I’ve told this story to my students over and over throughout the years. Every so often someone new will contact me and ask for details on how I got started as an author, coach, and teacher, so I decided to set it all down in an easy-to-reference form for those who continue to come my way with curiosity about how I found my path, and how I found the faith to keep following it…

I graduated from college in the year 2000 with absolutely no plan for what I wanted to do with my life. I had majored in literature, loved books, wanted to write something (anything!) but was hopelessly blocked while also struggling with alcohol abuse and severe low self-esteem.

I ended up moving around for a few years. I lived in Seattle from 2000 to 2004, then moved to San Francisco where I lived until 2008, then moved back to Seattle for 2009, and then back to San Francisco in 2010, where I stayed until 2020. So, I was kind of like a ping-pong ball, bouncing back and forth between these two cities, shuffling between jobs and trying to find my place in the world with no clue about what I was doing.

The entire time I was moving around I worked low-level jobs. I worked in a bookstore for a few years, and I worked at a shoe store for a while. In 2005, I was able to get into an office job as an admin and I stuck with that kind of work for over a decade. I worked at a private detective agency, and three separate startups, sometimes being called “the secretary,” and sometimes “the executive assistant,” depending on what I was doing that week in the office.

None of these jobs paid very well, and none of them were all that fulfilling either. I liked coming into contact with different kinds of people and observing them all from a psychological point of view, but beyond that the work was dull and mostly tedious.

At my third startup (and the last “real job” I ever worked), I had a lot of time on my hands. The company was small and our business was running a website that didn’t require a whole ton of work. As the admin, my main duty was to organize our weekly company lunch on Fridays. Other than that, I was mostly responsible for running errands, cleaning up the staff kitchen, and occasionally making a phone call for my manager. I was largely left on my own to figure out how to fill my time and also figure out a way to “look busy.”

That’s when I started my blog.

At first, I wrote about writing and publishing. I was shopping around a novel at that time, and so I wrote articles on subjects like what agents were looking for, and how successful authors employed worldbuilding and character development in their stories, and how to edit effectively.

My blog did okay. At that time, I was mainly using Twitter to promote my articles and that seemed to work well. Twitter was way better at that time (2013 to about 2017). Most people were friendly and you could actually make some really nice connections just from following people and chatting with them. So, that’s what I did for a while. I wrote articles on writing, shared them on Twitter, and tried to connect with other writers.

At the same time, I was running an in-person writing group in San Francisco. There were six of us who showed up every week to do an hour of silent writing together. I had just started getting into personality theory at that time, and so I started talking to the people in the group about their personality traits. It came to light that most of the people in the group were INFPs, and then I was an INFJ, and we had one ENFJ. I thought that was really interesting, that so many of the same kind of personality type had seemed to naturally be attracted to this little group I had put together.

It gave me the idea to write a couple of articles for my blog on writing and personality type. I had always had trouble writing, and although I was open about my troubles, it wasn’t a primary focus of my articles. Until, that is, I started writing about INFJs and INFPs and writing. I wrote a couple articles and shared them on Twitter and that’s when I began to get a bigger response than I had ever seen before.

This whole first year that I had the blog, I had also had the idea of being a coach kind of rolling around in my mind. It sounded fun and I thought I could be good at it (eventually), but I was also super scared. I was usually really, really nervous talking on the phone, talking to strangers, and talking to people who expected answers from me, so it seemed weird that I was drawn to doing something that would probably require me to do all these other things that made me really uncomfortable.

But after I got a good response to those couple articles about why INFJs and INFPs had problems writing, I decided to go for it. I made a coaching page on my website and I shared it on Twitter, and I mentioned in articles that I was a coach and taking new clients and I waited to see what would happen.

Well, not much happened that first year. Or the next. That was 2014 and 2015. I got three people in 2014. Two writers who wanted to talk on the phone, and one woman who wanted coaching over email. The email woman actually wasn’t even interested in writing. She wanted help on building a vision board and I was hungry for experience so I jumped in and agreed to help.

2015 was a bit better in terms of getting more clients. More time had passed for people to find my content so more people had found me, but I still only had, like, maybe six or seven people at the most at any given time. I also gave birth to my son that year and so I was on maternity leave and then transitioned back to work. It was rough. I was nursing my son and so I had to pump breast milk every few hours, so on my lunch break I would leave my office, go sit in my car, plug the pumping machine into the charger and pump while I called clients and coached them over the phone. I just hoped none of them could hear the pumping machine in the background. If they did, no one ever said anything.

