Episode Transcript
Hello, my name is Aziz and I'm the son of a divorced mother.
She is really my superhero.
That's why it's important for me to support women, to share their uniqueness, their personalities,
perspectives, and emotions about life.
Too many women in this world feel alone. They worry about the judgment of others,
and they struggle with their mental health. But when they listen to the Rare Girls podcast where
empowered women share their voices and tell their stories, many women will feel inspired
to live a life of freedom and to overcome all insecurities.
They will feel it is a safe space to find their confidence,
to remember their unique beauty and to feel their self-worth.
And they will connect with the sisterhood of rare girls
who encourage their success and support their dreams.
That's what this podcast is all about.
My guest today is Maria Cherimlich.
Maria was born in Belarus and currently lives in the south coast of Turkey.
She's building her life there.
Maria is an experienced marketing leader who's
passionate about developing new ways to engage customers with the products.
She always has been drawn to create.
Maria is gathering experiences and working to start her own business.
Maria, how are you today?
Hi, Aziz. I'm so glad to be here with you today.
Thank you for this opportunity.
I'm feeling great and excited to start.
What about you?
I feel blessed. I feel lucky and very, very curious about you as a person and as a woman.
So I'll begin with this nice first question, which is,
Maria if your friends and the people who know you very well could describe your personality
what would they say about you? Well as for the closest friends of mine they will definitely try
to say something cringy just to annoy me but actually the other week I had a chance to ask them
this question because I took a course of a personal growth and one of the tasks here was
to ask your nearest and dearest people
to share five good and five bad things about my personality.
And I was so surprised
that they struggled to find something bad
and those bad features I know myself
and I try to conquer them.
And I was pleased to know that people see me
as a kind and polite person, someone tolerant,
empathic, and of course I was proud to hear
that they consider me as a strong,
a charismatic and successful woman who chooses to grow above herself.
So I would really advise this practice as something that will make you feel so loved
and so needed in someone's life, just the way you are.
And you should also definitely ask your parents to participate in this because the answer
that I got from my mommy was just, I couldn't ask for more.
I love that.
I agree very, very much with the sentiment.
And I want to know more.
You said a lot of your friends will describe you
as a successful woman.
What drives you to be successful in a time
where there are so many people, including women,
who stay in their comfort zone
and they don't dare to go into the unknown
because it's risky?
Probably the fact that we only live once.
So you wanna know your strengths
and you want to learn and try as much as you can,
spend the best time,
build best occasions to be proud of, support people you love and someone who needs help.
Sometimes I try to imagine myself in future as an old lady and I ask myself, who is she?
What was her life like? Is she glad to be the one that she's become? And I don't know,
but I always imagine the happiest person, someone who's smiling and shining.
And it really, really motivates me a lot, I would say.
Thank you. And I understood one of your motivations is becoming a businesswoman and starting your own business.
What motivates you about this? Why is it interesting for you?
Well, you know, as I've already told you before, I've always been drawn to create in different senses.
As a kid, I loved drawing. I used to attend and graduated from a school of arts.
As I got older, I realized I'm not only a creative person, I also love and can manage
people, manage things, finance, build tactics and campaigns.
So I've decided to try myself in marketing and that was one of the best decisions ever
made by me because it gives me the opportunity to create something which is not just a
beautiful painting to observe, but that people and brands are going to use.
So marketing to me is a perfect area for creative person like me with analytical skills, because
we have a chance to develop strategies, launch bright commercial campaigns, we help brands
to enter new markets, we launch and promote new products, we work with the quality and
the customer's feedback, we do a lot of analysis.
So there's so much you can do.
And when you realize that, for example, you work in a company with 200 employees and the
project that you, one of those 200 people manage, it brings the company five or even
10% of its revenue and you get a positive customer's feedback.
You see how involved and interested they are.
Imagine how proud you are.
As for me, I also really like socially significant projects, even when they are
mall, for example, when brands collab with different charity organizations or I've managed
the project for a pizza chain when we asked customers to bring us the pizza boxes, so
we recycle them after.
And the customers would receive coins on the personal account that they can use to
pay for their next order.
And as a final target of these efforts, as I told you before, I'm gathering the
experience to start something on my own, maybe someday I will share it when we meet here again.
I love that. I love the ambition. I love that you believe in yourself. Did you always have
this confidence or was your journey one where you had moments and periods where you didn't
believe in yourself and your self-worth and then you did something or you have
been through life maybe like you said, you thought I'm wasting too much time, time
is too short or you're thinking about yourself, like you said, as an 80 years old lady or something.
