We are pleased to introduce you to one of our beloved ModernWell members who lights up any room she is in and shares her gifts of uplifting and illuminating women within the ModernWell community and beyond!
Hello! Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Dorothy-Inez, I am a holistic confidence and well-being coach for women entrepreneurs. I am known as the Queen of Shine because I help women to show up and shine from the inside out through the power of beauty and sacred self-care.
You had come to ModernWell and left for a period of time, what brought you back to ModernWell?
I came back to ModernWell because of the shift that I saw in ModernWell after the George Floyd incident. I love seeing and being around other women who have the same goals as I do, but also being around women who look like me is really important to me. To see ModernWell really take what happened here in Minneapolis as a call to action and be part of the change was really inspiring to me. I love being at ModernWell because it feels like home.
Self-care is a shared value of ModernWell and your business, what self-care practice could you not live without?
I have so many! But honestly, I couldn’t live without my spiritual practices. You know connecting to spirit and God is so important to my way of being and living that I couldn’t live without God, and I have to add music! They are almost synonyms for me because it is through music that I encounter God. I sing every day and that’s how I connect to God; I also read my devotional or some kind of spiritual reading, sometimes I do cards and all of these are ways that I connect with spirit.
I know that in your work with women, spirituality can come in different ways. Can you talk more about how you can be spiritual without believing in God?
I believe we are all spiritual beings, having a human experience. You don’t necessarily need to believe in God to have a spiritual experience. Doing things like going out into nature can be spiritual for some, having soulful conversations that really impact the heart is another way that one can connect with their spirit. Getting to know themselves is one of the greatest things I teach in my work – identity and knowing who you are. The way I teach it is you know who you are in terms of your oneness with the divine source, the divine creator. However, someone who doesn’t believe in God can connect with just who they are, which in itself can be a divine experience, to be in love with who you are created to be and the gift that you are.
You have been coaching for a while and you are now opening a physical location. Can you talk about your journey and the path that led you here?
I have been coaching for 13 years. I started as a beauty and self-love coach back in 2010 when I was 40 years old, and that was the beginning of the beginning for me. I was a woman who was filled with anger and didn’t really love myself. I left the corporate world to become a professional makeup artist, and when women sat in my chair I began to see what they struggled with. I was working with really successful women and celebrities and no matter who you are, every woman was coming to the chair with the same thing: self-doubt. She wonders if she looks good, if she is pretty enough, and I realized that what I was doing was more than makeup. What I was doing was uplifting them and helping them to see who they really are and to experience themselves as beautiful. It was more than just painting a face and putting a mask on. So, when I was in college getting my master’s degree my thesis work was in the area of confidence. I am actually a published author in academic journals on the topic of confidence. I also became a health coach during the pandemic, and then I went to school to become a pastor, which didn’t work out. I bring all of this together and that is why it is holistic confidence, because I am able to assist a woman at every level – the outside woman which is a reflection of the inside. I am also able to help that woman step into her own so she can realize a true and authentic confidence, not fake confidence. It is a confidence that comes from knowing who you are. As I step into my own confidence I’m owning all of who I am and that is I am a healer. A lot of times people ask me what I do and I do a lot of things, so my coach helped me create an umbrella which is the Shine Collective. The Shine Collective is a community of women that I am developing. It also encompasses a personal development leg where we do workshops and classes hosted by myself and other women experts. I am all about sisterhood and uplifting other women, so I am inviting my other sisters who complement my work to teach workshops out of the Shine Collective. Then you have the Shine Sanctuary, a healing space where women can come and receive healing through energy medicine. We use vibroacoustic sound therapy modalities to facilitate their healing. That’s what I am doing and I love what I get to do and how I get to serve women and facilitate sisterhood.
Why is confidence important?
You know confidence right now is really important, especially in a digital age for girls who have not really come to this fullness of self-awareness and they are not grounded in who they are. When a woman or girl is not grounded in who they are it opens them up to being influenced by social media, so you end up presenting a fake version of yourself. You get messages of not being good enough, smart enough, or pretty enough, and then you add in the AI factor that can make you look so different. I don’t mind using a filter, but when you filter yourself so much to the point you are not even recognizable, that’s a problem. Being confident helps you to navigate your way through the artificial age in a way that is healthy, rather than it taking you down. I was just watching a show where little girls are becoming anorexic because they see these things on social media. So confidence is really important and not just that ‘fake it till you make it’, that’s not real. What’s real is that authentic confidence when you know who you are and you stand in it boldly and unabashedly and you own your truth because that is where beauty lies, the makeup, and all that stuff just enhances what is already there.
Who Is your biggest inspiration?
I have two, Jesus and Prince. Jesus is my inspiration regarding how I should show up in the world, which is unconditional love. Prince invites me to be all of who I am unapologetically. I came to this earth full and together they invite me to leave empty, to leave nothing unsaid, unshared, and to give all of who I am.
