“The Horse’s Mouth with Tom McManus” is a unique talk show offering opinions and facts that come straight from the source. No gossip, no hearsay, no agendas; just topics straight from the Horse’s Mouth! His guests include top of the line, high profile figures in sports, news, entertainment, business and leaders in the community. He will tackle the hard subjects in society over a beer and laughs. Today our hosts, Morgan Allen and David Ramos, spoke with Heather Mutchie.
Heather Mutchie
Owner/Operator of J&C DEISEIL LLC
Website Address: https://www.yourjcd.com
Short company description:
Administrative guide for the bereaved – giving hands on administrative support and guidance to First Coast families after a death.
Leading pre-death planning group programs for adults all across the US.
How do you define success?
Success is the light bulb moment, the spark of a new synapse making a connection. Success is failure with a lesson and another attempt.
In the death space, we don’t succeed by overcoming grief, or by ‘getting over it’ faster or better than people expect. We succeed by facing a terrible reality and living anyways.
What lessons from sports have you applied to your personal life and career?
1. Let them underestimate you, it’s always funny.
2. Being left handed may make you play ‘weird’, but sometimes that’s exactly the edge you need.
What strategies do you use to improve your performance?
I have a business coach; someone who’s played the game and can look at my performance from the outside, wants me to win, and isn’t going to sugar coat how I do that. I’m invested in hearing from experts. I don’t and can’t know everything about every sub-field I come into contact with in my death work – I trust and listen to experts in their fields (i.e. don’t let ego out do you)
Can You Discuss a Time When You Had to Work with a Team to Achieve a Goal?
I’m a solo operation at the moment, but just before opening my business I was a project manager for a research team. We had team members on the East and West Coasts, and in Europe. Our West Coast team was entirely retired social workers. We were interviewing every County in California about first ever federal funding for their Adult Protective Services programs. I’m not a social worker, though it may seem like it. I have no clue about the history of these programs, or the acronyms they toss around and how they connect to each other. My team of retirees were INTEGRAL to understanding and coding the data we collected. It was like writing a book in a foreign language, having a translator to translate the book, and then writing a college level report on this translation. It would have been impossible to get meaningful data without them and their experience. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t stumble over many miscommunications, tech problems, and crossed assumptions. Sometimes it’s the things that make a team struggle that are inversely what make it shine.
