Reinvent Yourself

“I’m a classic case of reinvention in the middle of life,” says Elizabeth MacBride, founder of the Times of Entrepreneurship (https://timesofe.com/), a website that reports on entrepreneurship, and co-author with Seth Levine of the new book, “The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business” (https://amzn.to/3g50weh). “Seven years ago I went through divorce that left me without a job….I had seven thousand dollars in my bank account. The mortgage was $2500 dollars and my only career was as a part time writer.” MacBride, however, noticed a hole in the market at the intersection of finance and entrepreneurship and wondered why no journalist was covering it. “[The website] worked because it’s business and finance,” she says. “It was the only area that paid writers at all….I was willing to combine the storytelling with finance.” MacBride speaks with CoveyClub founder, Lesley Jane Seymour, about how to ask for employment help from friends and associates and how to really know your value. 

FREE GIFT! Don’t start your reinvention without downloading CoveyClub’s starter guide called “31 Badass Tips for Launching Your Reinvention Without Fear!”

“When I left [corporate] it was a difficult transition,” says Kate Isler who’d spent 20 years (most of them overseas) in international executive leadership and as a CEO for a digital health startup. “I always identified myself as a corporate executive. I had business cards and a persona. When I left I had nothing. People stopped returning my calls. I was just Kate Isler….It made me look across my life and reevaluate: what did I want to do?” Her first steps? Kate reached out to people on LinkedIn to set up coffees or phone calls: “98% of them said yes.” She then asked them to tell her about their job: “what are your aspirations? What did you learn? I got to know people who did a variety of things,” she says. When the calendar rolled around to International Women’s Day, however, she realized that while the holiday is a major celebration of women around the world, it’s not very big in the U.S. What was missing: A market place focused on women’s small businesses. So Isler co-founded TheWMarketplace, an eCommerce platform which supports women-owned businesses, service providers and gender balanced companies. “The site is [an] economic engine for women,” she says, “and [we] earned revenue from the launch day.”

FREE GIFT! Don’t start your reinvention without downloading CoveyClub’s starter guide called “31 Badass Tips for Launching Your Reinvention Without Fear!”

13 years ago Danielle Butin, founder of Afya Foundation (afyafoundation.org) which rescues and collects discarded medical supplies to ship to 83 nations,  had a significant senior job in health care. “It did not fit what I wanted to do any longer,” she says. “I was ready to make a change. I kept making that clear. Ultimately I got a severance package to launch Afya.” Divorced, with her kids at summer camp, Butin decided that instead of looking for a job, she would travel to Tanzania to clear her head. “In the Serengeti I saw a woman bawling her eyes out. I sat down with her,” she says. The woman was a doctor in London who volunteered in Africa. She was upset because she was watching children die because she didn’t have IV starter lines. “There are moments in your life when you hear something and something inside rumbles and you have to do something about it,” Butin says. “That’s what happened to me.”  Though Butin knew nothing about international health or shipping, she knew she could “bring programs to life and inspire people.”  Back home, she began dumpster diving in hospital alleyways to see what their garbage looked like. “Because of [U.S.] hospital regulations, anything in the [operating] room has to be discarded because there could be germs or exposure,” she explains. “There are millions of pounds of [discarded] supplies.” Listen to Butin explain how Afya weathered the storm of Covid19--where hospitals who used to supply her actually called her for PPE (personal protective equipment)--and how she skirted the red tape to get supplies where they were needed. 

FREE GIFT! Don’t start your reinvention without downloading CoveyClub’s starter guide called “31 Badass Tips for Launching Your Reinvention Without Fear!”

