Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Jeanette Mills and I believe that anything is possible.
This is anything is possible.
I'm Halloran Hilton Hill and my guest is Jeanette Mills.
Part two of our interview, what have you learned about possibility for somebody that might be
looking, wanting to learn, to think about their future?
What are the life lessons you've learned?
So I tell people all the time, one of the things I always was was open to considering
thoughts from others or positions or responsibilities that are things I would have never thought
about doing it myself.
So I've always been open to that possibility, which is how I ended up at TVA because someone
called me and said that they were looking for someone to take my position and they were
doing a national search.
I had never thought I'd live in Tennessee.
I had to be open.
So I was open.
The next I'll say is in life I try to focus on good intention.
I try not to believe that people with situations are kind of out either to get me or whatever.
I try to focus on the positive no matter what's happening.
And there are times things have happened in my career where I thought I really want to
quit today.
I really do.
But then I stopped myself and I said, Jeanette, God has a reason for this.
There's something good that needs to come out of this.
The other part I've always stressed is relationships.
You have to have relationships with people.
And what I try every time, whether I'm working at a company, if I leave a company, I never
talk bad about it.
When I'm in the company, I try to bring positive and I try to establish really strong relationships.
So you go back to my time at Baldwin Gas Electric.
I was at 25 years and many times a first.
But to this day, they say people still talk about me because they said I was a good boss
to them and that I treated them well, but I treated them with respect.
And so relationships mad and I tell folks that as well.
And I'll say one more that I think about, which is acceptance.
Because you have to accept circumstances that are beyond your control.
You cannot keep replaying the tape.
If something happens, whether in life or at work, you have to get to a point where you
even accepted it.
How'd you learn that professionally and personally?
So I'll start professionally.
Believe it or not, I'm with him.
My late husband, Dave, he was eight years old and so I was like every time something
happened, I'm like I'm quitting the mar.
He was like what?
But you got all these good things going on.
This one thing, he was very much a glass half full kind of a person and he helped me learn
to see that bright side.
Okay, so you didn't get that position.
Jeanette, he said to me one time, I felt like I was passed over at work for a promotion.
And I didn't say anything at work, but I tried to manage my self at work.
But when I went home, I was talking to him about it.
He says, well, Jeanette, it's okay.
You didn't get this position.
He said, but one day you're going to look around and you're going to be promoted and
you're going to look back.
And this is just one step in the journey.
So I listened to him.
So years later, when I was first promoted to an executive, I looked back at that one
position I was so upset about.
And those folks, even though they were doing well at the company, they hadn't become an
executive yet.
So it worked itself out without me emotionally getting negative about it.
And he taught me, see the bright side, there's always a bright side.
And then personally, I had to practice acceptance when he got sick with cancer.
What was that like for you?
Actually pretty devastating.
I got to be honest with you.
It was one of those moments where it's like, really?
So quickly my mom passed away from cancer at 51.
And she had a colon, we think, but due to lack of healthcare, it's trying to everywhere
by the time we found out.
And my husband, Hotley, who had healthcare and everything, he ended up passing away at
51 from cancer.
15 years later.
How about crazy?
Is that crazy?
That's crazy.
So the irony of the whole thing is, seven years before he passed away, we decided he would
stay home because I had become an executive at BGE.
And I was going to quit before I became an executive.
He's like, no, you're going to take that job.
I'll stay home with the kids.
We had two children.
Little did we know.
We didn't know he was sick or going to get sick or anything.
So he was home the last seven years of his life.
My son, I think from the time my son, the youngest, was two until he went even dying.
His dad was home with him the entire time.
And my daughter, right, five until 13.
So at the time, we found out he was sick.
He was home.
And so there was this process of a lot of treatment, chemotherapy, surgeries, et cetera, et cetera.
We ended up having a lot of great vacations.
We were like, we were cramming all these great vacations with the kids.
But he passed away when my kids were nine and 13.
So it was one of those moments where I literally had to accept that this is my reality.
