Force of nature

There was always a side hustle on the go in my childhood home in the middle of Maseru. My mother spent more than 40 years as a grade one teacher in a government school, and my father worked in government. They were both very entrepreneurial outside of their day-to-day jobs. They were also farmers, and although we lived in the capital city, my parents were forever selling things from our home; milk from our cows, trays of eggs from the chicken coup, chickens and produce that had been grown on the farm. 

It’s in my DNA to measure the cost of what I want in life and get ready to pay for it. It’s also a principle deeply rooted in my parenting style.  I have good home assistance, but I don’t outsource mothering and nurturing my family. I do my best to cook dinner and dine with family around the table, pray with them and tuck my kids to sleep with individual conversations to know what is happening in their lives.  

Growing up, I loved numbers with every fibre of my being. So, after school, I enrolled in a degree in computer science and statistics at the National University of Lesotho. I worked in the IT industry for a while in Lesotho, and then when I was 25, I was offered a job as a senior systems engineer in the IT department at UCT in Cape Town. It was one of the greatest gifts in life. I had never lived in another country outside of Lesotho before then and found myself in a land where I spent most of my time on my own, connecting with self, meeting me, and learning so much about who I am and what I stand for. The change was exactly what I wanted and needed at that point in my life. I often say the greatest literacy is knowing thyself. And those years were invaluable.  

A year into my job at UCT I decided to study an MBA part-time at UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB). It was there that I met Henley Africa dean, Jon Foster-Pedley, who lectured us on creativity, strategy and design. I loved his content and would walk out of his lectures feeling alive, challenged to the core and, sometimes, a bit confused too! 

Jon has played a powerful mentoring role in my life – both explicitly and implicitly. He was my thesis supervisor and steered me out of my comfort zone and into an area that I am passionate about. He specifically asked me what I was curious about in life. When you work in IT, and you are studying at a business school, the expectation at the time was that you will solve for the alignment between IT strategy and business strategy, so this was an unexpected question. It started me on a journey that exposed me to the discipline of design thinking and creative problem solving and introduced me to the innovation tools, resources and frameworks that you can apply to bring yourself to work in a more authentic way while also building corporate cultures that stimulate creativity and engagement.  

My mother died suddenly in 2010. I was 30 years old. It was one of the most devastating times of my life. It was also a time of deep introspection. In the year of her death, I reflected deeply on how she had lived her life, how she had always put others first, how her life was lived in service to others. It prompted me to think deeply about the life I want to live and how I want to be remembered.

I started a journal at that excruciatingly painful time. I did a 40-day fast to help define who I am and what my life should be about. I imagined myself at 40 (still a decade away); I thought about the type of life I wanted to be living. I wrote down my financial goals, my corporate goals, my career goals, and what type of mum I wanted to be. Journaling gave me a clear direction on how to reach my emerging future self. I reinvented myself from an IT specialist and created a new brand for myself around design thinking, innovation and public speaking, I also enrolled in a PhD to support my new career goal of impacting lives. 

I didn’t want my family to suffer because of my decision to do a PhD. It was an intense five-year period of full-time working and part-time studying and I made a conscious decision not to neglect my role as a wife and mother. I maintained the rhythm of normality at home: work, dinner and bedtime at 8pm. But then I would wake up between 2am and 5am to work. I used holidays and leave days to build my brand as an innovation and design thinking lead. I had no social life outside of my family, but I was hyper-focused on the reward I knew would come at the end.

By the time I turned 37, I had reached all the goals set out in my journal. I had the PhD; I had travelled the world – visiting more than 40 cities as a speaker/ facilitator – and I had established a global network. I had built my brand and a whole new career path centred on making a difference in people’s lives. The same year, my daughter, who was five at the time, said: “Mom, we know you don’t work; you play and enjoy what you do; we see the joy when you go to work.” I knew then that I had achieved the ultimate goal: to show my kids that you can pursue a life where passion meets purpose meets profit, and not to settle for less in life.  

As I navigate my forties, I am on a new journey to define my next big vision for the decade ahead. It certainly involves ongoing research, products, facilitation tools, conferences, events, and digital platforms to satisfy my insatiable appetite to maximise the potential that sits in this powerful computer between our ears – the brain. Through coaching, strategy/consulting and leadership development, my focus is on building and developing the alchemy inspiration that unleashes the magic that manifests when we show up as the human race, in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

I am passionate about Africa, about women on our continent and the potential of our youth. I believe we hold the power that unlocks the alchemy of this continent if we just lean in and get to know ourselves deeply and pursue our passion.