Abundant Leaders with Tenji Moyana

Andrew Johnson is a professional life coach and my second guest expert on the podcast. He joins us to discuss how he helps leaders to find more balance in their careers by mastering their calendars as a gateway to owning their time and clarifying their priorities. We discuss the importance of confronting the truth about yourself and life, managing your ego, and practicing being present in the mome...

Fear shows up in so many ways in our leadership journeys - as imposter syndrome, fear of taking on a meatier role, fear of negotiating the right compensation package, fear of having difficult conversations, fear of taking the risk to dive into a new market or to recall a product that is no longer working, on and on. In order to lead successfully, we need to learn how to turn towards fear instead o...

Thokozile Lewanika is a coach, speaker and facilitator with a rich leadership career as a talent executive at Absa Group, Discovery Group and Novartis, and an organisational performance expert at McKinsey & Company. In Part 2 of our conversation, we explore the shifting motivation behind her career choices from primarily solving for making an impact to increasingly solving for happiness. She’s...

Thokozile Lewanika is a coach, speaker and facilitator with a rich leadership career as a talent executive at Absa Group, Discovery Group and Novartis, and an organisational performance expert at McKinsey & Company. Today we discuss how she’s transitioned successfully in these meaty roles in order to have impact quickly and overcome setbacks. For Thokozile, a deep abiding faith in her ability...

2024 is an opportunity for us to make significant strides by empowering ourselves to make bold, strategic moves in our careers, in how we lead our teams and in how we drive the business agenda. I share 4 key themes that are emerging as an energy for the year based on what I’m seeing in my coaching clients, podcast listeners, the leadership development community and social trends that are shaping t...

Traditional corporate culture, work culture and performance culture is not working for us anymore. It’s being disrupted by our growth – our desire for more freedom, authenticity, alignment, meaning, support and ease in our lived experience. If you’re growing in any of these ways, you’re playing a vital role as a trail-blazing paradigm-shifter on the behalf of humanity. Your role is important, the...

Alinafe is back for the third installment of the Real Talk series. Alinafe Thupa is a management consultant and my dear friend. Today we discuss the problem with believing that leaders should have all the answers. We’ve found in our own experiences that the best leaders create space for their teams to explore ideas, problem-solve together, resourcefully gather insights from experts and, effectivel...

I’m online dating right now and discovering so many parallels between what makes for successful dating and what makes for a fruitful job hunt. In both cases, you have to be intentional, clear about what you want, clear and confident about what you bring to the table and honest about whether there’s a fit between what you’re offering a potential employer and what they have to give. Let’s have a fun...

I was recently interviewed by Charles Cormier on the CEO Wisdom Podcast. We discussed my career history, lessons I’ve learned from entrepreneurship and how I coach senior leaders to get results.   Topics discussed: * My history in entrepreneurship as an interior designer and now as a coach and lessons I learned * Struggling to market myself and fear of rejection limited my business’ growth * The g...

Simbah Mutasa is a Managing Director in Investment Banking at Bank of America, South Africa. One of Simbah’s foundational values is enabling the growth and expansion of the community he’s in. This has shaped how he approaches leadership, invests in his teams and defines success. He shows us that it’s possible and rewarding to be a heart-led people-leader in demanding corporate environments without...

I have spent my life searching for safety and security. I’ve looked for it in financial security, the approval of others, the prestige of my role, the value of my skillset, my ability to perform and deliver, on and on. Many of my clients have felt the same and it’s led all of us nowhere because the trick to safety, acceptance and belonging is that it lives within us. We will never find it in anyth...

In the second Real Talk episode, I’m joined by my girls Alison Cohen and Rehema Kutua. We’re best friends from college with a standing monthly date to coach each other on our businesses and careers. It’s lonely at the top and entrepreneurs and leaders feel it significantly. Fewer people check in on you, offer you honest developmental feedback, invite you to informally socialise at work or feel com...

