Letting Go of Control Because God Owns The Outcome | Episode #3

In this episode of Fulfilled with Isimemen, I share the breaking point that revealed my performance mindset and the powerful spiritual truth that set me free: God owns the outcome.

As a high-achieving woman of faith, I thought I was trusting God with my life and career, but deep down, I believed my effort guaranteed the outcome.

I’m walking you through the biblical revelation that changed everything for me, the battles of Joshua that brought it to life, and the mindset shift that’s helping me show up, do my part, and fully trust God with the rest.

If you’ve been hustling hard, trying to hold it all together, and carrying pressure you were never meant to bear, this message is for you.

🔍 What You’ll Learn:

• How to stop tying your worth to your work
• Why trusting God isn’t passive — it’s powerful
• What the Bible says about effort, outcome, and obedience
• How to approach your career with boldness and surrender

🔁 Share this episode with a friend who needs permission to pause.

🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe

🌐 Visit my website - https://www.isimemen.com/

📬Connect with me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/isimemenaladejobi/

📢Connect with me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/isimemen/

Transcript

Welcome to Fulfilled With Isimemen, the podcast for high achieving women of color who want career success and life fulfillment God's way. Here we trade pressure for peace, performance for purpose, and hustle for Holy Spirit LED strategy. Now let's get into today's episode.

One of my favorite topics I'm going to be   📍 sharing on the Triple C Framework.  This is where I show you how to truly have a career that you love and as a result, a life that you love, making money that you love on your terms.

I'm talking a life of fulfillment because you did not just come to this earth to pay bills and die. No, you did not. You can have a career you love. That speaks to your passion, that speaks to your calling, that speaks to what you enjoy doing while making great money, while having work-life balance. This is possible.

It's not going to happen for you if you do not have a strategy and if you are not using strategies that work right here, right now, the stuff that used to work 5, 10 years ago, throw it out the window. I'm going to be walking you through my process. And this process has helped hundreds of women. I have trained several thousands of women on it, and our clients in just four and a half short years have gotten over $7 million worth of salary.

So you wanna grab a piece of paper and a pen. Take your notes app out, because we are going to get into it. Now, if you are starting your job search process by touching your resume, you've already lost. I'm telling you right now, you have to go deep if you want to get this right.

So today we are going to be   going through clarity. Then we're gonna jump to conviction, and we are going to land on connections.  You know this whole thing is undergirded and held tight by mindset, so I'm also gonna get into that as well. Buckle up buttercup. 'cause here we go.   First is clarity.  If you lack clarity, you lack everything. If you are not clear on what you are the best at, if you are not clear on what it is you truly want, your industry, what you bring to the table, you will stumble in this entire process. So many people skip this step and wonder why they're struggling.

Clarity brings a level of alignment and conviction. So when people are speaking to you, they are just taken aback by you. There's something about the way you show up that makes them want to help you. You cannot be confident if you are not clear.

If you want more money, if you want more fulfillment, if you want more alignment, you have to start your search with clarity. Now, how do you get clear? Now clarity has a couple pieces to it. It has a mindset. It has your golden triangle, which is where you get clear on your values, your skills, your strengths, and it has figuring out your joyful job. Let me walk you through each one.   📍 Now, you might think mindset is just a fluffy, cute term,  but when I tell you what you believe is literally what you will achieve, I mean it. If you believe you can or you believe you cannot, you are correct. Your mindset and what you believe about the opportunities that are available to you, what you believe about what is possible for you, what you believe that you can do.

What you believe you are capable of, these things will dictate what type of roles you go after. It will dictate the type of people you network with. It will dictate whether or not you actually put all the right skills in your resume, because if you have trained your mind to believe that you deserve less than that, there's not enough that because of the economy, because of the administration, because of all these outside forces, you cannot get a fulfilling role, a purpose aligned role that you enjoy.

Then what will happen is your mind will rise to the level of your belief system. So when you are looking for roles, you'll find that you are actually blind to high quality roles. Your brain literally will not see them because you have conditioned it to believe that those roles are not for you.

You will literally not reach out to people who can hand you roles and change your life because you'll think that you have nothing to offer, or why would they wanna speak to someone like you? Or there must be a million people already reaching out to them. Why would they reach back out to me? Here are some negative mindsets that you need to delete immediately, and here are the positives that you should replace them with. Number one. I can't figure out my purpose. I can't figure out my calling. I can't figure out what I'm placed on this earth to do. I've been lost for too long, and time has run out for me.

