Entrepreneurship
Meet Vanessa Demopoulos: From The Streets To World Champion And Business Woman
Vanessa Demopoulos knows what it means to fight. Trained and accomplished as a World Champion MMA Fighter, she came from rough beginnings, experiencing homelessness and drugs as a young teenager. She worked and fought her way out to freedom, overcoming the adversity to now be the proud professional athlete and author of two books.
Her path to athleticism was not a straight shot. While working at the club, she was introduced to the opportunity and knew it was right for her, and a way for her to channel her natural inclinations into a successful career.
“The industry found me. I was dancing on the pole at the club and someone approached me to say that if I put that same effort into fighting that I’d be successful. After that, I fell in love with fighting. I had spent a lot of time in detention during high school because of fighting, so I guess it was a natural path for me,” Vanessa says.
She cites her main motivation as the passion of helping other people. This lead her to creating a platform where she was able to pursue public speaking, using her skills of being a warrior to create world wide significance.
Despite her natural abilities and motivations, Vanessa admits there are many difficulties to making it on your own, especially in the business world. Specifically, she knows it’s difficult to move forward when the journey ahead of you is so long. Only seeing one step ahead of yourself at a time makes it difficult to keep your end goal and motivations in mind.
To counter this, Vanessa focuses on what she can control: her mindset. By keeping her mind focused, disciplined, and open to understanding, she’s able to remember the reason she chose to fight. This applies, she’s found, in business as well as the professional athletics world.
“You have to understand the difficulties on the front end and understand why you’re doing all the things your doing. Finding the why outside yourself to keep going in the most challenging of times. Remembering why it was so important when you started and continuing to remind yourself along the way,” Vanessa says.
Preparing for the long game is a strategy Vanessa uses often. She finds that it’s a necessary precaution, regardless of the venture, whether it be in business or fighting. This means you won’t burn out, make unrealistic expectations of yourself, or go into situations unprepared.
“Be ready for trying to make things happen and know that its going to take way longer and look completely different than what you started out for. Know that the product and mission stay a steady course in the vision, but nothing will be as you start out to become. It could very well be so much more and better,” Vanessa says.
Vanessa is a great example of how mindset can lead you to success. It’s an impressive feat, especially when fear can creep in at any time. For Vanessa, however, this does not distract her at all from her goal. She sees fear as something to be used too her advantage.
“Fear is only a feeling. Fear is fuel. Fear is something that when it happens give me excitement for whatever is on the other side of it. Fear is a green light to break through a new barrier,” Vanessa says.
Success is seen in a similar way. Vanessa keeps this feeling and measurement close to home, avoiding any social comparison, and seeing it as something well-rounded to pursue.
“Success isn’t measured by any outside force. Success is in your soul and knowing who you are, that you’re a good person and doing the right things for the people in your circle. Success if spiritual, financial, physical, and emotional. Success is balance of happiness and health in the spectrum of life and discipline,” Vanessa says.
Her views of fear and success have lead Vanessa to overcome her biggest life obstacle: her past.
“For a long time I defined myself by my pain instead of who I was in the moment of being a decent person. Learning that I wasn’t my action. I’ve almost died multiple times in the streets, but those were only moments. It was my haunting memories that I defeated to being my biggest obstacles,” Vanessa recalls.
Follow Vanessa on Instagram to stay up to date on her upcoming success.
