We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elizabeth Watkins Price. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elizabeth below.
Elizabeth, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you as a business owner?
This may seem like a strange way to answer this, but for the decade before I started my business, my creative self was demanding that I make room for creative expression in my life. Throughout my school years I’d loved writing and music and art, but when I graduated from college I had no idea how to allow those things to be part of my life except that I remained an avid reader and music listener. The creative urge grew louder when I was practicing law, so I sang in a band with my husband and some friends; we recorded two albums as The Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band.
After years of building a professional identity in a context that didn’t traditionally value creative expression, I wasn’t sure how to take my creativity seriously. When I stopped practicing law, I started to make more room for personal creative practices, and that’s when I started writing regularly. When I got stuck on a big writing project, I tried to fan the flames of my creativity by painting abstract watercolors. To allow this part of myself to have full permission to exist and grow, it felt important to be creative out loud and in public, and so I started posting my paintings on Instagram each day.
Looking back, this was a radical shift for me, allowing new parts of myself to be visible and valuable even before they were “good” felt deeply uncomfortable. I often added haiku pep talks to myself and the earnestness of the whole thing was mortifying. The fact that I could feel embarrassed and do something anyway was a revelation, and furthermore, I realized how engaging in the creative process could open up a greater freedom in my work and life.
The skills of being uncomfortable without freezing and being openly imperfect in public have both been hugely helpful to me as I learn how to run my business by doing it. Being a new business owner involves a lot of trial and error, and knowing how to tolerate and even find the fun in being in the midst of a transition has been incredibly helpful. At this point, my business and my creative life overlap so much that they are nearly synonymous. It isn’t only the obvious things, either, like the way that being a new business owner requires creative problem solving, or the curiosity and interest in creating an entirely new entity that didn’t exist before. For me, allowing myself to invest in my creative life was the first step towards allowing myself to imagine a different way to bring myself to work.
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 professional journey is a winding road, which is part of why I enjoy coaching people who are going through big life changes. After college, I moved to Costa Rica, where I worked at a bilingual immersion school in the Cloud Forest. Because I loved being an educator, I went on to be an ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) teacher in Washington, D.C. and then the Durham public schools, before I made my first big career change and headed to law school at UNC. I went on to practice civil rights law with Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York for several years, and when I left the practice of law, I spent six years in higher education, first as a director of career services at a top-twenty law school, and then as a judicial educator.
Because I believe that mindfulness is a powerful tool for stress management and clear thinking, I shoehorned it into every professional development opportunity that had room for it when I was working in judicial education. Also, because my past experiences always informed what came next, even after I left career services I continued coaching people who were approaching retirement, since that had inadvertently become my specialty.
As mindfulness and coaching became more and more compelling parts of my work life, I decided to think creatively about how to allow them to take center stage. I started building the infrastructure and clarity around what would become EWP Consulting. EWP Consulting integrates my work in education and career services with my mindfulness meditation training. I want to help people making big career and life transitions do so with not only minimal stress, but with the curiosity that mindfulness facilitates. Change, approached with self-compassion and an open attentive mind, can be fun.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
In my years practicing law, my anxiety disorder had ballooned from a personality quirk into a challenge that was disrupting my life. In an effort to rid myself of anxiety, I signed up for a mindfulness class offered by the university where I worked. Entering that classroom for the first time, I was surrounded by people on a similar path, many of whom mentioned that they were hoping mindfulness might help with their pain or anxiety or depression. Even so, I was the only one who burst into tears as I introduced myself and said how much I needed something to be different in my life. I was embarrassed and unsettled by my outburst of emotion, but I also had enough experience with meditation to know that the practice held the potential to be powerful and healing for me. So, I went back, over and over.
Mindfulness helped me develop resilience that I needed in that season of my life, and in all the seasons moving forward. It not only softened my relationship with my social anxiety, it gave me the toolbox of practices that taught me how to face the full spectrum of my lived experience with self-compassion. This ability to inhabit my life more fully, living alongside my fears and worries without being controlled by them, gave me the capacity to try new things and make mistakes and learn as I grew toward what is now EWP Consulting. In EWP Consulting, I get to share these and other tools with my clients and watch how all manner of life challenges can shift with consistent and kind attention.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I think one of the biggest and most subtly harmful lessons that many people, especially women, and even more especially Southern women, learn from early childhood, is to prioritize the comfort of others. I’m not talking about the way that we may try to be a good neighbor even when it’s inconvenient, or compromise to be a collaborative team member. Rather, there is a pattern of politeness which demands silence about all manner of harm which is trained into us from a young age, and it diminishes our essential self-trust.
I often tell this story, but when I was in second grade, I was sitting in class when I felt a pain in my back. A searing, white hot pang happening over and over. My first response, my guiding thought during this, was “Do not interrupt or make a scene.” As tears rolled down my cheeks, despite my best efforts to remain calm, my teacher noticed and called me to her desk. A large wasp flew out of the top of my shirt, and my horrified teacher sent me to the nurse’s office, where I learned I had been stung about a dozen times. I don’t think anyone even asked why I hadn’t said anything, because I was a good girl, and it was obvious that I was just being good.
So, for me, the lesson of prioritizing other people’s comfort at all costs had been completely absorbed by age seven. It is a lesson that, like so many others, I hadn’t even been aware I’d been taught. Even after we begin finding our voices and speaking up, many of us maintain the fundamentals of this old pattern by speaking up only on behalf of others. It is deeply liberating and empowering work to amplify our own advocacy and to include ourselves in the sphere of our compassion. Unlearning the notion that everyone else’s comfort is more valuable than my own has been the work of a lifetime, and it is work that I am always happy to share with others.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ebethwatkinsprice.com
- Instagram: @byewp
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-watkins-price-9b51927b
- Twitter: @ebethwp
Image Credits
Portraits by Rosie Valentine.