Each episode of Colleyville-based Evolution Collective founder Tamika Taylor’s podcast “Say More Words” starts with a song of the day – almost always something uplifting and motivational. On the bright September morning when the mindset and leadership consultant excitedly breezes into the Southlake Style office for her cover shoot, the song she’s vibing is Katy Perry’s “Daisies.”
With Perry’s signature girl-power-centric lyrics like “They said I'm goin' nowhere, tried to count me out; Took those sticks and stones, showed 'em I could build a house,” it’s a highly fitting tune for this powerhouse entrepreneur.
Talk to anyone in town, and the adjectives that you will hear most often to describe Tamika are “energetic,” “passionate,” “inspirational” and “life-changing.” Not to mention “ambitious,” “brave” and “wise beyond her years.” Behind the disarmingly warm and welcoming 1,000-watt grin is a 35-year-old who has turned unimaginable personal challenges into a catalyst for helping women become their best selves. With a thriving personal coaching and leadership business and a calendar packed with speaking engagements, it is her particular brand of exuberant expertise that has clients lining up at the door.
A COLORFUL CHILDHOOD
Despite her current success, the path to get there was anything but a straight shot. Tamika moved around a lot as a child, growing up in a military household to a Marine father and a mother who worked in health care. The parents had a very colorful and increasingly volatile relationship, which at times created a heavy atmosphere.
“I grew up in a home where you were terrified to make mistakes,” she recounts. “That’s why today in our house, we celebrate mistakes, we celebrate failures, and we always ask our kids, ‘What did you learn? What could you do differently next time?’”
In addition, life as a biracial child in the 1980s wasn't nearly as common as it is today. When she was in middle school, the family settled in Wisconsin, where her mother had grown up. "I went from a military environment where everyone looked different to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, where everyone looked the same, and only I was different," she recalls. "It was an adjustment in the way that people treated me, the way they showed up."
BluDoor Studios
Nonetheless, Tamika worked hard and excelled in school, graduating in 2006 and then attending college at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Despite initial plans to become a doctor, she soon realized her natural extroversion and innate ability to connect with people would be more suited to sociology. After receiving a bachelor’s, she continued her studies, later awarded a master’s degree in higher education administration at St. Cloud State.
“I focused primarily on students... how they moved, how they functioned, how they could be better people, how they could find what they wanted to do in life. And I had a huge passion for it — it was my jam,” she recounts.
TRAGEDY STRIKES
It was in the midst of her undergraduate studies that tragedy struck. In March 2010, at just 21 years old, Tamika's father, in a blackout drunken state, attacked her mother and set the house on fire. Tamika and her sister were trapped inside. Luckily, with the help of firefighters, the girls were safely rescued from the house, and the father was taken into police custody. However, the family lost everything that night.
It was an entirely new reality to confront — and on television, no less, given the tabloid-esque nature of the night. It’s an understatement to say that getting through the aftermath took many years of hard work, self-reflection, and community backing to come out the other side. Yet Tamika persevered.
"I spent 11 years in anger, resentment, blame, shame and guilt. [I was] running from my trauma when it turns out, what I needed to do the most was dive right in. Ask the questions. And come out raw, but stronger on the other side," Tamika writes in a blog post. "Sometimes the work seems like it's going to break you in half. But I promise that surviving the pain and working through [it] leads to unimaginable growth and a much better life. Life is too short to hang out with trauma.”
LIGHT IN THE DARK
Yet even through the most turbulent times, Tamika was able to find bright spots. In May 2010, just two months after the fateful night, she met her now-husband, James, who stuck with her through the tough times and became a rock through her father’s trial. She also found unbending support in members of the local community, giving the family a chance to heal and move on.
“One of the most magical things that happened to me is that I became so very abundantly aware of who my people were and who my people were not,” Tamika recalls on one of her podcasts. “The people who were for me showed up in droves.”
Going through such darkness helped drive home the point that happiness is a choice, which helped form the basis of Evolution Collective’s trademarked “Personality Recipe.”
BluDoor Studios
“You can be happy while hard things are happening —it’s a matter of choosing how that happiness looks,” Tamika says. “The average person doesn't think about what happiness means to them. I know that there are bad moments in a day and that there are also good moments in the day, so I make an active choice to lean into happiness and joy as a way to pull me out of the negativity that could bring me down.”
However, happiness and resilience are not just concepts for the wellness coach. She weaves them into every aspect of life, especially her most fulfilling job — parenting. For 7-year-old daughter Frankie and 6-year-old son Calvin, the proud parents make a point of incorporating play and fun while also making sure the kids understand that they have agency.
At home, the couple makes a concerted effort to instill affirmations like ‘I am kind,’ ‘I am strong,’ ‘I can do hard things,’ ‘I can always figure it out,’ and ‘I am safe.’ Tamika explains that this is because she and James want the kids to always feel empowered to make choices - good and bad - and to be able to learn from them in a loving and supportive environment.
