[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]Who is Lauren?
I am many things (as we all are) but below are the basics:
- I am a 28 year old woman
- I have a 3 year old daughter – I am Mama
- I am married to my best friend
- My husband is the most successful man I know (yes I am biased)
- We all live in New York (Manhattan to be precise)
- We are all English (my daughter only by birth)
- I exercise regularly whilst hating it with a passion
- My favorite color is black
- My favorite food is Sausage, Mash and Peas (it’s an English thing)
- I couldn’t survive without chocolate
- I have the very best family and friends (there’s that bias again!)
- I am very shy
- Loyalty is key
- I love deeply
- I do not forgive easily
It’s funny, writing the above I did not think of myself as many things: among them, entrepreneur, CEO, founder, yet I am also all of those things. Perhaps it is because it is so new or because it doesn’t quite feel real.
I am the person that tells the same story to anyone she meets – “In my yearbook my teacher wrote that he thought I would be the first student to make a million”. I am hoping this may still be true (I should go to that school reunion one year!), not for the money but for the success.
I had big dreams, I worked my butt off at school and then college, I got into University studying English and then I was lost.
I found Univeristy hard, frustrating and scary. I believed I should have a plan, I was convinced I had no passion and minimal skill set and so I meandered through the work assignments and the final exams earning myself a 2.2.
I went travelling, took temp jobs and fell in love with a number of boys that were bad for me (Sorry Dad!). Then as fate would have it I took my ‘final’ temp job (I was determined to make this one work) and within 2 months I had fallen in love with the CEO.
I remember telling my dad and I can still hear his reaction: “Well, you’ll either be fired or get married” – thankfully it was the latter.
We lived in a bubble of new found love for 2 years where I did no work but a hell of a lot of travelling and then we fell pregnant, unplanned but pleased. I had an easy pregnancy, a more difficult birth and a hard time when she was born. In the very beginning I suffered post natal depression but thankfully that lifted quickly but what was to follow was harder to shift.
I loved being a mum but I was by no means a natural and I pined for something of my own, my husband had his work and I realised that I had this little person but I also wanted more. More for her and more for me.
I attempted going back to work when she was 9 months old and I lasted just that – 9 months.
It was too much, I was missing too much, I was stretching myself thin and so again I fell into the mindset that I couldn’t have both.
However, this year that niggling feeling came back. New York will do that to you, you are exposed to so many amazing women and I realised that the only thing holding me back was fear.
Fear of harming my daughter, fear of damaging my relationship, fear of failing.
That fear will creep over you and infiltrate your thoughts and dreams, it will win if you let it but this time I decided I was going to be bigger and braver.
I decided that I would try and be the woman I always wanted to be and so 2015 is the year that I became an entrepreneur.
Lauren = Woman, Wife, Mother, Entrepreneur.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