This is my reality.
And the irony of it, Helen, is I said I never wanted to be a single parent.
And in a weird way, I was a single parent from a structural perspective, meaning I'm
there taking care of the kids.
It was a lot of great help from my family and friends.
But he was always their father.
To this day, we talk about him.
And it'll be 15 years this September.
Sorry, I can't be more sure.
But yeah, but that had to practice and accepted.
The spirit was present.
Right.
Even though he physically.
But it was present.
Right.
Even now.
Exactly.
To this day.
And it sound like to me he was more than a husband.
He was a friend, coach.
And maybe his, what he shared with you, kind of as I'm mapping your story, having people
in your life where you feel seen and known is just a huge part of the backstop that you
need to be in a position of leadership.
Yes.
Right.
You need to know that somewhere somebody believes in you no matter what.
And no matter what.
Right.
Yes.
And that's rare.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
And it's funny, my analogy is from the gladiator time.
You know, I'm in a big coliseum in the stadium and you know, you're standing there and I'm
the one standing down there and they're about to lift the gate up.
I knew I could always look up.
There's Dave, my mama, my grandmother, my aunt, my sister saying, you can do it, Jeanette,
you can do it.
Even though there's this big monster about to come out right and eat me or something.
So they would always be there.
So because sometimes work can be that way.
Empowered by Covenant Health, Home Federal and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Your story is so fascinating to me.
What and hope you're okay with this, but what God has done in your life seems to be so amazing.
These women that surrounded you with love, your late husband, seemed like he loved you
on that same frequency.
And maybe, you know, as we were talking through your life and you figuring out what success
looks like being open and being available, you would get to the next thing and opportunities
would come and Ms. Tommy would tell you to take the opportunity.
And so you've progressed and you've had a very successful career, but we were talking
about the power of what I see in the arc of your story.
By the way, if I was titling your book, it'd be Tommy's Girl.
Okay, okay, okay, like that.
That's good, I like that.
Might use that.
Because it seems like her strength, you know, is kind of the, that's the foundational thing
there.
Like being bracketed by all this love, but it seemed like, so I'll throw something out
to you that I don't know if this will resonate with you, but we'll see where it goes.
You learned to live on a certain frequency of love.
Like you know the signature of what it means to have a community that loves you unconditionally.
So that would correct you, but encourage you, is a perfect bracket.
And that quality of love has a frequency.
What I'm imagining is that when you and your late husband found each other, what made him
so important to you was it was a matching frequency.
Yeah, and you know, it's interesting because he-
Does that sound right?
Yeah, it was.
And it was, I tell people all the time, he was my friend.
I knew that he would do anything for me, no matter what.
And so for me that it was, you know, secure.
It was almost like a security blanket.
And so, you know, he grew up, what I call rural poor on the eastern shore of Maryland,
and I grew up urban poor in Baltimore.
And then when we met up, it's almost like we clicked.
Just emotional and all different levels.
And I knew, no matter what happened, that he had, you know, my goodness or my, you
know, he had a positive intent for me, no matter what.
How did he express that knowing?
You know, it's funny, the way he, for me, the first thing he did, I think, when we
were dating, I had three nephews that went everywhere with me when I was single.
As a matter of fact, when I had my kids, they were upset.
They were like, to this day, they'd try to, you know, rough my two biological children
up, like he roared it for us.
But so they went everywhere with me.
So when I start dating, and so a lot of times when you're dating, the person just wants
to be with you, but, you know, Dave was like, no, come on, they were going to come with
us because they've come with you, right?
And I'm like, yeah.
And so there was this willingness to kind of be open and have everybody in.
And he just embraced my family to the point where, to this day, all of them still talk
about him, like he's going to walk in the door, even though he's been gone, or to be
15 years this September.
Leadership can be lonely, right?
Lonely rhymes with the word only.
In your case, you're in a lot of rooms.
As you've been moving through the arc of your career, you've been in a lot of rooms where
you're the only woman, the only woman of color, a strong woman of color, right?
