Breaking Free of People-Pleasing, Reconnecting with Ourselves, & Redefining Entrepreneurship with Leoni Parkinson, Performance Marketing Strategist

Leoni: [00:00:00] what might work for your business is. Sending out 500 cold DMs every day. But does it suck the energy from your soul? And is it sustainable for you? Because if it works for your business, but it doesn't work for you in the end, it's not going to work for your business. Because if your energy is sucked dry, there's not going to be a person to run the business anymore.

And I feel so passionate about being connected to yourself, because It's the only way you can sustain the energy to do this.

Abby Schommer: Hello, marginal listeners. I'm so excited to have you back with us, 2025 edition. hope everybody had an incredible, restful, and rejuvenating holiday and that you're ready to get into the new year. today's episode. I'm not going to lie. It's with a friend. It's with a really close friend. And it's pretty obvious when you listen to us talk.

Um, we met in a professional capacity, but very quickly, it was obvious to us. Our relationship spanned much, much more than that. Leonie and I, Leonie Parkinson is our guest to date. she recently shared some professional news with me. And upon doing [00:01:00] so, I was like, You need to get on the podcast as soon as possible.

with that, I'm so excited to have Leonie on with us. Leonie is a performance marketing strategy and breath work coach. In today's episode, we dive into Leonie's nonlinear career path, which includes jobs in e commerce, marketing tech, and even early childhood ed in Shanghai, of all places. We discussed Leonie feeling disconnected from herself, which led her to move cross country on more than one occasion.

That is until the pandemic, which is when she also discovered breathwork. Leonie shares the lessons she learned when starting her own breathwork coaching company and her own performance marketing company, and how she ultimately decided to pause business ownership and start operating from a place of abundance this year.

if you're looking for conversation between friends around self discovery, career transition, or entrepreneurship on your own terms, you're definitely not going to want to miss this episode. So with that, I'm so excited to get into it, and thank you so much, Leonie, for everything you share with our audiences today.

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Abby Schommer: I met you because LinkedIn has become a weird, weird [00:02:00] place these days. It's really been infiltrated by the chat GPTs of the world.

and it just kind of feels like a land grab for how can you self promote as much as possible, And when you find someone that actually meaningfully engages with other people's content, wow, does it really stick out? As you can probably imagine, that's how I met Leone.

She was leaving very, very thoughtful, comments on other people's posts, not in a way that she was just trying to promote her services or her offerings, I mean, from there on out, I think I commented on something you commented on someone else's post, and then you slid right into my LinkedIn DMs.

Leoni: we basically had a conversation on someone else's post and I was like, I like her, I like her energy. Let's meet and be friends.

Abby Schommer: I know. And it was just, my wildest dreams realized because again, I had just gotten so disillusioned with what I was seeing on LinkedIn

I mean, I'm not going to lie. I'll be on LinkedIn and sometimes I'll DM people and it's [00:03:00] very clear that they're only happy to have conversations with me out loud in front of an audience.

Leoni: totally. And I've even had where people will comment on the, on your LinkedIn posts as a way to, negate what you're saying or to try to, as though they're starting some kind of discussion or some conversation. And then I've commented back. Cause I'm like, let's totally have a conversation. Cause I'm also open to like learning.

I'm interested in what other people's perspectives are. But then. the, the discussion, the conversation ends there because then they don't want to end this. It's as though they're just trying to comment on as many, leave one comment on as many posts as possible.

And the minute that a conversation opens up, they're not interested anymore. And And I think that's what I also noticed about. which is why, when I met you and some other people that we've got in our humans in business group, that was when I wanted to like, hold onto these people because you guys were providing the depth that I was missing when I was doing all of the content creation on LinkedIn.

Abby Schommer: Yeah. And as Leonie mentioned, what we did is we quickly acknowledged, [00:04:00] Hey, people like us are few and far between on these platforms. What if we. Curated a group of people like us who are looking for mutual value exchange and to not just self promote. And that's what we did. And I think we kicked that off in the summer and we've been meeting monthly since August or September now.

Leoni: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It must've been June or July when we did that because I remember it was back in Manchester when I was back in Manchester when we, uh, when we decided to do it and I was there at the beginning of summer. So yeah,

Abby Schommer: Yeah,

Leoni: idea. I'm glad we did that. Yeah.

Abby Schommer: I can't wait to see what other ideas we have. but I think it's so essential to, and a big reason we started it is because you and I are both entrepreneurs. and in many ways that can be. Not only frustrating, but isolating, particularly if you have other people in your life, who are not entrepreneurs and it's not just that they're not doing the same job as you, but it's almost as [00:05:00] though they they don't even really understand your why, They don't understand your motivations. So to feel deeply misunderstood by a lot of people in like your family circle or your friend circle necessitates this need to.

