Her Turn participant Kristi Paluoja is a board member and head coach at Cheer Estonia, a coach educator and examiner at the Estonian Cheerleading Federation, and head coach of the Estonian Cheer Hip Hop national team. Alongside her work in sport, she also works as a freelance marketing professional. Sport has been part of her life since childhood, but over the years her role has changed – from athlete and coach to a leader responsible for the development of people, an organisation and the sport itself.
Kristi is a board member and head coach at NGO Cheer Estonia, where she also coaches several training groups herself. The club has recently opened a new studio, and Kristi and her two colleagues are responsible for managing the premises. She also works as a coach, educator and examiner at the Estonian Cheerleading Federation. In addition, Kristi is the head coach of the Estonian Cheer Hip Hop national team, and continues to train as a dancer herself. Alongside her work in sport, she also works as a freelance marketing professional. Kristi wears many hats, bringing the same level of commitment and dedication to each of them.
Sport has been part of Kristi’s life for as long as she can remember. As a child, she tried a wide range of activities, took part in athletics and dance, and went running with her mother. At some point, however, it became clear that dance was what interested her most.
Success motivated her to work even harder. While training and competing with dance club Semiir, Kristi and her team went on to win medals at European and World Championships. This also changed the way she saw sport – it was no longer simply about going to training, but about pursuing something with a clear goal.
Leadership came naturally
Looking back, Kristi says the desire to guide others was there from a very young age. At primary school, she created her own choreography and taught it to her classmates. By the age of 16 or 17, she had already started coaching properly – both children and adults.
“I liked leading and teaching, guiding people and giving advice.”
When she moved to Tallinn to study, Kristi became increasingly involved in cheerleading. She gained her coaching qualification and was one of those who helped develop the sport in Estonia at a time when cheerleading was still establishing its place on the sporting landscape. Today, she is also involved in coach development within the federation, but she deliberately wants to maintain direct contact with coaches, young people and athletes. For her, that is where she can have the most immediate impact.
The same principle can be seen in the development of the club. For years, training sessions took place at different locations across Tallinn, and the lack of suitable facilities eventually began to limit the organisation’s development. The choice was essentially between scaling activities back or taking a major step forward. Kristi and her colleagues chose the latter.
They decided to take the risk and create their own training studio, solving a long-standing problem. For years, the lack of suitable training facilities had been one of the biggest obstacles to the further development of the sport.
Wanting to be the best, but not at the expense of others
Kristi admits that she has always had a strong drive to achieve. As a child and teenager, this often meant wanting to be the best and wanting to do things her own way. Over time, she has had to learn how to use that ambition more constructively as a leader.
“I still want to be the best, but I don’t want to get there by walking over other people.”
One of the most important changes has been learning to trust, delegate and to accept that others may not always do things exactly as she would herself. She has also learnt not to take every setback personally, although she still feels a strong sense of responsibility for the organisation’s results.
Today, Kristi has no doubt that she sees herself as a leader. She describes herself as someone who naturally sees the bigger picture. With that comes a strong need to organise, move things forward and find solutions to problems.
Directness can be both a strength and a weakness
Kristi sees directness as one of the most characteristic features of her leadership style. She wants to listen to people’s views and take them into account, but at the same time she believes a leader must also be able to say when an idea is simply not feasible at that moment.
At times, she has wondered whether others might perceive her as too forceful. Feedback she received through the Her Turn programme, however, showed her that people see her as a more attentive and considerate leader than she had assumed.
“As a leader, I always want to look at what we can do. For me, the question is not so much whether something can be done, but how we can do it,” Kristi says, describing her solution-oriented mindset.
She also describes her leadership style as a willingness to take considered risks, ask others for their input, and then make a decision and move forward.
More women mean more perspectives
Kristi’s own sport is strongly female-dominated, which means her experience differs from that of many other Her Turn participants. In cheerleading, she has not had to fight on a daily basis for more women to be represented in leadership. It was only by listening to the experiences of other women in the programme that she began to understand more clearly just how different women’s experiences in sport can be.
In her marketing career, however, she has encountered attitudes where the knowledge and competence of a young woman can be underestimated. As a result, she has recognised many aspects of the experiences shared by other Her Turn participants, even if she has not encountered them directly in sport.
Kristi believes that women often bring a different way of assessing situations and making decisions. In her own experience, women are often particularly good at recognising patterns, taking people and the wider environment into account, and looking beyond purely numerical outcomes when making decisions.
That does not mean, she stresses, that results or money are unimportant. Rather, the question of which values underpin the path towards those results, and whether the decisions made still feel right in the longer term, can be just as important.
Of everything she has experienced through Her Turn so far, the programme’s first meeting in Tallinn has left the strongest impression on Kristi. She particularly remembers Kersti Kaljulaid’s message about remaining true to yourself as a leader.
For Kristi, it reinforced something she had already felt: it is important to develop, learn and take other people’s views into account, but that does not mean allowing yourself to be reshaped according to someone else’s expectations.
“Stay true to yourself. Take others into account, but don’t let yourself be reshaped against your will. ”
Equally important has been the opportunity to hear about other women’s experiences. Their stories have encouraged her to look at her own challenges from a different perspective and have further reinforced her natural focus on solutions.
“I’ve never wanted to keep talking about the problem. If there is a problem, my first question is: how do we solve it?” Kristi says.
If Kristi had to sum up her Her Turn experience in one word, it would be empowering. For her, the community of ambitious women and the opportunity to learn from one another’s experiences are among the programme’s greatest strengths.