The new mindset you should replace it with is the following. My God-given purpose is within me. All I have to do is uncover it with the right strategies, the right guidance, and the right steps.

I can do this with ease and it'll become crystal clear to me. Another negative mindset.

My dream job does not exist. No one is gonna pay me well to actually do work I love to do. Here's a new mindset.

There are millions of companies and millions of jobs. I just have to find the right one for me. Another negative mindset.

I cannot lay on my dream job. I've made too many mistakes. I'm too old. I'm too young. I'm too dot, dot, dot.

The new mindset.

I am experienced, I'm qualified, and I'm knowledgeable.

Once I understand how my skills, impact experiences and expertise all work together. Finding a role will be easy for me.

With this renewed confidence, I will become a company's answered prayer.

Another mindset shift, you absolutely have to have is you have to make decisions from your future self, not your current self. So imagine the version of you six months from now, a year later, who's in that role, who's feeling fulfilled, who's actually waking up, excited to go to work in the morning, who's on the team that respects and honors her?

Who's making the money that they actually wanna be making? What kind of decisions does that version of you make? You wanna be making those type of decisions. You can't be making the decisions the old you would be making, which are usually anchored in fear, lack, and resistance.

So the first step of clarity is having a clear mindset, a mindset that actually supports the life you want to live.

The second step in clarity, is Golden Triangle.  Now Golden Triangle is a process I created to help individuals get extremely clear on their strengths, their passion, their purpose, their gifts, their talents, their experiences, their calling, what they do better than anybody else.

What I have found is that people are richly gifted, but they don't know how to articulate their gifting. They don't know how to articulate their value. And if you're not able to tell someone how good you are at what you do, then how are they supposed to know?

And many job seekers have left their fate in the hands of recruiters and hiring managers. Hoping that they'll decipher and be able to figure out their greatness when it's your job to be able to articulate that greatness. So here are some questions you can ask yourself to start getting clear on your strengths, your passion, and your purpose.

 What are some things I do exceptionally well?  What do people constantly ask my help with and why?

 What was I really good at doing growing up that just kind of came natural to me that I now downplay?

 Who do I wanna impact? What do they struggle with and what solution would I love to provide for them? What issues do I always notice when I walk in a room? I see things through a certain lens. What is that lens?

What issues and challenges keep me up at night?

What issues and challenges do I constantly find myself thinking about on my downtime?

What do I love enough that I would do for free?

If I could teach on any topic and not get bored, what would that topic be? I.

If I could be remembered for three things in this life, what would those three things be? These are some questions to help you extract what really matters to you and what you're really good at.

Another exercise you could do is look back on your last three to four roles and think about what did you really enjoy doing? What came easy to you? What were you constantly praised for in your performance reviews? And then I want you to think about what you really struggled through, what you did not like doing, but you had to do for your role.

You'll start to see patterns in your skillset. You'll start to see things that you've taken for granted. A lot of times we are really gifted and really good at what we do, and we just become used to it. But by doing an exercise like this, we start to key in and focus in on what we do better than anybody else.  

Now the   📍 third part of getting clarity is figuring out what your joyful job is.  Now, I define a joyful job as a role that plays to your strengths, your passion, and your purpose, and is an actual demand paying you what you want. This role may be at the intersection of your areas of interests and your strengths.

Your joyful job also hits your must haves. These are the few things that you are not flexing on, that you're like, look, I have to have it in my next role. It might be a salary band, or it might be remote versus in person, or it might be a specific type of benefit.

A joyful job is also a role that you're actually excited about, that you wanna tell your friends about. That has you working on interesting projects and has you leveraging your skills and your strengths. There is no perfect role. So the goal here is not to love every single thing about your job, but it's to feel good about your job.

It's to feel like you're supported, like leadership wants you to win. You enjoy the culture at work. You do not feel undervalued or unfulfilled, but rather you feel like you're an important team member and it feels good to come into this job.

That is a joyful job. And I always tell my clients, there are roles you did not know existed at companies you did not know were hiring, making money that you did not know was possible. But how do you uncover these roles? So here's a quick exercise. You can actually go to LinkedIn and click jobs, and now there have this search feature powered by AI.

So you can type in the type of job you're looking for. But the exercise I love my clients to do is type in an industry and type in a role or type in an industry and type in a department. So for example, you might say fashion and writer, or you might say hospitality marketing.

Or you might say tech and operations. Once you type in these words, take note of all the different type of roles that are coming up, and actually take those roles and copy and paste them into search, and then repopulate another list of roles.

