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In this installment of the Women Who Wow series, get to know Nita Sanger.

Nita is the Chief Executive Officer of Idea Innovate Consulting, a boutique strategy consulting firm transforming businesses for growth in professional, financial and legal services. In addition, Nita is a Managing Director at Corporate Legal Innovation Consultants (CLIC), a consulting company focused on the legal industry and the Chief Operating Officer at In the House, a community for innovative general counsel.

Nita is a C-suite expert with more than 20 years of strategy and operations experience, transforming and scaling businesses for growth at global large and mid-sized corporates, and start-ups. In her previous roles, she assisted businesses to redesign their processes, reduce costs, optimize M&A /post-merger integrations, and drive talent and change management.

Michele Bonds is a New York-based Principal at Heidrick & Struggles and a member of the global Legal, Risk, Compliance & Government Affairs practice. Michele’s primary focus is on law firm infrastructure/business professionals, and law firm culture and acceleration advisory work. She has over 20 years of financial services and legal industry experience.

Prior to joining Heidrick & Struggles, Michele was longstanding Chief of Staff to the Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell. She worked with firm leaders in navigating clients through numerous complex events including the financial crisis.

Michele received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in political science and her Masters of Business Administration at Babson College. I worked with Michele at S&C and always admired her work ethic, poise and creativity.

Learn more about her in this profile.

The next Woman Who Wows is Dr. Catherine Sanderson, a professor of life sciences at Amherst College.

Professor Sanderson has published more than 25 journal articles and book chapters in addition to four college textbooks, middle school and high school health textbooks, and trade books on parenting as well as how mindset influences happiness, health and even how long we live (The Positive Shift). In 2012, she was named one of the country’s top 300 professors by the Princeton Review.

I met Professor Sanderson at the 2018 Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference where she served as keynote speaker. I was so moved by her talk about why happiness is significant, what truly makes us happy and practical ways that each of us can incorporate happiness into our everyday lives.

Learn more about her below. In addition, Professor Sanderson will be our featured speaker at the next Women Who Wow virtual event, this Thursday, May 21 at 5pm ET. Register here.

In this installment of Women Who Wow, meet Sheryl Odentz. Sheryl is the founder of Progress in Work, an award-winning, career management firm that provides attorneys and other professionals within the legal industry with tools and resources to “progress in work” and maximize career success through business development training and coaching, executive/leadership coaching and outplacement/career transition consulting. Learn more about her.

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My mentor has always reminded me that happiness is a choice available to each of us and is crucial for our well being. She also told me that it’s okay to not be okay all of the time.

After the recent ending of a relationship, she again said to me, “I know you’re sad now, but you can to choose to be happy.”

You can be stuck feeling bad during bad times or you can choose to make hardships and the worst times of your life teaching moments and turn them into something positive. You’d be surprised just how resilient each of us are if we just believe it.

Also, happiness comes easier to some people and others must choose to be happy at certain points in our lives in order to turn the tide around or just to carry on and not to fall into a dark hole of despair.

I’m about to share a personal story in the hopes that it helps others. Not everyone shares what’s going on with them personally with professional colleagues, but I want others to know that life is messy and no one is perfect – especially me, and so many of us are struggling with personal crises and it’s a miracle we are so high functioning. It’s about time we got real and stop making it seem like everything is fine when it’s not.

Paula T. Edgar, Esq., is a partner at Inclusion Strategy Solutions LLC, a consulting firm that provides innovative and strategic solutions on organizational diversity efforts, intercultural fluency initiatives, sexual harassment prevention and EEO compliance.

Paula speaks and consults on these and other topics by facilitating workshops, conducting live and virtual professional development training, delivering keynote speeches and coaching executives. Paula is an expert in inclusive executive/leadership development, personal branding, networking, social media and career strategies. She is a past President of the Metropolitan Black Bar Association (MBBA), New York’s largest black bar association.

Paula has previously served as the founder and CEO of PGE LLC, the inaugural Chief Diversity Officer at New York Law School, and as an attorney for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

I met Paula at a conference in 2019 at which we were both speakers. I was so moved by her talk, that I went up to her, let her know that and asked if we could keep in touch. We started following each other on LinkedIn and I became an even bigger fan of hers. Learn more about why Paula is so awesome below.