3Finding My Inner Activist CEO

When you look back at the timeline of your life, often things fall into place when you see them from another perspective.

My role as a CEO and my calling to be a leader I've now realised were an inevitability. I was a little girl searching for where I belonged, and I became a young woman searching for where I belonged. I couldn't find that place, so I built it myself.

So how does an adopted, Hong Kong-born, Harrogate-raised, dyslexic woman become an Activist CEO? Believe me, had you asked specific of my teachers when I was at school, the answer might not have always been particularly positive! But, life is a rich tapestry of experiences, learning, and interactions, and my tapestry has shaped me in a way I couldn't possibly have envisaged.

Like the other Activist CEOs I will introduce you to in this book, my professional outlook has been profoundly affected by my personal experiences. Those experiences eventually sparked something within me that made me realise, after what felt like years in the wilderness, what my purpose in life is.

That's not to say that the purpose remains consistent. To go back to the kaleidoscope analogy, just as our identity can change, how we bring our talents into the world can as well. I've been driven to make the world a more equitable place in many different ways – recruitment consultant, executive search consultant, CEO, and as I now find myself looking at life in a different way since the debilitating grief of losing ...

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