MRA Alumni Spotlight: Vanessa Joy
Vanessa Joy has a long-standing interest in helping. It started with self-help, and devouring books on personal growth, motivation, and mindset exploration. In time, it led her to hire Diana Eskander, an International Coaching Federation-accredited transformational life coach (and another MRA graduate). Those coaching sessions changed Vanessa’s life beyond what she was expecting. The impactfulness of that experience, and the framework Diana used, lit a fire in Vanessa: “I told her, I want to do what you do, I want to help people, I want to bring value to this world.” Diana introduced Vanessa to the Mind Rebel™ Academy, and the journey really began to accelerate.
Just as Diana specializes in Love Coaching, Vanessa chose a niche for herself: men’s coaching. But she soon learned that you don't pick your niche – your niche picks you. While she concentrated on men’s mental health and self-development, she was routinely approached by women looking for coaching. After this went on for a time, she started to feel these requests were “something the universe was telling me like, this may not be the place where you’re meant to coach, there's a pull where you need to go help women.”
And help women she does. Together with her business partner Sonia, Vanessa runs the marketing and branding side of Montreal, QC-based V&S Consulting, a firm “bringing purpose and color to businesses of today.” Their online presence is a masterclass in color, and purpose absolutely radiates from Vanessa as she talks about the women she works with.
She also runs The Joy Talk, where she offers a boutique combination of branding and self-development coaching focused on helping women “do business and life their way, with purpose and confidence.” The fact that purpose is front and center in the mission statements of both her businesses is no coincidence. Intentionality is at the heart of Vanessa’s work.
Listening to those nudges from the universe has paid off. She couldn’t be happier with her decision to focus on women, because women “invest their whole energy, their whole soul into the coaching process”.
Vanessa’s average workday sounds like the dream of entrepreneurship: She wakes up, and moves her body in some kind of physical activity first thing. Her day isn’t tied to the alarm clock, as she’s learned she loves fluidity in her schedule, and prioritizes listening to her body and getting more sleep when she needs it. Next up, coffee and planning out her day, which can look like marketing work, brand development, personal coaching, or content creation.
More and more, the business side and the personal coaching are influencing each other, with amazing results. Consider a client who comes in for guidance on starting a brand; Vanessa believes that starting a business, growing a business, even just pursuing your professional career in someone else’s business, all stems from understanding and having confidence in yourself.
That means all her clients work through the MRA framework for self-development. As Vanessa explains her exploratory process: “I'm always working with the MRA tools. I like starting with the whole self-development part. Like who are you? Who's your best self? Who's your Mind Rebel? What are your fears? What are your emotions? And then we go into, okay, let's build your brand. Let's do the marketing part.
Vanessa and Sonia recently put on a workshop at L’Oreal Canada about self-advocacy and how to design and develop the career you want. Sonia focused on tactical steps, things like how to have tricky conversations with your manager. Vanessa worked with the principles of transformational life coaching, introducing the employees to one of her favourite MRA exercises, identifying core values:
“You design your career with your core values. ‘What are your eight core values? Here's the list. What's the big bold vision you have for yourself?’ And these are things that I could tell that it wasn't something they would do regularly. It was like, ‘Oh, what do you mean? Like how are my core values tied to my work life balance? How is this tied to my professional life?’ And it was just these big aha moments.”
She practices what she preaches too. Starting her career working in ecommerce and digital branding for beauty and fashion companies, she took the plunge into entrepreneurship thinking she was leaving marketing behind. But before too long, she felt pulled to her roots in brand development work, and examined her desires and motivations. She coaches her clients to do self-inquiry and determine what they really want, what they’re intrinsically and externally motivated by, and give up on ego validation and ideas of what their career should look like. Holding herself to that same standard of honest examination, she determined that what would really fulfill her was doing both.
And so she works with individuals through The Joy Talk, and businesses through her consulting firm. Some clients are strictly marketing, some are strictly self-development, and some end up being an organically emerging mix of the two. Every day is different, and every person and business has different needs. It’s constantly evolving, and requires constant inquiry into how the two prongs of her self, and her business, can co-exist in harmony.
The Mind Rebel Academy is proud to help innovators like Vanessa achieve International Coaching Federation accreditation and apply Transformational Life Coaching in their inspiring work.
To learn more about Vanessa and her work you can visit her website at www.thejoytalk.com
