Founder of The Werk
Christina, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? How was your childhood and when did you become an entrepreneur?
Being a connector isn’t something that has ever felt like a conscious behaviour. Rather it’s been part of my identity and showed up in the role I played within my family from a young age. Starting at the age of 4 I was continually surprising my parents with visits from neighbours who I had invited into our home to join our family meals.
My parents nurtured different values; my mother was an artist and supported and nurtured my creativity and my father initially ran his business from our home, instilling the value of hard work and grit and, also, from the lens of someone pursuing success with only a grade 9 education.
After struggling with mental health, I made the decision to drop out of college. By starting my career in HR, I was introduced to organisational coaching and developed a foundational understanding of how to best support people in defining and reaching their goals and dreams.
With Werklab, I saw an opportunity to support those who were taking an alternative, non-linear path. At Werklab we set out to create an environment of care that would foster leadership and support them in cultivating their dreams.
You had a late learning disability diagnosed. How did this affect your teenage years and early adulthood?
Due to the traditional academic school system and the way in which it assessed intellect, I developed a self-limiting narrative that “I wasn’t smart enough”. This seeded feelings of self-doubt that lead to anxiety and other mental health disorders by the age of 14.
In my experience, the traditional school system did not support my learning because it failed to offer alternative methods to support how I metabolized information. I wasn’t until I was in grade 11 that I was diagnosed with a learning disability.
Through this experience I came to realise the power that I was granting to an external source in determining my value.
This created a new level of awareness - especially after dropping out of college. I learned to recognise that it was m y choice to leave, that I wasn’t going to let others define me and decided to take control of my own narrative. I made the choice to sit in the driver’s seat of my own life.
In 2016 you launched Werklab. How would you define it, and which is the mission behind it?
Werklab is a holistic wellness co-work space. We set out to support humans in taking care of themselves and their businesses, because our belief is that when we do the work within, the work we put out into the world is the right work that we were meant to be doing. We need more people creating from their heartspace and creating from their most authentic and connected self.
How was your journey towards entrepreneurship? Did you have any mentors or friends/family members that helped you during the process?
As someone who had challenges learning through conventional educational models, mentorship was fundamental for my personal development. I knew that to get the education that I needed, I would have to seek out and connect with others. Just as when I was young, I never felt intimidated to reach out as I felt I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. I pursued mentorship as my professional education. I have been fortunate enough to work with multiple mentors through my career - offering differing perspectives to add breadth to my understanding.
Because mentorship has been fundamental to my entrepreneurial path, I recognised the importance of passing-on what I’ve learned by providing support for others - especially young women - in a mentoring role.
What does it mean to be well at work?
To be well at work is to be in an energetic space that serves us to create and produce from our most authentic and connected self.
You are also Editor in Chief at The Werk. How have you been able to build such an expansive community interested in your content?
Our society has conditioned us to believe that work and life are two separates and when we speak about work life balance we tend to make a gesture of a scale of balance. I don’t believe that when you're working, you're not living. Our best work is when we are feeling “alive”. When I launched Werklab, we started to receive global recognition, not with a focus on the physical cowork space, but because our concept of integrating care for self in the context of work seemed revolutionary and appeared to resonate for so many. We knew that we wanted to share this ideology with the global collective and didn’t want didn’t want geography to limit our ability to cultivate a much needed dialogue. We wanted to position Werklab as the concept case study (ie. the “Lab” of the ethos”), and designed The Werk to be the metaphysical experience of it.
We were leading conversations from the understanding that we have one life and one body and we are going to do our best work - contributing to the world in our best way - when we are connected. Because our society celebrates separatism and it’s apparent in how we relate to work - we create suffering for ourself when they seem to seep into each other. As the consciousness of the world rises, and in a capitalistic system, we knew The Werk needed to support the dialogue around consciousness and how it relates and integrates into the age old patriarchal system of work.
How would you describe happiness? Do you think there’s a relation between being happy and a good working environment?
I love to use the word joy instead of happiness. Joy feels richer and more connected.
Joy is also often a byproduct of being in a state of flow. When we are doing our best work - we are in flow. We all have experienced it in some capacity - and to note, this state is not always connected to our professional work. When we are in flow we feel a sense of energy that is given back to ourselves - it’s regenerative. This is the place where we will find our deep quality of joy.
The work we do and where we do it is our largest part of our days. If we are having an experience that is depleting, it is going to be that much more of a stretch to access joy.
A lot of the work I do from a coaching and consulting perspective is about working with business owners to help them get connected to their “why”, what’s their source of fuel, that will then inspire their team to get in flow.
And how would you describe success?
This is a really important practice for someone to continually come back to. Success to me is living life in a manner of integrity to yourself, defined by a greater purpose where you feel that you are contributing in a meaningful way. For me, success is being able to go to bed at night with grace that you’ve done your best that day (to the best of your ability provided the conditions) for yourself and for others.
How are your personal dreams or goals intertwined with your business career goals?
I see them as inextricably linked. I feel deeply connected to my greater purpose of elevating humans, and that aligns to all corners of my life. We often see businesses as an extension of a founder’s way of being and so when we are connected to ourselves that will directly impact our business.
I had a big shift in how I relate to goals, adapting them from being externally focused to an internal sense of feeling. The shift was brought on from one of the earliest entrepreneurial learnings that “this too shall pass” - the lows and the high. We often will set goals. And then we reach them. And we believe that we will “arrive” somewhere (at “success” especially) and then there is another day, another year, another experience. Life is an experience and that means that what’s most important is to have our why and greater purpose guiding us so it doesn’t feel like a destination we’re trying to reach.
Typical goals can often be very cerebral - goal setting is future-focus, and often connected to planning. I find that with setting goals from the head versus the heart, it’s easier to feel thrown over issues of control, versus when we are leading a deeper-purpose it allows you to adapt, pivot and be resilient.
It will be easier to figure out “the how” when you are continuously connected to “the why”.
DISCOVER her london guide
CHRISTINA – Wellness Guide
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Meditation App and installations - Co-founder Chris Connors has been an incredible influence and mentor in my life. Through OPO, he and his partner Elliot Cox are revolutionizing mindfulness digitally. OPO evokes an experience through engaging with space through meditation, taking us outside of our minds, and integrating with the outside world. Chris is a key reason why I moved to London.
