What 34 Years of Entrepreneurship and 15,000 Aura Readings Have Taught Me About Leadership
- 9 hours ago
- 6 min read
Written by Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann is the Founder & CEO of Auratherapy, a luxury wellness brand helping people reclaim their breath and remember they are vibrational beings. A 30-year CPG + tech founder, she’s building a modern movement at the intersection of scent, energy, and self-mastery, turning daily rituals into transformation.
When I became an entrepreneur at 28 years old, I thought leadership was primarily about intelligence, determination, and execution. Like many founders, I believed success would come from working harder than everyone else, solving problems faster than everyone else, and refusing to quit when things became difficult.
My toolbox was filled with practical skills. I understood sales, marketing, product development, retail, branding, and operations. I knew how to create opportunities where none seemed to exist. I knew how to hustle. What I didn't understand was myself.
Looking back, I realize that I was leading largely through instinct. I had ambition, resilience, and drive, but very little awareness. I knew what I wanted to achieve, but I had no framework for understanding why certain situations energized me while others depleted me. I didn't understand how my stress affected the people around me, and I didn't recognize how fear could disguise itself as perfectionism, or how overachievement could become a substitute for fulfillment. Like many entrepreneurs, I spent years building businesses while neglecting to develop a deeper understanding of the person building them.
Over the next three decades, I would build multiple companies, experience successes and failures, survive a life-changing health crisis, and have the privilege of learning alongside hundreds of founders through organizations such as Entrepreneurs' Organization, EO, Vistage, and the Tory Burch Foundation Fellowship Program. I watched entrepreneurs build extraordinary companies from kitchen tables and garage offices. I watched founders navigate exits, acquisitions, divorces, health challenges, family struggles, and identity crises. I observed people achieve goals they had spent decades pursuing, only to discover that achievement alone didn't provide the fulfillment they expected.
Again and again, I noticed the same pattern. The most successful leaders were not necessarily the smartest people in the room. They were the people who understood themselves.
At the time, however, I didn't have language for what I was observing. I could see the effects, but I couldn't identify the underlying cause. Some leaders created trust, confidence, and momentum wherever they went, while others generated tension, confusion, and exhaustion despite possessing impressive credentials and accomplishments. I began to suspect that leadership involved a dimension that extended beyond intelligence, experience, and strategy. What I didn't realize was that I was beginning a search that would take decades to fully understand.
The lesson nobody taught
Business schools teach strategy, books teach management, and mentors teach tactics. But very few people teach entrepreneurs how to understand themselves.
We spend years learning how to read financial statements, negotiate deals, hire employees, and scale organizations. We learn about customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, and operating margins. We become experts in understanding markets. Yet many of us remain strangers to ourselves. We know our KPIs, our revenue targets, and our growth goals, but we often have little understanding of the internal forces influencing every decision we make.
Why do some opportunities excite us while others create resistance? Why do certain relationships energize us while others drain us? Why do some leaders thrive under pressure while others collapse beneath it? Why do some entrepreneurs achieve remarkable success yet remain perpetually dissatisfied?
These are not business questions. They are human questions. And because businesses are ultimately built and led by human beings, they are leadership questions as well.
My fifth reinvention
I've often said that entrepreneurs experience multiple incarnations throughout their careers. The person who starts a business is rarely the same person who leads it ten years later. At least they shouldn't be. Growth demands transformation.
By what I often call my fifth incarnation as an entrepreneur, I understood myself far better than I did at 28. I had survived challenges that forced me to grow. I had experienced enough success to recognize that external achievement wasn't the entire story. I had learned the importance of emotional intelligence, resilience, and purpose. Yet I still lacked language for something I could feel but couldn't explain: my energetic self.
It was the part of me that influenced how I entered a room, how I handled uncertainty, how I responded to conflict, how I inspired confidence, and how I communicated under pressure. It shaped how I showed up for my employees, my family, my customers, and myself. I could feel these dynamics at work, but I had no framework for understanding them.
