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

Maia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you get your first job in the field that you practice in today?

“I couldn’t even imagine by myself the first job that helped me build a business. I never found my place in the job market. I wanted to do something that I didn’t know was created until my friend offered me the most random opportunity, knowing my skill set very well. My two loves are creativity and mental health. My superpower is the ability to combine them together. But I didn’t know that at that time.

My friend was offered a job by another friend running a writing program in a private mental health treatment center. She didn’t want to do it and called me to see if I was interested. I didn’t even know there were treatment centers and had never seen one. But I trusted my friend and I needed some extra money, so I said yes.

I was hired and was asked to invent a program and facilitate it for people who are struggling with their mental health. For a year, I showed up every Saturday morning and invented prompts for them to write that would help them with their mental health. And after a year, I had a full program in my hand.

At the end of the year, I was let go from my work with a lucrative exit package and decided to see if I could make something with the program I created.

Cut to eight years later, and I have a full working business from that one program.”

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

“My company is called Mental Health + Creativity. We provide programs and content about mental health using only creativity, mainly through writing. Our clients are mostly from the mental health and education fields.

We aim to solve the problem of making mental health accessible and enjoyable. Just as physical health is not solely about running, and there are various ways to exercise and improve physical health, we are doing the same for mental health.

Our clients want to introduce mental health in nonthreatening and engaging ways to their communities and programs.

We also create mental health content and host a podcast where Maia interviews her feelings. It’s called “Interview with Myself.”

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

“When I started my company, my main focus was on clients from the mental health field. It was easy. They knew the importance of mental health programs and were looking for new ideas to bring to their companies. It was a necessity because it was very hard to sell mental health programs outside of the mental health field. Mental Health was a “bad” word.

Then the pandemic happened, and mental health became a “good word”. I felt much more comfortable starting to pitch my programs to other fields and found all new business in education.

I also found that now many communities are open to doing mental health activities, and I found myself here and there working with organizations that have nothing to do with bringing wellness to their people.”

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

“Having my own business was nothing I ever wanted or dreamed of having. I love working for other people. I like the safety and stability it brings and the familiarity of working in a company where the bottom line is not my responsibility. So when I found myself with my own company, it brought up a lot of my mental health challenges: stress, feelings of loss of control, lots of uncertainty, which was not good for my mood swings, and mostly, financial challenges. The last one brought up some childhood trauma for me that I hadn’t faced before.

The times when income was low and I lost clients were very triggering and pushed me to do trauma work on myself to be able to live the healthy life of a business owner where ups and downs are part of the journey.

Turns out this trauma work, as hard as it was (and it was), eventually contributed to my business growing and expanding. I was able to work on all the personal things that kept me from succeeding and building my business.”

Contact Info:

• Website: www.maiaakiva.com
• Instagram: @maiaakiva
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maia.akiva.1/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maia-akiva-0977b43a/
• Twitter: @maiaakiva
• Youtube: @maiaakiva
• Other: My Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/interview-with-myself