Business

The following are the tenets, values, and practices I uphold within all aspects of my business including marketing, sales, coaching, teaching, collaborating and leading a team. I believe that how I show up in my work is a living expression of my values. Practice, not perfection, however, is the goal. I am always a work-in-progress - as I continue to learn and unlearn I will likely make changes and updates to this list in the future.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Dedeker Winston for our many conversations about ethical business practices in the coaching space.

I want to credit Gina Senarighi as the inspiration for writing out and clarifying my professional values and ethics as a small business owner. I borrowed some of her languaging because she expressed my values more perfectly than I sometimes can.

Enormous gratitude to my therapeutic and coaching colleagues, who hold me in my values: Rebecca Wong, Terri Delaney, Akilah Riley-Richardson, Juliane Taylor-Shore, Anna Sterk, Mel Cassidy, Sophia Graham, and Joli Hamilton, among many others.

And tremendous credit goes to Kyrr Kark, my partners in work, life and love and one of the co-creators of my backbone in my professional work. I’m also grateful to the others who hold me in love and friendship who have cheered me along the way - you are so many and too numerous to name.

I also want to acknowledge being inspired by the work of Mia Mingus, Kai Cheng Thom, Mariame Kaba, Adrienne Maree Brown, Juliane Taylor-Shore, Shannon Perez-Darby, Sonya Renee Taylor, Glennon Doyle, Brene Brown and countless others, whose writing and words have had tremendous impact on my practices.

Business values

Mutuality and informed consent

I honor the agency, sovereignty, and competence of anyone I work with. As a person called to serve a population I love and am a part of, as well as called to support profound transformation through the relationship I have with my clients, I hold myself to the standard of both intentional enthusiastic consent as well as mutuality with anyone that I work with or that joins one of my programs.

The process of earning money in a capitalist system can be rife with tactics that use anxiety, fear,  scarcity, manipulation and taking advantage of people when they are vulnerable. I will not engage in the marketing and sales tactics that do direct harm such as eliciting pain points, creating a false sense of urgency or scarcity, arbitrary price increases, and buying personal data for the exploitive use of people’s private information.

Commitment to excellence and rigor

The field of coaching is chock full of self-made “experts” who do unintended harm by making claims beyond their capabilities and training. I am committed to being clear about my scope of work and staying in my lane. I am always willing to admit what I don’t know. I am upfront about my training and the roots of my work. As a perpetual learner, I am continually growing and expanding my knowledge and experience, and I accept that I do not hold all the answers. 

Because the fields of psychotherapy, wellness, self-improvement and healing are shaped by patriarchy, capitalism, and white body supremacy, to be a healer, I must dismantle these systems within my work. To neglect doing so can lead these tools to sometimes be harmful rather than helpful, including hyper-individualized approaches that are rife with spiritual bypassing. I am committed to refining my craft, expanding my skills, uncovering my blindspots and challenging and undoing harm as a leader in these spaces.

Accountability

I practice self-accountability regularly. I ask myself: are my actions in alignment with my values? Am I truly walking my own talk? Where am I falling short and need to do better? When people give me feedback, I listen, sit with what feels true, and make adjustments and corrections accordingly.

I own that I am human, I am a product of a world that marginalizes and oppresses others, and I have worked with and learned from a lot of professionals whose practices are sometimes later deemed by me to be harmful and out of alignment with my values. As such, I am bound to make mistakes. When I have made a poor decision or have inadvertently harmed someone, I practice holding myself in loving compassion while also endeavoring to own the harm, acknowledge my impact, and repair, if possible.

I also have accountability support. I have peers in my professional community who are signed on to support me in doing accountability work, who both support me in my growth and hold my feet to the fire when I need that as well.

Read more about my accountability pod and practices here.

Bigger is not always better

I measure my success not by the dollars I earn or the followers I have on social media, but by the positive impact I have on the people who work with me. Scaling a business can perpetuate the exploitative nature of capitalism rather than being about expanding positive impact. Power-over culture encourages hierarchical, appropriated expert-driven guru-ism that celebrates and encourages the power of one over many.

Success for me is not about being a social media “influencer”, becoming a celebrity-like self-help “thought leader”, and or creating content just to get likes and clicks. Success for me is not about making a certain amount of money. Any growth of my business or content is so that I may expand the positive impact I can have on those that I serve. That impact is the measure of my success.

Cite my sources

I stand on a great many shoulders, and my work has roots in ideas that I have gained from others. The life coaching and social media content industries today are rampant with sharing others’ ideas without attribution, with cultural appropriation, and stealing other creators’ work by passing it off as their own. I commit to citing my sources, naming my teachers and acknowledging where my ideas come from. That said, I also want to simultaneously call into question that ideas should be owned - many great concepts have arisen simultaneously by multiple creators. Since ideas are incubated in a soup of cultural context that is shared, it’s worth considering that some ideas cannot and should not be “owned” just so that one can put a trademark on it and gatekeep it.

How I Practice My Values

• I endeavor to offer several free resources and educational materials online to support my community.

• Aware that the coaching industry is an unregulated industry with inflated pricing, I seek to offer a wide array of offerings at varying prices, and all of my offerings are made available at pay-what-you-can (PWYC) upon request.

• I pay people for their labor. When I co-create an event, class, or workshop I profit share with my collaborators.

• As a self-employed queer woman, I charge appropriate prices that reflect my training, skills, experience, and commitments to support my family’s future.

• As a white woman with power and privilege, I pay micro-reparations monthly. I am currently supporting The Future Foundation, Black & Pink, No Justice No Pride, Petrona Xemi Tapepechul, Stop Police Terror DC, and SPARK. Note: Making donations is not in itself enough to end oppressive systems specifically held against Black and Indigenous women of color. I am explicitly naming this as a resource for others.

• In March 2022 I signed the Anti-Racist Small Business Pledge, you can take the pledge here.

• Aware that access to coaching can be cost-prohibitive I hold 25% of my available spots for coaching and group programs at a pay-what-you-can rate.