Today we’d like to introduce you to Kenya Johnson.
Hi Kenya, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today?
I love when my mom tells the story about how I got up in front of a crowd and randomly started singing “Victory is Mine” for my great-great grandmother’s 85th birthday party. When she tells the story, her main focus is how fearless and confident I was singing that song and how much joy it brought my grandmother to hear me sing. As an adult, I think about how incredible it was to choose that song of all the songs I knew. “Victory is Mine!” What a glorious affirmation for a 3-year-old to chant to a crowd of people. The song goes on to say, “Joy is mine! Peace is mine! Love is mine! Happiness is mine!” with several refrains where you proclaim and affirm that you will not only have all of those things in your life, but nobody else can take them away from you. Those lyrics are genuinely my story. I wake up each morning reminding myself that victory, joy, peace, love, and happiness are all mine, and I have everything I need to keep and nurture those things in my life.
Now, in all honesty, it took me a while to get to that point. I still have to choose that frame of mind in my everyday life consciously. But as of recently, I have realized my life (and everyone else’s) is just all about choices. When people ask me what I do, I tell them I am in the business of freedom. As the Founder and CEO of Auclare Vision, I truly see my role as doing everything that I can to get people to see how much control they have over their own lives, how much victory, joy, peace, love, and happiness can be theirs just as much as it was for me at three years old. My goal is to do this through coaching and programming and by being a living example of what it means to have victory and freedom in my own life.
Like many people in HR, I can’t say that I dreamed of becoming a work-life strategist or career educator when I was a little girl. (I honestly don’t think I knew what human resources was until I became a working adult). But in 2017, my entire world transformed in a way that changed my mindset for the better. When I graduated from Howard University, I had no idea how to be an adult. No one taught me how to manage a career. I had no work-life balance and definitely no work-life integration because my entire life was centered around work. I missed out on so much, and most importantly, I was absolutely miserable. I hated getting up in the morning. I even hated Sundays because I knew Monday was around the corner. I was so miserable at work that I was getting physically ill from the terrible stress.
I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. I thought I did everything that everybody told me to do: I went to school, got into college, got my degree, got a good job with benefits, and was still miserable. Eventually, I knew I had to make a change: it would either be the job or me. I chose me, and it was the first time that I felt like I had any actual power over my life. I finally felt like I was in control, that this was my life to live. My journey taught me that I was holding myself back. I had cowered in the name of material security rather than believing that I had the power to actualize my dreams.
So I started to open myself up to taking chances and betting on me. Once I got in the habit of choosing myself, my intuition and discernment were incredible forces to be reckoned with. I had to learn who I was in the fullness of my personhood, and from that, I realized how wildly dangerous it is to settle for things that are less than what you deserve in your life and your career. Over time, it became more natural to leave situations that weren’t for me, advocate for myself and my needs, and set boundaries. But I never could have done this if I did not experience who I truly was as a person.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
There have certainly been several definitive challenges in my life that have shaped my path. Notably, learning to manage my mental and emotional health has been a somewhat arduous journey, but a journey that has also been incredibly enlightening and healing for me. I experienced a very significant emotional breakdown in college, highlighting how I misused achievement as a coping mechanism. I have been learning hard lessons for the last few years, which have amplified how often I avoided and suppressed my negative feelings and experiences in vain to push forward and persevere.
Even after years of actively working through my overachiever blues, it took my Lyme Disease diagnosis to really wake me up to the reality that there is a toxic side to resilience. In many ways, my “hyper resilience” disconnected my mind and body from one another. I was not in tune with what my body needed until it could no longer function in the way it used to. Eventually, this started to take a toll on my mind too. Even with my incredible support system (shoutout to my partner, best friend, and mom), being sick with a chronic illness is an incredibly lonely and isolating experience, especially amid a global pandemic. Dealing with chronic fatigue, brain fog, chest pains, constant migraines, nausea, and just general malaise was a completely different reality for me. Like many chronic illnesses, it is invisible to others, but it is insidious for you.
Balancing and accepting the ups and downs of chronic illness is my new challenge, but advocating for accessibility for people with invisible diseases at work and in life is my new personal mission. Many people don’t know that chronic illness is just as much of a mental health issue as it is a physical health issue. I believe it is imperative to bring awareness to the lives of those surviving these debilitating illnesses to reduce stigma and increase support and accessibility for our lived experiences. As we continue to have conversations about the long-term effects of COVID-19 (and other chronic illnesses), we have to advocate for more community care and external support for people living with disabilities.
