Burnout, Bravery, Breakthrough: Finding Brand Clarity | Leila Lahbabi - Part 1

Welcome to Spark & Ignite Your Marketing, the podcast where real conversations meet real strategies. I'm your host, Beverly Cornell, founder and fairy godmother of brand clarity at Wickedly Branded. With over 25 years of experience, I’ve helped hundreds of entrepreneurs awaken their brand magic, attract the right people, and build businesses that light them up.

What happens when the hustle becomes a trap instead of a path to freedom? In this episode, we welcome Leila Lahbabi, founder of Mindful Academy and author of The Billion Dollar Purpose. Leeila shares her journey from burnout in a consulting career to finding clarity in her brand after experiencing profound grief. We discuss how burnout and societal expectations can cloud our vision and what it means to build a business with intention and alignment. If you feel you're doing all the "right" things but still feel lost, this episode is your invitation to pause, realign, and rediscover your true spark.

Three Key  Marketing Topics Discussed:

1. Burnout and Misalignment in Business: Leila discusses how passion can lead to burnout if not aligned with personal values, warning against societal expectations that thicken the disconnect and threaten sustainability.
2. Brand Clarity Through Personal Transformation: Authentic brand clarity arises from understanding ourselves, as Leila and Beverly highlight the role of personal growth in building a meaningful business.
3. Mindfulness as a Business Strategy: The episode connects mindfulness with marketing, emphasizing that true effectiveness stems from focused, intentional leadership rather than doing more. Learn more about how to elevate your Marketing Strategy here!

Follow Leila:
Leila Lahbabi | LinkedIn
Leila Lahbabi | Instagram
Mindful Academy | Website

Transcript

Beverly: 0:09

Did you know that most business failures aren't about bad strategy but really about burnout, misalignment, and leadership blind spots. Scaling with purpose requires more than ambition. It takes conscious leadership. I'm your host, Beverly Cornell, founder and fairy godmother of brand Clarity at Wickedly branded, and we have helped hundreds of overwhelmed overachieving consultants, creatives, and coaches awaken their brand magic and boldly bring their marketing to life so they feel more confident and attract their absolute favorite and most profitable clients. Today's guest is Layla Lahbabi. She is the founder of Mindful Academy and author of the upcoming book. The billion dollar purpose. After burning out in her own consulting career and experiencing profound personal loss, she now helps other founders scale with alignment, purpose, and people first leadership. Layla, welcome to the podcast.

Leila: 1:03

Thank you so much, Beverly. I'm happy to be here with you.

Beverly: 1:06

Oh my gosh. The story of burnout and like actual life happening in the background is so real for me, and I think so many of our listeners. So talk about how you got to this entrepreneurial journey. We call it the Spark, but what led you to start to Mindful Academy and what did those early days look like for you?

Leila: 1:25

Okay, so Mindful Academy was first a personal journey before becoming an entrepreneurial journey. As you know that I pronou now to a career in strategic consulting that is, a place where we work really hard because we are working with 1400 CEOs on strategic and very important subjects. It needs to go fast, it needs to be clear, it needs to be documented, it needs to be structured. So there is a lot of pressure in this career and I love it and I still love it today. I love it because it's brings so much, interest into oh my God, I'm in room with someone who has built a billion dollar business, or that is running a billion dollar business with thousand and thousand of employees and how this all run. So it's intellectually very stimulated. And this is actually also the risks. And for me, like the burnout that you just talk about, it's not because I was not doing something that I love. It's like I loved so much. Yeah. What I was doing. I wanted so much to help, so much to offer. Then I lose myself in the process.

Beverly: 2:30

Yes.

