E30 Being Courageous in the Pursuit of Your Dreams, with Rachel Aiken
Welcome to episode 4 of the “How She Did it” mini-series where I’m interviewing 8 inspiring women who have kindly agreed to share their stories about how they found their passion and purpose, started their businesses, and left their day jobs.
Today I’m speaking to Rachel Aiken and Rachel is sharing her story of how she actually knew what her passion and purpose were from the age of 4, and how it’s always been there with her throughout the challenges she’s experienced in her life, to guide her and help set her back on the right track. Rachel has taken her passion for teaching and created her own business so that she can fulfill her passion and purpose in a way that works beautifully with her life as a mum.
We also talk about:
- The many brave decisions that Rachel has made throughout her life and how this courage came from the things she went through as a teenager.
- How Rachel took the brave decision to quit her job on the same day that she was offered a promotion to head of year.
- How Rachel took her skills and started her own business as a virtual assistant and then became an online business manager.
- How we should make decisions based on how we want to feel when we are 80 years old and our grandchildren ask us what our best memories are. Rachel wants to have a whole list of amazing memories to share with her grandchildren
- and how we should celebrate the success we already have in our lives right now.
It’s such a great conversation and I know you will take away so much from it.
Links
Your Passion, Purpose & Potential Course
Timestamps
3:11: How Rachel has known her purpose and passion since she was 4 years old! She’s lost it at different times in her life, but she’s always come back to it.
6:21: How most of us know at the age of 6 what we want to be when we grow up. But most of us get told we can’t do that. So we start to lower our expectations.
7:36: One of Rachel’s students who was in the bottom sets at school had always known he wanted to be a builder. He picked construction for his GCSE year and came in to tell Rachel that for the first time in his life he was top of the class! He was finally doing what he was meant to do!
9:36 How Rachel’s Grandad was the one who encouraged her to follow her dreams of becoming a teacher.
10:31: Rachel tells us that her parents got divorced when she was 15 and how this was a turning point for her. She doubted whether she should go to university as her mum depended on her a lot.
11:31: Rachel’s mum met a new partner who moved in with them and he was violent towards one of Rachel’s sisters. This resulted in Rachel being kicked out of home at the age of 17.
12:41: Rachel had a choice - she could either do what she had planned or she could follow her instinct and get out. She made the decision to go to university. She got her degree and she hasn’t lived back in that town since.
15:36: Rachel describes hearing her mum saying that she didn’t want her to be in the house and how she didn’t speak to her mum for 20 years. And how she asked her dad if she could stay with him and he told her there was no room.
18:51: Looking back Rachel can see how these events led her to have an element of risk in her life that’s led her to go on some big adventures.
20:06: How Rachel didn’t feel like she had enough life experience to support the students yet, so she took a job in a university, gaining experience, but keeping with the education theme.
21:36: Every job Rachel has done she has only stayed 3 years. She always knew when it was time to move on to the next thing. She needed to have a challenge.
22:46: Rachel decided to move to China and teach English as a foreign language at 25 years old. Because she had already gone it alone when she went to uni going to China didn’t phase her. She knew she could fend for herself.
26:06: When Rachel came back to the UK she did her teacher training, met her husband, and got a great job.
26:36: Rachel had her first child and this is when things started to change for her. She had to ask herself what kind of mum she wanted to be.
27:21: Rachel started counseling to make sure she didn’t become the mum that she’d had.
27:36: Rachel moved to Hong Kong while pregnant. This didn’t phase her as she didn’t have a support network in the UK, so it didn’t matter where in the world she was. She left 25 weeks pregnant and came back with two children.
30:51: When Rachel came back to the UK she missed teaching, so she got a new job, and things went a bit pear-shaped. Teaching didn’t work with her schedule. She was never seeing her children. She felt like she was doing a rubbish job of being a teacher and a rubbish job of being a mum.
33:36: Rachel quit her job at the same time she was offered a promotion to head of department, even though she had no idea what she was going to do.
35:36: How Rachel was in tears when she left her job because she loved it. But she had to choose how she wanted to be as a mum, over how she wanted to be in a career. She knew her career would always be there if she wanted to go back.
37:36: Rachel took her first steps into starting her own business as a virtual assistant. She soon realised that she could be an Online Business Manager and started to explore this idea. Soon she had her first client and then her second, and it was great for a while! Until she realised that she was still working in a way that didn’t really work for her life.
40:51: Rachel decided to reduce the number of clients she had while she figured out what to do next. She had the urge to teach again and her passion for education came back. So she set off to try and work out how her skills could work as a business to allow her to teach.
42:31: She has always had a way of understanding people’s potential that they can’t see. So she decided to become a Minimalist Business Strategist. She helps six-figure and above business owners simplify their businesses and get focused on the right things. So she gets to teach while having her own business.
45:36: Rachel found out she is 80% teacher through a human design reading.
47:06: Rachel was going to do a Ted Talk last year and the title was “women are going to save the world, but only when they know their purpose”. There are so many women who have given up their careers and set up a business so they can balance work and home. They’ve thought outside the box and are their own boss. It’s us as women who have taken that leap and we’re forced to think of other solutions because of the demands on us.
49:56: Rachel hopes her journey will give her children a different perspective on what they can do for their careers.
50:21: If you’re on furlough and you’ve always had something niggling at you then now is a good time to explore that. Or if you’ve loved working from home and you’re dreading going back, now is the time to come up with a plan so you don’t have to!
51:51: Life is too short. Rachel has always made decisions based on how she wants to feel when she is 80 years old. She wants to reel off a huge list of adventures when her Grandkids ask her what her favourite memories are. Life is short and it can be extraordinary and we have that choice: is it going to be ordinary or extraordinary.
54:21: We can put too much pressure on ourselves. It’s ok to make mistakes. It’s not about being perfect - it’s just about doing things well.
55:36: Rachel shares her biggest piece of advice for you if you are stuck in a job you hate and you don’t know what else to do.
58:36: We always worry about what could go wrong - but we don’t ask ourselves what it would be like if it was amazing.
59:28: Rachel shares her biggest fear and how she overcame it. Wondering whether she’s made the right decision is still Rachel’s biggest fear to this day.
1:00:36: Success isn’t something you want to look at for 20 years time - what does success look like for you right now? Because you can feel successful right now.
1:04:11: How you can find out more about Rachel and the work she does.