Sam Pokroy, CEO Sanari Capital: What It Really Takes to Build a Private Equity Firm in Africa

Aug 26, 2026

“This was never really about the right thing to do. It was, however, always the inevitable thing that I was going to do.”

“It’s been a hard ride, but it’s been a great ride. I wouldn’t change it, but I do wish it had been shorter.”

– Sam Pokroy

She turned down a $50 million deal because it wasn’t her strategy – then spent ten years proving she was right. In this episode, Debbie sits down with Samantha “Sam” Pokroy, founder and CEO of Sanari Capital, a private equity firm focused on high-growth mid-market businesses across Africa. Sam gets candid about the “dark night” her firm’s first deal collapsed, the double standard women face on technical credibility in finance, and why disappointment has repeatedly redirected her toward something better. It’s an honest, often funny account of what building a business from nothing actually costs.

Sam and Debbie dig into:

  • The myth of the overnight success – Sanari’s decade-long grind to a sustainable fund, and the “countdown to overnight success” ritual Sam and her co-founder used to survive the years no one was watching.
  • Saying no to the “easy” money – Turning down the Pritzker family’s capital because deploying it would have meant abandoning her actual strategy, even with no fund and no track record of her own to fall back on.
  • The dark night of the deal – The collapse of Sanari’s first deal, the “time of death” moment, and the choice to be transparent with her kids about what failure and resilience really look like.
  • The unequal bar for women in finance – Being held to a stricter technical standard, having zero “forgiveness margin,” and needing tactics – not just inspiration – to operate in a structurally gender-biased industry.
  • Disappointment as redirection – Using emotional attunement in moments of setback (relief vs. regret) as a compass for whether a closed door was actually the wrong door.

Sam answers the following questions for CEOs and Founders:

How do you decide when to walk away from a major funding or business opportunity that doesn’t align with your strategy?
Sam Pokroy’s decision to turn down the Pritzker family’s capital offer is a useful model: the money was real and the offer was significant, but taking it would have forced her into a transactional model misaligned with the business she actually wanted to build. For CEOs, the lesson is to stress-test big opportunities against your core strategy, not just their headline value – a “yes” that compromises your operating model can cost more than the “no” you’re afraid to say.

How can leaders address the double standard women face around technical credibility in male-dominated industries?
Pokroy names it directly: women are held to a near-zero “forgiveness margin” on technical competence, where one mistake risks being generalized to “women don’t understand the numbers.” HR and leadership can counter this by setting universally high technical rigor as the norm for all team members from day one (removing the ability for errors to be selectively attributed by gender), and by actively naming and correcting this bias when it surfaces in the room rather than leaving it unaddressed.

How should founders and leaders talk about failure or crisis moments with their teams or families?
Rather than projecting constant confidence, Pokroy chose to be transparent with her children during Sanari’s lowest point, framing it as a gift, showing them that setbacks happen and that getting back up is the actual work. For leaders, this models a healthier crisis-communication style than false positivity: normalizing disappointment as data (not failure) and pairing honesty about hard moments with visible recommitment to moving forward builds more durable trust than curated resilience.

    Helpful Links:

    Follow Debbie on LinkedIn

    Follow Sam on LinkedIn

    Open for Full Episode Transcript

    Open for Full Episode Transcript

    Debbie: Hello everyone, and welcome to On Work and Revolution, the CEO series. I’m your host, Debbie Goodman. I’m CEO of Jack Hammer Global, which is Africa’s largest executive search boutique. We operate in 24 countries across the continent. I’m also a CEO coach. I work with top leaders around the world. And in everything I do, my goal is pretty simple, to help companies and leaders create amazing workplaces.

    This is season four of the podcast, and in this season I go deep with CEOs, many of whom I’ve been lucky enough to know for years, to unpack their real, sometimes raw, personal behind-the-scenes leadership journeys. Not the curated LinkedIn version, the AI-enabled version. I’m looking for the real ones. And today my guest is someone who has built something pretty unique and unusual in the South African investment landscape.

    [00:01:00] Actually, from where I sit in the US right now, it’s pretty unusual here too. And she’s done this from scratch, against the odds, and over a period of time that probably felt interminably long. Samantha Pokroy, Sam, is the founder and CEO of Sanari Capital, a private equity firm focused on high-growth mid-market businesses across Africa.

