Debola Deji-Kurunmi’s is a transformational catalyst, equipping a new breed of African visionaries to rise and enthrone the continent into global prominence.
Her work of coaching, consulting and capacity building cuts across Christ-centered ministry (through Deborah Initiative for Women and FIREBRAND Movement), Mindset Coaching for women (through IMMERSE Coaching Company), as well as public policy and impact advisory (through Ideation Hub Africa).
At IMMERSE Coaching Company, Debola leads a 20,000+ strong community of female change makers who are using her breakthrough coaching and courses to create new powerful mindsets for a life of purpose, contribution and influence.
Her clients have cut across social innovators, entrepreneurs, career professionals, thought-leaders, faith-based voices and women seeking exponential growth.
Through Ideation Hub Africa, she runs a social profit accelerator, which supports non-profits, innovators, civil society organisations and public sector agencies, through executive education, collaborative platforms, funding opportunities and advisory.
Ideation Hub is also the host of Development Dialogue, which is Nigeria’s leading development sector conference.
Debola has been severally recognised for her outstanding leadership impact and has received Awards including 2014 New Leader for Tomorrow in the order of business, government, and parliaments at the Crans Montana Forum in Geneva; an award conferred before several Presidents and world leaders.
She served twice as a Mentor Jury of the Queen’s Young Leader Awards (a UK Government fellowship that honors exceptional young leaders in the Common Wealth).
In 2018, she was selected by the US Government as one of Africa’s most promising young leaders and a Mandela Washington Fellow.
At the 2018 Mandela Washington Annual Summit in Washington DC, Debola delivered the electrifying viral speech on “How to Fry Fish to Solve a Wicked Problem” where she shared heartfelt insights for young African leaders willing to fix the continent’s toughest challenges.
DDK, as she is fondly called, is an author of 20 books till date, including the classic called FIREBRAND which continues to reach thousands of readers in powerful ways.
Born from the book, is the FIREBRAND Movement which includes FIREBRAND Festivals across cities, FIREBRAND Prayer Journals, FIREBRAND Psalms, and more recently FIREBRAND Forerunners.
She is joyfully married to her lover, Ayodeji and they are blessed with children
Growing up
My childhood has shaped everything about me. I grew up as second of three children in a close-knit middle class family. A great priority was placed on education, spirituality and self-awareness. There was enormous degree of attention given to each of us, words of affirmation were spoken over us and my parents invested greatly in ensuring that we had the right thinking, the right paradigm and belief systems. My father spoke to me about myself every single day. We were literally made to believe we were the best.
I had and still have a very beautiful relationship with my father. I started to read Wole Soyinka’s novels from when I was 10 years old. Then we would sit and talk about lessons from the novels I was reading. But definitely there was priority placed on spirituality and self-awareness, and my father used to make us pray over our hearts. He always said that the world was such a wicked place but if you had a good heart, God will defend you and make your way straight.
Academic background
I went to Command Children School for my primary education. My mum worked with the presidency as a secret service personnel. So, we had a lot of military around us. We went to military primary school, we were driven to school. So, a bit of a sheltered life as well but we didn’t feel like anything was missing because of the family we had.
Then I went to Lagos State Government College, Ikorodu for my Junior Secondary School. And then Lagos State Model College, Igbogbo, for my senior secondary school. Then I went to Obafemi Awolowo University for my first degree, and then I’ve had executive education at Lagos Business School, University of London, School of Oriental Studies, and I’m currently a PASGR-funded student running a PhD in Public Policy.
I also had an executive diploma on the bill of the US government at Humphrey School of Public Affairs which was a very significant investment into my education and preparation as a public policy professional.
Also, I’m a student of life and I put that into great use in how I relate with people.
Impacting lives through Deborah Initiative (Now Kingdom Women Global Alliance (KWGA).
Deborah Initiative for women is a non-denominational faith-based outreach for women, helping them both impact their society as well as building a meaningful relationship with God. We were 10 years in September 2020, and God gave us a new name and so we’re now Kingdom Women Global Alliance (KWGA).
KWGA which used to be Deborah Initiative for Women, started September 2010, and it was partly a continuation of the assignment I received while on campus. While I was in OAU, I had started what was called God’s Great Girls Network in year 2003, and it ran all through my time in school till 2007. It was a really beautiful community of young women who were passionate about God and about purpose. It ran till 2007 when I left the university.
