SUNAINA’S FAVORITES

Food

Dosa with sambar and chutney. I could eat it every day.

Destination

Going back home to Mom. I get all my favorite things. Other than that – Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Hawaii and Paris. Some of my greatest memories and milestones were celebrated in Paris.

Movie

Has to be Shawshank Redemption. It’s a classic, but so powerful and so emotive in so many ways. Absolutely love that movie. The most recent movie that I’ve watched that was equally powerful was, She Said. It’s about the start of the MeToo movement from two New York Times journalists, and it is very much appropriate for the age we live in.

Color

If you had to put a gun to my head it would be blue. That’s because I love the sea. I love going to the ocean, and I love all different shades of blue.

Sport

Definitely not golf, but my favorite sport is tennis. I love to play it. I love to watch it, and have been a follower of tennis for many, many years. I used to actually even teach tennis as a young teenager to make money.

Hobby

Wine and food. I love to taste and drink different types of wines. I find wines complexity very compelling. One of my best and greatest hobbies right now is to engage where my kids are engaging. So at the moment I am teaching myself how to solve Rubik’s cubes.

Piece Of Jewelry

Very much my engagement ring. My husband gave it to me when he proposed in Paris. I will give you another one. At my wedding my mother gave me our ancestral nath (nose ring). It’s gone from eldest daughter to eldest daughter through her lineage over 5 generations, and it’s incredibly precious to me.

lessons here, and I keep digging for lessons, so that I won’t make these once again. And the third one really has been my family. I come from a large family in terms of my siblings and my parents, with my husband and my 3 kids and a dog. You need to have a set of people that you can really rely on to be yourself with, and that’s been a real blessing.

Tune Out The Noise

One of the ways that I tell others who are in my shoes or at different stages of their careers and who are women of color, is that you have to learn to distinguish signals from noise. I get comments to this day. It’s unfortunate, but it exists. I can’t control what other people say and do. I can only control myself. I consider it noise and that noise is there to distract you. It just fills your brain, and you have to have a way for distinguishing the signal from the noise. That colleague comes and mentioned something to you. Yes, of course you can get worked up about it and spend 45 minutes of your day thinking about it, or you can just let it go and move on with what’s really important. Your job, where you can make the most difference and where you’re valued. So that’s my biggest piece of advice to women of color. It isn’t easy and there will always be noise. There was noise 20 years ago when I started, and there’s noise today, and there will be noise 20 years from now. Use your difference as your power, and use your position of power to pull someone up below you. You can always do that. There is always someone else you can pull up and that’s the only way our ranks increase.

The Hard Ask

This is one of my interview questions. (The one quality needed to ask clients to part with their money.)

Diversity doesn’t come by itself. People just sit back and think it’s all going to magically appear. That’s not how it goes. Leaders really have to lean into it and make that extra effort.

I actually love asking this question and you get lots of answers –persistence, tenacity, communication, etc. The actual answer is and the research shows it - is listening. The more you listen the more information someone shares with you. To have curiosity, genuine curiosity, not fake curiosity about another human being. So that you can ask them open-ended questions and you start receiving that information and that has made me good at my job. Which is very much asking people for money. That is what we do. The more information I get about my counterpart, it makes me stronger at what I say, and, therefore, what I say is going to be much more nuanced. It’s going to be much more relevant to what they want to hear and it makes me much more effective at my job. So it’s one of the most undervalued skills in the world today. Everybody just wants to talk and fill the space around them and be seen and heard. Well, if you sit back and listen, the information will come to you that will allow you to be even better at your job.

Wine Enthusiast

The green is not my thing. I have tried to play golf and it just takes too many hours of one’s life to get any good at it. My strength has been the goblet. I know enough about wine to be dangerous, and a lot of men think they know their wine really well. So when they get someone who can match them, and can talk with them fluently, it stands up very well and that very much has been one of my secret weapons. I found wine to be a very easy going common thread across cultures. At the end of the day you have to find a point of connection with the human being on the other side of the table.