There's a whole dynamic to that.
And I would imagine that when you're moving up in leadership, and you have to help me
with this, but having somebody in your life that has your back, does that help with that?
Because I would imagine you've put a really positive patina on your rise through a very
competitive, male-dominated.
The power industry is not for the faint of heart.
It's a numbers industry.
It's all of those things.
It's a regulatory space.
It's all of that.
What was that journey like?
So many times, initially early in my career, again, I would go to a meeting.
I remember one time I went to a meeting, basically a white man and me.
I come in and they're looking.
It hadn't happened before.
I just got now associate engineer.
They literally turned to me and said, who are you and why are you here?
Why are you in this meeting?
And so I'm like, oh, so I said, okay.
And so I explained to them my name, my title.
I just joined this group.
And the person with me was like, no, she's with me.
But it was very, in some ways, disrespectful because I'm the only woman in there.
But I learned not to project that back, to take it to a place of, okay.
So from that point on, when I went to a meeting, I said who I was, why I was there, what group
I was from.
And when I jokingly tell people, over time, as my career rose, I didn't have to do that
anymore.
But I had to make sure people understood my role.
Did you feel like you had to somehow reset the room and make it okay for you to be there?
A, I'm qualified to be here.
B, I've got the added responsibility to make you comfortable with me being here.
Exactly.
That's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work.
And then two, being an engineer adds a whole other dimension to it.
And honestly, going to Virginia Tech always helped that out.
Because they'd say, where'd you go to school?
And I'd say, I went to Virginia Tech, oh, okay.
Okay.
I was like, you're good, you're good.
So that helped me as well.
And I always said to myself, you've got to focus on your goals, not necessarily the journey
will be there, but it's your goals that you have for yourself, Jeanette, that really matter.
And we grew up in a place where people would say a lot of things about you outside, and
we learned at home early and on.
My mom would say, that doesn't matter.
What matters is what you believe about yourself, where you're going and how you're going to
achieve it.
And so she would especially say that to me, and she'd say, because I was the least popular
of my sisters.
And I'll say this, my sisters and I have achieved, we did what our mother wanted.
We all got through high school education.
So my oldest sister now works in retail, in the office at a retail company.
And she switched jobs quite a bit, but that's another story for another time.
Second oldest worked at Social Security her entire career, retired.
So she went there as a high school student in like an internship program and retired
from there.
And then the next one, Jackie, the one closest to me, she works in the state around.
So from my mom's perspective, we did that.
She wanted all our girls to be safe, to do well, and to make something out of their lives.
And they all did it.
And they all did.
Miss Tommy got it done.
So to your point about like my rise, I always, many times felt like because I was the only
one I had to do well, I had to be perfect.
I had to make sure, you know, my work was good and that I was very, um, type A, almost
a bit of a perfectionist early in my career.
And then when I moved into leadership and had to lead a group of people and typically,
you know, my first leadership assignments were always all male, pretty much all male.
And they would say earlier, Hey, you got kids your age.
And I'd say you probably do.
But I had to learn how to lead them, even though they had kids my age in a way that
brought out the best of them.
And so how'd you do that?
So a lot of times, my first group, I'll give an example, they were designers.
So they would go out in the field and meet with folks about running new electric or gas
lines.
And so, um, when I came in, because I knew they had called everybody to find out about,
you know, Jeanette, Jeanette's coming.
So what I did was at our first kind of unit meeting, a group meeting, I talked to them,
told them a little bit about myself.
And then I said, I want to go out in the field with each one of you.
And they looked at me.
What?
And I said, Yeah.
I said, So let's get a schedule.
And I want to go and just go out in the field with you.
And so they had never had a supervisor say they'd do that.
So I would, you know, I said, Okay, got my safety equipment inside of me.
I had my heart hat and everything ready to go.
And so I scheduled that.
And I went out with each one of them and being able to sit in a car with somebody as they
go around and do their job and talk to them.
You get to know them.
