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Celebrating Your Whole Self and Redefining Success with Rashim Mogha, CEO of EWOW

How do you define success in a world that often tries to define it for you?

In this episode, Becca sits down with Rashim Mogha, the founder and CEO of eWOW—Empowered Women of the World—a platform that supports women in discovering, visualizing, and actualizing their success on their own terms.

Rashim shares her journey from escaping an arranged marriage in India to becoming a tech executive in the United States and eventually founding eWOW. She discusses the challenges women, particularly women of color, face in defining their success amidst societal expectations and professional pressures.

Rashim emphasizes the importance of embracing all aspects of one’s identity, both personally and professionally, to drive impact and fulfillment.

Redefining Success on Your Terms

Discover how societal pressures shape women's views of success and why it’s crucial to define it personally, a core principle of eWOW’s mission to empower women globally.

The Creation and Growth of eWOW

Rashim founded eWOW to help women and the LGBTQ+ community redefine success. The platform has expanded to include a popular podcast and coaching programs.

Navigating Identity in Leadership

Rashim shares how embracing her identity as a tech executive and woman of color has enhanced her impact in both business and life.

Integrating All Aspects of Your Identity

Understand the value of embracing all facets of your identity to create a more authentic and impactful presence across every area of life.

Key Moments You Won't Want to Miss:

Personal Journey: Hear about Rashim’s inspiring transition from escaping an arranged marriage in India to becoming a tech executive and founder of eWOW.
Redefining Success: Learn how Rashim challenges societal norms to help women and marginalized communities define success on their own terms.
The Birth of eWOW: Discover the motivations behind creating eWOW and how it evolved into a platform offering community support and coaching for diverse groups.
Balancing Identities: Rashim discusses the complexities of integrating her roles as a tech executive and entrepreneur, and the impact of embracing her identity as a woman of color in tech.
Empowerment Through Authenticity: Rashim and Becca emphasize the importance of integrating all aspects of your identity to foster a more genuine and impactful presence.
The Impact of Community: Explore how eWOW’s podcast and coaching programs have fostered a supportive environment for individuals to achieve their own definitions of success.

Empowering Thoughts to Take With You:

“We became our best advocates.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“The best way you become an advocate is knowledge.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
You have to find the right support system and the right person to listen.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“Fertility is about the couple as a collective.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“You are a team, when one goes down, you both go down and when one is struggling, you're both struggling, so you should both know.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“There are so many more options out there than we are being told.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“We are all different, so there's no one magic pill that's going to work for everybody.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“Learn when to pivot and when to pause.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“I want to let other people know you're not the only one and there's nothing wrong with you.” — Dr. Brenna Squires
“You really can put your health and outcomes into your own hands.” — Becca Powers
“Including your partner as part of the process might have a little bit more positive outcome for you.” — Becca Powers
“You don't need to share your sh*t with everybody.” — Becca Powers

About Rashim

Rashim is an influencer, a LinkedIn Top Voice, a thought leader, a best-selling author, a speaker, and a technology and business leader. Rashim is a prominent woman in tech evangelist and a frequent speaker at global conferences.

Her thoughts on leadership, innovation, and technology have appeared in Forbes, CNBC, MIT SMR, and Thrive Global. She has held leadership roles at companies like Skillsoft, VMware, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, and Automation Anywhere, where she launched innovative solutions to support over $2 billion in businesses.

Rashim also founded eWOW (empowered Woman of the World) – an intellectual platform that empowers leaders to discover, visualize, and actualize their success. Recognized by Business Chief USA as a woman to watch, Rashim received Women Empowerment: Game Changer, Woman of the Year, Women Tech, and Silicon Valley Woman of Influence awards and was inducted into the Alameda County Hall of Fame.

She was recognized as a Top 100 DEI leader by Mogul.

We Want to Hear From You!

How have you embraced your entire self and leveraged your unique strengths to overcome challenges?

We want to hear how you’ve recognized and utilized your skills to support each other, define success on your own terms, and achieve your goals.

