An interview with Maria Angelova
Sincerely understand every participant of a situation and check all possible compromises looking for an option that supports everyone’s interests — don’t make rash decisions.
As a leader, some things are just unavoidable. Being faced with hard choices is one of them. Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. What’s the best way to go about this? Is there a “toolkit” or a skill set to help leaders sort out their feelings and make the best possible decisions? As part of our series about “How Leaders Make Difficult Decisions,” we had the pleasure of interviewing Anastasia Veremyova.
Anastasia Veremyova — founder and CEO of global communications agency Trust PR Production, co-owner of a mindfulness platform, strategic communications consultant in the tech sector, mentor for female professionals and founders, Global Women in Tech, and PR expert. The company was founded in 2020, in the middle of a crisis, and since then, they have been PR & marketing partners for more than 50+ tech startups, VCs, tech events and impact charity projects in the US, UK, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Lithuania, Latvia, UAE, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, India etc. Over the past year, the Trust team grew more than 10 times, brought professionals from new countries on board, and the company’s revenue grew 5 times. In this interview, Anastasia shares her rich experience and insights on how to make difficult decisions as a leader.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to ‘get to know you’ a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Of course! Thanks for inviting me to share. I hope my story will inspire someone and help them believe in themselves a little more. Each little part of my past became a puzzle piece in the big picture of what I do today. I believe that everyone can notice this in their lives and value very different experiences.
I was born in a small town and finished a Mathematics-Physics school. This gave me clear structure and a core that helps me to this day. Apart from dancing and martial arts, I spent all of my free time in music school — we toured around the world with our choir every year, competing with professionals from different cultures. That’s when my thinking became truly global.
When I went to study History in university, I got very interested in Gender Studies, Mass Psychology and different mentalities, International Relations and the heritage of European intellectuals. As you can see, this set the vector and essence of my work: communications, researching people and societies, female empowerment, and making the world a better place.
I dabbled in entrepreneurship for the first time while I was still in uni, when I joined a company that organized business events. I always felt the need to support myself, which also set my pace on the self-made path.
I self-taught myself PR from scratch by working at agencies. My education helped: mindfully and quickly immersing myself into a new topic — from lifestyle to science — an endless thirst for new knowledge, and strategic approach. I became an independent strategic communications consultant for businesses, a speaker at professional events, and helped young female professionals as a mentor on the side. The number of projects I wanted to help grew — I needed a team. Look, this is how the Trust agency came to be. Now, my team and I help venture funds, startups, female founders build and promote their dreams, ideas, and products. We’re more than PR — we help with research, production, events, and 360 marketing.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Honestly — it’s absolutely every person in my life. But the biggest and hardest, deepest and most daily life-altering investment into yourself, in my opinion, is still therapy. A therapist helped me overcome over the years barriers that couldn’t be breached by years of meditation, scores of wise books and wise people around me. Without a real knowledge of yourself you don’t know other people, without a deep relationship with yourself you can’t build healthy relationships with others. Mindful communications and emotional intellect are a base for any entrepreneur, not just in communications. And for any professional, at that.
The person who determined my key motto for life, set the lighthouse that gets me through every storm is my father. He hung a picture with the words ‘never give up’ above a little girl’s desk — and they really stuck with me and determined my journey. Moving forward is the only key to any goal.
There were and are coaches, mentors, professional teachers I was lucky to work with on the same team. And those who gave me the opportunity to get negative experience had a special influence, from colleagues to global crises affecting entire countries’ lives. Experience like that teaches more efficiently, highlighting points of growth. I’m grateful to them for how much stronger I’m becoming.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion. Can you share with our readers a story from your own experience about how you lead your team during uncertain or difficult times?
A company’s success is teamwork, that’s why the team is always my top priority. In the best times and in the worst times you need to stick together, that’s why we regularly support each other instead of just tracking results and working on mistakes. The best investment for a company is constant education: trainings, master-classes for professionals, and not just in communications, there’s even a health coach.
Each team member holds their own part of our collective responsibility, there’s no avoiding challenges and difficulties in work. I’m convinced that in these moments we have to take care of ourselves and our health, approach solving problems calmly, be kind to ourselves and others. When a person has emotional and physical resources they will deliver more for themselves, their team, and the company. In tough times, we especially focus on this.
Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the motivation to continue through challenges? What sustains your drive?
In the toughest moments, anyone can feel like giving up. But even this passes quite quickly — thanks to the mindfulness tools that I am learning to this day, and a discipline that can be improved endlessly. I recommend constantly studying attention management to everyone. And — always — with the help of the support of loved ones, which you also need to learn to ask for. Sometimes you need someone to remind you the words you say to others.
Globally, I am absolutely sure that a firm inner knowledge of what you want exactly and that you’re leading people to a better future will take you through any obstacles — the main thing is to keep going. And I believe that absolutely everyone can do this. The secret is to take responsibility for what is within your radius of influence, and not worry about not being able to change everything globally at once. An invincible motivation for me lies in the belief that I should succeed the way I see it — it’s immutable. Maybe there’s something about fatalism here, but only the kind that brings calm, not new anxiety.
A mandatory quality that is important to strengthen in yourself is tolerance to uncertainty. Basically, it is already ‘embedded’ in the psyche of an entrepreneur, but the good news is that I know cases when it was ‘trained’ almost from scratch. As a result, you meet new challenges with sincere gratitude and even (don’t be surprised) with joy, because you know that difficulties lead to growth, crisis means new opportunities. Take what’s happening like a game and choose the next move.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?
Recently I had to accept that the company is going through different stages of development and some principles stop working where they used to. Then, I had to make one of the toughest choices in my life.
The team comes first for me from the very beginning. We build trusting relationships, support each other, grow together, have fun together, make plans to take over the world together. For me, the interests of everyone on the team have always been above even the interests of the client. I am confident in this choice, because I know that when team members are on the same side and have high-quality emotional resources, they’ll deliver much more worthwhile results than tortured and spent employees, each for himself. Absolutely everyone wins — we, the clients, the journalists, the audience. By the way, that’s why I almost always refuse to work with outsourced specialists — once cooperation with people who didn’t have our culture of communication with the team almost ruined our firm’s reputation and cost me incredible resources.
So, we scaled very quickly. At some point, through a lot of resistance, I discovered that my and team resources were no longer enough to compensate for the decline in the results of one of the team members. For several months, we’ve been investing quite heavily in this in turn, following the values embedded in the team: someone covered loose ends, someone corrected mistakes, someone stood in, someone resolved conflicts. Here came the moment of choice that I have never had to make before: choose a person who has their own circumstances, and who I desperately want to save — or choose the rest of the team, who are spending resources on someone else’s work.
From that moment on, I had to admit that the interests of the team and the interests of an individual are no longer the same. They are practically the same in almost everything, but there may come a time when ‘good’ will mean different things for different sides.
The decision to part ways was unbearably difficult until the very last moment, but after it happened I felt better — I realized that the overall reputation of the team and its condition were saved. Since then, I begin to feel the moment when the goals of one team member begin to diverge from the general ones faster: for example, they don’t want to grow, or they want to develop in a completely different area, and so on. And this is completely normal — neither good nor bad. The key to success here is for each of the parties to be honest with themselves and be responsible for their choices. And again, everyone will win.
What process or toolset can a leader use to make a choice between two difficult paths?
Back to Erickson, first, remember — every choice you make in the moment will be the only right one. Trusting your ‘sixth sense’ isn’t about esoterics, it’s about quick and precise work of your brain that already gathered and accounted for all the data, added them up and solved the problem. Think of much-loved Kahneman who mentioned physicists and neurologists, Nobel prize winners who noted what neurophysiological process is hiding behind what we call intuition.
Secondly, be real strategists. Strategic thinking doesn’t mean thinking all the steps ahead. As Kaspersky said — I only analyze the current situation. But a strategist holds the goal in his head and makes every new decision in accordance with it.
The third will contradict the proposition that we should consider the experience of others. Let me clear this up: studying your colleagues’ experience doesn’t mean repeating their actions in the hopes of getting an identical result. Everything is individual, however, the analysis of others’ lessons and achievements will undoubtedly help your ‘OS’ store data and better navigate reality.
Do you have a mentor or someone you can turn to for support and advice? How does this help? When can a mentor be helpful? When is this not helpful?
First of all, entrepreneurs underestimate experience exchanges with colleagues. But networking and experience exchange can boost your results by several times! In addition, there are some professionals who can offer support.