To connect with people who do really understand your reason for doing what you do. And so that's, that's what I love about our group too. We're all people who have launched into entrepreneurship and to have that community as an entrepreneur is so essential.

Leoni: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I even had it earlier this week. we, we had like a dinner with a friendship group and then everybody was going out drinking afterwards and I didn't go. And this is, I'm not judging anybody for their choices. If they want to go out, they can go out and drink on a, on a Monday night.

That's totally fine. But then somebody said, Oh, you're so disciplined. I don't know how, like they couldn't understand why I didn't want to go. But the next day I was doing like strategy sessions. I was also kicking off my own podcast. So I was like, I do not want to go live with a gravelly voice and a hangover, because it's just, it's not the way that [00:06:00] I want to show up again, no judgment to anybody else doing this, but I could just see at that point that there was this disconnect between the choices that I make, because I want to work on these projects and the choices that other people make, because they have other things that they get enjoyment out of and other things that they want to invest their time doing. But like you said, if you are. you don't have these kinds of people that are also working on similar projects and in similar ways to you, I've even had it in the past where you come away and you think, Oh, is there something wrong with me? Like, why do I not want to, you know, go out and do that, that kind of thing.

And it can, in that way, be very isolating. And sometimes , if you're not grounded enough in your values and, you know, You can have the people pleasing tendencies, which I hold my hands up. I

Abby Schommer: I'm going to show you how to do that.

Leoni: and not go [00:07:00] out with my friends this weekend or something because I wanted to work on something that can, it can help to have these people who said, I've, I've done the same thing.

I've been in your position.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, I'm so glad you bring up people pleasing because any entrepreneur who's a people pleaser, you really have to reckon with why that's the case and how can you let some of that go.

And it's, it's the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship because I think you really have to shed different habits and really look deep. In word and I feel like that level of introspection might not be as necessary when you choose a different career path and that's not to say that entrepreneurship is like a more enlightened path or were far more self actualized than anyone else because trust me, that's absolutely not the case, particularly in my scenario, but at the end of the day, if somebody feels violated by decisions you're making in your life, the reality is those choices you're making are making you happier. there's something we need to further [00:08:00] scrutinize there Because the people that you surround yourself with ultimate thing that they should care about is your happiness and you coached me through that so i'm so glad that you i'm so glad that you did the only I I mean You have had such sage wisdom across facets of work and life and there's a There's a reason for this and I would love for you to kind of get into a little bit of your back story as to how got here and developed some of these insights.

if you want to go all the way back to Leone from inception, tell us a little bit about your childhood and growing up. Silence.

Leoni: And this is something that I have, um, this is something that I've learned as I was growing up. I was always like a very quiet child and I always wanted to just be in the background and be very passive. And I think that this is, exactly say what the exact [00:09:00] moment where the people pleasing developed. But I just knew that it started very young and I always just wanted to, I was like the peacekeeper in the house.

You know, I grew up with a couple of siblings, you know, how sibling relations are, and I think at some point my whole thing was just trying to keep the peace. So I'd say as a kid, I was always. Very aware of how other people thought how other

Abby Schommer: So today I'm going to be presenting a special draft of the Sustainable Mobilization Plan. And what you'll see on your screen is the draft draft. It's the first draft of the plan. And it has a couple, uh, notes to it. Um, the first part, which is like uh, this the draft draft. The next one is, um, the principles of the third draft.

There's a lot of things you're going to see about the third draft. And then there's the, uh, uh, The, uh, My first draft. What it's about is the ideas about, uh,

Leoni: And then that followed,

Abby Schommer: [00:10:00] Okay.

Leoni: that's what I thought that you were supposed to do. that I was doing up until that point, I thought that this is what you were supposed to do. And then

Abby Schommer: And I think we're going start with. Um, Uh, Uh, Uh, Um, Uh, Uh, Um,

Leoni: immense pull and I didn't really understand where it was coming from.

And it was super scary for me to say that to people, because at this point I was still in my people pleasing phase. it was one of, I was living in one of the biggest contradictions that I'd ever lived in, because on the one hand I was feeling this really, this really strong pull to just, Quit this [00:11:00] stable job that I had that people were like, why are you doing that?

You've got this safe job security and all the rest of it. And you're going to move to China on a one way ticket where you don't even, you don't really know what's going to happen there. So on the one hand, there was the people pleasing part that was really thinking about what everybody was saying. But then on the other hand, this thing inside me was so strong that I was like, I just have to do it. The only way I can describe it was like splitting, I guess, in, in my personality, that is the only way I can describe it. and I guess that was the first time that I really started to make decisions for myself where I was like, fuck this, I'm doing this and I'm, I can't say at that point I was fully in a place where I don't care what other people think of me, because there was a huge part of me that did, but that was the first time where I started to listen to myself and be like, I'm doing this, even though it's uncomfortable, even though I'm going against what other people expect of me, what society expects of me.

