Show Your Worth: Engineering Your Ascent with Shelmina Babai-Abji
In this episode of Her Career Unplugged, Joanne and Vimala sit down with Shelmina Babai-Abji — bestselling author of Show Your Worth, former IBM Vice President, and founder and CEO of ShowYourWorth.ai — for a conversation packed with hard-won strategy. Shelmina traces her path from leaving home in Tanzania at 15 to becoming one of the highest-ranking women of color at IBM while raising two children alone, and breaks down the frameworks from her book that took her there: defining success on your own terms, feeding your "voice of courage" over your "voice of fear," building a leadership brand that isn't self-promotion, and knowing the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. She closes with a rapid-fire round covering the strategy most women skip, what to tell a woman passed over for a promotion, and the one thing that's stayed true across every chapter of her career.
Show Notes
- Shelmina's origin story: leaving home in Tanzania at 15 to lift her family out of poverty, becoming the first in her family to graduate college, and rising to Vice President at IBM while raising two kids as a single mother.
- Why she initially settled for "incremental success" — and the moment a mentor, Susan Whitney, asked her a single question ("Where do you want to be in five years?") that changed her career trajectory.
- Strategy one from Show Your Worth: define what success means to you personally, aligned with your own core values — not just the goals your boss hands you at the start of the year.
- The fear of speaking up as a young engineer surrounded by Ivy League PhDs, and how being "stuck between a rock and a hard place" forced her to create unique, hard-to-replace value.
- "Power quotient": Shelmina's term for your innate ability to choose an empowering response over a disempowering stimulus — and why that choice, not the stimulus itself, is what you control.
- Courage is not the absence of fear — it's doing what you must do despite it. Fear and courage are both voices in your head, and the one that grows stronger is the one you feed.
- Reframing leadership branding: it's not self-promotion, it's about becoming, day in and day out, the kind of leader you want to be known as when you're not in the room.
- Mentor vs. sponsor: both matter, but sponsorship — someone willing to put their credibility on the line for you — has to be cultivated early, before you hit the "messy middle" of management.
- How ShowYourWorth.ai turns her book's eight strategies into a 24/7 personalized AI mentor that remembers every conversation, tracks weekly reflection and celebration, and scales her mentorship to thousands of women (and now men) globally.
- Why reflection and celebration are the cornerstone of her framework — most high achievers move from success to success without stopping to build their "success muscle."
- Rapid fire: the strategy most women skip is self-care; mentors matter throughout a career but sponsors become critical at the middle-management "messy middle"; and the one constant across her journey from Tanzania to IBM VP to AI CEO — staying true to yourself.