Maybe you're looking for someone who has lived a little
Someone who's made mistakes. Changed her mind. Started over.
Built things that worked and things that absolutely did not.
Someone who understands what it's like to spend years building a life around what everyone else needs, only to eventually become an empty nester and be forced to look around and wonder:
If that's you, you're in the right place.
I'm Vanessa. You can call me Ness.
Which means I grew up alongside my children
For years, life was full of roles and responsibilities.
Mother. Wife. Employee. Business owner. Problem solver. The person people counted on.
And I got really good at being needed.
I built a career. I built businesses. I created products. I learned how to sell, market, solve problems and figure things out when there wasn't a roadmap.
I also made mistakes. Plenty of them.
I changed direction. Started things. Scrapped things. Started again.
I wrote books.
I spent years in corporate environments and learned a tremendous amount about business, people and how things actually work behind the scenes.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became very good at building things.
But I wasn't always as good at asking myself:
What Do I Want in all of this?
Then life got quiet. Like eerily quiet. I'm talking, I could hear the crickets sing kind of quiet.
And suddenly, I had something I hadn't had in a very long time:
Space.
Too much space, if I'm being completely honest.
And when the noise gets quiet, sometimes you can finally hear the questions you've been too busy to ask.
Who am I now?
What do I actually want?
What parts of me have I pushed aside?
What do I want the next chapter to look like?
And perhaps the biggest one:
I thought I was having some personal identity crisis. I felt lost. I kept searching for myself. There is an industry built around that. So, that's what I did. I kept searching. Except....
Eventually, I realized something much more useful.
I wasn't freakin' lost. I just spent decades becoming who I needed to be when life was calling me.
That's Where Identity Reconnection™ Began
The language taught by the self-help industry teaches us to find ourselves. Follow our heart, our passion. But none of it made sense to me.
As an empty nester, I tried to find myself. But then I realized I wasn't freakin' missing. I was right here.
So, instead, I started paying attention to what I was experiencing and named it.
Once I started to reconnect with myself, I realized something else. There was so much of myself that I lost touch with.
The dreams I postponed. The interests I put aside. The parts of myself I kept promising I'd get back to someday. The compromises that seem insignificant in the moment but add up over years. I decided to name that too.
I now had a language that clearly explained what I was going through, which made it easier to understand and build from there.
Because once you start asking WTF now?
Another question tends to follow: “What do I want to do with this version of me?”
For me, that question has always been connected to business. I've built businesses for years. Some for myself, mostly for others. I've sat with multi-million dollar business owners and helped them get to the next level. I've sat in boardrooms with some of the biggest companies in my career in the corporate world. I've worked behind the scenes to solve problems and improve the way businesses operate.
I built a business from scratch to feed my kids as a single parent. I have spun digital products, developed offers, marketed, sold, experimented, pivoted. I've seen business from the inside out; I've learned more lessons than I could possibly count and learned a hell of a lot along the way.
Your experience is worth something.
The things you've learned. The problems you've solved. The skills you've developed. The things people come to you for. The lessons you had to learn the hard way. You may have more to build from than you realize.
That's why Business Building is part of what I talk about here too.
I believe anyone can build something that is wholeheartedly their own. Something that uses something you already know but, more importantly, supports the life you actually want to live.
The moments of... well shit I didn't see that coming...
The stories. The mistakes. The hard truths. The funny stuff.
The things nobody tells you about getting older.
Relationships. Starting over. Changing your mind. Figuring yourself out.
Building something and wondering if it's going to work.
Learning something the hard way and thinking:
“Well, I wish someone had told me that sooner.”
That's Life.
It's where Letters from Ness comes in.
It's where I write about the things I'm thinking about, learning, questioning and sometimes still trying to figure out.
I'm reporting live from the road because I haven't reached the finish line yet. I am not sure I ever will and that's the point I'm learning in all of this. But I've lived enough to have something worth saying, so I'm gonna say it.
Besides, maybe something I've learned will save you a little time, make you feel a little less alone, or give you something to think about.
Leave the rest.
It's one conversation
Who are you? What do you want to build or do next? How do you want to live?
Because I don't think those questions can really be separated.
They're connected. I'm connected to all of it.
So I stopped trying to put myself into a box. And I stopped trying to build a brand around just one piece of me.
This is Vanessa Somerton.
All of it.
To what you want...
To what matters. To what you've outgrown. To what you're curious about. To what you've been putting off.
Then, start building from there.
One Decision.
One idea.
One story.
One brave little experiment at a time.
It's time to build a life that feels like your own.
I'm endlessly curious about people. I've always been fascinated by why we become who we become
I love questions more than quick answers.
I've learnt that strength and self-trust are not the same thing.
And, I'm still learning.
Still changing. Still becoming.
I don't write from the finish line. I write from the road. I would love for you to tag along in the beautiful journey and thing called life.