We were lucky to catch up with Brian A. Street, MSW recently and have shared our conversation below.
Brian, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.
There was definitely a defining moment in my career. It took place slightly after I completed my master’s degree studies and I had moved on to my doctoral studies. During my time in the master’s program, I had one internship that allowed me to conduct observations in middle and high school settings with students in the “alternative school” program in that specific school system. During one visit, I met this young man that we will call William. William was a high school student that was serving time in alternative school due to behavioral issues in class. I took time during this visit to talk to William and learn why he ended up in the alternative school program. The administration that had sent him to the alternative school was engulfed with his behavior at school and never dug into the root of his behaviors. They did not see the potential for a fruitful life based on what they were observing. My method of speaking to ‘at risk youth’ is different from how they are accustomed to being spoken to by many professionals within the school setting. That being said, I really helped William open up about his situation without having him feel judged or unvalued. During this conversation, I learned that he was actually a distant cousin of mine, whereas his grandmother was my great aunt and this first cousin was a cousin of mine that I grew up playing sports with. I ended up driving him home from school and decided to speak with his grandmother and his cousin. I let them know that I was there as a support and not to hesitate to reach out to me when there is a need.
I did not hear back from William or this in-home family for the next few years, but finally, while I was working on my Ph.D. in another state, I received a Facebook messenger message stating,
“Hey I don’t know if you remember me or not but I’m ‘Jane’s grandson, you spoke to me while I was in the anchor/alternative program at the middle school and came to the house to speak to me? Yea I’m texting because now I live in Tennessee I have my own apartment, my own car, and a full-time job I’ve been pursuing for a year and 4 months now I’ve grown and matured a lot and I want to thank you for the conversation we did have I’ve always looked up to you and I want to thank you for being one of the few who cared to open my eyes and actually talk to me I really appreciate it.”
Reading this message from him put me in tears, set my heart ablaze, and solidified my mission to always continue to work on opening up and helping the healing process of young traumatized adolescents who had been given up on my general society and cast off as a failure. The feeling that message gave to me is incomparable to any sum of money that I could have received for being that momentary mentor for this young man. Since that moment, there are countless young people and also older individuals that I always approach with a sense of nonjudgmental openness and empathy combined with empowerment and principles for success. It has served me beyond measure to this day.
Brian, 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?
First off, thank you again for the opportunity to share my story. Let me start with the fact that I grew up in the deep south of Southern Mississippi. Most of my childhood was spent living in a single-wide mobile home where we had to avoid about 5 different soft spots throughout the house where the floor was about to fall through. The toilet in the kids’ bathroom had begun leaning to the right due to moisture causing a soft spot. I remember having to place a short wooden rod between the toilet bowl and the side of the cabinet to prevent the feeling of being about to fall through the floor.
While these sore memories are core components of my childhood there was so much good as well. At the age of four, I began to play organized baseball, and fortunately, I had great athletic genes, therefore I was pretty good at sports. This was the start of my constantly elevating mental growth. As I got older, just like many kids and teens, I suffered some bullying, was shoved against lockers, and had items taken from me…it was tough at times, but I always went back to sports regardless of what life threw at me. That was my place of solace; where I felt invincible. My childhood was loaded with a tug-of-war between that which pulled me into dark places where I felt less than, then back into the positive spotlight that helped build my self-confidence and increased mental fortitude. While being a solid athlete, I also maintain an A average in my academics, graduating high school with a 3.89 GPA.
After high school, I went on to college and was no longer a student-athlete, and I had no idea how to be that, as I was a student-athlete my entire life. This newfound identity threw me off track as I spent more time trying to fill that athlete bucket, there was a hole in my student bucket. After my sophomore year, I ended up flunking out of college and having my first child all in the same year. It was 2007 and I was only 20 years old. It was at this point that realized that I needed to get my act together. After some undesirable working conditions, I eventually returned to college in 2010 and graduated with a degree in Psychology and another in Spanish in 2012. From there I moved to Miami, FL where I eventually entered the child welfare field. It was there that my career took off, while ultimately leading to a sense of unfulfillment. This triggered my shift to another level of drive which was initiated after seeing teenagers aging out of the foster care system and either ending up in prison, in a grave, or having children of their own that ended up in the system. I saw a perpetuation of this issue that was not addressed by the system itself, so I chose to return to pursue a master’s degree so that I could be more hands-on in bringing about change in that space.
After returning to Mississippi to pursue my master’s degree I got highly active across campus, across the city, and across that state where I stamped a name for myself in the youth/motivational speaking space, mentorship space, and program development space. I was sought after by numerous universities to serve in all of these roles and have worked with a large number of universities across numerous states to help empower students in ways that their traditional settings were not designed to do so.
