This summer Jessica Lightbourne left her job at the Bermuda Hospitals Board to focus on her own business.

The change was brought about by a near-death experience.

She was walking with a friend when she heard what she thought was a bike backfiring.

“I looked at my friend’s face and I could tell that was not a bike,” Ms Lightbourne remembered.

In fact, it was gunfire, so close that she could easily have been caught in the crossfire.

“My life flashed before my eyes,” she said.

Badly shaken, she felt compelled to reconsider her life’s choices.

“It was the sense of my own mortality,” she said.

Until that point, she had been keeping a hectic schedule.

“I was working 9am to 5pm as the learning and talent development adviser for the Bermuda Hospitals Board,” Ms Lightbourne said.

She also ran three businesses on the side.

“One was executive coaching, the other was corporate training and I ran the Leadership, Development and Coach Training School,” she said.

She loved everything that she was doing, but realised the pace was unsustainable from a health and wellbeing perspective.

“I had become really clear on my zone of genius, and my passion,” she said. “I made the leap to focusing just on my own businesses. Now, I have to pinch myself because I get to do what I love, full-time.”

Since that, she has gone full-time with Jessica Lightbourne Coaching and has more space to take care of herself.

Now her businesses are all under the umbrella of Jessica Lightbourne Coaching, where she hones in on leadership, confidence coaching, team building and corporate training.

“I have a specific focus on dignity and joy at work,” she said. “My father [Ronald Lightbourne] wrote a poem that says in the last line, ‘live and I will live’. Now I feel like it is part of my mission to really live life instead of being in survival mode and not thriving. I want to support others in doing the same.

“The message that I would like to give is that you don’t have to wait for somebody you love to die, or to be in a situation where you almost died.”

She said it can be challenging putting yourself out there, especially if you are an introvert, or have a sense of unworthiness.

“I've been practising this for a number of years now,” she said. “I’ve been putting myself out there, more and more.”

She does not yet have office space.

“Most of my executive coaching is done virtually,” Ms Lightbourne said. “I Zoom and I use various locations for my group coaching and training.”

She enjoys working with leaders, especially those who want to create a sense of dignity for themselves and others in the workplace. She is looking to take on more executives and leaders as clients.

“I have a special interest in Black women who feel unheard, under-supported or frustrated,” she said. “They may be disillusioned because they have not just hit the glass ceiling, but hit the concrete ceiling.

“You can see through a glass ceiling. I am supporting a lot of highly talented Black women who either have gone through bullying, harassment, incivility, daily micro aggressions, and it’s really putting them into survival mode, rather than creating a situation where they can thrive.”

She has a workshop scheduled to start the first week of next month.

“Curating Me is specifically geared for entrepreneurs,” she said. “There is going to be a specific focus on money mindset and wealth mindset and a sense of worthiness, because a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with asking for what they are worth.”