Denisa Tudor is a communication specialist and, currently, she successfully manages to handle both the Global Online Campaigns Manager position held at Bitdefender and the professor chair at National School of Political Science and Public Administration. Denisa passionately fosters creativity and innovation, and human relationships are illustrative of her professional ground.

Trainart: Which is the most difficult aspect of your profession?

D.T.: As a specialist, the most difficult part is coordinating people and making decisions about communication. On the other hand, as a professor, the most difficult thing is to attract and maintain student’s attentions. I think in both cases it all comes down to people management, but the tactics you use are slightly different. In both cases we are talking about adapting communication to different human personalities and maintaining interest. And you cannot do this unless you offer them information which they consider interesting or up-to-date. I don’t think there is a moment when you can say that you have gone beyond these limits because there are situations which make you adapt to new contexts.

Trainart: What inspires you to be creative?

D.T.: People. Creativity comes when you least expect it. However, I don’t believe in inspiration of the moment; instead, I believe that in order to be inspired and inspirational it is necessary to maintain our minds strong. And talking about training, I’ve tried the rule with learning a quatrain every evening and, though I failed to maintain the habit, I can tell you it works. It trains the memory and focus. I strongly believe that inspiration comes from a lot of reading and it doesn’t mean to copy, it means to come up with something new, different, knowing what there is out there. Otherwise you can’t make anything relevant because you have no basis to build on.

Trainart: How does a normal day in Denisa Tudor’s life look like?

D.T.: Busy. No exceptions. I’m always on the run. I think if I lost my `must do list` I, myself, would be lost. I wake up, I go to the office, I deal with my current tasks. After work I go home and I start working for `my other job`, the academic one. In a nutshell: I know when it starts, but I never know when it ends.

Trainart: Tell us about the latest crisis you faced and how you managed it.

D.T.: I don’t know if they can really be called crises. It is in my nature to get excited about all the activities I get involved in. I am a perfectionist so, very often, time and I are at odds with each other and time pressure creates the environment for a crisis. But, I do remember a crisis back when I worked in the agency and the deadline for a pitch was closing in and the whole team was working hard to finish up the materials. I was the one to centralize all the information and I had to make sure that our presentation is coherent, with a start and an end.

Trainart: Which do you think are the 3 essential qualities a person must have in order to work in Communication?

D.T.: Empathy – this is the way to know and to understand the others and it can lead to efficient communication. Reasoning and criticism – the capacity to analyse our own words, but also the answers we receive. It’s worth mentioning that I’m talking about constructive criticism, as we can easily have destructive criticism, especially if we are not interested in the end of that process. And last but not least: adaptability, the capacity to adapt to different contexts and situations, to different people and problems.

Trainart: How would you define success?

D.T.: I’ll start with a negation. It’s not the usual way to go about it, but I want to emphasise on this. Success is not a destination one needs to reach; it could be portrayed as beautiful bouquet of flowers. Success can be a sum of achievements, big and small, which we gather throughout the journey without knowing where they would lead in the end. Each achievement is a flower and, one flower next to the other will form a beautiful bunch. And I really want to enjoy each and every flower, each and every achievement. Enjoying the journey, not getting stuck on the destination, this is what matters to me.

Basically, I think that the problem is that we start to define success as an unreachable ideal and we dwell too much on its definition so, in the end, we don’t know how, or  we fail, to see the journey. Octavian Paler (n.t Romanian writer) in his book `Viata pe un peron` (Life on a train station platform) portrays the idea of turning success into a purpose in itself by using the metaphor of the train and the railway station: We wait too long for a train so, by the time it finally arrives, we are too exhausted and don’t even have the minim level of energy to enjoy it. I think this is the major trap that comes the moment we set a strict definition for success. We forget to enjoy each day at a time.

Trainart: Tell us about a situation in which you felt empowered/resourceful/spectacular.

D.T.: There have been many such moments. And all of them have been related to teaching. I think that one of those moments was at the beginning of the last year’s school year when I was giving a lecture to first year students about the comparison between life in an agency and the steps one goes through as a student and it was empowering because many of them came at the end of the lecture to thank me for being an inspiration to them and to tell me that I’d given them the enthusiasm and the energy to start their student life. When I inspire other people I feel useful, I feel I can convey my knowledge to others, and I feel like that every time I receive feedback from my students. Either after class, or on Facebook or by email. There are students who ask me for advice about jobs. There were students who wrote me two years after the last time we saw each other to tell me I had changed their lives and that I was the person who caused that changed. It is a wonderful feeling. To feel useful.

Trainart: What do you cherish most about people around you?

D.T.: Honesty and feeling that that person means well in everything he or she says or does.

Trainart: What did you do the last time you looked at your watch and realised that you had lost track of time?

D.T.: The first thing is to panic. Secondly, I realise that I cannot lose even one second and, due to the adrenaline rush, I enter automatic mode. Last time, I had to make a presentation. My fingers started typing away like a machine gun when I realised that time was no longer on my side.

Trainart: What is the theatre/film character you think you resemble most?

D.T.: I really love animations. Specially those which give us a lesson. The first character I can think of is Joy, from Inside Out, an animation I love. We share two things in common. The first one is the permanent desire to make things work well with all the necessary resources and the second one is to understand the idea that sadness is useful because it brings about, in certain moments, cooperation and it makes you really cherish what you have got. Something happy, something sad. What is important is the result or the resultant arising from these sandwich-like experiences.

Peter Drucker states that “the most important thing in communication is to hear what isn`t being said”, Denisa Tudor is one of those people who have this skill and, spiced with a sustained interest for people and a specific curiosity, she is the perfect portrait of an ERS model.