The varied, and a little wild, journey that built the foundation of becoming a virtual assistant.
When people hear the name of my business, I usually tell them it came from some personal changes I made a few years ago. And that’s true. But the full story? That took closer to two decades, and honestly, I’m still working on it.
Here’s where it really started.
The Early Years (aka: I Was a Handful)
Growing up in the 70s and 80s,. I acted on emotion first and thought about it later,usually after the damage was done. And, there seemed to be a trail of collateral damage. By the mid-80s I knew something had to change, but I had no idea where to start. I didn’t even know who I was yet.
I served in the Coast Guard, picked up some solid skills there, and landed a few decent jobs on the back of that experience. But they never lasted long. My mouth and my emotions had a way of getting there before my brain did.
A Decade That Shaped Everything
Eventually I landed a job as a line worker at a frozen food manufacturing plant. Not glamorous. Sitting on the line gave me motion sickness. The manager would just punch me in the arm and tell me I could suck it up. I learned to adjust by looking up the line and the items coming at me, not wheezing by me. Motion sickness cured. But something shifted there. I’d come through some real challenges to get to that point, and I made a promise to myself that things were going to be different.
So I got to work. I soaked up everything I could, and within a year and a half I was promoted to Quality Assurance Superintendent. I wrote every SOP and GMP for our HACCP changeover. I learned to adjust product formulas for 2,000-pound batches, and I am genuinely terrible at math, so that tells you something.
More than the technical skills though, I learned to stay calm when things went sideways. And in food manufacturing, things went sideways regularly. My job was to contain the situation, figure out what happened, put a fix in place so it wouldn’t happen again, and document everything. Every. Single. Time.
Have to walk into the plant manager’s office and tell him his whole day’s run is on hold for a compliance or safety issue? You better have your paperwork in order and your voice steady because back then tempers were often exuded in the workplace. That’s where I really started practicing calm over chaos, not as a concept, but as a skill. But this only applied to my job, in real life and personal habits were a train wreck.
The Decade That Locked It In
I left food and moved to Texas to get into the pet industry. I’d worked in a vet clinic back in high school, done some grooming salon work in Colorado, and decided this was the direction I wanted. What followed was a full decade of learning, kennel work, pet sitting, dog massage therapy, grooming at Petco, then 10 years as a solo contract groomer. I also became a Level 2 Reiki practitioner, partly to manage my own energy and partly because animals and their people pick up on everything.
That last part is not a small thing. When you’re working with animals, your energy is your most important tool. A nervous groomer makes a nervous dog. An anxious pet sitter makes an anxious pet. If you show up to clients house angry, loud or in mental chaos, chances are your going to have a hard time getting that pet to let you in, let alone get near it with clippers and shears. The ability to stay calm no matter what was happening on the grooming table, or with a dog who’s family is away from home, was genuinely one of the most valuable things I ever developed.
At the same time, I built a nine-year Etsy shop selling dog bows and fancy collars, then transitioned into custom handmade wood and acrylic hair accessories for humans and did that for quite some time. That chapter taught me about customer relationships in a way no business course ever could. People trusted me with their dogs and their pets and many Europeans trusted me with their long hair. Some of them felt like family. That kind of trust is earned slowly, and I never forgot it.
The Part That Tied It Together
During those years I also met my husband. He has a saying that still runs through my head several times a week:
“Don’t let the situation define who you are. It’s how you react to it.”
That’s the whole thing, really.
All of those years, the chaos, the mistakes, the animals, the compliance reports, the Etsy shop, the grooming sessions that could have gone badly and didn’t, they all pointed to the same truth. Calm is not something you either have or you don’t. It’s something you practice. You build systems for it. You create habits that make it easier to get there faster when things get hard. I still struggle at times just like everyone else and have to recognize what’s going on in my head, and try to correct it intentionally.
That’s what Calm Over Chaos Virtual Office is built on. Not a catchy name. A lived-in one.