Doing Good Now: Alchemizing Our Stories into Change | with Alaina Shearer

After fleeing an abusive relationship, becoming a single mom, and nearly losing everything, Alaina Shearer rebuilt her career by learning digital and tech. In the span of just five years, she climbed from making $8 an hour to running a small business that generates nearly $2 million per year in revenue. 

In 2016, Alaina created a national network for women in digital and tech, now called Together Digital, where she fought fearlessly for equal pay and opportunity. Then, in 2020, she continued to fight for positive change as a congressional candidate for Ohio’s 12th district.

Today, she’s hooked on bringing more good to the world by building lasting movements for purpose-driven brands through Good Now, an agency dedicated to doing good and accelerating the speed of positive change.

What Brett asks:

• [05:10] Let’s start at the beginning
• [11:15] What was it like growing up with these strong, loving, entrepreneurial influences?
• [16:40] Tell me a little more about the mental health challenges that your mother was struggling with.
• [24:18] What was it like coping with the grief of losing your father?
• [35:25] How did life start to unfold as a young adult?
• [38:22] What drove you to start over in your career?
• [42:55] Were you married when you started your business? Where did you get the strength to leave an abusive relationship?
• [53:18] We should live life, have our experiences, and use them for our benefit and for the benefit of others. Right?
• [56:30] Tell us about your run for Congressional office.

Lessons for intentional living:

• We all deal with grief differently. Some of us completely shut down, some of us throw ourselves into work, some of us face it head on — and there’s no right or wrong way to cope. It never gets any easier. You miss them like hell every single day, but you learn how to live with it. “The way I describe it is it’s as if I have a third arm that you can’t see. No one else can see it, but I can feel it, and it’s here with me every single day, and I just learn how to walk around with it. I learn how to accommodate it. But for me, that was the very beginning of learning how to get through this.”
• Lifting yourself up after experiencing a challenge in your life, like the loss of a loved one, can make you stronger. When you really put it in perspective, you can face new challenges. “It doesn’t make the things that you go through in life any easier. It’s not like a magic power or anything… this is obviously horrendous and awful, but I have got to figure out how to use this as a strength, and that’s what my father would have wanted me to do.”
• If you have a story that needs to be told, do whatever you can to get it out there. These stories need to be shared. They’re very cathartic and they’re very healing for everyone involved — and when used to their greatest potential, just sharing these stories can be an incredible service to help others.

Resources:

• Twitter: @alainashearer
• Instagram: @alainashearer2020 | @alainashearer_
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alainashearer
• Good Now
• Together Digital
• Alaina Shearer for Congress