Thankful Thursday: Gretchen Hirsch
It’s Thankful Thursday and today I’m sending gratitude to Gretchen Hirsch, the first consultant I hired when I started my first company many moons ago.
We didn’t know one another when we started working together and our lived experiences were very different. It started with the fact that she is from Ohio and I am from Michigan, and if you know anything about college football you know that we are rivals – Go Blue! Very quickly our differences melded into one unified spirit focused on providing the best service to our clients that we could.
For many years, Gretchen wrote for nearly all of my clients. From nonprofit organizations working in perinatal care to Fortune 500 financial institutions in the area of family wealth. The words she put to paper spoke to the hearts of our clients and their stakeholders. On the wings of her pen and paper, my firm won awards for communications and advertising, and we had clients who stayed with us for many years, often taking us with them as they moved from job to job.
What Gretchen taught me through her excellence in communication has stayed with me since our first engagement. Through her writing, I learned to be a better writer. Through her meticulous editing, I learned to edit better. I attribute much of who I am as a writer to the brilliance, patience, and serious yet fun approach to writing that Gretchen poured into me.
Our learning was a two-way street. The conversations we had about race and privilege decades ago as these topics related to our work and lives resonate today, and the ease in which our conversations flowed are evidence that bridges can be crossed. I am blessed to call Gretchen my friend, and when I attended her daughter’s wedding and was asked to sit with her family in the front, I knew that our friendship was true.
She’s written 13 books across too many genres to share here. And she’s affectionately called “The Book Doctor” as she works with aspiring authors to help them get clear about the journey. Follow the links in her LinkedIn bio to learn more about my amazing friend.
Thank you, Gretchen, for what you do but more importantly for who you are to me.