My Story

Where at the BROOKe Began

For six months, dream after dream after dream became a reality one right after another…

After a decade of praying for some of these things, we were experiencing so many answers to these prayers consecutively. We had been praying… well, I can say we, but it was I. I had been praying for them for years, standing in the gap for my family, and suddenly they were happening.

God led us here. God provided so many confirmations and blessings as we traveled into this unknown… and it all led us here.

Led us to this place, this home where we would raise our children, play with our grandchildren, have holidays for generations… for the rest of our lives.

That assurance lasted three months.

Over the course of a few days, it all came crashing down.

We put the house up for sale and started packing.

Then we left.

We sold what we couldn't fit in two trailers, packed up our six children (ages 2-9), and our dog and cat, and moved from Colorado to Alaska. Our third move in ten months, this move was 3000 miles away to accept jobs in schools we had never visited, and rent a house sight-unseen.

We needed a fresh start in so many aspects of the word… and Alaska gave us that.

After the whiplash of our last six months in Colorado, Alaska allowed all of us to pause and take stock of what had just happened. Alaska was exactly what we needed - a wonderful place for our family to recalibrate, expand our wings, and learn to dream again. My husband loved what he was doing for work. Our children were showing resiliency and making new friends.

All of us, even our two pets, were adjusting as best we could.

The truth was, I had brought every hat I wore in Colorado with me to Alaska… and juggling it all was not sustainable anymore. We found so many things we were desiring in this new place, but I was stretched beyond my capacity as a mother, a teacher, homemaker, and wife after a move I never expected to make… and it started showing.

I had less patience at home with my children, my dog, my cat and my husband.

After a particularly memorable tantrum of mine in September 2023 where my outburst included throwing a fork at the wall, I told my husband I was getting worried about myself:

He had not been home when I threw the fork, so while he knew I was stressed, the full magnitude of my unraveling was really only being witnessed by my six children ages 9-2. These innocent, loving children, so full of joy and spark, and curiosity and happiness. These children who were doing their best to adjust to our third move in one year and they were watching their mother become a monster.

I saw my doctor and we talked about all I had on my plate and how many changes had happened in our life over the past 18 months.

She agreed that all the transition was enough to increase stress and anxiety.

I left her office with a prescription for a mild antidepressant.

In the winter of 2023, I yelled a little less. Slept more.

I still kept up with our daily hamster wheel of getting all the kids all the places, all the student reports done, all the IEPs written, all the meals thrown together, all the clothes washed and dried (never folded)…

But when my family slept, I moved less. Smiled less.
Binge-watched shows like, "How to Murder your husband without getting caught."
Started buying Reese Fast Break candy bars in bulk and keeping them in my nightstand.

On a sunny day in late February, I was fed up with how I spent my lazy, apathetic winter and I agreed to go sledding with the kids. Alaskan sledding where my husband drives the truck and lets the sled riders off on the side of the road, and the sledders slide down a mile or so of back-country terrain down to where he parks the truck at a lower part of the mountain. Finally feeling the sun on my face, and smiling with my kids for the first time in months, we had such a fun ride down the mountain… until my sled crashed.

My fast-paced hamster wheel suddenly stopped indefinitely.

By the grace of God, I was able to use community sick bank leave to be paid while I was home resting and recovering otherwise, this injury would have financially RUINED us.

But during this time of therapy, surgery and recovery, a funny thing happened.

Our home ran so much smoother with me home, INJURED, moving at 25% capacity, than it had when I was 100%, working full time and doing everything full speed.

That WOKE ME UP.

I started playing BINGO on my phone… if I could figure out a way to get paid WHILE I was home, in a way that didn't require surgery and months of PT, that would be amazing!!!

Well, online BINGO was not the answer, but in early May, an opportunity caught my attention with a lot more promise than online BINGO.

I saw a Facebook post about someone who had replaced her income as a dental hygienist after just a few months of starting an online business. She was now working from home with her kids home with her and no longer attending daycare.

I had clicked on a few posts about earning money online, but they always included videos of a twenty-something kid in a bikini earning money from a beach while she applied baby oil. I never went past the landing page because I didn't trust the twenty-something, and I couldn't relate to her at all!

This Facebook post was by a fellow wrestling mom. I had met her before. Her son wrestled with my son. She wasn't some lying influencer. She wasn't a young college dropout in a bikini.

She was a married, hard-working mom of littles… just like I was.
She had a career she had worked hard to establish through degrees, internships, and years of experience… just like I had.
And, best of all… this was the real kicker…
I knew where to find her on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights because her son wrestled with my son.

This may sound dark (but I already admitted to you that I threw a fork and had turned into a monster, so there's no point in pretending now…), but I really did NOT believe her. I wanted to believe her. I wanted to learn more, but I was COMPLETELY skeptical of whatever illegal invisible snake oil this woman was peddling… and I wanted to KNOW there was no way she could disappear into cyberspace with my money and my mother's maiden name.

