Amne Suedi: Why failure is a necessary part of any journey

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Having boldly tried, failed and tried again; Amne has learnt when to pivot career paths to have more of an impact on those who look up tp her and the young women she mentors

For me, career goals do not start when you get that first job, but building your career starts much earlier. I really questioned my career goals at these points in my life: 1. I went to a highly competitive university in Switzerland where we started out as 500 in first year and by the time we graduated we were only 50. After having studied in English all my life, I found myself studying law in French in a very different system from that which I had known. I failed my exams in first year of law school and had to redo the exams. I had never failed anything at that point in time and I was deemed to be a good student in high school so this came as a shock. I really questioned whether law was the career path I wanted to follow, but I realised that I was questioning my path for the wrong reasons. Failure is a necessary part of any journey. 2. I wanted to work in human rights and got the opportunity to work at the UN Human Rights Commission at the time. It was a rude awakening for me as I realised that I needed to readjust my career goals and go for investment and corporate law. This realisation was sparked by the fact that I saw that it took extraordinary effort to make a decimal of change. So I reoriented myself to corporate law because you see the impact immediately and able to actually make a living. 3. When I started my business as a lawyer, some people told me I would not make it because it is very hard for women to make it on her own in the legal field. I was told that I should get a male partner if I wanted a chance at the business. I really had to question myself at that point and really ask myself if I was in the right space. Luckily, I was able to look up to other women who have been doing it on their own for long and during times that were less progressive than our time now and this gave me the courage to go on. 4. Another challenge I faced was when I was sitting as a board member of a company in London investing in Africa and I was the only woman on the board. With time, it became obvious that the other male board members were undermining me. For example they would have meetings by themselves where they would discuss and hash out different subjects and then come to me and say “we have discussed and decided this.” Other examples of being undermined was when I would make inputs and suggestions in a board meeting and then in the write up of the minutes, my ideas were presented as the ideas presented by the chairman of the Board. It was very frustrating and I felt like resigning, however, I realised that resigning as a result of this was exactly why they were adopting such behaviour. I continued despite everything.

Amne Suedi: Why failure is a necessary part of any journey

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