Bringing our full selves to work and leveraging our uniqueness as a source of differentiation and competitive advantage is a game-changer for driving our performance, impact, and resonance as leaders. However, we aren’t always in spaces where we are able to fully be ourselves or our unique approach and way of leading isn’t celebrated. What then? How do we determine if we’re in the right company, r...

Amira Elmissiry-Sulai is a lawyer, investor and development professional with unshakeable confidence in what she brings to the table as a senior leader. She knows her strengths, celebrates her ethnic and gender diversity and is deliberate about creating environments that support her and others to thrive. Stillness is a fundamental skill that helps her to return to herself and to be able to steer t...

We’ve been raised to believe that the harder we work, the more successful we’ll be, the more money we’ll make, the faster we’ll rise up the ranks – the more valuable we are. But is that still true? We’re squarely in the era of the knowledge and experiences economy, which means value is created not in terms of widgets produced but something more intangible. The game has changed and it’s inviting le...

This is the first conversation in the Real Talk series and my first visitor is Alinafe Thupa, a management consultant and my dear friend. Today we explore a belief we were both raised with that the best way to have a strong, stable career was to pick one company, work steadily up the ranks then retire as loyal employees. But neither of our careers have looked anything like this. We’ve had to break...

We’re suffering from a global burnout pandemic and I have not escaped it. I burned out 3 times before I realised that I was the root of the problem – what I believed about work, high-performance, myself and others was at the heart of the choices I was making in my career and the extent of ownership I was taking for my outcomes. Join me as I share the 5 things I have done progressively over the pas...

This is my first expert interview and I’m joined by Ida Achiume Shiaka, a mental health consultant, coach and advocate, and the CEO of Mental Wealth. Many of us have experienced imposter syndrome, lack of confidence, and feeling the need to shape-shift in order to belong, succeed, and avoid rejection. But at what cost? Ida shares her personal story of struggling to fit in, her journey to finding h...

We’ve spoken about the shadow of being too resilient (Episode 9) but what happens when we leave too soon? We can miss out on a chance to grow, to exercise our agency, rally support around us, and renew stagnant situations if we pull the plug too early. The balance we need to find as leaders is knowing when to press in because more is being demanded of us, and when to cut our losses and leave a bad...

We are under the illusion that we can do anything, overcome anything, become anything. I believed I could. But we can’t. And life shows us this everyday but we often butt heads with this reality because it can make us feel weak, scared, uncertain of the future, and like our dreams are at risk. Yet, it is in accepting this reality that we can begin to be resourceful, mindful of how we spend our tim...

In the second Real Leaders conversation, I’m joined by Charmagne Mazhindu, the Regional Marketing Lead for Sub Saharan Africa at Amazon Web Services. We explore how our definitions of success change as we grow and evolve in our careers and how much of the safety that we seek in financial success and career progression should really be found in ourselves. Charmagne shares how much who we are from w...

Resilience is a virtue – in its highest expression it makes us adaptable, resourceful, scrappy and results-focussed. However, sometimes it can go too far by making us habituate to hardship and desensitise to suffering. We then fail to notice or respond when changes are needed to bring about more ease and flow so that we can perform better and deliver better experiences to our teams, clients and ou...

In this first conversation in the Real Leaders guest series, I’m joined by Kundayi Munzara, co-founder and executive director of Sesfikile Capital, as we explore what it can look like to be guided by your strengths and what matters most to you. For Kundayi, a deep desire for freedom has shaped his career opportunities, the sale of his business, and how he leads his teams and makes decisions. Join...

Feminine energy has a bad rep. So much of corporate culture and the patriarchy tell women and men that displaying “feminine” traits is soft. Yet these are the very traits that help us to nurture strong talent, collaborate, adapt to shifting trends, take risks, co-create answers that are more fit-for-purpose, and many more critical leadership skills. Our “softness” is actually critical to our abili...

When we’re in more junior roles, our value comes from our ability to deliver operationally i.e., technical execution and sharing highly specific content knowledge. But once we become senior managers and leaders, our value comes from our ability to enable value creation against the company’s strategic goals – this requires a different type of skill. It’s helpful to redefine what “expertise” means s...