I got into Lagos and started to mind myself and excited to get into career, and then I remembered that every time I prayed, God would begin to talk to me again about how important my assignment is to women, how he wanted to set me up as an example. But I didn’t think he wanted me to start anything, I just promised to help women everywhere I go, but what started to happen from mid-2009 was that, I started to meet people from God’s Great Girls Network, who questioned why we did not continue what we had in OAU.
They said to me “We still need that encouragement and that community”, but I didn’t feel like God wanted me to do anything about it at that time. 2010, I had a retreat and the Lord said to me very clearly, “I want you to hold a meeting”. I said “I can do that”. He said “A lot of my daughters need refreshing”. So, I did that meeting in September 2010 and I was like, “I’ve done that for you, can we move on?” and He began to say to me to establish this. So, it’s been 10 years, thousands of partners across 11 countries passionate about Jesus Christ.
What has changed, what are you grateful for and looking forward to?
What has changed? I have changed. I feel like going on the path of service, following the assignment the Lord put in my heart with KWGA, Immerse Coaching and Ideation Hub, and generally being an available vessel while building my relationship with God.
It has been an undercover mission to change me first and then change the world through me. So, I have changed so much. I’m happy to be a blessing; I don’t want to be seen but if anything puts me in the fore front, it is just my obedience to Jesus. I just want to do all for Jesus. I’m a person I’m happy to be with.
What am I most thankful for? It would be three things. The first being thankful for what my relationship with Jesus has done for me. I’m thankful about that.
Also, that because he died, He’s teaching me how to die to the flesh and just really experience a beautiful life of peace. The second thing I’m thankful for is the families that God has given me the opportunity to meet all over the world both physically and virtually. The opportunity to be a true blessing. I wake up to multiple messages every single day and every time I receive them, the practice is to return it back Jesus and to say “look at what you’ve made out of my life. I’m not the prettiest, wisest or wealthiest, but you chose me to contribute my own quota to the world.” So, I’m thankful for the opportunity to be a blessing.
I’ve written 20 books, I’m going to write five this year. I’m going to write 50 in the course of this decade and I’m excited about that.
Thirdly, I’m thankful about being African and I’m thankful about the future of Africa. I have this relentless optimism about the prosperity that is emerging out of Africa. I carry an open conviction that Africa is the desire of nations and the nations of the earth are going to come to her and feed from her and impacted by her. I thank God for my role in shaping that future possibility.
What am I looking forward to? Again, three things. I’m looking forward to Africa’s greatness. I want to show her off when I’m standing at those UN Conventions and the World Economic Fora. I want to show Africa off. I’m looking forward to her prosperity, her emergence, the innovation that is going to come out of her agile young population.
I’m also looking forward to Africa being healed of longstanding plague of corruption and broken governance. She’s going to be liberated.
The second thing is the work we’re doing, building an online university that premiers this year. We’re putting a lot into it for us to be able to reach a hundred thousand students by the end of 2021. And I’m looking forward to teaching.
The third thing I’m excited is the spiritual revival that I see breaking out in the world. I am so excited about it. Gone are the days when some people are like the superstars in the Kingdom and people think they have a special relationship with God. I see young people catching fire for Jesus. I see the love for Jesus spreading out so rapidly and that is almost like an emotional thing, and we see that happening already with the work that we’re doing at Fire Brand. But beyond that, all across the world, there is a positive revolution spreading and it is truly exciting.
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IMMERSE Coaching
It is a personal transformation coaching institution. We started in year 2014. So, far we have built over 50 communities in 99 countries who have been part of our course and programmes.
The underlying drive for what we do is to provide mindset re-engineering, mental transformations that lead people to upgrade their lives and access peace, purpose and prosperity without trading the things that matter to them.
What I’ve experienced is that, it is possible to elevate your income and step into the arena of significance without trading the things that matter to you. But I know there’s an alternative system in the world that pushes people to make decisions that make them lose their spirituality, family and personal convictions and move into becoming who they don’t want to be.
So, our work is to help men and women build rounded lives of purpose, peace and prosperity without trading the things that matter to them. And our methodology is primarily the kind of courses we create. Many of them are short courses you can take on the go and it begins to open you to new ways of thinking across different areas of life.
