Maine Living: Heather Shields

And on Radio Maine, we like to celebrate creativity in the human spirit, which is why it's pretty wonderful to be with an extremely creative and very spirited human. This is Heather Shields, who is formerly the senior Vice President and broker at Legacy Property Sotheby's International Realty, but more importantly, somebody I've known for quite a while and really a self-made individual I'm very impressed by. So welcome back to Thank you for having me, Lisa. So happy to be here. I love the fact that you and I didn't know anything about each other. And first it was our daughters that actually brought us together and I think it was soccer? lacrosse. Okay. Of course. Sorry, sorry. I don't want to give the wrong sport, but that was a very, very long time ago. It was a very, very long time ago. Who would've been able to tell that I'd be standing in the presence of greatness? This person that you've become as the self-made individual? I mean, it truly is impressive, and I just want to give you a lot of credit for that. Thank you. That's very kind of you. Thank you. You are working for Chellie Pingree? And I'm hoping people who are listening who will know who Chellie Pingree is, but if not At that time, she was the senator in Maine, actually, and now she's in the House of Representatives and represents us in the United States House of And you have a very personal connection. Yes? I grew up on North Haven Island and Chellie, she lived right up the road from us actually. She had a farm and we would get our milk and our eggs from her. And her daughter, Hannah is best friends with my sister. And so it was a very natural connection. And of course on a very small island, you know everybody very, very well. So I've known them for a very long time, and Chellie was wonderful and hired me to do constituent services way back when. So I feel like she taught me a lot about people and interacting with people and how to help people. If anybody looks up Chellie Pingree, one of the very early things that comes up is all about her sheep and her wool and her knitting. And so the person that she is now kind of fast forward a couple decades is very different than the person that I think everybody first knew her as. So in some ways it's really interesting that you had that kind of early connection. And then in 2005, I mean there was a few things that happened in between 2005, you had this other pretty big transition yourself into real estate, but both of you in parallel ways were a version of yourselves and then became a dramatically different version of yourselves. I love that. That's an interesting analogy. I hadn't thought about that. But yes, in 2005, I had been living on the island. I had a five-year-old daughter, and I decided that I wanted to live on the mainland. So I left the island, which was a pretty big deal. And I look back and think, how did I do that? But I was 32 years old and (maybe 31) left the island and sort of didn't really have a formal education, didn't have formal training, and I just kind of packed up and moved to the Midcoast Camden area and started a real estate career because I didn't really know what else to do. And someone suggested that would be a good thing to try for me because I like people and I'm very outgoing. So the rest is history. Hold the show a little bit here. I mean, it was a big deal for you to move to the mainland. I mean, because that is something that, especially if you're growing up in a larger main island like North Haven, your community is pretty well contained. So for you to full-time kind of leave that behind, especially as a single mother of a five-year-old, that was a hard decision to make. That was probably the hardest decision of my life, to be honest with you. It was all I knew. And as you said, when you're on this little island, we had about 350 people there year round, and it was my community. It was what I knew, it was what my daughter knew. It was a big shift, a big change, a very painful change, but also one that I knew I needed to make if I was going to be true to myself and true to what I was hoping for my daughter. And I look back and like I said, I sort of wonder how I did it and now I'm very grateful I did it. And I still pay a huge homage to the island. The island is such a special place and the people are so special. My mom is still there, my sister lives there, and my niece is there. My daughter's dad is there. Just a lot of really special people that I will never, ever lose ties to, but I definitely, I think I made the right decision 20 years later. The thing I love about North Haven too is that I think it seems like almost everybody has a connection in particular to North Haven. I don't know what it is about North Haven, but we've got artist Eric Hopkins and we've got the Pingree's and we've got Nebo Lodge. I mean, it really does not take very much to find the Kevin Bacon kind of story. I think it's less than Kevin Bacon. My husband says this all the time, actually. We'll be, I don't know, in California, wherever visiting my daughter and someone will say, oh, you're from Maine. We're in Maine. And my husband will say, well, she grew up on this little island off the coast of Maine. And I was like, yeah, you probably haven't heard of it. And of course they're like, oh, my cousin goes there, or my cousin's mother just, there's always a connection and we're always shaking our head and scratching our head saying, okay, it is such a naturally beautiful place. It draws in a lot of people for that reason. And it's also just such a creative place. I mean, I can't stress enough, again, the natural beauty, but the people as well just make it so special. So I'm not surprised that it's one degree of separation, but it's very fascinating when you travel and see or hear about the connections. I remember the first time I had been in North Haven and we were hanging out with one of the artists, Eric Hopkins, and he was bringing us around the island, the thing I was most struck by was he showed us his house, but he showed us his studio and he just had all of this valuable artwork that he had created over the years, all of them just piled up. And for me, it felt very metaphorical. There's just these treasures. There's these treasures over here, or you're driving down the road and oh, here's the place where we all stop and get oysters because these people happen to farm oysters. You just put money in their bucket and then you, it's magic. