How to Choose Meaningful Work
Do you ever wonder how your skills and experience could lead you to your higher purpose? Amy Yeung’s soul journey from corporate fashion designer to social entrepreneur shows that inside each of us lies the ability to create positive change in the world. Owner of the Orenda Tribe lifestyle brand, Amy lives and works with artisans in the Navajo community to create upcycled clothing and share indigenous culture.
Growing up in rural Indiana, with her Native American heritage and obsession with fashion, Amy felt like an outsider. When she moved to New York to pursue her career in fashion, she knew she’d found her path and never looked back.
As a mother, Amy desired to leave a legacy focused on sustainable design and solving the social problems plaguing her native community. She left her corporate job behind and retraced her family history back to the Navajo reservation of her birth, where her studio is now based.
In this episode, Amy models reconnecting with ourselves by connecting with the land, sky, and water. She shows us that, while we can step into our true calling at any point in life, the best time to align with your greater purpose is right now.
Featured Moment
Amy: We only have x amount of years to be here on earth, so I just decided, it’s just time I start living the life I’m supposed to be living.
As a parent, the thing that probably pushed me the hardest, is I got to a point, and I thought, what legacy am I going to leave my kid? How is she going to remember me? Is she going to say, “oh my mom, she worked at blah blah blah activewear company, she was a designer.” Is that really what I wanted my kid to remember me as?
That’s when I started manifesting this bigger plan, maybe there’s more for me out in the world that I can do. There’s some way I can be of service. I have these amazing skills I’ve learned over 35 years of making clothes, marketing clothes, fixing brands, selling stuff, creating wealth. What if I took all of that skill set and I applied it to a larger social situation. We talk about entrepreneurship a lot, female entrepreneurship, but what about social entrepreneurs, what about people that find really fascinating solutions to problems that aren’t getting any focus? As I started traveling back to New Mexico and trying to figure out how to reintegrate with my tribe at a very late stage of my life, I became more and more aware of these problems, these crazy problems. Living in California, I’ve never heard of environmental genocide, I’ve never heard of fracking, 100 feet from a school. I didn’t realize the whole water system here is compromised. These are things we don’t see in the news…
Show Notes
Learn about Amy’s Diné heritage and growing up in a small rural town in Indiana.
The historical context that played into her mother’s decision to have her adopted.
The difficulty of trying to translate your passion into a career in a community that is unlike you.
Feeling like an outsider as a Native American artsy kid who made her own clothes.
Starting with studies in pharmacy before convincing her parents to let her apply for fashion.
The sink-or-swim experience of moving to New York and creating a life there.
Ascribing her success to a deep understanding of being loved by her parents.
How motherhood made her more community-oriented and invested in sustainable design.
Responding to the call to consciousness by turning her back on the corporate measures of success.
Rethink, revive, rebirth, and other re-words that form the foundation of Orenda Tribe.
Learning about environment genocide, fracking, and other problems on her journey of reintegrating with her tribe.
Advice for crafting the life you want: simplify, eliminate the noise, and connect to the earth.
How the meditative processes in indigenous cultures brings us closer to ourselves.
Reclaiming her ancestry, learning about the native community, and educating others.
Find out which Navajo community service projects Amy is currently working on.
References
One Last Thing
If you preorder my book, Break the Good Girl Myth, before July 28th at goodgirlmyth.com, you will receive a bonus training (~$300 value) to help you design your creative purpose.
In the training, you'll learn:
➕ The one intention you must clarify to get clear about your creative purpose
➕ How to more easily bring shape to your creative purpose by choosing one of the four creator paths
➕ A powerful process for choosing a direction if you have a lot of interests and passions
➕ How to turn your creative dream plan into an actionable, creative dream plan