Dini Mehta, Chief Revenue Officer @ Lattice
Dini is the CRO of Lattice, an employee success platform that enables people leaders to build engaged high-performing teams, inspire winning cultures, and make strategic decisions. Dini previously led winning Sales teams at Quantcast and Drawbridge and is one of the few female Asian American revenue executives in tech.
In this episode we spoke with Dini about the following:
Growing up as an ambitious South Asian woman within a conservative extended family
Running your own race by serving your why versus seeking to impress others
How psyche management has helped her succeed in her career in sales
You can listen to her episode below or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Breaking past conservative traditions through positive role models
I grew up in a fairly conservative family where women typically get an arranged marriage in their 20s. That was the expectation growing up. Thankfully I had a brilliant older brother that I tried to compete with to get in his league. That allowed me to do pretty well and pushed me to punch way above my class. Both of my parents deeply instilled those values of the importance of education and work ethic. They would remind us of those two things constantly. My mom would even have a point system on household chores for us to get good at. In hindsight, my mom was a sales leader!
The influences of a progressive atomic family but a traditional extended family
This is a fascinating point and one I have thought about a lot. As I look back at my upbringing now and think through if I want to have kids at some point, I would love to find this balance again. I had a huge extended family; my dad has six brothers and sisters, and my mom has seven siblings. They all have kids and allowed us to have a very tight-knit family. However, there are also a lot of expectations from those family members. There were many rules that they brought to us on how we should be and had high expectations.
My parents didn’t play by those rules. My parents felt they wanted to give their kids the opportunity to pick their paths versus the paths that society had chosen for us. So that’s what I mean when I say that I had a conservative family but very progressive parents.
The importance of psyche management
I think psyche management is one of my superpowers. In sales, people talk a lot about developing the right processes to be successful. I think psyche management goes hand in hand with those processes because you have to deliver month after month, quarter after quarter. So I’ve trained my brain to see things to be more positive than negative.
When things don’t go your way, you’re working hard and don’t see results, then it’s easy to get into the victim mindset. When I’m in this headspace, I have to remind myself that I have to take an abundant perspective to life rather than a scarce one. I have to remind myself that I’m a girl from a small town in India living the dream in San Francisco. If you keep training your mind to do this, you perceive others as trying their best. I want to be focused on the positive because there are a lot of positives out there.
Like reading about Dini? You can listen to her episode above or wherever else you get your podcasts. Want to get notified of any new episodes of the podcast? Subscribe to our newsletter here.
Until next time,
Jay and Angie