Currently, I focus on helping adolescents and young adults to develop solutions to the social issues they battle through methods of mental empowerment with my mentorship and process groups, and methods of financial upward mobility through my business and financial education services. What set’s me apart in the services that I provide is that I don’t treat my clients as “less than”. I don’t make them feel ashamed. I don’t make them feel as if they are completely at fault, regardless of their situation, but I compassionately help them realize that they ARE responsible for fixing the situation. I provide the tools, the support, the network, and the mental empowerment to instill a belief that they can be successful.
What really makes me proud about the work that I do is the fact that I can work with clients across any industry and at any age where there hasn’t been significant cognitive decline due to age. I can have a client frustrated and cursing me out at one moment and thanking me, saying that words can begin to explain how thankful they are for me at the next moment.
If you feel like you can’t catch a break, all odds are against you, you can’t elevate beyond the plateau you’ve been on for months or years, we need to talk.
If you feel like your current and past environment as well as your family name have doomed you to repeat patterns of demise, we need to talk.
If you feel like life can’t possibly get any worse for you, we need to talk.
It doesn’t matter what happened in your life all the way up until the moment that you are reading these words. You can start now, to connect with the right people and consume the right content so that you can begin to live YOUR life of purpose because your legacy begins NOW.
If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?
Well, as I subtly mentioned earlier, I changed my major in college a few times and it caused me to take more of a nontraditional route along my academic track and professional life. Many would likely believe that I’d desire to go back and choose the proper major from the beginning, but I would not. I’m a firm believer that all things that we go through were meant to create who we are being designed to become. I was able to take lessons, connections, and knowledge from all of the areas of ‘failure’ in my life and use them in one way or another through my journey to success. Many hear of my work and directly connect it to my academic journey as it pertains to the traditional learning process, but I’m now a social entrepreneur that uses a mix of the resilience needed through my academic trials combined with the traditional as well as my self-education along the way.
So, the short of it is, yes, I would choose all the same professions and specialties. Had I not, I’d likely be working in a traditional setting seeing clients every day and lacking the financial and business knowledge that has helped me lead a life far beyond that which I could have ever imagined.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Well, like in the previous question, many overlook the fact that I’m a business owner when I speak about my mental/emotional health services, but my current business partner came to be, “in my opinion” due to the eclectic background that I have. Whereas he has a very strong, firm, and disciplined financial and business background, I have more of the soft skills/people person type of background. So we actually balance off well in that regard.
As far as how I met this genius of a big brother figure/business partner (Chris Holder); it was on March 23rd of 2018. I was capping off the first multi-school, multi-organization, dual-university partnered mentorship program that I developed and served as a leadership consultant over. I had recently been a significant voice and officer in the development of a nonprofit organization in partnership with a major university. I had recently gotten my first academic publication, started a social business, served as a keynote speaker, received countless accolades, and set numerous records. Needless to say, I was feeling rather accomplished at the moment.
The occasion was a leadership seminar that Chris and I were both going to be speaking at. He was the financial guru and I was the mentorship, mental empowerment coaching guru. The CEO over that event sent me to pick up Chris as he felt we would get along well and I could learn a thing or two from Chris. I was told that Chris was this super successful multi-millionaire businessman from New York and I should get to know him. So I go to the airport with a picture of Chris in my head. I’m imagining a guy in a 3-piece suit and maybe carrying a briefcase. I was on the phone with him as I approached the airport and I see this guy with a backpack and some luggage, wearing some white slacks, a white t-shirt, and a fitted cap. I’m thinking to myself, “This is Chris Holder?!”, but I kept my mouth shut on that front. He gets in the car and I welcome him. The usual formalities; nice to meet you, so on and so forth, then I believe he asked me to tell him a little about myself. At this point, I’m sticking my chest out, spouting off all my recent successes, and mentioning to him that I’m looking to make my first 6-figures before I finish my Ph.D.
He showed a bit of recognition for my success, as it was pretty impressive, “for being from where I’m from”. Those weren’t his words, but I took it that way, which was respectable…I understood his notion. Then he went on to tell me that based on what I’ve shared with him, I’m not even thinking anywhere near my capacity; the 6-figures goal is too small for one. He kept reminding me of that, “Stop talking about thousands, you’ll never get there if that’s as far as you keep talking about getting to.”
That day went on as a major success and the next morning at breakfast, he had to remind me again, “There you go talking about thousands again.” It was at this point that my mindset really began to shift.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.yourlegacybeginsnow.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourlegacybeginsnow/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bstreets20
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yourlegacybeginsnow/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/bstreet4life
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHgVc3xdf4So0FmgbNGoBzg
Image Credits
– USM Image Center – CrumlicMedia