The little girl who knew her purpose. The woman who lost it and found it again.

A candy table, with hand-drawn flyers taped to trees in my neighborhood park, what I'd later recognize as my very first marketing campaign. Nobody told me to do it. I just saw something I wanted, intuitively believed in myself I could do it, made a plan and I executed it. At 7 years old. I didn't have language for it then, but that was ownership. That instinct, that inner belief, would later become the very foundation of everything I now teach.

Twenty-one years ago, I endured one of the hardest, darkest phases of my life during a major life change. I was a brand new single mother, a few months postpartum, freshly moved back into my parents' house after making one of the hardest decisions I'd made in my life at that point. My whole world had just been turned upside down and I felt stuck. Like I was frozen in time. For the sake of my newborn child, I knew I needed to get out of this black hole, but at the time, I really didn't know how.

My parents watched as I struggled with depression during one of life's biggest transitions for a woman, becoming a new mom. They were worried and insisted I should be on antidepressants, but I was never one to take pills. Reluctantly, I followed their advice. I went, filled the prescription for antidepressants, and set the bottle on my dresser. Never to be touched again.

Not out of denial or stubborn defiance of the people who loved me. It was an inner knowing, a belief I didn't create but somehow already carried: If my mind had the capacity to take me this far down, then surely it had the capacity to bring me back up. I couldn't fully explain it, but I chose to trust my intuition and follow it, because it sounded reasonable to me, even if it meant going against what my parents, and society at large, expected me to do.

Determined to overcome my own depression without prescription pills, I tested my intuitive inner belief and to my surprise it worked. I found a way to overcome it by making intentional, positive, conscientious, daily choices that collectively helped me climb back over my hill. Then my brain did the rest, but the deep desire and determination to overcome it came first. By no means am I recommending anyone bypass seeing a doctor for depression. I'm simply sharing my story of what worked for me.

The intuitive decision to follow a belief I couldn't explain but helped me anyway, was the catalyst that sent me searching down a rabbit hole of personal development content for the next 20 years. I was trying to understand myself and those around me.

That curiosity stayed running in the background when I stepped into a District Sales Manager role for a legacy direct sales beauty company. My district had over 400 independent sales representatives across the Bronx, with close to three million dollars in annual revenue, and ranked number one for growth across eighteen districts. From the outside, that looked like success. I observed brilliant, capable, motivated women hit walls that had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with what they secretly believed they were capable of or deserved. The problem wasn't behavioral or even lack of skills. The problem was hidden deep underneath within their own belief system.

In 2020, I found a course on Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), based on Dr. Albert Ellis's work on how belief drives thought, thought drives emotion, and emotion drives what we actually do. It all made sense now. I finally had the answer I had been looking for. That REBT course led me to additional courses required to earn my certification as a Master Mindset Coach, but then I sat on my certification for two years and did nothing with it. I told myself I wasn't ready, that I needed more experience, more proof, more knowledge, more certifications, and that I just wasn't qualified enough to be anyone's mindset coach. I truly embraced imposter syndrome like my life was depending on it.

Once I finally stopped sitting on that certification and started building what would become Mind Your Matters today, I took everything I'd learned and applied it collectively to the women in my own district, from all those years ago. That district, all those women I'd watched hit the same wall for reasons no spreadsheet could ever explain, became the proof of concept for what I developed: the BTEAR™ Loop: Belief, Thought, Emotion, Action, Reality. It's what became the engine for The Ownership Alignment™ training and the Belief Alignment Quiz, a diagnostic I built to bring awareness to our own core thinking patterns, because one didn't exist. This is the framework I wish I'd had all those years ago, to give to the women I was working with, because this would have helped them, transformed them, and brought awareness to what was truly holding them back: their own limiting beliefs.

My own crazy personal realization: What I was actually doing during the phase in my life where I spent those two years sitting on my own certification, was me living out one of the 5 exact patterns I'd eventually name and teach in my own curriculum, the Prover, self-worth tied to performance, terrified of being exposed as not enough. Yep, that was me, hiding behind imposter syndrome, too afraid to call myself qualified, even though I had the tools, the knowledge, the experience and the skillsets. I had built my framework while I was still living inside the exact pattern it describes. That's actually the framework proving itself. The pattern doesn't disappear because you finally understand it, it surfaces under pressure, at the exact moment your identity is being tested. What actually changes once you understand the framework is the awareness of your thought pattern and the loop you're stuck in. Gaining that awareness gives you the ability to catch the loop, name the limiting belief running it, and choose differently next time in real time. It's an intentional, conscientious choice you need to make on a daily basis in order to permanently rewrite your old beliefs and rewire your thought patterns.

I'm still in that process. I'll always be a work in progress, because real growth requires daily consistent changes over time. Some days I catch myself proving instead of owning, and I have to rewrite the belief in real time. At least I have the awareness now, which helps guide my decisions and choices on a daily basis.

This work didn't start as a business plan. It started with a 7 year old girl who instinctively knew how to take ownership, yet grew up to be a woman who spent years relearning that same lesson the hard way. I am that little girl, the one who knew exactly what she wanted and instinctively knew to just believe in herself, make a plan and execute it with a marketing strategy and all. As an adult, I had lost sight of that foundation. Now, I'm on a mission to teach others how to do what my younger, entrepreneurial inner spirit apparently already knew.

That little girl had already found her purpose and calling before the woman she grew up to be even realized it.