Karin Volo, an expert in engagement, career, personal and organizational development, is known as The Evolution Expert. She is a best-selling author, speaker, entrepreneur, and consultant. She uses her professional skills and draws from her personal experiences to help individuals and companies thrive and maximize their potential. You can get her new book, Engage! at www.TheEngageBook.com and find out more about her company at www.Evoloshen.com
Tell us a bit about yourself, background and what you do currently
My “title” is the Chief Joy Bringer….as a co-founder of a company called Evoloshen (it’s pronounced just like Evolution but that website was already taken!), we believe that a new way of doing business is emerging. When 71% of people are disengaged at work according to the latest research by Gallup, it’s time to do something about it. Life is too short to not be living to the fullest and we help companies maximize the potential through people engagement.
I’m also the co-author of an international best seller called Engage!, a book about employee engagement and how to create an Amazing Company. We’ve researched fifteen Amazing Companies—like Virgin, PUMA, Southwest Airlines, TOMS, Zappos, Ben & Jerry’s, John Lewis and many others—who are showing us how to create a thriving culture where employees and customers are raving fans.
I have always worked in helping people my entire career through headhunting, coaching and mentoring. I started in executive search in the US, becoming a Vice President and creating a new business area for the top US office for that company I was working for. Then I moved to Sweden and founded an executive search firm in Sweden that did very well helping people and companies going through transitions.
After going through a major personal crisis that literally removed me from my life as I knew it (see below), I wanted to use what I had learned in a way that could really help a lot of people. This is what lead me to start Evoloshen and writing. I blog often and love sharing the message of empowering people to be their very best.
What has been your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge by far was being forcibly separated from my daughters for almost four years. I was wrongly accused for fraud related to my abusive, professional conman, ex-husband’s activities. I ended up being held in a high security holding facility in San Diego for 1352 days, fighting an extradition case, before all charges were finally dropped and all the cases closed! I didn’t get to see my young daughters (who were 8 & 6 and living in Sweden when it started) during the entire time.
Each and every day was a personal battle for me to try and stay positive in a very dark environment.
I worked diligently on staying hopeful and “escaped mentally” through the hundreds of books I read. I also visualized several times a day that I was completely exonerated and free to return home to raise my daughters. In the end, that is exactly what ended up happening.
What’s been your greatest achievement personally?
Besides having my amazing daughters, I am most proud of two things. The first is that while incarcerated, I wrote a series of 27 children’s books called Bringing Joy To The World that helped me teach my daughters all that I was learning during those tough years. It helped our family stay close. Going through such a difficult time and coming out on the other end with a greater understand for life, it has put me on my personal mission to bring joy to the world (hence the title I now use). I’ve also co-written the 28th Bringing Joy book with Neale Donald Walsch.
The second achievement is releasing Engage!, our first business book, and having it already become an international best seller and getting it translated into several languages. Bringing joy into the working world and helping to empower others is so important now when we seem to be constantly bombarded by bad news and negativity. The message in our book is powerful and clearly on that the business world needs to hear!
If you weren’t doing what you do, what would you be doing?
I am living my life’s purpose now.
I know that deep in my heart so other than maybe not working so hard and travelling a bit more, I wouldn’t be doing anything else.
Who has been your biggest inspiration?
My grandfather was a famous Swedish photographer and publisher having written and published 100 books in his lifetime. He was my first mentor and I learned a lot from him as a teenager. My other two biggest inspirations are Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson—I love how they are both contributing to making the world a better place.
What does the future hold for you?
I’m so excited about building Evoloshen into a global training company that is the bridge from the old ways of doing business into the new paradigm that is focusing on people, planet, and profits. My personal story is slated to be released in 2014 and I’m excited because by sharing this story, we’ll be able to touch so many lives and inspire them to become empowered and live their best life. So sharing my methods for bringing joy into the world, whether it is through our corporate training with Evoloshen, for parents and children through the Bringing Joy series, or inspiring others who read about my personal journey, the theme is the same—inspiration, joy and evolution.
