I was given a recipe which I believed to be the correct and only recipe to bake the cake of life with. When I didn’t feel fully understood by the people giving me the recipe, I gradually started experimenting, switching up ingredients, and rewriting the recipe for my own life. Here I am sharing ten alternate techniques I incorporated in my recipe, with the hope that it can guide youth, students, and young non-professionals and professionals to understand themselves and live a more fulfilling and authentic life.
1. Choose a humanizing approach
As I went from being a high-school student to a university student with part-time jobs to being a management consultant to being unemployed to now contributing to various social impact projects, this has been the most critical approach. The first major initiative I took on in the name of inclusion and accessibility was for the children in orphanages in Karachi. As a teenager, I co-led our team of volunteers to create a system to build their capacity. All our projects for education, healthcare, renovations, sponsorships, and social awareness were designed to make these children independent and self-sustaining. The successful catalyzation of this system was entrenched in one core idea — to refer to them as children instead of orphans — and then allow our minds to come up with wonderful ways to design better life experiences for children.
2. Seek feedback
I regularly seek feedback from my supervisors, colleagues, subordinates, mentors, friends, and family, giving them a chance to invest in my life or the project I am working on. It’s essential to keep an open mind when seeking feedback and I ensure that in two ways: how I ask for feedback and how I listen to the feedback.
Asking for feedback: ‘What do you think about it?’ is so much better than ‘Do you like this?’ Asking open-ended questions about people’s thoughts yields better value instead of asking a close-ended validation question about people’s preferences.
Listening to the feedback: LISTEN is an anagram for SILENT. If at any moment, I feel the urge to clarify or defend myself, I take a breath in and out to return to my body and the present moment; then follow up with this powerful question: ‘can you please elaborate on this?’. I then observe the connections they make to explain their thoughts which helps me deconstruct and reconstruct.
Later, I reflect on the feedback in solitude. If it feels genuinely constructive, then it’s about you. If it feels more of a criticism, then it’s about the other person. If they say they are providing constructive feedback but start criticizing, I pay less attention. When reflecting, I suspend my ego (basically stop creating any narrative and look at it objectively) and gauge what feedback aligns with my values and life goals. It’s not about which feedback I like or dislike, it’s about which feedback can help me be a better version of myself.
3. Use your voice when you are in that room
I have had many moments in which I thought that my perspective didn’t matter for this decision or I wasn’t at the same level as the people at the table or my idea wouldn’t get to breathe. Things changed when I reframed it to my perspective matters because for better or for worse I am in the room or I will embrace my level and speak about how this decision impacts my level or my idea needs a sponsor and I will be the first one to back it up by investing my voice. People can’t read minds and many a time people can’t understand body language so use your voice. Looking back, the rooms and conversations I chose to use my voice in have defined my brand.
If you see anything right, appreciate it with respect. If you see anything wrong, condemn it with respect. Your voice is your vote.
4. Interior design your professional brand
It’s never about the furniture pieces or artwork in your home, it’s how you arrange and present them to create a cohesive narrative.
‘Tell me a bit about yourself’. My professional pitch goes something like:
‘Currently, I wear three hats. I am managing a civic engagement campaign around the accessibility of Montreal’s metro stations. Along with that, I design immersive ideation events for environmental entrepreneurs through MTLGreen. For my 9–5, I design and manage experiential learning projects at the Institute for Integrated Management, which allows us to embed sustainability and societal impact within business education at McGill. Design, Sustainability, Inclusion, and Accessibility tend to be the overlapping themes in the personal and professional projects I decide to invest my energy and time in. What would you like to learn more about?’
My volunteering experiences shine according to the positioning of the spotlight. I place them on my resume as Civic Engagement Experience or Professional Volunteering. I remove unnecessary details, a laundry basket in the corridor disrupts the flow from the door to the lounge. I showcase my personality, values, and purpose in my narrative, with authenticity, and take up my space. Even if people don’t pay attention to these right away, it will exist in their peripheral vision, hopefully for future interactions.
Here’s how Carla Harris walks into every room, owning everything in her professional and personal life. Her narrative flows and gives so many avenues to connect.
5. Networking as a culinary experience
Elevator pitch, business cards, LinkedIn connections, and personalized notes are all technical items to support ‘networking’. Sure you set up the dining table with fancy plates, matching cutlery, and fresh flowers but what are you serving?
