Changing The Game

Shivani Gopal is the founder and CEO of Remarkable Women a company born out of her desire to empower women by helping them establish financial independence in order to live a more free and happy life.

She describes her main ambition in the mantra “forever strive towards your ever striving potential”, which brings into reality by constantly pushing not only the outer status quo, but her own internal one as well.

As an Australian woman, Shivani has seen some of the best and worst that the country has to offer, and we are really lucky to have her share some of her stories with us on the Changing the Game Podcast.

Shivani starts out by talking about how she learned the value of financial independence in quite a hard way when she was younger, all because she did as so many young women do and started dating a boy she knew.

Surprisingly enough, Shivani’s views on arranged marriage were a lot more neutral than one may expect nowadays, according to her “it was not the worst thing in the world”, as within her culture forced marriages were quite common, (and it was her boyfriend after all).

That being said, she explains that “it wasn’t something I was ready for at that time”, and being only 16, she simply didn’t know what she was in for, and more, that her ambitions to challenge the status quo remained the same.

The result? She was quite simply, and quite deeply, unhappy.

But the silver lining would come, and it came when she was crying with a friend on the phone about not being able to divorce, when that friend made her realize that the fact she could support herself away from her husband was her gateway into freedom.

It is often through our own hardships that we tend to find the most valuable lessons, pain is, after all, the greatest teacher, which makes spreading the lessons we have learned through pain so that others don’t have to experience it one of the greatest acts of empathy.

And this is exactly what Shivani did after fighting for a divorce, she went on to act so that as many women as possible could find their way out of dangerous or unhappy relationships through financial independence as she did.

Not only that, she made it her mission to tell these women that they could be more than just wives and mothers, that the entire world was there for them, that it was okay to have dreams and aspirations about the future.

That is, she made those women aware of a universal right that they’ve had since the beginning, the right to live life on their own terms.

In many ways I saw my own mother’s story in Shivani’s, as both were forced to marry early and live frustrated lives due to the pressures of a culture that wouldn’t allow them to separate.

At the same time, I also saw in her a little bit of myself in that unsatisfaction with a status quo I did not choose, nor want to participate, so I just had to ask her where this ambition to change the game come from. Here’s what she had to say:

There is something quite important about what Shivani said here that is the unspoken truth about changing the game: If you are even considering changing it, consider that it is because you climbed high enough to even consider that as a possibility.

It takes a great deal of honesty and responsibility to recognise this privilege, and we must be very wise with the steps to take to enacting change because of it.

On the other hand, you also want to change the game because you or people near you are being harmed by the way it is played right now, because you are seeing things from a point of disadvantage.

Eventually our conversation got into the topic of Shivani’s work with Remarkable Women, “accelerating the path towards equality for women around the world.”

This empowerment process occurs through three pathways:

• Personal: Within the sphere of their personal lives and relationships.
• Professional: In helping these women accelerate their careers and succeed in the job market.
• Financial: In helping them make money so that they can be financially independent and able to build a wealth of their own.

According to her, “If you can get that trifecta right, then you’ve given someone the absolute foundations to success, what you do with it is your call”, Remarkable Women therefore helps women find mentors that orient women within these three categories towards a better life.

The main lesson that we can draw from my talk with Shivani is that if you have a clear goal, no matter how big and a full conscience of what you are capable of accomplishing there is not going to be a single human force that can stop you.

Not that something like that would be easy of course, this certainty of action takes a lot of cultivation and a good deal of struggle to form within us, but once we have it, nothing can take it from us.

So, in order to start this process of confidence in your ability to change the game, I would like to close yet another article with an exercise in imagination: What is the wildest, most unhinged and radical way in which you could change the game?

Think about that, and then think about what aspects of your life have to improve, before you can make your vision a reality.

This episode of the Changing the Game Podcast has a little twist I hope you all enjoy.

Instead of the usual one-on-one interview, this time around I’m going to be chatting with Jodi Rybicki and Alison Welsh.