Connect with us on social media or leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Share your stories of personal growth and empowerment, and inspire others with your journey.

Welcome to another episode of the empowered Half-Hour. I am so thrilled and honored to bring you today's guest Rashim Mogha. She is the founder and CEO of eWOW. I met her when she was putting on the last conference for eWOW, which was a global women's summit of empowerment. It was amazing. I got to be a speaker and it was delightful to be a part of it. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Becca. And you forgot to mention that you are also the winner of the top five empowered women of the world. So let's not forget that.

Yes. Thank you. I humbly accept. So I'm so happy to have you on this. podcast because we share a common theme in our name brand, which is empowerment.

This is The Empowered Half Hour. You have EWOW. I would love for you to tell the listeners a little bit about EWOW. What does it mean? What does it stand for? And then I want to hear the backstory of why you founded it.

The Birth of EWOW

EWOW is the Empowered Women of the World initiative. It was founded in 2018, and it's an intellectual platform that empowers women to discover, visualize, and actualize their success through community coaching, celebration, and connection. And that's what EWOW is all about. I think the most important word in this entire description, Becca, is "their success" because, so many times, as women and specifically women of color, our success is so defined by what society expects from us—how people want us to behave, whether we are married or not, whether we have kids or not, if we have a high-paying job, or if we have a good paycheck. But that’s not what our success really is. Everyone's definition of success is so different.

And I realized that through my career and my journey as well—how different my success was from what others were defining it as. So we wanted to make sure that comes through in the message and the values of the Empowered Women of the World initiative.

I love that—goosebumps as you were talking! Breaking societal norms is a passion of mine. While I’m not a woman of color, I am a woman in tech, and I’ve been in tech for almost 20 years. So, I’ve been a minority, and I’ve also dealt with societal labels. For example, when I was in college, I wasn’t expected to be a high-performance salesperson or an engineer in tech—I was expected to be a teacher because that’s what "good girls" do, right? I had to find my own path.

As I’ve grown in my own career and helped others grow in theirs, I’ve realized that you need to define what success looks like for you. So, you are speaking my language! I love it. I’d love to talk about that a little bit more.

What have you found to be a result of women defining success?

Yeah, and this is important, and it goes back to the backstory a little bit, Becca. I want to hear more about the backstory too.

Defining Success and Breaking Barriers

I moved to the United States in 2005, basically trying to escape an arranged marriage and coming to another country to figure out my dream life and define my life on my own terms. I was well-educated in technology, and when I got here, I thought life would be easy. Little did I know that I would face different kinds of struggles here.

Being a woman of color in technology was not easy. It was not easy in large corporations, where we still talk about diversity and bridging the gap. Fifteen years ago, the story was very, very different. I was paid less compared to my counterparts. I had a manager who would say to me, "See, notice the color of your skin, and that's why you're paid less," and say that to my face.

Oh my gosh. I know a little bit of your story, but I didn't know that.

That’s our story, and then I started speaking about it openly. It was in 2018 when I was speaking at Women Transforming Technology, an initiative between VMware and Stanford. After delivering my session, "Fast Track Your Leadership Career," a few women leaders approached me and asked if I had a book on the topic. I said no, but I would soon. That day, while driving back from Palo Alto to Livermore, I made frantic calls to all my friends who had published books, asking them for a publisher. Three months later, we published Fast Track Your Leadership Career. Eleven hours after its release, it was an Amazon bestseller in its category.

Then people started reaching out to me—not just women, but men and people from the LGBTQ+ community—asking how we could take this conversation forward. And that’s how eWOW was born.

Wow, I get goosebumps.

The product leader in me said, "I need to build out a platform first. I need to invest in a product that I can put out there." And the innovative, think-fast business leader in me said, "What can I do today?" That’s how we launched the eWOW podcast. The eWOW podcast now has a listenership in 60+ countries and is available on 11 platforms. That’s how it was born.

