Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to Chasing Life Podcast, where we talk about fitness, running, career, and life tips to inspire you to live your best life. I'm your host, Sarah Kane, and I hope you enjoy today's episode.
Welcome to another episode of Chasing Life. I'm your host, Sarah. Today's guest is a mentor of mine, Gerald Hector. Gerald is the Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance at the University of Central Florida. And we met back in 2015 when we were both working at Ithaca College. He was my boss's boss, but we've stayed in touch ever since.
And he is one of my go-to people for career advice. And I thought he would be a great guest on this podcast because over his career, he has held many leadership roles in higher education and private companies. Plus, he is an author of It's Easy, Son, Quit Making Things Difficult, Lasting Life Lessons from a Coach and Mentor, as well as a podcast host of It's Easy, Son.
On this episode, we talk about how athletics has impacted his life, what inspired him to write a book, what he has experienced since publishing, and career advice for young professionals. Gerald is a thought leader, mentor, husband, and father, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Welcome, Gerald. Thanks, Sarah. It's my pleasure. I'm happy to be here with you on your podcast today. Why don't you get us started with telling us about what do you do? Who is Gerald Hector? Wow. That's an open-ended question. It could go many ways, but Gerald Hector is a young man born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, lived a little bit in Trinidad and Tobago, and eventually migrated to the United States in 1989 when I was getting ready to
take up a track and field scholarship at Howard University. And since that track and field scholarship, I spent four years at Howard and then from Howard went into the corporate world, the work world, with Deloitte & Touche, a public accounting firm. Back then it was the big six. And from there, I was blessed and fortunate enough to be seen by folks. And former president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund, William H. Gray III,
saw my work ethic and the way that I functioned and got people to move and get things done, and asked if I would leave public accounting and join him at United Negro College Fund. And then from there, my career in higher education just took off. So I'm currently the Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance at the University of Central Florida. And I've been in this role now since January 4th of this year, 2021.
Prior to that, I was the CFO at Johnson C. Smith, Ithaca College, as you said, and I was also the Vice President for Financial Affairs and University Treasurer for Ivy League Cornell University. So I have been very blessed by God and very fortunate to be where I am today.
And it all started from getting a track and field scholarship, migrating here from Jamaica at Howard University. So can you tell us a little bit more about your collegiate running and how that really impacted your life? Well, sports was my life from not only just running. Growing up in Jamaica, sports is the thing. I used it as a way for me to not only gain friends, but as I'm now wiser, a little bit older and wiser, I'm realizing as I look back,
Sports was the anchor that allowed me to understand some of the things I do today in my everyday work. And that is around teamwork. That is around setting goals and more importantly, execution. So I played three sports growing up in high school. I started out actually playing tennis when I was very young. My dad was a very good tennis player and I used to play with him and the older guys from his work. And I was pretty decent at it at a young age. But when I got to high school,
I went to a high school, Kingston College. That was not a school necessary for the affluent and wealthy. It was a school that was founded for the least of these. My dad was an alum. My older brother was an alum. So it was just by nature that I was going to go to Kingston College. But when I got there, tennis was not one of the sports there. So I started playing soccer. I used to play in the community, but I started playing more in an organized way there. And I played a sport called cricket.
And track and field, believe it or not, was just something came along later after returning from Trinidad and Tobago and a coach seeing me warm up for soccer practice and said, you know, you got some speed. But athletics is what drives me and drive my early years. I got to Howard and two things happened there. Howard was a transformational time for me because it allowed me to grow and develop. You know, I was young, raw talent and young.
Young people, 18, 19 years old, think you know everything, but Howard University became a place where I grew and matured. And track and field and studying under William P. Moultrie was a blessing for me because not only was he a coach, he was a mentor and a father figure too.
