Limitless Internal Alignment: Suzana Ristevski

"You have to choose your hard." That's Suzana Ristevski, and it sums up how she sees everything.

Suzana is the Chief Marketing Officer for Google Australia and New Zealand. She's spent more than 30 years across NAB, GE, Optus, Medical Benefits Fund and 20th Century Fox, and she started out studying commerce and law before one marketing subject changed her whole direction.

This conversation goes places Chloe wasn't expecting. Suzana talks about growing up in Oakleigh as the daughter of factory-working migrants, and how watching her parents graft shaped a work ethic she never questioned. She talks about finding out her son Ollie was on the spectrum, and how she went in thinking she'd have to teach him about the world, only to realise it was the other way round.

There's a proper pull-apart of the word "smart", and why Suzana had spent decades believing she wasn't it. There's her separation, the year she didn't tell her own parents, and what it cost her to sit in that grief instead of running from it. And there's the idea Chloe keeps circling back to: internal alignment, the thing Suzana names as her real superpower, and the reason none of the rest of it, the job, the title, the boards, means much without it.

This one stayed with Chloe long after the mics turned off. Suzana didn't hold back, and neither did the conversation.

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