Sonia Aranza – Helping people create their own luck

IF you’re fortunate enough to sit in on one of Sonia Aranza’s motivational sessions, you’ll hear her tell her audience repeatedly, “Create your own luck.”

It’s a philosophy to which Aranza, an award-winning global diversity and inclusion strategist, is totally committed, having learnt of her Filipino father’s experience as a boy.

“My father was orphaned at a very early age and he asked a very wealthy family to take him in to work as a houseboy in return for sending him to school,” Aranza told All Woman.

“So by the time I was born my father was an educated man, but he was not always that way. In other words, he created his own luck.”

Aranza kept emphasising the luck-creation ideology during ATL Industrial Group’s Managers’ Retreat at Terra Nova All Suite Hotel in St Andrew on June 17.

The retreat had as its theme ‘Leadership Evolution: Times are changing and so must we’.

That was a perfect fit for Aranza, who has been travelling the world for the past 20 years addressing corporate executives on global leadership.

Chevron, Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, NASA, Toyota, the US Army, US Social Security Administration, and Walmart are among the companies and agencies whose staff have benefited from her expertise.

Her work has won her the Outstanding Asian American Woman of the Year Award in 2002 from the National Association of Professional Asian Women.

She has also been voted among the top 100 influential Filipino Americans in a national survey conducted by Filipino Women’s Network.

Both awards, she said, were “unexpected” and left her feeling “humbled”.

Aranza was born in The Philippines, but grew up in Hawaii. Twenty-four years ago she journeyed to Washington, DC, where she worked for Congressman Neil Abercrombie as director of constituent relations.

It was, by all accounts, a good job, but Aranza couldn’t shake the urge to do what she felt was her calling, her passion — global leadership.

“I try to do a lot of this type of work… try to contribute to communities that are struggling, groups that are underserved,” she explained.

“I like to talk to students who are underprivileged, as well as women’s groups and minorities, and I think that’s how they got a hold of my name,” she said in reference to the associations that honoured her with the awards.

“I really believe through my core that you are not a slave to conditions. That you can create your own luck, that your hard work can differentiate you,” Aranza said.

“So yes, you may not have been born in a particular family with particular advantages, but we can in fact be very intentional about opportunities, and if you’re willing to do the work, to go after those hopes, wishes and dreams, and that’s what I tell people, because I’ve seen it in my own life, [and] through many different examples,” she added.

One of those examples, Aranza said, was US President Barack Obama.

“He was not a slave to his circumstances,” she argued. “This is young man whose father left when he was a boy; this is a man whose mother remarried and that marriage didn’t work out; this is young man who lived with his grandparents in a very small apartment in Honolulu; this is a young man who didn’t immediately go to an Ivy League school, he went to a college in California before he moved on to the big schools; this is a man who had nothing and aided his own luck through his hard work, determination, skills, smarts, that’s why I’m such a huge believer in that,” Aranza said.

“But I’ve also had the privilege of seeing many others who have created their own luck, whether it’s through hard work or education, or just looking for opportunities, that’s why I’m a true believer and that’s what I tell these underprivileged individuals.”

Asked if she had ever had a discussion with Obama, Aranza said that she actually met him at one of his rallies when he was campaigning to become the Democratic party candidate in the run-up to his first bid for the presidency.

She said her son, who was very young at the time, wanted to take a photo with Obama and so was placed on the stage by a local politician.

Aranza said that after she identified herself as the boy’s mother she asked Obama why she should vote for him instead of Hillary Clinton.

While Aranza couldn’t remember the details of his answer, she recalled that the answer was long.

Did it convince her?

“I have to say yes, I became a believer, I became a convert,” she said.

Aranza also pointed to Sandals Chairman Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart as another example of someone who created his own luck.

“I think the boldness of his thinking, just how audacious; how could somebody who… didn’t have a fancy name [with] just pure guts and big vision and fearlessness, not only start a hotel but have the audacity to go and create Sandals?” she said.

She also voiced great respect for Stewart’s son, Adam, whom she said displays “dynamic leadership”.

“He’s a standout for me because I have an unusual advantage; I get to listen to a lot of leaders across industries, captains of industry and he’s a standout for me, because of his conviction, because of his tenacity, and just the big vision, the boldness,” Aranza said.