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. It's interesting. But it's also, it's funny because living in Portland, the largest city in Maine, I'm really bad at locking my doors. I'm really bad at taking my keys out of my car. I trust everybody to a fault. Well, I know I trust everybody to a fault, and it's because of that upbringing. It's special. It's very much a throwback, but it's gotten me into trouble with keys especially. So it's definitely a different lifestyle there. I am not going to tell anybody where you live in Portland because now that everybody knows you don't lock things for that, that it could be a problem for you moving forward for that. But yeah, I do think it's special in lots of different levels, kind of the trust that you feel being out there in the middle of the ocean. Yes. You have to trust. I mean, those are the people who help you in a moment's notice. They're the people who you call when you're sick. They come when you've had a death or any sort of emergency. Your boat's out to sea. I mean, those are the people that come and help you in a moment's notice. So trust is sort of innate, and it's also really special. There's also the sense that I love about islands in particular, that there's nobody who's coming to save you, so you better figure out how to do it If you can't do it, you better know somebody else has got to do it because there's only one, I don't know, one chainsaw to go around. I mean, not that I'm saying North Haven only has one chainsaw, and I think that's something that not everybody quite that if you want to have something done, it's a huge amount of effort. And so the first person to start with is yourself. A hundred percent. Yes. It teaches you resilience right off from birth. I mean, I think that's super special as well, but also, people forget if you want to go to the doctor or the dentist or whatever it is, you're taking an entire day. I remember when I was a kid and they actually made our Fridays a half day at school, so we could go to the mainland for our doctors and dentist appointments. Because think about it as a school, being in school age, being a school age child, if you had a dentist appointment, you missed an entire day of school. You couldn't just go. So when I moved to the mainland and I took my daughter out of kindergarten, I was like, wow, this is epic. This is easy. I can take her and take her back to school and she's missed an hour and a half. It's great. So I feel like there's the little things if you run out of sugar, you're relying on your neighbor. There is a little grocery store, but you definitely learn a level of, again, resilience that it's hard to explain unless you've lived in, but it's a really special trait that islanders have. One of the things that you and I were talking about just before we came on air is this idea that you quote "don't have formal education or training", which to me, I just think is so interesting because I have plenty of formal education. I mean, I have more degrees that I need, let's be honest. And mostly it's become, I mean, yes, okay, I earned these first few degrees and they've been great for being a doctor. You need to have degrees to be a doctor. The other ones I just continue to earn. I think it's kind of interesting. I like learning stuff, but you like learning stuff too. So the fact that you say, I have no formal education or training, first of all, it takes a lot of training to eventually get to where you are in real estate. I mean, it's a high level of specialization that you've actually achieved. And also the things that you have had to teach yourself about business and connections and speaking, communicating, responsiveness. I mean, it's essentially like you've created your own little, not even little, your own MBA as you go along. So I'm just astonished. I just follow the path. Somebody's like, okay, take this class. I'll give you this grade. And you're like, I got to figure this out. I got to know what I'm going to do next, and how do I do that? I am grateful to my mom and dad for teaching me to be pretty self-motivated. And I also have two younger sisters who I was always the leader in the family, so I was always the bossy one. I am sure they will agree to that, but I also think that for me, I am a different learner. I'm much more of a hands-on, do it sort of then learn from it and fix my mistakes learner. And I was very hard on myself about that for a long time because first of all, leaving that island and going to college for me was really difficult. And I went for one semester and I couldn't do it. I didn't like it. I missed the island. It was really, really tough for me. So when I moved back to the island, I felt like a failure. I felt like I had dropped out of college. And when people would ask me, I would just have this, I'd be embarrassed. But it's funny now because I've completely shifted and I think I've gotten to the point where I'm like, you know what? I'm proud because I do only have one semester of college under my belt, but I have an entire life of lessons that I've learned that I feel like you don't have to follow the traditional path. You can still be successful in your own way, in your own right, by following what's true to you. And I think that's been