7/4/22 - Trusting God is a Great Adventure: Sheeba Philip, Akola

Intro: As a Christian working woman, you have many roles from your responsibility with family and friends to community and work. How do you connect all that you do with all that you are, and still have your faith shine through. It's a challenge, but you are up to it. The, sheWorks4Him, podcast it at the gathering place to empower Christian working women, to live out their calling at work.

By connecting them to God resources and each other through powerful faith stories from other working sisters in Christ. Welcome to sheWorks4Him.

Martha: You've tuned into, sheWorks4Him, where we connect Christian, working women to God resources and one another. We are your cohost today. Martha Brangenberg and Catherine Gates.

And I am so excited. Every time we get to share new resources that are out there for the Christian working women. And, you know, we have so many resources available to us that God is just pouring into people's lives each and every day, women that are writing books, women that are. Doing podcasts that are leading in some way, connecting their faith and work and putting a voice to that conversation.

And today I wanna just highlight the BOLDLY conference that is coming up in October, and you can go to BOLDLY conference.com. That is where you can find all the information to register. Catherine, what's the date of that again?

Catherine: It is Friday, october 21st.

Martha: Awesome. And on location in Dallas, Texas, and virtually all around the world, anywhere you happen to be. You can be a part of that gathering of Christian working women, having the conversation about faith and work. And just to remind you, we have a YouTube channel, sheWorks4Him. Great place to connect with us there and watch these interviews, cuz I know there's so much expression that doesn't necessarily always come across in our voices. But we are grateful for you being here today. Thank you for spending a little time with us having to chat with friends. Catherine?

Catherine: Thanks, Martha. Many of us have a vision for what we want our career to look like. When we first start out, we set goals. We create a plan. We work hard to achieve those goals.

Sometimes that vision is influenced by family or the culture in which we were raised. Other times we're driven by a passion for a particular type of work, or maybe to live a particular lifestyle. But God has a way of changing our heart and messing with our plans to achieve the purpose he has for each of us.

Sheeba. Philip is CEO of Akola, a globally inspired jewelry brand that was built to champion women around the world and empower them to get out of poverty so they can provide for themselves and their families. Sheeba started her career as a chemical engineer, working on construction sites for Merck. God moved in her heart on more than one occasion at times, leaving her in what felt like the wilderness Sheebas story demonstrates that God doesn't waste a thing. Sheeba, welcome to. sheWorks4Him.

Thank you, Catherine. I'm so excited

Sheeba Philip: to be here.

Catherine: It's so good to have you, and we definitely want to hear about how you connect your faith to your work. But first, can you tell us how you became a follower of Jesus?

Sheeba Philip: Gosh, I feel like I've been following Jesus for many, many years. I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were both born in India and my grandfathers on both sides of my parents. You know, they're, they're both my father. Well, my father and my mother, their parents were both pioneering pastors in India. So I come from a strong lineage of, you know, apostolic church leaders and, and church planners.

But really for me, my personal walk with the Lord didn't get solidified probably till I was in college. And after college started my professional life and, and then going on to business school. So I've always known Jesus since I was a child being raised in my home, accepted the Lord as that personal savior, probably on the, around the age of 14 or 15, but I can't really say Jesus had my entire life under his control until probably in my mid to late twenties.

Catherine: So how did your decision to follow Jesus influence your career choices at that point? And, and even the way maybe you approach your work?

Sheeba Philip: You know, it's been a journey and I think that probably up to the point of me being in business, My faith was a compartment. It was part of my life. It wasn't my entire life and it definitely was not influencing the way I showed up professionally in the workplace. As a leader. When I went to Harvard business school, I was invited to lead the inner varsity Christian fellowship on campus. And this was the first time ever in my life that I was asked to publicly profess my faith in Christ and talk about how my faith is influencing my life.

My, my work, my profession, my academics in grad school. And this was a big, challenging thing for me, because particularly at Harvard business school, noone's talking about Jesus. Everyone's talking about money and power and influence. And so I had to force myself to really think about it. Am I, am I willing to really get out there and talk about Jesus?

