Living The Potential Network is a community of inclusion, collaboration, and innovation for learning, wellness, and conscious entrepreneurship because I believe this is what we need to save our world.
I began my journey as a high school English teacher in Ohio with a vision of positively impacting the lives of youth. My dream was to connect with students in a way that fueled their confidence and self-awareness – to support youth in discovering their passion and purpose and finding meaning.
I admit it was an idealistic vision, although it didn’t seem so at the time.
I quickly found the traditional school system didn’t bend easily to my way of thinking and teaching — building on the students’ sense of curiosity and tapping into their natural genius. Instead, this industrialized system ignored what drives the students and focused on what curriculum experts believe is important for everyone to know.
Distraught and burned out, I left teaching after six years with a promise to return, but with no idea of the journey that would take me there.
I moved into the corporate world, hustled, and succeeded by most of society’s standards. I worked in exciting careers spanning marketing, product development, real estate, healthcare, software, and financial services.
But in every domain through which I traveled and succeeded, I saw the same problem I’d witnessed in education: There was very little interest in engaging the primary consumers’/stakeholders’ interests and needs.
Rather than creating space for curiosity, self-empowerment, and collaboration, the systems provide the answers, create competitive environments, and crush all innovation to preserve themselves. Eventually, I walked away from all of these domains, frustrated and depleted.
And yet, I believed that it could be — should be — different.
Finally, I was gifted an experience that proved it was not only possible, but also so much easier and more fun. when I began working with youth again in the natural learning movement with Brent Cameron, founder of SelfDesign Learning Foundation. This movement fosters students to develop curriculum around their natural curiosity and desire to know things, while being guided by mentors. It was exactly the style of learning environment I had wanted to create as a teacher many years before. I had an incredibly rewarding experience working with Brent and his students, and I have served as a board member of SelfDesign for many years, helping establish the Transformative Learning Foundation offering certificate leadership programs for the development of learning communities.
Eventually, the entrepreneur in me wanted to find a way to incorporate this new whole self and well-being into my work. So, I partnered with a friend who introduced me to the wellness industry, and I began to create a community with wellness at its core. As my wellness business and community began to grow, I recognized how everything I believed about learning was applicable for not only youth struggling inside a system that wasn’t serving them, but it was also applicable for entrepreneurs wanting to build careers aligned with personal interests and a desire for optimum health and well-being.
My business became an expression of my individual authenticity and aligned with my innate core values, allowing me to positively impact many people in the world.
This community has now grown to over thousands of people who have been supported to bring forward their authentic contributions to serving others. As a result, I’ve been able to step fully into the role of mentorship. Working with mentors, our members learn and grow not only mentally and physically, but also emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Plus, many of us, as we learn the power of passive income, can finally find the time and motivation to follow a philanthropic vision of conscious innovation for a peaceful and sustainable planet.
This is why I felt compelled to create Living The Potential Network — to help parents, youth, and entrepreneurs (even those in the making) live from a place of joy, purpose, and passion and create a path to success that is aligned with who they really are.
In all my years of education, I’ve never seen a more direct and accelerated path to reaching personal and professional goals than working with mentors and coaches who are experts in their fields, so why not build a network full of them and invite other change-makers to learn, collaborate, and work together to solve some of the very serious problems our world is facing?
Welcome to Living The Potential Network!