Jerine Murphy

I attribute my success to my mom. She's my current caretaker now after she had a stroke in 2022 and developed full-on dementia, but she's my biggest cheerleader. She's always telling me I can do it and that she believes in me. I always just grew up watching her work ethic - she worked for the city of Chicago for 32 years, almost as long as I was alive, and I got to see that discipline. She came from the 9-to-5 world where you get a good job, work it forever, and then retire. I was the black sheep in the family because I wanted to do it different. I didn't think I was meant to do the corporate thing forever. A part of me is showing my family, as well as her, that there are different ways to get to that level of success. The beautiful thing is she forgot a lot of things, but she also forgot fear. So now when I come to her with big, big dreams, she's excited and says 'Yeah, we can do that.' Before, it was always 'oh no, you can't do that,' but now it's the complete opposite.

One of my former life coaches told me that you don't need everyone to believe in your business, but you have to believe in it. That was the biggest thing for me because at first, I wanted validation from everyone. But everyone's not my target audience, so needing validation from people that I'm not even going to be doing business with defeats the purpose. It's like if Jeff Bezos was needing approval from Target - that's nice, but I'm Amazon, right? Having that mentality of I don't need everyone to believe in me, but I have to believe in me and show up every day removed all of these mental blockages and barriers that I was putting on myself. They'll catch up to the brand later. It's still kind of a newer thing, I understand, but now that I have that mentality, it removed all of these mental blockages.

Enter it. Start. That's the thing - a lot of us spend a lot of time on research and learning, and I'm one of them. I'm a person that spends a lot of time feeling like I need one more digital course, one more launch page, one more something. But you have everything you need right now to start. What you don't have, you'll get along the way. What you need to perfect, you'll perfect it along the way, but you have to start. So that's something I would tell someone - just start. You want to start a business? Get the LLC and start the business. Everything else, you're making it a big, big, scary monster. I'm even in that space now because I'm currently going to turn my book into a keynote talk and implementation program so I can reach out to companies, organizations, and colleges. I'm having that imposter syndrome myself, thinking 'what if they say no?' But I was talking to my therapist about it, and she said I'm not afraid of them saying no, I'm afraid of them saying yes, because that's where the real work comes in. You'll get better along the way, so just start. Just make the calls. Send the pitches. Just start.

The biggest challenge is convincing people that they need a coach. A coach isn't necessarily seen as optional - I think they see them the same way that we had that era when people were resistant to therapy. It's the same wave. For a while, so many people saw it as taboo, like 'Oh, I don't need this. Nothing's wrong with me. It's admitting that something's wrong with me. I don't need that,' instead of seeing it as a resource. A lot of times I'll have people that will reach out to me and they're like 'you're amazing, I need you, but admitting already that I need you makes me feel inferior, like something's wrong.' And I'm like, no, even coaches have coaches. Even if you're a basketball star, you still have someone to coach you. So I try to put that in their ear, but that's, for me, been my biggest challenge - removing that taboo factor of 'oh, another life coach, someone to tell me that I'm living life wrong.' And it's like, no, I'm just trying to help guide you to where you want to be.

My main value is making an impact. Every time I pray about my business, I want to make an impact. How I got into the life coaching space was I did all the transformation and identity shifting on my own, and I was like, well, if I did it for myself, I want to help other women that are in this space. I was in an abusive relationship for about 3 years, on and off, and at the end of it, I prayed to God saying I don't want to be the woman that I had to be to be in this relationship. I have to get rid of her so I don't repeat this cycle. My prayer was, if you help me get out of this unscathed and alive, I will hit the ground running with changing my life. And I did. After my ex got arrested December 30th of 2024 - that's my freedom date, my freedom papers - I hit the ground running asking myself who is the woman I want to be? What does she dress like? What does she think like? Where does she go? What are her boundaries? What does she tolerate? And I started moving like her. That's what really got me into this role - after I got out of the relationship, I started doing all the things I tell my clients to do, changing my identity in the ways I eat, the things I ingest like TV and social media, and just started living the life I wanted to live.