Love yourself. Why this is important. Let's look at this topic from a different lens. When was the last time you looked in the mirror to your inner soul and think about it. I love you. It's not something cheesy.It's extremely, extremely important and thinking, have you loved yourself enough to love yourself? Is more to understand that you do not need to be perfect, to be good. It is to boost up your morale, self acceptance and more so allows you to shower that love with other people around you. This thought would have never occurred to me. I had a very good life while growing up and had a lot of family support and allowed me to achieve what I needed to achieve. Got married and things changed. Now, you are playing multiple roles as a working woman, as a wife, as a mom, as a daughter in law. And also depends on the society. Suddenly you are divided amongst multiple roles and in the midst of all you forget about who you are. What is your existence? At one point, I did realize these questions in my mind and that's where this triggered like it is really, really important to love yourself, to define your struggles, heal themselves and to do something for yourself, always focus on progress.

Do not worry about being perfect because I think that is one thing which kills us at many times. How do we love ourselves standing up for yourself, as you might have heard in the previous session, which Mata was doing? Uh It's all about self advocacy. How do we do it? How do we stand up for ourselves? Because no one else will do it. Self advocating is very important. This is one thing my mom told me when I was growing up, like go and ask have your opinion, make your decisions. And I feel that it is really important to bring that um culture in our kids as they are growing up. And many times we suck up things thinking that it might be considered rude or aggressive. We all need to stand up and work towards an advocacy. We need to get comfortable being uncomfortable, which means that it's really important to shake yourself when you are in a comfortable zone. Because at that point in time, you are no more a student. You want to make sure that you are continuously learning whether it is professionally personally.

But in order to take these new challenges, you have to be comfortable in that uncomfortable situation. My first story happened when I took as math as my major in my high school in India. We we were able to take math as majors in high school. And guess what? I was not concerned about math. I was more concerned about being the only female in the class in the math club and also being the one who is pursuing her career in engineering, which was very unusual. Make yourself a self affirmation. Ask what is important for you because it can be money, it can be recognition, it can be role, it can be title. Typically, what I do is to create a log for myself and translate it into what does it matter for me? And it can change at different phases of your life. Make time for things that matter. As a woman, we tend to focus a lot on work and doing hard work. But we forget about investing in ourselves. We forget about making sure you know, connecting with people outside work, which can help us build brand again, lesson learned. I got my first gig of connecting with many amazing people and amazing women started myself investing in women in tech forums at different companies and speaking opportunities happened, mentoring happened, blogging happened, this was just a chain and casket of events that happened in my life.

And it really helped me and I realized this is my thriving zone. So you need to make sure like you do understand what thrives, you learn to say no and be unapologetic about it. That's really important. A lot of time we say sorry about this or my apologies. It's ok to say no because I'll tell you no, is the most powerful world in this planet, world in this planet on this planet. Make fun as a priority. Take some time for yourself as simple as meeting your friends watching movie and to love yourself first because this is one person you'll be spending your rest of your life with. I captured this from a book called Lead Yourself by Lolly Daskal. Before you can lead others, you must be able to lead yourself. If you cannot lead yourself, others will not follow you. So when you lead yourself, you are focused, you are carving a road map for yourself and it will allow you to be accountable towards yourself. Most important thing is it helps you to do a self reflection on yourself. And self reflection is very important for authenticity. So the better you are at leading yourself, the better the chances are for you to have a positive impact on others around you leading from within is really, really important because the truth is we all need, it, need each other and we are a pack.

We are a pack of strong women. We want to make sure we learn from each other. We lead together, we lean in together and we lead by example, I'm sure each of you have been role model for some other women around you, your daughters, your friends, you know your peers. And here is the crux. If you want to be successful in what you do, you have to lead yourself from within while it is true that leadership is a process and it involves mentors, sponsors but never underestimate the power of self leadership. It is within you and it is your strength. So make sure you leverage it and don't let it go. How do you lead yourself? Couple of things I learned over experience is women tend to be more emotional and managing your emotions is really, really important. Sometimes expressing your emotions is good since it helps people to get energized, but sometimes you have to hold your emotions so that you can put others in front of you and process them diligently in business at work. Never make decisions based on emotions. For example, having conflicts with peers or someone reporting to you always ask yourself what is the best for the organization and how will it make it easy for all, including yourself?

So it is really really important that when you manage your emotions, you bring your poise and your power together in that do the best you are capable of doing and do everything to bring forth your personal best. That's really important. Managing your time, managing your time is really important because you need to prioritize your tasks, you can do it all and you shouldn't do it all. Learn to delegate, learn to ask for support, learn to prioritize your task important task first and then rest comes next and be vocal about it in your meetings, in your, with your uh you know, discussions with your boss. This will really bring the focus and help you thrive. Better. Managing your thinking is really important. Sometimes our pace of life is so busy that it gets too demanding for us to get things done. And the best way is to point out two top or two or three things which you want to do. For example, last year, someone told me to do a podcast. And I was like, I do not think I have time for this. And when the opportunity came, I was like, ok, now let me make it as the topmost priority for me and believe it or not, it really helped me. It boosted my confidence in general and it really helped me to be more open to the those kind of forums.

