Intentional ambition with Rha Goddess

On Thursday, Oct. 23, Mount Holyoke College hosted a conversation between Vice President for Student Life and Dean of Students Marcella Runell and entrepreneurial soul coach Rha Goddess in the Great Room.

Goddess is the founder and CEO of Move the Crowd, an organization dedicated to the intersections of profit, personal views and social responsibility for leaders and entrepreneurs. She is also the author of “Intentional Ambition: Redefining Your Work for Greater Joy, Freedom, and Fulfillment.”

Runell started by discussing her personal and professional relationship with Goddess and explained how Goddess had inspired her work on hip-hop and education.

“I was just completely fangirling her,” Runell joked.

Goddess shared about a difficult emotional and professional period in 2017, including conflict within her company and the loss of her father, and how this started her on her current path.

“It took, with the help of a therapist and a really phenomenal coach, about 18 months to peel myself off … the floor,” she said. “The gift of that meltdown … was permission to interrogate it all, to question it all and to challenge it all.”

Her work with leaders now focuses on preventing burnout by making small changes that help them embrace their most authentic selves and learn to rebuild constructively when conflict arises.

Goddess said that in today’s culture, one of the most useful things you can do is take stock of what isn’t serving you, rededicate yourself to important and intentional work and keep sight of your values and interests. She distilled this concept into a three-step process: reclaim, realign and reimagine.

“We are obsessed with being busy, and we live in a culture of busy … and I believed that the busier I was, … the more in demand I was, which meant the more important I was,” she said. “But those moments [when] we break the monotony of what we’re doing to invite in other aspects of our expression are often the [times] that help us unlock around some of the more challenging things.”