We were lucky to catch up with Krista Parks recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Krista thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
Being an entrepreneur is a risk in and of itself… if you know you know. But after starting my wellness facility from the ground up and running it for 8 years, I decided to change paths. I still love health and wellness and its a big part of what I’m still doing, although in a different way now, and thankfully the employee who bought it is doing amazing things there still! But I had to make the decision to take a risk on myself. Working for yourself is hard. You have to develop such a strong sense of trust in yourself and your team and deciding to change directions was scary. People thought I was crazy, not to mention having this realization in the middle of the 2020 Pandemic… But that trust muscle was about to get tested in a bigger way than i thought was possible. I was healing from a divorce and going through my own growth edge journey and at the same time realizing i wanted to dig deeper into helping others with theirs. I loved what i was doing, had developed an amazing team, culture, and brand; but I also felt deeply called to help people in a different way. The riskiest part was that at the time i had absolutely no idea what that looked like or how I was going to proceed. I just knew in my soul it was the right answer for me. To me, as a single female, taking a risk to follow my purpose was the only way. It was also the scariest leap I’ve ever taken. I started digging deeper into that trust and decided to trust in myself in a bigger way than I ever had. I was going to trust the staircase without seeing the steps because I knew I was not exactly aligned with my purpose and service in this lifetime. I spent the next year or so deep in studies, doing odd jobs, and absorbing as much as I could to learn my path. I’m still in the process of figuring that path out, and even completing another certification to help people heal through trauma. I’ve leaned into trust each day and am following the things that light my soul on fire and it feels less and less like a risk as I go.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My career path started in health and wellness. Being a college cheerleader, I’ve been an athlete my whole life and started working as a Physical Therapist Assistant for several years. In 2012 I opened my own Physical Therapy practice with the vision of incorporating overall health and fitness into patients and clients as they graduated from pains, injuries, and surgeries. The deeper I dove into helping people with their overall physical health the more I realized there were mental, emotional, and even spiritual factors keeping people from living healthy, fit, and well. This was all being realized at the same time I was on my own healing journey and starting a life after divorce so looking back it’s been a well orchestrated path. I sold my wellness studio in 2020 and have been working with clients on their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing the last couple years. I spent most of 2021 becoming a student once again getting certified with energy work, yoga, and life coaching, however I’m in the process of getting another intensive certification that will allow me to go deeper in my client’s healing. I’m still creating what that work looks like for me and my clients but I’ve been following the things that set my soul on fire and its been so rewarding! Since selling my biz and working in the capacity i do now, I’ve been empowering people live a more calm, connected, and authentic life by helping them release traumas, trapped emotions, and self limiting beliefs. A common question i get is how my work is different from therapy and it definitely is! Therapy works from the neck up.. and I work from the chest down. When we reconnect with our bodies, our heart, and our soul we can get to the root of healing and release what’s in the way of feeling calm, connected, and authentically us! I have many different modalities to work with people and I think that’s important because we’re all different and I believe each of us has our own capacity to heal within ourselves and I’m just the guide :) Some of my favorites are- Energy work like Reiki and trauma release, embodiment work like breathework, meditation, and IFS, and I hold transformational retreats as well as one-on-one coaching with clients. There isnt really a “template” for my work since I treat each person on their different needs but I’m most proud to be following my purpose, using my spiritual gifts, and helping people tap into their own power and happiness!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
A big lesson I’ve learned and continue to learn from my previous business to current is to be more authentically aligned with myself, to trust myself, and to allow the ebbs and flows of business to happen. In my previous business I operated in very masculine energy but did not have a good balance of trust, allowance, and flow (all feminine energy). With my current business practice its very important for me to move and build from a more feminine energy of trusting myself and magnetizing what is meant to be. Dont get me wrong… every business needs that masculine structure of action, statistics, etc but I feel like I have a much more natural balance of that that fuels my energy instead of draining it and its made such a difference in my work.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Being an entrepreneur requires resiliency no doubt. Resiliency is something I’ve been required to figure out. It’s part of my dharma, so I’ve learned. I’ve had many things in life to strengthen that muscle, as have most of us, but the one time that sticks out the most was my junior year of college. I think I have been prepped and coached to be resilient when I was younger for this very moment. I was a cheerleader my whole life. Small, loud, and spun and flipped just as much as I walked so it was a natural step. I loved being in the air. I loved challenging myself and working as a team. I made my local collegiate team my freshman year and by the time junior year rolled around I was voted female captain of the co-ed team. We traveled, practiced, and competed at a national level each year and I ate, drank, and slept everything this team stood for. But one night at practice my junior year took a turn. We were struggling with a pyramid and I had been moved to a different position to figure out what was going wrong. I was supposed to do a front flip from another girls stomach as she was hoisted into the air but instead took a dive. If you can imagine diving into a swimming pool with no water then you can imagine how this went wrong. My body immediately went numb… but excruciating pain at the same time. I was in and out of consciousness for the first several days and had spinal shock paralysis that no one was sure would resolve. I had broken my neck in several places, including a chip of bone that was floating in my spinal column that I was reminded could kill me on the spot if I moved wrong. I was determined to get the feeling back in my arms and legs and at this point I was determined I would cheer again soon. But after several days in the ICU things took a turn for the worse once again. I began having seizures and swelling on my brain that required emergency surgery and a few more follow up surgeries thereafter. They drilled a hole in my skull to drain the fluid, hoping it would go back to normal on its own. Turns out my traumatic brain injury was so severe that I required a permanent drain to keep the fluid off my brain and I still rely on that implant today. I fought every day in the hospital to stay awake, alert, alive…. but the real fight would be returning home, and to the regular world. To my surgeon and hospital staff they had helped heal several issues: fractures, blood clots, and swelling but I had suffered a traumatic brain injury back when brain injuries weren’t really widely spoken of. I had memory loss, slurred speech, word finding issues, mental fatigue, gait and balance trouble, and migraines that knocked me out for sometimes days. I sought help with little return so I took matters into my own hands the best I knew how. I wouldn’t say I’ve healed from my brain injury… I still struggle with those things although tons less often and less severe. But I’ve learned how to mitigate my symptoms to live a “normal” life. My resiliency comes from necessity. It comes from choosing to live. I’m reminded every day that I’m able to walk and talk for a reason… and I’ve had to teach myself to overcome a lot of hard obstacles to get here so I will be choosing to seize each and every day. No matter how tough or challenging it is running a business, I have relied on this to remind myself how strong and resilient I am.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mymoderntribe.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristaparks901/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/krista.robinson.902
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCedAXjNilOe2WERd0ES2Ohg
- Other: https://linktr.ee/moderntribe
Image Credits
Allie Jorde