By: Editorial staff, STAGE IIX
For much of her childhood, Brooke Hemingway felt like she didn’t belong.
Before she became an entrepreneur, leadership mentor, conference founder, and the creator behind her coaching work, she was the girl who kept moving. Her family relocated five times throughout her childhood, living in Indiana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Ohio, and Wisconsin. While many children grew up surrounded by lifelong friendships and familiar faces, Brooke often arrived as the outsider in small towns where everyone else had known each other since birth. That experience left a mark.
“I always felt slightly on the outside looking in,” Brooke says. “But what I didn’t realize then was that those experiences were preparing me for the work I would eventually do.”
Those early years taught her how to connect with people from all walks of life, adapt to new environments, and build relationships quickly. They also planted the seeds for what would later become one of her life’s greatest missions: creating spaces where people feel seen, valued, and like they truly belong.
Today, that mission has reached thousands through her businesses, coaching programs, retreats, and the annual ALIGN Conference, a transformational event that brings in hundreds of women from around the world.
From Campfire Dreams to a Career in Nursing
None of that was part of the plan. Her story began very differently. When Brooke and her husband Thomas started their life together in the late 1990s, they had little more than a dream and determination. Some of their favorite memories came during simple camping trips because they were free. Without cell phones competing for attention, they would sit by the campfire for hours talking about the life they hoped to build.
They dreamed of living near the ocean and the mountains. They dreamed of a home filled with love, adventure, and meaningful experiences. They dreamed of freedom, travel, and being present with their future children. At times, those dreams felt impossibly far away.
Living on modest incomes while Thomas pursued medical school and residency, they spent years working long hours, facing financial constraints, and uncertain about what the future might hold. Making ends meet through working three jobs, Brooke simultaneously pursued her education, earning two degrees in kinesiology and nursing. The demanding schedules left little room for flexibility. She worked in the fitness industry before becoming a cardiovascular ICU nurse, often taking on high-stakes twelve-hour night shifts. “We knew we wouldn’t always struggle financially,” Brooke says. “What we didn’t know was how good life could eventually become.”
Working as an ICU nurse shaped Brooke in profound ways. She learned how to remain calm under pressure, solve problems quickly, and lead in high-stakes situations where panic wasn’t an option. She learned compassion while supporting patients and families through some of the most difficult moments of their lives. Nursing also taught her something else. It taught her what she didn’t want.
Burnout was not going to become her identity. She refused to spend decades sacrificing her health and relationships in pursuit of success. And she did not want to wake up one day and realize she had postponed her life waiting for the “right time.”
“One of the worst things that can happen is reaching the end of your life and regretting the shots you never took,” she says. “I never wanted to live with that kind of regret.” That mindset would eventually fuel one of the most significant pivots of her life.
Building a Business From a Phone and a Wi-Fi Signal
While raising five children under the age of nine on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, Brooke began building her first business. Moving from a traditional career as an RN into unfamiliar territory, she had every reason not to succeed. She had no large audience. No website. No social media following. No local network. No family nearby to help with the children. No nanny, housekeeper, chef, or support staff. At the time, she had roughly 150 Facebook friends. Most people would have viewed her circumstances as limitations. Brooke viewed them as motivation.
Living on an island with a population of around 60,000 people taught her to think differently. Instead of focusing on what she lacked, she focused on what was available. She drew on the lessons of her early life, prioritizing relationships, social connection through social media, and communities of belonging long before many entrepreneurs understood their potential. Building primarily from her phone and Wi-Fi, she watched those relationships slowly turn into opportunities. Those opportunities turned into partnerships. And those partnerships eventually grew into a thriving business.
The moment entrepreneurship became real wasn’t when she launched her first offer. It was when she realized she had built something with staying power. “For the first time, I thought, this is actually a business,” she recalls. Over the years that followed, she grew her work steadily while building several additional ventures alongside it.
Yet the achievement she values most isn’t about the business itself. It’s what her work made possible. For years, Brooke’s husband worked in multiple emergency rooms, often logging eighty-hour work weeks. The family had always dreamed of more freedom, but like many families, they assumed it would come much later in life.
As Brooke’s business grew, the family reached a turning point. In late 2020, Thomas stepped away from the grind that had consumed so much of his life. There wasn’t a dramatic celebration, because that’s not her style. Instead, there was something even better. The freedom they had imagined around campfires years earlier had finally become reality. But success didn’t come without challenges.
How Burnout Led to the Idea of Alignment
One of the most difficult seasons of Brooke’s life happened while she was simultaneously growing her business and raising six children. From the outside, everything appeared to be working. Inside, she was falling apart. Exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply burnt out, she found herself questioning whether success was costing too much. “I almost burned it all down,” she admits.
That season became a turning point. It forced her to confront patterns of people-pleasing, over-functioning, control, and self-neglect that had quietly shaped her life for years. She began learning about boundaries, self-care, self-worth, and the importance of asking for support.
Most importantly, she discovered a concept that would later become the foundation of her life’s work: the idea of alignment. “ALIGN wasn’t born out of success,” Brooke says. “It was born out of burnout.” Today, alignment sits at the center of everything she teaches. To Brooke, an aligned life is not about perfection. It’s about creating a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. It’s about being connected to your values, your purpose, and your deepest priorities. And it’s about pursuing success without abandoning yourself in the process.
According to Brooke, some of the clearest signs a woman is out of alignment include chronic stress, physical exhaustion, emotional disconnection, comparison, and constantly forcing things that don’t fit. An aligned woman looks different. She experiences peace within herself. She faces challenges rather than avoiding them. She stays in her own lane instead of comparing herself to everyone around her. She makes decisions based on conviction rather than approval. Most importantly, she is the same person offline as she is online.
A Message for Women Who Want It All
That philosophy has become synonymous with Brooke’s work as a leadership mentor, conference founder, business strategist, speaker, and entrepreneur. She also shares it regularly with her audience through her podcast and across platforms like Instagram. It is also the lesson she hopes her children carry with them.
Having watched their mother build businesses from scratch while raising a family, her children have grown up believing that possibility is bigger than most people realize. They’ve learned teamwork, discipline, resilience, authenticity, and courage. They’ve learned that dreams are meant to be pursued, not postponed. And they’ve learned that success doesn’t have to come at the expense of what matters most, and that you can stay true to who you are both on and offline.
If there’s one message Brooke hopes women take away from her story, it’s this. You do not have to choose between success and family. You do not have to choose between health and wellbeing. You do not have to sacrifice the things that matter most to create an extraordinary life.
“The greatest lie women have been told is that they must lose something precious in order to gain something meaningful,” Brooke says. “I don’t believe that’s true. I believe you can have it all without losing it all. When your life is aligned, the things that matter most don’t compete. They work together.”
For the little girl who spent years wondering where she belonged, that may be the greatest success story of all. She didn’t just build a business. She built a life that she loves, and she shows other women how to do the same, in alignment.