Both of these amazing women have a career in education, with Alison starting out in the field of child care management while Jodi was in the academic sphere giving lectures in universities (teaching the big kids).

The two of them eventually got together with the mission of completely changing the game by founding Frog Ponds, a business dedicated to “making sourcing simple”.

As you can imagine, they were a blast to talk to, so here are some of the great takeaways I got from our chat.

Right off the bat it was easy to see how the two of them got to cofound a company as there is a clear yin-yang dynamic between the two where each fills in for the other in different areas.

This became even clearer as they told the story of how they met by applying for the same job where “Jodie was the one qualified to do it and the one who was persuasive was Alison”.

From there on their partnership only solidified as they leaned on each other’s strong suits to achieve success at work, with Jodie teaching Alison to take notes, while she wrote the emails.

Their relationship is a great example of why I try to hammer the point of diversity home every time. As humans, we all have things at which we are lacking and things at which we excell that come from a combination of our personalities, our identity and our background.

So, by giving different groups of people a sit on the chair, and incentivizing them to work together, we can combine their strengths in a way that would otherwise be unlikely, all the while promoting equality.

Every entrepreneur has a why, be it tied to personal experiences, a generally creative lifestyle or just a wish to escape the salary worker’s life.

For Jodi and Alison this call came in the form of “an absolute desire to change the space that we were in”, for as they explain, both were at a point of extreme unsatisfaction for the sales process between schools and suppliers.

Where schools work with short budgets and hardly have enough time to look through every email, while suppliers that are actually trying to bring quality products into schools find themselves having trouble contacting them.

This is actually a pretty common start for a new business and a good one at that.

Identifying an aspect of your work or consumer life that you are not satisfied with gives you an idea of the needs that the market is not seeing to, and then you can model your business around tending to these needs.

Now, Alison and Jodi were not about to just quit their jobs and start a business out of the blue, taking an enterprise off the ground takes time and they were very aware of that, so they did the smart thing:

With Jodi managing the finances and Alison bringing in new ideas, they slowly developed it until they could leave their old jobs to manage FrogPonds full time.

The journey, as they confirmed was full of the inner and outer struggles that come with starting a new business, and yet both claimed with a smile that they would do it all over again.

They reveal the secret to enduring such things a little later by talking about how passionate they are to be solving this issue for both schools and suppliers and how that makes both their lives and the world a little better.

Despite the fact that the world is filled with start-ups, quitting your day job to have an entrepreneurial adventure is not exactly the norm, and if one actually tries to do that, they’ll find that many people will seek to discourage them.

Both Alison and Jodi went through that as well since at the beginning stages of Frog Ponds there were many instances of people calling them “ambitious” (in the negative sense of the word), for what they were trying to do.

And here too we find a valuable lesson in that, when you are trying to change the game, you can be sure to expect some level of opposition from people that either want to keep the status quo, or are simply intimidated by what you’re doing.

These people will voice their opinions, whether they were asked to do so or not, and if you hope to succeed, you can’t allow yourself to be phased by them.

Recently, our dynamic duo got the opportunity to speak with a state minister during a small company event, and being honestly impressed and curious as to how that happened I asked them what one could do to get this big of a shot. Their answer was wonderfully simple:

No 4-D chess, no elaborate strategy, just and email with “honest intent and good purpose”, explaining why the state minister might be interested to show up and how their company could contribute to education.

So often are we paralyzed by fear, not of some catastrophic consequence of what we did, but just of being rejected, hearing that terrible “no” that won’t really subtract anything from our lives.

Therefore, sometimes, if we want to get that big break, is just ask.

Jodi Rybicki and Alison Welsh make for one hell of a team, and not just as interview guests, but as forces for change that saw a problem and worked together to solve it, no matter what obstacle opposed them.

There is a valuable lesson about relying on other people here. As human beings we are at our best when we work together to combine our strengths, it’s what we do as a species.

So, for our closing reflection, I’d like you to ask yourself what are your core strengths and shortcomings, and how you can use your talents to help others, versus what kind of person could compensate your flaws.

