The women’s empowerment coach-turned-TikToker is here with advice for students dealing with the stress of finding ‘success’
During a period that has cultivated seeds of worry and self-doubt on generations of students, Shadé Zharai is bent on introducing a new outlook on career advancement to her almost 250,000 followers on TikTok.
The 31-year-old Australian’s TikTok account is brimming with advice on how to battle self-doubt and achieve professional and personal success. Her positive attitude asks viewers to self-evaluate and peek at their strengths instead of embracing the on-trend culture of comparisons and toxicity.
“I just want to help people [understand] they have more control over their life than they realise, and that starts with their thoughts, because their thoughts are what shapes their beliefs and how they show up,” she tells me over the phone.
Yet control seems more elusive than ever during a year that shook the world with a pandemic and a global economic crisis. Young adults are now walking down a path saturated with suffocating uncertainty, with no sense of direction and no handy map to consult. For some, it may feel like success is a far-away dream exchanged for survival.
Shadé’s story could serve as a hopeful point of reference for students; her list of accomplishments is long, but hers is a success story that took a while to come to fruition.
She is Harvard-trained Coach, a women’s career strategist and speaker, a member of Forbes magazine’s esteemed Coaches Council, an author and a businesswoman who consults many companies.
Her success however did not come overnight, right after graduation, or even 5 years after that. It took her almost a decade to reach the point she is now and, according to her, every step of the way was vital.“There’s no way that I could have gone straight out of university and moved into the space I’m in now where I do career coaching and consulting for women,” she says.
“I would say very few people get that dream job straight out of university. It takes time to get the developed skills in order for that dream job to want you so you might need to first work for someone else, change your strategy and be more flexible. But that’s not to say you’re not achieving your goals. You’re just taking a slight deviation.”
Yet students are wired to believe that if you work hard enough and get the right grades, that dream job will be waiting at the end of our stint at university. It is what the world has taught us to believe and any other scenario feels like a blatant failure – not to mention a reality where, even after working hard for years, you still need to start again and build your way up.
“It’s very easy to feel scared about the possibility of failing because, at university, if you fail that’s it. We use that experience as our benchmark for what we think the world is going to be like.”
There’s truth in that. Since entering the world of education, our success, self-worth, and skills are measured in grades; failure means re-taking an exam or failing the year altogether, and facing the stigma that comes with it.
In reality, Shadé tells me, you could have “someone who doesn’t get particularly good grades in university but thrives in the workplace simply because their learning style is not one that is supported by that educational system”.
While university plays a major role in our journey as individuals, it does not define our career – in fact, a 2018 report by Universities UK showed that one in three UK graduates are ‘mismatched’ to the jobs they find after university because they failed to pinpoint their skills and commercial strengths while in university. Probably because they were also too busy chasing after grades.
This is where universities’ careers advice centers usually come in handy, but many times it is also a journey graduates have to take on their own, while venturing into the world of work. Shadé was one of these cases.
It’s easy to wonder if she feels like she has now reached that success we all seek coming out of university. But, when asked just that, it appeared her definition of success was different from the conventional one.
“What I’m always encouraging people to do is make happiness mean success,” she says. A very controversial statement in a consumerism-led world where usually it’s the other way around.
Still, Shadé seems to live by this statement and is adamant that there is more to success than money and more to happiness than being happy and optimistic. She’s even written a book about it!
“It’s breaking down the understanding that we have in this society around what success means and redefining it for yourself. When happiness is your goal, it changes how you approach your life, your work, your relationships and even the legacy that you want to leave.”
It has been a relatively long journey for Shadé and yet she’s barely started. Like many graduates before her, she found herself in jobs that did not suit her and it was due to blindly following other people’s opinion of what she should do. It is her biggest lesson to date; listen to yourself.
“Every single person will have an opinion about what you should be doing, where you should be with your life, how you should be applying yourself. But they’re giving you guidance based on what they would do if they were you in your circumstances. They’re not in your circumstances, only you are you.”
As a soon-to-be graduate afraid of what awaits at the end of my university career, her story inspires me. Here is a woman whose journey was not all plain sailing; who is ready to tell us that the road ahead is not easy but it is attainable if only we make the most of each experience and job opportunity, take from it that which will propel us closer to our goal. It might take a while, but we’ll get there.
“My entire journey was full of deviations,” Shadé tells me. “But I learned so much and now I’ve finally reached the point where I can do what I know I was born to do.
“Took me 10 years. That’s okay.”
