What does it really take to navigate the transition from academia to the corporate world? Join me as I delve into a candid conversation with Kadija Samura, a recent Stanford grad, about the challenges and triumphs of entering the professional world. We first met a few months ago through Stanford Alumni Mentoring. Kadija just earned her Masters degree from Stanford’s School of Education, works at a Health tech startup, and is exploring her passions in education, technology, and entrepreneurship.

We thought it would be fun to talk about career and life from our two perspectives - a mid-20s woman who is transitioning from academia to the business world and a middle-aged woman who has been in the workforce for a few decades. Throughout this series, we'll uncover practical strategies, share personal stories, and offer support to anyone facing similar crossroads.

In this series, we talk about embracing challenges as a way to learn and grow to the importance of having the right people around you to support you on your journey, seeking out new experiences, and how to figure out what you want in life. In today’s installation, we cover embracing challenges as a way to learn and grow, the importance of having the right people around you to support you on your journey, and more. Check out the highlights below or listen this podcast for the full conversation.

Navigating Uncertainty and Accepting the Challenge of Growth

[Kadija] I'm figuring out what I want my life to look like. This year, I took several leaps of faith and embraced uncertainty as part of my growth process. What is your take on accepting the challenge of growth, and how has that manifested recently?

[Caroline] That’s been a prominent theme over the last several years for me. I was only 20 when I started my first job, and I believed that you do all of your learning when you're young and then you’re a fully-formed adult. What I found as I got older is that even as an adult, you never feel like you've got it all figured out. Your learning may be stagnant at times, but the potential is always there. You can build on all of your life experiences and knowledge and continue to grow, evolve, and develop as long as you want to.

[K] That's absolutely true.

[C] I personally love change and don’t feel as much resistance to it as most people. Sure, my human nature still gets in the way, but I'm someone who really loves challenge, growth, and transformation.

[K] I completely agree. I’m the type of person that loves to go off on an adventure. I enjoy this through travel, but even if I'm not traveling, adventure shows up in my day-to-day life through learning. I value being a lifelong learner. In accepting the challenge of growth, I've learned the importance of your environment and having the right people around you, such as sponsors. There's a difference between mentors and sponsors, and having sponsors who are willing to guide you into something that might be completely different for you is critical, as well as having or being able to build the right knowledge for a specific area of growth. Lastly, trust that by taking a leap of faith, even if you fall, you can always get back up. That has been my motto: no matter how much I fall, I will get back up.

[C] The more that you fall early on, if you figure out ways to pick yourself up, those skills will stay with you for the rest of your life.

[K] That's true. It is also a skill to learn how to fail. 

[C] I've been lucky – if you can call it that – that I faced some major challenges as a young adult, and being able to bounce back from them gave me the confidence for the rest of my life that when tough things happen – and usually it's unexpected and unplanned – I'll be okay in the long run and I just have to endure. I carry with me an optimism that I can handle whatever comes my way.

[K] Absolutely, I agree. The second part of accepting the challenge of growth is seeking new experiences, which sometimes means failing fast and failing forward. I love that concept. I heard on a podcast that a key part of your 20s entails learning to fail fast and then fail forward to wherever you're trying to go. In order to do that, you need to seek out new experiences and recognize that you're not going to be good at them for a while because you’re like a baby learning to walk and you have to practice again and again and again. 

I have been working on getting a general sense of what I want in life, and then working backwards from that. That has come through many conversations with people who've also walked the path that I am trying to walk.

[C] Who are some examples of those people in your life?

[K] A lot of them don’t even know me personally. I am a huge consumer of podcasts. A podcast I listen to almost daily is a podcast on personal finances, which I think are really important, and also Wisdom from the Top with Guy Raz. He speaks to a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs, like the one who led Target during its security breach. In his conversation the CEO, they discussed what it means to lead in a crisis and the importance of having crisis management skills. 

Then there are mentors and sponsors. Many are from fellowships programs I did internationally as well as my school institutions. Some are family members who I know I can run to and say I need help with X, Y, and Z. And I met you through a call, Caroline, and we discussed what it means to pursue a career in program management while I was pursuing a program manager role. 

It's those connections – both weak and strong – that are making a world of a difference because I have been in academia for so long. I now need to implement everything that I've learned and practiced, and it’s the people around me that are helping me do that.

[C] I believe that everybody you encounter – virtually or in real life, old or young – can be a teacher to you, even if they don't know it. I follow some yoga teachers on YouTube. They may not know that I exist, but they’ve had a lot of influence on me. 

Learning from failures and setbacks

[K] What are some of the lessons that you took from failures and setbacks when you were in your early 20s?

