Dr Ashley Ng

Life is all about connections and communications. Some of the best advice I have received to date is around making sure that your network knows what you are searching for, or what your intentions are. That way, someone in your network will undoubtedly know someone, somewhere who will be the right person for you to talk to.

Having straddled the diabetes community, the clinician world and research setting over the last few years, I have been lucky to have grown my network immensely. While luck may play a role, I have also put in a lot of work into maintaining these relationships. Although, most of the people I have met to date have been genuinely such lovely, generous and amazing individuals that I wouldn’t call it hard work as much as a privilege. I have been humbled by the number of like-minded people I’ve met and collaborated with. The only downside is the sheer number of exciting projects that come up that I can’t say no to or as a friend calls it “we’re forever chasing the shiny things”.

One of the biggest things I have learned about maintaining these relationships is to be really careful about leveraging them for your own reasons. As we often say in the consumer and community involvement world, it takes forever to build a relationship and only a second to ruin it (or something along those lines). I am very conscious about using my networks to get ahead or seek favourable treatment. It is something I have seen happen within the diabetes community, which is disappointing, as this ends up creating a divide between the “elite advocates” and “emerging advocates”. In reality, we should be supporting each other for better care.

Over the years, I’ve also learned that when you have a wide network, some people will take advantage of that without a care for you. When I connect people, I expect that they would treat each other with the same respect that they would give me. So if that doesn’t happen, it feels like a bad reflection on me, which has made me a little more guarded these days in fostering connections between people. These are hard lessons I am still learning and piecing together through experience.

One thing that I love doing though, is seeing the people who deserve that opportunity go out and ace it – makes me feel like a proud parent. Knowing that this was how I got my start into the diabetes advocacy world, it gives me the warm and fuzzies to give back to the community by capacity building the next generation. Most importantly, this makes me hopeful that good work will continue to be done within the diabetes community that will benefit all of us in years to come.