Given the importance that parenthood plays in the devoted mother's life, Tamika realized her journey needed to include reconnecting with her father, who was still in prison in 2021. While the reunion did reopen old wounds, getting to know her father again and having the chance to introduce herself as an adult, a mother and a successful businesswoman also allowed the story to be reframed with unexpectedly positive benefits.
“Sharing my trauma journey, and most importantly healing, has been a journey that has helped not only me heal, but others around me heal as well — which has been a special surprise since I never intended on bringing it up in the first place,” Tamika says.
LESSONS LEARNED
It’s a hard truth that life can't always be sunshine and rainbows. When rough patches inevitably arise, Tamika is now able to call on deeply engrained knowledge and understanding of the healing process to help her face any challenge. It is precisely this know-how that she passes along to her clients.
In 2013, Tamika and her husband relocated to Colleyville when she accepted a new position at UT Arlington. When James decided to open his own chiropractic practice, she threw herself into helping him network. With a side hustle as a professional makeup artist, it was a perfect chance to market her own skills, build a name for herself and meet people.
A few years later, following the birth of their daughter, Tamika found herself in a rut. In the years following her father's trial, she had become estranged from her mother, who, in dealing with her own issues, decided to embark on a different path. Combining that with postpartum depression and having left higher education for a higher-paying but less fulfilling corporate position, Tamika was left feeling lost and without purpose. It was then the new mom realized she couldn’t stay in victim mode any longer without eventually passing down these issues to her children.
“Generational trauma is a very real thing. When I had my daughter, it hit me that I don't ever want [her] to feel the way that I felt growing up, to think about herself the way that I thought about myself growing up, or to have the mom that I had growing up,” she recalls. “[My mom] lost her identity, and I saw so many similarities. I decided – no, I refuse. This ends now.”
A MOMENT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
This was the proverbial lightbulb moment for Tamika to forge a new path. The multi-hyphenate talent was increasingly booked as a makeup artist for events. While applying her artistic talents, she would chat up her clients, unofficially coaching them on life and finding joy. These informal conversations hit home with the revelation that adults needed as much guidance as the students she had loved working with so much before.
When clients started returning with concrete examples of how much her advice had helped, the concept behind Evolution Collective started to come to life. With a budding hypothesis for how to help people on a larger scale, Tamika enlisted a friend as a test subject, channeling her experience into a new process for coaching adults. By focusing on routines and habits, monitoring feelings and thoughts and giving highly personalized advice, her friend’s business increased fivefold within a month. As soon as word spread, business exploded.
The initial plan was to create a monthly workshop where people could learn about and openly discuss difficult and sensitive topics in a safe, secure and loving environment. The inspiration came from her German grandmother, who instilled the idea that tough conversations are made easier when done around the kitchen table. Thus was born “Wine, Whiskey & Wisdom,” a monthly class on topics ranging from finding your love language to becoming more confident. This soon led to the creation of a new regular conference series aimed at empowering women called the Evolve Women’s Conference.
THE RECIPE FOR GREATNESS
However, it was personal coaching that took business to the next level. One of the cornerstones of Evolution Collective, formally founded in 2019, is the “Personality Recipe” that Tamika developed, which includes self-discovery through a combination of personality assessments like Enneagrams, strength-finders, Myers-Briggs and love languages. It also means answering a lot of hard questions — and homework.
By the time new clients seek out Tamika's expertise, they've usually reached their limit, unsure of how to move forward. Tamika believes this is almost always a symptom of a deeper root cause, which usually manifests in many areas of life – personal finances, business, relationships, parenting choices – until addressed directly. This root cause is precisely what the “Personality Recipe” helps to uncover and unblock.
Alas, there are no quick fixes for personal growth, and the Evolution Collective founder is quick to point out that true growth only comes from putting in a lot of work. That's why clients have regular assignments, including consistent journaling. Tamika has also developed a two-pronged approach to forgiveness, consisting of writing an “F-You” letter to purge grievances on paper that you later burn, followed by a “forgiveness” letter, where you let go of feelings that are holding you back.
“That’s the thing about forgiveness — you can’t just declare forgiveness like Michael Scott declares bankruptcy on ‘The Office,’” she explains.
While Tamika works with a wide variety of clients, the entrepreneur has found a particularly loyal niche with women, who appreciate her youthful energy and wise outlook. However, if Tamika has learned one thing through hardship, it’s how important it is to have someone in your corner who isn’t emotionally or financially attached to the outcome — it’s a role she excels at as a coach.
“People stay with me because they need the belief. That's the best part of the work that I do. And I think I am a person who just breathes belief,” she expresses. “Because I came from an environment in which I did not believe in myself — death would have been better than what I was experiencing at that time. It took believing in myself and that life can actually be good to get me moving forward.
“So when my clients need somebody to believe in them, they call me because I'm gonna believe in them better than they're gonna believe in themselves when they're in a down moment.”