Leila: 2:31

So that was the starting point. And then I was like, okay, so how can I get out of it? And I was beating myself. I was like, okay, so there is something wrong with me. I need to fix myself. And this is how I went to mindfulness training. I was there to fix myself, right? And then mindfulness, looked at me and laughed ha, you don't know anything about this. And because, my background is in engineering and mathematics and all that. I was very far from anything that is spiritual or grounded or breathing. All those subjects were unknown. And what led me to mindfulness was a scientific study that proved that it changed your minds. So it has linked with neuroscience. There's so many documents, study that explains that it helps with focus, it helps with getting clarity, it helps with managing the emotions, it helps with, understanding the flow of thoughts and dealing with that. So I use it for myself at first and then at work people start seeing that I changed that it's not the work that changed, but I changed internally and I was not interacting with the work similarly as I was before. I was a bit more grounded. I had more listening skills than, when someone is speaking and not thinking about what I'm going to say, but actually listening. I'm more present. I'm less multitasking, but I'm more efficient. I'm working less, but I'm achieving more. Wow. And then people like, oh, what's going on? What did you do? And then COVID hit. And in my career, I used to work with international teams, so people in us, people in uk, people in France. I used to work remotely, but then when COVID hits, some people discovered remote work. And it was really stressful for them. They were like, oh, you are working from home? It sounds like something great. And then they discover that working from home is not as beautiful as the image that we paint. And people started spending more times with themselves. When you spend more time with yourself and then you not used to spend time with yourself. You can be afraid of your own thoughts and your own emotional, what's happening.

Beverly: 4:39

That is such a powerful statement, Leila. You can be afraid of your own thoughts. Yeah. Spending time with yourself. We live in a very quote unquote busy world, right? Between social media, our work, the checklist you talk about all the things that we have to do. And I know like we're running kids places, like the messy middle of life is very real. And it's this never ending drive to get more done, right? And so when you have a minute to stop, it can get real uncomfortable really quick. I'm an only child, so I spent a lot of time by myself growing up. And I'm not afraid to be by myself, but I know like my husband who had six brothers and sisters, he never was alone. So for him, being alone is a whole different experience than for me. I actually crave being by myself, and he doesn't know what to do with himself in the quiet. So this is a very real thing of people having to be alone in your thoughts. So you found that this was happening and your response to it was what then? What happened next?

Leila: 5:46

Eh, saying, okay, actually, I'm not being productive, being busy.

Beverly: 5:51

Oh yeah. I feel attacked. Layla why are you talking to me like that?

Leila: 5:54

And that changed the whole approach that I had to work. I started doing less, but then focusing on the right thing. I started doing the hard work instead of working hard.

Beverly: 6:05

Oh my gosh. This is such a mindset shift though, because I was raised, you work hard to make money, right? This is like a financial money mind shift for people. I've worked really hard to not think I have to work hard. That's ironic in some ways, but I've really tried to reframe this part of my mindset that you don't necessarily have to work hard all the time to get what you want. You can work hard maybe a day or two and get what you want. You don't necessarily have to quote unquote work hard not to the point of burnout. Nobody needs to be burnt out in the society. That's not healthy in any way, shape or form. We don't have to work to the point of mental and physical burnout. But our society says we should Layla. So how do we combat that?

Leila: 6:49

Yes. Because you start to listen more to yourself rather than what society says. Because what's led me to burnout is following what others says or wanted for me, other seeing me like my career. Everything that I've done at that point was following what my brothers had done, what my dad has done, like engineering, this is what she should do. And then it's prestigious to be at a strategic consulting firm and all that. And then when you lose your health, nothing else matters. Nothing else matters because when you don't have your health, you cannot do anything.

Beverly: 7:26

Yeah.

Leila: 7:26

I experienced the burnout and then I started with mindfulness and I thought, oh, okay, now I know. And then I started teaching, and by teaching, I learned even more because I met people from different backgrounds and from engineer, I met doctors, I met people in hr. I met moms of different backgrounds and dads. And everyone is pushing through and I was like, oh, okay. I think I know what I'm doing. And then a second event hit me is I lost my child at birth. Then I was like, okay, so this is not it, because I was during the week doing strategy work and in the weekend teaching mindfulness. It was a person in the weekend, and I was another person in my daily job, right? And then with the second event, it was like a strike. The burnout was like, oh, it's not worth it, but I need to learn. And then the second event was, it's not worth it and I need to change. It's different than learning. Transformational. So I need to transform this. And then I was pregnant again, and then I had my first Lilia and then Sarah, the second one that came in. And when I started having that and being a mom and following the nine to five job. And starting to juggle there. I was living in Paris and my family is in Morocco. So with COVID, with all those things, I was like, woo. Why am I doing all this? So I started transforming my life first. And I started to say, okay, so I need to have my financial stability. I need to have a place where I feel good. I need to be surrounded with the right people that will support me when I'm going through stuff. So it starts by being a personal transformation, why I was teaching. Yeah. And then like Mindful Academy started and started like that. I was teaching around me and it was word of month and people coming to me and transforming their own lives. This is how it started. And then it scaled. Then I moved back to Morocco. Now I had a business that runs mostly remotely With people around the world. I wrote the book, which is Billion Dollar Purpose, which was actually moving from transforming personal transformation that Mindful Academy was based on. To organizational transformation because one of the thing that hit me is, I used to work with people on stress reduction and mindfulness and so on, most of their stress come with their work and their relationship to their work. So my idea like, if I transform one person at a time, I don't know how long I will live, but I want to impact as many people as I can with my skills. And my skills are not just mindfulness, but also strategy. So how I can bridge those? So I merged the mindfulness work with the strategy work.

