We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shauna VanBogart. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shauna below.

Shauna, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?

I’ve been working in the personal and professional development field for 15 years, coaching and mentoring thousands of individuals to thrive in their careers, have better relationships and improve their home life. One of the most innovative things I’ve done is leveraged that experience to study and deepen my knowledge around how sustainable change and transformation within people occurs and then ask myself, ‘how could this be better and happen faster for people?’ By continually studying my own work and results, distinct patterns emerged over time. Using these insights combined with my ongoing education, I was able to innovate outdated coaching models for faster results with my clients. Over the years this came together in what I now call PARA Technique™ (and also now train and certify other professionals to use this modality).

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My career began as a personal branding and image consultant back in 2007 and continued on through the creation and rescue of numerous female-led businesses and nonprofits, supported by my Masters in Communication and Leadership, and my passion for business and technology.

My desire to help women at a much deeper, more personal level led me to obtain my license in, and develop my practice of, clinical hypnotherapy. During this time, I also embraced the intuitive gifts that had guided, supported, and even scared me since I was a child—gifts that would eventually lead me to do remote readings for my clients who have described these exchanges as “life-changing,” “mind-blowing,” and “disruptive in all the right ways.” Incorporating my intuitive gifts with my experience and education changed everything moving forward in all the best ways.

In 2020, I mined the wisdom and knowledge I had gained from 15+ years in business, leadership, coaching, and personal development to create the PARA Technique™, an inner-transformation modality now used by professional coaches and therapists across North America to catalyze rapid and sustainable positive change.

In 2023, I developed and created a platform for high-performing women called The Pause, of which PARA is the foundation for the programs and meditations this platform houses. The Pause is an app-based membership for women to ground themselves amidst the challenges of their fast-paced lives.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Since I was a child, I’ve been quite intuitive, being able to read energetic and emotional patterns within people quite easily. My closest friends knew I had an accurate ability to “read” people from simply looking at their photos and were often encouraging me to offer this as a service. I shrugged it off for a long time for many reasons — I thought it sounded crazy, I was afraid of what people would think, I didn’t know how to explain it, and I doubted people’s interest in such a concept.

After much time had passed, I was dealing with a sudden change of our daycare schedule that cut my working hours nearly in half – temporarily. Instead of seeing the constriction on my schedule as a constriction to my revenue, I decided to leverage this circumstance as a challenge. I wanted to see how I could not only maintain but increase my revenue without hour-long coaching calls since I now had limited slots available on my calendar. It sort of forced me into this idea of doing “photo reads” for people. It was a way I could offer my mentorship without utilizing 60 minutes of time on a zoom call. The idea was that I could have people submit 3-5 recent photos of themselves, and I’d give them a read. They could ask for a specific read around an area of their life or just leave it open. It felt risky but also quite natural and I approached the entire offering with a, “Let’s just see what happens” mentality.

In less than 20 days, more than 100 people paid for a reading and were mind blown at what insights I could provide them from photos alone. This led to an immediate $10k in revenue with an additional $65k the following month, all from this one “experiment”. Needless to say, I significantly underestimated people’s interest and also how incredibly life-changing this very simple yet powerful offering of mine was.

Now, it’s one of my favorite things to do for people and I have a waitlist :)

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Patience. The field of professional development and coaching is saturated with people thinking it will offer overnight, easy returns. The people who last are the people who lead with purpose, who understand that money is the vehicle that allows them to have more impact and if you stay focused on impact, money will follow. Too often, I see people chase money, get impatient, and lose sight of purpose. That’s the fastest way to ruin your reputation with your audience, especially in a service-based field.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.getthepause.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shaunavanbogart
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunavanbogart/