Avia Collinder, Outlook Writer

"Ink is in my blood," says Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson. Working in communication for over 20 years, the woman, who is wife of Minister of Justice A.J. Nicholson, says that her innate shyness was never enough to dilute her love of her career in writing and communication.

We met her at her lovely home in St. Andrew where she has been quietly hibernating after leaving her post as marketing and communications manager at the Jamaica Stock Exchange in February this year.

"I have not taken a break from work. This is a little interval," she protests, and true enough, she later impresses us with her plans to translate the skills learnt in communication at the exchange into a technical consultancy for local businesses.

Her introversion, she explains after we accept her gracious offer of coconut water, has never prevented her from functioning at peak levels in both her roles as a business communicator and wife in the public eye.

So quiet is she that one would never guess that Grinam-Nicholson started out in the hurly-burly world of news reporting, but it's true.

That's where she also met A.J., and she claims that their opposite styles was a factor in their initial attraction.

Quiet, cool and collected - her personal style is a fact which her husband accepts, Yvonne says. "He knows who I am and knows that I would rather stay in the background. He does his thing and I do mine."

Yvonne's "thing" is the business of communicating ideas and information.

She started out in news, she admits, as a way of paying for her A' Level subjects. A student at The Queen's High School in St. Andrew, she was faced with the challenge of finding a way to pay for her A' Level subjects, when she called on her one sure skill - that of writing - and applied to the Jamaica Daily News in Kingston.

The late Carl Wint, who was then editor, gave her the opportunity of working weekends and holidays until she finished her studies, and the job became full- time. Then, when the Daily News closed, Hector Wynter at The Gleaner employed her. The year was 1983.

Was this what her father, Edward Samuel-Grinam, a building contractor, and mother Joyce Grinam, a housewife, wanted for their quiet daughter?

To her parents and to anyone else who knew her well, it must have been abundantly clear that Yvonne was born to write.

At school she wrote poetry with ease. "I would write and write."

While others were more mathematically inclined, it was a skill with language which came naturally to the young student.

As a young journalist at The Gleaner, her ambition was to "become professional" and go to North America, which she would conquer in short order. And, falling under the influence of several great journalists, she did achieve the professional skills she desired.

In her seven years at this company, she says her primary influences were veteran editors Ken Allen, Dudley Stokes and the late Hector Wynter.

The Gleaner, Grinam-Nicholson says, was "like a university" which exposed her to "every layer of Jamaican society." It also involved international travel to conferences in Washington DC in the United States, and then to Germany on a scholarship.

"I was in Berlin before the wall came down," she reminisces.

But, after Yvonne completed a degree in mass communication (radio) the seven-year itch set in. She had plateaued. It was time to seek new opportunities but, before she could, A.J. Nicholson found her.

The pair - politician and journalist - met at an assignment featuring Prime Minister Michael Manley after Hurricane Gilbert, and they clicked. Her husband-to-be, she says, "had an excellent sense of humour and was very forgiving. He was moody, but he was different from all the others. He had depth and charisma."

He was also her complete opposite - an extrovert to her introversion.

They were married in five years.

Being a wife in the public eye, Grinam-Nicholson admits, "impacts on the way people look at you professionally. It has its positives and negatives, but I prefer to look at the glass as half-full. People have expectations, which are totally unrealistic. I prefer people to see me as a professional."

The truth, she says, is that she enjoys friendships on both sides of the political divide.

After marriage, Grinam-Nicholson forgot dreams of going abroad and she made the decision to go into public education and public relations.

Leaving The Gleaner, she did a one-year stint with the National Housing Trust, travelling to every nook and cranny in the island, then another with Justice James Kerr at the Constitutional Commission before her interest in finance led her to the Jamaica Stock Exchange.

The Stock Exchange needed a communications specialist and employed her in this role in 1993.

At this company, Yvonne was immersed in a world which totally fascinated her.

She developed, she says, "a love of finance and business", which enabled her to flourish in her role of providing marketing and public relations services for the exchange.

When the exchange expanded into training, Grinam-Nicholson led this thrust.

She also developed the Best Practices Industry award in 2005 and a regional conference in investment.

Last August she became the Caribbean's fifth Accredited Business Communicator, which is based on her body of work and an examination which she sat.

But, after 14 years, the communicator decided to do something new and resigned from her job at the same time as she enrolled with the University of New Orleans to do her MBA. While studying, she has also been polishing her own business model - R.O. Communications (Return on Communications).

"At the stock Exchange, I realised that Jamaicans were afraid of figures," Grinam-Nicholson explains.

Even the general society, she believes, is almost illiterate where finance is concerned, with many parents giving "material gifts which depreciate instead of stock certificates" and otherthings which appreciate with time.

R.O. Communication, she says, targets the business community with a plan to break down technical information into easily understood material for staff. The company is also into public relations services, including event planning.

The writer believes that there is a vacuum for this kind of technical expertise in Jamaica.

"Not enough people know how to translate numbers into written words that those who need to read their reports can easily understand."

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson also teaches at the University of the West Indies, lecturing in business communication at CARIMAC. In the corporate world today, she explains, the communicator is challenged to "add to the bottom line", otherwise he or she will soon be out of a job.

She reflects that, at the Stock Exchange, she initiated several income generating projects including a magazine for stakeholders and investors with advertising content.

After 14 years of training others, she is ready to spread her own wings, solo.

Her new office is virtual one operated from home and from which she intends to reach out to Jamaica and the Caribbean.

Predictably, her hobbies are not disconnected form he interest in finance.

Grinam-Nicholson reads widely ("reading is like breathing") and rates her favourite television show as the 'Apprentice', declaring, "I think Donald Trump is a genius."

Yvonne is mother of Alexander, aged 11 and stepson Che, aged 30 and who is resident abroad.

Of her five siblings, she is the only one remaining in Jamaica but the communicator says, "I have no regrets. I love Jamaica and there is nowhere else I would rather live."