We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ashley Miers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ashley, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. undefined
One of the most innovative things I’ve done in my career is find a way to marry my seemingly disparate interests, bringing them together to not only live in the same world, but to inform and enhance each other’s impact. These interests include: neuroscience, psychology, nutrition, health and mental health, fitness, yoga, music, spirituality, acting/hosting/speaking/presenting, and cooking/food. How could all of these subjects complement each other and combine? In a cooking show I conceptualized called “Dancing in the Kitchen” which utilizes the power of music and food to elevate mood.
I’ve never been one to follow the status quo (I’m not even very good at doing so), so innovating my own path was more of a necessity than necessarily an intentional choice. I think that all the ways I’ve found myself NOT to fit in boxes has forced me to innovate how to create a life and career that fits who I am and the value I inherently have to contribute.
While mental health has always served as the umbrella under which most of my interests tend to gather, I had previously tended to bounce around from one interest to another. Music didn’t talk to neuroscience, yoga didn’t talk to cooking and food. Creating my cooking show felt like a very full-circle moment where all of my interests finally aligned into a meaningful and clear trajectory. Essentially, I felt like I finally achieved velocity – my interests aligned to all be directed along a cohesive path toward a specific objective. They were finally all traveling meaningfully in the same direction.
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 work has evolved as a synthesis of my education and my lived experience. My degree (from the University of Denver) was a combination of psychology/neuroscience and philosophy majors and m*nors in biology and communication. In 2018, I completed Kundalini Yoga teacher training. And in the years in between, I worked as a singer/songwriter and actress, but also dealt with severe depression, self-harm and substance abuse. I completed a Dialectical Behavior Therapy outpatient program at the end of 2017 that was pivotal in helping me finally shift into sustainable recovery, along with fully embracing sobriety after starting on that path back in 2012.
I now work to inspire and educate others on the subject of mental health recovery, and going beyond that, I work to empower others to live into their highest purpose and potential. My goal is to give hope and to also equip those seeking recovery with information and skills that can actively help them improve their well-being and quality of life.
I do this through several enterprises.
One is my group coaching program “Transcend the Turbulence” where I work directly with women struggling with depression and help them recover naturally through a combination of self-care (exercise, nutrition, meditation), support, and learning and implementing healthy coping skills. Once women are feeling and functioning better, we then work on creating meaningful, personalized goals to move them forward on a path of purpose and contribution, and we develop actionable strategies they can implement to accomplish them.
In addition to Transcend the Turbulence, I also started a cooking show at the beginning of 2023 called “Dancing in the Kitchen” which combines music and food to elevate mood. The show is a collaboration between my good friends and colleagues Elizabeth Russo (songwriting partner and co-host), Octavia Klein (DP and co-producer), and myself, and brings together my 15+ years of songwriting experience with my passion for nutrition, psychology, neuroscience, wellness and mental health in order to educated and empower viewers to optimize their brain and nervous system health, and thus their mood, well-being and overall quality of life. I love that the show is an outlet for my creativity and also helps me contribute value to our viewers.
While TTT and my cooking show are my main enterprises, I also continue writing, recording and releasing music, and speaking, presenting and performing at events to share my story and a message of hope more broadly.
I think what sets me apart is both the scope of my experience and my honesty in being willing to share it. Because I’ve been through such dark times myself, I am able to meet people without judgment in their darkness – in their vulnerability – and uplift them. So many of us feel intense shame for the pain we carry, but that isolates us and reduces our chances of being able to heal it. We must have courage to feel our feelings in order to move through them and be able to recover, but we need to be safe and supported in order to do so. Feeling safe, supported, and understood can give us the courage – and the hope – we need to be able to face our fears and believe we are capable of transforming and transcending.
My hope is that my story, my songs, my coaching program and my show are able to touch the hearts of those that are suffering and struggling, and give them hope – and a path to follow – to reach recovery – and even better, true self love and actualization – for themselves.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
There have been many times that I’ve pivoted (had to pivot) both in my career and in my life. In fact, my experience has been that life is a series of curveballs, and the better we can become at adapting and responding – basically in developing resilience and agility – the better equipped we are to succeed.