I could probably make an entirely separate article from this one just to list Tracie Clark’s accomplishments, she’s an entrepreneur who’s had two extremely successful businesses, a board member and advisor, an investment professional and so much more.

Born in Perth and raised in New Zealand, Tracie started out her career in accounting, though always making her own investments here and there, and as it tends to happen, her side hustle became her main gig and the way she found to completely change the game.

Today Tracie is self-employed and provides financial advice to several enterprises, all the while being the vice chair of Perth Angels, a committee member for the WA Cancer Council, all of which made her a blast to have on the Changing the Game Podcast

Going back to the start of her career Tacie recalled that her interest in economics began when she was young, when she would visit her auntie who, despite the fact they lived in a small rural community, would take the time to teach her about the stock market.

Now, if the idea of someone learning about the stock market in farm in New Zealand is not interesting by itself, we also have an element that has been present on the podcast since day one, which is the role of outside influences.

As we grow up we don’t really know that much about the world, which is why any conversation with more experienced people tend to have a huge influence on the path we pick far ahead.

So, whenever we are talking to younger people, or from the position of someone senior, it’s always a good idea to take into account the ripple our words may produce in their life.

Fast forwarding to the end of Tracie’s period in accounting, I asked her about what the trigger for this switch in her career path, which she attributed to a “unfortunate situation” where an offer to become a partner of her company was pulled due to her being pregnant.

The reason given by the company for pulling the offer, according to Tracie, was that they “weren’t sure if she could cope” with being a partner and a mother, well, it turns out she could, as she then went on to found her first business when her daughter was just six weeks old.

So, not only was she doing the same job “with the added stresses of owning your own business”, but she did it while looking after her new born, and managed to make quite a life for herself.

Sometimes you will knock on a door and it won’t open, and that’s okay, but other times it will be slammed in your face for unfair reasons, and if that happens, being able to prove the people slammed it wrong like Tracie did can be not only beneficial, but quite satisfactory.

In case you’re unfamilar, Perth Angels is a community of business people that prospects up and coming enterprises to invest in, and Tracie, as you already know, is part of their board with myself, so I asked her what were her parameters for choosing these businesses.

Firstly, she listed market values such as whether they have a product which customers would be interested in, if there is a market for it, if the customers are willing to pay for what is being sold and so on.

Then, she listed a much more human factor: The team. That is, if they are personally invested in the business, if they have a good notion of the market and how to run a business, and if they are aware of the missing skills that need to be filled.

Despite the fact that Tracie already has seventeen successful investments under her belt, there have also been two companies that didn’t pull through despite angelic intervention, and according her, one of them fell primarily because of “founder burnout”.

In other words, the companies founder was adding more responsabilities to an already exhausting role, straining herself beyond the point of productivity, by trying to do too much, she was doing too little.

This burnout, mixed with the fact that some of the capital investments made by the company didn’t have the expected return, which made the angels work towards a position where it could be sold, though at a lower price than the ideal.

Within Perth Angels, Tracie is also a part of Scale Investing, a group solely dedicated to investing in enterprises founded and led by women, and she tells me that “over 50% of my investment portfolio is female founders”.

Not only that, as she explains, Perth Angels made a point to evenly divide their investiments for last year in 50/50 between men and women. Something I am also very proud of.

Tracie also had a suggestion for any young women that are looking to change the game themselves and become business owners, saying that:

So, her main advice is that if you are a young girl with a business idea you’d like to develop, her main advice is that you take advantage of all the resources that are at your disposal, from workshops, to grants, to seminars and so on.

When it comes to changing the game there are many ways to go about it, you can help entire groups of people through activism, individual people through charity, or you can help businesses through investing as Tracie does.

What makes this particular way to change the game so important is that it gives you a bit of both spheres, you are helping the individual by empowering them to build a space for themselves, and you are helping the group by giving them a welcoming place in the market.

Courtney Barron is a senior executive in the Western Australia Executive Council, having worked with the Premiere in the cabinet. She is also a global supporter and advocate for women especially in relation to employment, housing and healthcare.

