#6 Lucia Tahara
Lucia was one of the first people I worked with when I joined Google back in 2013. Since then, both of us went through a lot of personal and professional transformations.
🤩 About Lucia Tahara: I'm a coach for teams working as startups for the French administration. Unlike private startups, they don't aim for company valuation but rather for the public interest aspect of their mission since they are financed by public funds.
I'm currently coaching the 'RNB' team, which is creating the national database of all the buildings in France and will be used in a number of use cases, including energy retrofit regulations. The second startup I'm coaching is 'Hydreau': our goal is to help administrations better address the critical issue of preserving water resources in agriculture.
The path that culminated in this role is the result of a long journey, including my 13 years working at Google in various projects and product areas, and my 3 years building my startup and experiencing the adventure of entrepreneurship.
🗽 Freedom dimensions: Back in 2019, when I left Google after more than a decade in the corporate environment, I felt very privileged to be able to take some time off.
I didn’t want to rush into the next position. First, I wanted to reconnect with myself and understand what truly energizes me.
Like many people during the COVID pandemic, I did a lot of yoga ;) and also became interested in a variety of 'non-work' related subjects: woodworking, essential oils, meditation, and neuroscience.
After this introspective break, a close friend of mine and I decided to launch the app we had dreamed of for some time: Radar, a solution that combines your extended memory of favorite places, a social network, and a search engine to ensure you always find the right place to go.
So off I went onto the entrepreneurial path and its marvelous discoveries, learnings, laughs, and tears. It was a rich, challenging, and intense experience that taught me a lot but sadly didn’t take off.
Now, as a freelancer, I’m leaning towards more of a portfolio type of career. I'm learning how to switch from project to project, striving to maintain full presence in each one of them while preserving my energy and making the best use of my time.
I’m also trying to sort out what really matters to me: freedom and autonomy to decide how I organize my time and space, having in-person interactions with interesting people, working on projects I believe in, and expressing my creativity (strategy is a creative process, in my opinion).
⚡️ Trigger and 🚀 Start: If I reflect on myself by the end of 2022, I had dedicated most of my time, energy, and part of my savings to my startup for the previous 3 years. My app was launched on both iOS and Android, but we were facing some major challenges (financial, technical, and motivational).
I felt the need to take a step back and reflect on the opportunity cost of that adventure. Should I keep investing for a couple more years and capitalize on the efforts made so far? Did I still have the stamina needed for that? Did I still believe in the project?
So, I started reconnecting with my network to broaden my perspectives. In one of these "coffee catch-ups," a brilliant guy I had worked with in a successful project while at Google mentioned that he was looking for coaches for the incubator "Fabrique des Géocommuns" at IGN (The National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information), and that my expertise in GEO data and experience dealing with difficult projects at Google made me a good fit for that.
A couple of months later, I was meeting with the head of the incubator, and then with the amazing RNB team to start working as a coach in parallel to my startup (which I eventually decided to close). It felt good to work within a team again, and for the first time in my life as a freelancer.
This role made me realize that the orientation, guiding, and mentoring path had always been there at a deeper level.
🔀 Pivot: I think the big pivoting moment was the loss of my dad back in 2017.
It made me realize that life is short and unpredictable. And that the most precious thing we have is our time. So I wanted to honor it by trying to be fully present and aligned with my choices.
💰 Finance: Fortunately, I was able to build a financial cushion before I left Google. Additionally, living in France where workers are protected by fair unemployment insurance made the transition from Google to my freelancer career relatively smooth in that aspect.
🏆 Why it worked: It might sound a bit esoteric, but I truly believe it's all about getting to know ourselves: what thrives us, what makes us expand and feel bigger, what makes us contract and feel smaller, what provides us with infinite energy, and what makes us feel stuck and unmotivated. This self-awareness creates an intention to focus on.
Being open to unpredictable outcomes, embracing new learnings, and accepting that life is bigger than us, while also recognizing that we are part of this bigger "thing" – this is a good way to move toward that intention.
I'm not yet there, but this is the path I'm striving to take, and it's already bearing fruit.
📌 Learnings: Pay attention to signs, whether they're green lights or red flags. Approach them with an open but rational mind, carefully weighing the pros and cons. Then, listen to your "gut feeling" – it's a sophisticated system that gathers all your experiences and knowledge, providing perspective on the reality of a given situation.
🤔 Key advice: You can’t avoid risks in life so make choices that resonate with your values. The risks will be then worthy to take.
☕️ Are you open for my readers to reach out for a coffee chat? Yes! Here is my LinkedIn