Jacqueline Misla - Founder, Crafting Your Path
Jacqueline Misla
Jacqueline Misla, MSW is a change strategist, coach, speaker and the Founder of Crafting Your Path, the CEO of JM Consulting, and the COO of Curious Fox. She has over 15 years of experience helping people and companies find success outside the lines.
After years of working hard to live, behave, dress, and love the way she was expected to, Jacqueline found that she was successful, but not happy. It took two significant moments and years of self-work for her to understand the expectations and fears that were getting in the way of her fullest potential. By leveraging her writing, her art, her network, and years of experience in organizational development, Jacqueline turned her journey into a platform to help all womxn identify the paths that are meant for them.
Her passion for this work has taken many forms over the last fifteen years, including: organizational leadership, systems building, consulting and technical assistance, learning and development, strategic planning, international research, early childhood education and youth development, and new immigrant services. Jacqueline is authentic and curious. She works closely with partners as a strategic problem solver who is motivated by the impact that is possible when we focus on the best of human potential. Jacqueline has a Master's Degree in Social Work, with a concentration in Community Organization, and she is certified in Complex Change Theory and Strategic Visioning, as well as in Seminar in Field Instruction (SIFI) for Social Work Interns.
I’m so excited for you guys to connect with Jacqueline, check out her work, and follow along as she continues to support and empower an incredible community of women to pursue their fullest potential, and bring about personal and global change.
I'd love it if you'd introduce yourself, what you do, and what you're working on.
My name is Jacqueline Misla. I help women get clear on and find or create the career that aligns with their calling and the deepest potential of who they are.
As someone who spent over fifteen years in leadership roles and now consults with large agencies around strategic change and growth - I bore witness to the challenges that women face advancing in their careers and finding roles that they love.
I began coaching women three years ago, helping them craft structured, fun, non-traditional pathways towards their passion and potential. I have had the privilege of helping so many women get clarity, find direction, and navigate through the external barriers and the internal fear and doubt that got in the way of their joy and success. Helping them land or create their ideal jobs. More than that, I have helped them reintroduce possibility into their lives. Most women I work with are shifting careers, moving from a 9-5 to entrepreneurship, or are interested in a non-traditional career. After years of playing it safe and playing by the rules, they are ready to lean into their dream and need help making their big idea a reality.
Not every woman can afford to work with a coach, so I recently founded Crafting Your Path to provide content, resources, and community to help women move from information to inspiration to implementation. CYP exists for women who are no longer interested in following the prescribed path, and are ready to craft a career and a life that is true to who she is.
How did you get started?
I had three significant moments in my life which led to me to this work.
By thirty, I was married to a great guy, we had an incredible little girl, we lived in a huge apartment in New York, I had a fantastic job that I was really good at…essentially, I had all of the things that I had worked so hard for (and all of the things that I was taught would make me happy). And yet, there were times when I felt like: This is not my life. Now, I don’t mean: This life is so great, I don’t deserve it – though I certainly felt that at times. Instead I felt like: This is a beautiful life; it’s just not the life that was meant for me.
Growing up, I was acutely aware of the world and the role that I was supposed to play in it. I paid attention, I played my part, and I excelled at everything that I put my mind to. But it was almost like I was a character in a play – externally I played the part to fit into my surroundings, but the person inside didn’t fit in. It was like I was split in two – the external me and the internal me – and while the external me seemed to thrive, the internal me felt abandoned. I had no idea what kind of life was meant for me – but I knew that I had to find out.
That realization led to some difficult conversations with my husband (who, as it turns out, was also feeling unfulfilled). After 13 years together, we were not going to be able to partner each other through the next iteration of our life. We decided to go our separate ways and have crafted a beautiful friendship and co-parenting relationship. And I went about the work of figuring out who I really was and what I wanted out of life.
After a lot of self-work, I eventually got remarried – this time to an amazing woman who was in pursuit of personal growth just as much as I was. I lived in a neighborhood that I loved, excelled at a job that was important to me, changed my parenting style from preparing my daughter for the world to preparing her to know herself deeply in the world – and overall, I was really happy. And then everything changed.
Within a two-month span, I found out that my position was being eliminated after over a decade of work and that emotional infidelity had crept its way into my relationship. I felt blindsided. I thought that I was living my best life, and it felt like it was taken away from me. After months of trying to wrap my mind around what happened, I found myself sitting on the floor in my pajamas one day and again realizing that I needed to regain control of my life.
I had gone from leading large teams and managing multimillion-dollar budgets, to feeling overwhelmed by the idea of doing the dishes and the laundry all in one day. From thriving in a relationship where autonomy was prioritized, to following my wife around like a sad puppy. From feeling in control, to feeling lost. The earthquake which rocked my life unleashed inner demons that began to undermine my sense of self.
During the first life-changing moment, there was nothing really wrong – I just felt a pull towards something different and bigger. This second time, everything felt like it was wrong – and instead of being pulled, I had to push myself up and into the next chapter of my life.