Beverly: 10:07

Okay.

Leila: 10:08

To make it an organizational way. of working differently, how we can achieve more, by being more focused, by being more grounded, by being more aware, by being more conscious. In my own business. So now that I'm passionate about what I'm doing, and also for others and for organizations at different scales.

Beverly: 10:29

So all these different evolutions though, it sounds like you first started, you were typical corporate Barbie. Yeah. Realizing that's not necessarily the life you wanna lead. Dipping your toe into the mindfulness space, then realizing that you're living two different kind of worlds. That's a real interesting thing like a lot of women do that. They live in two different spaces. We are like very chameleon-like at home, we're very nurturing. And then at work we have to be a certain way, right? We have to be hungry for the ladder, hungry for the next level. I call it the should suitcase. It's the suitcase filled of shoulds that we should be doing. And I think our generation, my mom's generation too, but my mom, when she got outta school, she could be a librarian, a teacher, or a nurse. That was the options she had. Or secretary, right? And my generation had so many choices. It was actually overwhelming of what we could do and what we could be. I remember looking at the options and being like, I wanna be a diplomat and I wanna be a marine biologist, I wanna be a marketer. I had all these options ahead of me that were. So diverse that I was like, what am I gonna do with myself? And this grind of keeping to go with the titles and get to the place that you're talking about and the pressure from your family even I think is interesting too. I'm an only child, so I think the pressure for me was I'm the only one that can succeed. So all the hopes and dreams were built inside of me to have a better life, to be better, to do the things that I was supposed to do. So there's this whole notion of growth in that way. I just feel like between society shoulds, corporate shoulds, familiar shoulds plus your own internal struggles of needing affirmation and things like that of your work and your life and your purpose and all that kind of happens inherently is a lot to handle for us. And this generation is saying, I don't think that needs to be that way. Who decided this? This doesn't feel right. I tell a lot of my clients that you get to design the exact business you want. With the exact goals, the exact work-life balance, the everything. And that's like revolutionary. It's literally a revolution of going against everything that we've been told. So I see you, I see your journey, and I see this really profound loss in the middle of it, which is so hard. I have not lost a child at birth, but I have had a failed adoption and some other things that have happened. And when you lose a child, it spins your world in a way you can't possibly imagine. But you have to go to work every day and pretend like everything is fine. Because women specifically cannot be emotional in this space. They cannot, quote unquote, do all these things. So I can only imagine what's happening in your world and how you're trying to be mindful and you're trying to do the corporate ladder, and you're trying to grieve and you're trying, this is the messy middle of life, like real life. This is what happens. And I know so many of our listeners are struggling with all the things and all the plates and all the stuff they have to do. So creating this business and helping people transform and wanting to impact organizations so that you can help more organizations is a big challenge. Leila, you didn't start out with a little goal here. This is like a big goal to do this. Talk about the moment when you knew this exactly where you were supposed to be.