one of my absolute biggest life lessons. My daughter obviously followed that traditional tract, and I'm super proud of her and she's happy and she does learn that way. But I think for me, figuring out where I learn and how I learn and being okay with it is has been my biggest life lesson. Well, I want to back up and also say, by the way, people who have formal educations, I also like formal education. I think teachers are very valuable. I think that that path is really great for many people. Me too. And also, I mean, what, when I hear you talking, I think about a lot of people actually who live in parts of Maine where education is not as easily accessible. It's very difficult to be somebody who's, I don't know, say you're 17, 18, 19 years old and you've known one way and everybody that you've ever been connected to is in that place, whether it's an island or whether it's somewhere in northern Maine, in Aroostook County that's six hours away from Portland where you could go to USM. I mean, why is that surprising to us? We've removed all of the support mechanisms for people that are used to a really different type of community. And also, I mean, people who grow up on farms, for example, in Arista County, they have worked hard all of their lives to farm potatoes, and they're very educated people who have run their own businesses and been independent. So it's funny to me that we can't somehow put together this idea. You're right, not everybody's going to go to the hallowed halls of an Ivy League school. And it doesn't necessarily define you. Not at all. It doesn't define who you are as a person. And that's something that I feel like I've had to learn. But it's so interesting because I think about my island education, and the other day, I was doing a photo shoot at a waterfront property, and I was talking to the photographer. We were looking at the weather, because the weather in Maine right now, let's face it, has been a little bit difficult. And we were talking about, okay, well, I said to him like, okay, the tide shifts at noon. The wind will be out of the southeast, so that probably means that this afternoon might be a little iffy. And he looked at me, he's like, how do you even know that? I was like, oh, you forget things that's growing up on an island. What wind direction are we looking at? Where's the tide? What's going to happen with the weather? You can sort of pretty much tell from all of the above. So those are things that you don't necessarily, you learn as a way, like you said, if you're in Aroostook County working on a potato farm, there's so many things that you and I would never understand about that, but it's completely an amazing education. So you look at those things and you're like, you know what? I'm so grateful that I had that. A dad who was a ferry captain who taught me all about the tides and the wind and what would happen as a result. I always like the northwest wind on the ferries, by the way. It's great for North Haven. Anyway, so as an aside, I certainly appreciate that about the different parts of our state and what they teach our young people. And it goes beyond our state too. So people who listen to the radio show know that I'm married to the Portland Art Gallery owner and the art gallery director is your good friend, Emma Wilson. So we happened to be driving all in the same car together, and she happened to call you up and you're like, oh, okay. Well, I'm in. I don't know where it was Utah, somewhere, exciting place. And this is literally your life. You're always somewhere fun and exciting. That is not necessarily in Yes I'm so lucky. I'm so lucky. My job, one of the things that, back to the education piece, I've really found for me, I am the average of the five people I spend the most time with. And so often I will look at real estate practices outside of the state of Maine and just think, okay, what are they doing? Because we're always a little bit behind in Maine, and I certainly appreciate that, but it always comes our way. It just takes a little bit of time. So if I go and I go to Utah, I don't think I was in Utah, but I think I was. I can't remember where it was. But if I go to these different states and I meet with these agents who are in the Sotheby's International Realty Network, I'm learning best practices from them. I'm learning what we're about to see come down the pike and how to help people more in my job, because my job truly is about helping people with their biggest life decisions. And if I can have more tools in my pocket to help them, the more I'll be able to help them and the better and easier their transition will be. So I do travel a lot with the brand, as I call it, the Sotheby's International Realty brand, because we are all about sharing best practices, and I get to learn from these incredible individuals who are the best at this trade. So that's my education. And that's my point, that you're still availing yourself of the ability to continue to evolve constantly. And you're also putting yourself in places where you get to know not just the things about where real estate is moving, but also people move to Maine. So getting to know the people in other places who might potentially come to Maine, and maybe you're the one who's like, here is your next home, here is your forever home. Here's your downsize home, here's your whatever it is home. I mean, whatever it is. And you, because Sotheby's is such a recognized international name, I mean, there's the opportunity to be like, oh, well, I was in your state last week, or I know people that know you. Absolutely connecting people, because we were just named, I think it was in Barron's yesterday. Portland was named the number one luxury market right now in the United States, which was super fascinating to me. And it's interesting actually, because Emma and I talk a lot about the similarities between