The impact I see every single day is incredible. Women leaders, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as male allies, all reach out to share how they’ve been impacted. I see men, driven by societal norms, feeling the pressure to be the provider, the person the family can look up to. That pressure is enormous. How do they define their success?

Over the years, it’s not just women who have benefited from this initiative and our coaching programs and virtual summits. It’s also male allies and the LGBTQ+ community. The impact has been anywhere from "You helped me realize that I was putting the wrong definition around my happiness," to "I grew 10X in the last five years because of how I’m now using my skills to grow my career."

The impact has been enormous. I receive emails every day. I just received an email from someone who said they were scared to speak in meetings about their contributions. After completing our Career Accelerator Program, they felt confident enough to talk to C-level execs about the program they were driving, and they were invited to a town hall to discuss the feature set. That is the impact we want to drive through the eWOW initiative.

I love that you’ve mentioned "impact" so many times because part of what I’ve learned, and it’s part of my brand too, is to elevate your impact. One of the things I’ve seen—and I hear that you not only teach this but have experienced it through your transformation—is that when you align with your definition of success and create a life and work that feel meaningful to your values, your impact increases tenfold.

When you're being your authentic self, you're no longer holding back. Now you bring in all your life experiences, your diversity of thought, and all the skills you have that play such a big role in creating inclusive products and services—all that to build something meaningful for our customers.

I love it so much. I can feel your passion coming through, which is awesome. So, I want to ask another question. We heard about your background and why you started the eWOW platform.

Now, I want to know what lessons or challenges you’ve learned in standing up for a platform that is highly impactful to others.

Embracing Your Full Identity as a Leader

The first conflict was whether to act as a product leader or a business leader. As you know, Becca, I've had a very successful career as a tech exec and business leader in companies like AWS, Oracle, VMware, and Skillsoft. I've driven multimillion-dollar initiatives.

When you start thinking about that, and coming from a SaaS world, it's very different from starting something of your own and figuring out how to start small and scale it. I've done it within large corporations or stable startups, but figuring out what my first product or offering would look like was a hard choice. The conversation between being a product leader versus a business leader is one you'll constantly have.

Another challenge was defining my niche. I am a woman of color in technology, but I'm also an author, public speaker, podcaster, YouTuber, and career coach. How do I define myself? That was a struggle I had before I could talk to other women about it.

The biggest thing for me was accepting that I'm much more than my job title and the industry I’m in. I wanted to bring that conversation to other women as well, emphasizing that you are so much more than your current company and job title. Those are variables that will keep changing. If you define yourself by your job title and company, your identity will always be in flux, and you'll be boxed in.

I faced a similar challenge. As I was redefining myself beyond being a salesperson in technology, I ended up blocking that piece. I pivoted so far that I felt I wasn’t owning all of myself. It’s so cool when you start on your own and develop your brand because you get the chance to set yourself free from previous definitions. I did a great job setting up everything else but kind of forgot the salesperson piece and had to bring that back in.

I did some research because people often reach out to me feeling conflicted about which identity to present on LinkedIn or how to describe themselves. I realized that successful CEOs never have this conflict. They are CEOs of their companies, serve on various boards, speak publicly, and write books. They embrace all their roles. So why do people who aren’t yet at the CEO level feel conflicted about leveraging other skill sets? They shouldn't.

I agree wholeheartedly. These CEOs bring all their experiences as board members, speakers, and authors back into their leadership. That’s what we should all be aiming for.

I love that you said that so much. Listeners, this is a really important conversation Rashim is having right now because, in The Empowered Half Hour, we have many working professionals trying to establish their "and." They have this and that, and the conflict arises about whether to keep them separate. I’ve learned that the more I align as one, like the CEO you're talking about, the more impact I have in my business. At Cisco and with Power's Peak Potential, I can do both. The more I align as one, the better the results everywhere.

And then I realized that with my brand value, I bring so much value to the company I work for. When you have your brand value, and you go into a sales conversation, clients already feel the power of your brand and want to associate with you. It was the same with me. When I was at Skillsoft leading their largest business unit, I already had a very established brand. The moment I walked in, CNBC wanted to talk to me, which brought credibility to my role and to the company I was working for at that time.

