A lot of people ask me what is it that got me interested in careers
and helping people with deciding on their careers,
changing careers or that type of a life journey.
What is it that got me interested? I mean to answer that,
I have to go all the way back to where my journey began.
I was an orphan and at the age of nine my mother passed away
and my father didn't want to continue a relationship with me.
So it was from that moment on a fight for survival every day.
And a year later when I was 11 I started working at this restaurant
and I was doing all the hardworking tasks, washing toilets,
waitressing, cashier or things like that. And,
one day when I was 14 this older couple came into the restaurant to dine.
They were having dinner there and I was their server and this couple at the time
they were in their 50s and they were very observant and wise couple.
And they noticed, just by meeting me for the first time,
they noticed and knew that I needed a place to stay.
So at the end of the meal when I settled their bill,
they invited me to stay with them. It was just like that.
They invited me to stay with them. So when I cleaned their table,
I followed them home right that night and they they led me to the road to their
home
and I followed them home and then they led me upstairs to this yellow bedroom.
All the floors, all the walls were yellow and there was this humongous furniture,
it was like the style from the fifties and sixties with this cherry wood color,
and this roof on the top that was slanted so far that when you walk
towards the bed you kind of have to slant your head so you won't hit your head
on the ceiling.
And then they turned to me and they said, "welcome home Grace,
you can stay here for as long as you need."
And I was 14 and I remember the feeling was really awkward and I didn't know
what to say, but at the same time,
what really bothered me was that I didn't trust them.
And I didn't trust that they had my best interests in mind and that I really
could stay there for as long as I needed.
So I spent the next two years testing that, you know, as a typical teenager,
I was rebellious. I was rude to them.
I didn't want or make any effort to have a relationship with them.
And by the time I was 16,
I got up one morning and I had this A-ha moment,
a realization that they were the real deal.
They really genuinely cared about me.
I had this realization and everything changed from that point forward,
and I was truly grateful that they had opened up their home to a complete
stranger.
So it was then that I made a decision that I wanted to have a relationship with
them and that I could trust them.
In that moment I also decided that I was going to take
extreme ownership of my whole life moving forward.
And for me it was a committed,
and a decisive commitment that my education was going to be my ticket to freedom.
So then I set on this journey,
I studied hard in high school. I set on this journey to do well in high school.
I studied hard. I continue to work at the restaurant, and
between customers I studied hard so that I learned about scholarships that I
could get, and between customers I studied really hard,
so that I could earn scholarships that would pay for my tuition,
and that way I wouldn't have to work for years and delay my education,
waiting for myself to save up for college.
And that was a journey I had been on for the rest of high school.
I wanted the freedom to live out my life and not having to depend on other
people to do so.
I mean,
I wanted the kind of life where I had freedom and I could live wherever I want
and to be whoever I wanted without constraints of money. I mean,
I grew up in poverty
and I didn't want that to be a repeat pattern of my life and I wanted to be able
to afford the lifestyle that I wanted comfortably.
My adoptive parents allowed me to stay at their house for as long as
I needed and I really trusted that they had my best interests in mind and that
they genuinely cared for me as one of their own,
they had kids of their own, and I was completely adopted by
their whole family and I had the sense of belonging for the first time.
But I was so afraid that if I still had depended on other people,
that in the future that I might end up
in another precarious situation if I wasn't independent.
That was my greatest fear.
And for me it was also about my adoptive parents,
they gave me the second chance at life,
I wanted to be able to give back to them in the future. I mean, in their old age,
I wanted to be able to give back even a fraction of what they did for me,
and to do so in a way where I could do it in abundance.
And that was really what I wanted.
I earned that scholarship after high school that paid for my tuition for my
first degree,
and I was off to the races so I went to college,
got my degree and in that degree I chose all the subjects that I was interested
in. I did really well in all my subjects.
In order to keep that scholarship year after year,
I had to maintain a certain GPA, in all my subjects an overall average as well,
and I maintained it throughout my degree,
but as I was approaching graduation,
the problem was I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my career.
I didn't know how to decide on my career after graduation.
Graduation was drawing near
and I really felt the pressure of deciding before the date,
before the graduation,
yet I was so busy with exams and it just felt like I was accumulating all this
knowledge and pursuing all these subjects for the sake of my interests.
It felt that way and it felt like I wasn't making any leeway on how am I going
to turn this into career now?
And I knew how to be a student and I knew how to do really well in school,
and navigate classes and subjects,
but I really had no idea how to make money in the marketplace.
So the only thing I knew how to do was to really climb that academic ladder.
And I did that all the way up to my PhD. But after my PhD,
I had absolutely no more clarity on how to build that career and how to monetize
and how to make money in that marketplace. I felt so lost and so confused.
I mean there were so many people out there, an abundance of people giving advice,
abundance of people with PhDs
who had their own thing going on and they would tell you what they did,
but it didn't quite apply to me.
And I went to all these career counselings,
and I went to all these departments that held career services,
or what do you call those, career fairs and still nothing.
Nothing stood out to me. I mean, I had varied interests,
but I really didn't know how to pick my career path and how to make it work and
how to be successful. I really had no idea.
So I was confused and I felt that a tremendous pressure on the competitiveness
of careers inside of academia, up after graduate
school. I met a friend who invited me to this luncheon with
esteemed business owners and entrepreneurs in the city and there were seasoned
entrepreneurs there as well.
