Once I discovered that fulfilling work starts with knowing yourself, your interests, values, skills and strengths, I couldn’t keep that lesson to myself.

So I built a career coaching program and took it into schools across Nigeria: more than 300 schools, and over 3,000 students sat with me one by one.

I walked in expecting to teach them about careers, but they ended up teaching me something much bigger.

I started noticing three kinds of students: those who had discovered their strengths early and chose their path with confidence…

…those choosing under pressure, from parents, from grades, from whatever looked most prestigious…

…and those who came alive the moment one adult noticed something in them that nobody else had seen.

The first group thrived, the second struggled, and the third reminded me how much one person’s guidance can change a life’s direction.

But I knew I couldn’t visit every school, so I put everything into a book, Start Your Career Journey, with the assessments, career research steps and real world skills I had been teaching in person.

The lesson was clear: children don’t need more pressure to choose; they need help discovering who they are first.

Parents, try this at home: swap “What do you want to be when you grow up?” for “What do you love doing, and what are you naturally good at?” Then name the strengths you see in your child out loud.

Don’t just prepare your child to graduate. Prepare them to navigate the real world. And next week, I’ll share what happened when I tried to sell that book, and the lesson every parent should steal.