LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF.
My name is Luisa del Rosario Gutierrez Velez de Perez -Chary-. Let ‘s simplify it, Luisa Gutiérrez.
I was born in Mexico City in 1969.
In 1991, I graduated in Marketing from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) campus Monterrey, México.
In the early stages of my career, I learned that Latin America is chaotic, only data helps to silence the noise that chaos generates. Therefore, I understood how important it is to master market research if you want to be a successful marketer. And in particular data analysis became my passion.
In 1993, I founded along with my best friend and partner STRATEGOS a consulting company specialized in marketing and business administration, it was not easy, but I really enjoyed the experience, and it brought me the privilege of working in the marketing field for almost 10 years.
In 1999, I had the opportunity to lead as CEO a group of companies that were owned by one of my clients in Mexico City.
After living for 13 years in Mexico City, my husband agreed to join the IMF. Therefore, we moved to live in Guatemala City. That excited me because at that time I had already founded an NGO to help empower immigrant women from Central America in Chiapas, Mexico. Therefore, moving to live in Guatemala was perfect to strengthen my project. My days in Guatemala were splendid, but unfortunately, we lived there for only one year.
In 2013, we came to live in Maryland. It was the beginning of the most difficult adaptation process I have ever experienced. It took all that I was and put me in another context. The most intolerable part was the language. I thought then that my English was good, actually, at an advanced and fluent level. But when I came to live here, I experienced the opposite. I felt such frustration that I adopted the motto: “Renovarse o morir” – it can be translated as Renew or Die. Now I feel adapted, but it was not easy, I had to reinvent myself. To be honest, it was painful.
In 2016, I volunteered to teach Spanish at IMFFA. I did it because I saw the opportunity to start something new in my career. Since then, it has been a win-win situation; I share my mother tongue with my students and learn from them.
As a Spanish teacher and coach, I work primarily with the spouses or partners of the IMF and / or World Bank Group staff. The universe that I have been working in is comprised of multinational, multicultural, intelligent, highly educated, polyglot adults.
The big challenge of teaching them is showing that you are capable enough to meet their expectations and goals about the class or the coaching.
In addition, this cohort of students is in itself intimidating because a large proportion of them have their own Ph.D., so they are used to learning from very high-level professors, leaders in their field of expertise.
All of this pushes you to be smart and creative enough to challenge them in each session, and you have to adapt the class to do this successfully. So, I customize the sessions to meet the needs, level, and goals of each student. The material that I design is current. This generates a double profit; the student is acquiring language skills and knowledge of trends in different current affairs.
In summary, if you look at my career timeline -top picture- you can clearly see that it is full of very different activities so it is difficult to track down a skill set that you could think of, -She is an expert in this particular field-. However, when you see the big picture, the line that unifies all the points of my experience is adaptation.
Adaptation has in itself a great set of great sub-skills: not afraid to try something new, accept change as a priority, be open-minded, uncertainty is not stressful is an opportunity, strong resilience, great creativity, and the constant and necessary learning process to immerse yourself and succeed in a new challenge
So, lend me your brain and you’ll say, “Yo hablo español – I speak Spanish -” or you will hear compliments like, “Tú hablas español perfectamente -You speak Spanish perfectly-” sooner than you think.