That year I got the idea to write a book for INFJ writers. In 2015, self-publishing still had somewhat of a stigma around it. As a writer who had been querying for years hoping to get a bite on one of my novels, I was highly reluctant to embark on self-publishing. I thought that if I wasn’t a good enough writer to get a traditional agent, then I wasn’t a good enough writer. But then I thought about all the people who had contacted me about those couple articles on my blog, and also the few people who had reached out to me and said coaching was just what they needed but they couldn’t afford even the lowest price I could offer (which, at that time, was $25 for an hour of coaching). I knew there was a need for a book for INFJ writers, a big need. And I knew the traditional publishing world would not be able to see that need. They weren’t on the ground like I was, they didn’t see the shift happening with all these different people finding out their personality type and it changing the way they saw themselves and did things. I WAS in the middle of it and I DID see it. And I couldn’t ignore that, waiting around for years and hoping someone in the publishing industry would see it too.

So, I wrote The INFJ Writer, and I self-published it.

I went on to write more books, and coach more people. Sometimes I coached people in the early morning before my office opened or on the weekends. My lunch break was also a favorite time slot for years. I continued to write my blog, and I continued to work my day job.

Then, in 2019, my office closed.

My little startup finally got acquired by a much, much larger company, and they had no need for a California office. So, they took our website and fired all our staff, and that meant I no longer had a job.

I knew it was time to go full-time with my business.

I’d been slowly building things for six years—writing, coaching, self-publishing, making friends and contacts online—and I knew it was time for me to make the big leap. I’d been thinking about doing classes for a while, and I had been studying how to launch courses and I had a rough idea of how to go about it.

But that was all I had, a rough idea.

What I did NOT have:

Savings.

Any other form of income (my husband was stay-at-home dad).

Any kind of certification in coaching or teaching.

Any kind of “expert” status (beyond writing articles about my thoughts on writing and personality).

Confidence.

Marketing expertise.

Any kind of experience in sales.

I didn’t have ANY of these things. And I was TERRIFIED. But, I figured, I would take it one step at a time, be willing to be very uncomfortable, show up as myself as authentically as I could, and see what happened. If it all went south, I would course correct.

That was six years ago, and I’ve been able to be “successful” ever since. I say “successful” with quote marks because that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. I haven’t had constantly free-flowing income. Every launch or offer I’ve built and sold hasn’t always turned out the way I thought it would.

I’ve had setbacks and disappointments and many moments of anxiety. But I’ve also had joy, excitement, freedom, and a feeling of being truly alive through doing the work that I’m doing in the world.

This way of life isn’t for everyone, and I’m not suggesting everyone should jump on board with it. But it IS for some people, and sometimes it’s the people who think they are the ones who are least likely to be good at it.

I thought that about myself for a long time. I’m introverted, I have social anxiety—and also anxiety in general—I’m socially awkward. While I can talk a lot when I get started on something I’m passionate about, I’m not a smooth talker. I’m not smooth at all. I pronounce a lot of words wrong, I’m hopeless at using current slang, and I feel really cringey using business speak. It takes me a long time to process things. I’m not good with numbers and paperwork confuses me. I could go on and on.

I am NOT the person you would expect to be an entrepreneur, or be good at business in ANY way.

But here I am. With my own business. And after six years, I am still IN business, which is my personal marker of success.

You can do this too. If you have an idea, or a passion, or a calling that you know you want to fulfill in the world, you can do it too. You don’t have to do it like I did it. Your outcome doesn’t have to look at all like mine and, in fact, it shouldn’t. Your path will look like you, and that’s exactly as it should be.

You don’t have to hold yourself back because you think you don’t know enough yet. Or you don’t have some kind of “expert” status. Or you think you need a degree or some kind of certification. Or you’re really, really nervous about building an audience. Or you’ve felt uncomfortable with selling your entire life. Or you don’t know how to build a website.

You can figure everything out as you go. You can hire people to help you with the things you are absolutely awful at, and you can challenge yourself to learn more about things that you could be actually good at but you feel hesitant about because they make you uncomfortable.

You do not need to wait.

You do not need to be different than you are now.

You do not need to “heal” or “be confident” or be able to “walk your talk” before you get started.

You can just be you, right now, and start making moves toward the work you really want to do in this life.

I teach a new class for INFJs and INFPs every month where we cover topics like these and more for INF people. To get all the updates about new classes and workshops, be sure to sign up for my newsletter here.