He is an accomplished coach. He was a former Olympic coach, Olympic referee, very knowledgeable about the sports. But track and field was his incubator to teach his student athletes about life. And I give all credit to him.
for what he has done for not only myself, but all my teammates that have come before me. So quite a bit that I have tried to accomplish in my own personal and professional career is done through athletics and what I learned even as young as four to five years old. Thank you for sharing that. I've found many similar benefits to having a regular routine of
working out or running in my daily life, just that goal chasing is really an invaluable and very special experience. Absolutely. So your coach at Howard University was an inspiration for your book. Can you tell us about that?
Yes. So my book, I published it in October 2019, is really to say thank you to Coach Moultrie at Howard. When I got into my professional career, Howard University is a historically Black college and university. And while there, you were just surrounded by Black excellence. I came from Jamaica. It's a Caribbean nation. Everyone pretty much, it was a very diverse population because the motto for Jamaica is
out of many one people. So I saw different people of different races and everything. And coming to the United States was rather interesting. I knew nothing about Howard prior to coming or someone getting me set up to speak with Coach Moultrie to take up this opportunity.
But when I got there, I got a better sense of not only who I was and what I was destined to do and finding my purpose, if you will, but being there around someone like a Coach Moultrie was really just getting me ready for what was next. And I'm ever thankful and grateful for going to Howard University because there I learned that Black excellence in the context of how I would then go out into the quote unquote real world
I was fearless. My confidence grew and my acumen and my ability to say, hey, I can get things done. That was nurtured and developed in that cocoon that's called Howard University. And while I was there, Coach Moultrie was like the conductor of an orchestra. So when I look at my teammates today that I went through my four years with,
And I look where they are and their stations in life today. It amazes me. There are lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, you name it, the upper echelons of their industry. They're all dotted around it. So the book was really just to say to him, look, coach, thank you. He passed away in 2014.
But this book took me about almost 10 years to write. I start, stop, start, stop. And eventually it's when I was actually at Ithaca College where you and I worked together that the impetus behind the book kind of hit me. And if you recall, when we were there in the fall of 2015, we
We had racial issues on the campus. But even prior to that, Ithaca College was my first predominantly white institution I went to. I spent almost a decade at Johnson C. Smith. But when I got there, it dawned on me when I saw the students of color, they would never look me in the eye. And I never understood why until one day a young man from New York, Puerto Rican guy, came up to me and said, Mr. Hector, how did you get here to have this job at this institution?
And out of that conversation, I said, you know what? The life lessons Coach Moultrie taught me would be a good way for me to give back to young people and try to share my experiences and my career path to give them some sense of they too can make it depending on what make it is, because success is not a thing.
Success is something that you definitely morph into. And it's a personal thing. The book was driven by that and the tenants of what Coach Moultrie shared with us, his words, his expressions that at the time we thought he was crazy. But now we're a little bit older and wiser. And when I get together with my former teammates, we all just sit around and said, look,
We really did not like him when he was our coach. But now that we see, looking back with our own children and our own careers, we're eternally grateful to him. So the book is really born out of that ethos of excellence that he always wanted to instill in us. What's been your experience since publishing the book? I have been overwhelmed by the support, the texts, the emails, the invitations to share. I wrote this book
as a way to try to get young people who oftentimes, especially in our current dispensation in time, they feel as if their voices are not being heard. And in some circles that might be true, but in other circles, it's all about the preparation that you get and to hear the
mothers and fathers and grandparents, you know, buying the book and sharing it with their grandchildren and buying the book and tagging me on Facebook and Instagram and say, look, this is a book you're supposed to get. I never envisioned any of that. I just wanted to write a book. And if I got to a point where I could help at least one person,
to look at their station in life differently. That would have been it for me. I love to write. I journal every day. I've been journaling every day now since about 2009, somewhere around there. And I like to write. Writing relaxes me. And I just thought how easy it would be to write this book about someone that I really cared about and who had an impact on my life. But what has been interesting also is, you know, there's one of my former bosses, David Thomas, currently the president at Morehouse College.
said to me that, you know, when you write a book and you're a publisher, people look at you differently. And I was kind of intrigued by what he was saying. And he'll say, you also have to be mindful of the fact not everyone necessarily is going to get the message you're trying to portray. But what you have to focus on, what are the vibrations you want to leave in the earth? And quite frankly, the book itself and that book has spawned a podcast, which is doing extremely well.