    She has over 20 years of private equity experience built on a foundation of having worked at some of the world’s most demanding financial and consulting firms. I mean, you’ll know brands like JP Morgan, Stone Stewart in New York, KRK, a Chicago-based PE firm, and then Ethos Private Equity back home in Johannesburg, where she was a principal before making the leap to start her own firm.

    She has an MBA cum laude, of course, from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a BCom, and I have to mention this, a BA Honors in Industrial Psychology from Wits, [00:02:00] ’cause you really don’t see that much as a combo. And then she’s a CFA charterholder. She’s also a board member of SAVCA and was recently awarded Best Female Fund Manager of the Year at the Super Return Africa Awards.

    That’s a pretty impressive accolade. But none of those credentials tell you the real story of how Sanari came to be and how it’s thriving despite all the odds. So that’s what we’re gonna get into today, the brutally honest story about what it takes to build something from nothing. And so in the next 35 minutes or so, we’re gonna cover the leap she took.

    I’d call it a jeté, but she took the leap when she left one of Africa’s most established PE firms to start her own with, like, no fund, no track record of her own. The decade of grinding that followed, as well as we’ll talk about the night when she thought it was all over. We’ll refer to that as the dark night.

    The mentors who changed how she perceived herself, [00:03:00] and then, You know, the day-to-day navigation in a world where just the odds are structurally stacked against you, and we’ll get into some tactical advice about that. Sam, welcome

    Sam: So, so good to be here

    Debbie: Okay, let’s start right at the beginning of Sanari because the origin story is, is a good one. You were a principal at Ethos, which is a premier PE firm in South Africa. You had 10 years of experience, pretty strong track record, and then you walked away from that to start your own firm, but with nothing set up yet.

    So what was going on for you at that time that made this feel like the right thing to do?

    Sam: So I think that, probably this was never really about the right thing to do. it was however, always the inevitable thing that I was going to do. So I think that that’s one of the things that is, often, misunderstood. I think when it’s in your DNA, I don’t know if it’s DNA [00:04:00] nurture or nature, but when it’s part of who you are to build a business and to build something, that urge and that drive is, is something you can’t ignore for too long.

    I, always planned to start and build something. Initially by the time I was 30, then I was like golden handcuffs, so I was 35, and there was more golden handcuffs. And then I had said by the time I’m 40. Anyway, I left when I was 36. Um, and although for me, I was comfortable to do something that was not necessarily well understood by others who didn’t necessarily have that same perspective. I had to still motivate for this, probably mostly with my dad who thought I was, being highly unreasonable, in taking, this risk.

    My mom was properly, celebrating on the sidelines. But, I did have to justify this with some sound reasoning. I will tell you, it was funny. He asked me how many months runway do I have [00:05:00] before I, you know, run out of cash and, have to go back and find a job. And, I did the calculations and then, and I told him, “Oh, I’ve got 18 months,” and you know, et cetera.

    And, I went home and I did the maths again. It shouldn’t have been hard maths, but it was like, it was actually like eight months. but I didn’t call him back and tell him. Uh, but,

    Debbie: Okay, good

    Sam: the big part of it, and I think that, maybe that, that’s one of the big things I think about is that it was definitely a risk.

    I think I always had the risk tolerance for it. But you know, one of the things that a lot of us don’t realize about risk, it’s quite obvious, it’s kind of in the word, is that actually the downside can happen. And so, you know, I, I did have some sound reasoning behind this. I had a lot of work experience that was very valuable, and I had a very strong education, which was very valuable.

    And so worst case, I could go and get a job again, step back into corporate. but I do [00:06:00] also acknowledge that, I was afforded in many ways a privilege of having a safety net that if really everything went wrong and, I had to go and move back in with mom and dad and the kids and the dogs and all the rest of it, it was actually, something that I had a safety net growing up and, not everyone has that.

    So risk-taking has a bit of a environmental context to it as well

    Debbie: Yeah. okay, so you had eight months. I had three, so you win. But I totally understand that, that, I don’t know if it’s DNA, but it’s a wiring. It’s a wiring to go out and do your own thing. Possibly it’s a desire to break the rules and make your own. so I know that’s a sort of inclination.

