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

Elizabeth, appreciate you joining us today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

If I’m being honest, I evaluate every year or every few years whether owning a business is still in alignment with my life. Anytime I have a demanding stretch, I catch myself wondering whether the grass might be greener on the other side and whether a 9-to-5 with a steady paycheck and benefits might just suit me better. I’ve come to think it’s completely normal for people to reassess their path, whether that means starting something new or returning to more traditional work.

Perhaps it all comes down to the ancient Delphic maxim: “know thyself.” Before starting my first business, I studied Sociology in college with coursework in psychology, education, fine arts, and philosophy. That liberal arts foundation helped me understand that knowing your talents and “human capital” is only a small part of knowing whether a work environment is for you. The deeper, more practical work of knowing yourself involves understanding your emotions, desires, abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and how you learn and operate in all aspects of your life, including your work.

In that sense, I was lucky that what I studied gave me a real lens for understanding how social institutions and businesses function. Starting or running a business will challenge every part of that self-knowledge. I do believe some people are genuinely more suited to self-employment, while others thrive within the structure of a company. But if you want to start your own business, I believe the will to do it matters most, because as long as you’re honest about your strengths and willing to work around the areas that challenge you, you can find your own balance.

For me, I get bored with tasks easily, so having full control of my schedule and the freedom to switch things up as a self-employed person more than makes up for the harder parts. And as an introvert, I find that too many meetings and social demands can be draining. Having the flexibility to set my own pace means I’m at my best and most present when I am with clients.

Elizabeth, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Liz Chang, and I started my YouTube channel and website Athena’s Garden TV in 2023, building a community and platform centered on spirituality, mindfulness, and conscious living. Formerly, I owned an events makeup and hair business for 15+ years.

I grew up across three continents and six countries, which gave me an early and deeply personal understanding of how culture, identity, and belief systems shape the way we experience the world. I like to introduce myself as a #CitizenOfPlanetEarth. The liberal arts education I received, along with my life experience, led me to constantly ask: how do social institutions shape us? How do we as individuals shape them back?

I spent over fifteen years owning a business in the beauty industry as a makeup and hair artist, art director, and artist agent, working with clients ranging from everyday people to notable names in entertainment. It was a creative, fast-paced world, and I loved it. But over time, my own spiritual journey was quietly deepening in the background. I had always been drawn to questions about soul, purpose, consciousness, and the nature of reality. Eventually, I was ready to transition and answer that pull, and Athena’s Garden was born.

Today, I offer Akashic Records Readings and Energy Healing sessions, available in both English and Mandarin. The Akashic Records are often described as an energetic library of a soul’s history: past, present, and future possibilities. Through my readings, I help clients gain clarity on their soul’s purpose, understand patterns or blocks that may be holding them back, and receive practical, grounded guidance for their real-life goals. Energy Healing sessions offer a complementary layer of support for those navigating physical, emotional, or spiritual shifts.

What sets me apart is the way I bridge worlds. I’m a sociologist and a spiritual practitioner. I bring the same rigor I’d apply to analyzing a social institution to exploring mythology, esoteric Daoism, starseed cosmology, or the Akashic Records. My YouTube channel reflects this, covering everything from the Chinese creation goddess NuWa and the Daoist roots of the Divine Feminine, to the Lion’s Gate Portal examined through the lens of astronomy and collective effervescence, to AI consciousness and what it means for souls in a technological age. I invite my audience and community to activate their critical lens and spiritual discernment.

I’m proudest of the community I’ve been building and the clients who have come through: each client and viewer who thanked me for helping them is a reminder of why this work matters. I relocated from Silicon Valley to Japan, first in Tokyo, now in Sapporo, Hokkaido, with my partner Bo and our cats Skyla and Lucio. In the future, I hope to organize retreats in the beautiful nature of Hokkaido.

If you’re someone who is curious, perhaps skeptical, and yet drawn to something outside of your daily life — to understanding yourself and your soul more deeply, to exploring what lies beyond the material world — I think you can find something intriguing in Athena’s Garden. I’d love to have you!

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?

This is something I wish I had known earlier, and only discovered when I took a marketing workshop specifically designed for businesses in high-end or luxury hospitality, which is the category bridal services fall into. I realized I could have made more sales had I simply tried alternating strategies to match how different clients prefer to process information.

To make a long story short, I am very analytical and detail-oriented. For those familiar with the DISC personality assessment, I am a “C” type, and I got lucky that many of my clients who came through the door were also C types, or at least appreciative of that style.

What I didn’t realize was that other types have very different needs. The “D” type, for example, wants to make decisions quickly. The “I” type wants to build rapport first. Both would benefit far more from a conversation with their service provider than from reading through a detailed website or a carefully formatted email.
There I was, writing these thorough, detailed emails, when a simple phone call would have made all the difference.

The epiphany came when I started experimenting with new strategies. I got on the phone with a father of the bride, and before I had even gone through pricing or the full details of our package, he said: “Let’s do it!” He liked what he heard. He may never have reached that point if I had led with a detail-oriented PDF estimate outlining everything included in our services.

The moral of the story: be creative, open, and adaptive to different clients and how they prefer to buy from you. Oh, and invest in a marketing or sales class or workshop specifically for your line of work. Some people naturally sell and upsell; it has always been challenging for me, as I never want to come across as pushy and prefer to provide a detailed website. It may be obvious to me that I am providing a great product for a fair price, but it may not be apparent for the buyer. Selling is an art, and I encourage anyone to lean into it.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Building an audience has been an ongoing and humbling journey. I started Athena’s Garden TV in 2023, coming from a completely different industry, with no existing following in the spiritual space. I had to learn everything from scratch: how to show up on camera, how to communicate ideas that I had only ever explored privately, and how to find the people who needed to hear them. It has been slow, intentional, and deeply personal.

Here is what I’ve learned along the way:

First, make sure what you put out is in alignment with your brand, your personal values, and your company’s ethos. Focus on the results your content creates rather than the number of followers or likes. It’s easy to let the numbers get to you. These apps are deliberately designed to rewire our dopamine cycles, and anyone can get swept up in that.

Authenticity trumps polish. Don’t worry about making everything perfect or beautiful; audiences respond to what is real. Do your market research, and explore which AI tools might help you present your ideas more clearly or streamline your editing process.

I had my own concerns about using AI to create images, but I’ve found a happy medium and have used AI to create unique and one of a kind supplementary visuals for my video creation, and my audience has responded to that. My goal is for education and consciousness expansion, and so as long as what I create is in alignment, it will resonate with my audience.

And if social media simply isn’t for you, that’s okay too. There are other ways to grow a business, and plenty of services available if you’d prefer to outsource your social media outreach entirely.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://athenasgardentv.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/athenasgardentv
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@athenasgardentv

Image Credits

All photos were taken by me; Art work & thumbnails I created.