Our challenge as a 60 year old company has always been to continuously transform ourselves in a constantly changing and volatile world. In fact, the pandemic has been the best change agent in addressing this challenge since there is no such thing as long-term planning anymore - everything now is demanded in weeks if not in days. Over the course of 100 days you can imagine the challenges presented to big organizations like ourselves. For example, what do we do about the lives of the 3500 employees who are looking to us for support? We tend to look for the biggest breakthrough, the home run, or the magic ball that will get us rich or solve all our problems. But it’s never about that, it’s about all the small things that we can tackle and solve that brings us to the breakthroughs needed. Taking small, but calculated steps during this crisis has allowed us to pivot much faster, to be more flexible, to be more agile, to have the right frame of mind, and to have the grit and toughness that is needed to tackle adversity.

If you think about it, every great innovation known to man is rooted on change makers that ask exceptionally good questions which then lead to exceptionally innovative solutions. You can think of the likes of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Leonardo Da Vinci - they all ask great questions.

My next level breakthrough is about helping communities and organizations be more innovative by guiding them to ask the great questions that need answering or solving. Now more than ever, it’s time to shift out of this workshop mindset that most organizations have - where curiosity is stifled by simply downloading knowledge and not really knowing what to do with it - and shift instead to a practice mindset where they’re not just downloading but focusing on building to learn, evolving and staying curious, and constantly asking bolder questions that will transform the lives of others.

Because of the pandemic, everyone has been more stringent with their assets and their money - traditional banking theories are thrown out the window. But how do we continue to serve these customers? How do we continue our purpose in helping SMEs and MSMEs grow? How do we continue to serve them as a financial institution? Our breakthrough came in the form of a tech platform that grouped together communities so that we could study their transactions within the platform and then accurately lend based on the data pulled from these communities. Since the first lockdown, we received great insights and datapoints as we continuously evolved the platform by matching different industries and different touchpoints, while perfecting user experience and user journey. This breakthrough allowed us as a bank to extend financial services to customers we never thought were possible for us, and it also allowed our partners and collaborators to extend better service to their customers. This collaborative and innovative breakthrough allows us to help build a better future for the MSMEs and the communities as a whole.

For us to be well and whole, so we can shine the brightest, we need to be ignited by discovering our GPS.

Genius represents the culmination of our personal gifts that are uniquely ours. Genius points to purpose, which is driven by a pain that we are drawn to heal or a problem that we are drawn to solve that we hold close to our hearts because we or a loved one has experienced it. Genius and purpose is further manifested through service, or serving others. GPS is a personal navigation system that leads us to live our deepest truths and so fulfil our highest potential and greatest promise. And that’s what makes a person whole.

In this time of pandemic, we need to transform the different types of pain that we are all experiencing, along with our gifts, towards a shared mission. We cannot do it alone. The only way for us to innovate and create greater impact, is to open our hearts and minds to collaboration. The practice of meditation, mindfulness and self-love is badly needed nowadays, but it’s not enough because we need to care not only for ourselves but for others. We need each other not just to survive, but also to thrive.

In my past work, I’ve discovered the inherent value of execution - that ability to bring people, projects, processes, and systems from Point A to a desired Point B. My next level breakthrough starts from asking myself, how do I make this happen for a community consisting of diverse individuals, each with their own identity, and each coming from different organizations with their own mission and culture? How do we forge collaborative leadership? What environment and opportunities should be available to the individuals, to the team, to the organizations, and to the community? Within the community, what habits should we be able to form and how do we form and nurture them? Ultimately, how do we build a community with a bias towards action, a bias towards making things happen, to getting things done?

As a mental health advocate and a motivational speaker, I was able to do 1 talk a week, and 4-5 talks in a month prior to the pandemic. Mental health is personal as I have been diagnosed with bipolarism for over a decade now. As the medium for my talks has transitioned online, I’m still able to do my talks while also reaching out to more people. The chance to talk about mental health, especially during this pandemic, has also shown me that mindfulness and meditation help me focus more on the positives and the opportunities available, rather than the negatives. I see the pandemic as an opportunity to learn, to grow, to find new talents, and to be better. Thinking positively has led me to open up an online food delivery service after my restaurant of 19 years closed down due to the pandemic.

Even as an OFW for the last 20 years in the Middle East, I want to explore other areas like entrepreneurial and investment ventures. In the last three years, I created a startup that hosts workshops for kids. But the pandemic forced us to innovate and adapt by migrating these workshops online. We are currently in the process of launching a project that teaches kids how to have a business mindset, because I want kids to understand that they can have this mindset even at a very young age. We innovate by using unique tools and games such as board games to teach the kids, because our mantra for the kids is always Play, Learn, and Earn. And because any business venture here requires local partners, we are building a community at the same time.

My organization manipulates search results for companies here and abroad. Given the lockdowns, billboards and other traditional means aren’t pulling enough views anymore, but by God’s grace, we are still busy since people are primarily viewing our client’s websites. Our problem however, is that even if our clients expect us to work, they aren’t able to pay us because their finance teams cannot go to work. So we have a lot of receivables piling up and it’s become an urgent concern. Having hosted public speaking seminars and workshops before, I started an online teaching platform that is an ongoing work in progress. It’s one of the recent breakthroughs that I’ve had and it’s something I’ve been planning for a long time, but the lockdown gave me the opportunity to just throw all of the urgent out of the window and work on something that finally is important to me.