Ideation Hub
It’s a social profit accelerator. What is at the heart of that is that, we’re building an ecosystem for nonprofit professionals. The crisis on the continent of Africa has become a systemic crisis, and because it has been on for so long, the rot has createe wicked problems. Those are the kind of challenges we face in Africa. For instance, children begging is not the problem itself, it was created by a problem that was created by a problem.
Out-of-school children, sexual abuse against the girl child, financial illiteracy, climate change challenges, they’re wicked problems that were given birth to by wicked problems.
So, what we believe at Ideation Hub is that, the government is incapable of fixing all the systemic crisis on the continent. We need well-meaning and competent social saviours.
If you’re a well-meaning Nigerian who wants to build Nigeria, I promise you that we can train you. We’re democratising the models of social innovation. We’re teaching you what you can do from where you are to affect Nigeria positively and recover her from the ruins of corruption.
We do that by consulting with organisations, advocating for policies at committee levels with the government, but also at the level of training.
We hold free online full immersive courses to help you know how to be a social innovator from the corner of your room. Go to Ideation Hub Africa on Instagram and you’ll find out current master class series starting next month and you can register.
Identifying a good coach
I did struggle with building out the vision I had about coaching because I didn’t want to get locked in the box of ‘Instagram coaches’. The way we upgrade our lives and become better is by unleashing our future potential, a thing we are that we’ve not become, a possibility we carry that we have not experienced. But we don’t unleash those future potentials unless we come into greater degrees of clarity.
‘Clarity’ happens through keen observation, immersive guidance, and revelation knowledge. The interesting thing for many of these levels is that, many times, an external guide can trigger those experiences for you. A coach helps you read those labels. Everybody who has ever made a giant stride in their lives had a coach. A coach uses tested methodologies to trigger and catalyze you into future possibilities.
Don’t disdain coaching, mentoring, training and knowledge quest. These are the things that 100 percent, birth transformation. These are the things that make you move faster than your natural abilities would have moved you. These are the things that will help you see yourself in a way that you could not see yourself before. Don’t disdain it, because when you disdain a thing you repel it, what you don’t honour, doesn’t gravitate towards you.
What is the difference between a coach and a mentor?
Both roles can be interchanged, intertwined, and can be housed in the same person. But the difference is that, a mentor has been where you are and can use the power of a vulnerable life experience to handhold you on your own journey because they’ve taken the part you are taking, so, they can shorten your journey and help you bypass likely mistakes. They’ve been where you are or where you want to go is the place they are now. It’s either they understand your path, or your desired future is their present reality. So, they can say ‘this is how I got here.’
A coach doesn’t have to have been where you are, but they use tested methodologies to move you from A to B, whether you’re a medical doctor, a single parent, there are universal principles that catalyse people from A to B. Conditioning is conditioning, subconscious conditioning is the same, negative emotions affect you the same way. Execution models, they work, whether you want to start a beauty business or you’re an athlete. So, a coach doesn’t have to be where you are, they don’t have to have worked your path, but they can use tested methodologies, framework and a science to trigger and catalyse you into future possibilities. My final word on this would be, don’t disdain coaching.
Being a pastor’s wife/ Challenges
Work has been made easy by the kind of assembly that I pastor. Our senior pastors gave a great legacy that cuts out all the funny stuff that comes with being a pastor’s wife. But a few of the challenges: firstly, by my natural disposition, I’m not ‘mummy G.O.’ I am more a prophet than a pastor by my calling and what that means is, I say things the way they are. In the past, I’ve gotten on people’s toes for just being upfront. I’ve not lowered my standards but I’ve now used the recipe of love more and I’ve gotten better at giving useful feedbacks.
The second challenge will be that I am not a hostess. I don’t have a grace for it. I believe that because of how public my life is in terms of the work I do, my home is a haven, it’s where I want to come to, where I hide from the world, it’s where I build my relationship with my husband and children. It’s not another ministry platform, and it’s where I recover from serving at the level that I serve. I love my solitude.
The final challenge is that I look and I speak like an extrovert but I’m an introvert so, that confuses people. That can be stressful because people think I want to laugh and play all the time, but many times I want to recover from being with people and if you respect that, I would love you more.
Words of admonition
Find God, find yourself and the way you find yourself is to throw yourself in a community where their current reality is your future possibility. Find God, don’t joke with that. And invest in knowledge. Life doesn’t necessarily respond to what you desire, it often responds to what you deserve as well.
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