I sent her a few messages. I was pretty rude with my responses… I wanted to know more, but I would commit to NOTHING. Once I got my hands on the first video, I watched it on repeat.

This made sense to me.

I didn't understand every nuance… but the whole thing excited me.

I KNEW I could do this.

Over the next two weeks, I watched the masterclass video about 20 times, and sent it to the people I trusted most who I knew would be completely honest with me – my husband, my parents, and my brother.

If there was a trip-wire somewhere that I was missing, THESE guys would see it for me.

They all asked discerning questions, but in the end, they could not find a catch. They gave no red flags at the prospect of my moving forward and actually getting on a zoom call with this wrestling mom.

I went into that meeting guns blazing.

I had 25 questions written down, pen poised, and both of my parents sitting beside me.

My hubby was at work, or he would have been there as well.

I was a debater in high school, and so I came ready to interrogate every angle of her story, the company, the comp plan, and discover the catch that I knew had to be there somewhere.

How do you respond when the thing you're hoping really is what it says it is… turns out to be true?

What do you do when you really can find NO tripwire? No hidden fees? No catch?

Do you keep looking for one… or trust and jump?

I knew if I was determined to find a reason not to move forward, I could eventually find one. I can go online right now and find someone somewhere claiming that the sky is green and 2+2 = 5. I was done looking for the problem, and ready to believe two things:

My husband and I did not have the capital lying around to invest the way we wanted to (five products from day 1), and, truthfully, I probably would have let the price stop me from moving forward. We didn't have the money and we didn't have the credit for a loan or new credit card at the time (we were still paying the mortgage on a home for sale in Colorado plus renting our home in Alaska).

Married nearly 13 years at the time, I had had thousands of conversations with my husband by that point. Most of them are foggy in my memory… but not the one that came next.

Chris and I sat down together without distraction and he asked me if I really wanted to do this. I didn't answer his question.

I still didn't answer his question, "I really think I can do this! This makes so much sense to me and I know I'm not the only teacher mom killing herself for her family! I know other mothers who need to hear about this. This could change so many lives!"

We had the money about ten days later, and I officially launched my business on June 1, 2024.

I knew I knew NOTHING about how this business worked, so this business became my new obsession! I attended every training session. I listened to many podcasts every day. I read every book my mentors recommended. I applied the exact blueprint my mentors outlined and never cut a single corner.

I checked every box, dotted every i, crossed every t.

I took advantage of every opportunity offered.

By the time I celebrated one year in my business in June 2025 and attended our global convention, I had retired from teaching.

I had done exactly what I had set out to do… I replaced my teaching income and MORE! I hit my highest income month in August 2025 right as my kids were starting school (and I was starting my FIRST school year as a WORK FROM HOME MAMA) - $9,000 in commissions in a single month. It was really working!!!

That's important.

Because this would be a much simpler story if the business model hadn't worked for me.

It did.

I did exactly what I had been taught to do. I worked the system. I watched the system work. I watched the system duplicate. I was praised and called the "most coachable person" mentors had ever worked with… a coach's dream.

I thought that was the end of the story.

Turns out, it was barely the beginning.

The obvious conclusion should have been: Keep going.

Instead, that success exposed a problem I hadn't been willing to see.

I was getting better at building a business I didn't actually want.

The more successful I became, the more people there were to support. The more people I supported, the more conversations, calls, onboarding, training and follow-up filled my calendar.

Many of the people I was helping still worked traditional jobs, which meant the hours they had available to build their businesses were often my nights and weekends.

I had left my job because I wanted greater ownership of my time, yet somehow, I had built a business that still revolved around everyone else's work schedules. This was not okay… and the issue wasn't going to go away as long as I continued to help the working mothers I had such a desire to help.

… And there was another clue I kept ignoring:

A mentor flippantly described my incredibly successful future to me a few times: extraordinary income, homeschooling my children, and eventually becoming so good at sales that I only needed to run two or three sales calls each day.

It was meant to inspire me.

Instead, I kept thinking:

What happens when the system you're using works, but you don't want the destination it is designed to reach?

For a long time, my answer was to try harder… nose to the grindstone.

Five partners signed paperwork with me in January 2026… and not one actually secured financing, purchased products, or started a business.

There was NO way this was a coincidence!!!

I had only learned a little about energy… but this seemed clear. I knew and understood the tremendous work and time commitment involved in welcoming new partners… and even when I GOT multiple people who wanted to work with me, I somehow blocked those people from actually working with me.

This wasn't a mindset block.

This was a real gap in the system that wasn't going away.