Leila: 13:48

This is really interesting when I hear you speaking and you talked about like having the pressure of society, having the pressure of your parents. And you know what I'm thinking at the same time and telling to myself I never had that, to be honest. Yes. And I will explain. So all the pressure I have two big brothers Okay. And I'm the little one and all the pressure was on my brothers. They got to get the job, they got to work. And in my culture it was, oh, if you don't wanna work, nevermind, you'll find a husband. So I was the one who put the pressure on myself. Nobody pressured me, nobody asked me to go on a career or anything. Nobody asked me to copy what they were doing. I was copying what they were doing just to say hello. I exist. Hello. I can, hello? is anyone seeing me? Yeah.

Beverly: 14:41

I'm just as good as them. Why wouldn't you want me to do the thing?

Leila: 15:52

why not? Why cannot achieve that? And for me, performance was just a way to be seen and to be loved.

Beverly: 16:01

Oh, it's so deep Layla. To be seen and to be loved. I think all of us want to be seen and to be loved.

Leila: 16:06

Yeah. But then what I didn't see is like by waiting for people to love me, I was. Creating something that was not me. That was not mine. Also, I always wanted to build something to be an entrepreneur. And then before mindfulness, I had many ideas. I had a school coding idea. I had an idea of doctors online making links. I had always a lot of ideas, but no idea stayed with me. The more I was forced to try to find an idea The less I was able to do it. Yeah. And then mindfulness come to me through my own experience. So when you say, for example, oh my God, it sounds hard or it sounds ambitious. I really don't see it like this because the way I'm building this, I have no expectations. I have no expectations. It doesn't mean that I don't want to succeed. It just means that I'm in a road where if I fail, I will learn. That's the only thing. And when I'm doing it, I'm doing it first for me, because this is the way I want to live my life. This is the way I want to raise my kids. This is something that I want to show also to my kids. That you can build something from your own, that is for you and that can serve other people that are like you. And I'm not building it anymore for the others I'm building it for me.

Beverly: 17:21

That's beautiful. To the listener who's listening right now I was in a space where I let my customers build my business. And I got to burnout and I decided one day that I wasn't gonna build it for my customers. I was gonna build it for me. I made a conscious decision and I actually let go of a couple customers, and I gave myself some space to really think about what it is I wanted out of my business, what it is that made me have joy, what it is that made me and the work I did meaningful. What was it for my business that changed that could change to make me not feel overwhelmed and burnt out. I remember, 3:00 AM One night my husband sleeping, my son is sleeping, and I'm like literally there. You remember the cartoons when we were little that had the toothpicks with the red eyes? Do you remember those? That was me staring at the computer trying to get that next thing done, whatever it was.'cause I had the whole list of things to do and thinking, how is this freedom? This is like a trap. This is not the quote unquote American dream. This is not it. And I had to change my whole thinking to that of like, how do I build what I want? But you have to get really clear with that and spend some time with your thoughts, journaling. And one of the things that we do in our brand Spark experience is we spend 90 minutes to two hours with you interviewing you and seeing what it is that lights you up, seeing what it is that creates that light bulb moment. Seeing the golden thread in the messiness of all the ideas that says, this is the thing, this is what I keep hearing from you. Because sometimes when you're in it, you don't realize it and need somebody from the kind of the outside to come in and say, this is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm hearing. And helping them really find. Their voice in that messiness. We have so many ideas in our brains as entrepreneurs. Like you said, you had all these ideas of, I'm gonna build this, I'm gonna build that, I'm gonna do this. We are builders and sometimes it's so busy that it's hard to do that. So we spend a lot of time in the beginning really looking for their soul before we go to strategy. That's something that's really powerful. We know it works way better and it's a differentiator from day one. For them, in the market, when they're really themselves, their personal journey, their passion, their core values, the things that drives them. And we say marketing becomes more joyful because you're coming from a place of real authenticity. It speaks to your soul as opposed to just anything to check off your list. And it's emotional for them to go through the process. I joke, I'm a marketing therapist because it's emotional for them. So I imagine when you work with clients. It can get emotional. What is that like for you as a consultant in this quote unquote business? Because emotion and business doesn't typically go together.

