, is unhappiness.”
Listening to Andrea, she is the type of woman many of us dream of being — fully in control, no-nonsense yet intriguingly irreverent, spontaneous yet practical in her logic (“If we can’t afford our house anymore, then we’ll move to a smaller house. If everything changes, we’ll make different decisions”). She is a fascinating example of a person who lives life the way it was truly meant to be lived — without regret and with a refreshingly light-hearted acceptance of the possibility of failure.
Andrea transitions seamlessly between easy-going charm and fierce intensity. She exudes a kind of in-control, action-driven, forward-thinking mindset — a combination of natural temperament reinforced by profound experiences.
Uncommon Courage
Last year, on her 50th birthday, her sister described her as courageous, citing it as one of her most admirable traits. It was only then, confronted by that revelation, that Andrea realised just how fearless she was and always has been.
“As Brené Brown says, ‘you get courageous by being courageous’… it’s like a muscle or a habit that you develop.”
“I’m not scared to take the big steps and I can’t ever remember being scared to take them,” she said, recalling how dauntless she had been even as a young girl.
Too often she would be hired by companies to empower employees and she would be faced with the same predicament: everyone was too afraid to make a mistake.
“So many leaders that I’ve worked with, they just don’t have any courage, they don’t want to make mistakes, they don’t want to be embarrassed, they don’t want to look foolish, and so they make the whole team risk-averse.”
In Asia, where failure is not easily taken at face value, Andrea would constantly prompt her team to take risks.
“My tip: if you want to do something companies have never done before, do it in silence. Don’t tell people what you’re doing, don’t ask for permission, go ahead and do it, especially if you believe in it.”
This was usually met with hesitation. Shifting gears, she told them that if anything went wrong, she would take the fall.
“As soon as I knew that they could take risks without punishment, it was brilliant, it was beautiful. I just watched them flower because when a person is given this opportunity to go and try something that they feel so passionately about and they’re supported, it’s incredible.
It completely transforms their entire personality and it changes the trajectory of their life.”
“Trust in your own counsel,” she said. This is something she discusses deeply in her upcoming book, aptly titled Uncommon Courage.
Andrea revels in uncertainty. Nowadays, it’s an invaluable quality described as the adaptability quotient, or the ability to manage and adjust to unexpected changes. “You've just got to do it. You've just got to take a chance, see where it takes you. Life becomes more of a ride… life’s more fun when people don’t know what’s coming next.”
Andrea often casually blurts out little nuggets of wisdom like this and it doesn’t come across as cheesy or clichéd because her sincerity is palpable.
At her age, she says, she’s past the point of nonsense and she likes to get straight to the point.
“I think the most important thing is you can’t sit in fear. Don’t worry about what you can’t do. Don’t worry about what’s being taken away from you. We've got to back ourselves. If nobody else is going to do it, we've got to back ourselves.”
Without borders
One thing that constantly keeps her on her toes is traveling. In her 20s, she went to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. A blonde twenty-something traveling alone. “Boy did I get a lot of attention”, she mused.
She went on to travel to Nepal, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, and China to name a few. “Travel was what really changed me. It absolutely fundamentally changed me… I don’t think everyone needs to travel to open their mind, but it was certainly good for me. I was constantly out of my comfort zone.”
“Every step of the way, I was exposed to the beauty of the human spirit. When you’re by yourself, you’ve got to be vulnerable. You’ve got to accept help whether it’s from fellow travelers or local people.”
It’s an experience that has shaped her conviction about the world. “Whenever I hear the divisive rhetoric, especially around faith, that goes on around the world, it just doesn’t match with the reality on the ground,” she began.
“The vast majority of people are amazing, they’re beautiful. We all want the same thing: a house over our head, to be able to feed our family, to educate our children. This is a universal thing across humanity.”
Even in the army, she was fascinated with people from a diverse set of backgrounds united under one roof.
“There’s a very, very small percentage of people dividing us,” she declared. “We’ve just got to wake up to the fact that we are constantly letting a small minority dominate the global narrative.”
She takes the #MeToo movement as an example. At the height of the controversy, she hosted a panel for the financial services sector in Singapore. Many of the attendees were men who revealed that they were now scared to take a female colleague out of lunch. “That’s not good for women… and it’s not good for men either,” she said.
“The vast majority of people are not sleazebags.”
“If you look at the world like a big circle, on the outer edges of that circle are the extremes on both sides, but everybody else, we’re pretty good. We’re pretty decent people. We take care of each other. We do our best,” she explained. “What we’ve always allowed throughout history and we’ve really seen in social media are the two extremes dominate the entire conversation, so we build a world and policies and societal norms and what’s acceptable around the extreme edges.”
And in a culture where social media drives reality, those extremes are magnified.
“We have a choice to lead the world into a positive direction and change how we live, how we do business and we build a better world where it’s more equitable and it’s more sustainable.”
Without the bollocks
Andrea is on a mission and she’s in it for the long haul, fully committed to bringing out the audacity and purpose in everyone. One of the themes she constantly repeats is intention. Intent, she believes, is what separates social leaders from the rest of the noise that is littered on social media.
“I’m actually quite an intense person with what I do because I really, really believe in what I’m doing. But I’m not doing it for me. I’m not doing it for ego. I really believe in the message that I’m sharing in the world.”
“Be really intentional in what you’re doing,” she advised. Being a social leader, she clarified, is about leading others and opening conversations.
“It’s not about you. It’s not about your business. It’s not about anything else. It’s about your audience, and it’s about putting a message out there in the world that is going to help them learn, grow, change, or even laugh.”
“The only way we can change society is within our own societies,” she continued. “Don’t be on your deathbed regretting what you didn’t do… Identify what you want to do and take the first step towards it. Keep taking more steps and then just enjoy the ride, but don’t be scared of tough times.”
Even her latest book, which she describes as the “scariest book I’ve ever written,” was challenging. She’s been thinking about it for ten years and working on it for three.
Writing — the fact that she can sit down and unscramble her thoughts — has always been cathartic for Andrea.
“When you write something that you’re thinking about, you have to go do deeper research and you have to have other points of view, so it actually helped me consolidate my thinking and it helped me calm my mind down.”
“I just kind of feel like we need to find our own individual peace of mind and it starts within us,” she said. “When that finally happens, everyone can come together and do what they need to move this world forward”.
From writing books to blogging about social leadership to openly sharing her parenting journey to changing the thought processes of major corporations, Andrea has done quite a lot, but in her own words, it’s just a “bit” to get people in the right frame of mind.
“We should all do our bit within our own societies. Each and every one, locally. Make an impact. If you change one person, it’s worth it. You only got to reach one person to matter.”
Her 12-year old blog “Without the Bollocks”, where she first started “embracing her own voice”, is about to be retired.
“My voice is growing. I’m becoming more and more courageous with my voice. I suppose I’m at the point now where I’m really bringing all of the parts of my voice together because I want to fight for a better future for everyone.”
Despite how far she’s come, there’s no doubt that Andrea herself believes she’s far from done. She’s dropped the pebble into the water, and I’m expecting waves.
Follow Andrea on LinkedIn:
andreatedwards
Andrea’s new book Uncommon Courage is coming soon!
Watch this space for announcements.
Watch the full video interview with Andrea
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page
