Personal Growth
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Professional Accounting Qualifications – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
I have a professional accounting qualification, is it all it’s advertised to be? It took me eleven years to complete my professional accounting qualification. I studied part time, worked full time, studied at night, weekends, made huge sacrifices. I did my articles, (my training contract), after my post grad and qualified as a Chartered Accountant at the age of 28. I guess that I had believed (and most students that I work with have the same unarticulated belief) that the day you qualify, everything will be okay, you will ‘be’ successful. You are so used to being on a path, and the only goal you can see is getting those…
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Why the education system let me down
‘Starting again’ has been HARD, and my education didn’t help I ‘started’ again in my late 30’s, and I feel like the education system hasn’t helped me! New career, new country, entrepreneur instead of employee. (I discussed this a little in a previous post). “I started over” – It’s such a short and simple sentence that hides a volume of challenges, emotions, experience, change, frustrations, excitement, life lessons and character building. It was a gradual shift for me, from employee to entrepreneur, from perfect student to rebel, from accountant to creative, and from fixed to growth mindset. I feel that my education and what I was taught about how the…
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11 Lessons I learnt from having breast cancer
Today is the two year anniversary of my mastectomy. Reading that sentence feels surreal. Saying it sounds surreal. I went through this, and somehow it still feels surreal. Just over two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage 1, fairly aggressive. I was 36. I share my story in the hopes that it pushes people to take action if they generally don’t, pass on a few lessons that I learnt, and as a reflection of the gratitude I have for how I came out of this. I was extremely blessed throughout this experience. I have an incredible husband, great family and friends, good health insurance and insurance plans, and…
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I’m starting over.
Just over a year ago, my husband and I decided to ‘start over’. We left the groups of companies we had shares in, the company we co-founded, sold everything, and moved from South Africa to Montenegro. Such a simple sentence! It still feels pretty surreal. Obviously, it’s never as simple as it all sounds. We had been considering moving overseas already, but were planning on moving to the UK, one of the businesses in the group was based there, so it made sense. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2018, and everything changed. I had a bilateral mastectomy and a bunch of reconstruction surgeries. This put me…
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Fixed Mindset: What it means in my life
“My brother’s artistic, and I’m not…” My brother is really artistic and creative. He was ALWAYS drawing, playing music and building stuff when we were kids. I was so jealous of his ability to create stuff, and draw stuff that LOOKED like the subject! I always said that we were standing in different queues when we were collecting ‘talents’ before we were born. He stood in all the creative queues, and I stood in the Accounting queues. And that’s how I saw it. He could draw because he was talented, and I couldn’t, because I wasn’t. I never tried to draw, because I knew that I couldn’t. It GENUINELY never…
