My Heroine’s Journey
It all started when I never wanted to go to college - but my parents made me. (Thanks, Mom and Dad.) I even went so far as to intentionally apply late to college and to all small, private, schools, too. I thought I had the system all figured out. I thought applying late, and to schools that only had 10-12 students per classroom, sometimes even less, would make me seem disconcerted and like a procrastinator. Turns out, those small, private, liberal arts schools, find the aloofness intriguing. I ended up getting accepted to one and when I got there - since I was being forced and all- I thought I’d do it my way. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life at the time, so I chose a major aligned to the thing I liked most about school; Theatrics.
Majoring in Theatre, apparently, they require that you also know some things about proper grammar, eh-hem, you know… that thing called English. They, like, wanted you to be all articulate, well-read and, like, learned, and shit. They even made you become versed in the matter of Communications. The kind that encourages understanding cultural differences, gender norms, and the history that brought us to a place of respecting relationships to topics of that type. I was put front and center in a dynamic that wasn’t just about dancing around on stage anymore. I was being challenged by some other Universe to step into the curiosity of human dynamics and it was occurring through the challenge of facing mine.
Being in college was the thing that made me realize I was stronger than even I realized.
There I was. Smack-dab in the middle of a situation, that I loathed. That I rejected. That I EVEN protested. But there I was, in the middle of it. Because, at the time, I often rejected the things I didn’t know I needed.
Mom and Dad made me stay in college. It fet like a four-year sentence at the time. But I also knew that I had no fucking idea what life was about and what it would require for me to live in it, but I did know that I wanted to find out and that Mom and Dad footing the bill was the best pathway for me to understand who I am and what I want. Through my parent’s collegiate requirements, I learned that there will be times in life where you are forced into situations that you didn’t ask for. That you will struggle. I also learned that how we respond to them is a choice. In this instance, I figured there were two ways of looking at it. 1.) As a bad thing, designed to destroy me and oppress my beliefs; or 2.) An opportunity to explore Self and Self within the dignity of struggle. In looking at both, I figured seeing each side was a positive and adding in a mindset of curiosity, couldn’t hurt, as a means through which to approach the experience.
In 2006, I graduated, proudly, with a Bachelors of Liberal Arts in Theatre and Communications but with a new intrigue about life, about people, about the stories we tell and why we tell them. I wanted to understand people and their behaviors. I wondered if in what we learn about each other, how much of it is the full truth; I wondered if we’re hearing each other’s whole stories; like those about why a person behaved a certain way or why they didn’t; why a person reacts or doesn’t; and those that answer, honestly, bravely, and with understanding, how life is going?
From there, life felt like a rollercoaster. After graduating undergrad, I started at the bottom as a Marketing Analyst for a local healthcare provider. While there, a former employee poached internal staff for ambitious talent looking to take a leap within a high-profile and high-responsibility role. It was a gut check moment when someone who knew the former employee asked me if I was looking for a little professional pizazz. I thought, “What the hell? Ya won’t know if you don’t try.” Thank you for that, Randy Pausch. Needless to say, I was interviewed and as I was leaving the building, they called my cell phone to offer me the job.
Within two years of graduating, I was hired by an entrepreneur who happened to be the broker of Major League Baseball. It was on that career path I established a zest for travel, philanthropy, self-made success, and helping people. My professional experiences, at that time, were encouraging me to scratch an itch I’d been ignoring for a long time; a master’s degree. I didn’t just want the degree for show; I wanted it because as I was leaving undergraduate school I fell more and more in love with people’s communications. But the idea of taking on additional debt, more than I already had at the time, was not an idea my 20-something bank account could manage. Regardless of my financial limitations, Baseball opened-up my eyes to Mastery. To the appreciation of not only the focus and discipline, it takes to move up from the Minors to the Major’s, to be an MLB Major League star, but also the strict structure required to run the MLB offices and overall, league.
The MLB organization was a top job from start to finish. I was then, and I continue now, to marvel at the extreme dedication it takes to participate in that profession. The high-level thinking, the high-level awareness that you are under constant scrutiny, and the high-level discipline required to process all that responsibility, and consistently choosing to show up, and show out as your best and matching that with intentions. Once you get to witness something like that from the inside and see the rigor it takes to own that level of discipline, as a business, as players, scouts, umpires, international scouts, field personnel, and much more, etc. Like I said, top to bottom, it is impressive; and I happen to believe that you can’t unsee something that magnetic, inspiring, and hypnotizing. It changed me.
