Dr. Lauren N. Huff

I attribute my success to therapy and my faith. Because my father wasn't present in my life at all, I struggled early on with low self-esteem and didn't have any confidence at all. I'm a proponent for therapy - I did go to therapy, and I like to say that helped me become the person that I am today. It wasn't the first therapist though; I actually had to go through four different therapists because choosing a therapist is kind of like choosing a partner - you have to see if it's a good fit. The fourth therapist helped me realize that I didn't talk to anyone else because I feared being judged, and I didn't know of any safe place for me to openly talk. After working with her for a little over a year, she told me I didn't need to come anymore because I could tell my story without getting emotional, and that's how she knew I had healed. My faith has also been instrumental in helping me get to where I am today.

The best career advice I've received came from the entrepreneurial classes I took and the people who believed in me along the way. Even though I hold a PhD, I never stop learning - I'm always striving to be better than I was yesterday. Before I started my businesses, I took maybe four different entrepreneurial classes because my mindset had to be changed. I hear people say that entrepreneurship is something you're just born with and that everybody can't be an entrepreneur, but I actually had to take these classes to change my mindset to let me know that I am capable of being one and that I can do it. Having other people who believe in me, people who have done it before me to let me know that it is possible - that's the advice that helped me along the way.

I would say there's no such thing as failure. If you fail at something, that might be telling you that you need to just try a different way - pivot and say, okay, it didn't work this way, well let me do it another way. The only real failure is when you give up and stop trying. You have to keep going and be willing to try different approaches until you find what works.

The biggest challenge in my work with people who are stuck is that you have to teach them how to believe in themselves, because sometimes they don't move because they don't know how, or they don't know that they're capable. What I do is give them advice - I suggest doing affirmations, writing them down and sticking them on the bathroom mirror to look at every single day. I suggest journaling and a lot of different things. However, if the client doesn't want better for themselves, or they don't feel like they're capable of having more, that's where the challenge comes in. You may see something in someone that they don't see in themselves, and if they don't believe it, they're not going to do anything with the information you provide.

Integrity is most important to me - it means doing the right thing when no one's watching. If you really think about it, people are always watching. When you post on social media, they may not have liked your post, but they're watching. I can speak from personal experience - I go out in my community, and someone will see me and say, I see what you're doing, keep up the good work, I like what you're doing in the community, and I had no idea they even knew. So always do the right thing, because you don't know if that might be a young person who may be looking up to you. Once you do the wrong thing, you ruin your witness. Hard work is another value that's important to me - it truly does pay off. You can have faith all you want to, but faith without works is dead. You can wish and you could pray that things will happen, but you still gotta do the work.