K. Joia Houheneka is the author of The Luxury Entrepreneur and the founder of Open Horizons Coaching, the world’s premier Excellence Coaching enterprise. Recently, she launched a revolutionary flagship coaching program, The 7+ Figure Luxury Entrepreneur Society. Entrepreneurs with high standards of quality for their work (and their lives) hire Joia to elevate their personal brands to an ultra-premium / luxury level and generate a 7+ figure revenue stream, guaranteed.
K. Joia Houheneka, Luxury Travel Advisor & Excellence Coach
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Absolutely! Thank you for the opportunity. I'm Joia. I am currently an Excellence Coach and the founder of Open Horizons Coaching, but my career has been long and circuitous, probably like many entrepreneurs. I actually began in academia where I was a Ph.D. candidate in English Language and Literature at NYU. I had this goal of becoming a college professor until I realized that academia would not provide for me the kind of freedom, autonomy, and expansion for growth that I desired most from my work.
So, I quit academia, quit that path, spent many years floundering and dabbling in freelancing jobs and work as a mind-body fitness instructor until I discovered the profession of coaching. And even then, it took me several years to really figure out what my contribution to the coaching industry could and would be. I went through several different certifications and training programs in life coaching, creativity coaching, plus an extensive program in peak performance coaching with the Flow Research Collective where I got to study flow states and self-actualization. But it wasn't yet clear to me exactly what I would do to bring my own unique value to this profession. However, at this point I did have an insight: I realized that for myself personally and for many of the people I was starting to coach, that some of the most profound transformational experiences came from travel and from retreat experiences.
Thus, I then had this idea to combine coaching with travel, and I devoted my attention to a specialization in travel itself, developing the knowledge, the resources, the tools, and the skills to become a professional travel advisor. That was the first main pivot in my work. The second major pivot came as I was learning and exploring different facets of the travel industry.
I had this experience where I found myself simultaneously allured by yet leery of the luxury sector in travel. When I stopped to think about this and ask myself why, it became clear to me that there was much in the luxury industry as it currently stands that I do admire, especially its aspirations to rise to high standards of greatness and excellence and to deliver the highest in quality. That very fact of being aspirational is in itself something that absolutely appeals to me.
However, there is also so much in the history and current practices of the luxury sector that I believe falls short of the potential of true excellence. And this insight led to what has now become the mission of my life’s work which is to transform and elevate luxury, to make luxury synonymous with excellence, excellence defined by the standards of human flourishing and human potential. I want to retain all that is ennobling and inspiring about current luxury, to strip away the negatives, and then also to add in new insights from the cutting-edge science that I had learned about flow states, self-actualization, positive psychology, and the philosophy of eudaimonia.
Can you provide some background on Open Horizons Coaching and its mission. What are your current offerings?
Well, through the above you can get a sense of how Open Horizons Coaching has evolved to its current state. At this point, we have several different options and ways for people to get involved.
We have Club Elevate+Aspire+ which is a membership program that we are building out as we speak. One thing that really is unique and special to me about Club Elevate+Aspire+ is that even at the complimentary level, we curate the club to admit only those who are serious about building a high-end, premium, and/or luxury business.
This is because the luxury strategy to building a business is special and distinct, and we want to have a community that is exclusive for those who are dealing with the particular challenges of growing a unique high-end business while prioritizing a personal life of excellence, wellness, and flourishing. I believe that “exclusivity” really ought to be about intimacy in the best possible way, and that is what we are creating.
Then, we have our signature offer, FLOURISH^n, which is our top-of-the-line and most customized offer. It starts at $250K as we aim to deliver the ultimate one-to-one personalized retreat experience, and depending on your investment, there really is no expense spared. This is a fully customized, laser-focused, in-person 1:1 coaching experience in an international luxury destination open to those with a mission of excellence. It is meant to be both a celebration of success and a catalyst to rise higher.
Finally, there is our new flagship offer, The 7+ Figure Luxury Entrepreneur Society, which we have just recently launched. It's been the piece of the puzzle that's been missing in our offerings, and, honestly, it's taken quite some time just to put together all the components, including all the different expert partners to ensure that we do have results that we can guarantee. So, I’m delighted that we've finally launched this and are now admitting people to really transform their lives, to skyrocket their wealth, their positioning, and most importantly, their ability to achieve significant philanthropic impact.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement thus far.
Well, I started to talk about The 7+ Figure Luxury Entrepreneur Society, and this is the latest and indeed the greatest apex of my work thus far. I'm so incredibly proud of what we've built and what we're building. It is a program that is absolutely going to transform lives, and I love that it will transform the lives of people who I think really deserve it, the people who have an ability to make a positive difference in the world but need to generate the wealth and position and standing to be able to have that greater impact.
That is what this program is for. It's all about empowering coaches, consultants, authors, and thought leaders to make a greater positive impact by elevating their personal brand to a high-end / premium / luxury-level status and put in place a system to reliably generate 7+ figures in revenue, ultimately on a yearly basis. I do believe that those who have the skills along with the focus on impact and philanthropy are the ones who can and WILL transform money into impact.
It’s important to me that we've built this program to be performance-based, with our clients’ payments linked to their results. I’ve had the personal misfortune of investing in programs that failed to deliver on their promise, and I want to help lead the industry to do better. In our program, there is an investment to get started, because we do want our clients to have skin in the game. However, even at the outset we've partnered with who I believe is the best high ticket offer financing partner out there so that our people can get started where there at financially and then build a flywheel effect. We've set up the program with milestones and built-in redundancy to ensure our client succeed through the creation of a stellar high-end offer, strategic philanthropy sales events, celebrity-level speaking opportunities, and custom PR. We are elevating the coaching industry while changing the world, and it’s incredible to see it becoming reality
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
I've described some of the pivotal moments in my career, but even earlier than my pivotal decision to pursue the entrepreneurial path, I experienced a significant pivotal insight that transformed my personal life and that ultimately even sparked the career change.
It was one of those Both-And moment realizations. I realized that, on the one hand, I was committed to a vision of human beings as powerful creators. I wanted to make sacred that creator pursuit, not only in my own life, but for others, to inspire and empower them to become high-level creators in their own right. I wanted to elevate humanity to seek more for that expansive level of meaning and fulfillment I know can come from committing to the creator path; to discover their identity as an explorer, an innovator, a discoverer; to revel in a spirit of curiosity and wonder; to go on the journey of making something out of nothing, of creating something where there had been no thing. That was one realization.
On the other hand, I recognized the value of understanding other people on their own terms, and acknowledged that most yet didn’t share my vision of the sacred nature and value of the creator life. In fact, building bridges between the vision I see and others’ context is still some of the most important work I attempt. However, learning to see the world from someone else's perspective and recognizing the value of that experience was and is perhaps the most valuable insight and lesson I got from all my years in academia focused on literature.
I like to say that a book is a time machine. Some old early edition books from centuries ago are a kind of time capsule, something that had existed way-back-then in its still current form, something that had been touched by hands that have long since gone to dust, but maybe traces of fingerprints are still there on the pages of the manuscript. And you can leave your own fingerprints beside them. Then, beyond the physicality of the book, you can open up the pages, and in so doing, enter a portal into another mind. Because language is how our minds work. Significantly, the language that runs through someone else’s mind can and will be so different from the language that runs through yours, streams of words you would never have thought to put together. To be able to have that experience of opening yourself up to the inner world experience of people potentially from centuries or even millennia ago, from such completely different cultures and life experiences, but you get a glimpse.
So this was my Both-And challenge, on the one hand to sustain and expand my own vision of human potential, my understanding of the glory of being a creator, and on the other hand to stand up as a champion for understanding people on their own terms, to empathically go with them down their rabbit holes far removed from the vision I could see. Ultimately, I do think it is about building bridges, the kind that ascend. Really, this is what all the great visionary luxury entrepreneurs do – they pursue their vision while at the same time staying connected with and calling up the untapped potential of all those around them.
Finally, what message would you like to leave to your readers?
The message I’d like to leave is to expand your sense of possibility. Whatever your current vision or goal, how can you make it that much larger, intimidating, and worth it.
I speak frequently with entrepreneurs, and most entrepreneurs know the value goal setting and goal pursuit. However, beyond just having and going after a goal, it's important that you create your own goals. So many people, even the best and most creative people, can be creative within the confines of their work, but leave it to society and those around them to dictate what their life goals ought to be. This is where I like to talk about the importance of the two methodological principles: first principles thinking and introspection. These are two methods to master. You want first principles thinking to be able to break down any complex aspect of reality into its fundamentals in order to find new patterns and creative integrations, and you want introspection to be able to deeply know and transform your own unique inner world.
These are internal operations, but it is through first transforming your own inner experience that you will then be able to go out and transform the external world into magnificence. Too often today luxury gets associated with materialism and consumerism – but the real success in life comes from being a creator of luxury and transforming your inner brilliance into material excellence.
For further guidance and empowerment as you build your rich inner reserves and transfigure that into luxury material form, I invite you to reach out to me and the team at Open Horizons Coaching. Thank you.
