Meet Sahar Andrade, MB.BCh—Founder of Sahar Consulting, an avid leader and success coach whose immense contribution helped many business personalities in various business sectors. Her unique ideologies and methods helped her achieve many milestones in her pathway, paving a successful stature for her company.
With the support and help of her husband, Sahar founded Sahar Consulting, LLC in the year 2011 and Reinvent Yourself to Greatness in 2018. She states that the connection between the two companies is “Leadership” while the first company is set to help develop Executive leadership skills especially the soft skills, the second helps develop “Personal Leadership” and coaching to become a better version of you either in your professional or personal life.
Her main focus in leadership is “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, which entails emotional intelligence, unconscious bias, positive thinking, higher productivity, effective communication and building diverse teams. She was named as “One of the Nation’s Authorities” on the subject of Diversity in the workplace by the “LA Business Journal”.
She offers “entrepreneurship full academy training” for one of the cities in Los Angeles, the program received “Congressional Recognition”.
Into the shoes of Sahar
Sahar grew up as the daughter of a diplomat, and got used to the idea of change. It was not until later did she realize that she grew up reinventing herself with every move. When she saw the joy that reinventing herself could bring, she finally found her purpose to bring those same exact tools to others.
Being in born in a male-dominated society, she always wanted to prove herself as a professional and successful woman. She went to college and graduated with degrees in Internal Medicine and Surgery, minor in Psychiatry (never practiced Medicine). Since she was a little girl, she wanted to become a Medical Doctor to make her parents proud and earn the respect of a society which did not always hold women in high regard.
But that desire to make her parents proud came at the cost of her own happiness. She states that she hated her intern shifts at the hospital. She felt stuck and could not bear the idea that this was what the rest of her life would look like. After some intense soul-searching, she decided to change her path and pursue marketing for international airlines with the blessing of her father.
At the age of 21 years old, she moved to Los Angeles to immerse herself once again in a new place, a new life, and a new culture. And, the change did not end there. Throughout that process of reinventing herself, she changed industries three times in the next fourteen years.
As she excelled in her international marketing career, she opened new offices for major corporations around the world. She studied local cultures, laws, and human relations; she also trained hundreds of employees and consulted on huge international projects as “Project
Manager”. She states that they call her “Fear whisperer” and many say that she has the heart to bring out your inner gift of genius and purpose where to become your better version of yourself.
Solutions to Rely on
She states that her solutions vary from training workshops, to virtual webinars, to seminars, to Public speaking, individual coaching, executive coaching and group coaching. She is very active on social media, and also offers written content, visual content and auditory content based on the preference of her audience. For example, for her corporate clients she is on LinkedIn, for her free lancers and individual professionals she is on Instagram and Twitter.
She always make sure that her content offer value to her target audience hence the importance of niching the audience properly so the message will not fall on deaf ears. “Understanding that it is not about me or my services, but it is about how to serve my audience the way they want to be served. My education and experience in multi-cultural environment help me navigate the field of branding and marketing as 80% is based on psychology and how to create genuine emotional engagement,” Sahar .
Lessons worth Learning
Being bullied when I was a child as always being the new kid on the blog, moving from one country to the other and being overweight did not help.
Being bullied when Sahar was a child never actually break her but in the contrary it made her stronger to believe in herself and accept herself with all her imperfections throughout the years.
Through quoting, “mostly how to be the voice of those that do not have one and stand up for the weak till they get their strength back and empower them to achieve their dreams,” Sahar states that seeing how women are treated all over the world made her become a fierce advocate of women, impacting them and raising their profile, adjusting their crowns and propel them forward. “ We can all RISE together,” she adds. She is also a huge advocate of the LGBTQ+ community, Gender Diversity, taking care and embracing our trans and gender diverse communities.
The biggest event that shaped her was the passing of her Baby Sister a mother of two at the age of 39 from Cancer. She fought every single day to stay with her boys so they will remember her, when she died she said “I didn’t give up my body gave up on me.” The concern for Sahar is that she was fighting with her when she passed away and she hadn’t seen her for more than a year.
The guilt stayed with her for over a year and taught her that we all have to learn not only to forgive others but to forgive ourselves as well and not only forgive but forget as well they go hand in hand – forgetting is not ignoring or cancelling the event but learning from it and moving on. She also made her realize that every day we live is a gift that we need to appreciate and not take for granted.
Attributes worth Possessing
Sahar implies that the main attribute that a businesswoman should have is to be an “Authentic Servant Leader” without being genuine, you will not go far. As a servant leader you need to have empathy, and genuinely care about people not just for profit, but also you must help those that might not be able to reciprocate your help. It’s all about the principles. You cannot lead others unless you are able to lead, inspire, motivate yourself; be vulnerable and hold yourself accountable for everything you do.
A leader in Sahar’s book is someone that in touch with who they are, self-aware and accept themselves inside out, smart enough to have teams around them that balance the weaknesses, truthful, human, emotional intelligent, positive thinking and accepting of others no matter how different they are. It is about elevating people to where they are supposed to be even when they do not believe in themselves.
“Resilience and positive minds are crucial to success as well as believing that things will happen at the right time, that everything we go through the good, bad and ugly happens for a good reason even if we fail to see it at the time,” says Sahar.
Sahar Andrade | Founder | Sahar Consultin
