Some women wait to be rescued, while others recognise they hold the power within themselves. Rola Diab, who has gone from award-winning saleswoman to in-demand business coach and speaker, is decidedly in the latter camp. 

She has traded the fairy tale of external salvation for the reality of internal transformation and, along the way, built a thriving career helping high-achievers – from Fortune 500 executives to KPMG consultants – unlock their innate power.

The key to true success for anybody, she says, isn’t external validation, but alignment. “If you’re misaligned, that’s what creates internal conflict. And guess what? You’re not going to succeed when you have internal conflicts,” she tells me over a Zoom call, the sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea sprawling behind her – she’s on holiday in Greece, just before she jets off to Amsterdam.

She learned this lesson first-hand. After climbing the ranks in corporate sales, she made the leap to entrepreneurship just over one year ago. Fuelled by a Tony Robbins coaching certification and a business idea rooted in instinct, she decided to go through the Kellogg Business School’s sales training programme and start her own company. Quickly, she picked up an array of clients, from Fortune 500 companies to small business owners.

If she had to narrow down one pivotal moment in her career so far, it would be a breakthrough during her first keynote address. “I remember being on stage and I literally heard a voice in my head… I heard myself say, ‘I’m home’.” 

That talk, The Currency of Confidence, laid the foundation for what would become her signature programme, The Conviction Code. “Confidence is great, but it wobbles,” she explains. “If you have conviction, there’s no wobble. There is a big difference.”

Now based in Dubai, Diab is working with clients like KPMG to bring her conviction-based leadership model into boardrooms, helping executives dismantle long-held limiting beliefs. “I have a process – no joke – that takes five minutes,” she says with a smile. “As long as we know what that person’s limiting belief is, we can remove it… Nobody so far has had their limiting belief come back, which
is amazing.”

Breaking Cinderella is another programme Diab has created, as she’s particularly passionate about empowering women in male-dominated industries. She came up with the name one day as she often referred to the “Cinderella syndrome” – the idea of waiting to be saved, a damsel in distress. “We don’t realise we have electricity running through our body,” she says with absolute conviction. “We’re like powerhouses of energy…and we are looking to the outside world for our power.”

There’s a big misconception that women need to be more masculine in business, she adds. “That’s actually doing us a disservice.” Instead, she encourages women to lean into traits like intuition and emotional intelligence – what were once called “soft skills”, but which, in today’s age of artificial intelligence and automation, are valued much more highly. “We just need to show up as the best version of ourselves, with the greatest amount of confidence and conviction,” she says.

“If we could just stop for a moment and self-reflect, go inward, and direct our energy appropriately, we can create magic.”