“I grew up with a disability. I had an artificial leg since age four. I didn’t realize it was anything. The goal was to pass and be as normal as possible. At puberty that screeched to a halt.” So begins CoveyClub founder, Lesley Jane Seymour’s fascinating conversation with Emily Rapp Black, author of the upcoming book, “Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg.”  Black, whose previous memoir, “Sanctuary” is a brutally honest portrait of a mother struggling to balance the joy of motherhood with the tsunami of grief of losing her first born to Tay-Sachs disease-- says her disability meant she was “always really open. I never had really any privacy. People were asking me rude questions in elevators since age four.” Black, who is now an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside and at UCR School of Medicine intended to follow in her minister father’s footsteps by attending divinity school, says she was in Korea on a Fullbright when she “had a breakdown...I’d never thought about being a disabled woman.” Her new book was inspired by a visit to Frida Kahlo’s home La Casa Azul and the exhibit of the corsets and braces and artificial limbs Kahlo wore that she saw on display. “I had a huge body emotional reaction,” Black says. “I had a back brace and the leg…[Kahlo]’s such a pop culture icon. There are CVS socks with Frieda Kahlo’s face on it. But what does it mean? No one remembers she was an amputee.” 

FREE GIFT! Don’t start your reinvention without downloading CoveyClub’s starter guide called “31 Badass Tips for Launching Your Reinveintion Without Fear!”

After college Kerrigan Behrens, now Co-Founder and CEO of Sagely Naturals (https://www.sagelynaturals.com/), grabbed a job at UBS because her brother seemed to like banking. Her hobby was creating lists of restaurants from which she advised friends and co-workers like a concierge. Deciding restaurant management would be more fun, Behrens entered business school, eventually landing a stint with Wolfgang Puck and later Taco Bell.  “I loved new experiences, the high and the low,” she says. “But I found myself writing my own job descriptions for restaurants which couldn’t pay me.” Behrens met weekly with a friend from business school (Kaley Nichol) who was thinking about quitting her own banking job. “Then I used CBD,” says Behrens who had long suffered from endometriosis and lower back pain. “I realized I could feel better, not because I took a Vicodin!”  With CBD products hard to find in 2015 she and Nichol quickly launched Sagely Naturals, a collection of CBD, hemp-derived roll-ons and creams, and rose quickly into 15,000 stores across the country (including CVS, Sprouts and Ulta). Then Covid19 hit and Sagely Naturals had to pivot to online.  “Pain, stress, trouble sleeping; every problem was exacerbated during Covid19,” she says. Luckily too, “people were looking for help.”

Imagine that at 45 you nab your first TV show, your second at age 50.  You snag your first book deal at 53.  Now imagine that you decide your passion project is acting. You get called in for one scene but they like you so much they call you in for a second episode.  As Beverly “Bevy” Smith, author of the new memoir, "Bevelations: Lessons from a Mutha, Auntie, Bestie" (https://amzn.to/3qVjRAZ), claims: “There is one mantra to live by: it gets greater later.” And she’s got the receipts to prove it. Smith grew up a nerdy, shy but “spoiled” kid in Harlem trying to fit in with “a bunch of mean girls.”  She broke into the cliques by dressing well, dancing, and having a quick wit. Attitude served her well and made her tons of money as a fashion advertising executive when she landed at Vibe Magazine, just as hip-hop was scaling. “They didn’t have luxury advertising,” Smith says.  “Systemic racism assumed that black and brown people would not be interested in fabulous clothes. And if they were interested, they couldn’t afford them.”  Smith showed them otherwise, hobnobbing in Paris and Milan, breaking Gucci and Dior and Dolce & Gabbana. She left to do the same for Rolling Stone magazine until she left there to reinvent again, or as she told her boss—“to write, act, juggle, be a helicopter pilot.” Smith says: “When pivoting, be an explorer. We don’t know where the [next] gift is going to come from.”

