Set your goals. Find your path. Follow your dreams.

From an interview with Roxana Radescu, Personal Skills Coach

As we all work or look for work from home, our business and family lives overlap and intersect. Business becomes personal and personal becomes business. We need to look to the future, make connections and build our networks. Personal skills coach, Roxana Radulescu shares her personal approach to career, life and making dreams a reality.

My career goal is to grow my business while bringing positive change to my clients. I want to help teams work better together, and help people become the leaders that they want to be. I want to grow more on consulting startups and help them grow their teams. I want to be recognized for my expertise in training and development related to communication and leadership and in creating happy and healthy teams – all across Canada.

If you’re starting a business, or even when you’re applying for jobs or going to interviews, look at it as if you are marketing your own business, and advertising your personal brand: it changes your mindset.

What I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is that you’re going to talk to a thousand people, and more than half won’t need your services. They won’t need to work with you right then, but perhaps sometime in the future. But that doesn’t mean you should stop. It means that you go on to the next one and to the next one, and so on.

It’s the same thing when you apply for jobs. Maybe they don’t have a place for you or your particular set of skills right now. Don’t take it personally; it doesn’t mean anything about who you are or aren’t or anything you may be missing. Take each situation as a learning opportunity, and see if there is anything that you can improve for the next time. Start building a network as soon as possible, whether you’re looking for a job or building a business. It’s the same thing.

It’s important to reach out to as many potential clients (or employers) as you can and just keep putting yourself out there. That will get you more leads. I built relationships with people I had trained or coached, who turned out to be very good references for work. The “going solo” aspect of being an entrepreneur forces you to connect with a lot of people. My networking goal: talk to as many people as possible.

On social media, I tell people, if you want to follow me, I’m everywhere. I’m on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and SoundCloud. It’s important to find what works best for you and how you can promote yourself and how you can help.

“It’s not easy to find a job here, but once you set your mind to it, you can really go for that goal and make it happen.”

Being an entrepreneur taught me about identifying the skills I have and how to use them. Even when I talk to people about seasonal jobs, I do it from this perspective. I connect with people from a place of “What can I do to help you?” And then we start our discussion from there.

It also taught me that you need to give a lot to create meaningful connections. It helped me connect with people who needed my services. I volunteered a lot, and that brought opportunities because people saw what I could do, and then somebody said, “Yeah, this is what our company needs.”

“I couldn’t have done what I do now back in my home country. I learned that I can overcome more challenges than I ever imagined.”

Even when I felt bad about things that were happening in my life, I always felt I belonged here. I never felt like I was a foreigner or an immigrant. I just felt that I was hustling, and that was tough, but I never felt isolated here. I feel like I’ve been here all along. I love it.

I want my kids to find their paths. And I think that here they are already on their way. When I went to my first parent-teacher meetings and saw what they were learning in school, and saw just how happy they were, I was literally crying. I realized that this is the kind of place I always wanted my kids to grow up in. I knew we had made the right choice.

My Canada goal is to travel across the country and really experience everything that Canada is all about: The 100% Canadian experience. So, my husband and I are thinking of one day buying a trailer and just driving all over the place. My personal financial goal is to buy a house here and not be completely broke after. That’s our plan.

“Dreams happen during the night, but they don’t come true overnight.”

You know your dream, and you know where you want to go, but at the same time, take each day for what it has to offer. Take it step by step. The immigration journey starts with a dream of a better life, of a better experience – a better future for you and your family. Follow your dreams. You’ll find your path.