Many of my pivots have revolved around my children and becoming a mother. Probably my biggest pivot was from exclusively pursuing songwriting and acting from 2008-2018 to starting my life coaching business in 2019. I had completed an outpatient Dialectical Behavior Therapy program in 2017 and Kundalini Yoga teacher training in 2018 while pregnant with my first son. Both of these experiences were profoundly transformational in my life, and after welcoming my son at the end of 2018, I knew I wanted to pivot out of gig work and into something more predictable and dependable. I also wanted to do something 1) that would make me good money 2) would be something I enjoyed and that utilized my experience, interests, and skill sets 3) that would still allow me time freedom to be with my son and 4) would also allow me time freedom and the economic resources to continue to record and release music. I settled on health coaching, enrolled in a program that taught me how to build and operate my business, and by summer 2019, I had launched operations and was enrolling my first clients.
What I love about this pivot is that I learned a complete new – and very complementary – set of skills, including how to run and operate a business in terms of systems, teams, and managing finances, selling skills, and the coaching process itself. However, while I was working on all of this, something had to go on the back burner, and it ended up being music. This left me feeling like a part of me was neglected and unfulfilled, so at the end of 2022 I decided to start recording again, and at the beginning of 2023, I found a way to combine my music interests with my health and wellness interests, and my cooking show Dancing in the Kitchen was born (which represented another pivot and also brought everything full circle).
These days, things are looking really exciting. I’ve got monthly music releases scheduled for 2025, and the cooking show is gaining traction with partnerships and a development deal on the table. I’ve found that the skills I’ve gained and everything I’ve learned from starting my coaching business have only further informed and improved my ability to be effective with my music and creative enterprises, and at the same turn, my creative work has found a way to join forces with my business and mental health pursuits so that all of my interests are encompassed and I am able to contribute meaningfully to the world through my work in a highly-integrated, comprehensive, and fully-realized capacity.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
When it comes to managing a team, I think the number one thing I’ve realized is that my behavior as a leader sets precedent. If I want my team to keep up communication and morale, to remain engaged, etc, it is my responsibility to be the example of that first and foremost. If I withdraw from or neglect my team because I am busy, overwhelmed, feeling doubtful, or burned out, that sets the status quo of my company culture. My team will see me on my phone at meetings and then I’ll start seeing them doing the same. Or I’ll stop checking in with them as frequently and then I’ll find them not responding quickly to my messages. So that’s key – I have to take responsibility as a leader for managing my behavior and holding myself accountable. If I set a poor example, I have very little ground to stand on to then be frustrated with my team for assuming that behavior is acceptable.
In addition to holding myself accountable in this way, I think it’s incredibly important – as in any relationship – to foster an environment where team members feel safe but also understand there are reasonable boundaries. They can come to me and let me know if they are struggling with personal issues, and we can troubleshoot together, and I will make accommodations to support them and help them continue to succeed – to a limit. If those personal issues don’t resolve or continue to interfere with work on an ongoing basis, well then we’re going to reach a boundary where we might need to have another kind of conversation along the lines of “is continuing in this position going to be the right choice if you’re not able to focus or fulfill obligations consistently?”. Maybe some adjustments will need to be made.
We are real and we are human, but I also won’t endlessly tolerate excuses and distractions because – circling back to point number one – it starts to affect company culture. The rest of the team sees it happening and it begins to become acceptable to, say, call out repeatedly for example. So it’s a balance and a dance. I will support people, and I will help them feel safe and cared about no matter what outcomes are necessary, but I also won’t tolerate behavior that starts to degrade morale or interfere with the happy, successful operation of the business.
Lastly, I look for what people enjoy and are gifted at, and I plug them into roles respectively. No one is going to succeed over the longterm in a position where they are doing tasks they loathe. Sometimes there is just legwork that needs to be done – there are always tasks that we are going to prefer less than others and we’ve got to buckle down sometimes – but to the extent that I’m able, I want to plug people in in ways that light them up because they’ll be more inherently motivated and excited to show up and contribute.
And on that note, it’s important for team members to feel valued and respected. I like listening to and incorporating their ideas and praising their efforts and successes. It’s not about me, me, me and ego gratification… It’s about I win when my team wins, I win when we do good work and make a positive impact, I win when I can lift other people up and empower them to succeed.
So those are my thoughts on that. :)
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ashleymiers.com and www.violetvista.com and www.dancinginthekitchen.tv
- Instagram: @ashley_miers_official and @dancinginthekitchentv
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ashleymiershealth
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymiers
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dancinginthekitchentv and https://www.youtube.com/ashleymiers
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ashley-miers
Image Credits
Octavia Klein, Matt Stasi