#movethedial stories: Meet Lisa Lisson, President at FedEx Express Canada

I've learned along this journey. My story tonight begins actually on August 13, 2007. My husband and I were just coming back from up north. We were on a little summer vacation with our kids. I have four children at the time. My daughters were nine, seven, five, and my son was three. I was a vice president at FedEx at the time in marketing and sales, and my husband was a vice president at a construction company. We had this beautiful vacation, and we came back on the Saturday, and it was Sunday night. We were just having live chats about how grateful we were, and it was just this really profound conversation I had with Patrick. Then we went to sleep. He wakes me up, and I'm like, 'What was that?' I click on the light, and my husband was not in the bed. I thought, 'Okay, well, that's odd. Where is he?' So I get up and I walk around, and I find him laying on the floor. I quickly went over there, and I realized that he was not breathing. So I obviously grabbed the phone and dialed 911, and I am screaming at the top of my lungs, 'Please don't die on me!' Because you see, I've been with him since I was 14 years old, and we were high school sweethearts. So I'd been with him almost half of my life. So I'm screaming so loud that I wake up my five-year-old daughter and my seven-year-old daughter. My nine-year-old daughter and my three-year-old son slept through all of this thankfully. The paramedics arrive, and my house is just lights everywhere. They come into the bedroom, and a big fireman picks me up and puts me outside and shuts the doors. So I go downstairs with my two little ones, and the police were there. They were up there for 45 minutes, the longest 45 minutes of my entire life. I finally said to the police officer, 'I can't just stay at the bottom of the stairs. I just need to know if they have a pulse. That's all I need to know.' So she finally let me go to the bottom of the stairs just as this one police officer came down and said, 'He has a pulse.' So we go to the hospital, and they put him in a drug-induced coma because when you suffer from a lack of oxygen, your brain actually swells. So we're trying to contain the swelling. After a week of him being stable, they airlifted him to St. Mike's Hospital here in Toronto. When he got to St. Mike's, we did a couple of days, and then the staff there said, 'We're going to try to pull back the drugs and see if we can wake him up.' So they pulled back the drugs, and there was a flicker of brain activity, and that was it. But there was a flicker. I had a team of doctors that wanted to meet with me afterwards, and they said, 'We need to talk to you about his living will.' He had a living will that says if there's no hope for a meaningful life, do not prolong a life worth living. But I assume when he signed that, he was hoping he'd be 93, not 38. So I just looked at them and I said, 'Do miracles happen in this hospital?' And they said, 'Well, yes, miracles happen every single day.' So I said, 'I need you to hook him up to whatever feeding tube, the trach, everything.' And they did that, and they sent him back the next day to Burlington, our local hospital. So talk about a defining moment in your life where you realize, 'Oh my goodness, what has life just thrown at me?' And my mother, who is my role model, said to me, 'You feel completely paralyzed right now. And although you feel that you've been punched in the gut, and although you feel you can barely breathe, just remember you have choices, and you can choose how you handle this.' That was a very profound moment for me. So I went on a journey, and I said, 'Okay, you know what? I can't control what's happened to him right now, but I'm going to focus on what I can control. I can control researching all the brain meds I can find to wake up his brain. I can focus my inner voice, which is telling me right now, 'You're not going to survive this. You're not going to get through it.' I can control that inner voice. One of my mentors always said this to me: 'The most important conversation you will ever have is the one you have with yourself.' So I had to find the strength from the darkness, and I'm going to make it my mission. I also learned to control my mind. This is a very profound moment for me. I learned that for some reason, our minds tend to do two things: they tend to live in the past, and particularly for me, I found I was going through with Patrick being sick and me trying to be a vice president, I found I was living in the past, remembering when he was healthy. It wasn't doing me any good. So I vowed to myself that I'm only going to live in 24-hour increments. I'm only going to look back for a life lesson, but I have to get my mind to be present in the moment. If I wasn't worrying about the past, the next thing I was doing was worrying about the future: 'Who's going to walk the girls down the aisle? Who's going to do this?' My mother said to me, 'Baby, even in the darkest of times, if you look hard enough, you can find a reason to smile.' I learned my reason to smile was gratitude. Because you know what? I had to find my silver lining. My silver lining was this: Patrick could have been driving our kids when he had that heart attack. That's what could have happened. So I started to live this life of 24-hour increments, and I would tell my kids every single night, 'What are