The first one is a therapist. I already said that thanks to them you can reach absolutely any heights.
The second one is a coach — they can help decompose your goal, structure a task, make a clear plan, track its progress and analyze the results. Coaching boosts and multiplies growth thanks to using a huge amount of tools and methodologies.
The third one I want to talk about is a mentor. It’s important that they have experience in an area close to yours, because their task is to share their knowledge and experience and sincerely support you through difficulties they went through themselves.
You know, I’d also add something less obvious — the mentees themselves help a lot. When I share my experience and knowledge with mentees I reevaluate what I went through and get new lessons and completely new insights.
I’ll stress that professional coaches, mentors and therapists aren’t interchangeable, they shouldn’t diverge into each other’s territory, but redirect if they see a need.
Don’t forget about friends and loved ones, don’t live just for your business. Their love gives you strength to move forward when it feels like nothing will help.
To answer your question, there is something any of them will never help with. It’s deciding for you. The moment when you shift responsibility for your actions and their result onto someone else is when you lose the whole battle.
What would you say is the most critical role of a leader when faced with a difficult decision?
Being honest with your team, not hiding the difficulties. I used to live playing the role of a superhero who doesn’t mind anything — always 100%, always wins, always saves others, no screw-ups. Then I burned out. I fought my partner Inna’s words hard when she said: ‘You’re not making it better for anyone this way’. I trusted her — and a miracle happened! Like the team’s belief in me as a human being only grew and didn’t vanish like I was afraid.
Moreover, as a professional PR pro I can share one of the key anticrisis rules: don’t lie. To anyone — not the media, not your own team. Recently, a founder I know had a big scandal, and its roots, as she reflected later herself, were specifically in hiding information about issues from employees, caused by a desire to shield them from stress and rash decisions.
Now I’m learning to trust my team more and share not just victories, but tough choices I have to make, too, the ones that aren’t about ‘win-win’.
Do you ever look back at your decisions and wish you had done things differently? How can a leader remain positive and motivated despite past mistakes?
Coaches and therapists often share one of Milton Erickson’s principles: in the moment, you or your psyche makes the single right decision. It can sound paradoxical, but it works. The point is that you don’t divide your actions into ‘mistakes’ and ‘non-mistakes’, but analyze the consequences of any of your choices, making note of them for the future. And most importantly, take responsibility for your actions, don’t shift it to others, fate, circumstances, and whatever.
What is the best way to boost morale when the future seems uncertain? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team during uncertain times?
A tool that I can’t help advising to everyone reading this is highlighting and discussing any success. We’re all used to devaluing our results, moving from task to task. In many companies, it’s customary to only discuss screw-ups in retro. In my experience, nothing gives a team as much strength, confidence in the future, quality in completing tasks as going over all the achievements and how incredibly we’ve grown over this time. I’m incredibly proud of the Trust team, because week after week I see the results they achieve, how quickly they learn, the cases they implement, how uniquely and creatively they perform. I could tell you about it forever!
By the way, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it’s better to use tools like this always, not just in difficult times. It’s like meditating only under stress, or starting sports and healthy eating to urgently make your body strong for giving birth when you’re already pregnant. Only by introducing habits regularly and permanently can we get their best support in a crisis.
Psychologically, in uncertain situations, fears about what exactly you might lose in the future begin to fill your head. The realization that you will never be left with nothing will help with this: no one will take away the baggage of experience, knowledge and skills in your head. The richest people on the planet can safely lose their capital, because they’ve already made it and know how to do it again. It’s the same with any other capital, not just money — your skills. Whatever is ahead, you are not going there empty-handed, you have all the tools — after all, they’re in your head.
Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses or leaders make when faced with a hard decision? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?
You know, I want to emphasize that one person’s mistake is another’s chosen path that brings its results, which a person or business chooses. But there really are some choices with consequences that seem too complicated for the company to me when I watch them from the sidelines after a while.
