About | Becoming Luminary

Hey, I'm Deborah.

Now this is the part where I'm supposed to assure you that through my extensive education and experience I am absolutely qualified to help you lead with more peace and ease without stalling your success or blowing your life up in the process.

If that's what you're looking for, click here to scroll down to the bottom because it's absolutely there.

But I believe that one my greatest assets as an Executive Life Coach & Somatic Self-Care Therapist is not my education, it's my lived experience. . .

... my human-ness.

I had a pretty rough beginning.

I was born in Colorado. My father, who at the time, had undiagnosed PTSD from serving in the Army, was also an abusive sociopath, and my mother spent a lot of my childhood physically, mentally, and emotionally escaping from him, and also by extension, from me and my younger sister.

I learned early on how to take a beating without making it worse on myself, and also tried to navigate being an inquisitive and very aware child without setting off the people who I relied on for my survival.

After years of abuse, when I was six years old, my mother finally mustered up the courage to leave my father. Rather than let us leave, though, he handcuffed her to our stair railing, pulled out a pistol, started drinking, and said he was going to kill her.

Luckily our neighbors, who were familiar with his antics, heard her screams and called the police. When they arrived, my father turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger.

By luck or God's grace, he missed his heart by an inch and was taken to a hospital to recover. Meanwhile, my mother, younger sister, baby cousin, and I were taken to a women's shelter to live, and it was my first experience being essentially homeless.

After a while, we moved to Illinois to be near my mom's sister, and spent a year bouncing around from couch to couch until my father came back into our lives and we moved back to Colorado.

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I saw how the "other half" lives.

After their reconciliation, my parents started a janitorial business, which was extremely successful.

Their business earned over a quarter of a million dollars in revenue a year (this was in the 90s), and suddenly we were a "rich" family.

My parents bought this big house in a rich neighborhood. We were the only black family on our block, and my parents, who were in their mid-twenties, were by far the youngest. My father had a variety of cars, including a Porsche.

The downside of their business, though, was that my parents had to work overnight. So at 8-years old, I was tasked with being the "house manager".

I cleaned our house, made the meals for my sister and cousin, and got us all ready for school and daycare in the morning.

Then, I went to school and ate lunch with the children of fashion models, celebrity makeup artists, and car dealership franchise owners who all bragged about having their houses cleaned and meals prepped by their maids and butlers.

I dreamed that as an adult, I would have a life like that and knew my only pathway to it was to excel academically.

When my parents divorced a few years later, my family was uprooted once again.

We struggled to rebound.

Without their business income, my mother couldn't sustain our "rich" lifestyle on her own and we were forced to move into the ghetto.

For years, we lived in extreme poverty.

My mother bounced around jobs, getting to a certain point in her career, and then being forced out (something I experienced later on as an adult).

Because of this, we moved quite a bit. Sometimes we had a home, sometimes we lived in motels until my mom could get back on her feet.

Unfortunately, I was exposed to a lot of precarious people and circumstances, and because of it I developed a deep distrust of people, especially men.

Despite this, I continued to excel in my schooling, consistently testing in the top 2% of my grade.

Eventually, during what was supposed to be a summer trip to visit my father in California where he lived, he enrolled my sister and I in school and kept us.

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Life continued to be really unstable.

Since my father worked as a truck driver and was often away, my sister and I were raised by our new step-mother, who we'd never met before that trip.

Unfortunately, my father began cheating on her and she took out her frustrations on me and my sister, which, when my father found out, resulted in my mother being forced to take custody of my sister for her safety. Though it was equally volatile for me, too, my father refused to give up custody of me.

A few years later, my father was unexpectedly arrested and jailed for over a year (which, again, not totally surprising because of his sociopathic tendencies), and my stepmother, who had been a stay-at-home wife up until that point in their marriage was forced to find employment.

Between her minimum-wage job and the cash that my father had left with her before he was arrested, we were able to stay in our home, but food became scarce. And because of my step-mother's pride, she refused to apply for free lunch for me.

That meant most days, breakfast was my only meal of the day. My friends, who were the sweetest bunch ever, alternated giving me their code to get free lunch so I could eat lunch or at least bring home food for my 3-year old brother so he had enough to eat.

I went to 13 different schools by the time I graduated high school.

When my father was released from jail, he decided to move our family to Texas.

My school counselor advised me that moving in the middle of the semester would cause me to fail my classes, and since my academics were everything to me, I asked my father to at least let me finish my junior year before we moved.

Instead, he took my stepmother and brother with him and left me behind in California to finish school. I slept on friends' couches for 4 months and finished my junior year with a 4.2 GPA before joining my father, stepmother, and brother in Texas.

Changing school systems meant I had to take 3 freshman classes in addition to my senior requirements to graduate on time.

Despite the heavy workload, and despite the turbulent home life as my stepmother navigated grief and anger that her marriage to my father was ending, I graduated with honors and received a full-ride pre-med scholarship to my dream school, Texas A&M Corpus Christi (8 hours away from my home).

But, while I was in back in Colorado, spending was supposed to be the summer with my mother, grandmother, and sister before classes started, my father called me on my 18th birthday to say that he'd sabotaged my financial aid, the college had revoked my scholarship, and I was being disowned for applying to a college he hadn't chosen for me.

Abuse, poverty, and strife were the foundations of my childhood.

This, along with witnessing my female caregivers being abused by a man in power and then struggling to financially rebound when he left and took his power with him, left a big imprint on me.

