Review: Unleashing My Superpowers by Dr. Patience Mpofu

Award-winning mining executive Dr. Patience Mpofu has gleaned recollections from her life experience and offers them with advice, instruction, and encouragement for ambitious women, especially those involved in, or considering, careers in the varying aspects of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), in Unleashing My Superpowers: How to Navigate and Succeed in a Male-Dominated Mining Work Environment.

The author believes she was given the name Patience when her parents, rather dismayed at having a third girl and no sons yet, needed to develop this quality themselves. In their African culture – her father was of the Lemba tribe – girls were not as “valuable” as boys, but her name gave her the stance to wait and to persist. The members of her close family were intelligent, and she excelled in school, though as an African woman, she battled numerous stereotypes.

Overcoming those preconceptions and succeeding in a profession largely taken up by men is greatly to her credit, although the path was often difficult and fraught with cultural, racial, and gender-based biases and barriers, which she chronicles with an engaging, yet matter-of-fact tone. Looking for a suitable career at university and having very high scores in math, she chose chemistry and soon attained a research job with a noted mining concern in South Africa. Then to her great surprise, she got a call one day telling her she had secured a scholarship to work for Anglo Platinum in Australia, which would lead to her achieving a PhD.

Though much of her narrative is focused on the crises and triumphs she has experienced, it is all aimed at inspiring other women trapped in the emotionally charged, sometimes perilous realm of executive-level management, known as the C-Suite. Learning how to get entry to and navigate within the C-Suite is a challenge for women, and Mpofu offers hope and help in that endeavor, elevating this book into an effective work of business self-help, rather than just a career guide.

Following a hiatus in her distinguished work pathway, Mpofu contemplated next steps, and encouraged by family and other influences began composing this energetic work to motivate other women. Interspersed in her personal reminiscences are poems, many written by her, far-reaching source materials listed for readers in a References section, bulleted notes for further study, and a Peak Performance Leadership Model designed as a dynamic pyramid. She has interviewed women across the globe to gather further insight and build a community of like-minded thinkers. Importantly, this book is not just the perspective of one woman, as the cover might suggest, but offers a comprehensive overview of achieving success in the workplace.

While composing this powerful treatise, Mpofu received word that another honor was bestowed upon her: the 2019 Pan African CEO Global Most Influential Woman in Mining in Africa. Such recognition has often been her reward for her unassailable grit. Offering this guide to assist other women reveals her strong writing gifts and her admirable generosity in helping women succeed in male-dominated professional environments.