- Lack of desire to understand the client’s goals. Roughly speaking, being interested only in your own KPIs — without thinking about how exactly your actions help an entrepreneur achieve what they want. Any product you sell doesn’t become useful in a vacuum. He is always part of a single chain of something more important. For example, when we become a PR partner of a company — public presence, brand development, crisis management, reputation management, launching campaigns and much more are directly related to how many deals they’ll close, how many investments they’ll raise, who will and won’t work with it, who’ll want to work in a company like this. The choice of publication for an interview will affect the decision of a potential partner, the choice of entrepreneurial community for a founder to join will affect the perception of the entire company’s level, the choice of a comment on Twitter can scale or kill a business. This is not about dry coverage figures and, God forbid, PR value in reports.
- Being a solo founder without partners. Too many times I’ve seen how even the strongest people can’t stand to carry everything themselves. Sharing responsibility is a strength, not a weakness. I understand the urge not to listen to anyone and go your own way. But this can lead to overestimating your own abilities and just become an obstacle for growth. Partnership is risky, but what new heights can be conquered without risks!
- Lack of communication with the outside world. A classic cognitive distortion of founders and their teams is that everyone already knows about them. However, let’s look at examples — great success is only reached by the ones who regularly work with the information field, talk about themselves, gaining access to control and reputation management. People whose comments are sought by every media and blogger have been working for this result for years. To make people talk about you the way you like you need to start talking about yourself. Preferably, through professionals.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a leader should do when making difficult decisions? Please share a story or an example for each.
- Sincerely understand every participant of a situation and check all possible compromises looking for an option that supports everyone’s interests — don’t make rash decisions. I just described a case like that above.
- Work with resistance using ‘non-violent communication’ tools. Again, everything comes back to the need to understand all sides of the process and not being a flake. A founder’s task is being a visionary and leading people forward. Our psyche gets naturally uncomfortable with any changes, but not all of them won’t be useful. I’d even say there aren’t many changes that won’t be useful, because progress is always growth! But progress through discipline, not abuse. When we introduced team restructuring, I felt some confusion on the team’s part. It was important to explain in detail that this is necessary for stronger results and for us to work as a well-oiled machine — there are more people, and I want everyone to feel in their place without trying to play the roles of everyone else in turn. If I just confronted the team with this choice without asking their opinion — I don’t think it would’ve been a success!
- Having given this time and attention, listen to the true needs of others. Using one of the methods of ‘non-violent communication’ from Rosenberg and asking deep sincere questions, you can feel a person’s real need. For example, if an employee comes with a request for a raise, they may not realize it — but right now they’re not feeling recognition, praise, a sign that they’re doing everything right and growing fast. Sometimes you may be asked for a new position — in the process of an attentive dialogue, you may notice they’re anxious about an uncertainty in life in general and are trying to compensate for this with more responsibility at work. All this can only be checked in a safe space environment. The main thing is that you’re not doing this to deny a person help or convince them, but to provide help with more care and awareness.
- Be a strategist. When I talk about retaining key goals in your head while choosing every step, this is what I mean. For example, as I keep repeating, the first priority is the team. Accordingly, the goal may sound like this: ‘the team is always in resource’. A client comes to me: big, well-known, but unethical, rude and without respect for anyone from the get-go. From the point of view of the ‘team in resource’ goal, it seems to be okay to take this client because this is a very large contract that covers a lot of bonuses and bonuses that I would like to award every month. However, the resource is always primarily emotional (without it there will be no rest). Realizing that the team will quickly burn out from communicating with this person, I easily and quickly refuse their request. It’s not worth it — and incoming customers with healthy communication principles were always out there and always will be.
- Take responsibility the right way. There are two extremes: blaming circumstances for everything, or taking responsibility for everything happening in 360. I used to live the second way — now I strive towards the golden middle. You can take responsibility for your choices, but don’t take responsibility for the actions and reactions of another person, please. What’s the responsibility of the founder? Legal and team performance — to the client, financial and supportive, developmental and educational — to the team. But the way others act on their part they choose themselves — learn to respect these boundaries.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Those words from the poster I told you about — ‘never give up’. I dream that everybody knows that there are no boundaries — they’re all only in our head. What you want in life and what you most sincerely want in your heart is possible. You just need time and finding the right tools.
How can our readers further follow your work?
You can find news about our company on my LinkedIn, and on the Trust agency’s website. You can also follow me on other social media. Thanks so much for this talk, it was very pleasant and exciting!
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.
Thank you for the amazing opportunity!
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
Anastasia Veremyova Of Trust PR Production On How Leaders Make Difficult Decisions was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.