Am I willing to think through how this would influence the way I work and show up? So that began a real, began a real introspective journey of my faith and truly how I think about leadership and work. So coming out of business school, I worked in New York city for about 10 years. I joined Redeemer Presbyterian, the church founded by Tim Keller.

I led the faith and work ministry for them. I now currently serve on Tim's board for his organization called Redeemer city to city, which plants churches around the world. But when I was in my twenties, in New York, out of business school, I was really wrestling with this idea of faith and work.

So I, I got to the point where faith was now part of my full life. I had already gone through the experience of sharing my faith in business school, but now I'm in New York. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate my faith and my work. And that whole process really was cultivated when I was with a body of believers, all professionals, all wrestling with the same thing at Redeemer.

So for me, that was really the pivotal time. It was my time in New York, where I really came to this idea that my work is not a thing that can be compartmentalized for my faith. It's all integrated and has to come together through a daily walk with Jesus Christ.

Catherine: Beautiful.

Martha: You know, it's amazing that you can, you know, you watch that journey of how God has taught you things and brought different people or organizations into your life that help you to see how to live that out. One of the things that I know as a Christian working woman, I learned so much from other people's experiences. So can you share with me, like, what has been one of your biggest struggles as a Christian working woman and how have you dealt with it? So that maybe we can learn something.

Sheeba Philip: Well, I will say I'm still dealing with this particular challenge, but it was something I was reflecting on actually today, as I was preparing for this podcast interview and the, the, the idea that God was reminding me about was this idea of leading with love.

And I think as women, we are very relational people. But oftentimes when we're in a work situation, the loving side of us, the relational side of us kind of falls apart and it's just about business. And for me, that was very much the case. I was a wonderful friend, a wonderful daughter you know, sister-in-law, aunts.

But when I would come into work that empathetic, loving kind self would sometimes go away because I felt the pressure of being an excellent executive at work. And I've been reflecting a lot in the scriptures in first Corinthians 13 around what does it mean to love? It talks about love being patient love, being kind, love lacking, or lacking irritability, having self-control and gentleness.

And we think about that often is how we love our spouse or our children or our friends. But it is also how we lead. We have to lead with love and we have to express that patience and gentleness and that kindness with our staff and our employees, our teammates at work. So for me, the biggest challenge has been leading with love.

Leading with excellence has always been easy for me. I think. Leading with, you know, intelligence and work ethic and determination is things God has innately gifted me with mm-hmm , but leading with love with that idea of I'm serving and loving the people I'm leading is something that has been a challenge for me.

And I've grown very much so since when I first started leading teams and people, but I would say I'm, I haven't arrived. And I'm still working through that process. But it's something that I feel has been a beautiful process with the Lord.

Catherine: It's not something that's often modeled, right? And so we really do have to have to learn it and, and hopefully be examples to one another right. In, in the workplace. But when you're loving others, you really are creating that opportunity for them to shine as well. Well, we have to take a quick break. You're listening to, sheWorks4Him with your host, Martha Brangenberg and Catherine Gates. And we will be right back to hear more from Sheeba philip.

Break: Did you know that God has a calling on your life? It's true. He's called you to bring Jesus to the world. For some that may look like a pulpit or a foreign mission field, but for most of us, it looks like a construction site, a cubicle, a hospital, or a classroom, wherever it is that you work, live volunteering and invest.

That is your mission field. To learn more about integrating your faith into your work in retirement, check out our books. iWork4Him. sheWorks4Him and iRetire4Him by going to iWork4Him.com/bookstore.

Catherine: Welcome back to, sheWorks4Him with Martha Brangenberg and, and Catherine Gates. And we are talking to Sheeba Philip and I love where we left off about just loving, really learning to love people at work. and that's agape love, right? That, that, that is that unconditional love it's it's, which is very different from what we often think about in terms of love, but it's really expressing, like you said, Sheeba, that, that patience, that kindness, thatempathy, really taking time to get to know people and understand them.

