Lydia Lee, business coach and entrepreneur

Hey, I’m Lydia! I’ve loved the transparency that’s shared in the Upstairs Community, including all the amazing stories that are being featured on entrepreneurs who are from different backgrounds — this feels really inclusive! It’s great to see that not every business is built in the same way, and there’s so much we can learn from one another.

Find me on my website and YouTube

Upstairs Community story: I chose to have a tiny business

My superpower skill

Reinventing people’s skills and gifts to start a business they love by identifying the “sweet spot” of their strengths, deep interests, and impact they want their work to make, connecting like-minded people together, storytelling and creating content that matters, producing videos, coaching, and strategy.

What influenced my career 

Rethinking my career after a corporate burnout, unlearning my immigrant family values to carve a more unconventional life path, amazing mentors and coaches who supported my journey to be an entrepreneur, moving to Bali, and having a more purpose-driven lifestyle that includes having more time for hobbies, passions, and time for rest and spaciousness.

Favorite way of slowing down to enjoy the moment

Intentionally blocking “white spaces” in my calendar to have thinking time and rest blocks, listening to podcasts, having meaningful conversations with like-minded people, living a location-independent life, mindful mornings without tech for the first two hours.

The last time you talked about a mistake you made 

I share a lot about learnings from my mistakes with clients often, to be truly transparent in the journey. The last time I spoke about this was about how I wished I slowed down to be more intentional about why I’m building my business and defining what’s ‘enough’ for my own version of success instead of constantly chasing the “bigger is always better” mentality.

Having a second burnout as an entrepreneur woke me up to being less ”hustly” and rushed into doing things in my business. What’s the point of rushing somewhere fast if it’s not where you want to go?

When I was building my business based on the model that was done by everyone else out there similar to my business, I was making great money, but completely overworked and unfulfilled.

Working with different people

I love the notion of “you don’t know what you don’t know.”  Being a traveler, I’ve loved meeting so many different people from different cultures and backgrounds to shift my own perspective of life.

It’s always so interesting to see how people solve problems, create ideas, and see the world with the lenses they have from their own life experience…it’s always opened my own eyes to learn this from people not like me.

One professional tip that you learned the hard way

As a child from an immigrant family who struggled financially, I’ve always had a belief that you have to sweat blood and tears to reach success.

Today, I’ve learned that being intentional in how I want to personally show up in my business is important for my wellbeing and having a purposeful (and profitable) business. That means identifying what my own genius-zone activities are that are in my strengths, superpowers, and gift so that I enjoy working on my business, and outsourcing other things that don’t make my heart sing.