The way I saw it, having financial power and influence was the only way to break the generational cycle of violence, poverty, and chaos that existed in my family, and I vowed it would end with me.

Fast forward, and I had it all.

At 29 years old, I was at the top of my game. My husband and I (who I met the day after I arrived in Colorado after my graduation) had 2 amazing kids.

We lived in a nice neighborhood and our kids went to a top classical charter school that went from kindergarten to eighth grade (can we say stable roots?)

I was making more money than ever working for the city government—managing and negotiating million-dollar contracts with vendors and settling high-profile customer disputes.

I had success, I had stability, and I was damned good at my job. On paper, I had cultivated the life of my dreams.

But the reality was I was falling apart. My job was stressful, I had a boss from hell, and my marriage was on it's last threads.

Between being the breadwinner, cooking, helping my kids with homework, all the school activities, managing our financial matters (by choice), and being the family mediator, I had nothing left for me.

Normally, when I'd started to feel overwhelmed, I had an escape plan; I'd book a hotel, spend a few nights away from home decompressing, and then jump back in.

But, over time, I started looking forward to the time away, and dreading coming back to the chaos and dysfunction of my life, as terrible as that sounds.

So, I asked my husband for a 6 month separation, where we would live separately and either try to reconnect or make the decision to permanently part ways.

Though, at times, it was tough and painful, we both put in the work together over those 6 months, reconnected on an entirely new level, and emerged as a family stronger than ever.

Then I became unexpectedly pregnant again.

One the one hand, I was so excited because this baby was in many ways, borne out of the newfound intimacy my husband and I had cultivated and worked hard at to keep strong.

But on the other hand, it was the hardest pregnancy on my body I'd ever experienced. I had high blood pressure, round the clock nausea, and blinding migraines. And, for the first time, my health started interfering with my ability to be a peak performer at work, something my male supervisor used to his advantage.

I spent the first 7 months of my pregnancy fighting for basic accommodations that never came. Being micromanaged and forced to track and report every step away from my desk. I started having nighttime panic attacks.

I couldn't will my body or my baby to do anything different. And, I couldn't persuade my male supervisor or the attorney I was dealing with in HR to help me or advocate for me.

I had no control over my body, and even more shocking, I also had no real control over my career.

That sense of powerlessness threw me deeply into my first real experience with burnout (or as I saw it, existential crisis) at the young age of 32 lol, which led to a 10 month sabbatical to recover.

After the initial shock of not working but still getting paid (aka EASE to the highest level), I can't lie, it was glorious.

I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy and spent 10 months being just Deborah. I painted, I started a food blog. I spent the summer building memories and experiences with my kids before school started back up, and started going to therapy for the first time.

Pettiness, spite, and one-up-man-ship make great fuel for a comeback.

Forever the high-achiever, 7 months into my sabbatical, I was itching to do something new. So, I helped my mom write a fictional tell-all about our experiences as black women in Corporate America.

We self-published and in less than a year, our book was picked up by an editor in Forbes who gave us an amazing review.

I fell in love with writing for other people, and decided to quit my job and start a ghostwriting service

11 months later, I had earned double what I made on an annual basis in my government job.

But, I approached my business like I did my corporate career, and because of it, quickly found myself drowning in work.

Between the long hours, the 6 month waitlist of clients, a team that I was either chasing to complete work or training for the umpteenth time on how to do their work, and suddenly having to homeschool both of my school-age children and care for my baby around the clock at the height of the pandemic, I burned out again..

The reckoning.

After this second experience with burnout, I realized that my job wasn't the issue. My business wasn't the issue. I was the issue.

I only knew how to create and lead a life that looked amazing on paper but was exhausting, overwhelming, and chaotic to live in (which, duh, because look at my childhood!)

I only knew how to be superhuman, I only knew how to be over-responsible for everything and everyone. I only knew how to over-function.

I only knew how to address my stress once the kettle was boiling over.

I didn't know how to lean on others for help. In fact, it terrified me to show weakness or vulnerability in case it would be used against me later.

Yes, I knew how to be a powerful and "successful" woman.

But I didn't know how to live and lead in a way where where my success and standard of living wasn't detrimental to my peace or my ability to have life—both physically and experientially.

So I started learning.

Feminine Impact was born.

For over three years, I delved deeply into the psychology, brain science, and somatic development of our attachment styles, stress management patterns, and societal conditioning, and then took myself through a complete BEING shift.

I learned how to work smart (vs. hard) & today I am running a successful business that allows me to fulfill my deepest dreams & desires WITHOUT all the hard work, effort, & strife from my younger years.

I’m way more resilient when stress is high & I'm able to maintain and restore my energy AND my composure with far greater speed and ease than ever before.

I’m able to set much better boundaries with my time which allows me to take WAY better care of myself than I did in my 20’s & early 30’s, allowing me to be much more loving, kind, patient & happier overall!

Not only that, but I can quickly & easily course-correct whenever life throws me a curve ball… all of which has led to far greater happiness, energy, joy, ease & grace in my life!

Using the Regenerative Success Method I developed, I'm blessed every day to wake up & teach my clients how to awaken, strengthen & unleash their feminine impact in their lives and businesses as well, and have gotten to travel around the world because of the impact I've made in client's lives.

Leading a life and business that both nurtures and makes space for significant achievement and delicious, peaceful well-being is what feminine impact

is built on.