“Life was good,” says Laila Tarraf. She was head of the internet division at Walmart, then Chief People Officer for Peet’s Coffee and Tea.  “I had a good circle of friends, a daughter. I was strong and capable.” Then one day her husband passed away accidentally of a drug overdose--a mixture of alcohol, pain pills, and antidepressants.  “He always drank a lot,” says the daughter of immigrants who moved to the US from Lebanon when she was seven. “I never really understood there was a problem.” Tarraf says she “was really numb. Nothing like that had happened to me. I tried to tuck it away but feelings kept coming back. And I had this little girl who was grieving...I didn’t know how to comfort her.” So began Tarraf’s journey into therapy, deep work and her examination of the stories she had always told herself about not needing anyone or anything: “My mother was more like a child...I jumped in to take care of her. But I didn’t want to do that with my daughter.”  A short while later Tarraf’s father and then mother passed away. “In four to five years I’d suffered three big losses,” she says. Tarraf left her corporate job to get certified as a coach and write her first book, “Strong Like Water: How I found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in life” (https://amzn.to/2Qji649). “I grew up in a home where mom and dad fought a lot and I didn’t want to feel. It happens that qualities that saved you once, now hold you back...You have to go through the valley and break down to come out,” she says. “If you don’t there is no healing or transformation.”

Linda Fears had been the Editor-in-Chief of Family Circle magazine for 12 years when four years ago, she was suddenly laid off. “It was the biggest shock of my life,” she says. “Was I stupid? Naive?…I felt sorry for myself for a few months and was really depressed.” But Fears, who was only in her early 50s, wanted to keep working. “It was clear the magazine industry was on a deep downward slide,” she says. “Of all the magazines I worked at only one is still in existence.” Fears took her interest in health and food (she loved cooking since a child), grabbed a nutrition certification at her alma mater Cornell, and started coaching friends, then clients on how to eat better and lose weight. Later, she began the blog GoodFoodRx.net, a weekly themed newsletter that dissects a nutritional issue and offers a corresponding recipe.   Covid forced her coaching online but Fears now has clients from different states. “The silver lining for me in the pandemic is that people are eating poorly and not moving or exercising,” she says.  “I thought I’d really miss my old life. But I’m really happy to be in charge of my own hours and not clock in."

So here’s the problem. You’re teaching Spanish in highschool for a total of 24 years, and early on you notice your students are bored out of their minds. “I was, too,” says Jennifer Degenhardt. “I said, they need a story.” So she gathered up the “themes” and the vocabulary demanded by the curriculum and made up more interesting stories that put characters who mirrored her students--Hispanic, from underserved communities, a boy in a wheelchair, LGBTQ, or from economic disparities--and put them at the center of the action. “After three to four years of teaching [my first] book, I published it and kept writing,” says the author of now 17 books in Spanish, 6 in English, one in German, and three translated into French. Encouraged by her students, she self-published her first book on Kindle Direct, a subsidiary of Amazon. “It’s made my life very easy,” says Degenhardt. It’s a “step by step process...and you’re in charge of your own products and you can fix your own mistakes.” Her favorite quote which she put on her refrigerator and looked at every day? “If you can’t stop thinking about it, don’t stop working toward it.”  And that’s just what she did. 

When Joyce Shulman, CEO of 99walks.fit (https://www.99walks.fit/aboutus), came home in a bad mood one day during high school, her father suggested she go for a walk. “I didn’t know what was bugging me. I waked out the door and walked for two miles. I vividly remember feeling that when I walked back into the house my whole mood had shifted.”  Shulman now offers her 12,000 members daily walking classes with coaches and meditations, and preaches the research that shows just regular walking can add seven years to an individual's life. But her path to walking wonderland was not a straight one.  Shulman began life as a commercial litigator in New York City. After marrying, she and her husband launched the “world’s first nutrition bar for dogs. which grew to include cats and horses.”  The business eventually fell apart and these serial entrepreneurs began creating the first pizza boxes with 4-color advertising. Fifteen years later they launched an e newsletter for kids and families, and then, upon noticing the health crisis among women, 99walks. “The country was getting bigger and less well,” Shulman says. “And I was watching the rise of the loneliness epidemic…For me, walking with friends and for community has tremendous value.” Best of all, walking engages those “left behind from the fitness industrial complex.”  She says: “Some older women never had a meaningful fitness program. They don’t feel like they have a place for them.” Shulman hopes that walking can also help be an answer to the depression and lack of movement caused by the pandemic.