As I look back at the journey I have travelled, more particularly over the last 18 – 24 months, one thing is very clear.  There has been a tribe of fierce & fearless women who have mentored & inspired me, holding me accountable to the goals that I have set.

I have learned that having a mentor is not a sign of weakness; rather – it shows you are smart enough and are driven enough to succeed. The reality is that the entrepreneurship journey is a tough one – a good mentor is a necessity!

Why you might ask? Mentors believe in you – they have faith in you & push to be better.  They also encourage you to keep moving when things get tough. Mentors are honest with you – they give out doses of ‘tough love’ & tell you to stop whining when it is necessary!  Mentors open up their networks & link you up with people who will help you succeed & achieve your goals. Ultimately a good mentor helps you towards your vision by helping you align your actions with your goals.

So let me tell you a little about this fierce and fearless tribe of sisters who have shaped my journey over the last couple of years.

Frida Owinga introduced me to Sarah Richson, CEO Richemele International Consultants.  I may have seen her in action previously, but our engagement begun when she was invited to speak at an OWIT Nairobi event.  I remember thinking that she was such a powerful & inspirational speaker and I wanted to be just like her when I grew up! Our initial lunch – at Java Hurligham, if I am not mistaken, gave birth to a relationship that has spurred me to greater heights.

Sarah is the QUEEN of DATA.  From the moment I met her, she has pushed me to be intentional.  If I tell her about a project I am embarking on, she will ask me why – is it aligned with your vision, does it take you closer to where you want to go?  Sarah is also big on substance – going deep. If Emotional Intelligence is my area of expertise, it can’t be at a surface level! She has driven me to create an intentional footprint – one that is aligned with my vision and then capture every moment!

I managed to pin her down & ask a few questions about her leadership journey & mentorship…

Sarah, my blog is primarily about my leadership journey & the lessons that I am learning,

What would you say is your number one leadership lesson? As Sarah, my biggest lesson as a leader is to understand myself first.  I have to put the mirror up and look at myself daily and reflect on who I am. And that then gives me how I lead. Many times if I’m looking at the people on leading, or the type of people I’m going to lead, you’d be very surprised because people usually choose to be led, you can’t choose the people that you lead. People choose to be led by you voluntarily. I remember having a conversation with my daughter just this week and she was asking me, “Mom, how did you become a leader?” I told her that think I can explain how I became a manager, but I can’t explain how I became a leader. I just started hearing people saying, ‘I would like to follow you,’ or ‘you lead me so well’ or ‘my heart just turns towards you in certain issues.’ I was very surprised to begin with in my early days of leadership because my personality is a very strong personality. I can be quite brutal with the truth – as I tell it as it is! Being a Choleric, type A female, whose test on personality talks about boldness to the highest degree, I felt that society can sometimes can judge you as being aggressive or abrasive. I also had a tough childhood so definitely there were anger issues in there. So, I never thought that I am anybody to be fit to be a leader, but people chose me anyway. My biggest lesson is that you have to constantly self-reflect and understand who you are, and why people choose you terms of leading them. I would tell any leader, don’t miss out on that deep reflection of yourself. We are all different personalities, we are all different types of leaders and each of us I think has our own following for different reasons. So, my number one lesson – be me, do me, understand me and then understand why the people follow me, follow me to be led. How important are mentors to the leadership journey? Having a mentor is like choosing to take the journey to a destination and being able to take a flight to that destination, especially if it’s Mombasa, rather than walking or riding a car that would take several hours. Having a mentor is so important – especially for those who want a smoother journey, those who want to learn the lessons that others have already learned very quickly, the ones also want to bypass the hardship of the road and get there without breaking too much of a sweat.

For us leaders, I think it is so important not to have a dry cup because a dry cup cannot pour out anything to your following. You must be able to receive from elsewhere and mentorship is where you receive so you can pour out, that is what has helped the leadership journey… in terms of being able to have people who speak into your life, who guide you, who keep on filling your cup, so that you cannot run dry when you’re filling other people’s cups. I think for the types of roles that we do, working with women. working with people constantly, you definitely need that. You need somebody who fills in your cup.

This is very interesting for me, because I’ve never looked at mentorship from a gender perspective. I use gender perspective for very many other things, but not mentorship because mentorship is a hierarchy of knowledge. They’ll always be somebody who has a hierarchy of knowledge on something and that is why when I even teach on it, I say, number one, it is not a hierarchy of age, it is a hierarchy of knowledge. That would come from any gender, from any person, at any age. Imagine if I am being mentored and helped through a transformational digital and technology phase in my life – that would be a younger person, male or female, right? As long as they have the skills, or they have the knowledge to be able to provide support to me in a holistic manner, understand my fears and barriers that may exist.  I’ve found younger mentors in certain areas who have serious hierarchy in knowledge in their subject matter area. I have also found women to be quite powerful if I’m talking about being a female rising and holding a career and children. One of my first mentor worked at the Financial Times and she really, really had an impact on me, because she had come from a background of a single mother, which is also my background and was able to really understand the issues I was having around parenting and holding down a job. That would come from a woman because that is her hierarchy in the knowledge.

A man was very, very pivotal in helping me get into the analytics space because that was his hierarchy of knowledge – quantitative analytics. I had just blocked my mind around maths because of the types of teachers I’d had, who were not mentors at all – they were just tough you and had ‘dry’ teaching methods. This person just took my hands and he has transformed my career and my life around analytics. Again, I went into that situation looking for a hierarchy of knowledge. So, that is what I always look for within a mentor, a holistic person who I admire, whom I find accessible, who shares and transfers their knowledge freely towards me. It must be who has a serious depth of knowledge, that I can continuously tap into – male or female, doesn’t really matter to me.

*Laugh* High heels! I am a tiny framed person so definitely my high heels have always helped, in terms of me just gaining that extra inch in everything. That’s truly me!

So there you have it, words of wisdom from a powerhouse who continues to be an inspiration to many….

“As iron sharpens iron,
    so one person sharpens another.”

With love,