Leila: 19:58

Yeah, it's a really interesting question and I needed to go through it myself to be able to guide people through it. Because one of the things that came to me when I started working on the field of mindfulness is the impatience, right? Growth is not linear. It has never been linear. It's linear when we streamline it into a process, but then you're not following your heart. When people say, okay, I'm doing the work, I'm doing the shadow work, I'm doing the soul stuff. And again, she's asking me question about things. Where are you going with that? Why are you leading with that? And then it's just resistance. It's just resistance to change. You have a mountain here, you have a mountain here, and then you want to cross. And then when you cross, when you get far from the mountains, you have more air pushing you, right? More wind. And when there's a lot of wind, you're in the middle and it's like the desert land. You just wanna go back because you were secure. And actually that's what keeps people coming back. So they start and the wind starts to push them, and then they try to go back. But the idea is having faith, so having clarity in the destination, having faith. And when start having faith like. Oh my God, I'm going to go through it anyway. It's going to be hard. And everything on the internet around the easy success that it doesn't have to be hard is not helping us. I didn't help me, I felt stupid to be honest. I was like, why people are succeeding in six months. I'm not succeeding in six months. But actually what we don't see is that yes, it took six months to skyrocket the thing, but before the six months, nothing happened for year, for two years. And when I work with my clients, when they say, at an organizational level is the cost of not acting, if you don't act, then it's going to be linear. Or not because the world is changing so much. The market is changing. So if you're not transforming, you're not doing yourself a service. And this is why I call this scaling yourself to scale your business. If you don't scale yourself, then you act on fear. You want to shrink back. You want to go back to this first mountain. But when you start scaling yourself is scaling. Your resilience is scaling, your ability to handle is scaling. Your ability to manage your emotions, and you build that with your strategy and goes along. Then you say that you're moving, you're business and moving and you're moving with it. Now with AI and with a lot of technical skills that are more and more automated, if you don't grow as human beings, then something is left on the table because going fast is something that everyone can do right now. Everyone can go fast, but going precise, focus, the human connection that would enable you to sell is first being connected to yourself, and then people who are like you, recognize themself in who you are, in your values, in the way of your doing things. And then it's yes, I want to work with you.

Beverly: 22:52

Your humanness becomes your differentiator.

Leila: 22:55

It's your differentiator. And it is also what wake you up in the morning, right?

Beverly: 23:00

I remember at 3:00 AM being stressed out and going, what the heck have I been doing? And now at 3:00 AM I'm like, Ooh, I wanna go do that thing. And I'm so excited. It just changes everything about you. The thing I think you're talking about is intentionality. Once you're aware of what, and you have that focus, everything becomes much more intentional. I use this analogy with my husband all the time. I feel like he has very deep roots, and when life hits him, he doesn't sway because he's so rooted in his family and his friends and who he is. He is deeply rooted. I have a lot of trauma in my history. My father left when I was three. We've moved 28 times. My mother was adopted. I was adopted. My son is adopted. The roots for me are not as deep. And so when life hits me, it hits differently that it hits him. Because I don't have such deep roots and I have had to be really intentional with building my roots, being okay with myself, being okay with where things are because of the lack of roots. And because of that, I'm much more focused and in intentional because with intention now it's easier yeses and nos, it's easier failures.'cause I'm like, oh, I'm trying this new thing and it may not work out and it's okay'cause I'll learn and I'll fix it. It's so much more intentional in that than if I just let things happen. I do the work because I don't wanna live in a life that is not okay. I don't wanna carry around the backpack of trauma. I want to do the work. It's hard work though, and it makes you very raw and it makes it harder, but it's definitely the thing that I know 100%. I am present, I am human. I know myself so much better because of it, and that's what gives me more roots so that the wind doesn't blow me over. That life doesn't blow through me in a way that makes me crumble on the floor. Not to say that I've not had those moments in my past, but I feel so much more fortified when I'm intentional.

Leila: 24:58

Yes. Everything that you just said resonates a lot. And one of the reason why I came back to Morocco is like I call it, and a lot of people that come here say it, it's a healing land. So when you talk about the roots here, oh my God, the energy here is so amazing. Each time I do leadership retreat here. People it's like they're rooted, they feel like rooted somehow. And I work with scale-ups, so businesses that wants to scale through talent. And the businesses that are impact driven businesses or people that start working with purpose, okay? And then, when your business scales, of course you scale yourself to scale your business. But then if you carry a mission that is really big, when you attract people that are like you and that have the same mission and they carry it also with you, you don't have to carry everything yourself. And this is beauty of it. This is the beauty of intentionality and purpose. Like when you talk to someone, especially businesses that are quite small, right? It's difficult to have an attractive package like a big business, okay? But the attractive package is you, your attractive package is your mission, is your project, is you want to build. And then you share this with people and they say, oh my God, yes, I want to work on that. And then you build the scale. And it's less heavy and you're having more fun. You are having more fun doing it.

