What Happens When You’re Ready to Leave the Identity You’ve Lived for 27 Years? – Cori Myka (Ep. 78)
Every Human Brand X-Ray starts with something that catches my attention.
This week, I asked a woman who has spent 27 years doing the same work whether she’d happily spend another 27 years doing it.
Her answer was immediate, “Ah, hell no.”
I laughed and then I wanted to know more.
This Week’s X-Ray
Cori Myka is a swim instructor who has spent nearly three decades helping people overcome their fear of deep water. Twenty-seven years is a long time to become very, very good at something.
Cori eventually opened her own swim school, and she’s built years of experience around understanding what happens when someone enters the water frightened and needs to find enough calm to trust themselves.
She’s also recently become an empty nester. So when we sat down for her Human Brand X-Ray, there was a much bigger question sitting underneath our conversation.
What does Cori want the next 27 years to look like?
She didn’t have a neat answer waiting for me. Good. That gave us somewhere interesting to go.
Following the Thread
I became particularly curious when I asked Cori why she was the person to do this work.
She struggled to answer.
She hadn’t entered the industry because of some dramatic experience in the water. She hadn’t built the business around a traumatic origin story. She had fallen into swimming instruction, discovered an affinity for the work and eventually decided she wanted to build something of her own.
Yet she’d stayed with water for 27 years. That’s a bloody long time for something that supposedly just happened. So I kept asking questions.
We talked about fear. Cori old me that public speaking frightens her. That led us into a fascinating conversation about the kind of fear she helps people manage every day.
Panic in deep water carries real physical consequences. Your body reacts. Your nervous system reacts. Fighting against the water can make the situation more dangerous.
Cori knows how to work with someone through that. And suddenly I was looking at her 27 years of experience differently.
Something Was Hiding in Plain Sight
There was another pattern running through Cori’s story that I don’t want to give away here.
It had been sitting there for decades. Once we found the words for it, the way Cori described herself started to make a lot more sense.
That’s one of my favourite things about performing a Human Brand X-Ray. Sometimes you’ve lived with something for so long that it has become completely ordinary to you. Cori’s relationship with water was telling me something.
You’ll have to watch the episode to see what happened when I told her what I could see. And then we had to work out what that might mean for whatever Cori decides to do next.
Watch the full episode of The Fairy BOSSmother Show to see Cori’s Human Brand X-Ray unfold.
Your Human Brand X-Ray
You’ve watched me perform the Human Brand X-Ray on complete strangers on The Fairy BOSSmother Show.
Now it’s your turn.
During your Human Brand X-Ray, I’ll look closely at the identity you’re putting into the world, the patterns running through your story and the signals other people may already be picking up from you.
If you’re curious about what your own X-Ray might reveal, book your Human Brand X-Ray.
