Launching My Year of Discovery

On March 1, I officially moved from my role as CEO of Moringa School and onto the board of the company I founded and led for 7 years. Since I announced my intention for a transition in August 2020, I received numerous questions from people curious about what I was up to next. I had no idea and knew I wouldn’t for awhile as I was so deeply immersed in Moringa up to the point that I moved onto the board. What I do feel confident in is that allowing for emergence, being patient, and listening to what my body and soul are telling me (trusting in the intuitive gut that I’ve cultivated) will get me to where I need to go. This doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything with my time, but rather that I’m spending my time learning through contributing to different projects, learning new ideas, concepts and skills in ways I couldn’t in the last 7 years and exploring my identity and inner world. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love — but rather than ‘finding myself’ through travel, it’s ‘finding myself’ through my journey inward.

Over the last few months, I’ve been going through a lot of different exercises and activities (some with the help of friends) to help me learn more about myself again (especially outside of the context of Moringa). I’ve received incredible ideas from brilliant friends and people in my network and created some different activities for myself. These include:

• Go through the activities of Designing Your Life to help me figure out what does or doesn’t energize me, where I find flow and where I’m engaged (on a micro, day-to-day level)
• Review my Wheel of Life
• Do an energy audit on my relationship with: food, sleep, physical movement, breathe, nature and mental rest with questions like: “How am I relating with X lately? How would I like to relate with X? (X being one of those categories)
• Have exploratory conversations with interesting people to learn about how the world — different sectors, geographies, etc has changed since I decided to put my head down and focus on building Moringa since 2014
• Spend my time prototyping different things, writing, reading and exposing myself to new ideas, skills and ways of doing/thinking that I didn’t have enough time for while leading Moringa — continue to support people and projects that drive the change I want to see but allow for enough time for emergence and spontaneity
• Learn from others and conduct a Listening and Learning Tour with older people I respect (not just in what they’ve achieved but how they live their lives). Ask them questions like: How have you made career decisions in the past (how have you factored in your values, beliefs, need to make money, family)? Have you had to make any tradeoffs with other parts of your life for your career? What are you most proud? What does success look like to you? How they think about the future of your industry?

On the Listening and Learning Tour, I’ve been so touched by the insights I’ve learned: anything from how the people I spoke with (usually between 40–80 years old) only discovered the threads that interlaced their life choices later on (and their encouragement to be comfortable in the not knowing), to try to make life decisions without the ego and with a focus on values alignment and the big picture ‘Why’. I’ve also learned to see life as a series of seasons, and to ask myself, what season am I in? Everything has tradeoffs, so what tradeoffs am I willing to make in this next season? Other thought-provoking questions that I’ve reflected on have included:

• Is your identity deeply attached to what you are doing? As opposed to who you are?
• What is your identity? What do you want in life?
• What areas in your life have you overlooked or neglected? Simply because we don’t have unlimited reserves for capacity and energy
• Is the way I’m living consistent with the values that I want to live by? Who you decide to be with is a manifestation of your values.
• If my values have changed, how do I design for that?

The way I’ve been approaching my Year of Discovery has been from an experimental/hypothesis-driven approach. As I learn more about myself, I’ve been trying to allow time for information to process and for my consciousness to stew on it — moving away from quickly solidifying beliefs and instead, allowing myself to be molded by the conversations I’m having with others, the books and articles I’m reading and the environments that I’m in. Allowing myself to continue questioning my core hypotheses about the world, my role in it and the potential solutions to the problems I’m seeing has helped me find comfort in the ambiguity of discovery. Holding myself back from needing to have strong conviction on anything until I truly believe it logically and feel it with my heart has put me at ease.

Moving forward, I will try to write weekly reflections on what I’m learning. Since I was younger, the question I’ve always had was: what am I doing today that is adding value to the world? As I stepped down from my role as CEO of Moringa, I felt an identity crisis where the way I was spending my day didn’t have a direct link to adding value to other people’s lives. I hope that by sharing some of my honest experiences navigating the ambiguity of my Year of Discovery that I can add some type of value to your life.