We recently connected with Alisha Wielfaert and have shared our conversation below.

Alisha, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Being successful doesn’t mean doing just one thing. Being successful takes guts, heart, and a very, very strong personal why. Being successful also depends on you being willing to do things that nobody else wants to do, it means being willing to try and to fail and to get back up, dust yourself off and try again, and again, and again.

Early on in my entrepreneurial journey, I was searching for a silver bullet. I believed that if I could gain enough social media followers, grow my email list to the right number, earn an award like 40 under 40, get endorsed by the right person, land a big speaking engagement or have a successful launch that it would help me ensure success.

I worked towards all of those things. Over the last seven years, I gained endorsements, was awarded 40 under 40, I’ve worked with incredible clients like NPR, I’ve had incredible sales in launches, had wonderful speaking engagements, I’ve hit the Amazon best-seller list with my book Little Failures, and I’ve learned that each of those supposed silver bullets, each only moved the needle a hair. It’s never just one thing that will make you successful.

You have to have the guts to keep going after what you want even if you find yourself hitting brick walls. Success is built on how well you learn to ride the waves. The ups and downs, the little and the big wins. It’s not just what you do in the good times and the big moments, it’s how you handle the times that challenge you, that bring you to your knees, and make you want to quit.

All of the little things and big things add up if you’ve learned to ride the waves with guts and heart.

Alisha, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

In 2017 I founded Yoke and Abundance, a platform where creativity and personal growth tools converge to form a vibrant community. This work began as life coaching but it quickly evolved into something more profound, a catalyst for transformation in the lives of women navigating crucial life transitions like divorce, empty nest, job change, the desire to get unstuck, and even women navigating retirement or reinvention. My passion lies in empowering creatives, spiritual seekers and entrepreneurs to embrace change to flourish in the face of uncertainty while learning how to find and access their own inner wisdom. My mission is to nurture a community that fosters self-discovery, resilience, and self-compassion, but my favorite thing to do is help women who don’t see themselves as creative access and embrace their creativity. I take immense pride in my ability to spark genuine transformation and growth while holding space for clients to feel what they need to feel and honor it while stepping into their highest potential.
I believe that what sets my work apart as a coach is the way I weave together principles of creativity, spirituality, and positive psychology. I’ve been there, I’ve faced big scary crossroads, and have searched my soul to find the road that would lead me down a purpose-driven life. I understand the unique challenges and obstacles that my clients face intimately because they are journeys I’ve taken myself.

I’ve had to overcome not only fear of failure but also failure itself. I’ve had to learn how to wake up my intuition and use it. I spent over a decade in corporate America in what felt like a soul-sucking job and knew I had to find a way out. I had the profound realization that the only person I can change is myself, and the journey to make changes for me led me to reach for a life of creativity, passion, and impact. That’s what drives me and that’s what I want for my clients too.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I’ve had to unlearn and relearn over and over is that my worth is not connected to how hard I work. I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. My dad grew up a farmer my mom worked in food service and they hung their hats on being hard workers. I internalized that message so much that for a long time, I believed that my self-worth depended on how hard I could work.

While I believe that being a hard worker is a fantastic trait, it’s never something you should let your self-worth get tied up in. As entrepreneurs we start out having to work harder than everyone else to make a living but working harder is not what gets you to the next level and it’s not what defines you as a person.

Now any time I find myself working on the weekend if I don’t absolutely need to, or work past 6pm in the evening I try to catch myself and examine why I’m doing that and what my motivation is for doing it. Working harder often masks uncomfortable emotions we don’t want to deal with and we can’t grow if we don’t examine that.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

It feels like I’ve tried every single strategy in the world for growing my clientele over the years but one I’ve had the most success with is collaborating with good partnerships. For instance, I’ve recently partnered with a wine bar in town to host a women-only wellness trip to Italy in 2024. We both are advertising and promoting. It’s a win-win for both businesses. When I promote the work to my audience the wine bar gains new clients and a new audience and when they promote this to their audience I gain new clients too. It’s going so well that I’m hosting a few other workshops for women at their wine bar.

This has also worked well when I’ve partnered with a local yoga studio. I’m hosting workshops at a yoga studio and it brings them a new revenue stream and it brings me a new audience.

Partnerships when done well are effective.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yokeandabundance.com
• Instagram: @yoekandabundance
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yokeandabundance
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisha-wielfaert-a3b43610/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK9_AZdvCpn6GkkwQz3j49g