Abby Schommer: [00:12:00] Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

Leoni: And I just remember like, it was, I don't know, a Thursday afternoon. And I was like picking up a kid's teeth off the gym floor in Shanghai. And I, you know, I mean, you just have this moment where you're thinking, how did I get here? Do you know? Like what, like what, not in a bad way, like not in a bad way of judging myself, but I was thinking, oh, it's so funny I don't even know how I ended up here.

Abby Schommer: yeah, that is such a, I can imagine how that visual would stick out in your memory. And I know exactly what you're talking about when something you're experiencing is such a foil to your previous self or your [00:13:00] previous life. Yeah, those moments are. So salient, it makes me think about, I don't know, you mentioned, I don't know why I necessarily made this choice.

And I this like splitting or this disengaging of like my new self from my previous self. And as somebody who, and I've been open about this on the podcast, who's struggled with mental health or, you know, ever since she was a teenager, I do think, and let me know if this is true of your situation. I do think there is a point at which when you are so deeply unhappy or dissatisfied with something in your life, you get to a point where you say to yourself, I'll do anything to just not feel this way anymore.

Leoni: Yeah.

Abby Schommer: care what it is. I've been asked this at times by like my husband when I've been going through, you know, some depressive episodes. What do you want you know abby what what do you want will you what will make you happy and i can't give him to the answer to [00:14:00] that question but what i can say is all i know is what's what's happening now is not working it's this impetus to get you to just try something radically different because.

At that point, you almost have nothing to lose it. Going through the motions of what you're doing currently is just kind of getting you further and further in this cycle of unhappiness. So that's when I feel like sometimes a lot of these radical shifts in these radical ideas come about.

Leoni: you absolutely hit the nail on the head because I've done that a second time and I'll get to that in a moment, but you're right. And I think before I went to Shanghai. I think I was so disconnected from myself at that point that I didn't know that I was unhappy and I didn't know that I was people pleasing.

I didn't know that I had all of these anxieties and these feelings inside. My body was showing me because like, at some points my face was covered in eczema, I wasn't sleeping properly. But if you would have asked me at the time, I would, are you happy? I would have said yes, because I. I was [00:15:00] such a people pleaser that I think it was the concept of saying, no, I'm not happy.

part of the thing that I thought I was supposed to be was also happy. Get a job in corporate and graduate from university and be happy. So if somebody would have said, are you happy? I would have been, of course I'm happy because that's what I'm supposed to be right now. So at that point I couldn't even admit to myself. And I think hands down, moving to China was one of the best things that I could have done because it was, it was the first step in helping me to reconnect with myself, you know, cause you put yourself in all of these situations. And I'm talking about more difficult situations than picking teeth up off the gym floor, but, you know, trying to communicate, having to rely on yourself in situations where you cannot speak the same language and things like that. Stuff like that helps you to reconnect to yourself and understand like who you actually are, how you want to operate. Because all of a sudden you're operating in a place where you're not with all of the family and the friends and in the parameters that [00:16:00] you

Abby Schommer: Silence.

Leoni: own pretty much, or like I was making new friends, there was nobody's expectations that I could project onto myself. So that was, that was, yeah, it was one of the best things that I'd ever done.

And it's, as I said, it started on this journey that I was on to discover who I really was.

Abby Schommer: I think that's a really important point around, it's not even to say that our friends and family are putting their explicitly putting their expectations on us. I actually don't know that anyone in my life has ever said, Abby, I expect you to choose differently in life or Abby.

I don't understand why you're making these choices, but it's something about just when everybody else is making different choices, you [00:17:00] start to infer in your own head that you are not being accepted. Because you are just doing something differently and to be able to take yourself out of a situation where you feel that you are doing something differently, behaving differently than everyone else and put yourself in a completely different situation where you don't have proximity to people who are making wildly different choices from you all the time.

And again, that's not to say that you're going to then be in a situation where everyone's making the same decisions as you. But. You don't have that relativity. You're not constantly comparing yourself in the same way. And I can absolutely resonate with that because I felt that as well. When I moved from the East coast to the Bay area, 3000 miles away from my friends and family.

Now, when I was in the Bay area, I actually was surrounded by folks who had followed a very similar trajectory to me, had moved to the city for the same reason. But, the way that your friends and family living has such heavy bearing on [00:18:00] you.

And there is a part of you again, this people pleaser part of you that feels guilty when you're deciding otherwise, even if they're not giving any indication to you that that's the case.

