Soma Ghosh

 

“I think he knew he wouldn’t be around much longer. When he died, something changed in me.”

I could see a well-worn hint of sadness in her face as the daylight cast a pale glow into her front room window at her flat in Harrow, London.

“I just couldn’t understand the other kids around me,” she said into the silence. “I couldn’t understand why my dad had gone and their dads were still around.”

It’s been years since her father died, but Soma Ghosh still remembers him as the man who taught her to help others.

She showed me a small, faded photograph of a smiling child and a proud father.

“He really loved helping people and when he was at home he wasn’t able to do that. It was really hard but it’s made me who I am today, so I feel immensely proud that I keep on learning from somebody like my dad because his spirit’s around me and I know that.”

Soma Ghosh, 34, is a careers mentor who is of West Indian Bengali descent. I met her recently through Twitter and when I heard the kind of work Soma did, it struck a chord with me and I had to find out more.

Soma’s father travelled from India to live and work with the rest of the influx of immigrants from that part of the world, who came to the UK in hope of a better life.

He trained as a barrister, but a devastating accident left him paralysed and unable to help people, something he really enjoyed doing, and which Soma thinks she learnt from him.

Soma’s father died of a heart attack; a while after a fall gave him a degenerative brain disease.

Before he died, he threw her a big fifth birthday party.

Soma grew up with her mother and older sister in Essex after her dad died. She welcomed me into her marital home with a smile to talk about her commendable work in helping women gain career confidence. Her warm and bubbly personality shone through, despite her protestations that she was an introvert.

As I sit in her cosy and slightly cluttered room, I notice some of the religious and cultural trinkets on the bookshelf in the corner. I comment on how lovely they are.

“My husband bought them, and some are wedding presents.” Soma beams. Next to them there is a wedding picture of her and her husband.

“My husband really, really encouraged me to start a business and to go freelance. I was working with a life coach at the time and she encouraged me to work with women who were, not necessarily unhappy at work, but women who I could give careers advice to.”

It’s been two years since launching her own business, and Ghosh has been written about in The Guardian as well as appearing in Women’s Own magazine. I’m really interested in Soma, not least because she is an ethnic minority female who has had to go through the same cultural obstacles I have had to, to get to where I am now. And they are the very same ones that thousands of women face every day; some of whom she works with.

But it’s not just her business I want to get to grips with today. I’d like to know who the woman behind the mentor is; and what pushed her to attain the career happiness she now preaches to her clients.

Before starting her business, Soma was made redundant. This caused a lull in her confidence and self-esteem. “I realised that I’m not the only woman who is going through this.”

The issues around confidence and self-esteem are what Soma says a lot of women suffer from in their professional lives.

And her new job following her redundancy didn’t fit the bill; especially after the bullying she encountered there by a senior colleague.

“She humiliated me in front of a colleague, telling them everything I’d done wrong in my job. No one else was complaining about my work. I think the problem with workplace bullying, is that people don’t know how to handle it, because there isn’t a cut and dry definition – it’s how it makes the person feel.

image: data collected from cipd.co.uk, graphic produced via canva.com

“When somebody is niggling away at you every night, what would happen to me is I would come home and I’d be crying in bed. And you might be thinking that sounds extreme, but if it’s happening to you every week it adds up.

image: a screenshot taken from thecareerhappinessmentor.com

“I wasn’t telling me friends and family, I’d gone to my doctor, and my doctor could tell I was having anxiety and depression, but I didn’t want to see people. I didn’t want to go out of the house, I didn’t want to go to religious festivals I didn’t want to do anything. So that was when I knew, I needed to make a decision to change my life because it’s not healthy for me to be in that situation and I can’t let this bully dictate my life.”

That was almost eight years ago. Soma decided to set up her business in 2016. But these events were not the only ones that led her to make the leap of faith from a secure income to an uncertain future in business.

 

Soma now devotes her time to helping women build CV’s, LinkedIn networks and plan careers.

“I really, really believe that us as women – we don’t speak up for what we want. I saw this in my own career, when there was a promotion or a pay rise, and that’s not because I didn’t want it.

“I think what happened is, we’re so cultured into believing only men can go for it that we don’t do it. So I want to help those women who are ambitious.”

I asked Soma why she is helping women exclusively. “There are a lot of women I know that have been in the same industry for maybe five or six years and they’re seeing their younger counterparts get promoted.” She tells me.

“And they have this voice in their heads saying ‘why is that not me?’ But it’s not you because you’re not speaking up, you’re not having that discussion with your manager.”

And she also feels she can identify with other Asian women, who may have more obstacles they have to navigate. She speaks with a passion, and with her hands, as she emphasises why it’s important for women to break the mould.

“A lot of my clients when they come to me, especially Asian minorities, and even other cultural backgrounds, they have a lot more cultural pressure to get married, have babies, dress a certain way all those sorts of things.

“For me, it’s about helping all women, but if I’m able to have that little connection with them and when I speak about my dad and my mum, they really connect.”

Soma achieved her dreams through this adversity, and didn’t give up despite the pressures she faced as a South Asian woman. But I wanted to know whether the line between raising a family, which is traditional in many ethnicities, to having a career was blurring with every passing generation.

Soma’s mother was widowed young, and she was one of the reasons Soma is so strong minded. But Soma was also coerced to get married at the age of twenty-five.

“There is immense pressure to be married by a certain age, in some cultures it’s younger and in others it’s older. I think that women are definitely choosing between a career and a family, they’re prioritising one over the other.’

I asked Soma what she thinks the issues are that women have in general, and how they can address them when it comes to their careers. There is something unanswered which leaves a lot of them just stabbing in the dark.

“What people don’t realise is if you talk to yourself negatively, if you’re always saying ‘I’m not enough’ ‘I’m rubbish’, then what will happen is those thoughts will prophesise and it will turn into a perpetuating cycle.

“So it’s about helping them understand what the root is, what’s the cause? It is quite emotional, it’s quite psychological we do go quite deep.”

Soma has helped some of these women who are going through career and emotional blocks. She told me she has supported a client to take on a more senior role and empowered another to ask for a well-deserved promotion.

In helping women deal with their demons, I felt Soma was more of a counsellor than a mentor, and she agreed. “I had a client recently who I was working with for about a month, and there was something going on that was blocking her.

“I’m not a qualified counsellor, but it’s about making sure whether they need to offload on me a bit. In some situations, unfortunately, it’s really sad, and it makes me feel a bit sad that they don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

I then left Soma to her work. I felt a sense of achievement, in the quiet acknowledgment that Soma and I shared, and for all the other women out there; that we were finally speaking up for ourselves.

Because life is far too short to not go for that job you’ve always wanted. Forget holding back. Now is the time.

 

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