Balancing Your Own Center of Gravity: A Manual for Hyperproductive STEM Professionals

By Jasmine L. Sadler, MBA

Balancing Your Own Center of Gravity is a manual unlike any other. Created for students on the STEM track, the guidance shared in this book is easily applicable to early-stage professionals in any field. With lessons ranging from time management and prioritization, to social groups and family ties, the knowledge curated in this text is formulated to assist young adults through the challenging crossroads where life meets career.

Key Components
1.Life Experiences
2.Soulmates Through Interpersonal Relationships
3.Self-Care Through Purpose
4.How to Balance it All

A Few Top-notch Takeaways:

•Identity: Who are you outside of your designated demographic description?
•Probability: A concept in math? A circumstance of life? Or, is it what you make it?
•Interpersonal Relationships: Are yours pinning you down or propelling you forward?
•Planning: Are you planning your future based on what if’s or based on what is?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jasmine L. Sadler, MBA
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780991052165

Jasmine L. Sadler, MBA

As a full-time CEO, trained aerospace engineer, and ballerina, Sadler is a force to be reckoned with. The dancing rocket scientist lives her life on purpose through her company, the STEAM Collaborative. Her devotion to providing access and exposure to quality experiences and programs to diverse youth is evident in every leap forward that she takes. An innovative and passionate supporter of the arts, Sadler has successfully constructed her company in an unprecedented way that combines the youth’s love of arts with their pursuits in science, technology, engineering and math. As a hyperproductive, functioning, professional, Sadler offers her known and unknown mentees Balancing Your Own Center of Gravity as a roadmap to making the most of life while embracing the lessons along the way.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

To all of my little sisters, mentees, up-and-coming engineers, and anyone else with conflicting priorities. To anyone who has ever asked, Jas, how do you balance it all? To those of you who have found yourselves to be the first and/or only one who looks like you in a room of crowded company. To the women in predominantly male fields. To Black professionals in predominantly white arenas. To Black women existing in societies dominated by white men. To those who have been labeled the minority, but deep down know and understand otherwise. I share these pearls with you, both in gratitude that you would look to me for advice and with the spirit of harvest so that you may find growth such as I did.

Through mentoring, volunteering and simply journeying, I often find myself sharing different parts of me, my life’s path and my experiences. In doing so, I have noticed some redundancy in both the questions asked and the stories I share. I’ve also noticed that I sometimes need to veer from the direct path of the storyline, down a back road to pick up some jewels not always available on the main road, in order to make it to the final destination—that is the moral of the particular story I may be sharing with any given person. Instead of continuing to give bits and pieces of myself here and there, I figured it was time to create a collection of said jewels; this book. This manual is written in much of the same way. You may notice that I tend to run on, and that is because I am talking to you on these pages in the same way I converse with my mentees face-to-face.

It is my hope to connect to you, the reader, by revealing my own self-discoveries and rediscoveries. My expectation is that something, be it only one thing, resonates with you and encourages you to keep moving forward toward your greatest aspirations. By giving you a glimpse into the ups, downs, hurdles and aha! moments of my sometimes-rocky trek, my intent is to show you by example that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Not only can you do this (whatever this may be for you), but you are already doing it, and you do it well.

SECTION 1.0: Climbing To Contentment—Life Experiences

Work is the result of the force you put in and the distance that it gets you. Force and distance are both needed to validate work being done. If the force is zero or the distance is zero, there was no work done. If you spend your entire career attempting to climb the corporate ladder and never get promoted, it does not matter how much force you put in, the distance is zero, so you did no work. Alternatively, if you get promoted, but did nothing to climb the corporate ladder and/or had no professional or personal development, there was no force done, so you did no work. Also, to result in the greatest amount of work, the force and distance must be in the same direction, or only a portion of it counts.