What you'll start to see is roles that you've never heard of or considered for yourself. That's one way to start uncovering roles that could be the perfect fit for you. You can also go into the filter for LinkedIn and filter it by location, filter it by salary and this now exposes you to roles at a certain salary level. So if you type in food and writer and you're looking for roles that make over a 100K, it'll share with you roles that make over a hundred K that have to do with food and writing.

So now we've locked down Clarity. We have the Mindset, we have our Golden Triangle in place, and we know what we do better than anybody else, and we're able to articulate our value and we have the Joyful Job. This part is so crucial because it will dictate how you move throughout the rest of your job search.

The mistake that people make far too often is they go for, so many different types of roles, and so people don't know how to help them. Their resumes are all over the place.

They don't have a targeted LinkedIn. You'll oftentimes see their bio and they're going after five to six different roles and you don't even know what you'd hire them for. That is a  mistake you have to stop making. Now that you're crystal clear on where you're going, it's time to   step into conviction.

 The job search is truly about transferring your personal conviction to the person on the other side. If you can get them to understand that you are their company's answered prayer, it is that much easier for you to land that role. Now, the conviction, it starts with the beginning, right? With the mindset, with the golden triangle, with the joyful job.

But now it's time for it to show up in your materials.  Now we're talking resume and LinkedIn.

 Now your resume is not meant to document every single thing you've ever done since you graduated from college. No thank you. Now you can have a master resume that has all that information on it, so you can pull from it as you need to, but your resume is a strategic piece of content. When someone reads your resume, literally they should be saying to themselves, oh my goodness, we have found the person we're looking for. How do you craft a resume that shares the level of conviction you have about yourself with other people? Very simple. Get in front of you the job description you are going for.

Read that job description and actually find three different job descriptions for that same role because every company's gonna do it a little different. But what you'll find for that role is that the most important skill sets, the most important parts of the job will be the same across those job descriptions. Your goal is to talk about the work you've done in the past using the language and sentences the job description uses to describe the role.

So what ends up happening is as people are reading it, they're like, oh my gosh, she's done exactly what we need her to do here. Well, duh, I use your language to describe what I've done in the past, and of course you should not just be listing roles and responsibilities, but you should have impact statements.

We want to know what have you accomplished. Another little hack and trick I love on the resume is you might have a title for a role in the past that doesn't really reflect what you did in that role. So what I like to do is, yes, put the original title of the role, but then in parentheses, put the title of the role you are going for so that they see, yes, I have actually done this.

I am an operations manager. I did operations manager work. They just didn't give me that title. And that's a great way, again, to subconsciously get buy-in from the person who's reading your resume. Of course, you should not make these resume mistakes like putting the year you graduated, putting your education at the top.

Crafting a resume on Canva and putting all types of shapes and doodles and graphics. You want a clean, high quality resume every single time. And should it be one page or two pages? Well, there's flexibility there. If it could fit in one page without missing a beat, absolutely. But if you have more than 10 years of experience, two pages is expected.

Now, if we start going to 3, 4, 5, 6, then Houston, we have a problem.

Now once your resume's locked in, it's time to get your LinkedIn all the way together. Listen, LinkedIn is a gift that continues to give, and if you unlock the power of LinkedIn, you will soar. My goal with you is that you build a personal brand. And you carve out your own space on the internet so much so that opportunities find you. Job opportunities. And if you wanna speak, speaking opportunities and if you wanna consult, consulting opportunities. No one can take your personal brand away from you.

You might have different roles, you might have different jobs at different companies, but when it comes to your personal brand, you've built that. And that is an asset. So your LinkedIn, your headline, your bio, your skills, everything is going to speak in the direction of where you are going and not where you have been. Do not be afraid of LinkedIn. It is your friend, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. This platform is powerful and people are on there looking for their next hires. Nowadays, a lot of companies are inundated with tons and tons and tons of applications.

But don't get it twisted. Companies are still going out and secretly searching for the right candidates. Wouldn't it be fabulous if your name popped up when they searched for the role they're hiring for? You can optimize your LinkedIn for the role you're going for. You can optimize your LinkedIn, so you are found.

Here's a mistake that a lot of people make, just like the resume. They optimize their LinkedIn for a ton of roles. They start talking about how they're seeking a new role, seeking a new role, seeking a role, new role, and it just makes it seem like they're begging. You want to operate from a position of power.

So what does that mean? That means you're going to update your headline and you're gonna update it with the key words that are most popular for your role. You are going to write a very rich bio and this is something ChatGPT can absolutely help you with, but do not pull it straight from ChatGPT onto your bio because we're gonna be able to tell it's ChatGPT.

Now once your LinkedIn is updated, you have a great headshot, it looks professional, you have an updated banner, and you're proud of what it looks like. You are going to begin to network. You are going to begin to connect with people because you want to do informational interviews. We always have women fulfilled doing informational interviews, and informational interviews are life changing.

They provide you so much. They let you know what's going on hiring wise in your industry right now. You can also learn what salary you should be going for. You can get people in your corner who begin to advocate for you. You can get people saying, Hey, send me your resume. I wanna send it directly to the hiring manager.

So instead of you hoping that your resume will be pulled out of a pile of 600 applications, you have someone literally forwarding your resume, handing it over to the hiring manager for the role. Informational interviews can get you mentors, can get you seen, get you visible, get you further connections to a company of your dreams.

They are so important in this job search. If you are just applying cold, you're not speaking to human beings who know other human beings who can get you in the door. You are missing out.

  The third C is connections.  I've already started talking about the power of connecting on LinkedIn and doing informational interviews. This is the secret sauce that most people are actually missing. And guess what? You don't have to be afraid. You've done the work. You're confident, you're convicted. You're able to speak to your value. You know exactly what role you want, so whoever you speak to, they know exactly how to help you. You are ready.   You're ready to have conversations.

 And if you wanna land a role in 2025, it would behoove you to have advocates on the inside of your dream company, gossiping about you in the best way possible, talking about you sending your resume to the right people so that your chances of landing that role skyrocket.

So what do you wanna do? You wanna carve out time in your schedule every single day, 15, 20, 30 minutes, and connect with people at your dream companies, connect with people in your industry, connect with people who have transitioned, who might've been doing work similar to what you were doing, and are now doing what you want to be doing, and you're gonna reach out.

Now, here's the thing, and my husband taught me this. It doesn't matter how many nos you get. You only need one yes. And in Fulfilled, we believe that one yes can completely transform your life. So you are gonna get used to reaching out to people in your industry.

So you are gonna get used to connecting with people every day and sending messages, and even sending follow-up messages, requesting time to connect with people.

This connection conversation is all about them. You wanna learn about their journey, you wanna learn about their career, you wanna learn about their growth because people love speaking about themselves. At this point, you're not really trying to get anything. Now, would it be great if it turned into something more?

Absolutely. But if you have the mindset of I am growing my network, I wanna connect with more people, I wanna share my story and my journey with as many people as possible, and I want them to share their story and their journey with me. I wanna begin to build allies in this space. Then you'll find opportunities

will begin to find you. You'll find you'll have advocates begin to rise up and want to help you because they're so impressed with the level of conversation. Now, what are some questions you can ask when you do these informational interviews?

 You might ask, what advice would you give someone like me who was trying to break into X, Y, Z industry?

Or you might ask, what did you wish you had known before stepping into X, Y, Z role? Or what has been the biggest challenge you face on your journey to becoming X, Y, Z?  These are questions that make the connection process flow, make it feel good, make it feel natural. And of course they're gonna ask you, tell me a little bit about yourself. And when you do that, you're gonna have an elevator speech ready, and your elevator speech is clear, it's concise, it's not, when I was in the fourth grade, I love to play basketball, but then when I was in the sixth grade.

No friend. No, no, no. You're gonna start off sharing the years of experience you've had and the industries you've had experience in, and the work you've been able to do thus far.

You're gonna share the type of work you love to do the most, and how that's led you to where you're going next. And how you wanna do more of X, Y, Z, and I'm interested in securing an opportunity doing a, B, C. And so now you've taken them on a mini journey, like, wow, this person has this type of experience.

Wow, they're pretty impressive. They've done these type of projects and they've enjoyed doing these type of projects, and now they're trying to do more of this in the future. And because this person has now been impressed with the conversation you guys have had, they're starting to think, how can I help this person?

You might even ask at the end of the conversation, Hey, do you have two to three people that you feel like I should meet? And they'll say, oh, I'm thinking about this person. I'm thinking about this person. I'll get back to you. And if you say that at the end of each of your conversations, you will always have someone to connect with.

Now once you get comfortable really networking and connecting with people in your industry, now you're gonna take your networking to another level. You are going to start finding roles that you want and you love at companies you want to be working at, and you are going to find 10 to 30 people within those companies because guess what?

Everyone is not going to respond. But you're going to reach out to 10 to 30 of those people and you're going to let them know that you would love to learn more about the company culture that you are interested in doing work at Visa or MasterCard or Meta or Google, and you'd love to know what it's like to work there.

