Be Powerful and Free

Taking the Road Not Taken….

Power story written by Karen-Marie Kragelund

Growing up as 5th generation on a farm in rural Denmark, at home I felt safe. Here I learned that hard work is inevitable and that if you fall and scrape your knee, then you have to stand up again, remove the dirt, and carry on. The same applied in school when schoolmates were bullying me – I stood firm, brushed it off, and carried on, while the pain and the gnawing feeling of having no one to turn to for help were buried deep inside. This approach worked for me, and I could (also) survive this, right?

Life is lived going forward…

It was a cloudy evening, April is notorious for its shifting weather. I was huddling together with friends, and fellow students at the Academy, and we were on the Red Square, just below the Kremlin, the heart of what US President Ronald Reagan had called the Evil Empire only 13 years earlier. One of the biggest boybands at the time, East17, was playing live and on the setlist, that evening was also my favorite song “Around The World”. The fact that we were together with a crowd of an estimated 100,000 Russians and that we were closely guarded by OMON special police forces felt more like a nuisance than actually scary to me.

Later, with some five weeks left of my semester as an exchange student, I packed a backpack. One of the most precious things in my bag was the just-published Lonely Planet guide on Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus that I had found by pure luck in a downtown Moscow bookstore. My plan, if you can call it that, was to take the overnight train from city to city, travel alone, and use the daytime to explore new places. This adventure would take me deep into Siberia until I would reach my far East destination, Vladivostok, and I had allocated about three weeks of traveling time. After all, a Moscow-Vladivostok return trip is some 18,600 km. And why three weeks? With the first post-USSR presidential election just around the corner, I wanted to be able to “get out of the country in case the s*** hits the fan”.

It was 1996 and I completed my first solo travel adventure without any major incidents.

I was far from fearless, but I welcomed the thrilling feeling of balancing on the edge. It made me feel on top of the world!

Reassessing the situation

No challenge seems too big

No challenge seemed too big. Yet, the future of working in Russia that I had dreamt about never materialized. Moreover, as a Russian translator by education and with extensive work experience as a law firm PA, my skillset more or less automatically qualified me for a supporting function – something I was good at, but which also no longer felt like a professional challenge. I might as well try and apply for that job that a friend had sent me – project coordinator in a Danish IT company in Kyiv. Ukraine was not Russia, and the application deadline had passed already, but the IT industry was booming, and this was 2006 after all, so what did I have to lose?

Four months later, I arrived in Kyiv and a week into a new industry, for the first time on a managerial level, in a country I had never been to before, I felt completely in my element.

Over the years I managed operations at a bigger and bigger scale in different companies: If an office fit-out project was stalled, I would engage with all relevant stakeholders and get it back on track. If a process were not working properly across departments, I would sit down with peers and their teams to find the optimal solution. If a customer had an issue with another department but came to me, I would involve the relevant department (and remain somewhat in the loop). If a member of my team would make a mistake, I would stand up for them and take responsibility externally. Internally, I would use it as a learning moment and encourage my people to develop further. In short, if something was not working, I took the responsibility upon myself, I had to fix it – and if I couldn’t fix it right away, I just had to try harder. So I kept telling myself.

While I was encouraging others to look towards and beyond the horizon, unfortunately, the tunnel vision about myself and my capabilities became more and more narrow: I withdrew from socializing, my quality of sleep deteriorated, and my body was working overtime to tell me that something was wrong right up until the day, when I was no longer able to ignore the inner voice, nor my body, anymore.

I had lost focus, I had allowed myself to fall into a state of learned helplessness, unable to see nor articulate what was needed for me to get back to optimal performance and a well-balanced life. I felt like a failure for not being able to cope on my own.

Mind Full, or Mindful?

Finding purpose, the Why can be compared to finding that cornerstone on which you can build the rest of your life. It took me years of traveling along a long and winding road, filled with hard-earned life experiences, executive education such as an MBA, as well as professional support. It was never a Eureka moment, more a long, learning-to-connect-the-dots reflection that eventually led to clarity. And when, temporarily, I lost the connection with my Why, my autopilot instinctively knew the direction I had to move in to return Home and start from Why again.

Establishing my own consultancy business was somewhat a lucky consequence of external circumstances. However, the more I adjusted to the mantle of being my boss, the more comfortable it felt. Even when my first major project was not a success, the day I closed it out, a new exciting project landed in my lap. Using all the skills in my toolbox, including multiple languages, organizing capabilities, stakeholder curiosity, bridgebuilding, and working with and learning from inspiring people from around the world, I recall the delight of introducing myself as “This is Karen from Ukraine” on one of the first Teams meetings. Once again I felt in my element, telling friends that I had “rediscovered the person I thought I had lost 10 years ago.”

Then Covid hit but just like those police troops on the Red Square so many years earlier, it felt more like a nuisance. Having the quiet time to think about where I wanted to take my business felt like a blessing and for the first time in years, I felt a positive, forward-driving force inside that led me to believe that this was it, now all the hardship was going to pay off.

Then came 24 February 2022. It was 6:45 am and an unfamiliar sound had woken me up. I went to open my kitchen window and recognized the sound of sirens blaring across the city. Russia had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a few hours earlier.

Until that morning I had been adamant about not wanting to leave but as the situation progressed by the hour, I had to revisit that decision with friends in the same situation. The next day we left Kyiv as enemy tanks were about 10 km away from our location and, it looked, closing in. Four days later we crossed the border to Romania, and I was now considered a refugee, fleeing from war.

Try to imagine sitting in a rowboat without oars in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This is how the first months in the Netherlands felt like. I know it came as a surprise to many friends and acquaintances that I chose to go to a new country instead of Denmark, yet instinctively I knew that this was the best for me to do. Well-being for me is triggered by people, not the geographical location, and the best person for me in this situation is Dutch. Without my friend and her family, I cannot say how my world would have looked today. Stumbling my way back on my feet, personally and professionally, it was my great fortune to end up at Deloitte Netherlands in a team under the emphatic leadership of Erwin and Uling. It was a year of professional challenges, positive learning, and growth while on a personal level, I was switching constantly between frustration, anger, sadness, longing, despair, and grief, all mixed up with rays of positiveness when spending time with or talking to friends from my Ukrainian life.

Through all the emotional turmoil, my inner autopilot kept pointing me in the same direction. I knew that if I truly wanted to get back on track in my life, to restart from Why again, then it was a question of returning home.

In July 2023 I moved home to Kyiv again permanently. I reignited my consultancy business, focusing on organizational transformation and change.

As before, into each project, I bring my hard-earned experience of what works and what doesn’t, what human and organizational warning signs to be aware of and how to address them, what impact it will have on the final result if actively listening to yourself, your team, and your stakeholders and positively acting upon what you hear. Combining all this with the institutional memory that my clients bring, together we co-create sustainable solutions for their organizations.

Always keep in mind that there is only one person inside your head, although, it may speak different languages at different times. What may feel like a walk in the park one day, may feel overwhelming the day after. That doesn’t make us unworthy or a failure – it makes us human. And playing to each person’s human strengths and openly communicating accordingly makes for better collaboration.

Taking The Road Not Taken

The last piece of inspiration that I want to leave you with, is the poem

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel to both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted to wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”