"Are You a Product Manager or an Agile Coach?"

"I quit." That was the text I sent my boss a few years ago, while I was sitting in a meeting.

"Is this it for you?," I remember my boss asking. Part of me was terrified but I knew deep inside it was now or never. And because my boss and I had a great relationship, he totally got it.

Six figure salary. Leadership position. One of the best consulting firms out there. A great boss. Engineering company with a start-up vibe.

Sounds like I had it all but in reality I didn't. I felt empty.

As a female immigrant, I felt pressured to suck it up, so I can pay the bills and prove to my family I'm not a failure, until I couldn't...I exploded and quit over text. I walked out of the client site without even saying goodbye. Not my proudest moment.

"Are you doubting your decision," I remember my boss asking. "You're a rockstar. You'll find something you love within a couple of weeks."

Except I didn't for 2 months and I was starting to run out of money. I got a huge slap to my ego as I kept getting rejected from one interview to another. I was confused and I had no idea what to call myself. How do you translate 13 years of being a jack-of-all-trades consultant into a single role? I had a whole bunch of key words I kept experimenting with on my Linkedin heading like "Product Manager", "Agile Coach", "Business Analyst", "Consultant", "UX". Then I boiled it down to "Agile Coach & Product Manager". But recruiters still asked me to pick ONE.

I was attracted to product companies because of my entrepreneurial tendencies and creativity. But my corporate and prominent financial services background made me appear uncool to the start-ups.

It happened to be a Scrum Master role, so that's what I branded myself as. And it was all good until I found myself walking out the door AGAIN, this time without a text. This continued for years and my threshold for faking it decreased, despite trying to do what I did best...ESCAPE. I was distracting myself with travel and taking up what felt like a second career in latin dancing.

Until one day changed everything. One of my closest friends helped me write a letter that reported my boss for racial and sexual harassment.

I finally decided to take the exercises my career coach shared with me seriously and got flashbacks of how I felt like the underdog as a child, while attending a private school meant for rich kids. How I was bullied. How I would come home and re-teach myself a day's worth of classes because of my learning disability. Yet, I still beat the odds and passed with distinction. Then there was this vivid memory of how I helped my mom build and scale her preschool business when I turned 9 and until I was 16. And what really stuck with me was this vision of creating products that align with people's learning styles so they wouldn't ever feel stupid, like I did, simply because they learned differently.

In that moment of feeling like I was about to lose my job, I was finally able to answer the question. Who am I?

So rather than waiting for a cool product company to hire me, I decide to build my own. Today, I build products that help people identify their occupational essence and brand themselves the right way, so they land jobs they love. I infuse agility to adapt to my clients' changing goals and adapt to the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous job market conditions. I have also built a self-organized community of professionals and a family who has each others backs through the ups and downs of their career. And next month, I get to hire the first employee of my company.

Am I an agile coach or a product manager? I am more than that. And that's what I teach my clients. They are more than a job title. The ones who truly believe this land the jobs, all 18 of them in the past 6 months. And they've all beat the odds and the job posting checkboxes. The sky is the limit once you start believing in yourself.

If you are stuck the same way I was. If you are getting overlooked despite your talent and looking for someone to help you amplify your voice, be your James Lassiter (Will Smith's agent), send me a message. I'd love to chat to see how we can get you discovered by hiring managers so they truly get you and see everything that you offer.