I worked really, really, really hard to build my marketing business. I waited tables for a living until I was 32. I went back to school for web technology at the ripe age of 30. While I was in school, I waited tables, finally got sick of it, and proceeded to start my very first business as a pet sitter.

I started building websites for clients in my second year of college. This was a huge deal, because most of the jobs I had were manual labor jobs. I was finally getting paid just to use my brain and my tech skills.

In my third year of school, I shut down my pet sitting operation and focused exclusively on passing my advanced programming classes, building websites for clients and also started to do online marketing work.

I officially founded my consulting business doing websites and online marketing a month before I graduated from my degree program. I also learned how to swim, and got married, all within about two months of starting my second business and graduating.

Still with me? Confusing, I know.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I had a lot of fucking skin in the game. I had worked very hard as a waitress, as a college student, as a budding entrepreneur with my pet sitting business, and finally as a web designer and marketer.

I worked my tail off to go to networking events two and three times a week while finishing school and getting my business off the ground. I went to marketing events, real estate events, cocktail hours, and told anyone with two ears that I was tech-savvy and knew how to build websites.

I had sales experience, which was a huge asset in finding clients and putting deals together. For five years, I kept my nose to the grindstone, and felt like I was on the brink of failing and closing up shop most days.

I ended up landing some pretty big clients over time, mostly real estate and marketing firms who needed to outsource their marketing and lead generation. The more knowledge and experience I acquired, the more I charged, and with that came massive responsibility.

My clients were no longer just wanting websites, they wanted an entire marketing strategy including content creation, paid advertising and lead generation. For the last two years of my business, I focused exclusively on generating leads for real estate brokers and their teams.

I was recruited to work as a marketing director for a fast-growing startup on the West coast. It was my dream job, overseeing an entire marketing team and working closely with the two CEOs, both very accomplished female entrepreneurs who had climbed the corporate ladder and started a company together.

I didn’t take very long for me to realize that my dream job was an actual fucking nightmare. When all I got to do was eat, breathe and sleep marketing strategy and numbers, and appease a CEO who wanted me to guarantee the financial future of the company. I wanted to shoot myself. Not literally, but it was soul-sucking, for sure.

I walked away from the high salary, high-growth potential job of my dreams with no idea what I was going to do next. I had been pushing myself so hard, for so many years trying to make more money that I had completely bypassed who I was and what actually made me happy.

What those things were, I had no clue.

I spent a couple of months anxiously chasing my tail, then decided to pivot and work as a coach. I knew that I was much more confident, aggressive and successful at winning business than most of my peers who were running service-based businesses.

I did a couple of programs to learn how to be a coach and started working as a business coach. I was really good at it, but I still felt this unbearable pressure from running the business. I also felt like money was still the main driver and began to understand that this might be part of the problem.

I parted ways with all of my clients and made time to just be and think about my life, and who I wanted to be. That’s when the shit really hit the fan.

Once I stopped spending all my time working to make money, things fell apart. I realized that I actually hated my business and the way it made me feel. For almost a decade, I had been solely focused on becoming the kind of person that other people would perceive as successful. I was miserable beyond belief.

I couldn’t figure out how I had gotten so far off track as to create a business that I didn’t enjoy, working for clients I didn’t even like. I felt sick to my stomach, like the whole thing was a big pointless lie I had been living for years.

After I fired all of my clients, I spent six months falling apart, and facing darkness, despair and processing childhood trauma that had remained invisible for three decades. 

I traveled through some very dark places. I spent most days in my pyjamas. I went to therapy every couple weeks. I read lots of self-help books and wrote in a journal every day. I shut out all of my friends and social connections, went dark on social media, and stopped checking my email and my bank accounts for weeks at a time.

I felt like I was barely hanging on by a thread. I had waded through some awful, horrible emotional shit dredged up from the past like a dead body out of a Florida swamp. I asked the Universe to help me get back to work. 

“Please Universe, just help me do something other than making self-therapy my full-time gig.”

At the end of 2020, I went to an online Christmas party with a bunch of women who live in my city. They each had horror stories about the darkness they had faced in 2020, and how their lives were shattered in one way or another. This made me feel like a lot less of a depressed weirdo.

I made a few connections at the party, and followed up and talked with a few women (which was my first social engagement of any kind in a long, looooong time). About a week later, one of those connections posted about a job opportunity on LinkedIn.

That job opportunity turned into a client, whom I helped, and then promptly fired a month in. But I had gotten what I had asked for!

The Universe had helped me to get back to work. 

I had sold a consulting engagement, created a strategy for the client, started to implement the changes, and in the process, had showered daily, cleaned out my inbox, settled my finances, cleaned up my office and put some money in the bank on my own terms.

That was my very last consulting client. It’s like when you decide that you don’t like a certain food (oysters, or raw onions) and you try it again six months later just to make sure you’re not being a total baby about it… and you still hate it just as much. Then you for reals swear that you’re never going to eat it again. That was how I felt about working in marketing.To this day, the word itself turns my stomach a little.

But you know what? Sometimes you have to figure out what you don’t want before you can decide on what you do want.

Saying NO to furthering my career in marketing created the space I needed to figure out what I really wanted. And that, my friend, opened the floodgates for a tidal wave of awesome shit to come into my life. 

Empowered No’s make room for empowered Yes’s.

More on that in the next post.