And I never envisioned any of this. So I sit here now with my wife, my wife and I are empty nesters now. And I just sit here, do my work during the day to what I'm assigned to do in terms of my work in higher education. I work extremely hard, a lot of long hours.
But writing, believe it or not, relaxes me. So I continue to do that. The response has just been overwhelming. And when we get out of COVID, we'll see what happens. There are several book signing events I had to cancel, several invitations to come and speak at groups and companies and other universities. But with COVID, I'm not making those trips, right? So my life is just St. Gerald. I'm not going to change. Still tied to my roots of where I grew up and that humility and
that my grandmother always told me I need to have, I continue to have. What has been different though, I will say this, when I published the book, I didn't realize that because I went to a small independent publisher that I had to market it myself.
Prior to the book being published, I only had social media accounts with Facebook and LinkedIn. That was it. Now I'm on Twitter and Instagram. She reminds me, you got to put yourself out there. You got to get images. Pictures are out there now. I share regularly on social media, LinkedIn, Facebook.
So that's a little bit different for me. But I do enjoy hearing back from people that, you know, your book actually made a difference for my child and it made a difference for me. And when you hear that from a CEO saying that he wished he had a book like this when he was younger, that really blessed me.
And I'll be eternally grateful for what's happening right now. And I read your book twice. I read it both on an ebook. And then I met up with you at a book signing. And I bought a hard copy from you. And you wrote me a very special note. And we talked about just kind of the lessons from that and how I can apply that to my life as well. So I really enjoyed and I saved many of the
quotes. I feel like they're not only applicable from a running perspective, but it was also really nice for me to learn more about you, about your running and your history at Howard University, because I knew you in a professional capacity, but to learn this background of you was a real pleasure to get more behind the scenes look of you as a person, not just as a mentor and a boss. Well, thank you for that, because the sentiments that you're sharing are
is what made writing this book all the more worth it. So you've had a very successful career holding many different positions. What are two to three lessons that you've learned along the way, if you can narrow that down? I would say first and foremost is to remain humble. Always remain humble. That's number one. Never let what's happening around you get to your head so you get puffed up.
I'm also a seminary graduate, so my spiritual side of me is actually key to my approach to life and people and interactions and relationships. So being humble is the first thing. The second thing is always be teachable.
Always be teachable. Never come off as a know-it-all. You always got to sit, learn, and observe what's happening around you and try to absorb as much as you can. And third, never take anything personal. I've learned over and over the time, even in the book I wrote, that if you're going to be a leader, you're going to have to go through some fires, right? And those fires sometimes are not there
what's happening to you, as Elijah Cummings had said once,
But why is this happening for you? So even when you get into adverse circumstances and situations are not working out your way, never, ever take it personal. Try to learn in the midst of it. Why is that thing happening? And just file it away in the back of your mind and you'll be able to persevere. I'll add a fourth one. This past Wednesday, I was privileged enough to have as a guest on my podcast, Dr. Otis Moss, Jr., one of the nation's
most renowned theologian, civil rights activist, and someone that's just an all around great person. And I had him, his son also is a, is well known in the country for the work that they do, but I had him on the show and I watched a sermon of his when I was preparing to interview him. As he said, in order to have a life of purpose, right?