It was in year three of that role that I went for it. I went for the call of my greatest and highest potential. I pursued aspirations to achieve my master’s degree while working full-time, and full-time traveling, in my role for the broker. I look back on that time of my life now and just thinking about it fucking exhausts me. I’m not saying… I’m just saying… I am impressed with the 20-year-old me. GET. IT. GIRL.
I did it. I went to graduate school to earn my Master’s Degree, while working full-time, and - oh, by the way - also teaching one semester as an Adjunct Professor teaching Public Speaking at my alma mater. Yeah. I was the gosh-dern Energizer Bunny back then and I was on a mission to fill up my knowledge and curiosity tank. And, I humbly say that I did. But, by the time I was graduating, I was so exhausted by the constant combination of working, travel, night school, teaching, family, and trying to maintain a social life, that I was burnt out. Oh, and did I mention I was also engaged to be married.
Yup. Shannon’s cup runneth over and it was running over in a major, burn-out, adult-child-sized tantrum.
It was after I graduated with a Masters of Science in Communication that I experienced what I would call an existential crisis. I was so full to the brim on consumption and responsibility and travel, that I knew I couldn’t keep the pace anymore. I needed a time-out. I needed to change the way I was managing myself and my activities. I also knew that some of what I had agreed to wouldn’t be able to sustain the drastic slow-down, stay in one place, attitude, I had in mind. Namely, I knew that what my job needed I could no longer give.
My job needed someone who could fly around the world with 24 hours notice. That wasn’t me anymore. It was time to own the truth and quit. It was time to make a change. What kind of change? I had no idea.
There I was, back in a circumstance that required I trust myself more than I trusted ‘knowing’, and, despite the fact that I was freaked out at the idea of such magnanimous change, again, I knew there was something to it. I knew I needed to trust the voice telling me to leap regardless of the road map. It was time to disrupt all normalcy that I had created and establish new norms. Yup. I had worked so heavily and functioned in a schedule so fully loaded, that by the time I was receiving my diploma, I was simultaneously saying ‘I Do’ to marriage and ‘I Don’t, to my well-traveled, robust, and all-consuming BIG, FANCY, impactful, inspiring, job.
Look, there are extenuating circumstances as to why I had to quit, that I will not go into, which contributed to my melt-down departure and created an urgency that made the move a necessity. The fact of the matter is, that job and I needed to break up, so I threw a flag on the play and skedaddled.
After my exit, I struggled with a few health-related issues that required monitoring and resulted in me staying close to home. As a result, I took on jobs that would allow me to stay put, and figure out… well, whatever I didn’t know I was figuring out at the time.
Following my exit, I worked for another entrepreneur who paved a path for themselves in corporate America’s health brokerage field. I became a licensed broker by gaining my health insurance license in a few weeks, and worked there, successfully, for about a year until I realized that I loved working with and for the betterment of people. Doing it via brokering health insurance was not for me.
Despite the fact that a broker career in the health industry was not for me, it was another communication-heavy, people-oriented, client management, self-made success, and human-centered well-being role. From there and with that understanding, I went on to a Third Party Administrator (TPA) where initially, I, Client Managed, and then later Project Managed diverse employer groups.
At first, my role and responsibility was to provide Customer Service to clients who chose to streamline their HR Benefits Services offerings and selections by building them on the company's technological platform. Later, and as I rose to an upper level management role, I moved on to a leadership position Project Managing all touchpoints that make technologically leveraging an employer group’s Benefits Services possible. I became the external gatekeeper of all new business and the internal liaison that made doing so possible.
I was the first and last line of defense for internal and external communications on all new client relationships. I learned not only how to manage myself effectively, but also how to manage projects, people, expectations, delivery, ROI, contracts, timelines, and external vendor relationships, too. I look at the time I spent there and the experience as invaluable. It taught me new ways to effectively and clearly be with people; by taking their needs and assessing how I can deliver, within the context of which I was operating, based on what I have available or what I need to learn to make it available, and even, how to confidently set expectations around what was possible as well as assert boundaries of a healthy, NO.