That began to change when my own health crisis forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about wellness, performance, and success. For years, I had approached life as many entrepreneurs do: push harder, work longer, solve the next problem, and move on to the next challenge. My body eventually had other plans.
What began as a search for healing ultimately became a search for understanding. That journey led me to aromatherapy, breathwork, energy awareness, and eventually to the work that would become Auratherapy. It also gave me something I had never possessed before: a language.
What 15,000 readings revealed
Over the last decade, our team has conducted more than 15,000 aura and chakra readings. People often assume this work is about predicting the future. It isn't. Others assume it's about spirituality, and while spirituality may be part of some people's experience, that isn't what fascinates me most. What fascinates me is pattern recognition.
After thousands of readings, you begin to notice recurring themes. People arrive believing they have a business problem, a relationship problem, a confidence problem, a creativity problem, or a stress problem. But often, the challenge is deeper. What appears to be a business issue is frequently an awareness issue.
The entrepreneur struggling to delegate may believe the problem is operational when it is actually rooted in trust and security. The executive experiencing creative stagnation may think they need a new strategy when what they truly need is reconnection with their own imagination and purpose. The founder who feels disconnected from their team often discovers that the disconnect began internally long before it became visible externally. Again and again, I witnessed people gain clarity not because someone gave them answers, but because they finally had a framework for understanding themselves.
Leadership is what you transmit
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that leadership is not simply what you do. Leadership is what you transmit. Every thought, every belief, every fear, every unresolved pattern, and every aspiration influences the people around us.
You can see this in every organization. The anxious leader often creates an anxious culture, the overwhelmed leader frequently creates an overwhelmed team, and the disconnected leader often creates disengagement throughout the organization. The opposite is also true. Leaders who cultivate awareness create environments where people feel safer, more empowered, and more connected.
This isn't mystical. It's human. We influence one another constantly, and the people around us feel it, employees, customers, partners, families, and children alike. The energy we bring into a room affects the people who share that room, and the energy we bring into a company eventually becomes part of its culture. Every company becomes a reflection of its leadership, and every culture becomes a reflection of its energy.
A new framework for leadership
This realization ultimately became the foundation for what we now call the Auratherapy Method. The method combines aura awareness, chakra understanding, aromatherapy, breathwork, intention, and conscious action.
At its core, however, it is not about chakras. It is not about auras. It is not even about wellness. It is about awareness.
The chakra system provides a framework for understanding different dimensions of human experience, from security and creativity to communication, intuition, leadership, and purpose. The aura provides a broader perspective on how those patterns are expressed externally. Aromatherapy offers a practical daily tool for influencing state and creating intentional rituals. Together, they create a language for understanding ourselves more fully. And when leaders understand themselves more fully, they tend to lead more effectively.
Leadership is self-awareness
Artificial intelligence will continue to transform business. Automation will continue to increase productivity. Technology will continue to reshape industries. Yet one competitive advantage remains difficult to automate: self-awareness.
The leaders who thrive in the coming decades will not simply be the most intelligent people in the room. They will be the most aware, aware of their emotions, aware of their patterns, aware of their impact, and aware of how they influence the people around them.
After 34 years as an entrepreneur, observing hundreds of CEOs, and conducting more than 15,000 aura and chakra readings, I've become convinced of one thing. The most important thing we build is not the company. It's the person we become while building it.
Because businesses come and go. Markets change, industries evolve, and strategies become obsolete. But the work of understanding ourselves remains. And perhaps the greatest leadership opportunity of all is recognizing that the journey inward is not separate from the journey of building a meaningful life and business.
It is the same journey. One breath at a time.
Read more from Laura McCann
Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann, a former child star, France-raised creative, NY fashion alum, and tech entrepreneur, now leads Auratherapy as Founder & CEO. With 30 years as a founder across CPG and tech, she’s bringing luxury and innovation to functional fragrance through breathable, essential oil-based Aroma Perfumes and water-based aura sprays. Auratherapy pairs this with data-driven aura and chakra diagnostics that translate energy into personalized rituals. Her mission is to help people reclaim their breath, remember they are vibrational beings, and transform through the practice of adoring yourself.
