Disruptor
Aligning with her purpose By Basetsana Makhalemele
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hen she entered the corporate world through a graduate programme at one of Pan-Africa’s leading banks, the eyes of Purpose Alignment Strategist, Nompumelelo Mbonane’s youth were opened and she took a different direction in her career. Until this moment Nompumelelo had felt unfulfilled in a field she had studied for. The qualified Mining Engineer from Wits University knew from the get go that she was in the wrong place and would not stay. Her dream had always been to work closely with people, developing them, teaching them, activating their full potential and helping them achieve great success and not engineering. Mining was not what I wanted for my life. I had never, ever imagined myself becoming an engineer," she admits.
At the beginning of 2017, after completing her vacation work at a goldmine in the Westrand, the young and ambitious Nompumelelo was offered a 3-year internship, because of her hard work and doing so well in presenting her research project as a vacation student. "I still knew that mining wasn't it. I prayed to God for guidance and He told me to let it go if it wasn’t what I wanted. So I declined the offer. With no other job prospects," she chuckles. The young woman from Soweto, in Gauteng, says most people in the corporate world expressed how they would rather be elsewhere doing different things with their lives. Their jobs caused them to miss important moments in their children’s lives and gradually compromise their values and integrity.