And you get on the phone with them, you get on a Zoom call and you talk to 'em about the culture. You talk to 'em about the journey, and most of the time there's gonna be space for you to talk about. The role that you're interested in. So whatever role you're going for, you always wanna have a conversation with someone in the company.

Hey, reach out to people in accounting. No one's ever talking to them. You'd be surprised who they connect you with and people love meeting other smart people. People love meeting sharp people. So if you're sharp, if you're smart, if you're interesting, then meeting you is gonna be valuable to them as well.

You have to understand that you are worthwhile. You have to understand that meeting you is a great experience for someone else as well. You have to understand that people wanna meet you, people wanna speak to you, people wanna learn about you, and you have to bring that confidence and conviction to this networking process.

  Now the next step in connections is interviewing.  When you are interviewing, you are not being interrogated. It is a conversation. You want to connect with your interviewer, but in order to feel comfortable in that connection, you have to prepare, do your research on the company, do your research on the role.

Understand the culture. Going into this interview, you should have spoken to a few people in the company, better yet on the team. So you're going in with the level of insight and comfort knowing that, Hey, I do wanna do this. I would enjoy this role. Before your interview, you also wanna prepare five to seven key stories that showcase how you've solved problems, showcase your impact and accomplishments in your prior roles. So when you are asked questions about, tell me a time when you, you already have a story prepared. You also wanna address any gaps in your resume, and you want to be prepared.

If you were let go and the company were at last downsized, you wanna be able to speak to the fact that they downsized and your role was eliminated. When you are preparing for an interview.

If you can remember an interview is a conversation and a transfer of conviction, you will do much better than you thought. Then it no longer becomes scary. It literally becomes a conversation. You also wanna make sure you have questions prepared to ask at the end of every interview. So when they say, do you have questions, the answer is never, no ever.

You might have questions around the culture, you might have questions around how they're approaching a new technology that's supposed to disrupt the industry. And because you've done your homework, you have sharp and smart questions to ask.

 Last but not least in connection is negotiating your salary. 

Now you've gotten the offer, it is time to connect and talk about that money. You do not have to be afraid to negotiate. Companies expect you to negotiate. They usually have a range. Very rarely are companies offering you the tippy top of the range. It's usually middle of the road. So get comfortable asking for more money. When you are reviewing an offer, you wanna look at it in totality. You wanna look at the total package.

So not only are you looking at the salary, you're looking at the 401k match, you are looking at the sign-on bonus. You're looking at professional development dollars. You're looking at wellness dollars, I want you to take the full picture into full consideration and then make your ask.

Now before making that ask, I wanna make sure you've done your research. You should have at least seven data points from various salary websites, and you wanna find that average. Where I love to get salary is I actually like to talk to recruiters for outside firms and ask them, what range can I expect for X, Y, Z role.

And if you're interested in learning how to negotiate and if you're interested in learning how to negotiate your salary, I actually have a free full out salary course. You can go to isimemen.com/salarycourse, and that is a hundred percent free. It goes in depth. There's scripts around how to negotiate your salary and to do so from a place of calm.

So these are the steps I love to take my clients through to land their dream jobs. I would say that beginning part of the process, that getting the clarity, I. The clarity piece is so deeply important, and it is why clients have been able to increase their salary by 20, 30, 40, 50 K because they just show up in conversations differently.

Also, building your personal brand on LinkedIn, that thought leadership, that's one piece that I didn't go too deep into. Is extremely important. Not only are you connecting, but you're also sharing your expertise. So when people come to your page, when they see your post, they read your post and say, wow, I would love her to come do that here.

Wow. This is the type of leader we need at our company. Wow, this person really knows what they're talking about. Thought leadership is powerful. So you really are going to build an incredible brand by sharing what it is, you know.

The goal of thought leadership is to share consistently and build a body of work that showcases your genius. If you take these steps. I'm telling you, you'll stand out from the crowd when it comes to landing your dream job, and you'll literally be able to craft a life on your terms.

 Now if you'd like me and my team's help to land your dream job to get clear on your value, add in what you do better than anybody else, to increase your salary, to grow your confidence, to understand how to navigate corporate America and really understand the rules of engagement, so you can be promoted so that you can speak confidently about your work.

I want you to reach out. I am a LinkedIn and Instagram DM away. You can also book a call with me at   📍 isimemen.com/start. That's isimemen.com/start.  I would love to help you get on track to landing your dream role.

Until next time.