In Coversation with Phumulani Mngomezulu

There are few individuals who maintain a standard high enough to ensure their success, and also ensure their ability to say i the end, that ‘it is finished, I have done all I came to do...’ Phumulani is a principled young man whose value goes beyond hitting the billionaire status (which he soon will) but he is passionate about people, as he put it, identifying people’s pain and illuminating it. He is ofcourse not a doctor but an elite brand strategist, thought leader and now an Author. I’m sure you are still caught up on the pain relief and what connection it has with branding. By the end of this conversation I had with him you will surely understand that you have had an encounter with genius. 

On a day-to-day Phumulani is the Chief Engagement Officer of Persntge, that currently works with select purpose-driven entrepreneurs to assist them on their brand building strategy. His brand formula evolves around illuminating the human experience, whether your pain is the job you have or debt or relationship he believes brands can speak to this and transform lives. In 2017, he was honored by the African Leadership Academy as a Thought Leader at the South African Ideas Festival.  In 2018, he was supported by South Africa’s leading private aviation group – Comair Limited and was selected for incubation at Raizcorp. This made Phumulani the youngest entrepreneur to graduate from the Raizcorp Prosperator model, which is top-rated and regarded the most successful incubator in Africa.

As an Author, his award-nominated debut book entitled Entrepreneurial Branding: Insights and Strategies for Purpose-driven Brand Building in an entrepreneurial context is scheduled for release this year, which includes a foreword by Former Commercial Director of PepsiCo/Simba, Nokuthula Fihla, and has also been reviewed and acclaimed by other industry experts and academics across Africa from brands such as FNB, McCarthy Limited, Comair, Takealot and the UCT Graduate School of Business.
 Growing up in a religious family, he watched his father travel to parts of the country to minister, a man grounded in Christ yet not lacking in knowledge as he also happened to be a man of science. Watching him navigate spirituality and science was an interesting experience. Phumulani found it interesting how people dealt with some of the most fundamental questions in life such as : What is good? What is evil? What do I do about all my love, guilt, hate, lust, envy, fear, mourning and rage? Does anybody love me? What happens when I die? Spirituality seemed to be vessel that carried answers to this and perhaps still is the order of day.

What always fascinated Phumulani was how spiritual beliefs would play such a key role and take center stage in how people would deal with inherent human pain or rather struggle. Phumulani believes the same advocacy that is found in religious faiths and spiritual faiths, is exactly why people love brands and are willing to passionately advocate for brands. He says “For me then, brands  are one of the many vehicles and routes that can and should help people on this human level of experience. We may sometimes get distracted by what happens at the surface and think that brand building is about looking professional and attractive in the minds of people, but that's not what I believe brand building is about. I believe it is about answering those profound questions of human experience and explore the ubiquity of the inherent human pain. There is proof in neurosciences research to this effect, people buy from brands that resonate with their emotions. They buy from brands that HEAL them, in the humanistic sense. Therefore, when we say we are building a brand, what we should be focused on is finding the human pain of our consumer and use the brand to alleviate it. That is bringing light and let the brand become their experience of healing.”

As human experience demands there are life interruptions that possibly stand in the way of fulfilling great ideas, plans and ultimately purpose. This is what Phumulani had to say about how he deals with such; “ I identify that my purpose is ingrained within me.  As we have explored that I find my purpose being about illuminating the human condition and contributing to the healing of humanity. My purpose is not in my surroundings but It is rooted deep within my emotional and spiritual realm. In order to fortify myself in my purpose, I have to search within myself by staying in touch with my emotions.

