We recently connected with J. nyla Mcneill and have shared our conversation below.
J. nyla, appreciate you joining us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?
My name is j. nyla, and I’m 27 years old. At 25, I had a fully booked private practice, and my whole life has been centered around the joys of doing exactly what I set out to do, and all the craziness it took to actually make that happen.
My business started after years of rejection. No matter how many things I applied to, how many people told me that they would follow-up with me, and all of the resumés I gave out, nothing.
I had only ever worked for seasonal jobs that lasted no longer than 2 months. For years, my mother would tell me to complete college, to keep going… and eventually, she would try to get me to “remove things from your resumé, you’re overqualified!”
After a lot of mental breakdowns and breakthroughs, I finally decided to start my own business. I took all of the rejection as a sign of protection: if “they” didn’t want me, then there was something better out there for me.
It had felt like I applied to everything in the city. Any kind of opportunity that involved working with people, anything my first degree in Psychology would touch upon, I tried for. After some 6-7 years of trying, I finally caved in and invested a few thousand into business trainings. I had an incredibly steep learning curve in the beginning, feeling like I truly did not know what I was doing in my business despite of my other skills… In addition to that, I decided that I wanted a PhD. I applied to my dream school and got in…
Though, when I looked into it all, my dream school would have put me in nearly $150k in debt. I wouldn’t have been able to have a social life. It would not have worked. With that, I also decided to design my own PhD. If I could do that with my business, I could create and design way more for myself.
I set to the internet to crowdfund thousands of dollars to design my DIY PhD. I got incredible support, and in four years was able to complete the continuing education I needed to feel as though I could serve my unique population the way I wished to!
Eventually, I would get into the groove with my life coaching business. I would work with many individual clients… and then eventually, opportunities from colleges all over the country. I started being invited to panels, podcasts, workshops, you name it! It was as if all of that rejection had never happened, but I knew it TOOK that to get to where I am today.
Now, my business even works as a liason to youth organizing in my city. It’s one of the biggest and most high opportunities one could have as a young entrepreneur who set out to affect real transformation at home, and as someone who knows themself to be an awesome life/systems coach, or “Change doula.”
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
From powerful talk sessions and lucid divinatory readings, to written organizational solutions, systems, and creative direction, j. nyla virtually assists those in an array of lifestyles, fields, and organizational configurations.
Mx. Lifestyling seeks to help individuals who are prone to burn out in a culture of overwork: students, full time employees, home-keepers, care givers, service professionals, neurodivergent, and disabled individuals, as well as couples, partners, organizations, cohorts, classrooms, and companies. The praxis centers rest, compassion, care, giveaway, and living in and on purpose.
j. nyla mcneill takes a personal-political approach to their work, and centers equity and queerness as verbs and practices.
Through deep listening and an embrace of what’s emergent in clients’ lives and respective environments, j. nyla seeks to bridge the gap between therapeutic approaches and business coaching, ushering major personal and/or professional change. Mx. Lifestyling makes for generative and fun work, inviting more-than-human accomplices to a deeply multi-faceted practice.
Mx. Lifestyling is a hub for design, visioning, mapping (short or long term), drafting, editing, energetically transforming, and healing, as well as a consultant to shape and center ideas that embrace liberation.
Mx. Lifestyling offers lucid divinatory readings, and other lifestyling solutions for individuals across various backgrounds and organizational configurations. Consulting and coaching at Mx. Lifestyling supports those prone to burnout in today’s culture of overwork, including students, full-time employees, activists, cultural workers, caregivers, farmers/gardeners, artists, neurodivergent and disabled individuals, as well as couples, organizations, cohorts, and companies, into a culture of ease, care, and conscious collectivity.
