Our Strategic Partnerships Director here at the Branson Centre SA, Nwabisa Mayema is not only the voice of our Branson Centre podcasts and also her own; She Rocks Global.
Listed as one of South Africa's 100 Brightest Young Minds and one of 100 Inspiring and Aspiring Young South Africans, Nwabisa’s entrepreneurial journey dates back to 2006 and her passion lies in connecting others to people and resources, and opportunities.
Nwabisa tells us all about her podcast and passion project, She Rocks Global.
" A few years ago, I was part of a leadership development programme that took me to the United States. I was part of a group of 41 women from around the world, who were identified as economic multipliers. What a term! Imagine 41 women, gathered from 38 countries, in the same room, and each woman is provided with two minutes to present herself. As each woman gets up to speak, every other woman is shrinking in her chair and asking herself, “there must be a huge mistake, how on earth am I in this room with these rock stars when I am but little old me?.” We only discovered that we were all thinking the same thing a few days into our three week programme. This experience is what brought me together with Macarena Botta from Uruguay and Zoja Kukic from Serbia to create the She Rocks Global podcast.
She Rocks Global is a podcast that showcases and celebrates "perfectly imperfect women" in business and leadership around the world. It made sense to us to draw from our leadership programme experience because it speaks to the idea that all women are perfectly imperfect in their respective corners of the world, and in that perfect imperfection, every woman who listens to our podcast rocks. We strive to highlight the idea of perfectly imperfect as an act of defiance, an act of liberation.
Putting together the podcast has been an education! None of us are media practitioners and in spite of my age my tech savviness can be best described as boomer-esque. Our first season was recorded in-person in Cape Town, which means most of our guests were South African and/or people living in Cape Town. We had a neat plan of taking the next season to Uruguay but of course, Covid-19 had other plans. This meant we had to learn how to work remotely. The best part being that we went global and our second season has guests from around the world. It has been fun and these are the things we have learned along the way:
Bare minimum is enough.
Each of us has a very basic podcast setup - microphone, laptop and a quiet room and yet here we are daring to produce a podcast. This is more than fine for us and we haven’t had anybody complain about our podcast sounding strange because it doesn’t sound strange.
See things for what they are.
We started this podcast as a passion project, and at one point, we got ourselves in a massive tangle - and then got stuck - because we veered into treating it like a commercial project.
Collaboration works.
We have found our momentum through the networks of collaboration that we have: access to resources, expertise, and guests! We initially thought that we needed to know everything and do everything ourselves, and so when we applied for funding, we would present these really big budgets and would be quite disappointed when we weren’t receiving assistance. When we changed our approach to a partnership-driven approach, we received what we needed to receive to get the podcast out there.
Embrace imperfection.
No beginning is ever ideal, so that should not stop us. It was a trap we fell into ourselves with the podcast, but then reminded ourselves that, no matter how hard we try, it will never be perfect, but it will be enough, and only by doing we can make it better.
The second season of She Rocks Global went live on International Women’s Day and we remain curious to see where this project takes us.
In the meantime, we’re having fun and love building connections with rocking women from around the world.”
She Rocks Global is available wherever you get your podcasts.