So, it’s important to embrace all of you when you start this journey towards your happiness. You’ll be surprised that the biggest hurdle in this process is your own mindset rather than anyone else's.

Thousand percent, and that's a really good pivot point to another question that I want to ask you. So now that you're where you're at, what's the current aha that's up to you?

The current aha is our Career Accelerator Program and the impact it is making right now. Being a leader and a hiring manager for over 20 years, and having led multi-hundred-million-dollar business units, I've often talked to HR teams about bringing in a leadership development program for my team. They would put out a set of 20, 25, or 30 competencies that someone needs to develop to be a leader.

That gets complicated. I've been part of highly impactful leadership programs where I went in for five days, surrounded by top performers from the organization. You go through the program, identify your red, blue, and green colors, or see where you are on the predictive index. There are many aha moments, but then you come back and put all that aside, saying, “This doesn’t go back to work. Let me do this and come back someday when I’m in an ideal situation.” That was the most frustrating part for me.

So, when we did our research at the Eval Initiative, we identified six competencies and six growth drivers that you need to master to be successful in any role at any level. They are storytelling, negotiating, influence, managing up, down, and across, managing your own emotions, and working on the mindset, skill set, and toolset aspects to address those. That is the aha moment. The testimonials we receive, and the impact it is making, are incredible.

When people come back and say, “Because of this program, I’m finally visible in my organization,” that’s the impact I’m talking about. When people say, “I am now able to have my promotion conversation confidently,” rather than realizing it was a bad decision to talk about a promotion within five minutes of a meeting, that has an impact on me. Those are the aha moments. Those are the stories, Becca, that give me pure joy.

I can tell; it's radiating through you. So I want to move on to another question. We talked a little bit earlier about mindset, which is one of the six principles available in your Career Accelerator.

But let's talk about mindset. If someone was able to define their own meaning of success and really get aligned to the truth of who they are and what they're doing or they're starting their brand or whatever that means to them. And they're doing both. How could it empower their life?

Own Your Whole Self and Harness Transferable Skills

I think the biggest piece is, and I have realized this throughout my personal experience, even though we often don’t articulate it: When you don’t have to hide a part of yourself when you can be yourself— isn’t it refreshing? It’s like, be you. Ah, freedom! Come in as you are, right? And you feel that confidence in yourself to show up.

You have seen me, Becca, how informal our virtual summits are. They’re informal because we want to remove the pressure and the tightness of showing up just as a professional. You are a human being first. Bring your whole self in. We are mothers. We are caretakers.

I get goosebumps as you say that. I couldn’t agree more.

We are business leaders. This is our whole self. There’s so much that intersects, the transferable skills. So that is the biggest piece: when you show up as you are, you can make an impact.

I realized that my products and services, not just within the Empowered Women of the World initiative but also in leading these multi-million-dollar businesses, improved because I can bring myself into the conversation. The way I look at transformational technologies like AI and cloud computing has changed because of that.

There’s something you said about transferable skills that I want to discuss further. I realized this when working with my women’s groups, especially those looking to switch careers or start their consulting or coaching businesses and build their brands. They often think they’re starting over. I love that you mentioned transferable skills because I want to permit the listeners to be their whole selves, as Rashim is saying. What you’ve done your entire career is transferable to whatever you’re doing next, and whatever you’re doing next is transferable to your current career.

I don’t know if you want to add anything else to that, but I felt like that was worth emphasizing because it’s so powerful.

The Impact of Identifying Your Strengths

It’s so funny you mention that, Becca. I was delivering a career workshop at a Fortune 100 company—though I won’t name the company. It was for leaders, and we had both men and women in the group. When we started talking about superpowers, one of the elements discussed in our book, and the skills that could be considered superpowers, I had men writing six pages about everything they’re good at.