    Nevertheless, on November 5th, 20f- 2013, you found yourself on the top floor of a Chicago skyscraper pitching the Pritzker family’s PSB Capital, which is one of [00:07:00] the most formidable investors in the world, with no solo track record. What was going through your head in that room? I mean, was it like a Shark Tank sSanario?

    Did they agree immediately to back you? I’m like, I wanna understand the picture.

    Sam: So I suppose there’s the before and after part of that picture. I I have, this beautiful clear image of looking out of this floor-to-ceiling glass windows, you know, top of the world, right? Waiting for the people who I was meeting with to come in.

    And, there was a couple of things that I can remember from then. So the first was something that I had been dealing with for about a month because I left Ethos beginning of October, and at the beginning of November I had a business, right? and this was an opportunity that came about because my mentor said to me, “Well, hey, why don’t you come and, invest for me and my investor buddies,” who happen to be the Pritzker family.

    So I was like, “Sure, I’ll come.” But of course I needed a business, I needed a name, I [00:08:00] needed a strategy, I needed… Then I needed business cards, which meant I needed a website, which meant I needed branding, and this all came together in one month, okay? So one good thing about it was proper trial by fire.

     This business that we manage today is very similar to what I came up with in one month. So the pressure of having to present, so soon really helped to catalyze that whole, development of my business that I didn’t even know I was going to make. So standing there I was quite buoyed and I was quite confident.

    I’d even managed to put together several deals that I brought them with. I was like, we really are ready to go. Pitch myself and my country and my investment strategy and these deals. And, but I was also having this internal kind of, I don’t know how else to call it, but like a giggle, okay?

    Because it was really funny for me to be able to present a business card with [00:09:00] saying CEO, okay? Because I, you know, like appointed myself as CEO and I had to very much kind of like still myself and say, and I had, I actually had up on my wall for quite a long time in the beginning, the word gravitas.

    Because you can’t be all enthusiastic, and I’m a very, enthusiastic, passionate person, but this is serious business and I had to, with great seriousness, know that I was a CEO and have confidence in being a custodian of their capital. So that was that was where my head was going in

    Coming out and, perhaps the short version of this, so I didn’t get their capital. I didn’t get it because they decided not to allocate their capital to me. towards the end of four hours of pitching, they said to me, “Can you invest and deploy $50 million per year?” Okay.

    Which is a lot. So at the [00:10:00] moment, Sanari is managing $85 million, okay? more than 10 years later. and, I had this moment of having to say to myself, “Don’t say no, you can’t because you’re not confident in yourself,” and, gonna be a real girl about this and, have to have delivered things, we know that there’s a always, men are far more confident to put themselves out there with far less experience, far less credentials.

    Women need to be perfect before they put themselves out. So I had that little moment thinking about that. But the reason I said no was because it wasn’t my strategy, right? So a big part of, of what, what we do is the building of businesses, not just the transacting. And to deploy $50 million per year, I would have to be literally on a treadmill transacting one deal after another.

    And it was quite difficult. I’m not sure that they would’ve actually allocated if I had said yes. but it was a moment of saying, I wanna [00:11:00] stay true to my strategy and stay true to what I wanna build and not take the easy path. Now, of course, it took us, oh, gosh, 10 years before we were really at a point of being a proper sustainable investment firm, kind of known and established in our market.

    So, it is a, bit of a reflection of, what would it have been like if I had said yes. But I do still think it was right to stay true to who we are.

    Debbie: Yeah, I mean, that’s a defining moment and, having the sort of wherewithal to turn down something so big, my goodness, that takes a hell of a lot of courage to do that. I mean, looking back, what would you tell that version of yourself? what advice would you give?

    Sam: So funnily enough, and a lot of people have asked me this question, and I’m actually in many respects glad I didn’t know what I subsequently knew because I’m a little bit nervous that I [00:12:00] might not have done it, um, if I had known how hard it would be.

    I think that the, the advice is around, call it your 10,000 hours to get to mastery.