you have to look at four things. It says, first, you got to find what is your purpose? What is that thing? And have that morph into your mission,
and then have your mission be actualized through a commitment. And then after you've gotten those three down, you move to what's called service, servant leadership, where your whole life is attuned to helping others. And I think if you can go with those four things, plus the three other tenets I mentioned, Sarah, I think you'll have the life that you're looking for in work,
in relationships, in everything that you do. My wife and I have known each other now for 31 years this summer, and we always get asked the question, how did you guys get married so young and still stay together? First, God is in the middle of it, but most of all, it's the same thing. Be humble, be teachable, never take anything personal, but more importantly, understand what you are doing
with your life partner in order to be a witness, one, or two, just enjoy your life together. Thank you. That is really some very valuable insight and advice. So I appreciate you sharing that. And I listened to this past Wednesday's episode, and it was just really insightful to hear what Otis Moss has done with his life to make a difference in our country. So it was very special that you were able to interview him and
share was memorable for me as a addition to what we were just talking about. We've had many conversations about my career trajectory. Can you maybe expand or share some helpful questions or thoughts for those who are maybe 10 to 15 years into their career? Absolutely. I just spoke with two young people this morning. One of the things I'm trying to do now is to mentor young
as many young people that are coming up that want to become chief business officers or chief financial officers in higher education. What I shared with both of them, first thought to them was know the difference between your core and your passion.
Your core is what's fundamental to you. It is your character. It is your makeup. It's what drives you. It's where your integrity resides. It's where you will never get pushed over this little edge and get into things that you know are not what are right. So that's your core. That's your general being, your makeup, and your passion is.
For me, that is what excites me. What will make me get up out of the bed every morning and go to work and enjoy it that I can put in sometimes 8, 9, 10, 12, 16 hours in a day because we have a task to get done. If you can find a career path that allows those two to intersect,
then I think that's where you're going to find those four things Dr. Moss talked about, right? You'll find your purpose, your mission, your commitment, and that ends up in service. A lot of folks, I think, are enamored with the title, some with the money that you could get. Well, I'm working in higher education, so there's not a lot of money. But they get enamored with the position and the power, and they get drunk on the power and all these things. If you just remain...
humble, like I've said before, but once you figure out the intersection of your core and your passion, the next thing for you to do is to learn
always be learning. I'm in the midst right now. People say to me, well, Gerald, why did you go back to seminary? I was like, well, I'm a CPA and I joke around and I tell them, I said, look, you know, well, I'm trying to get right with God before I leave. But when I got to seminary, there are so many people, lawyers, engineers, doctors, all these folks that are successful and accomplished. So I always come back to the fact that remain teachable, but also be mindful of the fact, where do you want to be?
What is that goal, the end goal that you're trying to get to and work backwards? So if I have an end goal in mind that I might have garnered from a mentor that I saw he or she got to a certain level and I would like to get to that level, or if it's around service to others, everything pretty much has an end goal for it around which you can plan.
And once you figure out that end goal, then you have to spend the time finding the steps necessary in order to get there. Right now, in a career setting, one of the things that trips up a lot of people is everything that they do, they have to be compensated for. And if you're trying to build a career, you build a career with relationships that are both inside your organization and outside of it.
So if you get outside of your organization, you're building relationships such that your name will be on the minds of others that you don't even know they're talking about you in rooms that you have not even entered. Right. In a biblical perspective, it says your gift will make room for you. Work on your gift.
And if you're working on your gift, those doors will open. And if you're working on your baseline craft of what you're good at, engineering, accounting, whatever it is, if you're constantly trying to improve your main craft, when the opportunity presents itself, you'll be able to walk right in.
And you can go in and perform. Right. But a lot of times is we're not focused in that regard. And we find ourselves flailing. We some folks that I've spoken to, they're in their their 50s now. And you're like, wow, you know, I should have. I could have. But I try to tell young people there is no right time to try something different, to try something new. But you have to always be planning on what's next.
And then when the next thing come around, make sure that you're ready for it. But, you know, prayer is a big part for me as well. So all those things combined, I think if folks sit quietly and try to chart that out, write it down.
put it on a timeline and execute on it, they'll be successful. Thank you for that insight and those tips. I found them very helpful and I hope all of our listeners did as well. I know that we've had the discussion about what my core values are versus my passion. And a year ago, I thought I had an answer and now I feel like my answer is different. And that's okay.