I had a woman leader who was so competent and felt so comfortable, but she sat there blankly, looking at me, and said, “Rashim, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I’m just good at organizing birthday parties.” I was like, “Wow.” I said, “Do you realize that that coordination piece in bringing everybody together is such an important transferable skill? It works in your project management, in your program management efforts, in your product management, and in your sales roles, right? When you have to fill in the RFPs and get everybody coordinated to build those RFPs, right?”

I told her that doesn’t come easy to people and asked how she could not just think about it and uplevel herself from organizing birthday parties. She was good at a lot of things because she was one of the leaders in that group who was recommended for the program. It’s amazing to see how sometimes we shrink ourselves.

We don’t let ourselves build out a complete picture. That’s part of the mindset that we work on in this Career Accelerator program. I am so happy you brought it back to the Career Accelerator because I want to encourage the listeners that if you resonate with this episode, reach out to Rashim and her program. She’ll share more in a few minutes. I got to work with her behind the scenes, and I put my stamp of approval on it. The work that you do is just so important, so thank you for doing what you do.

We have about five minutes left, and I do want to ask you one more question because it’s one of my favorite questions to ask and it oozes through everyone pretty much in the episodes: Why are you passionate about what you do?

The Power of Giving Back and Building an Equitable World

Becca, I waited too long to give back. That's my biggest regret. I thought that I had to be at a certain level and I had to prove myself. I had to break various glass ceilings to be able to build that credibility around myself, to be able to give back.

Little did I realize that you can give back at every level where you are. You don't need to hold a title or a position at a company to be able to give back. And most importantly, you're breaking glass ceilings every single day at every layer.

So, that is what is my biggest regret, right? And that's what I look forward to every single day—how can I empower? I'm very impatient. I'm not willing to wait for another 110 years to see gender parity. By then, my daughter probably would be in her eighties or nineties. I do not want that. I have an audacious dream of seeing this world as an equitable world. And I know that each one of us has the power to come together and make it happen.

Oh my gosh, I got goosebumps. And I just, I feel your passion and I feel the meaning behind it. It gives you a sense of purpose. I love that you're getting to do what you love to do and making a difference in the process. Keep going, keep going.

Small, little steps in the right direction count. That's how I look at it. And that's a really good takeaway for the listeners too. I know sometimes when we're planning new things and we've got big lofty dreams, or we've got a big difference we want to make, we're seeing the outcome and it seems so overwhelming. But as Rashim said, just take a small step in that direction because there's a saying that I have: there's a beautiful unfolding. I would have never known how this all would unfold. It was impossible to know what my journey was going to look like. But with each step, a new piece unfolded. And just like for you, every time you took a step, a new piece unfolded, a new idea came, a new connection came, and then slowly you built this world that is powerful, meaningful, and difference-making. It's just really incredible.

What's the maximum that's going to happen if you take the risk? You're not going to be successful in what you want to do or successful. That's okay. You learn something in the process, right?

I love that. Yes, ma'am. So I know we're coming up on time. So let's take a second to share with the listeners how they can stay in touch with you.

Empowering Yourself and Others:

So the best way to stay in touch with me is to connect with me on LinkedIn. There's only one of Rashim on LinkedIn. I'm lucky up until now. So reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you are interested in the Career Accelerator program or want to explore more, go to our website, ewowglobal.com and you can find the details.

You can also find me on YouTube and TikTok. I will say I'm not very active on TikTok, but I try to do an okay job over there. That's funny. I'm working on it myself. I haven't mastered it yet. So, all right. Well, let's close this session out with an empowering statement for the listeners.

Keep empowering the world and keep empowering yourself.

I love it. Well, Rashim, thank you so much for being a guest. It was awesome to have you. Thanks, Becca. And I can't wait for you to come to our Evolve podcast and start talking about the awesome work that you're doing. I'm super excited about your book.

I can't wait to get my hands on the book and wishing you all the best. You're doing some amazing work. Thank you so much. We'll make a difference together.

Keep empowering the world.