Episode 1 | Why I Left My Corporate Job to Build a Business Around Wellbeing
Episode 1 | Why I Left My Corporate Job to Build a Business Around Wellbeing
Introduction
What happens when the career you've worked so hard to build no longer feels aligned with the life you want to live? In this opening episode of The Eleshia Lifestyle Podcast, I share the personal experiences that led me from corporate life to creating a business centred on wellbeing, purpose and freedom.
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In This Episode
Why I chose to leave my corporate career.
Building a successful career while pursuing my passion for wellbeing.
How family, grief and motherhood reshaped my priorities.
Why wellbeing became the foundation of my business.
The journey from employee to entrepreneur.
What inspired me to create The Eleshia Lifestyle Podcast.
"Investing in yourself is investing in your business."
Episode Summary
For many years, I built a successful career in the corporate world, but despite achieving professional success, something always felt missing. Through personal challenges, family responsibilities and becoming a mother, I began to question what success truly meant.
In this episode, I share the pivotal moments that encouraged me to step away from the security of corporate life and create a business centred around wellbeing, purpose and helping others. I also reflect on the lessons I've learnt through grief, resilience and personal growth, and how those experiences shaped the vision behind Eleshia Lifestyle.
This conversation is an invitation to pause, reflect and consider whether the life you're building genuinely reflects the future you want. My hope is that by sharing my journey, you'll feel inspired to invest in yourself, embrace change with confidence and create a life that supports your wellbeing as much as your ambitions.
Key Takeaways
Success is about alignment, not just achievement.
Wellbeing should be the foundation of your business.
Life's biggest challenges can reveal your true purpose.
Trust your intuition when making major life decisions.
Investing in yourself benefits every area of your life.
Prefer to read? Browse the full transcript below, or listen using the player above.
Read the Full Transcript
Eleshia Harris:Hi, I'm Eleshia Harris and I am your host of The Eleshia Show. I am also the founder of eleshialifestyle.com and I'm so excited that you're here with me and I am here with you. I'm also really appreciative. Each week, I will be sharing with you conversations with my hosts and sometimes just on my own, so solo conversations. And I'll be sharing strategies and stories and insights to help you enhance your well-being and to build your business while still navigating life because sometimes we often try to separate the two. And let's face it, if you are not well, you have no business. So try and work with these two things combined because we can to enhance your lifestyle.
Again, I'm really excited to have you here. I have wanted to put together a podcast for over two years. And so here I am ready to share. Let's get into this week's episode.
Before we actually get into the episodes, I just wanted to do a quick intro recording just to let you know who I am and also why I'm so passionate about what I do and how I got here. So let's get into that.
As you know, by the title of my show, I'm Eleshia and I am a business growth strategist, and I really love it. I love what I'm able to do with other female business owners, because sometimes when we're running businesses, it can feel really lonely. I know for me, it did. And that's one of the reasons why I've put this podcast together because I felt lonely. I felt vulnerable to share my stories and my experiences and just my expertise.
So here I am putting it all out for you. So that's me from a business perspective. I'm also a wife and I'm a mother to a very energetic daughter. She's a toddler right now. I'm also the main carer of a brother who is on the autism spectrum. And I'm just here to share my insights.
Every week, we're going to have different guests come on to share their expertise also.
So how did I get into what I'm doing? When I was 19, I decided that I wasn't going to go to university. Let's just be frank. I had spent all of my teen years listening to what my parents wanted me to do. And when it came to deciding on universities and decide on subjects, I decided I don't want to spend another three to four years studying IT. I've grown to love it now, but at that time I want it to be more creative. I loved well-being. I loved holistic therapies and I got lit up about all of those things, but because of the fact that I want it to be a good daughter, I listened to my parents. I listened to my dad.
He was the driving force of wanting me to go into it. And when it came to. 19, I was like, no, I'm not. So I decided to go to work. I found myself a job in the West End and I absolutely loved it. I loved working full-time. I loved my commute. I loved knowing that I was going to get a paycheck every month that I could spend on the things that I wanted to spend. And I really enjoyed it. But equally, I still had that passion to know more about well-being. So while I was working and it's been like this for the last 20 odd years, I lived two lives, parallel. I would work full-time and then in my spare time I would study. So I started studying well-being back in 2000.
Yeah. Even just to say that oh my gosh. So I started studying well-being in 2000 and it started off with an evening course in beauty therapy that was supposed to take two years. I loved it. So I did it in one year and the sheer enjoyment out of it just got me so fired up, but I also had in the back of my mind that I needed a full-time job to be able to pay my bills.