Leoni: 100 percent and it's actually, an innate thing in human survival, right? We, you know, throughout our human evolution, we survived by being a part of a tribe and a part of a pack. So we grew up in this group of friends and family that if you think about it in evolutionary terms, that is our tribe.

That is our pack. That is who we feel so closely bonded with. But And, you know, in, millions, however many years ago, I probably need to check, uh, check on the human evolution timeline when I, uh, when I finish this conversation. At some point, if you went against tribe, you would get rejected and your chances of survival would be reduced. So we do have this thing, this innate need, let's say to fit in. that's why, when it's our friends and family and [00:19:00] people that we've grown up around, it is so much stronger that we want to fit in and we want to please, because that was our That was our safety bubble, you know, and when we were up, when we came into the world, this was our safety bubble.

So that's why the bond that we feel is stronger. Obviously, when we get older and we meet different people, this, this need for safety is not there because we've already grown up. We've already survived a lot of years in this, uh, in this wild world.

Abby Schommer: Yeah. Thank you for so eloquently describing what I was trying to convey, Uh, but it makes perfect sense, you will get rejected if you do not assimilate to, or you do not mirror that of other people in your tribe. So of course that triggers a fear response and the person who is diverging from the pack.

Absolutely. So, okay. So you, you, you went to China, you fell. That wow, what am I doing here? This is a complete new reality, but I feel more in tune with myself than I ever have. So continue down that journey with us.

Leoni: So, um, I [00:20:00] stayed, uh, thanks for bringing me back on track. I think I got a bit excited there Um, yeah, so I stayed in China for a few, for two years. I went on, yeah, I did all of the self discovery. still not quite understood the whole people pleasing concept at that point. I just knew that I was becoming more connected to myself and understanding who I was. then after two years in Shanghai, I made the decision to move to Berlin. Um, and this was a geographical choice that I wanted to be closer to my family because, you know, Shanghai is like the complete other end of the world to where I grew up. And it was taking one to two days for me to, you know, Get home to visit my family.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to move a little bit closer in location. Still

Abby Schommer: Okay. Okay.

Leoni: [00:21:00] I really delved into performance marketing and strategy and started on this trajectory, but in terms of like sticking with the thread of the whole self discovery topic. I think that I don't really know how it happened, but I think I started to feel this disconnection with

Abby Schommer: Okay.

Leoni: again.

Abby Schommer: joining us today.

Leoni: say, because in Shanghai, I was more in like discovery phase, I was traveling, I was working in a kindergarten, which was a load of fun, but it wasn't a career development move for me.

It was more of a self discovery move. And then when I came back to okay, I want to develop my career now. I want to start learning. I want to seek more opportunities in that, in that way, I think I was starting to become disconnected to myself, from myself again. I was starting to do the people pleasing behaviors.

This is, I

Abby Schommer: Okay. Okay. [00:22:00] Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um,

Leoni: like, I guess I'd been working in startups and in, I also got a job in corporate for about four years when I noticed this, you know, the signals to, towards my body were becoming louder. at this point. To loop back to what you nicely really, you really put it in a nice way before I was getting to the point of desperation where I was like, I need to do something.

I need to change something needs to happen. And at first I thought I needed to move again because in my head, every time I moved to a new country, things got better. So I was like, maybe this is just who I am. Maybe I just need to move around every, you know, two to four years to solve the problem. But then the pandemic hit. And obviously there was [00:23:00] not so many opportunities to move, and it really made me sit down with myself and be like, every time I want to move, am I just running away from the feelings that I'm feeling? Because the pattern that I was also noticing is that every time I wanted to move, these feelings caught up to me at some point, and I was starting to think, well, it's not the best thing to live a life where you constantly have to move.

I mean, if you want to move every four years, that's a load of fun and that's great. But you have to move every four years because you're getting anxious, then that's really something to look at. And then I discovered breathwork and meditation, which is also, I'd say, When you're talking about this, uh, sage wisdom, this is where it started to develop because so I started doing the breathwork practice on myself and then I trained as a coach. I studied somatic experiencing like therapy techniques. I went down this whole road because I was like, I just want to understand what [00:24:00] is happening in my body. Why can I not sleep Why am I having heart palpitations? Why am I constantly grinding my teeth? you know, at some points I'd be on the bus and I'd have to get off because I was feeling so stressed and there was nothing stressful on the bus happening.

And I'd be thinking, why is all of this stuff feeling like it's caving in on me? And I started to understand like the whole stress response. I won't go into it now, but all of the things that were happening in my body and I worked through that.

Abby Schommer: everything you're saying, I, you know, there is this whole notion of the body keeps the score. Right. And I feel like sometimes it's hard to. Intellectualize what our bodies are telling us, because even if you feel like you are on the right path, you are ticking all the boxes.

