Shivani Gopal is the founder and CEO of Remarkable Women a company born out of her desire to empower women by helping them establish financial independence in order to live a more free and happy life.

She describes her main ambition in the mantra “forever strive towards your ever striving potential”, which brings into reality by constantly pushing not only the outer status quo, but her own internal one as well.

As an Australian woman, Shivani has seen some of the best and worst that the country has to offer, and we are really lucky to have her share some of her stories with us on the Changing the Game Podcast.

The Fight for Financial Independence

Shivani starts out by talking about how she learned the value of financial independence in quite a hard way when she was younger, all because she did as so many young women do and started dating a boy she knew.

“[having a boyfriend] is a big social no no, and our families got together and decided that we should be married.”

Surprisingly enough, Shivani’s views on arranged marriage were a lot more neutral than one may expect nowadays, according to her “it was not the worst thing in the world”, as within her culture forced marriages were quite common, (and it was her boyfriend after all).

That being said, she explains that “it wasn’t something I was ready for at that time”, and being only 16, she simply didn’t know what she was in for, and more, that her ambitions to challenge the status quo remained the same.

The result? She was quite simply, and quite deeply, unhappy.

But the silver lining would come, and it came when she was crying with a friend on the phone about not being able to divorce, when that friend made her realize that the fact she could support herself away from her husband was her gateway into freedom.

Spreading the message

It is often through our own hardships that we tend to find the most valuable lessons, pain is, after all, the greatest teacher, which makes spreading the lessons we have learned through pain so that others don’t have to experience it one of the greatest acts of empathy.

And this is exactly what Shivani did after fighting for a divorce, she went on to act so that as many women as possible could find their way out of dangerous or unhappy relationships through financial independence as she did.

Not only that, she made it her mission to tell these women that they could be more than just wives and mothers, that the entire world was there for them, that it was okay to have dreams and aspirations about the future.

That is, she made those women aware of a universal right that they’ve had since the beginning, the right to live life on their own terms.

Ambition

In many ways I saw my own mother’s story in Shivani’s, as both were forced to marry early and live frustrated lives due to the pressures of a culture that wouldn’t allow them to separate.

At the same time, I also saw in her a little bit of myself in that unsatisfaction with a status quo I did not choose, nor want to participate, so I just had to ask her where this ambition to change the game come from. Here’s what she had to say:

“Ambition comes from looking at my parents and unpacking their history” she explains and adds that it grows from a sense of responsibility for the privileges that she received in being able to have an Australian education, and the opportunities that came with it.

There is something quite important about what Shivani said here that is the unspoken truth about changing the game: If you are even considering changing it, consider that it is because you climbed high enough to even consider that as a possibility.

It takes a great deal of honesty and responsibility to recognise this privilege, and we must be very wise with the steps to take to enacting change because of it.

On the other hand, you also want to change the game because you or people near you are being harmed by the way it is played right now, because you are seeing things from a point of disadvantage.

Education and Freedom

Eventually our conversation got into the topic of Shivani’s work with Remarkable Women, “accelerating the path towards equality for women around the world.”

This empowerment process occurs through three pathways:

• Personal: Within the sphere of their personal lives and relationships.
• Professional: In helping these women accelerate their careers and succeed in the job market.
• Financial: In helping them make money so that they can be financially independent and able to build a wealth of their own.

According to her, “If you can get that trifecta right, then you’ve given someone the absolute foundations to success, what you do with it is your call”, Remarkable Women therefore helps women find mentors that orient women within these three categories towards a better life.

Conclusion

The main lesson that we can draw from my talk with Shivani is that if you have a clear goal, no matter how big and a full conscience of what you are capable of accomplishing there is not going to be a single human force that can stop you.

Not that something like that would be easy of course, this certainty of action takes a lot of cultivation and a good deal of struggle to form within us, but once we have it, nothing can take it from us.

So, in order to start this process of confidence in your ability to change the game, I would like to close yet another article with an exercise in imagination: What is the wildest, most unhinged and radical way in which you could change the game?

Think about that, and then think about what aspects of your life have to improve, before you can make your vision a reality.