[Caroline] My mom died suddenly during my sophomore year of college. I went through the process of recovering from the most devastating thing that I could ever imagine happening, and I saw it gradually become just a part of my life as I started to move on. This is one of three seminal events that I often share when I talk about building resilience. The second was a devastating earthquake in Kobe, Japan that took the lives of over 6000 people and caused mass destruction. In the aftermath, I felt like I was in a war zone. Seeing an entire city and community rebuild, literally from rubble, gave me perspective on the power of possibility and human resilience. 

My “failure” was a bad marriage that ended in divorce. It was right around the time I turned 30, and I felt like I was living in a fog. It was really terrible and shitty at the time, but I knew that I just had to endure it and would eventually be okay.

[K] That's really incredible.

[C] At the time, I felt self-blame and guilt for my mistakes. I believed I had to face the consequences for screwing up. Fortunately, I’ve learned that I’m only human and we all make mistakes that stem from good intentions. Being ignorant or naive was not my fault. Giving myself grace helps me recuperate from failures more quickly now.

[K] Thank you for sharing that. As women we’re often taught to beat ourselves up with a club for making mistakes, or we (or those around us) put extremely high expectations on ourselves. This need for perfection has led me to near paralysis when I’ve felt like I can't perform perfectly on the first try. 

I'm also an eldest child and I feel pressure to be a perfect model to everybody around me. I want my sisters to be able to look up to me and aspire to follow in my footsteps, but in doing so, I'm causing myself damage. There are times when I really want to try something but I don’t because I'm worried I'll fail and other people will judge me. Navigating the challenge of how others perceive me stresses me out! 

I also feel other internal pressures, and the best thing I can do for myself is speak to myself kindly. If I beat myself up, I open the door for the rest of the world to confirm whatever limiting beliefs I have about myself.

[C] I can relate to that so much. I know from my mentoring and coaching experience that most people struggle with that, especially high achievers. If you're in an environment like Stanford, for example, with an unusually high concentration of high achievers – maybe even overachievers – with all these amazing talents, you almost can’t help but lose perspective and develop imposter syndrome and perfectionist tendencies. 

That's something I've had to overcome over and over. You think you’ve got the doubt and insecurity under control, but they creep back in different ways. Once your focus shifts to something new, some of these unproductive thoughts slowly come back. Life just becomes more complicated, and you have to learn to apply the same lessons in increasingly complex situations. 

Dealing with Complexity

[K] How do you accept the challenge of growth when the complexities of life show up? For example, when you’re in school, it's a very curated environment. You go to classes, do your work, etc. And the rest of your life, you work, take care of family, do so many different things and learn to change in the process. It's a push and pull – I want efficiency, but change takes time and might require some lack of structure at first.

[C] I love applying the analogy of building muscle to growth and skill-building. Muscles need to break down before they can get stronger and grow bigger, and it's a slow, painful process. You might feel sore. Recovery is super important. If you really want to gain strength and build muscle mass, you have to work until total failure, till you can’t complete another rep. So failure is actually necessary and it allows you to come back stronger after you recover. 

I still kind of feel like a kid who doesn’t know what she’s doing. I don't think you ever reach the point where you have it all figured out and just go through the motions. And frankly, that would be boring!

I've come to embrace being challenged and doing hard things. When unexpected things happen or you face uncertainty, if you know that uncertainty is just part of life and can't be avoided, you see that it’s a waste of energy to resist, resent, or fear it – it's not going to change the outcome. I decided not to – at least consciously – spend my energy on feeling like that because it doesn't help me in any way - it tends to be detrimental to my well-being. 

Letting go of Worry

[C] I remember a moment when I was in grad school, which was so much harder than undergrad, when I was super stressed and lay awake at night with all these thoughts spinning around in my head. I realized that worrying endlessly wasn’t productive; it just made me miserable. I had heard a saying, “Who by worrying adds another hair to their head?” That really resonated for me: I'm not adding any hair, but I am turning the ones I have white. 

Since then, when I notice myself worrying, I remind myself: this is pointless. I know that it isn’t easy to just flip the switch, but I did experience a change in my mindset. I understood that worrying is just a form of self-torture, and I don’t want that. 

When you can recognize the negative thoughts and limiting beliefs as they happen, they suddenly lose their hold on you. So I may feel scared while facing a new thing I haven't done before – I might even experience a physical reaction – but if I’m pursuing something that I want and am excited about, I remind myself that discomfort is just part of the process to get to where I want to be and it won’t always feel like this. 

To listen to our full discussion, check out this podcast. Stay tuned for part 2, where we discuss the cycle of learning and how to overcome limiting beliefs.