Driven 4word
Driven 4word
'In God's economy, NOTHING is wasted.' - Sheeba Philip: Part 2
In the last episode, we met Sheeba Philip, and she talked through some of her top successes and what God showed her through those times. In this episode, we dive into two of the major setbacks Sheeba has experienced in her professional and personal journey. As Sheeba says in this episode, “in God’s economy, nothing is wasted,” which is especially true for the times when it feels like there’s no recovering from a failure.
This episode is sponsored by Vision Trust. Vision Trust is an organization that provides essential support in the areas of health, education, and spiritual development to children and adolescents living in poverty around the world. Vision Trust is brimming with female role models who are investing in the next generation of women. Their love is defiant. It stands strong against all odds. And yours can too. Join us in raising up confident young women that embrace their God-given talents to create a better future for us all. Learn more at Vision trust.org/welcome back to Driven Forward Influential Leaders Powered by God's will. I'm your host, Jordan Johnstone. In the last episode, we met Sheba Philip, and she talked us through some of her top successes and what God showed her through those times. In this episode, we're going to dive into two of the major setbacks Sheba has experienced in her professional and personal journey. As Sheba says in this episode, in God's economy, nothing is wasted, which is especially true for the times when it feels like there's no recovering from a failure. Listen now to the rest of our time with Sheva. Well, we ended the last episode talking about why God allows us to experience success. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Uh, so now what I would love to hear from you, uh, is kind of the same question, but it's about setbacks instead. So what do you think the purpose of setbacks is in our lives and in God's plan for our lives?
Speaker 2:Ooh, that's, it's, it's one I know is a hard topic to talk about, but I'll talk about it through a lens of a, a s a setback, I'm sorry, or a failure that I experienced, and I've talked about this before, but I can go a little bit deeper on this. You, I lost my job, um, many years ago when I was an executive at JC Penney. Up to that point, I had never had, frankly, I don't think I did, I can't remember, but in my recollection, never had a mediocre performance review. Um, always was promoted faster, you know, than I thought or, you know, anticipated. God just blessed me, blessed me, blessed me, blessed me in my work. I get to JC Penn. I am the vice President of marketing. I'm being asked to help transform, uh, this very iconic, uh, you know, brand. And from, for long story short, it did not go as well as I had hoped. And I was asked to step down from my role because they were gonna do a big restructuring of the executive team. And I gotta tell you, Jordan, that was a really tough moment receiving that news and going home. And that, uh, marked a almost two year journey in processing that failure and that setback with God. And what I learned at the, out the, at the core, and I'll go back to that question you asked me in the prior episode about who am I, God really had to tell me in through that failure. You are my daughter first. And for you are not a vice president of marketing or potential CMO or business strategist. Yes, those are things I am asking you to do in participation with me. It's why I've given you these giftings. But at the end of the day, your identity does not rest on what you do, how you perform. It rests on my son Jesus Christ. And, and what, what he has said on the cross for you. And through that, you're my daughter and I have a relationship with you. So that was probably the number one thing God had to get me, get my mind wrapped around was identity. Because up to that point, my identity was defined by my work and what I did. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And I remember those early days. I would go to a cocktail party and I was so used to people saying, you know, you have a glass of wine. And someone says, what do you do? Well, I'm vice president of marketing at JC Penn. I'm part of a turnaround team. I'm leading the brand. And I had my answer mm-hmm.<affirmative> for many, many cocktail parties. After that moment of losing my job, I did not know what to say. I didn't know what to say. What, what, well, who am I? What do I do? Blank. And so that was really hard. And God kept putting me in these moments of very, super uncomfortable, awkward because he was forcing me to let go of that identity and to help me to get to a place of humility to say, you know, it's okay to say I'm not doing anything right now. I'm in transition. You know? And that is, and that was really, really hard. So I think to me, that was the number one thing. Number one thing was my identity, um, I think, and, and the failure was, I think was, and the setback was for that. The other reason I think he gives setback and failure, and I can also tie back to JC Penney, is, you know, sometimes he wants to kind of halt us because we aren't depending on him or doing it through a selfish motivation, a selfish ambition or just heart posture that isn't right. And God's way of loving us is to put the breaks on it before we self-destruct. And I think for me, my work was becoming toxic. I was approaching work through a need of striving. I was burnt out. I was stressed. I was, I just was dysfunctional, frankly. And a lot of the way I was leading at JC Penney at those end days. And I think the Lord finally had to put the failure in, you know, have me lose my job to really understand that I wasn't a servant leader. I had lost why I'm doing what I'm doing. It wasn't coming out of a place of love. It wasn't coming out of a place of dependency on God and humility. And so, I hate to say it, God needed to do this to break my pride and to, and to really help me get to a place of kind of Christ Center leadership that I had lost, um, for a while. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, and you know, the, the cocktail party experience that you were talking about, that has to be very common nowadays. Oh yeah. You know, with, with everything that happened with the pandemic and just everything that's gone on with the workforce. I mean, there are probably quite a few people listening to this right now going, oh yeah, I know exactly what that feeling is. I know what you're talking about, but I love what you said. I mean, sometimes it's gotta get uncomfortable. Yes. You know, you, you have to go through that because you're just, like you said, stripping away all of these little things you've built up to present yourself in such a way that it's all about you, you know, and it's not about God anymore. Exactly. Right. And you know, he doesn't like that<laugh>. So unless you are willing to listen to, you know, cuz he won't just out of nowhere rip the rug out from underneath you. He's probably along the way, you know, whispered some things here and there, sprinkled some stuff and mm-hmm.<affirmative>, you know, sometimes we just get to a place where
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're so set in what we're doing that we don't see it. I, and you know,
Speaker 2:I also think, Jordan, I sorry to cut you off, but you, you triggered a thought failure. I think obviously failure allows you to, you know, rethink and revisit your identity in, in Christ. Yeah. It breaks you of some pride in probably dysfunctions that you've been operating in. Like for me that was my experience. But I think it also is a way to course correct and get you on the right path, not even course correct. Yeah. To the next step in your journey. Like I think about a cola and running a early stage venture and having incredible experience, um, building an early stage company. I never ever would've done that had I not lost my job at JC Penney. So, so much of setback is setting up of the next step. And if we look at it that way, it can be also incredibly exciting. So yes, there are very much correction tools. He's do, he's using mm-hmm.<affirmative>, you know, with setback, that's also setting up things he's doing Yeah. By getting you to fail. Because if you don't fail and he gets, he's trying to kind of get you ready for the next assignment. So I definitely think that that's a another real strategy behind failure when it happens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, and I love this is harkening back to last month's episodes with Cheryl Batchelder, but she said something, uh, when we were talking about setbacks and she was sharing about one of them, she said, you know, one of the jobs that she left, um, she had worked so hard to build up this servant leadership, um, you know, company culture and everybody was just so focused on that and it operated really well. And so that was like one of the biggest heartbreaks for her when that company totally restructured, was that she felt like, wow, I just lost, you know, those nine or 10 years that I had just invested. But she said it was, it's just been so rewarding and comforting, I guess in a way to now see all of those people that she trained have gone out to other companies and now they're doing the same thing there. And that might not have happened, you know, had they not kind of been cut off from the parent company and then gone off on these other things. So yeah, it's, you don't know what God's up to, but you don't have to know what God's up to<laugh>. You're just supposed to come along, you know, and just trust like we've talked about.
Speaker 2:And I think I, I love what you just said, and it triggered a thought, you know, in God's economy, nothing is wasted. No, nothing is wasted. There's a beautiful scripture, if I could look it up, right, I would, but it's not Isaiah and Isaiah talk, like, it's just talking about, like, these last three years was a moment. The scripture's like those last three years, it was a, it was a waste of time. And God, you know, I, why did I do? Is I'm adli, the Lord responds, you know? And he goes, no, he, he responds and says, you know, I will take heart because the Lord will ultimately reward me. And I think this idea of nothing is wasted was, was underneath underpinning of that. And in the case of Cheryl, that's so true. And in the case of, even for me, it's like, you know, yeah, I, we, we lay these seeds and these foundations in an organization mm-hmm.<affirmative>, And then we may have to leave through failure, you know, or our own decision to leave, but we have to believe in God's economy. Those things have still been planted. And even though we may not see the harvest in our lifetime or in in that, in that organization while we're there, we still have to believe nothing is wasted it, and that there is fruit that will be born. So I think that even when you're faithful and you feel like you've honored God, like in the case of Cheryl, like she honored the Lord and the servant leadership, there was still failure. Doesn't mean you're not gonna fail. Like there's a real, you know, principle I wanna reinforce here to the listeners, you could be doing everything right, honoring God, submitting to him, leading with humility, you know, being faithful and you will still fail. And, and in that moment, the encouragement I wanna have for you is that nothing is wasted. That commit to God was not wasted. And those seeds you planted are gonna bear fruit. It may not be when you want, but hopefully God and His grace will allow you to see it at some point.