Your body has a way of knowing when things are just not in alignment. I love how you keep mentioning too, that you continue to become disconnected from yourself.

Leoni: Yeah.

Abby Schommer: think, yeah, when you're not. When you're not living an integrated existence, when you're not living with integrity, [00:25:00] meaning you are living your life in a way that is true to your inner knowing. And I, I know this can sound a little bit elusive or woo woo, but for folks who felt it, I think they really get it because when you're basically denying yourself the things that you actually should be doing as a person and the things that actually make you feel like a whole.

Person, things just start to happen, right? Like the teeth grinding that you and I have talked about having our hair fall out. And I do think more and more people can empathize with this now because of the burnout culture we're seeing, not just in corporate, but even with entrepreneurship.

I just think that this is such a timely conversation for us to be having now, because I feel that so many people in whatever work settings they're in, they are feeling disconnected from themselves their bodies are starting to illuminate that to them.

Leoni: 100 percent and I think this is the perfect segue because you and I had a little talk about Yeah. What, what potential topic we might want to discuss on the podcast, which was [00:26:00] exactly the entrepreneurial journey. But actually let's put a pin in that because I'm just going to finish, uh, I'm just going to finish my story and then

Abby Schommer: Please do Yep. Okay. You

Leoni: was working from nine to six and then after work, I will be doing my courses. I will be doing my practicum for my breath work. I was constantly on my laptop, just doing different things.

Um, it was probably one of the most intense periods I've ever, I'd ever lived through. Um, because also when you start doing breath work of this extent and doing these kinds of All of your, let's say, bottled up emotions come to the surface to be [00:27:00] processed. So there was a seven month period where I was probably processing stuff that I'd have been holding on to for my whole life.

And it was all just coming out at once. So it was, uh, it was a slightly Unstable time for me in terms of like emotions. But the main thing is, is that we got through it and I feel like it built the groundwork for entrepreneurship, for all of the instability that comes along with that, because I knew that if I could hold myself through all of that, I was like, okay, you've got this girl, you can hold yourself through probably most of the things that life is going to throw at you.

Um, and once I'd qualified, I decided that I wanted to get breathwork out to the world. So I quit my

Abby Schommer: Okay. So, um, I'm going to start off by saying all of the wonderful do. very much.

Leoni: There is this idea that you should be working full [00:28:00] time on the business that you are running. And I want to share this because I want to normalize the fact that it is not always possible to work full time on this project, on the new project.

I still needed to be able

Abby Schommer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Leoni: decided to take a part time job. Also, I took a part time job still in performance marketing strategy, because I do love it. I love performance marketing.

I love business strategy, and I was lucky enough to be able to get a job where I was able to do that and also work part time while I focus on the breathwork stuff. So

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Leoni: [00:29:00] world, speaking a lot about people pleasing, because I feel like. Breathwork was one of the things that helped me to break the people pleasing pattern, because it was one of the things that helps me to get in touch with what I wanted and I needed.

Abby Schommer: what a wonderful combination to be pursuing, some more traditional type work and, and breath work, right? Because I could see how those two would actually be very synergistic. I mean, even folks who might still work in traditional corporate environments.

They don't necessarily need to be a breathwork coach, but to have that daily practice while you're in corporate. Wow. I mean, What a incredible grounding exercise to have, but thank you so much for bringing up the point around. Entrepreneurship full time is not for everybody. I actually would venture to say it is not for most people because the Not everybody comes from generational wealth. Not everybody had a previous crazy exit at their last startup. Not everybody was making, multi six figure salaries, you know, compounded by an amazing severance. That was my situation and I was really fortunate to [00:30:00] be in that situation, but I know I come from an immense place of privilege saying that I think there's this notion that.

As a founder or as an entrepreneur, if you're not all in on your business, you're not all in on your business. If you're not quitting everything else to make space for that one thing, there's no way it can be successful. And that is one of the most damaging narratives, I mean, for most folks, that is just not a feasible way to be a business owner. So I think we just need to dismantle some of There's a rhetoric that's coming out about if you want to be a good founder, if you want to take your business seriously, you need to eliminate any other streams of income because what that is going to mean is that we have A lot of entrepreneurs and business owners who look exactly the same, who come from the exact same backgrounds.

And we're not going to introduce any level of diversity of perspective when it comes to business ownership. If the only people who can financially sustain their own businesses are the ones with heaps and heaps of money in their savings account that they're willing to just burn through in the [00:31:00] process.

Leoni: A hundred percent. And it can be such a dangerous thing to tell people like, Oh, just quit your, quit your job or quit your stream of income because, and I'm going to loop this back to anxiety and all of the stuff that I learned when I was studying like breathwork and the nervous system. When you cannot take care, you know, I'm thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs right now, when you cannot afford to take care of your most basic levels of need, food, clothing, housing, or when your income stream goes, your brain and your body go into survival mode, and the decisions that you're able to make in survival mode are Never going to be as good.