I present my cohesive narrative and ask people what they would like to learn more about. Give them a menu and direct the conversation based on their choices. Listen to learn more about them as a human instead of as a professional connection. After they answer my scripted question ‘What led you into this profession?’ I would ask ‘Is it as fulfilling as you expected it to be?’ instead of a surface-level ‘Do you enjoy it?’. I generously sprinkle ‘Can you elaborate on that?’ in my conversation. A well-paired dessert would be when I can provide a relevant anecdote, synthesize a recent article to build on their point, or talk about a friend who works in a company that would be relevant to them. When I focus on a humanized experience, they leave my dining table content rather than stuffed with processed fast-food. They usually accept my next invite or may even reach out to create a similar experience for me, as we both are seeking the same thing: a genuine human connection.
6. Draw the bigger picture on paper
Life can be overwhelming and it’s hard to see the bigger picture when you are juggling between school, entrance exams, applications, university decisions, extra-curricular activities, courses, job applications, social life, relationships, mental health, proper meals, exercise, sleep, financial planning, to name a few. Any time I feel overwhelmed with things to do or when I find myself at a major decision point, I put it on paper. Draw it, write bullet points, make circles, connect lines, scribble, whatever works for me at that moment, I take it from my mind and put it on paper and give my mind a moment to breathe. Once it’s on the paper, I can focus on doing the tasks instead of also having to remember the tasks. When everything is on the paper, I can look at it as the big picture and use the now-vacant capacity to make my decision(s). It’s as simple as that.
7. Realize when you are an orange among onions
This is the toughest one to practice. Over time I understood that I can fit in some places without ever belonging, imagine a slice of orange in place of an onion wedge. When your values are not aligned with people think of it as the different flavours of onion and orange. When your goals and purpose are not the same, it doesn’t mean that either orange or onion is wrong, it simply means that they contribute differently to the world. I have chosen to walk away and in due time found a place that let me bloom. Use informational interviews to assess value alignment or ‘Do you have any questions for us’ moment at the end of job interviews to gauge if you will thrive in that environment beyond the glittery title, pay, fame, and label. This is true of friendships as well.
8. Don’t say I’m trying when you are actually doing it
A few months ago, some students in our Fellowship were talking to health professionals to gain broader insights for their project, designing a guidebook on the circular economy, and mapping mobility barriers around the university campus on an app. When they were providing updates to the cohort, they presented it saying “I’m trying to reach out to health professionals” or “We’re trying to create a guidebook for designers” or “we are trying to map barriers around the university campus”. They were actually doing the work, not just trying. Trying can be a gray spectrum inducing mixed motivation levels. When you are doing something, say exactly that, no matter how small your effort is, then you start believing in it and so do the people around you, and hopefully, the effort becomes larger than just trying.
9. Say or write a genuine ‘thank you’
When I walked away from my management consultant job to find something in social impact, I took up early morning shifts at a bookstore to pay my bills, pricing and shelving books and other products. Working in the quiet hours of 6–10 am, I was inspired by my colleague Daria (a Physics student) who said thank you for even the simplest actions, passing a price-gun to her or for picking up a piece of plastic that fell behind her or for aligning boxes in a pile. Over time, I sensed that her thank-yous were not a courtesy or acknowledgement but rather genuine appreciation. I transferred this into all my connections. In every email or message, I choose to type thank you with genuine appreciation. In every conversation, I choose to pair thank you with an appreciative tone. When I wish someone a wonderful weekend, I genuinely wish them a wonderful weekend.
10. Life is a grocery shopping cart
You have the choice to add or remove items from your cart. You have the choice to walk into the aisle with healthy fresh ingredients or sugar and fast-food. Sometimes you ‘have’ to choose the latter but understand the reason why so that when that reason is diluted, you can remove them from the cart. Take responsibility for pushing your own cart and adding items yourself, it’s your life, don’t depend on someone else to push you forward. If you are too overwhelmed, make tough choices to remove items that don’t spark joy in you or are energy-draining. Your choices will evolve with you. People can see through your cart and at times people won’t understand why you have or don’t have certain items, no need to explain — everyone will be checking out independently.
Consider shopping from a waste-conscious store so that you leave a less negative impact on the world. And enjoy the view and ride!
