Mehtab Badwal

I attribute my success to my never-giving-up attitude and learning how to keep showing up for myself, even when times are hard. It's also about finding your community or your people - it can be one person or 20 people around you - but finding that one person who can be with you when you are at your low and when you're trying to figure things out. But the most important thing I've learned is finding yourself first. There have been times where I felt lost, but I never gave up. I sat down with the mess and went inside, internally rather than externally. I didn't reach out to anyone outside of myself - I just sat with myself and learned so much about myself. Once you learn about yourself, your community needs to include yourself in it. It can't be just external people.

The best career advice I've ever received is that you can learn the fundamentals - anyone can learn the fundamentals - but the real growth lies in the depth. Once you pick a lane, you need to go into the depths of it to grow in that lane. This advice has made a lot of sense to me and has guided how I approach my career development.

My advice to young women in my industry is that they might feel that they are stuck because they haven't figured out things - they haven't figured out what they want to do, what role they want to be in, or what's their next move. But it's not that they haven't figured it out - they are stuck because there's something which is slowing them down, and they don't know it yet, they haven't named that yet. So my advice would be to sit down with yourself and think about what is it which is causing friction. Don't think about the next role, don't think about what you want to do next, or what you're doing now. You just need to think about what is it which is slowing you down and causing friction. Once you recognize that, it will bring clarity in a way that they will be unstoppable after that.

The biggest challenge right now is the market. The market is really bad. There are so many layoffs happening, there are so many people who are looking for jobs, and there are so many companies who are hiring but at the same time they are laying off people. The uncertainty of the market and of the job market is the biggest challenge. But I also think that if you position yourself right, there is a big opportunity in terms of how you think and what you bring to the table. It's chaos in the world right now - there are so many distractions, there are so many dopamine hits, people are lost, people don't know what to do, they are trying out many, many things. But knowing what you are good at and positioning yourself specifically for those things, I think you can show value, and that will bring many more opportunities in your life. For example, for me, I know that my strategies, my skills - all my skills combined, not just one skill - made me work for this opportunity with an AI startup. When people recognize the true you, you'll get all the opportunities. But again, you need to stay true to yourself, and you need to position yourself in that way.

The values most important to me are staying true to yourself, staying true to your thinking, and making sure that what you do is basically just following your path and being true to who you are. You cannot let anybody tell you otherwise - people will tell you things, but even after so much noise coming from outside, you need to stay true to yourself. You can take some from what people are saying and leave some. You need to choose what's good for your own growth, and you have the power to make a choice.