7 ways I stood up and stood out — with SUSE's Melissa Pinder

Combining the roles of Digital Partner Executive at SUSE, on-call firefighter with Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, and parent to four children, Melissa Pinder knows a thing or two about knowing her own mind and making her own mark on the world. From rebuilding her life after becoming a single mum, to challenging stereotypes and building bridges, she discusses the strategies she’s employed to help her stand up, stand out, and show her children and others how differences can be used for good.

1. After my first husband left, I had a choice to become a victim of my circumstances — or to move on to make a life for me and my girls.

My confidence was shattered at the time, so as a coping mechanism I started running a half-mile every day; it was also a way to clear my head and sometimes just to have a cry away from my girls. Before long I was running 5k, which later turned into half- and full marathons, and gradually I made small steps to recovery — I got a full-time job, and years later, despite all I had gone through and because I’m a romantic at heart, I made the choice to remarry.

2. When life gives you lemons, make orange juice…and make them wonder how you did it.

That was the lesson I taught my girls after we moved from the Caribbean to the UK 17 years ago. At the time, we thought we were making the best decision for our children; however, my eldest daughter had a different viewpoint. She felt everything she knew had been taken away from her; access to her grandparents, friends, school, sunshine, lovely beaches…and what she had gained was a broken family, an all-white school and life in a village where we were the only black family at the time, and where she felt like the odd one out. To her, the sacrifices we made to come here had been in vain. Hearing her express those views, I knew I needed my kids to understand that what they saw as a negative could be turned into a positive, and so I began to immerse myself in my local community — for the community’s sake, but also importantly to show them how our differences can be used for good.

3. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world today and it doesn’t matter what you look like or what people think of you.

I wanted my girls to see the kind of positive influence we can have on our community, even if they felt that community did not accept us. And I wanted them to understand that it didn’t matter what experiences we’d had or what we’d gone through, we were going to be the family that people knew because of the positive influence that we had. So, when I saw they were looking for an on-call firefighter for the local fire station here in the village I jumped at the opportunity.

4. I am the only black female in the Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service.

And that makes me take this role even more seriously, because everything that I do is about helping my girls to see that our differences should be positive. Being an on-call fire fighter providing a service for my community is something I take to heart. It’s a way for me to give back and for my children to see that you can be faced with any challenge and overcome it through hard work and determination. In the fire service, we don’t just fight fires, we turn up at traffic incidents, go to schools to give fire safety tours and do fire safety appointments locally — so we are heavily involved within the community in all aspects. That’s something that also shows my girls that you can do whatever it is that you choose to do, and importantly you can help people in your community not to stereotype you as well.

5. I face challenges head-on and I have done that with everything that has been thrown at me at different stages in my life.

But I always try to see the positive in everything that I do and understand what the takeaways are from those experiences. In life, it’s not a question of whether adversity is going to come — it will. We all will experience it. But we must mentally prepare ourselves to handle it, or it can crush us. It’s how we deal with challenges and how we view the world as we do that makes us stronger. And things will get better. It won’t be grey skies forever. The sun will eventually come out and shine.

6. When you are experiencing difficulties, you need to know how to ask for help.

It’s no weakness on your part; it shows great strength and bravery to say, ‘I can’t cope with this, I need help to work this out’. I live by the saying, ‘be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help and brave enough to ask for it’. That’s how I get through every day. At times in my life there have been things that I had no control of and needed to move on from, but I allowed myself to not shoulder all the problems on my own. If I was in a bad place, I always found someone that I could lean on and cry on. I didn’t try to do everything on my own strength.”

7. SUSE’s old motto was ‘we adapt, you succeed,’ — and for me life is about that power of being able to adapt to any situation

and whatever life throws at you. The pandemic, for example, has influenced everybody’s life; we’ve all had to deal with working from home, some of us have had to home-school and we’ve all had to adapt within SUSE as colleagues. But it has shown me again that you do learn to adapt through facing challenges and problems and doing what you need to do to overcome them. Everyone has done a great job within SUSE, as well in the fire service, around that. It’s been a tough year. But those of us who are healthy, have our families with us and still have jobs should be thankful for what we’ve got, and not complain about any of the little things that we may have lost during this year. I encourage my own family just to be appreciative of the things that we do have, because so many people have lost a lot more.