One, they'll talk to you about things.
And then you get to learn about how they do their work.
And you know, in initial stages, just going out and just having that interest.
And they each one would say to me, we were shocked when you said that, that you were
going to ride in the field with each one of us.
They said, no one's ever done that.
They would come in, have a bunch of things that they want to accomplish.
And then we would always just, you know, kind of through passive, passive rest or resist.
Right.
So they said, you're the first person like to say, No, we're going to go, I'm going
to ride with each one of you.
And I would do that.
I couldn't do it all the time, but I would go ride with them.
And so to this day, I was keeping touch with them.
They all retired.
Wow.
And yeah, we still keep in touch.
Do you think your relationship with your husband gave you an insight to race and racism that
gave you a wider angle lens on it?
Yeah.
You know, in its own way it did because he was white and I was black and it was, you
know, different time, but he also gave me that human element.
So the irony of it is I went back after I, since we started going out, I actually looked
at his high school yearbook.
And like I said, he grew up rural poor.
I grew up urban poor.
But when I looked at his high school yearbook, I think he was like in the student government.
And everybody except him was black.
Wow.
And the student government.
So he had.
So he, you know, so he had been used to.
He had made a decision.
Yeah, he had been around folk.
Now I don't know.
I don't think he thought I'd married somebody.
But it ended up that way.
How did your daughters adapt to all of this?
And what was it like raising them?
So yeah, so, you know, so actually I have to correct you because my son would die, but
I have one daughter, one son.
But even though when he was little, everybody thought he was a girl.
They would say, hey, she's pretty.
And he'd say, no, I'm a boy.
But, but both of them, it's funny.
We grapple with whether they even have kids.
We thought once we got married, it would be just the two of us.
But once Tommy passed away, I thought that's a legacy really in a life for me.
That was my definition.
So, so I decided, so we had Sinclair first, my daughter, and Garrett.
But, but as they grew up, we never talked about race because we figured they figured
out, right?
So when she was a little girl, she'd come home and she'd announced to us, I'm yellow.
I'm yellow, mom.
Okay.
And so one day she comes home a few days.
She's a pretty little girl.
Well, she's pretty lady to me today too.
But she said, mom, one day she says, you know, I've been thinking, she said, daddy, you're
African and daddy's American.
I said, what do you mean, honey?
Like, we're both Americans, right?
Because she was taking the African American and she was taking the peace, she had learned
about Africa.
So she's in her own little way, like kind of piecing it all together.
But she'd say, but then she'd end up, I'm yellow.
Okay.
So when she got older, they figured it out, right?
Because they'd see, you know, we'd have events at our home a lot, cookouts, whatever, everybody
came, you know, white, black, you know, Hispanic, straight, gay, everybody was welcome.
And so, so over time they figured it out.
And, and then for my son, his, you know, he was my athletic.
So, so they jokingly had said to each other, she kind of grew up as the white mills and
he was the black mills because he was, you know, I mean, even though he, even he had
a mixed group of friends too, but most predominantly African American because he played the sports
and stuff.
But, but they both, they live in their space.
They know when they were kids, their dad was home with them, the three of them would go
out and then I would come along, everybody would think that they were white because my
kids are light-skinned.
And then I would come along, people are shocked, like, this is your mother, you know.
And now that Dave's gone, Garro to say to me, mom, when we're together, my daughter
has a big afro, my son, he has pretty much an afro.
And they think they're African Americans.
So we just, they just roll.
We just roll.
Because you just roll.
We just roll.
It's fine.
Right.
You know, and they're good people with good character.
And that was really what Dave and I wanted.
I think your life is a testament to possibility.
And I think it's an honor that you would share your story and your journey with us.
And we wish you the very best as you continue on this journey forward.
I think the title of the book is, Tommy's Girl.
I don't know.
Okay, all right, okay.
I got a new title, but I appreciate that.
Thank you so much for having me.
But I think you represent the best of possibility.
And thank you for being with us today.
Thank you.