Me and My Mentor. Norah Breekveldt
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where you lack confidence?
What are your self-confidence-busters? Which ones would you like to work on with your mentor?
In the absence of a formal mentor program who can you seek out and approach as a possible mentor?
What courageous steps or decisions have you made? In what ways have these decisions built up your courage?
Ruby Anandajayasekeram
Ruby Anandajayasekeram is a Senior Legal Counsel at Shell Australia and works virtually from Melbourne with culturally diverse teams from around the world supporting Shell’s global downstream acquisitions, divestments and post-closing team in the Asia Pacific region. She has been with Shell since 2004 and has worked in both their Melbourne and London offices supporting a variety of Shell’s businesses. Prior to that, she worked at Allens Arthur Robinson (now Allens Linklaters). Ruby is passionate about and actively champions diversity and inclusion initiatives both within her organisation and externally, with a particular focus on the legal profession. She has had many successful mentoring relationships over her career, both as a mentor and as a mentee.
Keerthi Ravi
Keerthi has recently completed a Judge’s Associateship in the Supreme Court and has recently co-founded the Diverse Women’s Mentoring Association, a non-profit association which matches diverse women with mentors from professional services backgrounds, largely based on her experiences of being mentored by wonderful people such as Ruby.
Ruby’s story
Education, sacrifice, family
From as early as I can remember, my parents instilled three core values in me—the power of education, the significance of sacrifice, and the importance of family. It is impossible to understand who I am without understanding my parents’ story. Both Sri Lankan, they met and fell in love at university. Their love story and marriage challenged both the religion and the class distinction norms of the day. Despite their different backgrounds, they both recognised the power of education to provide opportunities in life and sought high educational success for all their children.
Sacrifice and family values are an integral part of their story. When my dad received a scholarship to study his PhD in Canada, my parents needed to choose whether to go their separate ways or marry and move overseas so my dad could pursue his doctorate. Recognising the long-term value of this opportunity for their future family, they left their country of origin as newlyweds with only 75cents to their name and a strong determination to build a better life for their children—a typical migrant story but also a decision which required my mum to sacrifice her own education and career. At this time, the civil war had started in Sri Lanka, so my family continued to follow my dad’s career and the different countries it took him before we migrated to Australia.
How I see myself and how others see me
I am often asked the question ‘Where are you from?’ I respond by saying I’m Australian, which then triggers the next question ‘Yes, but where are you really from?’ How do I answer that question when although my parents are Sri Lankan, the first time I visited the island was only two years ago? Let alone that I was born in Canada, grew up in Kenya and Tanzania where I went to international schools, had short stints in Mexico and Jamaica, all before coming to Australia at the age of thirteen.
These conversations have made me realise that there are two realities in life—your own image of yourself, and then how others see you. Navigating your career, and life more broadly is about understanding and reconciling these two realities. Mentoring affords an opportunity to both mentors and mentees to facilitate this understanding and reconciliation.
Others will often judge you first by the way you look and, if you look different to them, will assume you come from a different cultural heritage and possess different values. Yet whilst appearing different to many around me, I don’t define myself by this outward difference. Instead, whilst celebrating my cultural heritage, I define myself as Australian and believe that hard work and merit have been the basis of my achievements, and that I have been judged on those factors alone rather than on the colour of my skin or my cultural heritage.
That is not to say I have been immune from biases and assumptions in my career, but from my perspective, these probably stemmed from my gender rather than my cultural heritage. After having my daughter, people (with good intentions) sometimes assumed my commitment to family would be at the expense of my career, without necessarily asking me whether those assumptions were valid. In some ways, I similarly applied my own unconscious biases, values and assumptions when I became a mother. Having been brought up with a mother at home and a father who worked, I naturally assumed it was my role to be the primary carer. But I also wanted to have it all—seamlessly balance motherhood with a successful, uninterrupted career. When I tried to return to full time work, I really struggled and this dream hit a reality check. My wonderful husband stepped in and offered to work part-time to care for our daughter, and when we discussed it, it never occurred to me that we could have had that conversation earlier—I had simply assumed it was my job to care for our child and juggle my career while he continued to work full-time. Everyone has a different journey and needs to work out what works best for them as a family. Once he stepped in, I have really understood the value of letting go, to ask for support and not attempt to control everything.
Balancing motherhood and my career has brought to the foreground the importance of challenging traditional assumptions and biases in order to reconcile how I see myself and how others see me.
Encouraging this thought process in a mentee is an essential aspect of being a mentor.
‘I felt honoured and privileged when Keerthi contacted me.’
I have experienced the power of mentoring as a mentee myself. I have been lucky to be mentored by some amazing people throughout my career and I attribute a large part of my success to mentors believing in me, encouraging me to move outside of my comfort zone, and actively sponsoring me. My first mentoring experience was provided through a professional association, and recently I looked back on the application form and was surprised to see that I had asked for a female mentor. I can’t recall why I made this request but I suspect I was looking for a role model in the days when senior women were in the minority in the legal profession, and perhaps I thought I would feel more comfortable and safer opening up to someone who I thought would be more like me and would have faced similar challenges. As it turned out, I was matched to a male mentor who was amazing, who challenged my thinking and pushed me to think laterally and out of the box in a way that I may not have experienced otherwise. One of the most valuable pieces of advice I remember receiving from him was ‘Don’t wait until someone recognises you. Put your hand up. Tell people and be heard.’
This advice resonated with me in the context of my cultural upbringing. Early in my career, I had been receiving feedback from my peers and manager that I possessed excellent judgment and was really good at my work, but lacked confidence in meetings. I was mystified by this feedback. I would never have described myself as lacking in confidence, so what was going on? Working through this feedback was a pivotal moment because I realised it was my cultural values at play. Having been brought up to respect my elders and not argue back, no one ever told me that when you go into meeting with senior people that set of values is not relevant. What I viewed as showing respect, others viewed as lack of assertiveness.
As my own career flourished I began to realise that a small investment of my own time can make an enormous difference to the careers of others. I am energised by mentoring others, actively sponsoring them and opening up my networks—and it’s a two way street—I continue to learn so much from my mentees.
My neighbour, Randell, asked me one day about how people approach me to be their mentor. ‘Well, they just ask—simple as that, or it happens organically’ I replied. ‘Really—that’s all there is to it? Then I’m going to introduce you to this amazing woman. I think you would connect really well and I think she could benefit from just meeting you.’
I then met Keerthi, this amazingly talented