Community Highlights: Meet Lizzy Pérez

Hi Lizzy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself
Growing up in a large family of eight in a small, rural community in South Texas as a gay, Latina, Catholic, teenager was quite the adventure of beautiful chaos and much love. My father served as a supervisor of a Mobile Oil plant for 35 years, a handyman, and mayor of our town and my mother was a stay-at-home mom, catechism teacher, and eucharistic minister for our local church. During my childhood early on, I knew I was drawn to teams and sports. Being active and moving was my outlet which made sense that Kinesiology would end up becoming my area of study in my undergraduate work.Another part of me was also fascinated with the arts, literature, poetry, and anything geared towards self-awareness and leadership. Into my early adult years before my career profession began, I was a summer camp counselor for abused and neglected children and a resident assistant in the dormitories. Because I was an athlete all through grade school and into college, I focused more on that and considered it to be my ticket out of small, rural Texas America. I wanted to move to a larger, urban, and more diverse setting. I received a scholarship to play both volleyball and basketball at a junior college in Kansas and finished my degree at Texas State University in San Marcos. It was not until then did I move and spend the next 14 years in Dallas.

It was there that I started my education career and became a school teacher at the high school level and coached for ten years. Leadership interests pushed me into the direction of educational administration and I served as school administrator for the next 10 years in Texas and Indiana. A position at Education Service Center, Region 20 here in San Antonio helped me to grow my skills in group facilitation, life coaching and consulting. I was hooked and knew I had landed in an avenue that felt completely and utterly natural. After 5 years, I was interested in creating my own department and was convinced to join another top workplace in San Antonio, AIM, consulting.

As soon as Covid-19 hit, it was then I knew my opportunity to begin my own business in leadership coaching and consulting was more within reach. Six months before that I had just started my Ph.D. and became certified by Brené Brown as a Certified Dare to Lead Facilitator. These metaphorical arenas I am finding myself entering keep narrowing my niche and allowing me to integrate all of the parts that make me who I am. As a result, this allows me to help leaders to do the same and invest in being introspective, self-actualizing,  and developing self-awareness.

As I approach my almost two-year anniversary, my vision is not necessarily grand, but purposeful and deeply intentional at the core. I have had the chance to work with many school districts, nonprofits, and organizations in meaningful work on emotional intelligence, wellness, and leadership in various capacities at a variety of levels of organizational readiness. I have learned so much about starting from the ground up with my business and manifesting all that I value to be naturally aligned with Lizzy Perez, LLC.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road is never smooth and I cherish the gift in the rockiness of the road. The practice of resilience has been refined over my entire life. I have been fortunate to have had parents, family, and friends who love me and have played a part in my overcoming of struggles. I have managed to pick myself up, bounce back, and start again and I promise you there has been angst, anguish, disappointment, tears in all of it. Without a doubt, there have been celebrations, successes, and fulfillment beyond belief.

Challenges have become a part of my story and I hold them close as a remembrance of the skills I acquired as a result of that rough uphill battle. Starting a business during Covid-19 has been life-changing, debilitating, flourishing, downright hard, and freeing all at the same time. Most difficult to me is that I am at my best when I can collaborate with a team. Being a team of one makes that hard.

Yet at the same time, it allows me to bounce off ideas with other community members and friends that are either in the same arena of consulting and coaching or from other sectors. Another hardship is not necessarily having a background in “business”. This has made me more vulnerable to areas that I have limited information, therefore having to rely on others to teach me. In addition, I have had to downright utilize more time in self-teaching and learning.

Then, it leads to spending less time on my content curation and preparation of delivery which is the service my clients are buying, after all. I finally feel I have a rhythm that is giving me back that time. Strategic calendaring and honoring my calendar is important to me to help stay focused.

We’ve been impressed with Lizzy Perez, LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I jumped into the arena, the metaphorical arena of which Brené Brown speaks. I have had my hand on the door and I had excuses for not walking into the largest arena I have been in quite some time. After 28 years in the education industry, I decided to own my own business. Sometimes in the mucky-muck of things, like a global pandemic and losing one’s job, if you look at things a certain way, you might find the patches of light. Well, for me, the light was shining on this endeavor like never before.

I knew it was time. Lizzy Perez, LLC’s mission is to evoke awareness and stimulate worthwhile change in self and others. My coaching, facilitation, and consulting revolve around emotional intelligence, personal ecology, and the human and authentic side of leadership. You will find thought provoking trainings, inspiring, and action-centered coaching and consulting that build everlasting results. This is a consulting business focused on the leadership and personhood of the leader.

I am not that leadership coach and consultant who wants to help my clients gather and disaggregate data on benchmarks, create crisis management plans, provide intervention master plans or facilitate classroom strategies workshops. I can definitely do that because I do have that experience. Those are not the leadership skills I want to help others enhance.

I have come to realize that my biological makeup and inherent intuition plastered with my tacit knowledge is something to not only be proud of as it makes up my personhood ,but it can be taught and transferred. Most importantly, these skills are beneficial to acquire especially in today’s times. These so-called, non-technical skills comprising a person’s emotional agility are where I landed on as a focus for my business.

This is the foundation of my work, my purpose, my why. The goal at Lizzy Perez, LLC is to capitalize on guiding clients to the “person” of the leader as that has empirically been proven to be more influential than theory or techniques. This is a journey of leadership and personhood.

How do you think about luck?
I like to think that good fortune has followed me and not always in terms of financial wealth, but spiritual wealth. All that resides within my personal ethos is more than just my values.

It is all that about the way I show up in the world which then becomes the legacy I hope to leave. In my legacy, I hope to leave with others that I care and love deeply for people and listen to and learn from their own lived experiences. Also, this legacy I hope to have shared a few gifts of life and love skills.

Whether good luck or bad luck has played a part in my life and business, I like to think that mountains of troubles, sorrow, grief and downtrodden times have at the same time set the path for the spiritual wealth I have managed to acquiesce.Through this acquiescence, I am able to view “bad luck” as a stepping stone in the journey itself.  Life has definitely thrown me curveballs. Those curveballs just may show up with less of a curve than before as a result of my continued practice of resilience and regulating of my nervous system. Most importantly, having a community to help support me in those moments, makes the journey undoubtedly less cumbersome.

Contact Info: