No One Can Lead Your Life Better Than You

Hello.

I'm Frida,

and I believe no one can lead your life better than you. And the reason I say that is because I discovered that a long time ago when I was younger.

And today,

I always remind people,

when you see someone successful,

congratulate them,

for you don't know what it has taken them to be where they are and what you're looking at and calling success. Because we meet people

when they've already accomplished some things,

and we don't know

e- the in-between

things that have been happening.

And you see someone, they have a successful organization, or they have a book, or you see them speaking on a stage, and we don't immediately see the moment before all that happened.

You know, what could they imagine at that point when they were thinking, "Okay, maybe I need to do this," or, "This is something I feel passionate to do"?

W- at that particular point, did they imagine how big it would grow or how successful it would be? They probably did not, because if I speak for myself, I really did not. And looking at my own journey, I can't possibly say that I knew. That would not be honest, because some possibilities become visible along the way.

When I started thinking about my Spiro University institutes or library or the publishing company or the coaching company, mentorship,

the masterminds that I started, all those things, I did not know I would have such a tremendous team that I would be working with. I did not know any of them. By the time they were coming to the team or when I was inviting them to the team,

I'd already done a lot in the background.

But

as an educator,

you also educate people, and you don't know how far they will go. I've met others who have become doctors, architects, you know, teachers like me. I had one tell me they actually decided to teach

because of the impact I had on their lives. So, as an author, I am grooming people to write and monetize every part of their process of writing and publishing. And then as a human development, you know, scientist, I study how people learn, how they develop, and what motivates them, because back again to how can you know?

Would you even imagine when you start dreaming how big your dream can be? And so, that's what I study, human development, how people learn, how people motivate themselves to develop themselves, how people create their lives, and how they become successful,

and what success actually means to them. Well, I'm originally from Kenya, and my professional [chuckles] development journey began very interestingly, because there I am, I'm a teenager, I'm finishing my senior high school year, and I'm being asked, you know, what career I want, and I have no clue. And so, I picked journalism and education, and then I got education. I always wanted to be a journalist, but now I'm a biographer, so that took care of that. And then I became a teacher, but I knew my teaching was just

a, a bouncing board, a, a beginning, and I was going to do more with my teaching. And that's how my motto became, "No one can lead my life better than me." No one can lead your life better than you, because I came to the realization that my life, whatever it is I was going through, no one else was going through the same what I was going through. It could be similar, but definitely not the same, because they can't experience it using me. And so, we might experience the same thing or something similar, but not the same way. We could even be in the same environment, but not the same way still, because each one of us has their own uniqueness. And so, when you're looking at life,

honor it, whatever it is you're going through. Participate fully in whatever direction you choose. For me, self-leadership became what I was paying attention to, and so I studied leadership all the way to PhD level and focused on self-leadership because of that early realization that no one can lead my life better than me. And so, as much as I studied organizational leadership, I wanted to study this organization called me, and I wanted to understand what was I thinking when I started my ventures, my organizations? What was I thinking? What was motivating me? What was influencing me? What was influencing even those decisions that I was making, like relocating? Relocating is expensive. Relocating can throw you off because you're going to be experiencing new languages, new cultures, and I've been to multiple countries. And even not just countries, even in my own country, we have different languages, different cultures, and I started relocating within the country. And- Again, the same thing. You're going to a new place, people you don't know, cultures you don't know, foods you don't know. [chuckles] You-- I've eaten foods that I had never eaten growing up, and now have become my staple. And then I have spoken languages that were not spoken where I was growing up, and so forth. So,

what was influencing those decisions? Expensive as it was to move,

what was I thinking? What was...

You know, w-what played such a great role in that decision

that I decided I had to move, that I decided I had to relocate, that I had decided that I could go to another country,

that I decided I could go to another continent and come to the United States and live there? And then even in the United States, there are so many states, 50 of them,

and I chose one, and it was cold, and I decided, "No, this is not it."

So that one, I can say the decision was the weather, and I moved to another state. And I still didn't like it, and I moved again and again. And now I am in a state where I feel, yeah, this one I like, and I'm gonna stay here. But along that, you know, pivoting and traveling and moving and those decisions and trying this and trying that and failing and trying again and falling and waking up and trying again every morning and every day,

and living honestly with myself,

you know,

what was influencing those decisions? Because a person can understand a concept. I can under- you can understand moving, but until you do it,

you don't know how hard it is.

You can understand, you know, oh, the difficulty of speaking a different language

and communicating and teaching in it, working in it, working in an environment where people are speaking English in an accent that is different from yours.

You can know that, but until you've lived it, you don't know it. You know of it, you don't know it.