So you have to get that goes back to being comfortable being uncomfortable, right? So it's really, really important. So pushing your boundaries is really important in order to evaluate yourself and see how far you can go and succeed attitude, have a positive attitude, have a great attitude because mutual trust, respect is really, really important that comes along with that positive attitude.

And don't forget to harness your network. Don't hesitate to reach out to your network. I still reach out to my network and continue to learn from every day. When I have a bad day, I have few people in my network whom I don't hesitate to call. And also I cannot re emphasize enough about keeping your network fresh and well connected. I can tell you today where I am. It's all because of my network that has played such a big role personally, professionally and continues to make me successful every day. Be yourself. Why?

So how many of you have heard someone telling you b like a man treat like a think like a man act like a man. And I was being told this when I was growing up in my, you know, professional career and I used to question myself, why, why can't I be who I am? And why do I need to be acting or thinking like a man in order to grow our society perceives a leader as having some masculine traits such as assertiveness, objectivity, goal, orientation. Therefore, women acting on feminine energy such as assertiveness, receptiveness, emotions, tolerance, they are not perceived as leaders. However, if we try to be true, assertive at time and action driven, it comes as either intimidating, suspicious or being bitchy about it, right?

So we don't want to be in that situation at times. But what we can do is, as I mentioned before, with our poise, with our power, with our facts, we can make this change. So it's really important to be truthful to yourself, do not fake because it doesn't last long knowing yourself is the foundation of strong character, purpose and the more authentic you are with very well defined purpose, it really, really helps and it meets people's expectations and it stops hurting you.

I had an instance when I had to help one of my team members to move into a different organization years back, my boss was not supportive and yet I did it because I was true to myself that I need to help this individual grow. And as a manager, it was my responsibility. And in turn, what I got was a great relationship forever which I really cherish till today. And that's the key for being a professional, be bold and confident, present yourself with facts and data with the right audience. Making use of your strengths, makes you happier at work. And it's correlated with higher performance, establish your boundaries because this is really important. You have to say no at times. Otherwise you become a doormat and you don't want to be in that situation. You want to make sure you protect your space, set the expectations around what is tolerable and what is not. And there are times I have I have myself suffered through it. So it's really, really important. It's a wake up call for all of us, stay focused. Have your goals, very clear, aligned and ambitions as well. Do not miss those part because that's really important. You know, ambitions drive, you build your own identity and brand. It's a journey. It's a long journey. There is a famous quote by the CEO of Morgan Stanley FAA Joffrey and I really like her quote. If two people are doing exactly the same work, good work, but one is better in showcasing their accomplishments. The self promoter will always win every single time. Be yourself.

How learn to accept who you are because that's really, really important. Always celebrate your strengths and wins because we tend to forget that we think it's minor. But trust me, when you maintain a log and if you go back, you need to celebrate those celebrate for yourself, celebrate for others do not shy away from sha uh sharing your failures. In my opinion, failures are the key learnings. Every single failure teaches you something different and unique, which can pave a path to success for future, never compare because comparison leads to pain. You may be good in something other person may not be good in that thing. So it's really important. Focus on yourself more than anything else. Be vulnerable, being vulnerable is really important that builds a lot of resiliency. A lot of us have moved from, you know, different countries as immigrants and we set up, we started our careers here and I always go back and think about like, hey, when did that happen? I'll tell you that has built so much confidence and grit in me that I'm ready to face the challenge. And I want all of us to have that share our, embrace our stories, embrace our success stories and embrace our failures as well. Because that's really important.

Lead with a presence when you are present somewhere. You wanna make sure that your brand, what do you have accom your accomplishments and are always visible, you know, you are able to talk about it. So leading with presence is really, really important, own your zone, which means that you wanna make sure that you do control your destiny at times and also making sure that you when you are sitting in these meetings where you have to make decision. And if you are in a decision making uh um position, you need to own your zone and be vocal about it and pave the path. When I say pave the path we all we have all come along this long way in our careers. We are paving the path for our younger generation for young girls who are coming up in technology and it is hard. It is very challenging based on the numbers, what we see. We can set as role models and examples and tell them that there is much more and they have our support. We can share our successes, our failures so that they can learn from it. Last but not the least. My last take from for you guys will be just be yourself. Let people see the real imperfect, flawed, quirky, weird, beautiful magical person. You are and I can tell you, you all can do it.