You're never going to be able to think as clearly as when you know, okay, my needs are taken care of, right? My needs are taken care of. I don't need to worry about that. When you're making decisions from survival mode, it's going to be all speed panic, and those are definitely not the best decisions that you need to be making in your business, especially in the early stages in like the founding years, [00:32:00] these need to be decisions that are made from a, from a clear head, like slow thinking. I will die on this Hill that people need to stop saying, Oh, just quit your job. And it will happen because it is so dangerous to say that to people a

Abby Schommer: Yeah, completely. And like you said, if your business isn't ready to pay you yet, you shouldn't be making decisions from a place of scarcity and disparity. And if that is your, your motivator, right? Is just this incessant need for money. You're going to start to take your business in a direction. Where it meets the needs of you and not the needs of your customers.

And then you're basically just set up for, for failure as a business owner. So yes, giving yourself that runway, permission to take your time with your business and make very strategic decisions about your business, not from a place of lack, it's going to make for a way better business.

Leoni: to be honest. that was my first time starting a business on my own. So of course I made all of the mistakes and this is another thing that I'd like to [00:33:00] share because I think people do not talk openly enough about, oftentimes online we see these overnight successes and all of the mistakes and the slog and the toil is that that person might've gone through to get this overnight success is missing. Honestly, if I was to start that breathwork business again, and I'm going to hold my hands up and say that round one of that breathwork business did not work. And I am so glad that I took a job because I tried so many different angles to get that to work. I worked with consultants and coaches, for whatever reason, or I have my own hypothesis about why it didn't work and things I would do differently. It didn't work, but I was able to sustain myself and give my freed, give myself the freedom to explore different avenues that I felt like I needed to, to get that business off the ground. this is a, this is another thing that I wanted to say to underline this is that it is okay to fail. I am holding my hands up and saying that I have already started a business project and it [00:34:00] and it is emotional and it, there was pain when I decided to. I'm going to say park that project because I think I'm not done with it yet. But you know, I, I had to let go of that. And that was another thing about emotional regulation that I had to go through about thinking, Oh, well, I must be a failure. I must be a failure because I wasn't working on the business full time.

I must be a failure because I didn't manage to it off the ground. But the truth, the facts of the matter is, is that failing is so normal and it does not reflect on me as a person, it doesn't reflect on you as a person, it doesn't reflect on anybody as a person if a project doesn't work because there's a million reasons why it might not have worked.

Abby Schommer: I think we can reframe it. It's not that it failed, right? Because you said this is more of like a, a comma or a pause. it's a punctuation in your story, but it is not the end of your story with breathwork. Like you can always. Take a pause in certain entrepreneurial paths and then.

Start them again [00:35:00] later. And when you, if you do ever re engage this, this part of your business, right, you're going to come in with so much institutional knowledge that you would have never had had you not started it in the first place. And what you have is signal. I think that's how we need to reframe looking at.

data points around our business there. Inherently, there's nothing negative or positive about the data points and the feedback you're getting around your business. It's just signal around what's working and what's not. And that is, that is one thing that you do want to detach from your own self concept.

That is one way you want to disengage because that feedback has nothing to do with you as a person. Um, I love that at this point, you know, maybe it's a little bit hindsight's 2020. At this point, I'm not sure if at the time you did feel feelings of failure, but,

Leoni: I, yeah, I felt all of those feelings. I felt like I was not good enough. I felt like there was something wrong with me for not being able to fit. At one point I felt like I was banging my head against the wall because I was trying all the strategies, you know, [00:36:00] I was trying all the strategies that you see online, all the business coaches, all of the things that they're telling you. and all I can say is thank God I knew how to do breath work. Yeah. To regulate myself through this, there was, there was a whole lot of breathing going on. There was a whole lot of breathing, a whole lot of tears, a whole lot of all of these things, because as I mentioned, I, I had levels of self doubt and people pleasing before, um, to reflect on what you said earlier, Avi, this brought up your business will reflect. Uh, like deeper levels of things that you thought that you'd worked on, that

Abby Schommer: Yeah. Yeah.

Leoni: advice [00:37:00] because what works for one person might not work for another person. all it is, is about testing different strategies and seeing not only what works for your business, but what works for you as a person,

Abby Schommer: Um,

Leoni: what might work for your business is. Sending out 500 cold DMs every day. But does it suck the energy from your soul? And is it sustainable for you? Because if it works for your business, but it doesn't work for you in the end, it's not going to work for your business. Because if your energy is sucked dry, there's not going to be a person to run the business anymore.

