Health Tech: Kokab Rahman Of Radeya Global On How Their Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
An Interview With David Leichner
Consistently improve your product, even after it has been made. With my book, I revised and improved it even after publishing it.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kokab Rahman.
Kokab Rahman is an entrepreneur and content creator. Her business Radeya Global has been ranked one of top consulting and recruiting companies and has maintained 100% customer satisfaction rate in 9+ years. Kokab tries to positively impact people’s lives with her work and writing. Her writing focuses on important topics like business strategy and finance, skills development, spirituality and mental wellbeing. Her articles have been published in leading publications including Entrepreneur. Her books include titles like Accounting for Beginners and Self-Help for Entrepreneurs & People Working from Home and are available from Amazon.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I come from a single parent home. My mother is a medical doctor. Growing up, I had a lot of ups and downs. Initially I studied in an exclusive private school in my home country that was open to specific people only such as children of medical doctors; later I went to a public school in the United States, in fact many different ones, and then was homeschooled. From an early age I was destined to travel a lot and live in a lot of different surroundings. At one time
I lived in a homeless shelter, near homeless project homes. Another time, I lived in the same neighborhood as diplomats and had friends whose parents were high level diplomats. Once I lived in a small house where we had to draw water from a well. Other times I lived developed cities like Dubai, in villas or high rise apartment buildings. In one town, I spent a summer living on the second floor of a small village house where we got to sleep under the stars. I enjoyed the different life experiences and felt it made life an adventure. One thing I am grateful for is the ability to focus on the positive and happy parts of life, ignoring or forgetting the difficult parts. In every situation, there is something beautiful, something to love and enjoy. And through all the years and changes in my environment, my mind focused on the beautiful memories and kept them. Definitely it made life more enjoyable. It also made me more grateful and we all know how gratitude is good for mental wellbeing.. Living among so many different types of people and cultures also helped me understand and relate to a lot of different classes of people.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
An interesting thing in my career was that I was able to do what I loved and it gave me the opportunity to enjoy every moment of it. When you love your work, you are able to progress in it so much more because you are all the more interested in it.
Like most people, I had a lot of different interests and wanted to do many different things. One of the high demand areas in Dubai, where I started my career, was tutoring. Tutoring had a lot of opportunities, plus it allowed me to be self-employed and be my own boss. I loved that about my career as well the opportunity to help others succeed. Since this was something I was so passionate about, I gave it my all. Pretty soon, I was getting high paying high school and college student clients who paid by the hour and my English and financial education allowed me to teach specialized subjects like accounting and business math. Working closely with students made me realize I had a talent in consulting and life coaching and a love for helping others. All my years of experience in this career helped me progress toward my current business which involves consulting, mentoring and career coaching.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Definitely my mother Dr. Firdous Bibi, who is also the co-author of my book Self-Help for Entrepreneurs & People Working from Home. I learned a lot from her, and her activism and never give up attitude contributed to who I am.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Every motivation and entrepreneurship quote is inspiring and I get so much inspiration from them. My favorite quote has to be “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.” It says a lot. Entrepreneurship is difficult. It involves many challenges and ups and downs. To stay persistent on the entrepreneurial path requires a lot of resolve but the reward is incomparable.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
- Having a strong vision and always keep sight of it. For Radeya Global, I had the vision of having a global business that provided the highest quality services and delivered 100% on what it promised. It has helped us have a high customer success rate and 100% customer satisfaction.
- Focus on delivering results for your customers. In my business I made sure that whatever service or product we provided, we had a full understanding of the customer’s goal and our product / service helped them achieve it, and we left no stone unturned to ensure we succeeded in this goal. The result is 100% customer satisfaction, high client success rate and being ranked among the top companies in our industries.
- Always aim big. A quote I love is “reach for the moon, for even if you fall short, you’ll land among the stars.” A person can never achieve 100% what they attempt. However, when one aims big, they’ll achieve more than average because they tried so hard.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
Mental health and mindset related problems.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Technology has a lot of potential to positively impact mental health and mindset and improve lives. Some ways technology can be used to address mental health issues include: online therapies and tele-health, positive affirmations, ASMR and other audio/video content, apps that send positive notifications, and ebooks on mindset and mental health topics. Each of these are proven to positively affect mindset and mental health. Just as a negative environment and negative feedback negatively affects mindset, likewise positive feedback positively affects mental health and motivation. E-books and audiobooks especially take advantage of technology to provide vital helpful information and content in a quickly accessible format.
My book, Self-Help for Entrepreneurs & People Working from Home, is one such book, available in ebook, paperback and hardcover.
Entrepreneurship is a difficult field. Entrepreneurs are twice as likely to suffer from mental health issues compared to the general population. The struggles entrepreneurs face and their lifestyle can put a strain on mental health. Misconceptions surrounding entrepreneurship and success further create situations that exacerbate mental health issues. In addition, recent changes to lifestyle like reduced in-person interaction, make people more susceptible to mental health problems.
Self-Help for Entrepreneurs & People Working from Home talks about common challenges on the entrepreneurial journey and offers tips to address them. It covers topics like financial challenges, relationship issues, isolation and lack of support, self-doubt and imposter syndrome, stress from failure and stress from success, as well as different mental health issues. I wrote Self-Help for Entrepreneurs & People Working from Home with the goal of making entrepreneurial challenges common knowledge and help people prepare to handle them so they can be in the position to better take care of their mental health. Self-Help for Entrepreneurs & People Working from Home is available in paperback, hardcover and ebook versions. I offer the ebook version free regularly on Amazon, usually on the first of every month.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
From my own experience as an entrepreneur and also learning about others facing similar situations, I realized that mental health was a big issue amongst entrepreneurs. In fact, entrepreneurs are twice as likely to suffer from mental health issues compared to the rest of the population. What’s more, many people are not aware that the entrepreneurial journey is filled with challenges and setbacks. So when people embark on this journey, they think their situation is unique. Some hide what they are going through from the world out of shame. All this creates self doubt and negatively affects mental health. For this reason I wrote my book to bring awareness to the challenges common on the entrepreneurial journey and the mental health impact of entrepreneurship.
How do you think this might change the world?
Making people aware of the challenges common on the entrepreneurial journey and their mental health effect will definitely help people be prepared and better handle the situation.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Technology is as good as its content and use. An ebook or audiobook with negative or irresponsible content will negatively affect the recipient while positive content will have a positive effect. I welcome critics to honestly review my book and inform me of any defects.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?
- Come from a place of empathy. For a wellness cause to work and be effective, it has to be based on empathy. Otherwise it becomes a business with the sole aim of making money even at the expense of the patient.
- Whether you are creating an app or ebook or some other technology, ensure it is user friendly and easy to navigate.
- Go full in. Make it your aim to deliver 100% and not half-heartedly.
- Consistently improve your product, even after it has been made. With my book, I revised and improved it even after publishing it.
- If you have something to offer the world, something that can make a positive impact, don’t wait for it to be perfect or for you to have all the information to get started. Start right away and learn as you go. Too many projects never get started because the person is waiting for the right moment.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Together we can make a big impact on the world. Every person’s contribution is needed, so get started today and do something to impact even one person’s life.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can follow me on Social Media: www.Twitter.com/kayrmn
On Instagram where I share snapshots from my life: https://www.Instagram.com/classicdisplay
My Business Website: https://www.Radeya.biz
Business and career advice Blog: https://www.Radeya.biz/blog
LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/kokabrahman
Entrepreneur: https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/kokab-rahman
Check out my books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kokab-Rahman/e/B00D55N9VE/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Thank you for this opportunity.
About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.
