Imagine earning over $580K in a single year and not being happy about it.
Many cannot even fathom the possibility, but it is where I found myself on my birthday in 2017.
After being laid off from my corporate job in December 2015 (I declined the offer to move my position across the country), I went into full-time entrepreneurship with my guns blazing. I did what most would consider a unicorn moment. I stayed focused, increased my discipline, and worked my ass off. I showed up daily, quadrupled my prices, launched program after program, performed done-for-you services, and eventually did the one thing most entrepreneurs dream of… I hit multi-six-figures my first year out of the gate.
By the end of 2016, I was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. And worse, I hated everything about the dream of entrepreneurship, so I did what any self-respecting woman would do. I hired a headhunter and decided to get a job.
That decision was my coaches’ worst nightmare. See, no coach wants to hear the news their star client (who is living the dream) wants to quit. They hammered into me; I was having a mindset issue.
Over the next year, I would spend close to $50,000 on courses, programs, and retreats. Still, I wouldn’t say I liked it. Something was definitely wrong missing. I didn’t know what that was.
It would be another two years before I figured it out.
In a random conversation, at the back of a room for a conference I was attending, a coach asked me, “what do you think was missing?” and I told him. At the end of about five minutes of verbal vomit, I ended with, “I wish more coaches understood that their lack of knowledge of the ancestral past Black Americans and People Of Color affect their ability to coach us effectively.”
“Why can’t you do it?” Mark replied.
Needless to say, I never went back into an office owned by someone else again.