Speaker 1:Mm. Well I'm glad we, we went on that little bit of a rabbit trail there with that, but you were able to talk through actually organically, uh, your first suspect that you sent me was, was about JC Penney, and that was the first time that you really had been told, eh, you know, it's not working. And it was just kind of a blow<laugh>, you know, cause that's not how you are used to operating. Um, so I'm glad we were able to talk through that. And so now the second setback, you also kind of mentioned a little bit, um, but I'd love to get further into it, uh, because it actually involves, like you said, Cola, which is a company that forward is very familiar with mm-hmm.<affirmative>, um, and you were able to come alongside them. Um, you were instrumental in actually restructuring them. And so some people might go, well, that sounds like a success, not a setback, but you had this big successful moment with them and then, you know, a little thing called a pandemic<laugh>. Right. Uh, so when did that success actually start to become a setback?
Speaker 2:Hmm. Uh, well it was, it was always challenging, but I think the pandemic drove the real setback of the company, like you said, just to give the readers listener sorry, context. Um, Ola was a nonprofit for a very long time. I joined in March, 2019 to restructure the company from a nonprofit to a for-profit to raise our first round of capital. At the time, it was an exciting time for a cola, it was in the human markets, Marcus. We were about to launch, we were launching in Nordstrom and in Sac. And we believed truly our investment team and our board that Cola had all the fundamentals, a great team in Uganda, a great product, great team in Dallas, great distribution to really scale. And so our ambition at that time was to be the first like luxury jewelry brand that was grounded in a purpose of serving the poor and, and creating jobs for women, uh, in the most marginalized of communities, which is in Uganda. And we were off to the races, like you said, and we closed our seed round in March, 2019, sorry, March, 2020, right as Covid broke, right as Covid broke. Like, I literally closed around and the pandemic was announced about a month later. And, uh, our number one customer and even Marcus filed bankruptcy weeks later and everything started to kind of fall apart. By God's grace we were able to stay, you know, um, and by the grace and, and just provision of our investors and our, our board and our team, we still weathered the storm and we were able to stay stable for the next couple of years for the pandemic when so many small businesses and retail shut down. Um, we were really put, and one other success is that we really transformed the company from a wholesale led company to a digitally led company because we had to, with the pandemic, there was a lot of successes, like, you know, restructuring the company, making it a luxury brand, um, setting its course for being an e-commerce first business. Those were all great things, but the setback really was, you know, the start of the pandemic was the start of the setback. But the culmination of a setback was sitting with my board, um, in early 2021 and saying, actually, I'm sorry, early 2022, and saying, you know what, this is just not a sustainable model. Like if we really wanna ultimately preserve the mission for these women and really give them a pathway outta poverty, we need to make sure that the Africa Division stays intact. And the best way to do that is to set them off, empower them as a local company to run and not be weighed down by a really big cost structure here in the us. And the reality was the retail market, and it still hasn't really completely rebounded from c um, wholesalers are still struggling, and now we're entering into a potential, you know, challenging economic environment with, you know, looms of a recession. So, you know, and at the time we didn't even know any of that. We just knew pandemic was still dealing a blow, and we had been getting so much impact from one variant to the next variant, and we just kept going. And so that was when we, the big decision to say it was a setback, that's also a set, it was a setback. And this was that we could not run this company the way we originally intended. Our dreams of scaling and growing a fast-paced luxury brand based in the US is not gonna happen, at least for now. And the set up is to set this company up to be local, to be locally led in Africa, where we can still empower women with the hope that they can ultimately bring it back to its former glory. You know, when the, when you know, when there's a different era of retail that's before them. So it was a tremendous setback to, and, and disappointment for me, but also I'm just so grateful to God that he kept, he, he kept alive the mission, which was the, the reason why I came, the reason why investors gave their money. But I'm so grateful for the investors and people that did give their money knowing, uh, that, you know, this was a risky bet and ultimately that they believe in the mission more than their financial return. And I'm so grateful for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, as we start to wrap up our conversation, um, I have a couple questions. First one, you know, we've talked about experiencing setbacks and kind of the hindsight mentality that we have about them of like, oh yeah, that was God. And you know, we, it's, it's a faith thing and you know, that kind of thing. But I know in the moment,<laugh>, when we encounter a setback, most of us probably don't feel that way immediately. So, you know, when you have gone through these setbacks in your life, what emotions immediately came to the surface? Like, how did you keep yourself from getting just so incredibly discouraged and just not moving forward?