When I was doing my incubation at Raizcorp to work on the Persntge concept, part of how that programme challenged me was to force me to go a level of my being  where I search what is within me. For much of my time at Raizcorp I believed that my purpose my around my work,  there were so many moments when I felt like entrepreneurship wasnt for me, as if I was  a cog in this machine.  Adding to the fact that I was the youngest in the group, my peers seemed to know what they were doing. I really felt like I made a big mistake. This affected how I would do my presentations, how I would explain my business, how I would show up, conduct and sell myself, etc. It was one of the toughest challenges of my life yet it was also my ignition point”

Phumulani’s experience reminds me much of myself, I find myself many times being a first in most spaces, only female, youngest person, youngest female, unmarried young female, only black person, there are so many things that a pioneer experiences that play on confidence, they can even have a great impact on work ethic as Phumulani highlights but in all this I have learnt that keeping true to your vision, learning and rising from your mistakes, acknowledging what’s standing in your way is very important. What fortifies me in my purpose regardless of my experiences is my vision. For this vision I will continue to fight myself, fight my fear, fight my bad habits until I one day get it right. As you read this if you fight without a clear vision you are like one beating about the air. You miss the point.

As we continue to learn from Phumulani’s experiences this is what else he had to say; “It was only after I left Raizcorp and did some soul searching and revised all my plans, that I realized what was really going on. During that 6 months training, I was so focused on getting my business right and my concept right that I stopped paying attention to how I really felt and what my emotionality was telling me. In 2019, I spent a lot of my time facilitating workshops with a group of entrepreneurs to pilot my concept and it was during that time, helping those entrepreneurs, getting the feedback, that all the voices of my Raizcorp guides started coming back to me like spaghetti in my head. I started to feel alive again because I was now interpreting all that information and guidance in a different way and its all because this time I was starting from the right place, within.”

“ The challenges that came, distracted me because they came in the form of the very things I thought defined me. You may be reading this and might think the specific job  you do is your purpose, and one day you get fired, and start thinking because of that, your lost your bearings, You must understand that, your purpose is within you, and it should be our purpose that informs everything we do, not everything we do informing our purpose.

So, today whenever I come across interruptions in my life that interfere with my purpose, I am reminded to search within and consult my emotionality, and I see that manifesting in my thoughts and mentality. I engage on a lot of mindfulness practices in my mornings, I affirm, I now eat a 100% healthy diet which contributes to my calmness and the quality of my mind, and I seek peace, calmness and order around me. So, I structure and ritualize it, and that structure then creates the space for me to be fortified in my purpose.”

I would like to believe that from what Phumulani has shared so far, it is clear that you are only as good as what is within you. A tree does not rot from its leaves, it all begins in the root, perhaps ritualized routine, an intentional approach to what you think, eat and eventually feel is non-negotiable. The quality of your experience is embedded in these little-big things. Decide to be better, decide to do better.
Purpose is a topic I am sure you have also come across in many relevant spaces, I then asked Phumulani to share at what stage he feels would define fulfillment of his purpose. This is what he had to say, “ When I am in my spiritual realm. That spiritual realm manifests in my emotionality. My emotionality manifests in my feelings and my feelings manifest in my thoughts, and lastly my thoughts in my actions. So, I look at it as a sort of cycle and then ask myself quality questions. Usually starting with a challenge to my actions, “Why am I doing this?” and the answer would be along the lines of “Because I think/thought/want..” moving on to a challenge to my mental state, “How do I come to think this way?/Why do I want this so much?” and  then I get the answer which is usually in the form of, “Because I feel this way ..” and then lastly asking, “But why am I feeling like this?/Where does this feeling come from?”

“ The key thing is to arrive at brutal honesty and sometimes I do not like the answer, because I start questioning my character and who I am,  but I appreciate it because it is feedback and it allows me to find my core so I can bring it in the state of awareness and consciously get rid of all the clutter that is in my head and go back to living out my purpose with radical sincerity.”

The world we live in we see much talk about physical efficiency, very little about mental efficiency. I then asked Phumulani, what he would say is the way to help us all achieve human efficiency in such a way that everyone escapes their pain and fulfills their purpose. Bombs of wisdom flew right out of him;
“ I think it lies in the quality of the question you ask yourself about your pain. So, how have you defined what bothers you? You see, the thing about us human beings is that we do what psychiatrists call confabulation. Confabulation is when we tell ourselves a story that is not necessarily true, but we believe that it is true, because we are not aware of what is going on in our subconscious. It is not that we are lying to ourselves, no. This happens as a result of not being in touch with our emotionality. You start telling yourself you are doing something because of a reason that is politically correct to you but deep down there is a real cause and effect that is taking place that you are not attending to which you should. This sometimes happens when in your life something happens that breaks you apart and you find yourself acting in a way you never though you would, asking yourself, “Who exactly am I?” “Why did I just do that?”

