Hi!
I’m Angelica and I’m excited to share for the first time my personal journey with you…
I moved to Australia when I was about 23 years old and I purposely didn’t ask my parents to support me financially… I’m so grateful for having my parents saying yes to my projects and adventures and for this one I new it had to be me… I found so many ideas to create a good enough amount of cash and saved up to come to Australia… once in Ozland I went to university whilst working in a day spa and I loved it .
One day the owner of the spa received a notice to vacate the premises within a couple of months and there was no way for him to open a new place… so that was a great opportunity for me to start my own thing… I was lucky enough to hand pick the people I wanted to continue to see and it was the beginning of my own business…
It was nice and safe, making enough to live well and travel the world.
I started to feel like there was no challenges in my work… day in and out same same same all… also if I wanted to earn more I would have to work more and I already was working long hours… until you can afford to delegate, being a sole trader/ small business owner usually means you do it all… so I was the secretary, the accountant, the marketing person, the human resources and the one who actually performs every task and looks after customers…
I feel my brain is always hungry… and from uni I’d learned traditional marketing and then learned how to code and make websites so made my own for my business and then had some people asking if I could do theirs too… and so the second business was born!
Now I was learning and working at the same time, I would have meetings with clients over skype and share screens to show them how their projects were looking like and also still doing all the other things… Time became tight but I could still have holidays and travel when I decided to do so… I kind of thought that was a great business model where I was my own boss, could have breakfast, coffee or lunch with my siblings and friends and also manage work… UNTIL…
My hands became very sore and I remember a client suggesting to insure my hands in case they didn’t work anymore… scary stuff! — I thought: “doesn’t that just happen to old people?” … the reality is that I was not planning for the future, I was living the day to day… There was not a sustainable, scalable business… it was just me and my own personal resources with no replenishment… The combination of physically using my hands to work doing the ‘spa’ treatments and also seating on a computer to type/code for hours was not helping… it was a matter of a few years doing the same and I would end up being part of the statistics …
I had to do something else… but what? through a friend and a great business man, there was an opportunity to source, import and sale an amazing artisanal, organic, handmade, Colombian product which I totally fell in love with. So I entered that world and kept doing everything else too… learned lots about distribution channels, marketing, branding and it was like a new world of opportunities to learn and make more money had opened… UNTIL…
I had my baby and I had a condition called mummy’s thumb — a condition created by picking up babies with your hands holding them from under the arms with your index finger and thumb opened… and I couldn’t do anything at all with my left hand…
I wanted to continue to make money, to have my own ‘freedom’ , to travel, to be healthy and also be a mum and spend time with my family… After all, what I really want was to contribute to my family, give back to my parents and grandmother who have always been there for me. I wanted to be a present mother and also had a great desire, a fire inside me telling me there was so much I hadn’t discovered about myself, about the impact I could make in this life, in this world…
I felt insecure and alone in my own entrepreneurial world. Not only I still felt my spoken English was not good enough but also I kind of thought that I didn’t know anything worth being paid for…. I didn’t have a network or people that stretched me, I couldn’t really have conversations about new opportunities or projects with people that would help me grow, that would challenge or expand on what I could see… I wished I had someone to show me the path and walked along with me…
I made a list of my skills and a list of what I knowledge/value I had provided to people… I also asked people around me about what they thought I was good at… it seemed that I was actually good at solving problems by ‘seeing the big picture and putting things in the right boxes’ … I was able to see the gaps and coming up with strategies to fill them… The problem was that I didn’t quite see that in myself and also didn’t quite know how to put that into a job or a business model.
Becoming a ‘business consultant’ was an idea that tickled my brain and I watched videos on YouTube of people doing this and had goosebumps imagining myself in that space…
There was one video that gave me the push — there is a guy on a suit walking into a warehouse and he says:
— “you only need to take a walk, observe and then you’ll know what’s going on” …
I don’t know how exactly but in that moment I pictured myself doing exactly that! some kind of a trip to the future, seeing myself ‘taking a walk’ into businesses and understanding where the gaps were’…
so… I looked for ways to becoming ‘professional’ in that space… I found that the leading business ‘gurus’ didn’t really have just one specific qualification but they seemed to have a cocktail of skills that gave them a ‘superpower’ some kind of a 6th sense that allowed them to just ‘take a walk and observe’ and they could read environments and people to provide a strategy…
and then the uncertainty… — Does it mean that I now have to go back to uni or go to the US and pick 2 or 3 specialties? How much is that going to cost me? What about the dream of spending quality time with my child? Where do I fit it my current business activities?
I made a decision to go into an intensive journey. Becoming a professional business coach and I’m extremely grateful for having found something that has fulfilled my live in ways I had never imagined.
But it wasn’t a ‘walk in the park’, not at all… I had to learn a whole new language (the coaching language) and it triggered my deepest fears… Am I good enough? do I really belong here? — there is a slang phrase in Spanish that says :
“it’s better to be the mouse head than the lion’s tail”
It’s kind of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ — you know… stay where you are, you are big in your little world, don’t stand out, and all the rubbish we can be conditioned into…
In the process I learned how to deal with people and how to add value, decode behaviours, thinking, maturity, how to read minds — kind of… , then add more value into their lives, expand my own boundaries, learn how to pace and lead others into a world of resourcefulness, with real people, not just case studies on a book but actual real people! what?! … Wasn’t I just going to learn how to become a business strategist?
Making an impact on people’s lives is an amazing experience, being part of their transformation journey and being able to see them fully and believing in them before they can even see anything possible is a gift.
Seeing businesses grow inside and outside, CEO’s and business owners transform their results and as a consequence achieve what I had wished for and so much more! living the life that I wanted to live, spending quality time with my family and at the same time doing something I love, that actually doesn’t seem like work at all!
Witnessing and working with people from a state of fear, excuses, insecurity and quiet desperation to empowerment and finding out their unique gift or as I call it ‘their superpower’.
I have seen amazing entrepreneurs take the step into the ‘uncertain’ and have the opportunity to walk with them in their path to create their own dream lifestyle.
The tenacious ‘9 to 5-do as you’re told’– frustrated entrepreneur going in the journey from the ‘head of mouse’ to becoming not just the ‘lion’s tail’ but the lion’s head.
But the real journey for me has been transformational. A journey of awareness, of understanding that I am and we are here in this world, having this human experience — which by the way is not a dress rehearsal — to explore beyond what is in front of us, beyond what we have been programmed and conditioned to do.
This journey is about giving, not getting, is about contributing to people’s journeys, to allow them to access the resources that they have and have always been there for them. The biggest gift and I’m grateful for the opportunity to create a ripple effect, to make people’s lives better and because of that, they can impact lives in their own unique way leaving a mark in the world as better place than how we found it.