the Portland Art Gallery and the real estate market, because there's a giant similarity there. And our market and our trends tend to be very, very similar. But to see that yesterday, I was thinking to myself that is the beauty of the Sotheby's brand is that we have a broker who's an expert at their craft in every part of the country. So with all the people moving to Maine, which we're so excited about, we always have a connection to help them if they're going the other way or if they're going to be selling wherever they are. So I'm lucky that way too. And since we keep talking about all the things that I love about you. I want to also just say you're also, for somebody who has so many busy things going on at the drop of a hat, I think you were one of the first people who came on Radio Maine during the Pandemic. You were one of the earliest. We hadn't figured out that how to do things remotely. We were still early stages. You're like, okay, I'll sign up. And then we asked you to come back. You're like, okay, I'm there. And that willingness to just kind of step in and engage and be responsive, I think it is sort of an ongoing suggestion that the things that happened early in your life shape the person that you are now, almost like pretty much everybody's a friend until they're not. Exactly. Especially living on an island or even living in Maine, you want to make, everybody should generally get along. You may not like everybody, but everybody should generally get along. And to that end, you stay connected. Yes. I think it's the beauty of Maine, and I said this, living on the island, it's like you're on the school board with this person, or you're on the planning board, you're going to see them the next day. So you got to think about how you approach that person if there's a disagreement. And that's so true in this state. It always amazes me. I'm thinking, oh, I'm in the biggest city in Maine now. It doesn't matter. It's a very small state. We are so lucky to know so many of our neighbors and have so many connections in this state. But I think you guys do such an amazing job promoting our state. And that's what excites me, and that's what makes me want to be a part of being on this show. And just because I think you're telling the story of what makes our state so special. So I'm just really grateful to you for how you do that. Well, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, it truly is my pleasure because I feel like, I mean, obviously we first knew each other through our daughters when we were both lacrosse moms, and I think the longitudinality that occurs is so important because in perhaps larger cities, maybe you'll see somebody once, you'll never see 'them again. But I think that's less so than it ever was. I think most people can stay connected with other people even remotely in ways that they never were able to before. And I think there's something really important about that, because one of the ways that people have become less civil to each other is by kind of putting them in the other category. You're not me. I'm not you. I don't understand you, and therefore I'm not going to want to stay connected. But truly, if we can be thinking about this, I don't really get why this person does what they do, but that's okay. We're all human. We're all human, and that's their place, and that's what they believe. And we have to respect that. I mean, again, I think that is such an important statement. And I think it's so much of what makes Maine so special is that we are not just a number or we're not just, like you said, behind a screen or whatever. It's like we're seeing each other all the time. We're interacting all the time. And the more we can respect each other's views and have open honest conversations and be okay with it, the better off we're all going to be. And it's important too for our kids. I mean, my dad, my parents are both very connected to Maine. My kids, one lives in Maine, and the other one actually two live in Maine. The other ones are elsewhere. And whether they come back and live or don't, I want them to still feel connected to Maine. I'm going to someday be long gone from this Earth and whoever it is that comes down successively in the generations, it's a pretty special place. We're so lucky. Anything exciting coming up for you in the next few months that you think people want to know about? Oh my gosh. Anything exciting. A lot of exciting real estate happening. Certainly we haven't seen the market in Maine slow down, that's for sure. So that's good. I've been working really hard on something called the Maine Women's Project that I'm trying to, again, similar to what you do with Radio Maine, just trying to lift up and promote our state through the incredible humans that we have living here and who are doing just incredible work. And I think we have a friend who's going to be turning 60, so that's a big deal. Don't think we should actually out that person. But it is a big deal. So that's my excitement. Yes. Well, those are all very good things, and I really appreciate you're taking the time to come in and reconnect this time in person. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming in. And as we've been talking about in our Maine love fest today, generally about people with main connections. And today I've been speaking with Heather Shields, who is senior vice president and broker at Legacy Property Sotheby's International Realty. That's a mouthful. It's a mouthful. But all the title is well earned. So thank you. No criticism here, but certainly I hope that those of you who are watching and are local, I hope that you take the time to come hang out with Heather and I at one of our upcoming Portland Art Gallery openings. And if not, it is very easy to find Heather online. She's a wonderful human. Thank you for coming in today. Thank you so much for having me.