Meet Alessia Gandolfo | Purpose and Business Coach

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alessia Gandolfo and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alessia, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I started my own business in 2016 during a time in which I was finishing my master’s degree in Marketing and also training as a Yoga teacher and Life Coach at the same time. The thought process behind starting my own business came from a few years of feeling unsettled inside of myself and not knowing exactly why. I remember clearly being about 24 and sitting at my dinner table looking at my life and not feeling at my place, always looking for the external circumstances (the work, the family and friends, the place) to be perfect for me and getting frustrated when something wasn’t, which obviously happened a lot. I wanted to be seen and understood and validated for who I really was and I was expecting anybody else to do it for me until I realized that I had to be brave and remove the layers from the inside out to be fully myself. That’s a long explanation but at that moment I hired a coach from an article she had written online that really resonated, it was spiritual coaching and I fell in love with that work myself. I remember looking at some online blogs from some coaches in Australia, looking vibrant with green juice in their hands and also talking about personal development and I felt a huge resonance with that desire of taking care of my body and mind. A few years passed by before I had the courage of training as a coach myself and since then I specialised in career change and then entrepreneurship. It all happened very gradually and it felt like peeling off an onion because with each iteration of my work, I arrived closer to my core and my truth and I am very curious to see how it’ll evolve next on this path.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
I’m a Purpose and Business coach and I help aspiring women entrepreneur figure out their purpose and turn it into a meaningful business. I think what makes my coaching unique is the combination of guiding women to their true purpose which is so unique to them and something that will keep on lighting a fire in their belly and make a difference in the world with the strategy and mindset of turning that idea into a business. I see many coaches focusing on one or the other but rarely both in the way I do which makes each client’s path completely unique to them and not a cookie-cutter blueprint of how they should run their business. Creating this business was really challenging at first because I found myself very young and out of a prestigious business school deciding to drop the corporate path I had planned for many years and go into completely unchartered territory as well as an unregulated industry like coaching and that was especially hard to accept for my family. Going on my own without the emotional support of my traditional Italian family was the biggest struggle at first but now looking back I see it was the best thing I could do for myself and it feels so natural and obvious looking back! I cannot imagine myself doing anything else. I really learned to trust my intuition even when it doesn’t make sense and it cannot be explained rationally, I learned to be brave and show up authentically on the internet which felt so scary at first and lots of resilience because working for yourself it’s not for the faint of heart and takes daily commitment. What I’d like the world to know is that you have the right to be free and express yourself fully and you can get paid for being yourself and do what you love!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I met so many mentors and people that have inspired me along the way so it’s incredibly hard to pick just one source of encouragement and support! After a lot of thinking I’d like to give a shoutout to Lacey Sites, an incredible business mentor I worked with that really impacted my own way of seeing business in a way that is sustainable and with lots of integrity, I’d like to also mention the yoga teacher training community of EFV in Paris led by Amanda Dates which is the first place I explored off the beaten path that helped me to get to know myself in a new way and open my eyes to what else was possible for me out there beyond a traditional corporate career and I also want to mention my amazing friend Katie McKnoulty, travel writer and photographer founder of The Travelling Light which was one of my first online “girls crushes” I connected with and inspiration for making the idea of working from my laptop possible. The last shoutout to the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek that really helped me explore my own purpose and something I coach many of my clients on daily.

Website: https://www.alessiagandolfo.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alessiagandolfocoaching/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alessiagandolfocoaching/

Image Credits
Aiste Saulyte Photography