Hiba Shabrouq

1.      What do you consider the main achievements in your life?

I’ve always seen achievements falling under three main umbrellas:

Professional achievements: under this umbrella, I became an international Stevie award-winning woman in business with years of experience in business solutions consultation, product management, and data forecasting across the telecom and automotive industries. With a background in telecom engineering and studies in business entrepreneurship, I’ve built a career that bridges technical expertise with strategic vision.

My journey has also led me to the global stages as a public speaker. I’ve had the honour of speaking at TEDx, Microsoft HQ, LinkedIn HQ, Juniper HQ, Autodesk HQ, IEEE/Women in Engineering, and many other prestigious platforms—addressing audiences that included royalties, business leaders, and political figures.

 Personal achievements: I am a proud wife and a mother of a curious joyful 3-year-old daughter (and another daughter is on her way J). I keep exploring their world in my lens and the biggest lesson I've learned so far is stress management, in addition to negotiations skills of course.

 Mental Health & Wellness Achievements: learning to say “NO” is my biggest achievement under this umbrella.

• NO to unhealthy friendships..
• NO to toxic managers..
• NO to harmful environments..
• And NO to too much chocolates (still working on this ;) )

2. What drives you to be at the Top of your Game? What are your success strategies?

Throughout this journey, I've learned “the hard way” the below 2 strategies which I always follow:

Create your own déjà vu moments.

When you work hard on something, day and night and you give up too many things that could be happening for the first time in your life just because you want to achieve this goal, when you trust your God that it's going to happen and you feel it deep inside your heart, and when you start imagining yourself in every single detail achieving what you want in the most perfect way, you are basically creating a view of your future that you wish to see.

Then you'll be ready to capture the opportunity when the right time comes, and you know it is going to happen! You'll start seeing the pieces of the puzzle gathering to form your déjà vu moments, and you realize that things are happening the exact way you imagined them to happen! You will live the moment that you created for yourself long time ago.

Work hard, trust God, and believe in your 6th sense! Invest in yourself to have the right skills and to capture the right opportunity at the right time.

Spend a good time creating a future full of meaningful déjà vu moments.

Do not follow a passion, follow a vision instead.

They kept telling me you should follow your passion. It's exciting. It's inspiring. But at the same time, it's sugar-coated, and I find it a misleading career advice. Let me tell you why.

First, I started biting my nails the moment I realized that I don't know what my passion is. I felt hopeless.

Second, following one passion blinded me from exploring other great opportunities that might have led me to other successes. Imagine loving apples where it becomes your passion, you might miss tasting bananas, strawberries and even better, a fruit salad, just because you thought your passion is apples.

Third, I realized that passion is a dynamic feeling. It keeps changing over time.  

So in a nutshell, I believe that you shouldn't follow a single passion. Rather, find lots of them, invest in them, even combine them, and let them be steps to follow your vision instead. When you have a bigger vision, you will ultimately love, or try to love, any related thing for the sake of achieving your moon-shot. Do not follow a passion.

3. Have you dealt with failure? If so, how did you overcome it and resurge when all the chips were down?

There is a meaningful phrase that is being sang in one of children’s song which says “when you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, and count to four”.

I found myself following these two steps if I fail:

• Taking a deep breaths to manage my feelings, to accept the fact that after all the efforts I put, I failed, and it is something out of my control now.
• Count to Four: counting at least 4 lessons I have learned from this failure. From an experience, succeeding in something after failures taught me and shaped me better than direct successes.

4. How easy was it for you to speak up and share your story when times were tough?

I would lie if I say it was easy to take a step out of my comfort zone, but I swear it does become easy.

The first couple of times I had to speak-up in a meeting with an opinion that differs from the majority, I was sweating, butterflies were in my stomach, my voice was shaking and I was literally out of breath. Once I started talking, my brain became like a black box with no single clue of what shall I say.

But pushing myself was a key, rather than stepping away.

It became easier once I knew my weaknesses and worked on them every single day, where ultimately, the comfort zone got bigger and it became way easier to express myself regardless of how big the audience are.

5. What did you have to do in order to be able to do share your story to inspire others?

There were 2 main things that are super helpful to spread my words:

• Writing: we all have access to what leads us to thousands of people, the social media. And because I believe that if we focus enough in our day, we do learn new thing every single day, no matter how small it is. I found it inspiring to share what we learn in a form of posts or even short videos.
• Public speaking: I never thought that I will be speaking over TEDx, or even in front of His Majesty King Abdulla II of Jordan, but when the opportunity came, I was ready.

Public speaking was a weakness that I struggled with. For years, I worked on enhancing this skill without knowing where it is going to lead me. And OH YES! , it led me into very good places.

From being heard better in regular daily meetings, to speaking over big companies, schools and universities, online and on stage, to sharing my words over many TV and radio interviews...

As Warren Buffett once stated: Public speaking is the skill that will boost your career value by 50%. I live by this quote.