Up until now, this podcast has leaned heavily expat because that is largely the network we have access to, but I finally landed a native Dutch guest! I are excited to introduce you to our November guest,  Odelia Djoe; Surinamese by birth and grew up in the Netherlands. Odelia has been designing her life on her terms while navigating her black Dutch identity, an often complicated topic in this culture. Our conversation covered all sorts of ground, including her upbringing and navigating the...

Inspired by the incredible story of my guest for this month, Faith Opiyo who has continued to face a lot of odds, including self doubt , while navigating her career as a black woman in tech, this month on the podcast we are reflecting on impostor syndrome and why we should rethink it through a more systemic lens as opposed to an individual one, particularly in underrepresented groups. Impostor syndrome is the phenomenon of experiencing self doubt or feeling like a fraud despite your...

Our guest this month is the incredible Faith Opiyo who has proven over and over again that she is the master of her own fate! Born and raised in Kenya, Faith’s journey has taken her to Russia where she lived for 10 years, through several career pivots and into where she is now as one of the few black women in cybersecurity. In this conversation amongst other things, we talked about Faith’s experiences with racism as a black person in Russia, how she started her career and pivoted industries...

Inspired by the incredible story of my guest for this month, Busi Sizani, who knew her purpose from such  a tender age, in this episode I reflect on my own purpose journey. I only discovered my purpose much recently through a series of experiences and in this episode I share how I got to this realization. I am a multi-hyphenate corporate healthcare professional, entrepreneur and storyteller who is passionate about equity. I get a lot of energy from solving problems around how to create...

Our guest this month is the incredible Busi Sizani, who has been stepping into her power since she was one of the fIrst black kids attending a previously racially segregated school, in post apartheid South Africa. From such an early age, she understood that her presence in the spaces she was privileged to access was an opportunity to educate those around her about her experiences, and has embraced this purpose ever since. Busi went on to navigate her career from studying engineering and...

My guest this month, Stephanie Goseine moves through the world with incredible confidence, believing everything is hers for the taking. Showing up like this as a woman and a person of color, specifically in predominantly white spaces can be treated with mixed reactions due to bias stemming from sexism and racism. This often leads to more than often, women of color being perceived as arrogant as opposed to confidence.There is a difference between arrogance and confidence and it has a real...

Our guest this month is the lovely Stephanie Goseine, a woman with so much audacity when it comes to her goals and her place in the corporate world as a woman of color. An island girl from Trinidad and Tobago, Stephanie has navigated her career from engineering to consulting and currently, she is making moves in change management. Amongst the many gems in this conversation included identity politics of mixed-heritage people like Stephanie and picking your battles when it comes to inclusion...

My episode 10 guest Omena shared very candidly about her experiences with mental health and this week I am reprising the topic with my own experiences with it! I also had to grow into an understanding of the importance of this topic, as I culturally did not connect to it and I grew up believing so much in the strong black woman narrative. I had to unlearn some behaviors and I love the woman I am becoming through therapy.  Taking this topic to the workplace, in this past year mental health...

In lieu of our normal programming on the podcast, I bring you this bonus episode discussing the recent debacle of racism in England directed at three black players, Marcus Rashford, Jardon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, who missed penalties in the final game. This incident was something every black person saw coming from a mile away and it is exhausting once again to watch the shock wash over most white people as the latest arrivals to the fight against racism. Additionally people keep referencing...

Have you ever met someone and their energy just swept you away? That is Omena Ukeleghe, our guest for this month. She is a walking testimony of all things black women that make me so proud to tell our stories on this podcast and platform. Resilient, passionate, courageous and loudly living her life and purpose. Omena has navigated herself from studying fashion and working in the fashion industry, into other roles before last summer taking on being the lead of  Diversity and Inclusion at a big...

My Ep. 8 guest Soraya and I chopped it up about lots of things, including career pivoting. I was particularly enamored by Soraya’s bold moves in her career, that took her from Austria, to London and now to Amsterdam and the fact that she quit her big time job in the middle of a pandemic to join a startup. Soraya is adaptable and versatile and has pivoted her career as needed. In this episode, I share my reflection on this topic and what career pivoting has looked like for me. My biggest...

Meet Soraya Hausl, a badass data scientist born in Austria and now living in Amsterdam. Soraya’s love for math and numbers as a kid led her into a career of being a data scientist who has been traversing industries applying herself in different ways, and her most current gig is about hair care for black women. Soraya is officially my first European native guest, so a black person born and raised in Europe, and we ended up talking about the concept of a shared black identity in Europe, like...

My Ep. 6 guest, Bongi Mataure and I discussed her experiences of defining belonging as a black foreign person and what integrating into the Netherlands has been like for her. We share a common belief that you have to find a balance when it comes to integration, embrace parts of your new environment but also keep some of your original self.  In this episode I reflect on my own experiences with integration as an immigrant who has lived in up to 4 countries now. The integration narrative is...