Help our listeners get to know you a little bit more. What are some things that you are obsessed with right now? I'm obsessed with losing 20 pounds I put on because of COVID. So yeah, I think a lot of people, I, um, since March, I have not been in the gym. So my wife just created a gym in our garage, but it's not the same as getting out the house and going to the gym, but, um, I'm going to figure it out. So I'm running a lot. I moved to Florida now, so I started running again, but, um,
You know, it's always a chore to try to get the weight off with no children around now. They're all gone. There's no incentive for me to get. I used to compete with my kids all the time. You know, I couldn't have them talking trash to me about that. You can't do this. You can't do that. So that's not there. So I have to be totally self-motivated now. So I'm obsessed about that.
I'm also still continuing my wanting to read as many books as I can outside of my regular work, you know, try to broaden my mind and listen and understand other things. I work now here at the University of Central Florida, which is an institution that was founded to pretty much a young institution, but it was founded primarily to support the space program here in Florida, Cape Canaveral, etc., etc.,
But the things that we're doing on this campus is amazing in terms of the work that we do. So I try to immerse myself in the campus that way as well. Now, COVID is impacting my ability to move around and meet people, et cetera. But I am that's what I'm focusing on right now is learning the campus I'm at and trying to meet as many people as I can. I do have a big role here.
But I'm hopeful that when COVID is over, I can accelerate that as well. That's great. It's exciting. I saw the picture of your new gym and I think many people are trying to build these home gyms since a public gym isn't as accessible anymore. So since you read so much, do you have a book...
Well, there's a book right now from one of my professors at the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. His name is Gart Roselle. It's a book entitled A Charge to Keep. I've just started that. Dr. Roselle was my professor when I was in seminary, and he taught me both the church before the Reformation and the church after the Reformation. But it wasn't so much the technical aspects of the book.
It was more so his teaching style and more so his care for all people. I really appreciated him. And I'm jumping into that book right now. And there's another book, I think it's Inclusivity. My boss here at UCF, Dr. Alexander Cartwright, gave us a book that we need to read. He would like for us to read on inclusivity. I think that's the name of it. But just reading the paper, the cover, seems to be an interesting book. But this whole issue of race and diversity is
is taking on a whole nother life in our world today, especially you see what's happening just in our everyday existence on the news and everything else. We have to get this thing right. We've been going around this Marbury bush too long.
So I hope to jump into those two books and get them done hopefully within the next month or two. Thank you. I'll definitely link those in the show notes and check them out myself. So this is a question that I like to ask all of my listeners. What does chasing life mean to you? Wow. That's a good question. Chasing life. Well, I'll flip it on his head. I have stopped chasing. I am more now, and this is the spiritual aspect of me. I am more about aligning. Chasing
You get tired when you chase, especially if you're out of shape. But if I am aligned with the purpose for which I believe that I am here on this earth, it becomes easier. Things that you would labor for when you're not aligned, it comes around and you're like, wow, how did that come this way? Now I can go deep into a spiritual sense and say, hey, this is because of my faith and God is blessing me. That is true.
from my perspective. But if you think of a car that's out of alignment, it's wobbly. If you take your hands off the steering wheel, it drifts either to the left or drifts to the right. But it's always moving forward, but it's still just crooked. And I have strived. When I was younger, in my 20s, I was a public accountant. I'll tell you this story. When chasing sometimes can go wrong,
When I was young, I got out of school, got to Deloitte, passed the CPA exam, and I was 31 years old. And Dr. Dorothy Calzianzi, that's just when I became a chief financial officer for the first time. I was 31, 32 years old.
And Dorothy Yancey hired me. She saw what I was doing at United Negro College Fund. I had just set up the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, the financial framework for that, a $1 billion program. Mr. Gray had allowed me to work at the senior levels of UNCF, even though I was just a controller. I was sitting in on senior leadership strategy meetings. So, you know, you get a young person in that space,
This is where the lack of humility might have come in because I was trying to prove myself all the time, trying to prove myself. And I carried that swagger with me, so to speak, ill-advised. And I went into higher education at Johnson C. Smith. And my second week there, I was saying in a meeting with some faculty members,
And an issue came up. I remember what it was. It was we had a grant that we had for like six years or something. And at the end of six years, we were doing a no cost extension. I'm like, why didn't we spend the money? You know, and I'm asking these questions that are obvious for a finance professional.
