Letters to Jasmine
A moment to share.
Welcome to The Pause, dear friend. Come on in and make yourself comfortable.
Today I’m coming to you with some exciting personal news: I’m writing another book. It’s called Letters to Jasmine, and as you’ll soon see, I finished designing the potential cover earlier this week.
I’ve dreamt of bringing this project to life since becoming pregnant with Jazzy, and while it will be a few months to a year before I’m ready to release it, I’m well on my way to completing my first draft.
Today, I’d like to share one of the letters as a semi-celebration for getting as far as I have in this project. This chapter is newly on the page—very raw and first-drafty—so, please..
Settle in, take a deep breath, and enjoy this chapter from the first draft of Letters to Jasmine.
💌 Letters to Jasmine: Success
When I was 26 I decided I wanted to start a life coaching business.
I’d watched your Nono and Mimi run their own business my whole life and felt I was equipped enough to give it a shot. To help me gain my footing, I hired a business coach to help me build a “successful business.” After that one, I hired another. And after that, another. Each with their own ideas of how to build a successful business. Each with their own, conflicting, definitions of success.
Three years into this endeavor, I had built a business I didn’t enjoy.
In my effort to be successful, I had built a business that was aiming to achieve success per three other people’s definitions, not mine, and in that had lost why I was doing what I was doing in the first place. If success meant making millions in one year. If success meant tens of thousands of people on my email list. If success meant customers knocking on my door to work with me.. well, I had failed. In my desperation to appear successful to the world I had exhausted my resources, monetarily and emotionally.
It was painful to shut down my business – to cope with the hurt and bruise to my ego of realizing I would not always be able to do whatever I put my mind to. I became so caught up in how I failed these versions of success, I couldn’t recognize how successful an endeavor this actually was for me until years later.
During those three years, I created 70+ video lessons and worksheets on everything from how to let go of limiting beliefs to how to embrace what made my clients feel incredible about themselves without feeling shame. I hosted 40+ community calls that were a safe and supportive place for women to get to know themselves better and challenge themselves to grow. I even put on a couple of live events to encourage women to celebrate themselves and the way they’d been showing up for themselves.
I helped women feel seen. Heard. Understood. I taught women be kinder to themselves. To set boundaries and advocate for themselves. I challenged women to reframe age-old stories to fit who they wanted to be instead of who they were. To ask. To take up space. To toot their own horn.
Those moments. Those feelings. Those lasting effects that led these women to be kinder, more compassionate, and more understanding of themselves – that was the real success. And while I had failed to be successful per my previous business coaches’ definitions, I had achieved success and then some per my own.
It has been years since I retired that business, and just today I got an email from a woman I worked with in Soul Confidence letting me know the work we did together changed the trajectory of her life. That one email. One acknowledgment. One lasting effect. That is my definition of success.
My love, be conscious of what success means to you. Revisit it. Keep it tucked away in the forefront of your mind so when the culture and people around you inevitably start to have feedback and you feel yourself getting caught in the rush, you remember what’s important to you.
If I could do it again, I would have doubled-down on those feelings I was creating. I would have trusted that the work I was doing was making a difference. I would have stayed rooted in the power of giving one person an experience so transforming that it still affects the way they operate today. I got so caught up in more that I lost sight of the power of one.
Success can mean whatever you want it to mean. You can define it in whatever way feels good to you. When thinking about success question: How will this definition of success affect you? How will it help you? How might it hurt you? If success only means making money, having all the followers, being the best there is how will you handle it if those things don’t happen right away? How will you speak to yourself? How will you be to yourself? Will defining success in these ways help you? Will they create pressure? Will it be suffocating when things take longer than you anticipate?
And when you hear someone describing someone else as successful, question in what way. Are they successful monetarily? Spiritually? In their integrity? Emotionally? Are they successful in helping people feel seen? Heard? Understood? Just because someone has made a lot of money doesn’t mean they’re successful.
Remember that no one on this earth knows what will make you feel successful. Only you. Most importantly you. Always, always, always: you.
Thanks for letting me celebrate the progress of this project with you — it means so much to be able to share outside the confines of my mind.
We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program next time. 🖤
With love and appreciation,
~ L
What a gift to Jasmine- what a gift to the world! xo