I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. In fact, I was God awful afraid of it.
When I was a teen, the city began digging up the streets in my neighborhood to replace the underground sewerage system, and there were these huge human sized concrete tunnels that sat above ground for months on end. They were massive; and day after day they would just sit there. I didn’t live in the safest of neighborhoods, so we began to rely on these tunnels for safety when the nearby gunshots would ring out. My siblings and I would squeeze inside, or hide behind them until the coast was clear.
Eventually we began to grow reliant on these tunnels to keep us safe. Years after they were gone, I realized I had replaced the physical tunnel with a mental one. I was comfortable inside my concrete tunnel, where no hurt or harm could come to me...or so I believed. No matter the dangers in my life, I knew I could survive inside my tunnel and had survived inside for so many years.
As a child I was taught that the way to the American dream was to get a degree, find a job and climb the corporate ladder. And after a few false starts, quite a few actually, I finally had a career that was not born of circumstance or convenience, but of choice. And I was happy. I was secure with no desire to leave, and I had a genuine passion for the work. So how did I get here you ask? I lost that job.
I was working in local government when the position of power changed and there was a complete reorganization, which is to be expected when a new Mayor is sworn in. We were on the other side of a national recession, but barely, so no government agencies were hiring and I was caught somewhere in the middle.
Thankfully, I have this incredible ability to see a gap and fill the space with solutions. So after sending out a few messages to everyone in my contacts I finally got a hit and was hired as a consultant. I started doing work for a few political action committees and some smaller non profits, and before long I began to create opportunities with larger corporations around the city.
Here’s the rub, although I was doing well, I was not happy. Completely unhappy, with a bleak outlook it would change anytime soon. I had no mentor. I had no guidance. I had no one to reach back and say, “Here, let me pull you over.” Sure, I had friends and colleagues who would lend a helping hand, but there was no one taking any real interest in a girl like me, and at the time I didn’t know how to seek them out.
So what does a girl do when she has absolutely no idea of what has become of her life and her American dream? She takes it day by day until something extraordinary happens. I never would have guessed the moment for me would come at a book club meeting, but it had. We were reading what had instantly become a cult classic for gender equality in the 21st century, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.
The author did not look like me. She did not sound like me. We did not share a similar upbringing. She was married, wealthy and white. But somewhere hidden in the black and white of the pages I could see our uncommon commonality; we both knew what it felt like to be trapped inside a glass jar 6 inches thick, fighting to be set free, with a reality daring us to start where we are.
This woman did not know my story. She did not know my personal struggles, yet she was asking me to step outside of that tunnel, to free myself of it, to open my mind and heart to life’s many possibilities. And as I sat there, book in hand, I made the decision to remove myself from the place that had kept me safe from my fears and insecurities for all of those years, and promised to lean into life instead.
Once free (and exposed), I immediately began to brace for the impact of the gunshots of life that would soon come ringing. And come they did. But not only have I survived, I’ve thrived. And so begins this journey of an entrepreneur’s sometimes hilarious and at other times frightening misadventures, with many invaluable and character defining lessons learned along the way.
Walk with me...