And you can understand the importance of asking for help,

you know, because you may have years of experience, like me, teaching English, but when you come to America, American English, you have to ask for help when, "Oh, what did they say? What do they mean? Why are you not saying water? Why are you saying water? W- how can I say that so that I'm understood?" And then the next step is not always clear.

And you take one step and take one moment, and before you know it, you're overcoming barriers.

You're being called courageous. You're being called resilient. And yet, that's not what I set out to do. I was just doing my thing that,

well, most of it was survival. You're in a new environment, you need money for rent, you need money for food. It's not like I could go to a garden and pick food or go to my auntie and ask her to pick for me some food from her garden.

When you move to a place you don't know people,

you're relying on getting a job to get some money so that you can

live.

So first, it was life and living,

survival.

Even though I had my spiral, though I had my mantra of no one can lead your life better than you,

I still had to face all that. And then you pick yourself up, and on the side, you're working on your passion. So you have a job on the side to meet the bills and to meet life, but on the other side, you're doing your thing, the one that y- you love to do. I love to read, and I love to write, so I would read and write. And whatever I was reading were things that were helping expand my life and understand, you know, w- w- where I was and what I was doing. So building the spiral ecosystem has not been that smooth and that easy as it now looks all beautiful in my background.

But I could see the possibilities. I still can see possibilities that are not here yet. And bringing an idea to the world is not easy, but it's fun. It's exciting. It keeps me awake at night, and it's like I can't wait for daylight because I have that discipline of I have to wait for daylight. Not that I couldn't wake up in the middle of the night and switch on the lights and work, but

yeah. So it really excites me to come and maybe write. Or when I'm writing a biography about someone, and I want to meet them, and I want to understand them, and I want to interview them, and I want to write their biography for them, and I want to tell their story. Just like I have told my own story, I want them to tell their own story, and so I help them. And it's just a conversation or a proposal or a small experiment. Like, I love going to LinkedIn and doing experiments. I talk to people. I interview them right on LinkedIn. I ask them a question, they respond,

and I gather data. And then from that,

like a researcher,

I collect all that data and

start using that to advise businesspeople, founders, entrepreneurs, telling them what other entrepreneurs are saying.

And that helps me recognize

the action that produces information. So I ask someone a question, they don't realize that they're sharing a piece of their life with me.

As much as I say no one can lead your life better than you, that life, when I ask a question, they share with me that slice. And that connects with all the books that I have written, especially "The Capacity Entrepreneur" and "The Weight of the Dream."

Go to Amazon and find those two books, "The Capacity Entrepreneur" and "The Weight of the Dream,"

because you will understand my story

about the weight of my dream and how I become an entrepreneur from a high school teacher in the classroom

to an entrepreneur of several businesses and an entrepreneur helping other entrepreneurs.

And when I do biographies, I'm interested in how that entrepreneur knew and how they sustained their dream regardless of the weight, because capacity can include understanding what we carry and the conditions,

you know? But it may also include

a reconsideration of that commitment. Do I want to go on or do I want to give up? I have met some who have given up.

I talk to them a lot, and they tell me a lot of stuff.

One was telling me they wanna give up because it's affecting their health.

Another one was telling me they want to just pause and take a minute before continuing with the dream.

They've not given up on their journey,

and that is where my other work on decision architecture comes in. I have a decision lab where I talk with executives and I take them through the lab so that they can explore how to make decisions better.

So,

yeah,

I am multidimensional because I'm multiskilled. I discovered that I have many skills that I can use because they're all related.

They're all me,

my way of expressing myself, my way of saying, "No one can live my life better than me." And through the journalist that I wanted to be, I can be a biographer. And through the educator that I am, I can be a coach and mentor.

And through the researcher that I am,

I can ask the good question that helps a leader think beyond just what maybe they're seeing on the surface and then make a better decision than they would have if I had not

asked them that question. And then I love technology, especially education instruction technology. And so I've embraced AI, and my ecosystem is AI native, and each of the deans you see in my background will have a deputy dean that is AI. And so capacity and human development and how technology helps us. And then the beauty of it all is, all of us, once we produce our intellectual property, we have our own academic press. And so we can publish our articles, we can publish our books, we can publish our workbooks,

and then we can sell

our IP, because I have another book that I call ge- "The Generosity Trap," where

we give and give and give because we are educators or we are in the service industry, and nobody teaches you how to monetize your IP. Now I teach people how to monetize their IP, 'cause it's yours. Even if you're designing it for an organization, the creativity is yours. You should be able to find a way to monetize it. And so, what did I intend with all of this? Well, just to help, just to serve,

because no one can lead your life better than you.