With a praxis rooted in rest, compassion, care, giveaway, and purpose, we prioritize equity and ways in right-relation with the Earth. Taking a personal-political approach, j. nyla mcneill combines therapeutic mindfulness approaches with magic and medicine making, alongside non-traditional business coaching, to facilitate significant personal and professional transformation. Through deep listening and embracing emergent aspects of clients’ lives, environments, and circumstances, mx. j. nyla’s private practice bridges the gap between therapy and business coaching, creating a generative and enjoyable co-creative process. Mx. Lifestyling serves as a hub for 1) multi-pronged design (personal lifestyle, arts, projects, business and organization), 2) visioning, 3) goal mapping, 4) drafting, 5) editing, 6) energetic transformation / healing.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
In 2016, I joined a sciences, technologies, engineering, and maths program in the middle of 4-year university. Overtime, I became sick, overworked, tired, and decided that I didn’t want to go directly into a PhD program as the STEM program required.
In 2018, I received my bachelors in psychology magnum cum laude, then lost access to important resources with the deactivation of my student ID. I halted my work in the sciences that I was not being paid enough/at all for. With a number of my boundaries crossed, being threatened with not getting paid if we didn’t take certain actions, and a really horrible relationship to money created by the program, I decided that taking ample space from academia would be a good choice. I needed to heal.
I somehow did not drop out through all of the sickness and pain, but I did quit my original “required” course of action that was co-designed with the STEM program that would place me into a fast-tracked journey from BA to PhD. I decided, instead, to rest and live my life outside of school for the first time in 20 years.
I got the study bug again in 2020. I found myself wanting to do deeply rigorous work again. Having chosen to work only intermittently, living under horrible conditions, and almost all of my earnings going to rent, I knew I needed to raise some funds. I was deeply frustrated by the fact that I needed to RAISE MONEY to WORK, but I recognized that I would also be gaining necessary tools, and building out a lesser known path in the process.
With $10,000 worth of donations, $8,000 have been spent on building myself as an independent scholar. I spent toward machinery, accessibility tools, tuitions for three decentralized school platforms, housing, and the full launch of my tiny little business, Mx. Lifestyling. I stretched the money with all of my might, careful about the allocation of each dollar knowing that it’s all intended to be funneled into offerings for my growing communities across several schools, organizations, and platforms. With all of this, I was able to join two justice-and-healing-focused fellowships, re-enter my work in psychological research with financial support, and join a number of extremely fulfilling projects that all started in 2019 (from the Trans Youth Justice Project to Black Girl Skate’s new initiatives). The funds have brought me what I needed to get my foot in the door to more well-paying opportunities as a healthier, well-rested researcher and entrepreneur, and to imagine what sustainable work can look like for folx like me.
The DIY PhD has also brought a lot of intangible abundance in the form of connection, lessons, and insight into other folx lives who are taking similar autonomous paths. It’s been the vessel for beginning again, starting the journey to achieving many of my childhood dreams, following soulmate cohorts at the School for the Ecocene. We’ve been plotting on creating a relatively new educational paradigm as Panchamama people, as interconnected beings, finally moving into vision collectively. What we are building feels worthwhile, and my journey feels as though its on its way to sustainability for the first time.
By 2021, I had raised nearly $22k for my alternative PhD path process, and I kept my continuing education online and local so I could vastly reduce costs. The school I had originally been accepted to would have cost $149k to cover costs of living on campus, expensive meals, and to pay educators who came from all over the world, who would not have had the nuanced perspectives of living in place, living where the people I serve are.
I am so happy I made the decision to continuously crowdfund, as I am in no student loan debt.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I have purposely been growing my Meta audience in a very specific way since 2019. I continuously limit my posts to under and my follower count to under 500 as a creator account, and continue to get to know those who interact the most in order to build relationships outside of the app vs. followers within it. What’s the point of working to limit my reach, even through shadowban? Why am I celebrating the end of my intentional platform growth for now?
I value my privacy. Keeping my posts under 500 at a time means Facebook does not own metadata from years of my life. It means I don’t have to cringe at a caption from 2016 and feel like I need to change it. It means I can live in my own human evolution/sameness/patterness without worrying about relevancy during the blip during which I’m alive.
When I set out to campaign in the beginning, I told myself “you’ll hit 2,000 by December 2020, and that’s it.” With the help of a friend who is an expert in social media campaigning, I hit 2k organically on par with simple milestone goals.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mxlifestyling.com/
- Instagram: @inkcrowcall
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxjnyla/
Image Credits
All images were taken by Daniel Arón Speer