4 Ways of Transforming Yourself
How FemGem35's creative leap from film to tech can guide you
After earning her Master of Fine Arts degree in Film Direction, FemGem35 didn’t initially see a clear career path for herself in tech. She followed her instincts though and tested out different solutions, learning massively along the way. Today she’s an experienced founder, CEO, and inspirational speaker. How did she create those opportunities and what can you learn from them?
Get ready to be inspired! Meet Aina Abiodun.
FemGem35 Aina shares her wisdom from an impressive career supporting health tech, impactful consumer brands, and social causes. Aina’s storytelling superpowers shaped her career and they make her a dynamic speaker. She’s got a special gift for aligning purpose, product, and people. Aina leverages the power of media and technology to bring meaningful products and services to customers – at scale.
This FemGems podcast episode called “When Doors Are Being Shut in Your Face, You Gotta Get Creative!” is packed with advice and is a joy to listen to. When tuning in, you’ll hear why creativity saved Aina multiple times. She transformed initial rejection from the tech scene into the opportunity to carve her own career path and build an amazing reputation as a leader.
In her talk with FemGems founder Dora Dora, Aina shares her deep work and offers remarkable ways to recover and grow from professional setbacks.
Aina’s advice is honest, warm and priceless; it’s also proving timeless in today’s fluctuating environment. I can’t recommend it enough; you might even listen a few times! I’ve shared four highlights below, but take the time to absorb her voice & stories for yourself.
1. Follow Your Nose
At each stage in her career, Aina followed her intuition; she jokingly compares herself to a dog sniffing along a trail. She quickly picked up on how to best use tech to leverage storytelling, identifying YouTube early on as a great path to use videos to market brands, products, and ideas.
By following good instincts, she used her creative abilities to build communities, start companies, provide value, and find new opportunities. This led to StoryCode, creative agency work for Facebook, the Obama Foundation, later a role as CEO of 8Fit, and speaking opportunities.
In every situation, she recommends learning as much as you can to prepare yourself for the next step. Even if at first you can’t get the exact role you want in a company, make sure you work for an employer whose values you align with. If you find yourself taken advantage of, protect yourself by creating new alliances and finding the courage to fight or move on.
2. Adopt the Right Mindset
Aina says you can’t change the past but you can prepare yourself for the certainty of new opportunities ahead. Remind yourself that new chances will arise and be ready to walk through those doors. This means acknowledging shut doors or failure, but rather than obsess on that, train yourself to quiet the internal critical voice and instead, focus on other opportunities available to you. It might be automatic to criticize or devalue yourself throughout this tumultuous journey, so taking care of your mental health is key.
What helped strengthen her mindset along this path is what’s called radical self-care; it’s partly how she worked on herself to heal old wounds and deal with issues. And self-care is not painting your nails. It’s deep work, often involving therapy and reflection, in order to dig up experiences that block you from owning your true value.
3. Deliver Yourself Objectivity
Get really good at handling feedback. You’ll need to cultivate resilience in every professional and personal situation. Here are two methods for achieving that objectivity:
- Know your strengths: Start by writing down your strong points. Get to know them by heart. Don’t shy away from this practice. Literally writing them down gives you confidence when questioned. It helps you honestly identify and refine any weak spots or growth areas. She recommends teaming up with people with different strengths than yours, too.
- Ensure you have a sounding board: Refer to that strength list above when receiving critical feedback to help you evaluate this input. Ask yourself: did you actually make a grave error? Or is this a minor misstep that you can correct? Feedback can show you where to improve without derailing you. Make sure you have a trusted friend who you can bounce the feedback off of to decide what should stick.
4. Pursue Your Passions
Whatever age you are, now is always the right time to start working on your own idea. She advises women to not delay in pursuing their passions if they can honestly confirm that there’s NO alternative. In other words, if you know you must pursue your idea, then, in the end, it will be a success because of what you learned by pursuing it. Aina says:
“There is no glory in ignoring the things you are passionate about…There will be nothing bad to say about the risk you’ve taken. There will however, be something bad to say about a risk not taken.”
Aina Abiodun is an outspoken voice and advocate for women in tech, speaking at events and making herself available for questions. Don’t miss out on what she has to say. It could be just what you need to hear right now.
Tune in to episode 35 featuring Aina Abiodun and leave us a review with your thoughts on it!
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