Who am I
The Outer Succes
In 1990 I made lots of money on my own by manufacturing “martisoare”*. I was 20 years old and Romania just entered a new era – the romanticized capitalism we experienced as a no man’s land – where all was possible and little was known. Courage was the main ingredient; failure had no clear measurement.
At 23 I met via AIESEC** a couple of entrepreneurs who where looking for students with courage and willingness to prove themselves. I was starting a new business in my dear No Man’s Land, grateful to have the chance to learn. I was fascinated and extremely enthusiastic to start a business in a non-existing industry at that time. Recruitment and hiring!
It was a time when the private economy was an uncharted territory. Nobody really knew much about recruiting and hiring. But that’s what made it exciting – I saw a chance to innovate and educate myself and the market. I travelled to America to educate myself on recruitment and hiring in 1992. Soon I became a shareholder at the company that was known as Snelling Personnel Services. We opened a couple of new offices in 1994.
At the end of the ‘90s I delved into personnel leasing, consulting, and training services. It was like stepping into a total void, but I embraced the challenge and I made it work. I was in my late twenties and I omnipresent – newspapers (since journalists where eager to write daily about salaries), speaker at conferences, all kinds of business events.
In 2001, I took another big step and joined a large international network of Executive Search companies called AIMS, further expanding my reach into 4 distinct directions: Executive Search, Personnel Leasing, Consulting and Training. At the time, the concept of “one-stop-shop” company was very appeling. Same year I attended my first coaching training and organized one of the first coaching public event in Romania.
As the maket matured, we have decided to have 3 separate legal entities. And since training was new for Romania I wanted to learn from the best. So, in 2005 I ventured to the USA to purchase the American training franchise Dale Carnegie. It was an exhilarating experience that enriched my training, coaching and leadership development approach. For 18 years, we have proudly trained and coached thousands of people on many soft-skills topics important to multinational companies.
Society’s Expectations and Validations
I my mid-30s I was (based on society’s standards) a business woman. A successful entrepreneur. I was owning several companies. We helped people find better careers, learn new skills and develop attitudes allowing them to reach peak performance at work. I also was a wife, a mother, a daughter.
In early 2000s, leadership and its meaning was a very new and distorted concept. At work, for many years I felt a lot of parental stress. Feeling needed was what kept my self-esteem afloat. Mentoring lots and lots of people made me feel smart and better. Colleagues leaving the company and starting their own firm (pretending to be self-made) left me feeling betrayed and angry.
To be a successful entrepreneur, to gain the respect of business men, to have a family, lots of diplomas – I met all these expectations and then some. For reaching this so-called top, I became this utilitarian human being: providing, mentoring, leading, solving problems. Meeting all these expectations about being helpful, I should have been fine, right? But I sacrificed most things about being me.
Inner Emptiness
2012 was the pinnacle of my professional career, up to that point. I became a Board Member of Romanian Business Leaders foundation. The whole year, every week, I was a speaker at o business conference, on TV or being interviewed for some newspaper. I felt on top of the world. By the end of the year, I felt total emptiness while on the outside everything was great: money, career, health, family….I felt as if all this success didn’t make me happy at all. And so, slowly, sloppily and timidly, my inner journey started.
Exploration & The “Good Enough Journey”
My spiritual journey started in childhood, originally; but I pushed it aside because it was definitely not cool to be spiritual in an environment driven by KPIs and public achievements. In a way, I did my best to fit in, hoping I will belong.
In 2014 I attended my first acting classes. Also a childhood passion I left aside. I was told that as an actress, I will die poor. Since I made a good living up to that stage in my life, I thought I could afford to follow one of my personal interests – acting.
In 2016 I attended the first coaching School – Solution Focused – but I didn’t feel ready to give up the power of being an entrepreneur. So despite feeling the need for more inner freedom, I stuck to the old me – the business woman.
In 2017 I took a two-year sabbatical I dedicated to my acting career. Being on the red carpet wasn’t that bad after all. Most people around me thought that it was a well planned move; that it was very sexy and appealing to take a some time off. It wasn’t planned, I just couldn’t sit at a desk anymore and I couldn’t do what I was doing anymore. So my sabbatical was kind of an abrupt decision. Thanks to my long-time team, I could hand over the companies and explore myself as a human being.
After a couple of years, I went back to the office and I just couldn’t find any joy. So my path went deeper in life via coaching, hypnosis and yoga. I attended my second coaching school – at PwC. I earned the certification for Hypnotherapist with Paul McKenna, the Positive Intelligence course with Shirzad Chamine and the yoga training of Inner Engineering with Sadhguru. I have to admit that the “Good enough journey” is a bit more difficult then the “Do, Prove, Please”.