    Call it, putting in the hard yards. Call it building experience. There’s, so much that I and my team have gone through that have defined us. They’ve also made us better investors, and a lot of those things are not good things to go through. They’re hard things to go through. but standing there in front of that building, just putting myself out there and really earning those hours, which gets you to a point of mastery and where you actually can, with a increasingly high level of conviction, promote your business, right?

     with really, solid backing and certainty around who you are, what you know, what you don’t know. and I think that the just the [00:13:00] patience of putting in the hours, it’s part of the journey and it’s part of defining who you are

    Debbie: it is. nevertheless, to step into that very hard journey, I mean, you and your co-founder Moshmi, you have used the phrase the 10 years to an overnight success, and you’ve also said that you knew it was gonna be hard. I mean, turning down that potential, like, quick win, and then stepping into the unknown still with nothing in hand, you knew it was gonna be hard, but man, it gets hard, and I know it.

     were there moments, days, when you thought you might just give up and go back to the fallback position, which was, “Okay, I’m just gonna get a job. I’m gonna go work for another firm. I’m sure, I’m sure EVOS will ta- take me back”?

    Sam: yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there definitely were. I’m pleased that in the very long journey that it has been, that there were very few of those days, thankfully. the 10,000 hours to overnight success is, and is something that I really do like to share because I think [00:14:00] that people feel very alone, and we felt very alone.

     in the early years, we kept looking at these other companies that were being successful, and they were raising capital, and they were investing, and why weren’t we succeeding? And being incredibly hard on ourselves, right? And then I came across this concept of 10,000 hours to overnight success, right?

     10 years, sorry, to overnight success. But it speaks to the fact that you only see what’s above the surface when people emerge into their success. And how I came across this is because I eventually was going to the websites of my competitors saying, “Well, you know, I n- I must go learn the secret to their success.”

    And lo and behold, what did I discover? They were 10 years old, okay? And when I discovered this, we were four years old. So we actually came up with a thing that we did every single year on our birthday. We did a countdown to overnight success. So it started with [00:15:00] six years to overnight success, and a year later, five years to overnight success.

    It was very terrifying when it was one year to overnight success because now we couldn’t kick the can down the road anymore. And luckily for us, we closed our fund, um, at a sustainable fund level just in time for our 10-year, birthday. But yeah, there were definitely occasions, and, we can talk about the dark nights.

     but I’m glad that it wasn’t that many. it’s been a hard ride, but it’s been a great ride. I think I I wouldn’t change it, but I do wish it had been shorter. I feel like there was a lot of wasted, kind of treading water, experience. and that part, if there’s an area that I regret, not that I think we could have done things and necessarily shortened it, but, um, that part was hard.

    The length of time was hard

    Debbie: Um, so before we go into the [00:16:00] dark night, ’cause we’re gonna get there, is what do you think you could have done differently to get there faster? I mean, on the one hand, it’s like it takes the time it takes, and it always takes longer than you think. It’s always going to be, it’s like building a house.

    It’s gonna go over time, over budget. the scope creep is gonna be there, Do you think there’s something you could have done differently to get there faster, aside from saying yes to the Pritzker money?

    Sam: Yeah, exactly. Um, it’s tricky. can I look at it and say, perhaps if, I wasn’t a woman and we weren’t having this diverse fund manager, would it have gone quicker? Would we have benefited from some type of advantage that may have made it go quicker? was there anything that we could have actually literally done differently?

    And I can’t really think of anything. it’s partly to do with… it’s the structure of our industry and it’s difficult, private equity management. And I can understand it as well from, LP and [00:17:00] investor perspective. You know, investment experience is, it’s a real thing, right?

    And, you know, them having an opportunity to have seen you operate through cycles is a very real thing. The fact that our team’s been together for as long as it has through pretty big challenges means a lot to investors. So time is almost something that helps them to manage risk. But I do think that there’s a lack of full appreciation of the, energy that it takes out of a private equity investment team, right?

    When you spend so much time, just to raise the fund. My son said to me when we finally closed our first institutional fund and we were having a, friends and family fund closing dinner, and he said to me, “Why do you call it fund closing? Like, it’s should be fund opening, right? It’s just the beginning.”