As someone that has been developing a good friendship with Courtney, it was a pleasure to have her over for the Changing The Game Podcast, where we got to talk about her work, and her role in promoting the welfare of women in Australia.

Despite the high ladders that Courtney has come to climb, working with the WA premiere, she talks about much humbler beginnings, being raised by a single mom and living in public housing.

Yet this didn’t stop Courtney from dreaming big, and pursuing a career on “either law or government”, which lead her to study the intricacies of law and politics, getting straight into the WA state government from there.

Even then, however, she explains that her true passion lies in working with non-profit organizations and that this aspect of her life represents her major focus point today.

Now, even though Courtney is open about the challenges she’s had to face growing up, I always found it interesting how she also tends to describe herself as being privileged.

When I pointed out this contradiction to her, she responded that this was due to her story “not being work hard to get to where you want, but rather, work hard and have privilege, so more opportunities will present themselves.”

After all, she was born a white, able-bodied, cisgendered woman who had access to education, which granted her a head start to turn her situation over, a head start that a lot of other people simply didn’t have.

This is something that we all could think about on some level, that even though no one in the world is a stranger to hardship, some of us are simply more privileged, be it because of our appearance, the functionality of our bodies and minds, or just our social standing.

Courtney also points out how this mindset can also positively affect your life, as focusing on your privileges instead of your hardships enables you to lift others up, and understand that you have come to such a position through resilience.

Now, being a woman and working for the Premiere of Western Australia, Courtney also had a ton of stories to share about going into spaces and being “the only female in the room, or the only person under forty.”

One of such stories was about a certain meeting she attended with emergency services personnel, and being the only woman in a meeting with five much older men, was interrupted by someone on a CEO level who commented on her top.

As you can imagine, this comment wouldn’t have happened if it were a man giving the presentation, and though Courtney was able to shut the unnecessary remark down, there needs to be a conversation about why it happened.

Even though Courtney herself has been a victim of such forms of sexism, she highlights the importance of not having “a chip on your shoulder” about these situations, as wrong as they may be.

That doesn’t mean in any way that you are not supposed to call people out when they engage in any form of discrimination, but rather that being angry about being the only woman at the table won’t lead to any positive change.

You can even go ahead and question people on their reasoning behind non-inclusive behavior, in fact that is a great way to drive home the message that what they did is not appropriate, but doing it out of anger won’t really lead anywhere.

And sure, getting as many women on the table as possible also helps, even if women can be just as sexist as men, (if not more), sometimes.

In my line of work I’ve often come upon situations where women were being treated unfairly in the workplace, and I’ve always felt that, since I’m in a position of authority within the company, I had to speak up and do something about it.

But Courtney argued that despite one’s best intentions, this may not be the best thing to do for the person that was the target of discrimination as “Where is the line between advocating for someone and talking over them?”

In saying this, she actually makes a good point, after all, if you just pick up someone’s cause and use your privilege to advocate for them, you can end up excluding the offended party from the conversation.

Sometimes, therefore, it is better to sit back and let the person who was discriminated against speak first, but at the same time, you need to recognise it when there is an opportunity to help.

When confronted with a similar situation, Courtney suggests that before anything else, you consult the victim and ask her what you can do to empower them, putting the initiative in their hands.

My talk with Courtney was eye-opening in many ways, not only by showing the mechanics of privilege that makes life so easy for some of us and so hard for others, but it was also enlightening in terms of showing how we can use our privilege.

Because, whether we like it or not, we always hold some sort of unfair advantage over others that enables us to take a higher standing in society, and have opportunities open up for us that are unthinkable for those that were not so lucky.

So, for our closing reflection, I’d like to propose you a simple chalenge: Take a look at your own life and try to identify all the ways in which you are privileged, be it the color of your skin, your financial situation, your physical and mental faculties.

Then, I want you to think about all the ways in which you can use these privileges to uplift the people around you and take a step further towards changing the game.

