November is my birthday month. Each year around my birthday, I spend some time thinking about the year that went by and plan for my personal and professional next year.
2018 has been a life-changing year for me. Last year in December, after years of thinking, I finally decided to mainstream my efforts of giving back and actively supporting women in tech in the bay area. Because unless we have a strong pipeline for emerging women leaders, we will not see women in senior leadership positions, at c-level , and in the board rooms. And for the few who make it, it will continue to be very lonely – we will continue to be the minority and face conscious and unconscious bias. There are numerous leaders, sponsors, and mentors who have helped and continue to help me on my journey as a women leader and it was about time that I took on the mission of empowering and encouraging women in tech, so that when I get to a c-level position, I am not the only woman in the room.
I wanted to blend my passion for technology, training, leadership, and mindfulness to empower emerging women leaders. I had been mentoring and speaking at events for a few years now and I knew that I had to put my audience first. I had to meet my audience – emerging women leaders- where they were in their journey and had to empower them in a way that worked best for them. Each time I spoke at an event, I realized that there was a need for resources in various formats for women so that they could take a holistic approach to prepare for leadership roles. Coming from the training industry, I knew that one style of information delivery doesn’t fit all. So I wanted to create content and information in all consumable formats- speaking sessions, books, blogs, audio, video, and apps. The goal was to have a global reach and empower and encourage every woman that we met. My professional and personal network encouraged and supported me in this mission.
I am big on “Nail the basics” and “Act now and iterate“. I had to start small, see what worked, what didn’t and rinse and repeat the process. I created this website as a platform to share information, right before speaking at the first ever Girl Geek event at Oracle on Dec 7, 2017 as the first step. One thing led to another and before I knew I was speaking at global events and women in tech panels and mentoring a force of emerging leaders almost every week. I had earned trust of my audience and they expected more from me.
In May, I spoke at WT2 (Women Transforming Technology) conference on “Fast-Tracking your Leadership Career”. It was a sold-out session and at the end of the session, many emerging women leaders reached out to me and asked if I had a book. “There will be one soon”, I said. It was time to act on the feedback from my audience. That night, I started writing the book. My wonderful publishers from Women Lead Publishing were great partners. They agreed to my crazy timeline and we released “Fast-Track Your Leadership Career” on Sep 28, 2018. Within 14 hrs of launch, the book was a #1 Amazon best seller. For those who know me, know how impatient I am. So while the publishers were busy editing and proofing the book, I decided to move ahead and launched my you tube channel- Rashim Mogha for video content. The audience loved this format and the mindfulness and leadership videos were top videos.
Continuous learning is key to growth and during this journey I learned a lot. Right from creating a website, recording and editing videos, to the publishing process of a book, I learned it all. I also learned to take risks and fail fast. I had to drop some ideas even though they were very good because they didn’t align with my core goal. The Amazon and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure values that I believe in helped me in this journey.
And last month, I published 5 new Alexa skills for my audience. This was a new initiative for me. My research had shown that 1 in 6 US adults owned a voice-enabled device and over 22 million Alexa devices were sold in 2017. So there was a scale platform that already existed and it was an opportunity for me to reach the audience and empower them through my content in a new format. When I published the skills, I didn’t know how the audience would react to it. The “Leadership Affirmations” Alexa skill got a big vote of confidence when Kai A. Dupé, a technical trainer at AWS wrote to me and told me that he invokes my affirmation skill in his class for his students before they start the class.
And on my birthday this year, we explored another medium- podcasts ( I say “we” because now I have support from my intellectual group of many women leaders with whom I bounce off new ideas and how to execute on them) . We launched our first eWOW- empowered Women of the World podcast on 8 listening platforms: Anchor, Apple iTunes, Google podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, PocketCasts, RadioPublic, and Stitcher.
eWOW has big plans for next year- to empower 100,000 women globally. I am using this three-day weekend to put a strategy in place and picking brains of leaders in the industry on how to achieve it. Forming alliances, collaborating with global women in tech organizations, social media campaigns, I am exploring it all.
2018 has been marvelous- we have touched over 25,000 emerging leaders, and 2019 will be even better! One day at a time we will empower and enable women to join and continue in the leadership roles so that we have a world where we all are equals.
You can help in this mission too. Please subscribe, support, and share this post with your network so that we can reach all emerging women leaders globally. Each one of us has a responsibility to ensure that we live and work in a diverse and equal world!
As always, please like, comment, and share with your network to empower women leaders. For my new blog posts, follow my website and connect with me on twitter: @rmogha
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