Anika

One-on-one with Anika

Why did you decide to join the CF Coaching program? What was going on in your life at the time?

The best way to describe my state when I decided to join CF’s program was that I was in a period of transition. I had decided to leave my corporate career and wasn’t sure what to do next. On the personal side I was 18 months into my very first “real” exposure to grief, with the sudden loss of my mom. This confluence of professional and personal transition led me to challenge how I defined myself.

Can you describe the impact of the program and what you learned from it?

I was able to stitch together my strengths, my past experience, my values, what was important to me AND the type of life I wanted to lead into creating the life that I desired. Forever ambitious and wanting more, I was always a high achiever and a hard worker.  But I didn’t quite ever realize the power of identifying goals and how that can help one channel effort, effectiveness and success. That by identifying a goal, working through my limiting beliefs around achieving that goal and removing the unnecessary noise and distraction (other’s beliefs, past evidence, outside world etc) that the goal can be mine. 

I carefully crafted the desire to be an entrepreneur, my previous experiences with my personal values and aim to honour my mom and others who came before me into a beautiful business platform called Root & Seed. Every day I get to help others understand the value of their family and cultural stories, inspire them through others stories and give them the tools to document their own stories.

What was your number one takeaway?

Surrender. What an interesting word to use when asked what you learned from a so-called professional program. I learned to surrender to my desires, to a life I dreamed of, to my strengths and gifts. To agree to not understand how everything is going to turn out before I act, to believing that everything I need is either within me or within my grasp. That doing this program was not going to give me the good mark I longed for with my old set of criteria for success. To shed the perfectionist, need to scenario the sh*t out of everything to a world based on intuition, gut, impulse, heart led decisions and self compassion.

Was there ever a moment where you thought “This is IT! This is why I’m taking this program!” An a-ha, or a eureka moment?

Often when individuals start in this program they don’t have identified goals and I was in that camp. After some initial resistance, I adopted an approach of curiosity and experimentation to my approach to the program. I tried identifying a number of goals, including following through on my first mini goal while I worked on uncovering what I felt was my real goal.  In doing so, I gave myself the confidence to go after what I really wanted, even if that wasn’t fully apparent at the beginning. My eureka moment came when doing a visualization where I painted a vivid picture of the goal of a platform that included a digital tool, our web app that facilitates and prompts meaningful conversations. It was that visualization that led to the decision to call my now business partner and the rest is history!

Did you “blow the lid off” your own expectations? How?

A moment of great pride and accomplishment was being featured and recognized by the CBC for the work that we are doing with our business Root & Seed. Getting media attention was a goal from the get-go but the whole process of hearing from the CBC, shooting with the CBC, being on the 6pm news and two programs of CBC live radio talking about our platform launch was real proof and evidence that if you unleash your gift to the world, you will be rewarded. It was also further proof that being intentional, specific and explicit and focused with goals yields results. It was a “blow the lid off” experience for sure.