Kate Kirwin is the founder of “She Codes;”, and a passionate advocate for the inclusion of women in STEM whom I’ve had the pleasure to interview recently on the Changing The Game Podcast.

The West, recently described Kate’s mission as follows: “Kate Kirwin likes to imagine a world where young girls aspire to be programmers in the same way they might dream of being ballerinas”.

With this in mind we had an incredibly productive talk about inclusion, equality and the challenges she has faced while working to make her vision a reality and change the game.

Kate doesn’t really have a technological background, something that she attributes to the fact that it was never really posed to her as an option, a problem that seems to be widespread across the globe.

In general, STEM fields, (that being science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are rarely portrayed as places for women, or somewhere women can flourish, which keeps young girls from even considering such areas for their future.

That is, of course, when people don’t just flat out say that these career paths are not for women, because they are not “safe”, a fallacy that She Codes has dedicated itself to debunk.

The absence of women in STEM fields is something I was able to notice for myself as it has always been hard to find women candidates, and no wonder as only 26.7%, of all workers in this market are female.

When I asked what we could do to change this reality, Kate mentioned the importance of making that invitation to young girls as so many of them are told no by counselors, by their parents and so many people that shut that door for them.

So holding that door open for these women, and helping them make a foothold in STEM, is one of the best ways to change things, and the main concern of She Codes.

Kate attests to the importance of this invitation herself, as she recalls how her background was in events and that she only awoke to her interest in technology while working on an event called Space Keep in Perth, Australia.

So, she did what most people do at an event and attended as many panels as she could, but at tech events she started to feel uncomfortable at how the environment was not welcoming to her “as a woman or as a beginner”.

From there on she started to participate on more and more groups to learn coding, until she was approached with an invitation start a community dedicated to helping women to get into codeing.

Today, She Codes has helped over 4000 young women insert themselves in the coding microcosm along six years of female exclusive coding workshops, and Kate stated that they even had people who had a STEM background seeking them out.

After Kate had confirmed it was indeed her, the girl explained how she had gone through their program and was now working on robotics, and how that “Yes, you can do this”, was a turning point in her life.

Under the light of the upcoming sixth anniversary for She Codes, Kate speaks about the future of She Codes with great enthusiasm, speaking about new programs to be launched in Port Headland and all the other regions that She Codes was able to touch.

She also spoke about how Covid has pushed the organisation to embrace online seminaries to a greater extent, which has students a lot more comfortable during workshops and increased the range of She Codes.

Lastly there was the mention of She Codes’ major long term goal which is the insertion of over one hundred thousand women on the technology field by 2025 across Australia, as she says this, she remarks “only 96 thousand to go!”.

This is a wonderful mindset to have, especially if you are looking to change the game in a big way, you need to dream big, after all dreaming small or big takes the same amount of effort, the only variance is in the results.

As you hear about Kate’s goal, you may be wondering why one hundred thousand specifically. why not five hundred thousand or a million, if we have to dream big in order to change the game.

Kate explains that this is due to a study that came out which states that Australia needs two hundred thousand people in the tech industry across the country to remain globally competitive in the field.

The main goal for She Codes, therefore, is to ensure that at least half of these needed job entries to be filled by women, which according to her “still wouldn’t be 50/50 diversity”, but it would be a really good place to start.

When we talk about changing the game, that is to say, changing the world in ways that make life a more free and beneficial experience for a greater number of people, our one guiding factor the trajectory that has gotten us this far.

Kate Kirwin was moved by the sensation of being unwelcome as a woman in technology directed events and situations, and instead of being turned away from it, she took it upon herself to create a space where her and other women wouldn’t fell like that again.

This is an important lesson to take away from my talk with her, we change the game by looking at what we don’t like about the way it is played, and if everyone starts doing that, it will always change for the better.

Nominated for Western Australian of the year, Suzanne Waldron has a great list of achievements under her belt, being an ambassador for RUOK?, leader of the TedxPerth team, a behavioral change facilitator and a twice published author.