As a project manager, I learned to understand the value of ‘getting’ people. I learned to understand the importance of meeting them where they are and as well as allowing them to understand my position and inviting them to rise to meet me. While refining my people skills, the health issues I was monitoring, developed into digestional issues that prompted me to begin assessing my lifestyle. I began investigating alternative therapies like acupuncture, whole foods, organics, oils, crystals, herbs, and vitamin enriched shakes like Beachbody’s Shakeology. I loved the shake’s health benefits so much that it was there I first experienced a taste of entrepreneurialism for myself.
There, in researching ways to holistically help myself, I was able to satiate my Entrepreneurial curiosities by sharing the impact of my positive health experience with others. This attempt was a short-lived endeavor, as I found the only real way to be in that business was by selling the shakes, and overtime, the zest I had for selling them dwindled into a realization that I couldn’t give a rat's ass if people drank them or not.
What I actually loved about the experience was the human connection. I loved promoting healthy living. I loved being of service and in support of people making active decisions for their own benefit and how doing so had the capacity to change not only their quality of life, but their life experiences, everywhere.
When I realized that helping people become actively awake to their life experiences and choices lit me up, is when I got curious about my role of service in nearly every occupational field I had up to that point. Not only was I considering how I could satisfy my desire to be of service and the longstanding nature of that appetite, but what I could do to leverage that desire moving forward. I was intrigued by the possibilities of entrepreneurially helping people help themselves. I was excited by it, but I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do about it.
By the time I realized I wanted to work with people one-on-one, I was married and in the throes of a struggle with infertility so big that it felt like it was going to swallow me whole. I was in no position to be of service when the service I wanted to offer is the one I needed.
I was so depressed during our fertility journey that I had lost myself, and in losing myself, my goals and aspirations went on pause while I gently offered myself time to be. After a long road of introspection and external Life Coaching, I “woke up” to realize that I needed more than just another job change. I needed a life to reframe.
In the wake of this clarity, one-on-one assistance and external feedback wasn’t something I wanted nor was I prepared for, so in an effort to continue honoring the progress I had made in coming to terms with where I was by seeing where I wanted to be, I allowed what I needed. What I needed was to give myself the attention.
Shannon needed the spotlight. It was time. I needed to focus on myself and it was through that realization, I decided to go inward. I decided to try being there for me, the way I always wanted. The way I wanted to be there for others, was actually calling me to attempt it on myself first, but because I didn’t know where to start, I did what I have often done when I don’t know what to do in life… I chose to review the options and decided to go forth on my terms.
In choosing to learn and on my terms, I landed - unexpectedly - at the feet of personal development books like “You’re a Badass”, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” and “Unfuck Yourself”. Their messages felt like they were speaking to my Soul. They felt so relatable and clear that I knew I was on to something. The clarity and visibility I felt within, drove me to the point that I not only knew what self-help and life coaching were, but I was also beginning to do more than wonder if I could do it. I was beginning to consider if Life Coaching could be the access point to helping me become who I wanted to be in service and how Coaching others could be the pathway to execute it in practice.
When I came to find that such a thing as Life Coaching school existed, I was 100% in it for my own health and well-being. I had explored other options and none seemed to land as clearly. None seemed to make me feel like I could trust the process quite like Coaching to my own understanding and agenda did. I felt seen in Coaching and I needed it. I needed to be seen by me. I needed to feel the spark of joy and possibility, again. I needed to be held accountable to my own agenda. I needed to wake up to myself, and Life Coaching was the match that felt viable to turn me back on, because, after years of struggling personally, I felt dormant. I felt disoriented. I felt like I had lost connection to who I was and what connection I did have, I didn’t know how to invite discipline and allowance to honor it because it directly defied everything I understood or felt like I knew to be true up to that point.
Coaching helped me see where I was in juxtaposition to where I wanted to be.
It helped me to see the life experience I wanted versus what I was having. It helped me to walk hopefully towards my own dormancy with softness and genuine curiosity, to the gutter where I had left my silenced and tired Soul, to acknowledge the space where I had abandoned it and me, to lay down in that discarded place with my weary Self, embrace it with sincere apology and recognition for past behaviors, and reclaim Me.
