How Leah Coss Rebuilt Her Identity After Teenage Self-Destruction

This is one of the most personal moments from my full podcast conversation with Leah Coss, co-founder of Build a Biz Kids.

In this shorter clip, Leah opens up about her childhood, growing up in toxic environments, and how that shaped an identity built for survival - not for fulfillment. She shares how her teenage rebellion wasn’t about being “bad,” but about trying to feel in control in a world where she had none.

You'll hear:

• Why your early identity might be holding you back
• How reactivity and internal dialogue reveal who you really believe you are
• The quiet power of shifting your identity on purpose — so you can finally live the life you’re meant for

This is just one moment from a deeply meaningful conversation about healing, growth, and becoming the person you're proud to be.

Listen to the full episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2460262/episodes/18120733-from-survival-mode-to-identity-on-purpose-leah-coss-on-rebuilding-who-you-are-to-live-fulfilled.mp3?download=true

Transcript

0:00

You know, my story is not super uncommon. I was a child of divorce. My parents divorced when I was four. They were childhood sweethearts, but it just didn't work out. And it was a very, it was not amicable. It was a very uh not good divorce, which created not great uh energy between the two and a lot of confusion for a child of that age. They also both then ended up in other relationships where those other partners were going through their own things. At the time just manifested as creating a really toxic and abusive household. And for the younger part of me, I really grew up not trusting the adults that were in my life. I grew up feeling very helpless, like they were making decisions like where we're gonna live, who's gonna be allowed in our home. uh You know, they label you as all parents do in ways that they think they're either being funny or they think they're being supportive, but you know, ends up creating identities for us, who we believe we are and how we're supposed to show up. When we receive love, you know, is based on ah if I'm outspoken, if I act confident, whether I am or not, I would get a lot of praise for that. So I grew up with this persona that I was an aggressive person that got what they wanted and was outspoken, rude, you know, but that was good. She was a powerful young girl, right? Standing up for what she wanted. But ultimately it was just me really trying to find some sort of autonomy in a world where as a child you don't get to make any of the important decisions in your life. And you're of along for the ride. So the moment that I became a teenager, as many teenagers do, we take whatever little power we can get and we abuse it, which ends up hurting ourselves. So I made a lot of terrible decisions as a teenager. Pretty much everything a parent would hate for their child to be into, I did. I was using drugs, I was selling drugs. got tattoos. I got tattoos at 15, homemade. I was living with my boyfriend. Started falling behind in school and actually went to an alternative school so I wasn't gonna graduate on time. Doing criminal activity, all kinds of things. That was my way of feeling like they may not be good decisions but they're my decisions. There's a certain sense of satisfaction you get when your parents are now the ones feeling helpless. ah So that I think is a fairly common trajectory. The difference is that some of us pull ourselves out of that and some of us don't. Some of us just takes longer. Some of us make huge strides and others don't. And that's really where as you get older, I think you can only have those types of reflections once you get older, and those things become less triggering for us and emotionally fueled, that we can look objectively and go, wow, what happened there? What could have happened differently? And then how do I relate that to how things move going forward? So for my story and why identity is so powerful to me, you can look at identity as mindset, which is a really big topic these days that people talk about all the time, right? But essentially identity is how are you... How are you showing up in the world? So one is an external component. Reactivity is the biggest indicator. Like if someone cuts you off in traffic, if somebody says something that you don't like, are you the shy person who takes it? Are you the aggressive person that tells them where to go? um Do you try to retaliate by being mean? What is that reactivity? Because it's when your guard is down that kind of who you are comes out or the insecurities that you have start to show. The other is when you're on your own, what do you say to yourself? What are you talking and saying in your head internally? How do you feel when you're by yourself? Are you a happy person when you're by yourself? Are you lonely? Do you feel like something is missing? Are you angry at the world? What is that internal dialogue? And that I believe is what really forms your identity. Because those are the things that essentially creates the lens with which you are viewing your world. And when we're kids, we just don't have a lot of perspective. Any identity we've been given, so much of how I viewed others or my strategies for feeling good about myself or the same strategies that my mom had or my dad had, and they were not healthy. You know, they'd be things like, you know, backhanded compliments, pulling people down so that you feel better about yourself. um Those were all things that I used to do. Now, the big shift though that I've reflected on and the thing that I'm so grateful for, used to say, I don't know why all of a sudden I changed literally overnight from that destructive teenager into a capable, successful human in life that could contribute meaningfully to society.