As I navigate through my post-treatment Lyme Disease diagnosis, I am learning to adjust and accept my new way of life more. Now, I bask in the love and support I receive for others and extend myself a lot of grace and kindness because of it. Most importantly, I have learned to be present in my own life by making daily decisions that make my mind, body, and soul feel good.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Auclare Vision?
In 2020, I founded Auclare Vision, a career wellness firm dedicated to making work enjoyable for everyone. Our firm utilizes training, coaching, and workshops to educate students and professionals on how to develop fulfilling careers without sacrificing their values and personal lives. We work with secondary schools, higher education institutions, youth development programs, and other organizations/agencies to help develop customized career programming for their constituents, not just to get a job or advance in their careers but to grow as people. Our firm believes personal journeys are just as important as professional ones. Every day, we are working to cultivate a culture where the workers are valued just as much as the work they produce.
As the Founder and CEO of Auclare Vision, I am focused on bringing humanity back to human resources. This is important to me because of my own struggles with work-life balance and understanding how to navigate work. After being miserable at work for years and quitting several jobs, I started asking myself some critical questions: Why was my transition from college to my career so tumultuous? Why was it so hard for me to navigate work and life as a young adult? Why was it so difficult to feel like I could be authentic at work?
After some soul searching and community analysis, I realized the problem was bigger than me. When I looked around, there were very few people I knew who actually enjoyed their job. It did not matter their age, field, or experience level; people were burnt out and unhappy at work. As a society, we have a toxic relationship with work. Our work culture offers no flexibility, no prioritization of rest, no care between coworkers and managers, no focus on personal development, and we have been groomed to see work as something we had to do rather than a meaningful experience. Our firm combats this toxic work culture. We believe as a whole there must be a paradigm shift to reimagine the way we work. Now more than ever, our current state of work is quite literally a public health crisis.
From my training as a Health Educator at Howard University, I learned how vital an ecological approach is to crafting community interventions and decided to take that approach to examine issues I saw in the workplace. Here is what our research has found: 1) Students need a clear path to becoming professionals, 2) Professionals need a clear path to having a fulfilling career, and 3) Organizations need a clear path to treating their employees well. So we decided to give them their paths. We design career training and programming for middle school, high school, and college students to help them understand themselves and learn how to start and manage fulfilling careers. We coach and train professionals to discover their values, determine their career ideas and create a career progression path that matches their lifestyle wants and needs. Finally, we support organizations by helping them align their processes, policies, and procedures with their missions and values to teach them how to value employees outside of their work.
When most people think about career development, they envision preparing for, managing, and advancing in your career. At Auclare Vision, we take career development to the next level by thinking about the personal stories that influence what we do in our professional lives. Our mission is a big one, but we know as we continue to develop more students, professionals, and organizations, we will get to the day that EVERYONE, from the employee to the CEO enjoys coming to work.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
An essential quality for any person to be successful is self-awareness. If you understand who you truly are as a person, you will know what you want in your life. Going after the things that YOU want in your life is what truly makes you successful; nothing else and no one else’s opinion matters. It’s about you and what success is for you. Without self-awareness, people get stuck doing things they don’t want to do or don’t like doing for the sake of pleasing other people. Once you know and appreciate yourself for who you truly are, you no longer have to appease other people to be happy.
Pricing:
- Career Brand Development ($600) – Partner with one of our coaches to rebuild your career materials (resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile) by developing a clear, concise, and authentic career brand.
- Job Search Consulting ($525) – Reevaluate your job search technique by developing and executing an efficient, effective, and strategic job strategy to alleviate the woes of mindlessly applying to dozens of jobs.
- Interview Preparation ($375) – Enter any room with the confidence and clarity to market your skills, qualifications, and experience at any interview or networking opportunity.
- Coaching Bundle ($900) – Bundle the Career Brand Development, Job Search Consulting, Interview Preparation coaching packages, and save $600 (40% off).
- Career Consulting ($50) – If you need assistance with a work conflict, have a basic career question or need help crafting a career plan, we provide customizable consulting to support your career journey.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@auclarevision.com
- Website: www.AuclareVision.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kenyalatrice
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kenyalsjohnson
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/kenyalatrice
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AuclareVision
- Other: https://theceolaunch.com
Image Credits
Kimberly Taylor at Kimazing Photos
