We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Hope Somadlangati a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hope, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

Taught me that I can accomplish anything that I put my mind and full effort towards. The key word being “anything” because life often presents us with many options to pursue and it is our active duty to try and figure out where our destiny lies

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Music and dance has been around me for as long as I remember. I started participating in it during high school in larger group but never alone because I didn’t think I was good enough. Graduating from high school forced me to do it alone because there weren’t musicals and choirs to hide behind. I am proud to have taken up that challenge to become who I am today. I perform all around the Grand Rapids area and take every opportunity I can to showcase my talents.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I am South African born and at some point in my life I got an opportunity to pursue my studies abroad. In a situation where something as small as lack of faith could have kept me down or closed mindedness, I believed that the opportunity would work out even though financially my family was not in a position to follow up with the opportunity. I got enrolled at a school here in the United States and had to find a way to graduate amongst other challenges whilst being far away from any sort of support system. To me, this phase of my life displayed resilience in me to my own self.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

If could go back I think I would be more bold about pursuing Music and Dance more seriously. I feel like I made it a hobby because I was not allowed to take it seriously. “Music and dance are not a real career”, “you can not make a living from that kind of stuff” and all the other popular remarks that society makes when you try to pursue such passions can hold you back and for me they have held me back for the most part.

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