On a family vacation during the summer break before her sophomore year at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, Maria was unable to think about anything but school. Unable to relax and enjoy her time off, she was absorbed in thoughts about school, her future, choosing the right career and meeting the expectations she perceived everyone had for her.
"Mentally, I wasn't there. Still racing - my mind was still going a hundred miles an hour. I need to do this....I need to do this...I have an entire week of vacation with my family and I am not even relaxing. I'm still worried about what I need to do. And it was the summer. I had the entire summer off!"
A go-getter by nature, Maria had several jobs. One of those was a minimum wage job handing out towels at a gym at her University. The hours weren’t ideal, and she was spending her time away from her studies in a position in which she wasn’t gaining new skills or using her natural abilities. However, she found leaving the job difficult because she didn’t want to disappoint anyone. There was comfort in knowing the job was there and that she was needed.
Maria knew her level of stress and uncertainty were signs of her internal misalignment but unsure how to tackle this, she reached out to Steph Gold for coaching. The first thing they addressed was the power her mindset had over her happiness. Maria began to discover that she had created her life to align to what she perceived everyone around her needed from her, instead of what she most needed and wanted for herself. This was the breakthrough that Maria needed to take the reins and begin aligning her external life with the one she sought inside. However, this was not an overnight switch. Maria had to adapt new ways of approaching people, communicating her needs and expectations, and trust in her intuitive pull to the things for which she was most passionate.
One of her first challenges was leaving her job handing out towels. Looking back on it, she realizes she was staying at the job and resisted leaving because she perceived that it was expected of her to stay, and she didn’t know how they would replace her. In reality, filling the position wasn’t the issue, it was the power she was giving it to keep her from moving forward. Leaving the job opened the door for Maria to discover what most lit her up, so she could build that into her work and her future.
Through shifting her mindset, she has shifted her approach to everything. Over the last two years, Maria and Steph have worked together to help Maria take control of both her present and future. As she prepares to graduate with her Degree in Public Relations with a Minor in Photography, she is also building a successful business aligned to her passion for photography and travel. And Maria, quick with a giant beautiful smile, is not only feeling certain in the present, she has never been more excited and ready for the future.
"I could not be more excited to just follow my intuition, my dreams, really! I can't imagine anything else but to travel."