Beverly: 26:23

You're having more fun. I say all the time, like marketing and business can be fun when you're doing that. Exactly that. Oh my gosh, Layla, you're like my soul sister in Morocco. I love you. So this whole season's been about confidence and the way you speak there is something very mindful about you, but this season's question's all about confidence and what does confidence look like for you as a business owner, and can you share a moment when you realized you were truly showing up with confidence?

Leila: 26:51

I will tell you something. I have no confidence whatsoever. I don't have any. But I'm keep on moving and building, I had a coach when I was on my corporate career, and he was like, you need to work on your confidence. You need to be confident, and then you need to work like a queen. And then imagine that you have something on your head and then work. And then I never had this, and I don't know if I'm going to have this one day. But what I know is I have bravery. And bravery is very different from confidence. Bravery is shaken, is having the fear is oh my God, I don't know if I'm going to do this and doing it anyway. This is bravery. I'm not confident at all. I don't know where my business will go to be honest. I know now it's working well. I know that compared to last year, like it's crazy what's happening, but it could fail at any moment. And I have no confidence that I'm going to be successful all my life. The only thing that I know is are we brave enough to go through whatever life throw at me with fear, with sadness, with emotions, with everything? It just bravery. You know why I'm brave? Because when I'm breathing, I'm alive. I still can do something about it. That's all I know.

Beverly: 27:59

So I think confidence is built. It's not something that you're born with and every time you're brave, you are creating and building the confidence foundation, because the more you put yourself in those situations where you're shaking and you're nervous and you're not sure, the more you're doing that, you are creating a practice of expanding your comfort zone, and you begin to trust yourself. That no matter what happens you'll be okay. And there's some confidence in that. Yeah. I love the coach said like the queen, I actually use the analogy of the unicorn. The unicorn has lovely confidence because it's not egotistical, it just knows it's special. I'm unique, I'm beautiful, and this is it. And it's just this quiet but loud confidence at the same time. And so I say unicorn like confidence. And so to me, a unicorn, like confidence is built and it's built through bravery. It's built through messing up, it's built through trusting yourself. I just had this whole thing where my therapist said I think your anxiety comes from not trusting yourself. And I was like whoa. I trust myself. What are you talking about? She goes I don't think you realize how much you've been through and how much you've gotten through, and that there's really not a whole lot that could come at you at this point in your life that you haven't already figured out. And you have to trust yourself in that. And she was totally right. And I was like, I hadn't normally viewed it that way. I viewed confidence for work differently. And I was like, oh yeah, I hear you. I hear you on this. This is right. But confidence is trusting yourself that no matter what happens, even I flop on my face in a talk, whatever, then I'll be okay.

Leila: 29:27

Oh my God. I love this definition and now I'm starting to think that I'm confident. Thank you

Beverly: 29:36

for that. This is the moment people, she got her confidence right here on the Spark Ignite your marketing podcast. This is brilliant. I love this so much. If you're a listener struggling with confidence, this is so important. I would love for you to drop a review and let us know this is a moment for you too. Or if there's somebody you know who's struggling and trusting themselves, send this to them. Share it with the world because it is, it's about building it. It's not something you're born with, and it's about trusting yourself that you'll be okay and taking the next step despite your fear, despite being scared, despite wondering if they're gonna get it or love you or not, but trusting that you'll be okay at the end of it. I love this. Layla. So what part of your journey has required the most bravery and courage?

Beverly (2): 30:19

Hey there, you've just finished part one of the Spark Ignite, your marketing episode. How are you feeling? Excited, inspired, but we're just getting started. Next Thursday we're dropping part two, and you won't wanna miss it. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, so you'll be the first to know when it goes live. Until then, take a breather, let those ideas simmer, and we'll see you next week.