A Tribute To Women: Embracing Your Worth

March 19, 2021 | Keynote Speech for Facebook Philippines and She Talks Asia

Part 1: Knowing I Was Worthy To Begin With

Before you can embrace your worth, you have to know you’re worthy to begin with.

Knowing my worth…was one of the many difficult parts of my journey as a female leader.

And it took years, a lot of good luck, and an entire community to know my worth. I’m still figuring it out to be honest.

In my journey, something I realized was that my sense of self worth had a lot to do with the goals I set for myself.

You see, I grew up with the perception that my dreams were really big.

At 8 years old, I wanted to be an engineer. No specifics. Just become an engineer. I just thought it was a really cool profession.

By the time I graduated from high school, my dream had evolved into not just being an engineer but also starting a small business.

But here’s the thing, when you start growing up, you’re just faced with reality.

So like any normal person, by the time I started my career, I knew that my other dream of starting a business would be a joke. I felt I wasn’t capable of doing that. So I got a job instead.

Obviously, my life sort of went a different direction. But before I tell that story, I want to share a few thoughts I had back then:

How come when I was 8 years old, my dream was to become an engineer, but not an engineer who changes the world? There’s a big difference between the two.

How come when I was in high school, my dream was to start a small business, not a big one. Again, there’s a big difference.

Lastly, why did I immediately assume I couldn’t be something I wanted to be? A successful business woman.

These goals I had set for myself back then, spoke a lot about how I saw my worth.

Back then, I would say I saw myself simply as a dreamer, but not really a high potential one. What do i mean by that?

It was like I allowed myself to have dreams but I didn’t really believe I could ever achieve them.

So fast forward to today, I was asking myself how did I go from that to becoming a CEO and someone who feels like she could change the world? How did that happen?

I think it’s because of 3 things:

Somewhere along the way, important people I had worked with, told me that I was smart, hard working, and I had so much potential to do great things. They also told me I could succeed in doing a business. It was powerful- being told by successful people I could succeed.

Early in my career, I experienced working with female change makers and I watched in 1st world countries the rise of the first female techpreneurs. In other words, what seemed like a “moonshot” dream, about an impactful business, now seemed possible, because I had role models.

And sometime in 2016, incubators and accelerators started cropping up for young entrepreneurs like me. I had the opportunity to submit a business idea and get initial funding for that. Because pursuing your dreams is a luxury, opportunities like this that came my way to make the process easier was such a huge deal.

The combination of being empowered to believe in myself;

having the role models to make my dreams tangible;

and having the opportunity to de-risk the process of pursuing my dreams;

…allowed me to realize that my worth and potential was so much higher

… and this allowed my company InvestEd to become a reality.

InvestEd’s concept is similar to my journey of finding my worth.

InvestEd aims to help disadvantaged high potential dreamers achieve prosperity in today’s difficult world. We do this by providing financing for traditional and non-traditional education. And through our proprietary Risk Engine, we make student loans both inclusive and sustainable.

High potential dreamers or “HPDs” are young people who have a great desire to lead a better life. They may be impoverished in the practical sense, but are not in the psychological sense.

Part 2: Dealing With Your Worth

If realizing your worth is about deciding to maximize your potential and pursue your dreams…

...dealing with your worth is about adjusting to the life you chose. The pursuit of any high potential dreamer is to become more.

When you go on that journey to become more, what basically happens is that you make a choice to play on a bigger stage.

What do I mean by a bigger stage?

• It’s knowing that your words and opinions now have weight.
• That your decisions can now impact lives not just positively, but also negatively.
• That your work can affect the ecosystem.

The bigger stage was and is very scary, especially for someone like me, who grew up and built my belief systems thinking I wouldn’t be at such a place.

And because I was unprepared, what basically happened is that I spent the early years of InvestEd focusing on what I didn’t have to succeed- whether it was that ivy league degree that funders always seemed to look for or an international network that would give me a leg up.

I took every mistake and failure heavily. And I made a lot of decisions based on fear.

In short it was a lot of impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is believing that you don’t belong or deserve to be where you are. And I had a very difficult time getting rid of it.

Why is impostor syndrome bad? When you’re trying to solve a 100-year old problem like education finance, and you have to hit targets, raise funds, and be a good leader to your team, impostor syndrome brings about self doubt. And self doubt can paralyze you.

For example, when I talked with funders, the opinion was always split. I was consistently told I was taking too much risk and that my targets were too ambitious. An impact business that wants to scale fast? There’s nothing like that in the Philippines. On the other hand, there were funders that told me I was too risk averse and my targets too modest. That I wasn’t raising enough money.

In these business critical moments, how would you decide what’s right, if you don’t even feel like you deserve to be a CEO?

Another example is when you’re a young entrepreneur and you go into a lot of meetings with very powerful and accomplished people. Your objective is to ask something from them and sometimes the only leverage you have is your vision. How will you sell your vision, if you doubt its greatness to begin with?

I believe i’ve overcome a lot of the self doubt, but it always comes back and managing it is a continuous process.

I learned three very important things in this stage of my journey:

• Imposter syndrome can really cap your potential and the achievement of your mission. When you doubt yourself, you tend to miss a lot of really great opportunities.
• Finding inspiration through serving others is a great way to overcome it. I found a lot of strength and perspective from our students at InvestEd. I always feel like my problems are small when I hear what our students face on a daily basis. And they go about their lives with such optimism and integrity.
• Surround yourself with people who are productive for your mission. There are a lot of well meaning people who exacerbate your feeling of not being good enough. My advice is to lose them.

Part 3: Embracing Your Worth

The business of achieving your dreams is filled with tradeoffs. Embracing your worth requires not just accepting this but also trying to enjoy the experience.

I have 3 tips when it comes to that:

First is recognizing that you can write your own story.

One of the things I really struggled with was the fear of being disliked. And being disliked often happens when people just don’t understand what you do or the decisions you make.

For example, it’s not normal in the Philippines for an organization to fight for systemic social change through a commercial solution.

However, what we’re doing at InvestEd is exactly that. We’re an impact business. We believe the core of the problem is the fact that there’s so much money out there, but everyone thinks it’s too risky to lend to low income students.

Our goal is to prove that lending to disadvantaged high potential dreamers can be not just profitable, but also deeply impactful. That there exists a mechanism to do it.

In short, for systemic change to happen, profitability of mass market student loans has to be proven first.

It hasn’t always been received well- some development practitioners think it’s wrong to have a commercial model while some experts think it’s not feasible to be a mission-driven lending company.

But that’s okay. Believing that profits and impact can co-exist is our story. No matter how rare.

Second is to find strength and inspiration by thinking of others first.

I’ve been in development work for more than a decade and what I can say is that serving others always makes a difficult journey worth it. There’s so much fulfillment in a work of service.

You don’t have to be in an impact venture to live a life for others. It could be as simple as making a positive impact to the people you regularly interact with.

Lastly, stay resilient during difficult times- it’s not easy, but the challenges are truly what makes us strong.

To close, let’s reflect for a bit and ask ourselves the following:

1. Look at the goals you have set for yourself. What does this tell you about how you value yourself?
2. During your journey, are you often paralyzed by self doubt? How can you overcome this so you can maximize your potential?
3. Try to verbalize your story. Is this story who you really are or would you like to write a new chapter?