And at the same time there was this keynote speaker who got up on stage and he
shared his journey on how
he built this empire with little to no seed money and all the challenges and
obstacles along the way that he had to face.
And when I heard that,
I mean I was sitting there and I was listening to to that keynote speaker
and all the other guests around my round table as well.
And of course everyone there is a business owner, a seasoned entrepreneur,
and they have all these experiences. I was listening to them,
I was thinking to myself, I noticed something.
I learned that many of them either never continued on to college or they had a
college degree,
but they built their empire despite a seemingly unrelated college subject or an
unrelated college degree.
And that's what I noticed as I really listened and I started talking to people
around me.
And that was an A-ha moment for me because all along as I was growing up and
going through college,
I really felt this pull and that is such a strong one that if you've invested so
much time in an interest,
and effort and energy into your degree program,
especially if you've gone on to other degrees or advanced degrees like I have,
then it kind of feels like a waste if you didn't continue along that exact path.
So listening to them, I had this A-ha moment and it really changed my life.
So then I joined this business association,
from that moment on I joined that business association that put on the luncheon,
and I really immersed myself in the business world,
in the business culture and that business community.
And I got myself really familiar with the challenges that business owners face,
that those seasoned entrepreneurs face, especially small business owners that
are just starting out in this competitive business world.
And I started a draw these unique and interesting parallels
between growing a business and a career.
And that was really a key moment for me. And that's when I realized that really,
the secret to building a successful career is strong business acumen.
My plan was to gain as much business knowledge as I possibly could so that I
could become
proficient at solving problems and figuring out ways to make money along the way.
And I started with marketing
and branding and after that I implemented what I learned and that's when I
pivoted my career and I implemented
what I learned in marketing and branding to land a position in a completely new
industry in healthcare ethics.
After that I pivoted again and that's when I left academia and I went,
and jumped head in to a product marketing role in the corporate world.
And that was where I was in charge of managing this
product line that brought in 4 million revenue every year.
Each time I pivoted and changed careers or changed industries completely,
I was met with new challenges,
of course,
that I had to overcome and new learning curves and that wasn't a problem for me.
Along the way at each step of my career, at each career move,
I had a lot of achievements and those went on my performance record,
but with every turn of my career I was either bored,
burnt out or feeling completely miserable. Like in my first career,
first career pivot, I was just feeling
so bored and unconnected with what I was doing. I hated it. It was,
it was not inspiring to me. It was unenergizing,
I was completely unmotivated doing what I'm doing and then in my next career
move I was just so burnt out. I mean it was exhausting.
I didn't have the energy to carry out, and the weekends were spent just
recharging and dreading Mondays and then on my next career move when I pivoted
again at that time, I was just miserable.
I felt like I was in a toxic environment and the management just didn't meet the
values,
they didn't meet with my own personal values and it just wasn't,
it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel right.
And the work that I did felt didn't feel right. And at the same time,
all of these times that I've made these career moves,
I didn't feel connected with my purpose.
I couldn't see what is my purpose in this.
There's gotta be more than this. And there was no fulfillment.
I ended up getting so frustrated at my last job that I quit without a backup
plan. I documented everything I did though to land the job,
and at each time that I reinvented my career and pivoted,
I documented everything I did to get that next career move,
even without any prior experience.
I reverse engineered all my processes,
my whole process that I did in order to make the next bold career move
and I did this all so that I could figure out what was missing,
the missing piece as to why I didn't achieve fulfillment.
Then I decided to do a year abroad, what I called my own sabbatical.
I did a year abroad and I traveled to Southeast Asia,
where I was immersed in cultures among people that I've never met before.
Cultures that I've never experienced before.
My plan was to look for inspiration among these cultures that I've never
experienced. So along the way I met
with a lot of locals who shared their stories with me and most times it always
involved this really strong duty to make money, to support for the family,
to provide for themselves or to provide for their aging parents.
And those conversations is what really solidified my purpose for me.
It was in those conversations that
I really started to realize the missing piece to fulfillment.
And along the way I met more people like me who are either bored, or burnt out,
or miserable in their career, or trying to decide on a career path and
didn't know how to approach it or didn't know what they wanted.
So then I started to share my journey on how I reinvented my career and how I
was able to make bold career choices.
And I shared with them how they could build fulfillment into their career.
Within three months I had six people
from completely different backgrounds who were able to build and create careers
of fulfillment,
doing work they love and getting paid their worth in the marketplace.
After celebrating their new beginnings with them,
I connected to my life's purpose, to helping people find theirs.
I started a coaching career to help people to create fulfilling careers.
Not only was I able to find fulfillment and success,
but I was also able to give back to my parents
in ways that I never thought I could.
My parents went on to start an orphanage in Uganda, Masaka
where they live and where they are now citizens.
And it's my honor and my privilege to have visited these poor countries
on the outskirts of Masaka to contribute to their lives.
And because of my parents, I was there first orphan, and because of my parents,
hundreds of other orphans who would otherwise have no basic provisions,
now they have education,
they have medical care and they have a chance at a future.
So I have 10 children who I contribute to in that orphanage and I've contributed
since they were the age of three and now they've grown up to nine, then,
and eleven and it is just a joy to see them happy
and to see them living out their purpose. If you like my video,
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Tell me about yourself and share with me your journey too,
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let me know in the comments below.
I look forward to hanging out with you in my next video!