We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Karlyn Green a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Karlyn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

The name of my business is a direct call to the heart of anyone who reads it or hears it. I believe that we are all born wild. What I mean by that is, that when we don’t yet have any conditioning from the world. Our hearts are wild and free of expectations of how we should live or what we should do for work. They are free of self doubt and worry. They don’t know what fear of failure is. With any luck, we hold onto this wildness until our ego is born. This is the internal dialogue that divides us from the wild. Tells us we have to grow up, we have to look a certain way, and we need to amass success or we don’t have value.

When I call directly to your wild heart, my aim is to skip over that noise and get right to your truth. Your truth is what you would rather be doing. Your truth is a combination of your passions and interests as well as your vision and your values. The you that get’s tucked away because she isn’t enough. That’s who I want to speak to. If we can get her attention long enough and she feels seen and heard, maybe… just maybe… she will come out to play. And by play I mean live a life that she is positively wild about. A life that reflects her vision and values rather than her doubts and fears.

Karlyn, 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?

“Is this for real?” I often ask myself this when I get off a client call or come back from an event I had the opportunity to speak at or lead. Today my life isn’t perfect, but I am regularly blown away that my job is to help women rediscover who they are, redefine what success looks like for them, and then create that for themselves. It hasn’t always been like this. Not that long ago I was the proud owner of an entirely different company in a completely different industry. And, I was pretty unhappy.

In my “previous life” I was a landscape designer and horticulturist. I owned and operated a small company that specialized in high-end residential design, fine gardening, and managing horticulture for area country clubs. It was a perfect career for me. And for a while I loved it. Particularly I loved the variety of the work I would find myself doing from day to day. One day I am drafting designs and closing deals, the next I am hand-selecting plants and slinging mulch.

It was fun. Until it wasn’t. About six years in, my vision for my life had shifted greatly from when I first started the business. I felt tied down by the physical nature of my work and I craved work that had a more meaningful impact on people. I secretly wrestled with this for a while. I kept thinking that I had come way too far to “give up.” Like I had been pushing this bolder up a hill, pouring my all into it and I “had” to continue pushing it up the hill or it all would have been a waste. I did this tortuous dance for a couple of years. Until one day, sitting at my desk, my chest felt like it was caving in. Like a ton of bricks were piled on me. Only when I looked down, nothing was there. There was nothing to see because it was the invisible killer, stress. And that was the moment I decided that nothing was worth that kind of stress. No one’s life was on the line, but mine felt like it was. If it meant that in order to be free to pursue the life I truly wanted, I had to let that bolder go, taking all of the time, love, and tears I had invested along with it, so be it.

I closed down my business and pivoted to fully invest myself in this little side gig I had already begun playing around with. A few years prior, I became certified as a yoga instructor. At the time, I had zero intention of teaching. I just wanted to study the practice at a deeper level and to be around my teacher more in the hopes that I could absorb some of her beautiful energy. However, by the end of the 8-month-long experience, I had learned many a thing about myself, including that I was not only good at teaching, but I loved it!

I started offering small things like pop-up yoga or private lessons and that evolved into retreats. The people who began following me asked for more ways to work with me and that’s how I became a coach. It was born out of a deep desire to help women stop counting themselves out and living these predetermined lives that they weren’t really happy in (kinda like I had been). I fused my experience with the philosophy of yoga, mindset, and energy work to quickly break down their barriers and empower them to take ownership of their lives.

I was a good designer and a great gardener, but I was an excellent coach. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was “in my lane.” I was doing what I was meant to do. I could feel it. Transitioning to a completely different business with a completely different business model and a completely different customer base was challenging, but also refreshing. I will never lie and say it was easy. However, pivoting was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Hard doesn’t mean bad. It means resilient, strong, committed, and rewarding.

Like I said before, I am in awe that this is what I get to do. It is an honor of a lifetime. When women come to me, some are crystal clear on what they want- like starting or growing their business or reclaiming their time and energy. For others, the work we do together helps them discover what they want. For all of them, we identify and overcome the limiting beliefs that have kept them stuck in indecision, self-doubt, and fear. And I help them embody the version of themselves that they aspire to be. Before they know it, they are thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that create the results they seek. Results that have them thinking things like “Is this for real?”

And together we celebrate. Yea girl. It’s for real.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Success in life and entrepreneurship is about unlearning almost more than it is about learning. One of the greatest things that what I do in business is less important than who I am in business. What I mean by this is, you can follow a sales script, you can download an email copy sequence, you can mimic other people’s social media, but if you are thinking things like “It’s not working,” or “I need this sale,” or “I don’t want to be salesy,” or “nobody sees my posts,” etc, the human receiving them will feel that. So it is more important to focus on what’s going on in between your ears than to focus on the specific things you are doing. YES, it is important to have a strategy. But a strategy is only as good as the mind that implements it. The moment I shifted my focus from myself and how to get a sale to the person I was engaging with and how I can serve them, everything changed. I didn’t even sound that great on sales calls, but I sounded like a human who cares. And that’s all people really want. They want to know that you care about them and that you can help them. So focus on that.

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

Giving. I focus on how I can help those around me succeed and by doing so people naturally want to work with me. I implement this through growing my network and connecting people I think could be mutually beneficial to each other or by sending people I connect with referrals. I also give a lot of value away. I share so much actionable and thought provoking material in my weekly Love Letters, my podcast, my social, and in my free workshops. I truly believe the Instagram cliche, “We Rise By Lifting Others.” Please don’t misunderstand this to mean that I don’t have a strategy. I plan ways to give. And then I follow through. My audience grows as consistently as I am consistent. This was what I was taught, it’s what I do, and it’s what I teach others as well. Don’t over complicate it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dearwildheart.ocm
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dear_wild_heart/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dear-wild-heart/
• Other: Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/Dearwildheart/episodes/Network-to-Six-Figures–Beyond-e29s82s

Image Credits
For blue paint image: Dani Venen, The Editorial Style