Business out of Breakdown

Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit." - James Clear. If you’ve read the book Atomic Habits, you are probably familiar with that quote. The interesting part is, we often don’t know the train we’re getting on before we punch the ticket.

It was 2019, and I was in my senior year of college as a biology major, and everything started breaking down. My anxiety was at an all-time high. Depression was at an all-time high. I was having suicidal ideations, and everything I thought I knew about who I was and who I wanted to be began crumbling down… it had started falling apart long before, if I'm being honest.

If you would have asked me then, I would have never been able to acknowledge or admit, but I had classic golden-child/people-pleasing syndrome. My value was determined by how proud I felt I could make my parents. I felt like my worth was wrapped into my ability to do everything “right.” I felt like I had to be the one to hold it together for everyone else because I’m the “smart” one, the “logical” one, the “mature” one. In this season of life, I felt like I was everything but that. I was in survival mode. I thought I had to honor this idea of success that I determined from the time I was 10 years old. Do well in school, go to college, go to medical school, become a doctor, make a lot of money. All of my worth was tied into what I thought I was supposed to be instead of who I was supposed to be.

I made the decision that I wouldn’t be pursuing medicine in a very painful way. Ultimately, it was because of a breakdown. A complete stripping of self and every understanding of who I thought I was to embrace a journey of understanding who God has said I am.

I felt like I disappointed my parents, my family, everyone who has ever poured into or invested in me, myself, and I was starting at zero. I had no idea what I wanted to do going forward, who I wanted to be, all I knew is that the resistance I felt, the pain I felt, the torment I felt, was telling me it was time to take a different approach.

I took a hard pivot away from science; I wanted nothing to do with any of it. This was really just a trauma response from all I had experienced in school. I felt like my college experience stole my soul LOL. I felt like it sucked away everything about me. But it was really the trauma and emotional wounds that did that. At that time, all I knew was that I wanted to run away from it, the problem was that I didn’t know where I was going. And as someone with Caribbean parents where the narrative is you go to school and get an education, so you can work hard, make money, and support yourself, my seemingly sudden shift from desiring “success” and being the kid with a plan, into this person who just needed a reset, didn’t really jive. I had to figure it out.

I VA’d in college so I had some knowledge of business and administration. I used that to start contracting out social media management and virtual assisting services. My goal at this point was just to use my skills to make money… but it became exhausting. There was a common theme I noticed with each client that I worked with, the idea that once they began to scale their business would boom. The thought that well I’ve hired a social media manager. I have a VA now, everything should be different. The limiting beliefs surrounding what they want versus the approach to take to achieve that. I became a sales coach, content creator, strategist, brand manager, copywriter, etc., all in one because so many people were looking at a one-fix-all for problems in their business when the problem really went back to that personal journey. Learning that wanting circumstances to change without thinking that you also have to change is a sure-fire recipe for frustration and burnout. This is where that quote at the beginning comes in. I realized the journey I am on was much deeper than just wanting to build a business and help people grow theirs; I realized my path and my pain wasn’t for no reason. I realized I had an opportunity to help people as people so that they can experience the results they’d like to receive and as a result build the business they love.

Thus LyvvCreative was born. To me, creativity is freedom, the ability to grow, express, change, build, are all core values that I want to inspire in others. Life beyond the traditional idea of success but really using purpose to fuel fulfillment and not the other way around. Now, as a fractional COO and Business Systems Coach, I get to combine what I love. I get to help people recognize the gaps in systems in business and in life and get to use biblical principles surrounding purpose and identity that stemmed from a breakdown for the benefit of others.

I hope you take this journey with me of learning and unlearning, programming and deprogramming, AHA’s and Oh wells, and appreciate the journey. Because there is truly no arrival point, just a lot of revelations along the way! I’d love to hear how you relate in any way!