“I was the youngest child in my family – an unexpected baby and inevitably quite spoilt. I wasn’t ambitious. In fact, I wasn’t very sure what I wanted to do once I grew up. Each week it would change. One week I was going to be a demon hunter a la Buffy and the next I was going to search for the truth out there by joining the FBI and following in the footsteps of Mulder and Scully. The one thing that remained constant was that at some point my white knight in shining armour was going to come and rescue me and we would live happily ever after. Even in school, everyone believed that I’d be the first one to get married.

I think I started working after college more as a means of earning money to do my own thing than as a conscious decision about a career. I still wasn’t ambitious and my parents worried about me so my father suggested I do an MBA. He felt that not only would it add to my resume but also would increase my confidence. He wasn’t wrong.

I started getting job offers even before I finished the MBA. At first, I was scared of interviews but I soon realised that these people did indeed see something worthwhile in me and my confidence in myself increased. I eventually started working in the liquor industry and the first seeds of ambition were finally planted in me. I started working harder than I ever had before, felt more involved in my work and tried to make sure I exceeded expectations whenever I could.

After a few years I got married. It was a love marriage and one would have expected that my career would take a backseat to marriage and family. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, almost from the beginning my marriage was troubled and slowly I found that the confidence I lost as my marriage started to fall apart, came back when I did better at work. Without even realising it I had finally become ambitious.

Today, I’m proud of not only having gotten to where I am but having done so on my own. My father is an influential man and could and would have used his connections to get me jobs I wanted if I’d asked him to. I haven’t however, and I think he respects me even more because of that. I know I respect myself a lot more than I did when I first started out on this journey.”