1.1 Self-Identity

I applied to a leadership program in San Diego in order to find a place to channel my inner activist. As a community-oriented program, it provided its participants with the resources, opportunities and outlets to engage in activism around the city with like-minded individuals. While applying, I was taken aback when I encountered the following questions:

Identities you hold and/or are attributed to you. What do you identify as most?

Cultural/social/faith/ideological or other communities you believe you represent.

How are these questions different? I wondered. This question came sometime after I participated in a panel where we discussed volunteering and giving back to the community, particularly in Southeast San Diego. One of the other participants on the panel expressed how she sometimes felt pushed out or that her help wasn’t wanted when she would go into certain communities. I couldn’t relate to the woman’s experience. I have never felt pushed out of the community because those are my people and I consider it my community too.

That’s when I realized that I don’t view community in the same way as a lot of other people do. Some people associate where they live or work, their zip code, as the community they belong to. I’ve always felt that my community is wherever I can connect, improve and contribute, whether I lived in that zip code or not.

Southeast San Diego sometimes has a negative connotation associated with it. Some would view it as San Diego’s hood, the underserved, or as the less desirable part of the city. It’s where I find myself volunteering a lot. I’ve never thought of it in that way. I’ve always viewed the Southeast as just a geographical reference. It really should be referred to as southeastern San Diego because that’s what it is. Even though I didn’t live in southeastern San Diego, between church-related activities, community events, youth engineering programs and volunteering, I would find myself in the neighborhood sometimes seven days in a week.

I found it a little odd that the application phrased the question about community in such a way. Usually those types of applications simply ask where you live and then use your zip code to chart your commute or vicinity. I appreciated the change in questioning. It allowed me to answer from a space of inclusion and belonging within a community that I already felt a part of, even though I didn’t physically live there.

Daughter. Aunt. Child of God. Mentor. Activist. Healer. When asked about identity, these are not terms or phrases that someone would typically answer with. So when asked the second question on the leadership application, I began my answer with African-American female. While that satisfied the question from a demographical standpoint, I knew my identity encompassed so much more than that. To not add those other descriptions would be the same as presenting an incomplete identity.

With questions about identity similar to the one on the leadership application, the expected demographical answers can also serve as identifiers. These identifiers can work for or against you depending on the reviewer’s intent or desire. I once co-led a workshop that addressed the notion of unearned privilege. A white woman at the workshop shared how she never had to think about her race except for when filling out a job application. She identified that as an example of her unearned privilege. I remember trying to put myself in her shoes, wondering how that might feel. Unfortunately, I may never know. I wake up as a Black woman. I walk as a Black woman. I work as a Black woman. I eat, sleep, drink, study, etc. … as a Black woman. I don’t have the luxury of forgetting that I am a Black woman. The constant awareness is ever present. Because it’s not something that she is constantly aware and/or reminded of, the woman from the workshop probably would not answer the identity question leading with Caucasian-American female. Why? Because she doesn’t view being a white woman as synonymous with her identity. She doesn’t have to, and I shouldn’t have to, either.

Completing those two questions regarding community and identity helped open my eyes to the way I view and identify myself, how I want others to view me, and how I convey that to those who matter. The unique manner in which the questions were phrased left an opening for me to self-define what I believed my answers should be as opposed to so many other applications that confine your answer to the multiple-choice selection of what the reviewer wants to know. This simple process of answering questions on an application allowed me to take back the power and control over what my identity actually is, versus the usual one-dimensional demographics that oftentimes make this decision for us.

Ever since completing the application, I’ve moved forward now knowing that even though I may never forget that I am a Black woman during every breath I take, I still have the power to decide, and the voice to communicate, that there are a lot more layers to my identity than my race and gender. I define my narrative.

1.2 My Slow Pace is Still Light Speed

There are few people like me. I am what some would call a unicorn. My brother and a particular mentee of mine share this unicorn-like quality, and I once found myself trying to explain that to her (the mentee). Even from middle school I found myself aiding other students in math classes. I