All of these titles arose out of Suzanne’s interest in how humanity can build the best possible existence for itself within the reality presented to us, and she engages in this wonderful interest in working with leaders from around the world in embedding healthy relationships.

There could have been no better option for our first guest on Changing The Game, where she shared incredible stories surrounding her life’s work.

Life is, in many ways, a game, and we are all trying to play it to the best of our abilities, and the mere fact that we are playing it is a privilege.

For Suzanne, this game started out rather roughly, and she describes the first seventeen years of her life as “Traumatic”, having grown in a foster home, her first aspiration was simply to be safe.

Now, knowing Suzanne as a friend, and generally a really positive and caring person, I was curious about what was that pivotal moment in her life.

So, she emphatically concludes that there was no “key moment”, but rather a mix of the natural flow of life, the kindness of strangers that saw something in her that she couldn’t see herself, and her own constant self development.

So, with the idea that Suzanne’s current success came as a result of the impact that others had in her life, we can look at her efforts in ensuring equal opportunity for all, and ask what role can we play in other people’s stories.

As an example, she points at herself, a white woman with all physical and mental faculties, that has access to clean water, healthcare, education, and housing, and how there is a plethora of places where people are not so lucky.

This accessibility to resources, doesn’t just affect our quality of life, but also our ability to solve problems, for example, a village without access to water is going to have a hard time growing crops.

The fact is, we don’t all get the same starting point, and those that find themselves with the short end of the stick need help from those in a better position to get a chance at bettering their lives.

When it comes to education as a motor for change, we find ourselves in a complicated place, after all, as Suzanne points out, “you can be educated and still not have access to something”.

In other words, you can be extremely resourceful, have a degree and a mind for problem-solving, but if you still have no access to basic resources, you will still be unable to come up with solutions for your immediate situation.

There is also the issue of cultural access, as you can be well-educated, but still be held back due to social alienation because of your gender, your religion, your ethnicity, or any other aspect of your identity that falls outside cultural hegemony.

So, although education gives us internal resources, it still cannot change our external conditions that might put themselves in front of our efforts for better living standards.

So, within this game that involves every member of society where some get more to play with than others, we can look at our governments as being a major piece in the board.

The first step for it to incorporate this central role is acknowledging this unequal reality and compromising to address it, for people in decision-making positions to recognize this state of affairs.

Then we can start talking about concrete action in the form of inclusive policies, resource redistribution, and accessibility efforts, but the very first step is the individual acknowledgement of what is not available to others.

One of the ways in which these issues have been addressed was regarding gender equality where the solution of dividing every position of the workforce in 50/50 for men and women has often been defended.

Suzanne then argued that “The 50/50 bit doesn’t mean anything to me, it could be 40/60 or whatever”, but that quotas actually are important as quantifying something does lead to progress.

The idea is that by implementing quotas, we can move into the position where they no longer are necessary, and that a more equal view of workplace positions is seen as something natural.

In essence, quotas are positive in the sense that they bypass bias, create a precise measurement for equity, and creates new opportunities, which is why they should be implemented until they are no longer necessary.

If we are to take anything out of this wonderful interview with Suzanne Waldron let it be a lesson on the necessity of reflecting how privileged we truly are and the need to break out of this spot of comfort to raise other people up.

After all, when it comes to inventiveness, talent, and potential, the human race is a never-ending treasure pool, and the only thing that holds it back is how unequally and resources and opportunities distributed.

So, I would like to leave you, my dear reader (or listener) with the following question: What are your privileges? And what can you do to raise another into a better place and completely change the game for them?

Changing The Game is going live on Wednesday, the 10th of March.

I have had the privilege of already interviewing Suzanne Waldron, Kate Kirwin, Courtney Barron and Tracie Clark and can't wait to share their incredible stories with you.

Join me and some incredible people on the 10th of March at 9am, as we launch the Changing The Game show officially.

Introduction to Changing The Game:

Discussing the importance of innovation and diversity for transforming and creating a new reality, and how education is the key. We will deep dive in successes and failures that all listeners can learn from.