Finding Your Purpose: Life Coach Devyn Penney Shares Her Experience Reaching Where She Is Today
When confronted with difficult times it is comforting to know that there can be someone who shares their guidance and motivates you to continue striving for what you are searching for in life. Devyn Penney is a life coach based in New York that is open to helping anyone who needs it. With a kind and inviting personality, and the ability to share words that fit any life situation, Devyn is someone to support and admire.
What is a life coach exactly? Devyn describes it as taking the role of helping people transition and transform themselves to the “highest self-place in their life.” The difference between a life coach and a therapist is that therapy focuses on a person’s past to try and figure out how it affects the present. While a life coach, like Devyn, is looking at the present day, “and how I can help you to identify patterns and habits, and change some things to get you moving forward and where you want to be in the future,” she shared.
Working with a life coach can be a transformative experience, from beginning to end. “It’s just about me helping people guide themselves to a place of just really true authenticity and doing what they believe is in their purpose,” Devyn said.
Photo credit: Devyn Penney
Devyn’s life purpose of helping others as a life coach did not come so easy. She has an astonishing background that has molded and helped her get to where she is today. From a young age, Devyn started working in retail and eventually worked her way up to the front of the store to help customers.
This was when she started to see a lot of women come into the store with a similar issue, having so much in their closets but feeling that they had nothing to wear. This sparked something in Devyn that led her to start helping women in their transformation of confidence with their clothes. “I was obsessed almost with this idea that something external could internally change somebody so, so quickly and so profoundly and so I started going into my customers’ closets when they would say things like that, and I would organize closets,” she shared.
By age 17, she was a closet organization specialist and had a personal shopping and styling business. Thinking that fashion was the realm and niche that she wanted to be in, Devyn moved to New York to go to fashion school. Then she ended up having an opportunity to buy a clothing line with a partner when she was 20-years-old.
Photo credit: Devyn Penney
In 2014, Devyn wanted to move the clothing line online. At the time it was more difficult to find someone to create a website. After looking for a year, Devyn decided to learn how to web design on her own. “Then I had more people going to the website asking who did the website than I did buying the clothes,” Devyn said. As she has with everything, she jumped on the business opportunity and started to design websites for businesses.
After two and a half years of web design development, Devyn had a realization, “I was helping people but not in the way that I felt was really true to myself. Behind a computer all day, not speaking to people, it was just like, not my vibe.”
At the time she had a life coach of her own that suggested she consider taking on the role of a life coach. “I had always had this like, very profound desire and prominent desire to help people on a bigger level, so when she said, ‘You can do that,’ and I was so young I was like, ‘Well, no one’s gonna take me seriously, I had so much imposter syndrome, I had all this stuff but I decided to start the process,” Devyn said.
It took her a year and a half to get the certification to become a coach and get started on a new chapter. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic came soon after. This did not stop Devyn from building up the work that she had come so far with creating. With the background that she has, Devyn was able to continue working with clients virtually from all over the world, have branding and an aesthetic that is appealing to others and even create different mediums of sharing advice like podcasts and books.
Photo credit: Devyn Penney
Everything that Devyn learned throughout every moment up to this has been very important to her, “I have been led by the same vision the whole time, which is impacting the lives of others for the better, and helping people to kind of, you know, get themselves into this place of lacking confidence to having confidence, whether it’s in business or individual and that’s, I think, a big part of what I do now.”
In the time of being a life coach, Devyn has learned so much and carries her knowledge to help understand her clients better. Devyn explained that she has seen how everyone drives on a collective energy source. With a bird’s eye view on it, Devyn said her clients will all book on similar or same days and times, but have completely different circumstances from one another. “So there is this sense of we feed off each other as a community, we understand that there’s this larger sort of energy source,” she said.
