Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephanie Burke. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Stephanie 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.

I quit my job! It was the scariest thing that I’ve ever done because I am a planner. I like for all things to flow together in the best way possible and walking away from a steady and consistent paycheck scared the life out of me. I knew 3 years ago that I wanted to leave, but I wasn’t in a position to actually leave. I had started my business but I wasn’t secure in my mission and where I wanted to go with it.

It took for me to be in a very uncomfortable position, one in which everything that I felt like I had worked for in my current position was taken away from me and I knew that if I continued in the way that I was going, I would not be happy.

When I first realized that I wanted to leave, I had no savings and my business wasn’t producing. I had given my business the best of me but results were not happening as I wanted them to. I was applying for positions and for the first time in my life, people weren’t responding and if they did, they weren’t calling back. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I stopped and reflected and I realized that I wasn’t in a space to be my best self because I was simply just trying to survive. In that moment, I started my most important project yet, Me. As I began to do a lot of work on myself, I learned that happiness was an inside job. Once I began to work on me, everything else began falling in place. Life got a lot better after that.

2 years later, after doing the work, I had finally made up my mind that I was going to leave my job, but at the last minute they called me and offered me the position that I had always wanted. I was excited for the position and I knew that I was going to rock it. It was the combination of all of my skills and gifts all bottled together in one. I was excited I did my thing in that position for a year. As I was working in that position my business picked up and I was truly living my dreams, I was exhausted, but it was happening. Because I loved what I did, I wasn’t thinking about leaving anymore, I was content with making it work.

Right before I did my extension paperwork, they came to me and told me that they were cutting my dream job. I was crushed. They offered to place me somewhere else and I accepted, however I wasn’t happy about it. A couple days later, I decided to walk away. I quit my job and decided to run my business full time. There have been ups and downs but I am so proud that for the first time I did what I wanted to do because I wanted to do it. I now do what I have helped other people do, create and live a life of their dreams!

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

I graduated from college in 2013 and in true fashion, I got a job and started working. In 2016, I started feeling unfulfilled and knew that I desired more, I always wanted a Master’s degree so I started my Master’s degree in counseling. As life began to take it’s course and between working, and taking care of my family, I wasn’t able to complete my practicum hours and I was really ready to be done so I changed my major to a Master’s in Education and graduated with that in 2018. In the summer of 2019, I started feeling like I needed more again. I still missed teaching and working with adults. I started researching how I could combine my background knowledge in counseling and my practical education sills and I came across coaching. That summer, I built Power of Potential Coaching and Accountability. Power of Potential was created to help who were going through the mundane tasks of life, and in a lot of ways being successful but not feeling that way. I started with 1 on 1 coaching and since then I’ve created products such as accountability planners, t-shirts and mugs, spoken on numerous platforms, expanded into group coaching and have created numerous ebooks and materials that support growth! My goal has always been to be affordable and make a difference so I created packages at all price points to make sure that my dreams of helping others create their dreams, was a real possibility!

What sets me apart from others in the industry is that I use a combination of education and experience to curate research based methods and create strategic plans of action for my clients. I don’t promise that you’ll make 6 figures, I don’t sell you a magical mythical formula, I actually teach you how to do the work to get you the results that you desire so that you have a repeatable process that you can employ over and over again. One of the things that I am extremely proud of is how much I’ve grown and how effective I am with the people that I work with. I specialize in results and every client that I’ve had, has always grown personally as well as professionally while simultaneously creating the life that they’ve been dreaming about. I take my role in my clients life serious and I specialize in getting results!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the biggest lessons that I had to unlearn is that life is supposed to be hard. As someone who is first generation, and came from a working class family, working hard and getting things done was all I ever knew. In my business a lot of times I found myself being more busy that productive and although I was spending the time, I wasn’t seeing the results that I wanted. I thought that the answer was that I wasn’t working hard enough when in reality, my limiting beliefs had held me down to a life of constantly being busy! Life doesn’t have to be hard, and we should not have to live a life of resistance, and once we understand how we stand in the way of our desires, the path to creating our dream life becomes a lot more clear

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Coaching is an art. The best source of leads for me is people experiencing me. Most of my new clients hear me speak, at either an event or online, and they come into my space via download or DM and receive information. Humbly speaking, I am an experience, and when people see or hear me in my element, it sparks something within them that then encourages them to want to be connected and see where they can go. I do a lot of live videos, free webinars and free resources because my platform has always been about education and helping people who feel stuck move forward, and I don’t think that finances should stand in the way, so no matter at what stage a person meets me, I have something to offer them and even if not in that exact moment, they become a client based on the experience that they’ve had with me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.powerofpotentialcoaching.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/powerofpotential
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PowerofPotential
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-burke-m-ed