    And I was like- Mm … “Oh my gosh. He’s so right.” And I felt exhausted just thinking about it, you know? And, um, that’s the thing is that the hard work only really starts when you have now got your fund and now you’ve [00:18:00] got to go and do all the, the really, really hard work and you’re pretty exhausted. So I think it’s a bit structural.

    Um, and I hope that emerging managers and that if we as an emerging manager prove ourselves successful, that it will make it easier for the next emerging manager, et cetera. But it is quite structural in our industry

    Debbie: Yeah. okay, The Dark Knight, we gotta go there. The night you thought it was completely over. Please tell the story

    Sam: So, uh, Moushumi and I had been trying to raise capital for, for some time. And, eventually we said, “All right, look, to be an investment firm, we just… we really have to have an investment, right? So let’s find a deal, let’s find investors, and let’s do a deal.” So we did. We found a company, and we managed to get the, the founders on [00:19:00] board, and the sellers were willing to sell, and we managed to find debt funding, and then we managed to find equity funding.

    We were putting together this deal by deal vehicle. And everything was going so well, probably too well, and, at the 11th hour, these founders, they had a chat with their wealth advisors. The wealth advisor said to them, “Are you crazy putting debt in your business? This is absolutely the wrong decision for you.”

    And they had a reaction, right? And so they just shut the whole deal down. No discussion, no, can we restructure? They just shut the deal down. And we tried that whole morning to resuscitate it, and eventually at 2:35 PM, we declared time of death

    Debbie: Oh

    Sam: on our whiteboard with all our fancy structures that we’d come up with, and we had, like, a time of death, and we wrote it.

    And anyway, so off Moushumi and I go home, ’cause there’s really nothing else to do here. [00:20:00] There is no rest of business. Um, and on the way home, I stop at the shops, and I buy this, a bottle of red wine, a giant packet of Flings, and a giant bar of bubbly chocolate. And I head home, and I don’t know, 3 o’clock in the afternoon, my children arrive home, and they find their mom with the wine and the chips and the chocolate and watching Harry Potter.

    Okay?

    Debbie: A beautiful picture

    Sam: “Mom, are you okay?” “I’m fine.” Okay. So that evening, my dad was around for dinner. I’m not sure where my mom was that evening. but again, rem- remembering that my dad had a more conservative approach on, my life choices. And I was telling, him at dinner and, about how this could be the end and, Moshmi’s probably not gonna come back.

    I failed to mention the fact that we didn’t have any income, so we didn’t have any salaries. We were doing this entirely on risk. And, yeah, we were and I’m saying, this could be the [00:21:00] end. And my dad says, “You know, Sam, I really don’t know if you should be telling this story or sharing this in front of the kids.”

    And my kids were quite young, probably about six, seven, eight. And, I said, “Actually, no, Dad, this is exactly what my children need to be hearing, okay? I may not be the mom who’s at home helping them with their homework every afternoon, but I can give them a gift. And that gift is to see and to hear what Mommy’s going through, and that life throws things at you, and it’s hard.

    And they’re gonna see that tomorrow morning, Mommy’s gonna get up, and she’s gonna go back to work and keep fighting the good fight.” And, and I did. And, and I think that that is a gift, to our children.

    Debbie: and to everyone around us, actually. they say that inspiration and motivation is for rookies. [00:22:00] At the end of the day, it’s the, you know, if you’re gonna step into this world of being an entrepreneur, you have to have the grit to get up, haul ass, dust yourself off, start all over again day after day

    Sam: And it was quite a moment, you know. We got back to work, and I wasn’t even sure if Moshimi was gonna show up. And, we sat there in our tiny little office. We were like basically the, like one little thing. The desks were so close together, you had to squeeze between them. And, um, we’re sitting there quietly because once again, we didn’t have anything to actually do.

    And of course in my mind I’m like, “Well, obviously Moshimi’s not gonna come back after, you know, just towards the end of the year.” And, she was sitting there, and she just suddenly looks up at me and she goes, “I am coming back.” And it was about the girliest moment that between the two of us with our quite intense hardcore investment banking type backgrounds have ever shared.

