Live Big Community is dedicated to empowering & equipping ADOLESCENTS and the people who support them with PowerFULL, life-changing mental health skills

Lex’s Origin Story

When I was 17 years old, my mum (not a typo; I’m Australian!) brought home The Princess Bitchface Syndrome: Surviving Adolescent Girls, a book written by prominent psychologist Michael Carr Gregg. 

I was outraged at having everything I was going through reduced to a syndrome as if there was something wrong with me and my company was something to survive.

I shared all this with my Mum who said, “Well Lex, why don’t you do something about it?”

Challenge accepted.

I immediately wrote a revenge book, Dealing with Mother, a Survival Guide for Teenage Girls, which I filled with my own life stories to help other teens feel less alone and learn the communication skills required to deal with their parents. 

While my book never made it beyond a manuscript, what it did do is clarify three things for me: 

  1. There is power in sharing your stories

  2. If support is not relatable and shame-free, it’s not going to work

  3. My life mission is to help teenage girls

Despite having this clarity in my early twenties, I attended law school and pursued a corporate career in sales, learning and development, and facilitation. 

While in my corporate job, I trained as a counselor, specializing in trauma and child and adolescent development…I was beginning to reconnect to my purpose.

Breean’s Origin Story

I don’t have many clear memories from my teenage years – I really did my best to disconnect and dissociate during those years. 

It was a time marked by equal parts trying to shrink and hide and a bottomless need for attention and external validation. 

My highly polished people-pleasing skills and my desire to prove my worth through how much I could do and achieve led to a Master’s Degree, a successful corporate career, and 15 years of inauthenticity, exhaustion, and total burnout.  

After spending several years researching behavior change, consulting on culture change initiatives, and creating skill-based leadership training programs, I shifted my focus from striving for success to healing myself. 

I practiced kundalini yoga, trained in yoga nidra, connected to my mind, body, and spirit, reparented my inner child, and became certified in somatic experiencing trauma therapy.

All of this clarified a few things for me:

  • Self-observation is a superpower that can be created, like any other skill set

  • Self-connection and self-acceptance allow us to live authentically and be at ease with ourselves…they are precursors to inner peace

  • What we need to UNLEARN is perhaps even more important than what we need to learn in this lifetime – unraveling the limiting beliefs and patterns that no longer serve us creates more choice in our lives

Live Big Community’s Origin Story

One day, as Breean is known to do, she sat Lex down for lunch, stared into her soul, and asked, “what are you doing?” 

As in, “what are you doing with your life?” 

Lex shared her dream of building a company that ran workshops for teenage girls to help them go into the world confidently, connected with who they are. 

Breean, having had similar dreams of her own, understood instantly. 

The universe was listening…

A week later Breean ran into her neighbor, the local superintendent. 

He had just won multi-year grant funding for mental health programs and he was looking for partners. What does Breean do? She described the programs that she and Lex had dreamed up together over lunch. 

The superintendent asked for an overview by the end of the week.

Breean called Lex immediately, leaving THIS voicemail:

Since that fateful voicemail, Live Big Community has expanded to support adolescents (grades 4-12) and school staff across the United States so they can build mental health skills.

What began with workshops facilitated by Lex and Breean has expanded to a growing community of Guides – school counselors, educators, and mental health staff dedicated to helping students create more confidence, resilience, and self-leadership by connecting with their minds, bodies, and characters.