I’ve described this experience at length with others and some label its description as a dark night of the Soul journey; I call it coming home to unconscious clarity by way of active consciousness. I call it seeing my shit for what it is and taking responsibility for it in a way that allows me to see the path forward. I call it what Carl Jung coined it as, Shadow Work.
When I came out of my infertility coma, I felt lost and alone. Everything I had believed to be true about me was turned on its head. I was scared and confused. I needed a talking to and for reasons I won’t go into here, I was a holy-hello-NO to doing it via therapy. I know some people arrive at Life Coaching because they want to make the world a better place. I arrived there because I wanted to make MY world a better place. I’ve been coaching from that place ever since.
The place of: looking at ourselves with compassionate accountability.
The place of: is this about me… is this my shit? Do I want to sit in my shit?
The place of: for what am I grateful?
The place of: what do I and don’t I care about?
The place of: how am I honoring the sacredness of choice(s)?
The place of: how responsible am I to the experience of my experiences, as it is in assessing responsibility I can discern the perspective from which I am choosing to live?
The place of: honestly answering how’s my life (i.e. Self-relationships, Work-relationships, Community relationships, etc.) going?
I coach my clients to the same perspective from which I needed to receive it. I coach my clients to notice their perspective. I coach to eyes-wide-open witnessing of our experiences. I coach to a clarity of consciousness, which means acknowledging if we’re hyper focused on a 1-sidedness and seeing where there is possibility to allow for wholeness; where there is room to see the obstacle for what it is, both an opportunity to be present to the challenge and to the celebration. I coach not only to the tip of the iceberg, but to the foundation beneath it, what beliefs, energys, and emotions support it and from where it came. I coach the willing. I coach clients who are ready to be actively and unapologetically visible. I coach clients to look at themselves and ask about the experience they’re having, what they’re receiving and contributing. I coach clients to their sacredness of their choices and honoring intentions.
I know this work deeply.
It is because I’ve committed to knowing all sides of me and growing in the transparency that only love and vulnerability can offer. That I can humbly acknowledge I have a habit of shying away from risks that aren’t a sure thing because I have notoriously doubted my BIGNESS, my capability, my endurance, and my allowance, for most of my life. I have hidden out of the fear of embarrassment or rejection, and as a self-defense mechanism to being hurt even more than I already was at that time.
I think back to that 18-year-old me, and I realize that she made the best decision for herself at the time. I trust that she responded how she saw fit because deep down in places I didn’t know because I didn’t have the tools to notice then, she heard in her gut the call of capability. The call of the wild. The call of wisdom. The call to presence. The call to humble honesty. That I am active - each day - learning to understand Me more and love her freer. It is through this knowledge and introspection that I also have learned to find meaning in how much I value community and my presence within it.
It is through what felt like suffering, that I took the leap to learn (undergrad/graduate school);
the leap to succeed (graduating undergrad & graduate school);
the leap to try (as EE for the broker of MLB);
the leap to fail (quit working for the broker of MLB);
the leap to get back up (job after job, health issue after health issue);
the leap to being new again (facing challenging choices, depression, loss and feeling lost);
the leap to trust (go to Life Coaching school);
the leap to being visible (fail, succeed, receive help, be an Entrepreneur, and help others);
I now take the leap to continue to challenge myself to be learned and vulnerable about what I do, as well as who I am with myself, family, friends, and clients, and you, each day.
It’s why I will never stop reaching for mastery of my practice and tools that help amplify it as an essential means through which to grow me, as well as be a living example of what is possible with others.
It’s why I will never stop sharing the truth of my experiences. I will never stop striving for better self-understanding, to showcase the vitality in clarity around such, not only with Self, but Business, Wealth, Relationships, and more. It is why I will never stop holding space for the value in our differences as being what truly unites us. It’s why I will never stop helping myself, and others, learn to trust that through the peaks and valleys, each time we get to succeed and be reborn, therein lies, yet again, more proof, another testimony, another divine declaration of resilience and potential. I will never cease on my mission to offer safety and support to those willing to take their own Hero or Heroine’s journey because I have the experience to support the wisdom that shows anytime is a good time for Self-discovery, and that’s because at any time, as soon as we sovereignly choose, we can leap to receive.