And equally, I wanted to prove my dad wrong, that I was not making the biggest mistake of my life. So I always held down a job. But then in my spare time, I would do the things that I really, really enjoyed. And yeah, so that was part of my life for 20 odd years.
I've studied so many different courses. I went to Thailand to learn Thai massage in the temples. I learned that by touch because I didn't speak Thai and my instructor didn't speak English. So we just communicated by feeling and touching. And that was an amazing experience for me. And then when I came back, that's when a lot of things shifted for me. At the time, I had left my job in the West End and I was working for a property company in Knightsbridge, and I had experienced some not very nice, let's just say, behaviours. And that's when I really realised that the world that I was working in was always going to be for me.
So that's when I started to think about running my own business at some point. And even just saying that now, wow. Just coming from a background where my parents, my mum was born in Jamaica and my dad was born in the West Indies too, just coming from that heritage of always working harder, always having to have a backup just in case that was really installed in me.
And at the time, I didn't really realise why it was going to be so important because I was young, but I always knew that I needed to have a second plan. That was just me, that was just how I was in that particular moment and season of my life.
So I think I spent two and a half years with that company, and then I decided that it was time to venture off and go and check out what was going on in Canary Wharf. So I secured a job in an investment bank and I worked in compliance for two years and I loved it. I loved learning. I loved going down onto the trading floor and trying to understand what was going on down there. And it was all just so fascinating to me, I was really curious.
And then I got into project management and that's when I was just excited about work. As I said, I had the creative part of me and the holistic part of me that I was really enjoying. And I was doing it from a hobby perspective because I was doing it in my spare time. And although I was working part-time and doing the things that I loved, I also found a passion at my full-time job as well.
So I worked in investment banking for over 15 years and I really enjoyed it. Rolling into 2013 where I was doing great. I had just bought my own property. I was earning six figures. I felt like I was smashing it. I was researching to become a Pilates teacher. So I was looking at different companies to become a Pilates teacher. And then my mum received a cancer diagnosis for an incurable type of cancer. And my life changed overnight.
So my mum found out that she had multiple myeloma in January 2013. And that knocked me for six. I had so many questions and like all of us, Dr. Google was my friend and I would spend hours and hours and hours trying to research a cure. And there just wasn't one. And so as much as I want it to have a script to cure her disease. I wanted to use my project management to map out what we could do to cure her. I just couldn't find anything. So I decided it was then that I was going to make sure that I kept both of us as healthy as possible. So when she did go to her hospital appointments and she did take her chemotherapy, then her immune system was built up. The most that I could do was my coping mechanism.
I could only do the things that I knew to do with regards to what I had learned from my whole well-being journey. Well, you can say that I was on this life journey to know everything that I knew at the time that I knew it.
So juicing had been a part of my daily routine already, and I had looked into studying more juice therapy. And so like, Eleshia does, I dived in and I found a course that was run by Jason Vale who is the juice master for those of you who are listening out of the UK. He's pretty big on juice therapy here in the UK. I did a course with him and his company and learned everything that I heard to know how to ensure that basically, I could keep our immune systems to their highest points by using food.
That really changed my life with regards to seeing what I was seeing and what they were providing my mum from a food perspective at the hospitals. I'm not here to be too judgmental because I know the hospitals do the best they could, but it was then that I decided that I was going to take control of what she ate and what we put into her body as well as mine to get her through her journey, her cancer journey.
So that's what I did. Whilst I was looking after mum, I couldn't just stop work. I had too many commitments. I had my mortgage to pay. I had car payments to pay. I still had huge projects that I needed to manage, but luckily I had a great boss at the time and she gave me all of the flexibility that I absolutely needed to be able to still to continue to work, but also to look after my mum and look after myself. And I will always, always be forever grateful for that.
Just because this is how I am. And I'm guessing now that I'm getting older, I'm seeing that, and I'm learning to scale that back. But I also dive straight in with my pilates teacher's training. My mum convinced me not to wait until the following year and to be honest, an reflection, I'm so glad that she did because that was my coping mechanism when things got really difficult, I would use my pilates practice to really tune into my body and to work out my stresses and just to close the doors and just to really still my brain as to what was going on the outside and it saved my life.
So I spent nearly three years continuing to juggle looking after my mum and my multiple responsibilities and stresses. And then we lost mum in June 2015 and I was heartbroken. Absolutely heartbroken. I became a sister mum to my brother who was 21 at the time overnight and I kissed goodbye to any of my own freedom. And I just immersed myself into looking after my siblings and making sure that they were okay. And I kind of just put myself last and really just focused on looking after my brother, trying to sort out all of mum's affairs. And just trying to live. Every day I would just take one step at a time. And if I'm really honest with you, it was a blur. My life was a blur for that first year of my mum passing away.