Once again, I set forth on my path; one that would require me to listen and cry and scream and speak and write and draw and sit and fight. In time, I understood that the inner voice of self-doubt was driven by fear. Fear of being unlovable, fear of not living up to my potential, fear of wanting too much, and fear that the inner me could never have a place in the world.
Instead of suppressing the fear, I confronted it. Through personal work, coaching, creative expression, and time, I was able to connect to my inner self once more. I realized that though I had crafted a life that was more authentic to who I was, I had been limiting myself as a result of my judgement and fears. The truth was that I was capable of deeper impact in my work and deeper connection in my relationship; however before the earthquake my inner critic kept me blind to that truth. As painful as that second moment was in my life, it freed me to explore who I was and what I was capable of without external or internal restrictions.
After over a year of focused work, I found a self that was not regulated by external expectations or a negative internal narrative. This brought me to my third life-changing process: keeping the real me as close to the surface possible. After pushing back on the external expectations that were prescribed, and then working through the internal fear and doubt that limited what I believed was possible, the third stage was crafting a new life around the more authentic (and ever evolving) me, and reintroducing myself to the world.
I chose to craft a life where growth, possibility, and change was at the forefront of my personal and professional life. I focused my energy on creating the resources and community that I wished that I had during my life transitions. And as a coach, I began supporting women through their life changes - with a focus on career transitions, as financial independence, passion-aligned work, and a healthy work environment all have a positive domino effect in the other areas of a woman’s life.
I now have a number of clients across the country who I work with weekly, my team and I run monthly events in NYC, and we are growing our online community of women who see, understand, and support each other.
What inspired the work that you're doing?
After coming up for air from my personal and professional recalibration, I began to speak with other women about their journeys. I found the same patterns in their stories. All of these women were in the struggle to figure out who they were and what they wanted out of life beneath the layers of external expectations and internal self-doubt and fear.
What I heard from the women around me was that…
they worked really hard to fit into external expectations and craft lives that were expected of them
they felt like something was missing, but simultaneously felt tortured by an internal critic that was proclaimed that “they were not enough” and could not achieve their inner vision
some felt like their lives were pretty good, others felt like they were in the midst of turmoil, but all felt like they were not in tune enough with themselves enough to know – deeply know – how to navigate through the next stages of their life
And so through my conversations with these women, my experiences raising a daughter, and my work on myself – Crafting Your Path was born.
What is your biggest passion? Do you feel like you're living your passion and purpose?
I feel so grateful to be aligned with my passion and purpose. I get to experience the excitement and relief that comes when someone taps into their deeper knowing and creates a plan to manifest that knowing. Each time I am engaged in one of those conversations, I know that I am exactly where I am meant to be.
What is your joy blueprint? What lights you up, brings you joy, and makes you feel the most alive?
Interestingly enough, I found that the pursuit of happiness may have derailed me from experiencing joy. While focusing on building a life that would make me happy, I did not stop to just be - and as a result I did not experience the joy that spontaneously comes from being fully present in the moment. Now my goal is to be fully present where I am as much as possible. To stop and laugh, taste, dance, hug, sit in silence, look at something with awe, and get lost in conversation. After working so hard to do amazing things, I am now focused on being in amazing moments.
How do you live intentionally? Are there tools/resources/practices that you rely on to help you stay mindful and grounded?
To live intentionally, I need to stay connected to my inner knowing. The inside voice that sometimes speaks without words. It can be easy for that inner knowing to be drowned out by the voices of external expectations and the inner critic who is driven by fear and doubt. It is as if you cannot hear the GPS because the radio is too loud. In order to get to where you want to go, you need to tune out the distractions and tune into the directions. For me, tuning in includes writing, sitting quietly with myself, running, and talking through my feelings with those I love.
What would your younger self think about what you're doing now?
When I was fourteen I wrote a letter to myself. I found it a year ago, as I was looking through my old poetry and journal entries. In it, I talked about how hard it was to live up to external expectations and how lonely and frustrating it was to feel like I diminishing who I was to make others more comfortable. I wondered in the letter if I would be able to do it differently and have alignment between how I felt on the inside and how I lived on the outside. When I read that letter more than twenty years later, I cried. I felt so sad for the girl in that letter and so overwhelming joyful that my life now would make her proud.
Do you have a go-to mantra or affirmation?
Roots and wings. These two words provide the blueprint for my life. I want to have foundation, stability, and values and people that ground me; as well as dreams, experiences, and a connection to possibility that allows me to feel free.
What is your biggest dream?
I dream of continuing to do what I am doing now, except on a larger scale. I dream of events with thousands of women, traveling around the world speaking with women, writing, and continuing to support people with crafting their own path in life.
To learn more about Jacqueline and her work visit her website www.JacquelineMisla.com and www.CraftingYourPath.com and on Instagram @JacquelineMisla @CraftingYourPath and Facebook @CraftingYourPath
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