But it wasn't the right way to approach it. The provost at the time pulled me aside and said, young man, I know that you are, you know, you're very bright. Obviously, you're here. But one thing, you're very young and you have to remember that higher education is different in corporate America and you have to sit, learn and appreciate what is happening around you. I've never forgotten that.
And my same boss, Dorothy Yancey, who was one of my lifelong mentors to this day, she sat me down one day and just basically said, look, you're going to have a long career, but you have to remember one thing. Any space that you go into, don't go into the space without knowing the outcomes before you go in. And that kind of just brought me back to, you know, just being humble. So if you're chasing a career,
Get mentors. If chasing is your thing, get mentors who could speak into your life and they can watch you from a distance or up close and see that you're about to make a mistake and will pull you aside and say, hey, you might want to try something else or take a different path. And but more importantly, listen to them. So when you say chasing, I don't use chase anymore. I say align. I align myself.
with people who can speak into me. A lot of my friends today are much older than I am. I have friends and acquaintances my age group and younger, yes, but the people I spend most of my time talking with are folks that are much older than I am in their, you know, wiser years because I want to get where they are and have the impact and influence and gravitas they have
But you learn from those folks. So I would just say to your listeners, it's aligning yourself rather than chasing. It's a little nuanced there, but I hope that gives your listeners another perspective to ponder. Absolutely. And thank you for sharing that perspective. That's a unique answer. I haven't had anyone, you know, twist it on me. So thank you for challenging that and also just giving some really insightful perspective. Thank you, Gerald. I really enjoyed our conversation. Where can people connect with you?
I'm on social media. Folks can do the friend request thing on Twitter. I'm at FaithWalking3. Instagram is just GeraldHector2 and Facebook is GeraldHector. The book is on Amazon. They can Google it on Amazon. I also have a website that I'm building, GeraldHector.com. Been up now for a while, but doesn't get the focused attention that I would like for it to have. And the podcast, you can just search on SoundCloud and you can get a playlist of all of the podcasts that I've done.
I'm up to episode 34 now, and the guest list for this year of 2021 is coming together. And once again, I'm very humbled by some of the folks who have even said they will consider coming on the show. So I'm very thankful and grateful for that. Thank you. And I'm looking forward to hearing more episodes on your podcast. And of course, just cheering you on as you are.
are making a difference. Well, thank you. I am blessed and I've been very fortunate. And because of that, I believe I'm duty bound to give back in any way that I can to the community and to just try to be someone that folks can look to to say, hey, do you have an opinion on this or that? That's one of the things I admire about all of my mentors. They are very open
and accessible to individuals who want to speak to them and learn. So I hope to replicate and copy what they have done now that I have gotten to a place where people say I'm somewhere. I don't know what that somewhere is, but I'm just humble and grateful that the good Lord has blessed me to do the things that I'm currently doing. And I'm grateful that we met each other a few years ago. Well, you were a very good and insightful person. And I expect to get
to see and hear more from you in the higher education space and the work that you're going to do. I told you that long time ago. So I'm watching and just, you know, observing. And now that you have your podcast, I see what you're doing with your fitness regimen. I see the people's lives that you're touching and changing. And quite frankly, I can tell you that I'm not surprised, but I'm waiting to see what the end is going to be because I think you're going to be doing something very impactful. And yeah,
You're going to be leaving some vibrations in the earth. And I'm just humbled that at some point in time, our paths crossed, even though it was a work relationship at Ithaca College. But I've been thoroughly impressed to see what you're doing and keep it going. Thank you very much for those kind words. I really appreciate it. Thank you again, Gerald, for your time. Oh, thank you so much. And good luck with your podcast. And I'll be listening in. And now that I know you're doing one, I'll be an avid listener in the future.
All right. Great. Take care. This was fun. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share on social media. Tag me at Sarah Chasing Life or at Chasing Life Podcast. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast. That helps me to reach more listeners.