This collective energy relates to something else that Devyn has learned, which is “everybody is going through relatively the same thing.” No matter if the details of someone’s life are completely different, feelings of loneliness and misunderstanding during a time of great uncertainty are something relatable. “The reality is that we all kind of want these same fundamental things of high vibrational living: happiness, joy, love, freedom,” she said.
Photo credit: Devyn Penney
On Devyn’s Instagram page, she shares different affirmations, quotes, and helpful tips to get followers through their day. One of her greatest affirmations to self is “I am unstoppable and I am impacting the world for the better.” She says it to herself throughout the day, especially when things are not the greatest and a little more difficult. This affirmation reflects Devyn for who she is and what she’s trying to accomplish. “I feel very strongly about the fact that if I can impact one person on a very small or large scale a day, then I am really doing my job,” she said.
As the new year approaches, many people can feel stressed out about the pressures that come with the start of a new year. A piece of advice that Devyn shared is, “that the new year’s total bullshit and that the stress around the new year and resolutions and all that kind of stuff, and the ending of a year should not bring stress to people.”
To help with this new year’s stress, she suggests creating a tier system for the goals that you want to accomplish. For changing a habit like working out daily, the highest tier would be getting up, leaving the house, and going to the gym or a class like SoulCycle. Tier two could be doing an at-home workout, and then tier three could be stretching or going for a walk. “I think that if you’re going into the new year looking to make healthier habits for yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, that you can separate them into sort of those tiers,” she said.
To help with transitioning into the new year, Devyn has created a three-month program called New Year’s Evolution that will commence on January 10, 2022. The program will help people “ease into actual attainable goal setting” and attainable mental health and happiness. To find out how to participate, visit Devyn’s website and follow her social media.
Photo credit: Devyn Penney
Other resources that Devyn has created for clients and others seeking help came about from the past two years of the pandemic and the feelings that many people have gone through. “It was in those moments, actually, where I was my most creative self, which is so bizarre,” she said. This helped her write two books in four weeks’ time and self-published them to get them out into the world and reach those who are going through the same life-changing events.
The first book is called Mastering the Art of Internal Intimacy. “It’s all about how we’re so programmed as humans to believe that we carry things like guilt and shame and insecurity, and how none of that actually belongs to us,” Devyn described the book. It also guides one's true self and has exercises that can be put into practice as you read along. The second book is called Everyday Affirmations, a book with affirmations for every day of the year. It came from what Devyn needed to hear at the moment, after experiencing a difficult past year and needing something to help kick start the day in a positive mindset.
Devyn was working with a lot of couples during quarantine so she came up with a game called fishbowl where during the week each individual writes questions for one another. At the end of the week for 15 minutes, the couple will pick a question out of the bowl and discuss it. “It’s basically meant to hold space for a) each other and just kind of quality time spent together and b) the things that’s on the other partner’s mind that might not be easy to bring up in everyday conversation,” she said. This led to the idea of creating card games to help relationships and self-growth. The cards give prompts to spark conversation or questions within a romantic relationship or give a person things to do to increase their vibration.
Photo credit: Devyn Penney
In 2022, Devyn is writing a third book titled I Want To Make You Feel Something, anticipated to release in the spring. It is not as much advice-based, but more experience based on those collective life experiences and feeling the “resounding resonance” in it. She also has another card game that friends should look forward to. Even though there are many exciting things for Devyn next year, her main priority is always her clients. Those looking for a life coach can easily book online. “Individual clients are the primary focus always and then the other stuff kinda comes in as a result of what the individual clients are saying,” she said.
It is inspiring to learn that Devyn has created books and card games all on her own to give the best assistance to those who are searching for it. Her dedication to her clients is admirable, she passionately speaks on the advice she gives them and how she creates these other mediums for them to continue improving in their life journey. It reflects the love and passion she has for being a life coach. “So I’ve had a couple of moments that are like aha moments of this is what I’m meant to do, where I’ll be speaking to a client and words will just flow through me like things that I’ve never even thought about before. And so that’s where I know that this is what I’m meant to be doing,” Devyn said.