How was your journey to find this confidence? Yeah, I would say to me, personal growth is a
very important part. You know, when we are young, we learn and try new things because our parents
tell us to. We have a lot of energy, we try to follow some trends, but as we got older, we
and right now is the best time to try to create, to grow, to change something and so on.
So I would say my main purpose of life for now is a self-realization, which means a search
for what do I do? What do I want to be? Probably the hardest question a person faces in his life.
When you're looking for your own way, when you try to understand what you want to be,
You face different experiences, situations, and people that aren't here to support you.
They have their own motives, own struggles, and you would say that the empathy, I would
say that the empathy helped me a lot to understand that there is no one whose goal in life is
to hurt me and stop me on my way.
People care about themselves first of all, and the reason why someone can treat you
is this someone is unhappy because happy people shine and only share love and joy.
There's another thing important to understand here. You can't help someone who doesn't want
this help. So you should focus on yourself and the only person who will follow you throughout
your whole life, no matter what and when is yourself, right? So you should care about
yourself and praise yourself the most. And sometimes it will mean to not let your
Your fears block your way because there are so many roads in front of you and you're scared.
And as for an expected difficult situation, you should always remember that I always
try to remember this thing that there's nothing you can't do.
It's truth because none of us knows the limit of our body and brain.
So you just need to believe it and you will realize it.
That is true after, if you're still not sure about that now.
You need to tattoo this in your brain.
That's what I think.
I agree 100%.
And for you to understand even more about your life, how was adapting to the culture
of Turkey as a woman coming from Belarus?
It's very different.
Are you staying within the digital nomad kind of circles and so you don't feel it
so much?
or how was that transition and adaptation?
Yeah, it's very different from Belarus, to be honest.
A year ago I moved to Turkey, so in some aspects I'm still building my life here.
Well, I try to take the best what I can from this journey.
I have a new hobby, which is tennis.
I tried it because I was just curious and it turned out to be so much fun.
And another thing, as we live near the sea, me and my husband, we started diving and snorkeling,
which was also a huge discovery for me, to be honest, because I found out that there is
another world under the water. And all the dramas and the life issues that you have,
they doesn't matter here. It's very peaceful and beautiful place to abstract from your
life and to find another life very different from yours. We also try to
travel here in Turkey. It's an amazing country with beautiful and unique nature,
with the nicest people, fantastic cuisine. I'm so grateful that I have this
opportunity to be here. I'm not sure whether life will bring me
tomorrow, but I can say that right now and right here I'm definitely very
Of course, along with the fact that new opportunities open in your life, some of them are taken
away from you, like your social life from the country where you were born, your friends,
parents, grannies, your favorite places with your favorite dishes.
For example, Minsk, my home city in Belarus, has the best cappuccino I've ever tried,
So, of course, I miss my life there, but I realized that now I feel like I'm living another
new life.
So, how cool is that, that you can live more than one, right?
That you got used to, you have another one and you seem, you feel like you're another
person now.
So, it's definitely a growing point too.
I'm learning a new language here, I'm meeting new people, experience new things.
Like, I've tried this thing called paragliding, do you know what that is?
Yes.
Yes, it's when you get on the top of the mountain and you fly down on the parachute.
So crazy, but I've tried it and I liked it so much.
I've also tried rafting, it's when you flow down the stormy mountain river.
Like, I can't say I'm an adventurous person who is addicted to extreme, but I'm definitely
the one who takes chances and tries not to miss opportunities.
So yes, this is the best experience ever, I would say.
I'm really, really happy for you.
That sounds absolutely fantastic.
And to share a bit more about Belarus
and you as a woman from Belarus,
how is the culture of women and girls from Minsk,
let's say, how different is it to other countries?
And how is it a part of your personality
that stays with you anywhere you go?
Well, definitely, I love my country. I love my people. I'm a huge fan. I always like to share
facts about it when I meet new people. But as for our society, I would say that it has a wide
space to grow as for accepting people's unique features, not only talking about women, even
though Belarusians are very calm and nice people, very peaceful, especially the older
generation have the outdated views on life, I would say, I think people of my age will
agree with me that if I call our society homophobic and the sexist, yeah, there's definitely a
growth in a positive trend like in five, maybe 10 years, but still we have a lot
to learn.
What I'm proud of is that there is an affordable high education in our country.