    But it was, it was a very [00:23:00] special moment, and it really does speak to, you know, I think long before our investors believed in us, it was really the team that believed. And I pretty much think that that is what got us through, these long cycles. and anyway, the, the nice part of the story is we managed to eventually resuscitate the deal, and this was our first investment a few months later.

     but, yeah, it’s always nice when a very difficult story actually has a little bit of a happy ending as well

    Debbie: Yes, you’ve got your Disney moment. but it’s the, the story itself, the grind, the grit, that really, that makes you. okay. I have to talk about gender. After all, it’s Women’s Month in South Africa. but also because private equity is one of the most capital-gated, gender-biased industries on Earth.

     when you walk into a room to pitch an LP, the [00:24:00] cards are stacked against you on multiple dimensions at once. There’s gender, there’s the size of firm, as you mentioned, the African focus. I mean, initially at least, you had no solo track record. Now you do, but, how do you get past that? And I’m not looking for the inspirational rah-rah version of this.

    I actually am looking for tactics because there are gonna be people listening to this to go, “Okay, so what do I do? I know that I’m walking into all of this, but how do I get around it?”

    Sam: So, I mean, it’s obviously stuff that I’ve thought about and, reflected on and I think about it in two ways, right? The one is I don’t know why or don’t know how, but- I think I wasn’t always as scared of things as maybe I should’ve been, okay? So, so, you know, what’s it like when we know some people can’t feel pain and whatnot?

    I mean, it’s not that I don’t experience fear. I- and I experience enormous amounts of anxiety, and my job is very stressful. But there’s also a bit of an experience of [00:25:00] putting yourself out there and saying, “Well, uh, what’s the worst that could happen?” Okay. And so I think having had a little bit of that over the years, there was a little bit of a natural style of engagement that I had that I think served me well, in that if people were discriminating against me, I’ll just put my little blinkers on and just keep pushing through, right?

    Now, that’s not a tactic. That’s not a strategy, okay? That was maybe a bit lucky that I just perceived the world that way. But I do think there’s something to take from it, right? And it is not that you ignore it and that it’ll go away. it’s just maybe around not taking it too personally, right? So, practical things that, in our industry that I think that applies across many, many industries and for women.

    First of all, [00:26:00] and this is, it’s non-negotiable, and it’s terribly unfair, but it is non-negotiable, you have to be exceptionally technical, okay? So, you know, in our field, if you get the numbers wrong, right, it reflects on all women, right? Or there’s an assumption that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and there’s a labeling that happens.

    So it’s very unfair. Women are held for certain to a higher standard when it comes to the technical side of things. Okay. So that’s the table stakes, and it’s something that we know in our firm. we set the expectation very high from a technical rigor perspective with all of our team.

    But those of us who come from these backgrounds where we know we’re going to be scrutinized, we know that there’s an unfair burden that is placed on it. But you

    Debbie: Yeah. I w-

    Sam: it, and you do the extra work, and you, you get that.

    Debbie: Yeah. I mean, I will call it the forgiveness [00:27:00] margin, which is thin to non-existent. You do not get a free pass ever

    Sam: That is it. That is 100% right. I think that’s a very good way of describing it. so that’s your first one. The second one I would say is, you know, to try and have, it’s not about being fearless, but it is about trying to move yourself into a position of being fearless because it helps you to navigate through, these responses and to not take it so personally.

    Probably one of the biggest things though that has helped me is, in how I handle things, is mostly with humor. Okay? I have had some fairly outrageous things happen, and there is only really one solid way through it because, tackling it head on, in a defensive or, very serious way doesn’t help to transition through what is a very tricky situation, and neither [00:28:00] does ignoring it.

    You can’t ignore it, right? So my experience has been, you know, bringing a light moment, and not only when you’re having a difficult time, not only when you’re being, wrongly treated, et cetera, et cetera. Um, not only when you’re being spoken over, but even just throwing it out there at all times.

    It can be very disarming, but in a very positive way. And if that’s not natural to someone, I think a lot of these things, they can be learnt and they can be trained, and there are s- definitely certain things that I had to have trained into me, which were not natural. And so I have direct experience of having to, in many cases, it’s that, what’s it, exposure therapy type of thing, putting yourself in the situation, a lot.

     but I definitely do believe it, it can be trained, and that helps you to navigate the fine line between avoiding the, situation and finding yourself in a direct conflict situation

    Debbie: [00:29:00] Yeah. I mean, I just think back to my earlier days and the amount of bullshit that I tolerated, and my only way through was to try and turn it into some kind of, like, humorous response, which I, looking back, I’m like, “Was that the right thing to do?” Now, being more mature, I can call it out and go, “Hey, bro, that was so not okay.”

