Lessons from a Quitter Ep. 05: How Melissa Wolak made the transition from employee to business owner through baby steps
We had such an interesting conversation with Melissa Wolak about how you can take all of the skills from your career and turn it into a business that you love. What is even more helpful is that Melissa shows us how to take baby steps from an employee to a side hustle to a full solopreneur business. For a lot of us, this journey is a lot more palatable than storming the island and burning the ships.
Melissa Wolak has a Master’s degree in Communication Disorders and spent 20 years working as a speech-language cognitive therapist in hospital settings. Throughout that time, Melissa became disillusioned with the lack of a holistic approach to treating patients, especially those with traumatic brain injuries. She began training in mindfulness techniques but was not allowed to use her new skills on existing patients. That restriction prompted her to begin seeing clients outside of her regular job. Slowly, her consulting career moved from just patients to helping action-oriented people achieve their goals. In 2016, she quit her job to pursue her private practice as a transformational and mindset coach and speaker full-time.
Here is what we chat about in this episode:
- Why Melissa wanted to become a Speech and Language Cognitive Therapist
- How having her daughter changed her perspective
- How she started learning more about mindfulness and how that changed the way she approached her work
- How she started her side hustle while still working at her job
- What happened since she moved on to her own business
- How she manages doing work as a Cognitive Therapist and a Mindfulness and Transformational Coach.
- How she grew her business to replace her old salary
Resources mentioned in the episode:
- Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap
- Jen Sincero, You Are A Badass
- Simon Sinek, Start with Why
- Brene Brown
Where to find Melissa: