A little about me
My name is Carly and I am passionate about living unapologetically from the core of my soul. This is forever a work in progress and I aim to get a little better at it each day.
I have a sailor’s mouth, a romantic heart, and sometimes I don’t know when to stop talking. I’m passionate about lighting others up and finding happiness in every day. I also laugh a lot, often at things no one else laughs about. Yes, that means I get awkward sometimes but even that can be funny.
My “qualifications” come in the form of walking the walk of the talk I talk. I require of myself: authenticity, self-compassion, and limitless curiosity.
My journey has led me to meet some of the coolest people on the planet, with new ones showing up all the time. As much as I love to connect with others, literally my favorite, I tend to spend a lot of time by myself, flowing in my own curiosity and creativity. I also love commas.
MY MISSION
It’s my mission to give a voice to my real-time, soul-level processing and to embrace my vulnerability and authenticity to the limits of my comfort zone and beyond. Also to co-create spaces, both one-on-one and groups, where others feel safe to do the same.
MY VISION
It’s my vision for Owning Authenticity that with each new breath, we arrive as a new version of ourselves – owning fully the lessons we’re learning along the way. Healing, growing, learning, and letting ourselves off the hook at every opportunity for the “shortcomings” of our past self.
MY VALUES
In both my life and my work, I value freedom, unconditional love, courage, vulnerability, intuition, and faith, as well as innovation and continuous improvement. I live and work through the perspective of a growth mindset, forever growing through what I go through.
You might be wondering why “Authenticity” isn’t on my list of values, sharp eye you have! In my lived experience and understanding, authenticity is a combination of embodying freedom, unconditional love, courage, vulnerability, intuition, and faith, as well as innovation and continuous improvement.
history of owning authenticity
I formed the business of Owning Authenticity on December 9, 2020. At that time, I had reached what I thought was a culmination point in my healing journey where I was ready to begin sharing my soul’s gifts with the world. Little did I know, that culmination was actually a beginning.
This journey began in June of 1988, the day I was born but for the first 28 years of my life, I was asleep, unconscious, in the dark and in pain. Lost to the light. The real starting point of Owning Authenticity was in July 2016 where after my latest deep depression, I finally decided that I was sick of living like that. I declared to the Universe that I was going to figure out how to live a life worth living, or I was done. For more about that turning point, I encourage you to check out this blog post about the Deservability Treatment.
The main thing that changed in July 2016 was deciding to do daily self-care forever, every single day, as long as I was alive. I was no longer doing self-care as a means to the end of feeling a little better. I committed to self-care as a lifestyle. No matter how good I already felt, I would keep doing the things that helped me feel even better. This is how I’ve taught myself the truth of what I love to say “there’s no top end to how good we can feel.”
4.5 years later, my life looked completely different. I had quit my corporate job, left my toxic relationship, repaired a lot of my family relationships, and opened my first business (a grocery store in my hometown). All of those things felt great, but the most impressive thing of all, I actually had a foundation of self-love forming within me.
At the time I started this business, “Owning Authenticity” had not fully crystalized yet. I opened the business because I was ready to begin offering 1:1 Natal Chart readings to help people find clarity about who they are. Personally, I had found Astrology to be incredibly enlightening as a tool for understanding my multi-faceted soul. A task that was previously completely mystifying.
Two weeks after forming the business, at the tail end of 2020, some events unfolded that helped me see the very real downside to “biting my tongue” to “keep the peace” in my close relationships. That led me to deciding to set my mantra for 2021 as “The Year of Speaking Truth”. My intention was to tell the truth no matter how uncomfortable it was, which turned out to be a little harder than I thought lol.
Hard as it was, my year of speaking truth unblocked my throat chakra and healed my voice in a BIG WAY. It was the end of February 2021 when I started my first podcast and the Fall of 2021 when I began making videos for my YouTube channel.
It was while recording my first few podcast episodes that “Owning Authenticity” first came to me (~March 2021). There were so many aspects of my performance on those early episodes that my inner critic wanted to have a field day with. I lost my train of thought, I rambled, my voice sounded stupid, I laughed at weird times, my tone was too harsh or too nonchalant, etc. Recording the episodes was so fun, and listening to them afterwards was lowkey torture. Until I was sick of beating up on myself and had a sudden download that there was a different way. I could just own my authenticity. I could just accept how I was, enjoy making the episodes, and trust they were exactly what they needed to be. And Owning Authenticity, what has become my life’s work, was born.
Following some growth of my YouTube channel, in early 2022 I launched my first community space, Sacred Circle, where I met soul-aligned friends who brought so much enrichment into my life it overjoyed me to the point of happy tears. Later in 2022, I facilitated my first group coaching program “Soul Revelation & Spiritual Business”.
In May 2023 I experienced a large activation and release of old trauma that I spent the rest of the year processing. While I was focusing on my own healing journey, I chose to shut down my Sacred Circle community and pull back from working with people in sessions.
After the deep healing journey, purge, and release of 2023, 2024 bloomed as a powerhouse year! Starting in January with re-launching Sacred Circle 2.0, a group I’m still facilitating.
One of my most favorite highlights of 2024 was hosting free online retreats. I ran 3 of them – Divine Design (March), Formula For Fulfillment (July), and Authentic Self Uprising (October).
In August 2024, I hit another culmination point and launched my podcast Authentic Self Revolution, where I’m sharing my own authenticity journey and diving deep into the components of embodying authenticity.
After 4 years of this Owning Authenticity journey I can honestly say, I’m only just getting started. This is the most fascinating and exhilarating ride I’ve ever been on and it’s an honor to be walking this path, one stepping stone at a time.