And I feel so passionate about this is why I kept on talking about. You know, disconnecting from yourself and being connected to yourself, because this is one of the things like going into business that I think is the most important, like making sure that you stay connected to yourself. It's the only way you can sustain the energy to do this.

Abby Schommer: Again, I can see where this sage wisdom came in, um, you know, having this experience as harrowing as it was, it did teach you that, yeah, [00:38:00] without. You there is no business. So if your business is not meeting the needs of you as a person, ultimately, that business is going to come to an end. so that makes a ton of sense.

So what happened? Where did that take you then after you spun down your breathwork business? Where did you go from there? Okay.

Leoni: So as I spun down my breathwork business, I was getting more and more pulled back into marketing. People started to reach out to me and they were like, we need performance marketing strategy support and, and things like this. So then I started on my business idea, 2. 0, let's, let's call it business 2.

0. And I thought about building a marketing agency. well, I was working on this for, let's say one year. And then during this year, I also started to feel similar feelings to how I felt with the breathwork business, where I was like, something's not quite right. And I don't know whether I was still feeling a little bit of burnout from the breathwork business.

And I'd kind of carried it over because I actually didn't give myself any time [00:39:00] between spinning down the breathwork business and starting this, because The opportunities were flowing in. So I just started taking them and over some, over the summer, I

Abby Schommer: Okay. Okay.

Leoni: the right thing for me. And maybe it even wasn't the right time after I'd taken such, like, I don't want to say an emotional hit, but the breathwork business, it was a very emotional rollercoaster that I was on. knew that what I was doing right now was not. Was not the right time and the way that I was running the whole thing and trying to figure it out. And I just knew that I needed to maybe take a step back from entrepreneurship. The good thing is, is that I came to this decision way quicker than I did with the breathwork business.

So that was already something that I'd learned. I'd learned to [00:40:00] listen to this feeling that, that my body was giving me and be like, pay attention to it straight away, rather than, cause I think in the breathwork business, there was a lot of I'm just going to keep going. Business advice, just keep slugging through. Don't just keep slugging through, right? There

Abby Schommer: Mm.

Leoni: there is a fine line between pushing yourself too hard and listening to your body. So I listened to the signal and I also decided to power down doing the marketing agency another opportunity popped up, which is actually me going back into at the moment, full time employment with a startup. Oftentimes, when you enter entrepreneurship, can be a great deal of shame, first of all, in taking a part time job, second of all, in deciding to maybe venture back into full time employment. And this is where I'm going to emphasize again, the importance of being connected to yourself, because when this opportunity dropped in. Honestly, the only feeling that [00:41:00] I can describe in my body was lightness and excitement. I felt like when I had the conversation with the founders of this startup, I felt like the fire relit in my belly for the, like for marketing strategy and for passion. that was the only thing that I could say. I knew that this was the right thing to do. Had I been holding onto this idea that no, I'm an entrepreneur. I need to keep on going. I might have Not taking this opportunity and I might've missed out on some, something that's really great for me, like some serious opportunity for growth, that I, I've just started at this company now, and I still know that I've really made the right decision.

had I been hanging onto this thing of what I think I should be as an entrepreneur, might've missed this. And that's why I really want to like labor this point that entrepreneurship is not. not always this linear path where you start a business and you stay on the same business and you [00:42:00] just keep on going and going.

It is up and down and it is all over the place. And I actually, I don't know where my journey is going to take me, but all I know is that I'm doing something that I love and I'm learning and I'm growing. And it is also giving me the chance to still work on other projects because I'm building a podcast and things like that. for me, the feeling that I've got now is the most important thing.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, that's so well spoken. something I said to you too, when you announced to me privately that you were kind of ending your entrepreneurial journey, was I, I don't think that's the case. Leonia. I think entrepreneurship is kind of a state of being. Irrespective of what you're doing at any point in time, I think to me, being an entrepreneur means you have this kind of insatiable desire to build your own things and you can build your own things within other people's companies.

There's this whole notion of intrapreneurship, and I think this role that you are fulfilling is intrapreneurship. I mean, you're coming in [00:43:00] and you're crafting your own role, your own scope, And in your building out this job function within the startup.

And again, you still have a portfolio of interests and ventures outside of that job as well. So you are still very much an entrepreneur. And I think this is really critical for people to hear because we think that entrepreneurship needs to look one singular way. And so long as we keep thinking that we're going to have a lot of unhappy entrepreneurs or a lot of people who just think entrepreneurship isn't for them.

And I don't want to live in a world where every entrepreneurship looks, acts and thinks the same.

So I'm so glad you brought that to me then.

And I'm so glad you're open to speaking about it now on the podcast. Thank you so much. I would love for you to share a little bit more about the startup you're joining, as well as the podcast you're starting, should listeners want to get a little more involved in either capacity.

