Alesha Thomas: Not only are you a life coach, where a lot of the skills that you learned came from your past experience, but you’re, also, the owner of Purpose by Design, which is an empowerment company, that helps to teach and inspire women and men, right, to untap their potential and accomplish their goals. What was it that drew you, or maybe even say inspired you, outside of your past experiences in social work and working with youth and women, to really establish this company?
Niki Brown: Just to back up, I do more so work with just with women now. In the past, I’ve worked with men, and couples, and things like that, but now we’re focused primarily just on women, and the inspiration came from the years of counseling therapy that I did with women. I found that who was drawn to my counseling department were a lot of women struggling with relationships, life call, their business, their profession, and just wanting to grow in a level of authenticity, where they really reach and tap into the person they really desire to be.
I found myself doing that work for many years, and it’s not that I set out to advertise to do that work. It’s what was drawn to me. Oftentimes that’s how purpose is. You discover your purpose on what you’ve already been doing, and when I look back over my life, and I realize the people who were drawn to me the most were women. The people I’ve had the most impact on were women. I do a lot of women’s conferences, and speaking, and traveling, and different things such as that, and although I do do other things, I think the greatest impact I’ve had is with women.
When I started looking for a shift and a transition out of counseling, life coaching was right up my alley. It’s something I’ve probably already been doing, and I realized that to maximize my potential, I really needed to just focus in on women.
Alesha Thomas: Piggybacking on what you just mentioned, growing and a level of authenticity, how can we, as women, who have so much pressure on us from really being the right mother, the doting wife, the loving daughter, et cetera, how can we really find the strength or even the right balance to working hard, growing in that authenticity, and succeeding in careers?
Niki Brown: It’s something that I talk about in my book. There’s a section in my book, I talk about embracing the greater you. As women, we’ve been trained from the time we were young, to carry other people. I mean we are the ones that birth the next generation. We don’t do it by ourselves, but, for the most part, it couldn’t be done without us. I think psychologically we carry people. We’re caretakers. We carry others. We nurture them. We help them. We support them, and in turn, we always end up losing ourselves. I think that we find that same phenomenon happens in our business, in our profession, in our ministry. We tend to focus in on others, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because God has given us our gifts and our talents to impact others, but, as women, we don’t always balance that with being able to bless others, impact others, but, also, make sure that we’re staying focused on the dreams that God has given us, which still will be impacting others, but we can get pigeon toed and locked into really just being in this vortex of doing whatever people are expecting of us, what they want from us, et cetera.
In my book I really outline a couple of steps, which is, number one, to really be and live your authentic self, you have to prioritize your assignments. Besides knowing your gifting, your skill set, what you’ve been put on this earth to do, when you discover all of those things, now you have to prioritize what is my assignment for this season of my life. That can be a little tricky, because you have to learn how to clarify your vision. You have to figure out exactly what it is that I want to do, not what others want for me to do. That, right there in itself, can take four or five months, Alesha, to get to the place where you feel comfortable saying, “What do I want? What do I want,” and being comfortable and feeling okay, and not guilty, with saying, “What do I want?” That’s the first step.
Then once we figure out what do I want, it’s how do I get there. How do I prioritize that, because we do carry a lot. The answer is not for us to drop everything. That’s unrealistic. We’re not going to do it. We’ve got children to take care of. Sometimes we have bills and finances. We’ve got parents sometimes to take care, and those things we can’t let go of.
My book does a really great job, I believe, of outlining exactly how to balance life and your dream, and that both things can be a positive in your life, and how we are able to accomplish both. One or the other shouldn’t have the dominance in our life. They have to prioritize their assignment. We have to clarify our vision. We have to learn how to practice the art of saying no, and I think if that’s the case, if we knew how to do that, we would be halfway there. We have to prioritize our time, and realize that our time is very valuable, and when you know that you’re valuable, your time becomes even more valuable, so valuing our time, and allotting to our life what it is that we want to do for this season, and not allowing anybody to change that. There’s going to be crises. There will be times when you can’t stick to the letter of the law of time, but I think a couple of those steps, as well as some of the others in the book, will really help to answer that question, how do we balance everything.