In February 2026, I started asking different questions:

When I started my business, I felt SO good about my decision because of what I had taken the time to learn beforehand.

How could I empower others with knowledge to feel just as excited and self-confident about the decision to start their business as I had when I started mine?

… and the questions kept coming…

Why was I training people to duplicate a sales process, when everyone is individual and might not want the same things from their business?

Could someone build through vendor events while another person built through networking, teaching or masterclasses, and another built through writing, automation or community connections?

And perhaps most importantly:

Why did we all need to build the same way?

I started learning from people outside the business world in which I'd originally been trained.

My understanding of entrepreneurship exploded.

I learned about funnels and automation. Lead generation. Value-first marketing. Live events. Digital products. Intellectual property. Different kinds of content. Different sales processes.

The more I learned, the less sense it made to me that there could be one prescribed path for everyone.

Then, in March 2026… it happened… a mentor asked me to explain my sales process.

So I did.

I described everything that happened from the first interaction with a prospect through the conversations, videos, confirmations, sales call, financing, coaching, purchasing, onboarding, launch and eventually helping that new person repeat the process with someone else.

When I finished, she asked:

Isn't that exhausting?

You should have seen my face.

Was I allowed to admit that YES, it is a whole lot of exhausting to have that many back and forths with one prospect?

Then she suggested something I had never considered:

Maybe my business wasn't growing the way I wanted because the process I was using had been created by somebody else - for the business and life they wanted.

Maybe in order to have a business that worked for me, I was going to have to CREATE my OWN business - my own system that worked for the life I wanted!

That landed hard.

Nearly two years after becoming an entrepreneur, I finally understood:

I had spent an enormous amount of time learning how to build A business

But I never stopped to consider how I wanted to build MY business…

I stopped asking what I was supposed to do.

I stopped being the "most coachable" mentee a coach could ever want!

I stopped following someone else's step-by-step method.

I started with a blank page.

Because people don't arrive in business as interchangeable parts.

We have different experiences, strengths, interests, relationships, responsibilities, personalities and seasons of life.

Someone else's brilliant strategy may be completely wrong for me.

Something I would hate doing may be exactly where another person comes alive.

The person building the business isn't separate from the strategy. The person is part of the strategy.

That helped me finally name a contradiction I had felt for a long time:

I was being encouraged to be authentic without being given room to be an individual.

So I built my own room… made my own space… and from all of that, at the BROOKe emerged.

I did not discover a new formula everyone should follow.

In fact, the opposite is true…

I began pulling together what I had learned from education, entrepreneurship, business strategy, mentorship, personal development, motherhood, success, failure and exploration… and MY OWN JOURNEY.

I began listening to my unique intuition that had been trying to speak all along… and I created something that could only come from me… Brooke.

As a person who disliked her first name her entire life, I realized the habitat for my coaching method was housed in my name the entire time… a brook.

So many tears flowed, the day that lens became clear.

And once I understood the significance and authenticity of my name as the geography for my sales and coaching process, I saw how the transformation of water could mirror the transformation of a person. In a true, full-circle moment, I found myself equating a person's hidden originality to that of a Petoskey stone.

Growing up near the beaches of Lake Michigan, hunting for Petoskey stones was part of my childhood. Found along the shores of Lake Michigan and formed from ancient coral, when dry, Petoskey stones look like plain, ordinary gray rocks. When water touches them, though, it's like magic. A completely unique pattern, invisible unless the stone is wet, is revealed.

Inspired by what water reveals in a Petoskey stone, and my own journey to this point, my philosophy found its structure:

Reflect. Carve. Surge.

Reflect before automatically adopting someone else's answer. Understand who you are, what matters to you, what you want and what is actually true.

Carve with what you discover. Learn the principles. Gather strategies. Use your strengths. Adapt and adjust what serves you, change what doesn't, experiment and create.

Then Surge with the contribution only you can make. No two people should build the same business, so prepare to build beyond this place of training and coaching. As you find your voice, prepare to share it as your business becomes YOURS.

And I knew there was one more requirement.

Whatever I created next needed to be built on land I owned.

I wanted responsibility for the resources and education I promised people. I wanted the ability to improve them, update them and expand them. I wanted the freedom to explore ideas without needing someone else's permission.

But ownership didn't mean I wanted to build another place people could never leave.

I wanted the opposite.

I don't believe the highest measure of mentorship is how long someone remains dependent on the mentor.

I believe great mentorship expands what someone becomes capable of doing without you.

That's what I'm building.

And I need to tell you something else while the story is still being written:

I am not standing at the finish line telling you I found the answer.

I'm standing inside MY business… exactly where I should be.

Because at the BROOKe wasn't born when I finally figured out the right way to build.

It was born when I stopped believing there had to be one.

The life you want isn't found. It's built.
For the first time, I'm building mine.