Leoni: Yes. Oh my God. Thank you for, uh, thank you for giving me the opportunity for that. so the startup I'm joining or have just joined, um, it's called Hunch Ads. They are an [00:44:00] automation AI platform that allow performance marketers to do things at scale. so I'm super excited about that because building out marketing tech products and going into the whole automation stuff, it is, it's Oh my God, it is right up my street. Plus combined with performance marketing strategy. This is like the thing that I'm so excited about. So if you want to check them out, please check out hunch ads the podcast that I'm building, we're not quite far enough yet that I can advertise it with the name, but I do have, I'm working together with, one of my friends and my podcast co host If you follow me on LinkedIn, I will definitely be posting more about that, the whole idea is to have cozy chats about marketing topics, things that are happening in the industry. We've even got a nice cozy vibe and the background and stuff like that. Um, so it's a very casual conversation about big topics that are happening in the marketing industry, because we think that business podcasts can be very. Very proper, you know, very [00:45:00] corporate, always done in an office. And we wanted to break away from that a little bit and have these interesting conversations, I guess it relates to what you just said, Abby, we want to make it more accessible for people. And if that, you know, if, if this feeling of coziness that we can put across makes it more enjoyable for somebody to feel like

Abby Schommer: Thank you.

Leoni: in these conversations, but out of a work setting, out of like a stuffy work environment, That is our goal.

So, please keep a lookout for that. Cause I'm super excited about this project.

Abby Schommer: if I could sify every facet of my life, I, I absolutely would. Yeah. Oh. 'cause I'm all over the cozy TikTok. I mean, it is a very, it is a booming industry, so you are are firmly within the Yeah. Cozy talk. Exactly. So, and I think marketing topics, again, like you said, Big topics deserve kind of this nice little container, Where you can still feel comfortable and you can still feel that these conversations aren't something that are stress inducing, Like I, I do feel like at the end of the day, it's good to remind ourselves marketing can be [00:46:00] fun.

Marketing can be. Connective marketing is not like, yes, we're spending money and it's high stakes in certain capacities, but at the end of the day, it's a creative outlet too. And I love that you're creating space for that as well. So, once you have more information to share about the podcast, we will update the episode show notes of this episode to link your podcast.

So folks know, uh, where to listen along, but in the meantime, we will also link your LinkedIn profile and also include information about the startup as well. Well, the only, this has been, I feel like. I know you very well, but I feel like I know you even better having come away from this conversation. So thank you so much for being so generous with your story.

And with all the wisdom you shared with our audiences, um, I feel like I've been on a little bit of my own breath work journey actually with that. I, let me know if you'd be okay with this. Is there any kind of, Small daily breathwork practices that people can integrate even if they don't have a coach like you, but a quick practice they can do.

Okay.

Leoni: 100%. So the [00:47:00] easiest thing I'm going to give the easiest, most accessible, thing that you can do. That it has so much impact. It's something that I'm still doing. I mean, I am five years into my practice now, maybe six years, and I still do this. It's called the six second breath. You inhale for six seconds and exhale for six seconds. Do that for five to 10 minutes. No matter how you're feeling, whether it's, you need to calm yourself down, whether you're feeling overhyped, it is something that consistently brings you back into a state of balance. If you can remember, even set an alarm on your phone, this is what I do.

I set an alarm on my phone twice a day, and I'm just like six second breath. And whatever I'm doing, I have to stop breathe for three to five minutes. Even that can have the biggest impact already on like your day to day life and how you're feeling. That is the one thing that I always encourage people to do.

You can even do it while you're on the bus. Nobody's going to know. when you're on the airplane. You can [00:48:00] just do it everywhere. So it is so accessible and so powerful. I can't, I'm running out of words to describe how good it is. Please do that.

Abby Schommer: You know, I was going to say you can even do it while you're podcasting, but you can't because then you have to eventually say something. So I was, I was a couple six counts in, but I'll need to resume this practice later on. And I love the idea of alarms. I also love the idea of putting this in your calendar, um, as a recurring event.

Not Well, Leonie, thank you so much again. Um, you've given so much practical advice. audiences are going to walk away from this conversation. knowing how to live a little bit more of an integrated. Experience through life and work and just being kind to themselves too.

If they are seeking entrepreneurship, but they think they don't have the means, or they don't have the personality profile or the resources, letting them know that entrepreneurship can look so many different ways and it doesn't need to be a linear trajectory either is such, such a liberating thing for you to gift everybody.

So I thank you for that.

Leoni: Thank you so much for having me on. I feel [00:49:00] like, oh, I love the conversations with you and I hope that other people get as much value as, uh, as I think you and I both get from them.

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