Sheeba Philip: Right.

Catherine: And so you know, it's interesting Sheeba, I know that you started your career as a chemical engineer and now you're the CEO of a jewelry company with a social justice mission.

Sheeba Philip: Who would've thought?

Catherine: I mean, sure. What did that journey look like?

Sheeba Philip: That is a great question. And I will tell you, I am a perfect example of this idea of living an adventure with God that you're, you're never gonna ever plan or anticipate where you're gonna be 20 years from now. And I am a living testimony of that. You know, when I came out of college, I had a passion for science and math, and I tell people, you know, this is kind of a funny story, but when you grow up Indian, Indian American, as I, I am, or I did, the emphasis always is you either become a doctor or you become an engineer.

You work in science and math. So I was good at science and math. I felt the family pressure of living their dream and becoming an engineer. And so I became an engineer. I worked for Merck. And, you know, I would say even at my earliest age, at 22, starting my career, God put in my heart this very intentional desire to live with purpose and have a career of purpose and of significance.

Mm. It was always something that kind of just drove my decisions. And I remember being at Merck and thinking to myself, gosh, I love engineering. I like what I'm doing. I'm constructing these manufacturing facilities for, you know, the production of big scaled drugs, but why are we doing it? What, what's the reason why this drug is going to market?

You know, and, and, and why is this so important for the company? So I realized that what I loved was being at the table, making those critical business decisions. And for me, I realized then and there that being an engineer was gonna be very rewarding, but what would be so life giving for me would be being at the table as leader, driving companies at the, at the highest level, when they're making decisions.

And so that's what made me go to business school. So I, I went to Harvard business school and yet again, thought I was, I had a certain path. I thought I was gonna come out and do consulting which is what most people do, consulting or investment banking. I decided that I really wanted to not only be at the decision making table, but I wanted to really build a brand.

I love this idea of starting with an idea of a product and seeing it all the way, come to life on the shelf. And so I decided to go to Kraft foods and work in brand management, running large consumer brands for them. So brands, you probably have eaten at one point in your life, like Oreo cookies or Ritz crackers.

And so I ran those businesses and loved it. But if you remember what I said, said in the beginning, I was always driven by purpose and I felt after 10 years of being at Kraft, you know, I love what I'm doing, but I, I really want to be more impactful with my work and long story short, I made the decision, pretty radical decision at that time.

Cause I was on the trajectory on the peak of my career at Kraft. To leave Kraft and join international justice mission to lead the fight against modern day slavery to take all the brand experience that I had gotten at Kraft and bring it to IJM, to rebuild their brand and redesign their whole marketing and communication strategy.

So I worked for IJM for two years and loved what I did. I felt the Lord so much in my heart. But I felt that itch to get back into business and be at that table making big decisions. And so, you know, it is all a miracle, but the Lord led me to JC penny in retail. Where I stepped into the turnaround team for JC penny to help reinvent their brand.

So I went from consumer products, food and beverage Oreo cookies to fighting modern day human trafficking to now working for a hundred year old retailer in Dallas, trying to reinvent their brand and the, the arc of all of those experiences was I loved building brands. I loved brands with purpose, and I wanted to be really redemptive in the type of marketing work I was doing.

So whether I was making someone twist and dunk a cookie, which you might think: what's redemptive about that? But it's really connecting moms with their children and, and bringing child like delight to families. All the way to JC penny, which was helping the working middle class, mom stretch her dollar and buy things at value.

And to me, that's very redemptive, and that's something that I think that is very Christlike and I would think about retail. So all those experiences kind of led me to JC penny, but as everyone knows, JC Penny has had struggles. And after a very kind of tough run at trying to reinvent the brand I decided to take a package and leave the company because the company was going through yet another restructuring and transition.