you grateful for from the day?' And I would do the same thing to ground me. I told my kids every single morning, 'When you wake up, I want you to declare the day to be a great one.' Because I had to tell myself that. My son turned five a year and a half later. His bedroom was beside mine, and I heard him put his two feet on the ground saying, 'Today's a great day! It's my birthday! I'm getting a brand new Nintendo!' I thought, 'Okay, I'm doing something right.' For those two years, he was starting to get worse. He couldn't see, he couldn't speak. I brought him home every Sunday. This became my new normal. Sometimes in life, you have to realize your old normal is no longer there, and you find a new normal. This was my new normal. But at the end of those two years, I started realizing it wasn't meant to be. His body was becoming very ill because he couldn't move, and I realized at that point in time that I had to honor his wishes of letting him go because he didn't have any quality of life. The very good news about that, though, is that he wasn't suffering. I always wondered, 'Is he there inside?' But he was not. He wasn't suffering. So at the end of the two years, a heart attack in August 2007, and then he passed away in August 2009. When that inner voice wants to come and rear its ugly head about, 'You can't carry on with what you want to do in your career,' I had to temper it. So I carried on with what I was continuing to do, and I learned to find strength from this. Then a year almost to the day that he passed away, this is now August 2010, I'm coming back from vacation up north with the kids, and my assistant calls me and says, 'The CEO for FedEx for the world is on the phone. He wants to speak to you.' I thought, 'This could not be a good thing.' There's that inner voice going, 'What have I done? Why am I on vacation? What's happening here?' And he said this to me: 'I'm offering you the position of president of FedEx Canada.' I went into complete shock. But I said to him, 'Well, aren't you going to interview me?' He's offering me the job! So it was said earlier on about women: we tend to lack confidence, and that confidence gap is real. We tend to lack confidence. It was said earlier on that men will go for a promotion when they're 60% ready, and women wait until it's perfect. So here, no man would have said, 'Aren't you going to interview me?' Right? I have to work on that inner voice. And I said, 'Did you just say that out loud?' Yes, I did. And he's been one of my mentors. He said, 'You have lots of mentors, I have met. I would tell you right now, the only reason why I'm standing here is because of my mentors and my sponsors.' And he's one of them. But I also would share with him what my other mentors told me. He said, 'You've been interviewing for 18 years because I started out entry-level at the bottom of the company. You've been interviewing for 18 years. You've used that time wisely because what else have you done?' I said, 'Well, my mentors always told me that the most successful people in life are the ones that write down their goals, both personally and professionally. And when life throws them a curveball like I had, I could have chosen to give up on my goal because I'd written down to be the first Canadian, first female president. I could have chosen to just throw that away because my inner voice was saying, 'You cannot be a widow raising four kids and still achieve your dream.' I had to tell myself to shut up multiple times, multiple times. And I said, 'Well, you told me to write down my goals and to look at them, and to also make sure I took baby steps.' He said, 'One thing that I know will help you in achieving this job as our new president is the white space thing on the calendar.' I said, 'Oh, that's the white space thing on the calendar.' He said, 'Yeah, that's the white space thing on the calendar.' What one of my mentors told me when my husband was still alive but very sick, I said, 'How am I going to do this?' He said, 'You must carve out white space on your calendar. I want you to carve out three to five hours a week at work where you're not on the phone, you're not in a meeting, and I want you to sit and pause and reflect and shut the world off. You have to rest your mind and use that time to focus on your goals, your personal and professional ones.' He said, 'But not only do that at work. I want you to carve out three to five hours a week where you're doing something where you're not a mom, you're not a worker, you're not a sister, you're not anything. You're doing stuff for you.' So what I started to do is I started to go to the gym. I started to do things for me. Those two years when Pat was sick and the year post, I believe helped me to get the position I'm in. I will close by saying this: one of the things that I teach my daughters, they're now 20, 18, and 16, I always tell them this: make sure you surround yourself with people, places, and things that inspire you. Throughout my career, at conferences like this, I commend you all for giving up a night where you could be with your family or friends to come and be inspired. On my phone, I have all these inspirational quotes, and whenever I have down days, which we all do, I wake up some mornings and I'm like, 'I do not want to get out of bed.' In faith, we all have those down days as long as they don't outweigh the good. But I will find strength from the darkness.