Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in personal development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Joan MacMillan, director at Cammac Learning Evolution, Inc., located in Sturgeon County, AB, Canada.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
I am in the business of helping people discover their value, mental balance, and potential. As a personal coach specializing in developmental psychology, mental well-being, and emotional intelligence, I work with clients to help them recognize how their executive functioning skills and abilities set the foundation for their emotional well-being, decision-making, and actions. I use the MHS EQ-i 2.0 Emotional Intelligence Assessment to start coaching sessions as the results provide insight into where a client's emotional intelligence (closely related to executive functioning) is helping them and where it might be hindering them in their day-to-day interactions and in achieving their personal and professional goals.
In other words (and sometimes words that make people shutter!), our emotions are the primary underlying psychological driver behind our behaviour. If we can learn to better recognize, process, and regulate emotions (no matter how gross we might find this concept 😉), we can learn to interact in a way that promotes a state of mental balance and well-being within ourselves and creates meaningful, healthy relationships with all those around us.
Tell us about yourself
It took what felt like a lifetime to find my way here, but I genuinely love what I do! I started university at 17 and completed 3 degrees continuously throughout the first 8 years of having graduated high school. I completed post-secondary in education, sport psychology, and athletic therapy because I knew sports while growing up, and otherwise, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And as long as I stayed in school, I didn't have to figure it out! Upon finishing school, I got a job working in the occupational health and safety (OHS) department at a diamond mine in NWT starting in health, and then moving into safety, emergency response, project safety management, and finally teaching OHS in a post-secondary diploma program. In the later half of my 16 year OHS career, I found myself drawn to the human behaviour of it all, more so than the systems and processes that typically underlie OHS. At that same time, my work environment was causing a significant amount of stress to the point that I began to truly doubt myself and my abilities, leading to some depression. With this impacting not only my mental state at work but also life at home, I found myself a therapist and spent some time working through my work issues and some personal discoveries to help set myself up for success. I also began my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology around this time, and I freaking loved it! I guess I always liked learning or I wouldn't have spent so long in school, but this time my mind was balanced enough for me to truly appreciate the learning, the discovery, and the self-growth that came along with it. It took some work, time, and willingness to reflect on my personal good, bad, and ugly, but I sit here now, about 5-years after starting my path toward self-discovery and am able to say that I truly know who I am, I love myself for who I am and all that I've experienced, and I am happy. Before this, I don’t think I really knew authentic happiness as it’s a very difficult thing to find when you don't genuinely know who you are!
And that's what motivated me to start working on my business. I had an incredible and loving family supporting me since birth. I married a caring, smart, easy-going, and, might I say, handsome man, who is a fantastic husband and one of the best fathers I've known, I have three incredible children, and while one might think that this is where happiness is found, I learned that all of this can bring periods of joy, love, and belonging, but without knowing and loving yourself, it's all right in front of you but often feels just slightly out of reach. I learned how to bridge that gap by taking the time I needed to acknowledge, accept, and appreciate myself for all that I am. I've experienced what life can feel like when you're constantly chasing that elusive 'something' that's missing but bound to make everything better... and I've experienced the work it takes to finally find out what it was. I now live on the other side of it, whereby I am fully aware that it's not so elusive, but it's not found in anything external. I want to help others find the same level of mental peace, balance, and hopefulness that I now feel most of the time.
I talk to people on a daily basis who are struggling to find balance, struggling to fit it all in, struggling to keep it together. I can actually feel their struggles deep within me, and I believe, with everything in me, that I could help them find the kind of life they're hopeful for if I had the opportunity to. I feel very humbled and proud to have been able to help those who I've already worked with and am currently working with, and I hope I get to keep waking up each day knowing that there is so much more to learn, connect, and offer to those around me to help us all live a little more peacefully, a little more balanced, and a little more connected than the day before!
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
This is a tough one as I see some of the incredible things that have been accomplished by other entrepreneurs, and as a human, it's difficult not to jump on the comparison train! That said, I think my biggest accomplishment so far has probably been my ability to learn from my mistakes and make the necessary shifts in my business without doubting my ability to get there. I started my business really focused on psychological health and safety because it was what I knew, having worked in the profession for 16 years. And while I still do contract training in the area, I recognized that my business focus and my passion were not aligned, so I transitioned into personal coaching and emotional intelligence, which is where I'm currently focused. I've wasted a lot of money, I worked almost a year to develop a training session on evolved decision-making that is sitting on my desktop, and I've had to learn a lot about business from SMEs in the business world. I've fallen a lot, and I've made a lot of mistakes. I fell, and I failed, but I never stayed down. I kept reflecting, I continued pushing forward, and I remained focused on what I know I can offer the world, and I found business connections that I've been able to rely on to help me fill the business-related gaps where I was limited. I'm very proud of my resilience and my ability to believe in myself even when it might have seemed wiser not to!
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
Financial instability, by far, has been the hardest thing I've had to manage. I quit a very stable and well-paying position, we've got bills to pay and mouths to feel, and it has sometimes been difficult to convince myself that I was doing the right thing when I can see the struggles I'm placing on my family by not having a consistent or stable income. I'm fortunate that my husband works and has been exceptionally supportive of my career change and that our children are equally supportive. I'm also grateful to have an opportunity to do contract OHS training while growing my business, as that, too, provides a source of financial support. I've not yet met a business owner who hasn't struggled with the financial repercussions of new business ownership. However, those I have met who are further along than I continue to tell me it's worth it in the long run, and I'm electing to trust them!
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- You're going to fail, and you're going to have to pivot as you work to achieve your business vision. But if you accept this upfront, you can place yourself in a position of being able to take the learnings from those failures and pivot and build something even better than you thought was ever possible.
- You've got to spend money to make money. This was one that was said to me multiple times by those business SMEs that I found along the way. It's a hard reality to digest when you're just starting a new business and you don't have the money to spend! But what you'll learn along the way is that when you take the risk, even if it doesn't work out and seems like money wasted (which I experienced quite often at the start!), the learnings that you'll take from the whole experience were probably worth the 'wasted' money you put into it. And they'll help you get better next time around.
- This one is a big one! Remember that you can't do it all, and if you try to do it all yourself, you'll likely find yourself unable to keep up. In my first six months of business ownership, I wasted so much time trying to learn how to use different digital development platforms to create my training, and I failed. I tried to manage all my finances myself and failed. I tried to do the marketing myself, and you guessed it, I failed! Finally, I got advice from another new business owner who said, "Know what you're good at and stay in your lane. Find other experts in the areas you're not good at, and depend on them to fill those gaps." This advice truly made all the difference in that I finally had the time to focus on what I knew, which was human behaviour and psychological development.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://cammaclearning.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cammaclearningevolution
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cammaclearningevolution/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cammac-learning-evolution/
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