Thirty-eight-year-old Rosemary Ikpeme enjoyed a decade-long career in media and broadcasting, but her success left her unfulfilled. While she loved her job, after some restructuring changes, Ikpeme’s mental health was affected. It eventually led her to create MYnd Map - a business with the aim to empower others to reach their fullest potential while focusing on positive mental health through mindfulness, gratitude and goal planning journals.
“I had someone new as a manager and we didn’t get on,” says Ikpeme. “There was bullying and I was like, you know I’m coming up with great ideas but I guess you’re trying to push that person down so that they don’t stand out.”
When the situation became so severe that it was affecting her mental health, she started thinking about personal development and becoming more productive.
“Since my mid-20s, I’ve always looked at personal development and how can I achieve the life that I want,” she says. “What is the life that I want? I come from nothing, so I want to build something. Once I made that decision, I left without any job in place.”
This wasn’t her first choice though as she had always been more interested in arts and drama. “According to my family, that is not a viable career but law was acceptable,” she says. She doesn’t regret studying it though, stating “your path is your path” but realised in the first year of her course that law wasn’t for her and that she didn’t want to do it.
“I came out of university, didn’t know what to do and got the worst job ever as a mortgage broker for Foxton’s, so you can imagine the ethics,” she says laughing. “The worst time of my life was my early 20s. Just imagine crying on your way to work because you're 10 minutes late.”
She realised she was too young to be so stressed and says she remembers thinking, “Let me find something that I'm going to enjoy. Also maybe something that is not too artsy that I'm not going to be struggling, but there's both a creative and financial stability element”.
It was how Ikpeme ended up in media and broadcasting, working for the likes of National Geographic, the BBC and CNN.
“I was climbing the ladder, enjoying the process, but, you know, something inside of me was just never fully belonging, or never fully accepted,” she says.
Ikpeme started working in the business through a year-long maternity cover role for CNN and worked on MYnd Map on the side.
“That’s how I started and it just felt like everything was flowing. It wasn’t easy but I think when you make the right decision in life, doors open and you see opportunities for you,” she says. “You will have challenges, but then you will find solutions as well because you’re focused and you know that it’s the right thing for you.”
Journaling has been a part of Ikpeme’s life since her mid-twenties, during which she had a quarter-life crisis when wasn’t getting anywhere with her media career and broke up with a long-term boyfriend.
Adding on issues with close friends, everything “just felt like it was too much”.
“I remember being on the phone with a friend who said she’ll send me a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron,” she says. “It’s a book for artists to unblock their creative flow but can be used by anyone.”
Ikpeme explains that a major theme of the book is “finding that child in you again and playing”, and that one of the things the author gets you to do is to journal three pages every morning.
“You can write even if you don’t know what to write on those three pages as long as you write something because then it unblocks whatever mental restraints you have,” she says. “It’s so powerful. It’s simple but so powerful.”
This was the founder’s first “initiation into journalling” which led her to finding different ways of having a better future and knowing how to get there. “I did yoga and meditation. I learned about vision boards. Because I wanted to improve my life, I ended up doing all the things that I’ve put into MYnd Map because I couldn’t find one place where I could have it all.”
MYnd Map is the perfect companion for those who want to have one journal for everything from vision boards to daily to-do lists.
“I have one notebook which was my special notebook and I would write my dreams and goals and intentions in it for the next five years,” she says. “That’s essentially what MYnd Map is.”
Ikpeme shares that the hardest part of starting her business was her mindset, and worries over throwing away a successful media career or what her ex-colleagues would think of her new business venture. “Thankfully, with all I’m doing with MYnd Map, it takes me back to thinking, why am I doing this? Because I know it’s good. It’s going to help me and most importantly, it’s going to help other people that were in my situation. And that makes it a little bit easier, knowing it’s for a greater good than just me.”
The exciting part for her is the potential to help people “figure things out” from those who have just moved to a new country to others who are undergoing cancer treatment, wanting to leave the journal to their family. “I’ve had people tell me it helped them to change their career and for me, that is the most exciting part, just seeing how beneficial it is to other people,” she says.
MYnd Map hosts workshops explaining how to get the best out of their journals along with workshops with mindset, nutritional and productivity coaches, themes that are included in the journal. They also host corporate workshops for companies looking to incorporate mindfulness into their practice to boost productivity and employer wellbeing.
Speaking of how Ikpeme came up with the name for her business, she says she remembers watching a TED Talk where the speaker mentioned that when you’re drawing, you are using the right hemisphere of your brain - the side that looks for solutions.
“I can’t draw so I wondered why there couldn’t be sheets that have images on that reflect my vision? I got a designer and then it evolved to a whole booklet, a journal and planner and I didn’t have a name.
“My Dad said, ‘It sounds like you’re putting together a mind map’ and I told him ‘I know, but I need a name for it’ and he said, ‘But it’s a mind map’,” she says.
It wasn’t until she got home that things clicked and she realized what her father meant by calling it a MYnd Map.
In the future, Ikpeme is hoping to create more targeted journals for people who would like to use theirs for different reasons from business to mental health.
“I’d also like to work with more companies to incorporate MYnd Map into their teams as well as coaches because the idea of MYnd Map is not to just give you a journal but to figure it out yourself,” she says. “I had a mentor and a coach who supported me. It takes a village - you need your mastermind group and peers because if you’re starting a business, your best friends are going to support you, but they’re not going to give you the support you need. So that’s my bigger vision.”