Ama Duncan
Corporate Trainer | Business Coach | Author | Speaker
Welcome to my blog! Here, I share valuable content on BUSINESS & MONEY to help new women in business to plan, execute and achieve their business goals.
4 MONEY MISTAKES STARTUPS SHOULD AVOID
Good day! I have a mentee who owns his own business which makes pretty good money. However, he blows his money as quickly as he earns it. In one of our conversations, I encouraged him to start keeping records of his income and expenses. I recommended the app I used and so he started. This
HOW TO FIND RESOURCES TO FUND YOUR BUSINESS
In 2017, while I was on the Mandela Washington Fellowship I visited several business hubs in Chicago. The idea of having a space where startup entrepreneurs could gather to learn and/or work from was so appealing. I had also benefited from a few hubs in Ghana – Hapaspace, Kumasi Hive, Impact Hub, etc. As someone
PRACTICAL WAYS WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS CAN MAKE IT EASY TO BE SUPPORTED
PRACTICAL WAYS WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS CAN SUPPORT EACH OTHER
4 years ago, I heard Tom Bilyeu say ‘Community is the new currency’, and totally agreed with him. At the time, I was on the Mandela Washington Fellowship studying at Kellog’s Business School, Northwestern University. How did I get there? The answer is a long story but the short version is that God has blessed
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT IDEAS TO HELP YOU SELL MORE
If you’ve heard my entrepreneurial journey before, then you know I didn’t have business in mind when I started The Fabulous Woman Network. It was out of a pure passion to tell stories about women, to celebrate them. Well, the other personal reason was to hone my writing skills so I could write a book.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR BRAND USING SOCIAL MEDIA
The trigger… Let me start this by sharing a bit of my journey to creating The Fabulous Woman Network brand using social media. About 6 years ago, I had been in corporate Ghana for 10 years. I loved strategizing and conducting training as the Learning and Development Manager for my company. However, after doing the
My Story
Dealing with low self-esteem
I was born in Sekondi to a nurse and a farmer. When I was about 5 years, we moved to Komenda, a small town in the Central Region of Ghana. Even though I was one of the best students in primary school, I always felt ‘little’ when we travelled to cities like Cape Coast, Accra and Takoradi.
I felt everyone there was more beautiful, more intelligent, spoke better English and was generally better than me. I had a similar experience in secondary school, always looking down on myself and feeling I was not good enough. Oh, how I wished I were an ‘Accra girl’ because I thought they were so cool! Yet, when my family finally moved to Accra, I still didn’t feel cool. On top of this, I didn’t even have a boyfriend! If only I could get a boyfriend, then I will be cool like the other girls… I thought.
In University, I met some really wonderful friends, some of whom were from ‘rich’ families and I thought being friends with them will make me feel cool. I didn’t. I had the opportunity to start travelling abroad, and I was certain that when I returned, I most definitely will feel cool and belong in a ‘cool girls click’. Well, I did have cool friends before and after travelling; still, I didn’t feel like I was cool and ‘there’ yet. Oh, by the way, in my third year, I finally had a real boyfriend (now my husband). Not only that, but he also lived abroad, and hence, I occasionally went to visit him, which should have made me feel cool, or? Well, guess what, I still didn’t!
Even as a career woman working in an international four-star hotel as a manager, I looked down on myself. Once my General Manager called me into his office and asked why I never came asking for a pay raise and promotion when other managers always came to him with such requests. My response was ‘I want to earn it, not ask for it’. That was a half-truth. The real reason was that I felt I was not good enough to deserve more. I convinced myself that ‘I was not there yet’. I used to look at my friends who were lawyers, doctors or pursuing something big and wished I could do that too. I also wanted to be ‘somebody’.
To make matters worse, I was just getting pregnant and fat! After having my two kids, I thought getting an MBA will make me finally feel cool and ‘important’, yet I felt no different after completion. Even with a handsome husband and two adorable kids who doted on me, I thought I had very little value. Interestingly, at various stages in my life, I would meet people who were so impressed by and thought highly of me, yet I never saw what they saw. Mostly when people even complimented me, I doubted them and thought they were just trying to be nice.
How I found my ‘cool.’
Read the rest of my story in Yarns of inspiration II