    Um, but when you’re sort of still moving through the ranks, it’s really hard to know what to do and say in those moments. I think obviously each to their own, ignoring it is also something we should not be doing. but if you’ve got the gift of the gab and can figure out how to respond, in that way, that’s, as you say, can actually be trained.

     but, I think it still remains a really tricky area for, for women. but, thankfully, there’s definitely more awareness in the boardrooms, these days. I am noticing that there’s some measure of, EQ that’s emerging from [00:30:00] our male counterparts, shall we say. Not everywhere, but, a little bit more.

     Sam, we’re having to watch time because I run a tight ship here. I wanna ask you a couple more questions. So you have said that on multiple occasions in your life, it’s been the disappointment that redirected you to something better, and that sounds super philosophical and very zen. but tell us more about it.

    Sam: You know, after we spoke earlier and, in preparation, I was thinking about this. is it something, do you need disappointment to redirect you? And probably that’s not necessarily the case. I think there’s one side of this which is, not to be afraid of disappointments because it does open up a whole new range of options that you may not have considered, and a job that you may have thought is the job that, you wanted and then you didn’t get, and that led to something better.

    I think that what I have found is that in the moments of disappointments [00:31:00] is when I have been in tune with how I feel about that disappointment in the moment is actually what has guided me. So when it has been something that has been disappointing news and I’ve actually almost felt a sense of release and relief, then I know that this has triggered a new path for me and that it was inside me all along.

    I maybe didn’t have the awareness that the path I was about to embark upon was maybe not actually my true path. And it’s being in tune with how you feel about it in the moment. So obviously, if you experience disappointment and in that moment you are feeling deep remorse, regret, and, disappointment, it’s very possible that you’ve lost an opportunity that you did really want.

    But being in tune with disappointment, and I just think that that is part of life, is if you are not experiencing disappointments, if you are not failing, you probably haven’t challenged yourself [00:32:00] enough. And when you fail or are disappointed, is to have that moment of reflection to see whether this maybe puts you into a, a different path, which for me has happened a lot of times, interestingly.

    Yeah.

    Debbie: Yeah. that’s a real nugget there. goodness, I’ve, once again, when you’ve been in business a long time, there’s so many of these twists and turns, and my view is that I just have to trust that what lies ahead is always going to be better, more elegant, the right thing. I don’t do the, “Oh, well, the shitty thing happened for a reason,” because that is what that is one way of thinking it, of it too.

    But in hindsight, I’ve always been quite grateful for those moments that point- put me on a different path. Okay, last question. if there’s one thing you want somebody listening to this to take away from this career business story, you’ve had many twists and turns, you’re still living it, what is it?

    One [00:33:00] thing

    Sam: Oh my gosh, I think I’m gonna be such a cliche here. just do it. Okay. I’m sorry. we have one life. One life. And making it everything and making it the most of what it can be for you and not worrying too much about what other people are gonna think and meeting the expectations of other people, putting too much pressure on yourself, being too hard on yourself.

    Like, doing something that’s meaningful and doing something that’s hard, I think it’s just about getting out there all the time and doing, not necessarily what is expected, but what is meaningful to you. And yeah, just living through it because… And it doesn’t end up being perfect. It is not a perfect journey.

    but you can look back at it and say, “Okay, but you know, but I did it.” So yeah, [00:34:00] just do it. Sorry.

    Debbie: That is a beautiful way to end. Yeah, it’s the adventure itself, which we sometimes romanticize a little too much, because man, it’s hard at times. But yeah, you could be the, you could be the Nike sponsor going, “Just do it.” Sam, thank you so much. This has been such a fabulous conversation. As always, really appreciate you, and, onward forth.

    Have a great day

    Sam: You too

    The Competitive Advantage of the Win-Win Workplace - Review

    LEAVE A REVIEW

    Kind podcast reviews help us make awesome content for you!

    This site uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience, analyse traffic and serve targeted content.