By Jevon Wooden

In a recent episode of the podcast “Design Your Life and Business,” Rakia Finley, CEO and Founding Partner of Copper & Vine Studio, opens up to Jevon Wooden about the importance of structure in one’s life, especially when you need to balance motherhood and your professional goals! And of course, you can’t do any of this without a solid support system around you.

Who is Rakia Finley?

Rakia Finley is one of the most impressive people you’ll ever meet, a leader you’d gladly follow into battle. She’s a software executive, Women in Tech Initiative Leader, full-stack developer, Salesforce MVP, mother, private investor, and philanthropist. She is best known for her work with the Obama Administration on their “Girls in STEM” initiative and continues to develop innovative technology solutions and community initiatives that promote diversity in STEM for girls of color.

In 2018 Rakia founded Copper & Vine Studio, a creative solutions corporation in the business of re-imagining, to blend Rakia’s passions: inventing award-winning technologies, making companies that scale, and building brands that produce results. She has also emerged as an entrepreneur’s dream come true, designing products for founders that average over $27 million in an acquisition!

Trust Your Schedule

Trying to balance all the different aspects of both your professional and personal life can be tricky, stressful, and, at worst, chaotic. It can be like trying to cook a big dinner for your family and making sure to get all of the timings right – it can all get too much. So how do you do it? Is there some sort of huge secret we’ve yet to be let in on? One so complex that only the enlightened few can achieve it?

No. Obviously not. That would be ridiculous. 

In her conversation with Jevon, Rakia explains, proudly, that she’s created a life wherein she enjoys every hour! Everything she does in the working day is planned out and scheduled to a tee; she knows exactly how she’s moving throughout the day. But it’s about more than just planning and scheduling, you have to trust your plan. As long as it’s realistic and doable, and you don’t doubt yourself, then how on earth could it go wrong?

“I am very pragmatic with how I go through my life,” she explains, “because I’ve created a life where every hour I enjoy it, I tend to move very intently throughout my day. So when parenting became a part of it, I had to treat it the same. I am a very scheduled person. I will say the number one tip of being a successful parent and business owner is to be very time oriented and very, at least, itinerary oriented.”

Hear that, everyone? If you want to make sure your life flows with some sort of ease, you need to make a schedule and stick to it!

A Support System is Built on Trust

Your daily structure, of course, needs a foundation. It cannot operate without any sort of support, and you can’t do it all by yourself. So what’s the answer? Well, it’s to build a solid support system, one built on trust and care!

Rakia wears a lot of different hats, both in her personal and professional life, and in order to do it all as effectively as she does, she needs a strong support system of people she can rely on. But how does one attain such a support system? She claims it’s all built on trust: her friends, her mother, her co-parent, her pastor, the people in her church, and her advisors. Every single person she surrounds herself with is an essential, irreplaceable piece to the puzzle that is her life.

“It’s built on trust. It is a trusting environment,” she says when discussing her support system. “I’ll be honest with you. It’s also lean, right? It’s not a lot of people. And I actually call them my village. […] So when we’re striving for our greatness, you know, if you’re like me, it feels like you have to look back to go to your village. You’re like, oh, OK, let me go ask my mother to pick my son up.”

Check out the full podcast episode at theleaderspod.com. Be sure to subscribe, rate, review, and share!