I just moved my life forward the best that I knew how. And then things started to snowball a little bit from there, and the stress is increased and got really worse. And my husband and I had decided that we were going to try for a baby. And after doing different tests and so forth, it became apparent that I had fibroids and I had polycystic ovaries. And one of my fallopian tubes was blocked. And the doctors basically told me that I wouldn't have a baby unless I had an operation. And then I had IVF.
But Eleshia being Eleshia, I knew that I had to start to be my own detective and I started to look into everything. Basically. I had learned prior to my own diagnosis. I decided that it was time to take action and actually be my own doctor. And it worked, it worked within six weeks. I was pregnant and we were absolutely ecstatic. Can you imagine being told that you wouldn't have a baby naturally and then finding out that you cured your own body? And you did this with the help of my acupuncturist and pilates and friends and well-being and food choices and so forth.
I mean, I did a lot of research on what it would take, but could you imagine then finding out that you were pregnant? We kept it to ourselves and then days after I was grieving my mum, I found out that we miscarried. And then I was heartbroken beyond belief. I mean, I don't even have the words to explain how I felt.
And I just knew at that time that although I had conceived before, I need to find space. I need to find space if I really wanted this to happen. So I decided, and it wasn't a hard decision to be honest with you, because it was at a time where I wasn't particularly enjoying my job. And I was asked to take a permanent role. And it was just not the right timing for me.
So it wasn't the right time to inform a corporate perspective, but it was the right time for me to decide that I would take the time out and I would solely concentrate on myself, my business, my well-being, and having a baby.
So as I said, I became my own case studies again, and with the help of an acupuncturist and my lifestyle changes and just purely making space. For myself, in 2018, we had my baby girl, Elessandra and she is the love of my life. And again, I did that naturally and I am so happy that I listened to my own intuition. Everything that I possibly could to ensure that happened.
But then the mummy role started to take its toll because nobody tells you when you first have a baby that this baby is going to need to be fed every two hours. And all it's going to do is sleep shit and ask for food. Nobody tells you that. So I felt drained and let's not forget, I was still grieving my mum. I was a new mum. I didn't have a clue at what I was doing and I felt isolated again because I was one of the oldest out of my friends to have a child. So a lot of them have already been through that journey.
So I was doing this on my own and it was hard. It was hard, especially, where I was still caring for my brother. I was still mourning my mum and I was still adjusting to this new person, one in all of my time, every day, every hour, every minute.
So I was constantly battling brain fog and sleep deprivation. Just as I said, the adjustment of looking after this new baby and I had to dial into what I already knew. I had to go back to the drawing board of knowing my project management skills and my well-being skills, and actually just really taken that time to make plans for myself of how I was going to look after myself, how I was going to look after my body, how I was going to look after Elessandra, how was going to look after my husband, my brother.
But ultimately, I had to look after myself because without me doing that, everything else would have collapsed. I was used to managing multi-million-pound portfolios in the past. So put in some simple strategies around how I could run my life helped me so much. And of course, I wasn't in a hundred percent control. I mean, who is when you've got a kid at home, who was less than a year and you are a carer of somebody who has special needs.
I knew that. I call myself a retired control freak because I have learned especially in the time that we're in now. I have learned that you can't control everything. So you have to be okay with just getting the stuff that you can get done. So I'm not saying that I completely relieved by a project management timeline. It really helped me to put simple strategies in place to be able to look after me.
So then I started to feel really empowered and I started to gain clarity that I could help others do the same. So now I work the hours that I want to work, which is part-time as I work around my daughter, which is really important to me. And I help other business owners hit their business goals and their well-being goals and their lifestyle goals. And I absolutely love it.
So I want to help you gain clarity and you really get what your heart truly desires. Each week, I'll be sharing ways to live the life that you want to live. And I'm not just talking from a business perspective and that's really important for me to share with you because I will always put your well-being first. lIke I put my well-being first. Because remember, without your well-being, there is no business.
Just like my website states investing in you is investing in your business. And so I'm really excited to share with you. So when you're ready, please hit that subscribe button and review and share, and let's get into those episodes.
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Eleshia Show. If you know somebody who needs to hear the conversations that we're having, please share it, take a screenshot and send it to them. Also, I would really love for you to rate and review the podcast as this really helps. And I'd love to read your comments. Lastly, remember, you need to invest in yourself first because you are important and amazing. Take care until the next time. Bye-bye.
About The Eleshia Lifestyle Podcast
The Eleshia Lifestyle Podcast explores business, wellbeing, mindset and personal growth through honest conversations, inspiring stories and practical insights. Each episode is designed to help you create a life and business that feels aligned with your purpose, values and ambitions.
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