As part of my ongoing series of interviews with UAE-based entrepreneurs, I met with Laura this morning. Her story is inspiring because she gave up being a part of a thriving family business to travel on a path less traveled!

Armed with a degree in Business from Bucharest, Romania she came to Abu Dhabi and started her career with Etihad as a cabin crew. She traveled the world and when she had enough of it, her life took a turn for the better. She got an opportunity to work in the real estate industry when real estate was booming in Abu Dhabi. She was a top performer and consistently exceeded the sales targets and grew to become the sales manager.

She was soon headhunted to work in a leading financial institution in the region. Here she worked on numerous projects in a wide range of areas such as strategy, sales, and business development, digitization, learning and development, client contact centre, regulatory & compliance.

After mentoring others for more than a decade, Laura decided it is time for her to give back to the community and use her life’s learnings to start her career coaching program.

Laura trained for six months at the Neuroscience Leadership Institute in UAE and did her MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School in Dubai, amongst other certifications over the years. With these certifications to back her, she is now fully involved in growing her coaching career and help others reach their potential.

Laura’s moment of truth came when she received this awesome testimonial from her client, “I completely changed my view over my career and goals and where I want to be in my professional life. With your help in less than three months I got clarity, transformed my mindset, improved my life, and got a new job in a field I always dreamed to work in”

The coaching and training space in UAE is crowded. I asked Laura what made her stand out. She replied, “Guided by one of my core values – continuous learning, I believe we need to improve continuously, as individuals, teams, and departments and I continuously seek new learning opportunities and ways to optimize my clients’ performance. Further, I believe collaboration is one of the key differentiators, and I often collaborate with industry professionals to bring the best results and opportunities for those I mentor and coach”

Laura is helping business executives who are overwhelmed with their current occupations to define their purpose, find clarity of thought and identify new opportunities for growth.

I also asked Laura about her future plans. She is presently working on launching a series of self-development products that will complement her current training methods.

Laura has achieved early success and she has only just got started!

Penned by Sharad Agarwal