Signage makes things look real, and the friends who support you make it possible.
Ok, let's get started with the manifesto part.
During the pandemic I came to know 2 things:
1. I must start a sauce company
2. I love teaching yoga
In the 2010s era I was all in on my tech career, “living the dream” in San Francisco. There was a lot that I loved about it and wouldn't take back. I started off BD and partnership focused - my roles entailed connecting with incredible people at my companies and across the industry. Plus there was everything else exuberant and progressive in the atmosphere, including getting paid well. I migrated to sales and was on a lucrative trajectory until covid. In February 2020 I left X-Mode for a dream opportunity at unitQ that didn’t work out. I was laid off five months later, then moved out of my San Francisco apartment to a coffee farm on the Big Island. After decompressing for a few months, I began applying to tech roles between surf sessions. Interviewing on Zoom was incoherent. Recruiters led on and ghosted. In the meantime, starting a sauce business was never even a thought until I started making sauce that people loved. Then it started materializing and happening. And even as it did I struggled with a lot of doubt, particularly:
-a sauce company is not going to make any money
-a sauce company is not an acceptable career
-I have no idea what I'm doing
-very self conscious about moving back home at 32
As each of these doubts is unraveling, being analyzed, and released, the inner conviction that I am going to see this through becomes clearer. Maybe it's random. Or maybe it is simple. Maybe I love food, miss my dad's cooking, and am motivated to share something with the world that people get excited about.
Regarding yoga. Yoga kept me grounded and moved me through life challenges during my peak tech grinding years. I was dealing with a lot in and out of work, intermittently grieving and numbing heavy feelings over people and relationships that had been lost, including with myself. While my life was practically sound, social and comfortable on the surface, I frequently visited the existential vortex, wondering what really matters? Who are we if suddenly everything goes away? I'd go to my mat and work these things through, breathing and excavating past noise and emotions to connect more deeply with my core unencumbered existence. The deficit between expectation and doubt is often so saturated in negative limiting thoughts, a breeding ground for psychosomatic disease, when really, nothing changed from one moment to the next. During the pandemic I finished two yoga teacher trainings, one in Nepal then one in San Francisco. Now I've learned how to guide people through the very practice that made me understand what really makes me come alive. Not random, I love teaching yoga.
I'm back in the Bay Area making sauce and teaching yoga. Check out Da Sauce at dasauce.co and follow us on Instagram @dasaucejourney for some good content of a growing female owned sauce company.
Da Sauce... it's been life changing for me - let it change yours, too. Namaste