I read a book once about a guy that had a father turned transgender. His son, who had a close relationship with his father felt heavily betrayed by his father’s decision but he does not confront and tell him how he feels, instead, he blocks it inside. One day he is driving and along the way he gets stuck in traffic. This puts him under immense pressure and he feels completely hurt by the fact that he is stuck in traffic as he didnt expect to. So, he starts calling the traffic a conspiracy and that someone is behind this. It is only later when he visits his mother’s house, and he starts talking to his step father who asks him questions that make him realize that he is suffering from grief for the loss of his father as he knows him to be. Yes, his father is still alive but he is no longer his father as he knows him to be. He is transgender now. After realizing this he breaks, and starts weeping because he also realizes that his neglected feelings were showing in the face of that traffic that he was calling a conspiracy. His real suffering was grief, not some kind of traffic.

Identifying your pain is not an objective, politically correct process of right and wrong. It is about the truth of how you really feel and why. Only after exploring that honesty can you begin your quest to finding out what you should do. Listen to your body. What does it tell you? And do not judge the answer, embrace it with humility and radical sincerity. I think this is the heart of how and why we start to have faith in something. Faith in a religious deity and belief, faith in science, faith in reason, faith in brands, and faith in anything. Do not focus on what is politically correct on how you should show up and behave in society. Express yourself in the manner that illuminates and healthily heals your condition. Only you can know.

I then asked if he has ever felt like he is the one standing i the way of his progress and how he deals with that,  He expressed how this was one of his greatest fears in life, this process happens through one’s mindset.
“ I am currently trying to grow my small business. In my head there is a picture of where I wanna take this business. The problem is trying to realize this picture, there are specific actions that need to be executed and those actions need specific mindsets that need to be acquired. If I don't acquire these mindsets over years and not execute these actions, I am standing in the way of myself because I am not doing whatever it takes to be big enough in my head in order to execute at the level that is required. I call myself a CEO of Persntge, but what does it really mean if I am not challenging myself each day toward understanding and execution at the highest level.

When I was writing my book, I realized something. There were some days where certain food that I was consuming was affecting my ability to concentrate and get the job done. Either the food was making me tired easily or incredibly hyper but irrational. This obviously required that I take more breaks than I knew I should’ve, and make more excuses or just simply find the stimulus to justify my reasons for not executing the task at the highest level. When I was consuming the other food that was making me feel more calm and rational and alive, I realized I had to make a choice and get into serious negotiations with my emotions. That was whether I would continue taking this food that harms me or not. It wasnt easy because I loved it. It satisfied my emotions yet at at the cost of my cognitive strength, and so I took a very difficult decision that I am gonna stop taking this food because it is helping me stand in the way of my journey to that desired cognitive strength, I need to pen down what my body was telling me to. As a result, I won against that mindset and got a new one that helped me execute at the level I needed to complete my book. I believe you rise by striving to challenge your mindset to get big, beyond emotion and instant gratification, so that you can execute at the level that is required.

I love a quote by my favourite author in the bible, Paul. In Acts 20:24, he says: ‘But I don’t care what happens to me, as long as I finish the work that the Lord Jesus gave me to do.” .... I can’t think of a better reminder that our life is much bigger than us, and our dreams have a source that is God. They are the work He has given us and we must defeat anything and anyone that stands in the way of our doing that work, even if those things and those people are us.”

I believe ending it here is just about right as you have seen that Phumulani is a man on a mission, a God-given mission. Pushing himself to his best potential to fulfill this mandate. The question then to you is what price will you pay to fulfill your God-given mandate?