Speaker 2:Well, going back to cola, I mean, that's a great question. I think that when I had to make that decision with the board, cause they were gonna shut down the US operation, there's a lot of anger because like, God, why did you pull me out of this really tough journey with AC Penny, this beautiful season of discernment. I come to cola and do all of this work, you know, blood, sweat, and tears, only to have this conversation at the end where, where is a redemption? How, how does this possibly in, in serving a bigger mission? And, and frankly, this just feels mean and it feels cruel. And, and I, I think so there's a lot of anger there. Um, but I think where I got to a place of peace and of just ultimate faith and trust in God is like going back to that word I've used before. It was, it's a journey. Like you have to look at it as a journey. It's never a moment where the light bulb goes off. It's conversations with investors and saying, okay, remind, I'm gonna remind us again about why we did what we did. This was not about us, it was about what God was doing for the hearts of the poor. Um, it's talking to the founder, Brit Underwood, who, you know, gave 25 years of her life to this work. Yeah. And said, okay, this is tough. And, but it puts things in perspective when I only gave four and you know, I'm talking to the founder who laid her life down to go to Uganda to have to, to make this decision with me. Um, you know, that's tough. And so praying with her every day, and both of us honestly weeping over the situation, got us into perspective. It was talking to friends that said, Hey, Sheba, like again, remind you, you're not defined by your work. You did the best that you could. We've all watched you. We've been rooting for you, and you did the best. And now trust that the Lord is in this and nothing is wasted, like I said before. So those initial emotions are hard. You're right, Jordan. They're tough. And there was a lot of anger and disappointment, anger with God, frustration with God, um, feeling like he was just wasting my time and my talent. Um, but then, you know, it's that journey of relationships and people and getting in God's word and praying that kind of gets you through to the other side.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And God uses those relationships and those people. Yes. So might not feel like it's him, but it's him. He's using them. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Well, so in closing, my final question I ask everybody, and I always enjoy hearing what everybody has to say. Uh, as you have gone through your life, what would you say is the number one thing that has driven you forward?
Speaker 2:Ooh. Um, I wanna say that it is giving myself grace, just giving myself. I'm not saying I do it well, but it's a thing that keeps me going forward. It's to say, okay, I messed up. I'm gonna give myself grace. I wasn't the best leader in this moment. I'm gonna give myself grace. And as you give yourself grace, you give yourself, you give grace to other people, and you end up dusting yourself off and moving forward. So to me, it's about giving myself some grace.
Speaker 1:I hope Hearing Shepa story, successes and setbacks have inspired you to continue driving forward in your own journey at work and in life. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a review on whichever podcast platform you're listening on. Your feedback helps us know what you wanna hear more of and also helps others learn more about us and join the Driven forward audience. If you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe to Driven Forward on your preferred listening platform. To learn more about Forward, you can visit forward women.org. That's the number four w o r d w o m e n.org. And you can follow us on social media where we post weekly blogs information about upcoming events, and share inspirational quotes and verses to help you get through your day. We hope you've enjoyed Driven Forward this year, and from all of us at Forward. We wish you and your loved ones a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for listening. Many women ask how they can become a member of Forward Journey. Forward is the answer Forward only exists because of the generosity of the forward community. When you give your time, talent, and treasure to forward, you make it possible for more women in the workplace to find their tribe and be empowered to become all God created them to be in work and life. We have a big goal in front of us to empower 10 million Christian women in the workplace to change the world by 2030. And you have a part to play your financial gifts to forward support the ongoing forward operations, support services, digital content like this podcast, as well as our outreach and overall mission journey forward is an easy way for every forward woman to be part of the mission and vision of Forward Through Recurring donations at one of four giving levels. To learn more about Journey and to find your level, go to women.org and click on the Join the Journey tab at the top of the homepage.