I can also see how people change their minds about the therapy, about mental health.
It becomes something normal and worth attention.
And I hope my generation and the younger generation will do even more.
I know they will. I hope so.
I know they will and I really encourage the progress of your society
and of everyone in relation to modernity and their perspective about women, etc.
You spoke about how creative you are and you have been throughout your life
and you're in love with marketing since you have discovered it.
Can you share how is it linked?
How do you express your creativity within marketing and why do you love it so much?
Well, I guess the main point for me was to understand what my mission in life would be,
because as I've said before, there are so many roads in front of us. So, it's probably the
hardest question that person faces in his life. What is my mission? What am I here for? And I
wish as many people would understand this in their lives. So, I think me and other people
should ask themselves about what makes you happy and what are their strengths.
That's what I did.
Um, sometimes you'll have to start all over again and it's great.
Uh, I also did that.
I used to be more focused on their arts, um, on drawing and stuff like that.
Uh, then I realized that I also have some other strengths,
um, like managing skills.
So, yeah, I decided to try marketing and I entered the Belarusian State Economic University
in Minsk.
So yeah, that's how I found this journey and I decided to move forward with it.
But even that doesn't mean that I will spend whole my life doing marketing.
Maybe I will change my mind soon.
I don't know.
You know, I've listened to a podcast, sorry, about Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken,
who actually started KFC at the age of 60 plus years something. So I don't know.
We should not say that it's too late to start, right? And we should always remember that we
have a right to make mistakes because we are human. Sometimes we're tired, didn't have enough
sometimes our belly aches, sometimes we just need a break and we deserve it no matter what.
Thank you. I love that. And even more since you spoke about caring about your society and how they treat women,
in you in general, do you believe there is a message that you would be glad to share with other women
so that they live a better life, they reach their potential and live their best life ever?
Yeah, of course. Thank you for this opportunity again, because, you know, I've been doing therapy
and I've been learning about myself and other women, what they struggle. We do have a lot
in common. So I wish every single woman in the world, is she a little girl, a teenager,
a mommy or a granny, each and every lady would remember how beautiful and unique she
is. She is one of a kind and she doesn't even know how strong she is. Please remember you are
enough. Your current version of you is enough to be happy, to be loved, to be gifted and praised
every day. So if there's someone near you who disagrees, you don't need them in your life.
You're not alone. There are millions of sisters around you. They know how hard your way is and
They will believe in you.
They will believe that you will succeed.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to share.
Thank you for that.
And I want to know more.
So you went to Turkey and even to your new job, et cetera,
and you needed to make new friends.
Although in the culture where you grew up in Belarus,
you had friends from your high school,
from your school, from small time,
like from being a young little girl.
How was your experience of making friends and what's your advice to maybe younger generation who grew up around COVID and maybe now they use too much social media and they don't feel confident about their skills, their social skills to make friends when they go to study in a new city or travel to a new place to live?
For me finding a friend. It's it's something about the chemistry
You know, my first all of my friends and my first friend ever
They are so unlike me and they are so unlike each other. So
You should you should pick what's what's more important to you as for me
What's common for my friends is that they are all kind and polite people funny and empathic. So
They share my life principles based on humanity and virtue.
Of course, we're happy to meet someone who shares our interests or at least one of them,
but I would say that what's fundamental to me is a person's soul.
And of course, there always have to be red flags, especially when you're a kid and
you don't really know how to choose people around you.
should be very, very attentive. And the red flags that can be universal, I would say, would be
toxicity, manipulations, cruelty towards other people, towards nature and animals. If a person
tends to say unpleasant things about you or other people behind their backs, about their
appearances, race, age, shape, I don't know, or weight, he's unlikely to make an exception
for you. You deserve a better friend. That's what I think. And
that's for making friends here in Turkey. Luckily, I have a
couple of friends here that I've known for ages already. And
there are many people, foreigners like me willing to
communicate and to have a good time. So there's nothing
impossible. The hardest part is to get out of a comfort
zone, you know, and just to make this first step. Yeah.
Thank you so much. Maria, it's my privilege and my honor to
include you in this podcast to share your thoughts, your
perspective, your voice and part of your story. I wish you
all the success you and your husband and those that you
love. I wish you to start your business to become the
successful business woman you want to be and to stay always
creative. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Aziz. You have a beautiful soul and a brilliant mind. It was a big, big pleasure for me.
Wish you and your audience success in your mission and take care, you guys.