Bongi Mataure moved to the Netherlands from Zimbabwe to pursue her education in aeronautical engineering and then decided to stay. In our conversation, Bongi and I explored what belonging means as a black person in foreign countries  through her many experiences, that included studying and living in the NL and working in France. She is actively shaping her life as a combination of cultures, between the things she loves about being Zimbabwean and what she enjoys about the Netherlands. Besides...

I am on a mission to create a space for black women in the corporate world to connect, inspire and support each other as we navigate our careers. I am strongly convinced of our presence in the corporate world to influence how companies reach our communities with their products and services. BsquaredC is more than just a podcast, and in order to allow myself time and space to extend the idea, I am changing the frequency of this podcast from weekly to bi weekly. That means having one interview...

Following my great conversation with Courtney Bradwell about moving to the NL as a black professional today, I am reflecting on one of the key things that helped my guest Courtney to position herself in her new job market, and that is investing in yourself. She spent a pretty penny on coaches who helped mer translate her skills from the American job market to the Dutch job market and more. Putting money on it, is one way to invest in yourself. Some of us fail to even just make the time to...

Meet this week’s badass black corporate woman, Courtney Bradwell. Having been raised in Ohio, she always dreamed of traveling the world,  but she didn’t have many examples of people that looked like her  making such bold moves. This perspective changed with  a trip to Europe in 2014 that opened her up to the possibility to call this continent her second home at one point. In this conversation we went into Courtney’s journey of moving to the NL, including cracking the NL job market and...

Welcome to the first reflection of season 2! Following my riveting conversation with the insightful Kelly Morales, in this episode I am bringing back the topic of feeling invisible in predominantly white spaces as a person of color for more exploration. As Kelly pointed out on Ep 2, feeling like you are invisible is a common phenomenon amongst black women including Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris. People sometimes treat us like we are not there and actively ignore our opinion and...

Welcome to the first interview episode of season 2 of BsquaredC podcast! Meet our opening badass, Kelly Morales an ambitious, entrepreneurial Colombian woman whose discipline and life philosophy is awe- inspiring to say the least. After moving from Colombia for her studies, Kelly found herself  liking the Netherlands a lot and 8 years later is still here and chasing her dreams in corporate NL. Her long term vision is to lead innovation in the Fintech industry and impact her home, Colombia....

We are back baby! Welcome to season 2 of BsquaredC podcast! This season we are celebrating stories of women of color in corporate Netherlands, my new home. As you all may know I have since settled in the Netherlands two and a half years ago. I am excited to highlight the black women who have crossed my path and to experience new ones as I continue to build my network here and make my home. In this episode, I am setting the context for the season, in particular the differences in how race is...

To close off BsquaredC podcast season one, I am bringing you the wisdom of four past guests, Stephanie, Ruva, Brittany and Ru. We came together in the “zoom where it happens”  to reflect on the stories they shared on their respective episodes, the aftermath of it and their view of their futures in the corporate world. We communed on stories of how they heard from people they had not heard from in a while post their BsquaredC podcast appearance, their advice on showing up authentically; one of...

Happy holidays everyone! We are almost at the end of BsquaredC podcast season 1 and I decided to share a reflection on what doing this podcast has meant to me as my Christmas gift to you all and to myself. First off doing everything about this podcast all on my own, from scripting, to producing to marketing really challenged my ability to commit to something and stick to it. It stretched my capabilities, letting me grow a new skill set and strengthened my belief that I can do anything if I...

My guest from last week Arlyne Simon is a multi passionate genius, out there inventing, writing, starting up companies and inspiring all of us! However even as talented as she is she still has moments of doubting herself experiencing impostor syndrome.  She shared her experiences about this stepping into corporate America for the first time and this is a phenomenon that is common to a lot of people, mostly minorities and women. That is because it is about belonging. In the majority cis-white...

Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? If your answer is no, according to my guest on the podcast today, Arlyne Simon, that's ok. She still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up and she lives what she calls a multi-passionate life, as an inventor, biomedical engineer, an author, an entrepreneur and who knows what’s next? When she is not inventing or leading project teams developing medical diagnostic equipment, Arlyne is inspiring little girls into STEM careers...

On the podcast this past week, amongst the many things we touched on, my guest Yinka and I talked about her experiences with diversity in the industries she has worked in, or lack thereof including consulting, banking and tech. We  discussed in particular the situation at Wells Fargo that went viral a few months ago. The CEO of Wells Fargo was caught up in a scandal about his comments citing the lack of diversity in the upper ranks of the bank was because there were not enough people of color...