And that marked you know, a time as you guys said in my intro a time of being in the wilderness and thinking through what I was gonna do next. And I said, I remember praying before the Lord and saying, God, how do you connect these experiences? I went from harvard business school, running Oreo cookies to fighting human trafficking across around the world to reinventing a hundred year old retailer to now what? These experiences feel so disconnected, how could they possibly come together?

And that began a journey of about two years of waiting on God. I was consulting. I was doing a lot of other things and that led me to Akola. And Akola is, as you mentioned, a fashion jewelry brand. It's in retail, it's global. It is working and fighting a social injustice, which is poverty. And so if you think about it, all these experiences that I had, Oreo IJM, you know, JC penny, all of these things were uniquely preparing me for a very, very special assignment, which was building this luxury jewelry brand that was changing the lives of women in Uganda.

So I joined the, that company after a 20 year journey of these different experiences, I never thought I would join a startup. Never thought I'd be doing a retail startup. Never thought I'd be a CEO. I never thought I would be really focused on poverty in Africa as kind of the real driver of my purpose in my work. So if you'd asked me when I was 22, what I'd be doing, I would not be saying being the CEO of an early stage retail startup, working in Africa.

Martha: You know, but the beautiful thing about that is that God does not waste any of that time, that, and that experience and the, whether they were hardships or victories, everything along your, a career, you just made it, you know, you showed us how he lined it up for you. He gave you those experiences for such a time as this. And I think that that's really the key for all of us to be really focusing on is the fact that. We could never have anticipated. We don't know what 10 years, five years, even tomorrow might hold.

But walking in that obedience gave you the experiences you had so that you're able to do now, what it is that God has you doing, I wanna really dig into that more, but we're gonna take a quick break, Sheeba. And when we come back, we can hear more of what God's doing through the work that he has you in right now. We'll be right back with more with sheWorks4Him.

Break: Hey listeners. One of the huge projects Martha and I have been working on for years is making it easy for every workplace believer to find all the voices speaking, encouragement, and equipping into the faith and work movement. Presenting the Awaken Podcast Network online at awakenpodcastnetwork.com with over 130 different podcast voices speaking truth into you, the workplace believer. Including over 30 podcasts, dedicated to Christian working women! Go online to AwakenPodcastNetwork.com. AwakenPodcastNetwork.com.

Catherine: Welcome back to, sheWorks4Him where we're talking to Sheeba, Philip and listeners. I want you to know that you can hear a lot more from Sheeba Philip, because I know this, this is going way too fast.

There's so much more to cover, but you can hear more for, from her on what it looks like to experience breakthrough at the BOLDLY conference, a faith and work conference by women for women, which is happening Friday, October 21st in Dallas, live and livestream anywhere in the world. And you can learn more about that at BOLDLYconference.com.

So Sheeba, what an amazing journey that really God has taken you on. I'd love to, for you to share with our listeners, what, what has God taught you through this process? What have you learned?

Sheeba Philip: Gosh, I think the, the thing I would say is the most important, less lesson is that God can be trusted. He is worthy of our trust.

And for me, that's been a journey with every kind of radical invitation to take a step of faith and move into a place where it relied completely on God. Whether it was okay, I'm gonna take a pay cut and take a job that is so different from the executive career that I had a Kraft. If it's coming off of a time of rest with JC penny and now stepping into an early stage startup, which I have never done before.

What I have found is that when you say yes to God, And when you embrace the fact and fully believe the fact that he is faithful, his character is faithfulness. He is worthy of your, of our trust is when you have this courage and this excitement to really have an adventurous career with the Lord. I don't think I would've ever made the steps I would've made had I not experienced his faithfulness day in and day out throughout my career.

And as I look into the future, I don't know where I'll be, you know, past Akola. Just like, I didn't know where I'd be five years ago, but what I do know is that he's faithful and that he's worthy of my trust. And so it's made me feel way more at peace and excited about the next assignment.

