A call to self-love

Barbara Okeyo, 30, founded Restoration Experience Africa to find her purpose and to help women tap into their individuality and practise self-love. PHOTOS | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • I got to catch up with many friends and I was wowed by how they talked about their jobs with enthusiasm. I didn’t feel the same way about what I was doing and I made a decision right then that I would start doing the things that would fire me up. I knew I wanted to work with women, to inspire them, but I didn’t know exactly how I would do that.
  • To help set the ball rolling in the right direction, Barbara enrolled for a four-month entrepreneurship programme at Sinapis in 2014, where she learned about accounting, operating a business and marketing it. Moreover, being in the top 10 of a competition organised during her course earned her an additional six-month fellowship to help her solidify her business. Now she was ready to fly.
  • Some men have been attending the seminars too and so Barbara is thinking about organising programmes for men.

Have you ever felt as if something was missing in your life despite having a relatively good life? Yes, you’re good at what you do and you’re getting promotions, more responsibilities and all the acknowledgement that you rightfully deserve, but something still doesn’t add up? This was exactly how 30-year-old Barbara Okeyo felt not too long ago.

Despite having worked in the world of marketing and public relations for four years, she felt uninspired about the path her life had taken. She wanted to feel as if her life was purposeful, but her career path then did not feel like it.

Barbara had initially wanted to be a human rights lawyer, but she didn’t score the marks needed to qualify for the course, so she stumbled into design.

“A friend of a friend came from Canada and we exchanged some banter during a night out. The next day she called me and said that she wanted to set up a Trade-Not-Aid initiative in Nairobi and asked me to help her with it. We designed T-shirts with the slogan ‘Trade-Not-Aid.

“I felt like a human right’s campaigner and I also loved the fact that we were raising money for the women who made the T-shirts by promoting business rather than reliance on aid from donors from Western countries,” Barbara remembers.

The T-shirts also had pictures taken by children from Samburu printed on them and part of the proceeds from the sales went to educating these children. Barbara thrived in this environment and her life felt purposeful, but her parents had other ideas. They wanted her to join university without further delay.

“I had to find a university, a course I liked, apply and get accepted, all in a month. I couldn’t get what I wanted on such short notice, and that is how I ended up studying marketing and public relations. It was okay because marketing came to me naturally and it was something I had done before with the Trade-Not-Aid project,” she says.

RARE BREAKS

In December 2009, after completing her course, but just before graduation, she was called for an interview and started work as a sales and marketing executive in February the next year. She worked for two years before joining an advertising agency as a marketing and brand strategist. Later on, she venture into project consultancy, which saw her handling events that brought international music acts like Anthony Hamilton and Erykah Badu, and handling the Miss Kenya 2013 finals and Tusker Project Fame. The project consultancies didn’t leave her any time for herself. She was always pitching new business or creating concepts for events during the week, and overseeing the execution and doing reviews on weekends. Barbara was losing a grip on her life.

It was during one of her rare breaks, while attending a friend’s wedding that she got an epiphany.

“I got to catch up with many friends and I was wowed by how they talked about their jobs with enthusiasm. I didn’t feel the same way about what I was doing and I made a decision right then that I would start doing the things that would fire me up. I knew I wanted to work with women, to inspire them, but I didn’t know exactly how I would do that,” Barbara says.

After her break, Barbara quit her job even though she didn’t have a concrete plan for her next steps. However, she wondered if there were women like her out there who had been sold the dream, but still wondered ‘what next?’ Women who had been told to go to school, get a degree, then get a good job, get married, have kids and the happiness circle would be complete. Barbara asked around and found that there were many women who were looking for a place where they could drop the masks and facades and be themselves away from what society was telling them that they should be. And these women wanted to meet with likeminded peers in that space, and so Restoration Experience Africa was born. Barbara hosts customised workshops and events to promote a holistic restoration of the mind, body and soul for the urban African woman.

To help set the ball rolling in the right direction, Barbara enrolled for a four-month entrepreneurship programme at Sinapis in 2014, where she learned about accounting, operating a business and marketing it. Moreover, being in the top 10 of a competition organised during her course earned her an additional six-month fellowship to help her solidify her business. Now she was ready to fly.

To figure out topics for discussion at her seminars, she conducted a survey on what women would want to talk about instead of falling back on the same old tired topics discussed in most seminars of a similar nature.

“Some people are brought up in religious backgrounds that tell them you can’t live a certain lifestyle; sometimes you have degree-holders who want to become stay-at-home mums and they’re being scoffed at. These are the kinds of topics we talk about,” she explains.

Some men have been attending the seminars too and so Barbara is thinking about organising programmes for men.

Barbara hopes that her seminars will help women get in touch with and acknowledge their individuality and strive to leave the mark they were called to leave in the world.

“Losing my brother last year taught me that we are all unique. There is no one like you anywhere else, so it hurts me to hear people say that they are not special. We need to appreciate our individuality and practise self-love to thrive.”

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Barbara’s tips

  • Pick up lessons from where you are. I learnt how to run a business not just from signing up for formal training, but also as an employee watching my bosses at work.

  • Seek to work where you feel fired up and inspired. You need a sense of purpose to thrive.
  • Take on any challenges you meet head-on and facilitate the growth of your team by giving them challenges. My bosses loved to throw me in the deep end and to assure me that I was capable of handling the challenges I found there. They trusted me to handle various crises and as a result, I grew into a more effective employee and leader.