It's allowed me to let go of the criteria or the need for it to fit a certain box, because I know that if he's worthy of my trust, he's gonna do something far beyond what I could expect. He's gonna give me the skills and the resources to do something that is requiring more than I can give. And so it has allowed me to kind of keep an open hand out when it comes to my career. So to me, the biggest lesson is just understanding that he is worthy of our trust. He's he is faithful and that's given me the boldness to step out and to step out of my career.

Catherine: Mm. So, and he, he cares about our work. He is working in it and he is fulfilling purposes through it. So what I'm hearing is just yield to the Lord, right? Like surrender it to, to him. We don't need to control the whole thing.

Sheeba Philip: That's exactly right.

Martha: You know, so one of the things we talk about on sheWorks4Him is connecting each of, you know, our Christian working women to God resources and one another.

As we hear about what Akola stands for and the heart behind it, as you lead this company, we are women that wanna get behind organizations like that. How can we become a good customer of akola or so, you know, be engaged in some way? Is there a way? Tell me about the retail side of it.

Sheeba Philip: Yeah. And I, you know, I didn't get a chance to really share that. I'm glad you raised that, Martha. You know, Akola means she worked and it's, we're a fashion jewelry brand. You can find us on our website which is ww.akola.co or Instagram. You can follow us at Akola jewelry. But the power of the product is it's a beautiful jewelry, but it's all handKrafted by very marginalized women.

Martha: If you're on YouTube, you're watching Catherine show everybody her beautiful earrings that she has on today.

Sheeba Philip: Wow. And there's a beautiful bracelet we actually have on our website, which is our best seller, which is the unlock it bracelet. It's gorgeous. It represents the beauty inside every woman.

There's six keys which rep represents the beauty that God has given women, whether it's grace or glow or hope or joy or peace. Each of those words are represented by a woman in Uganda that represents that hope, that joy, that glow. When you wear the bracelet, you're connecting and honoring this woman, who's given her skills and her artistry to make this bracelet.

You're also honoring yourself and celebrating what you carry inside. And if you give it to somebody you're honoring that woman and letting her know she's got a hope and a joy that God's given her. So to me, yeah, wearing an unlocked bracelet would be a great way of honoring the women of, of, of, of Akola and Uganda.

And also just representing this idea that when women give their gifts and purposes to an one another, we can lift an entire community of women up and we can all realize our full potential in Christ.

Martha: Amen. Thank you for that. We'll put the, the website in the show notes for all the listeners that are driving and going I'm not gonna remember that. But Akola.co. And I just love that. I know that our dollars vote and our dollars have a, we have a choice what to do with them. And if we can do something that, that pays back and pays forward all at the same time, what a beautiful place to be. So thank you for sharing that. Catherine, why don't you just close us out?

Catherine: Yeah, it really is. Good conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us, Sheeba. We really appreciate your time and your wisdom and sharing your story. We thank you so much.

Sheeba Philip: Thank you. I wish we had two hours. I really enjoyed this conversation and if you decide to be at the conference in October, I hope everybody comes. I know it's gonna be an amazing time.

Catherine: Yes, absolutely. But you've been listening to, sheWorks4Him with your host, Martha Brangenberg and Catherine Gates. We are Christian working women, helping other Christian working women to live out their calling at work, as sheWorks4Him!

Outro: As Christian women, we have many roles. From daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother to analyst, accountant, executive or educator. Is it possible to balance our roles at work and home in a way that honors God? The answer is yes. And our new book, sheWorks4Him will help show you how.

Written to celebrate, encourage and equip women in the workforce. sheWorks4Him. Discusses the diverse experiences of today's Christian working woman. Pick up a copy by going to iWork4Him.com/bookstore.

You've been listening to the, sheWorks4Him podcast with your host, Catherine Gates, Nadya Dickson, and Martha Brangenberg.

Please like us on Facebook and subscribe on YouTube under sheWorks4Him and to access any of the resources we mentioned on today's. See the show notes at sheworksforhim.com that's she works the number four, him.com. This podcast was created to empower you to live out your calling at works. So the world knows sheWorks4Him.