Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Janela.
Hi Laura, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Absolutely, I love sharing my story! It’s wild because I started my adult life as an accountant, working in corporate in NYC. I’m definitely proud to have my years in corporate, it taught me grit, organizational skills, technical skills, and it gave me my eyes for business. But I always had a feeling accounting wasn’t my forever.
In 2019 my husband and I moved to Zurich, Switzerland when he was asked to move temporarily for his work. We are avid travelers so we jumped at the opportunity to live somewhere so unique and ironically we had never been, so we figured why not?
My visa at the time did not allow me to work locally, and remote options weren’t even a thing yet. So I had a lot of time to contemplate who I was, what I liked to do, what I wanted to fill my time with. My identity was so drilled into my American culture of being an accountant with a busy life that this felt extremely uncomfortable at first.
Finding purpose in my days led me to creating a travel/lifestyle blog. I loved it but I didn’t take it seriously. It was fun for me to share my unique experience abroad with everyone. But I ended up back in accounting because that’s the only way I felt secure to make money at the time… Until 2024, when I had a voice that wouldn’t leave me alone – and it kept repeating “leave accounting, this isn’t what you’re meant to do”.
This voice made me nervous but I followed the instruction and started thinking about what else I have to offer the world. I went inward, I went on a solo trip to hear my inner voice, I reached for modalities like Human Design and Astrology to see if it had answers around what I was meant to do in this life. I had this yearning to marry my purpose to my career. At the time, I was also in EMDR therapy and using tools like To Be Magnetic to keep building a list of what I authentically felt lit up by, what others saw in me as my gifts. And little by little it dawned on me that my passions for life is what I wanted my career to focus on: Travel and Wellness.
So, I turned back to my creative skills and launched my podcast, Late Checkout in November 2024 and started a newsletter. I had a feeling – a knowing – that if I share my experiences that make me feel most aware, most human and connected to myself that it was going to lead me to something big and intentional.
Of course our journeys are never linear, I had to stop the podcast for almost a year because we moved back to the states in 2025 and I also welcomed my second baby in 2025. When I picked my work back up in March 2026 I knew I wanted to bring my work to the next level, it was time for me to build a community, build a business where I could work directly with people who craved connecting to themselves. I could feel my brand evolving into not just travel and wellness but Conscious Living. Intentional travel and conscious wellness – rituals that bring us back to life, connect us to our inner voice and use micro decisions to gain our power back and be in the driver’s seat through our daily lives.
Late Checkout came back, and I launched my first wellness series called Pour Back Into You. My series includes a monthly list of rituals to use throughout the month that help you tap out of autopilot and build that muscle of connection to self and put some fuel in your energy tank. I even took this series into a live 7 Day Challenge back in July which was so fun to get a group of women in the same (virtual) room who were craving that connection and energy.
From there I created a 1:1 Pour Back Into You service, where I sit with people individually to understand the season of life they’re in, reflect back patterns they may not see, guiding them with real tools that carve out space for them to truly meet themselves and what they’re going through and help connect them to their natural inner light.
I also built a service for intentional travel. Traveling has always been a therapy to me, my first trip in my 20s was the first time I had a major revelation in my life and I noticed quickly how powerful it is to get out my environment to truly hear myself (and now I’m 46 countries deep and counting!). And that’s why the Intentional Travel Blueprint was born. It’s my way to pay that forward. It provides a front to back experience for a trip that you want planned in every intentional way possible. And it’s tailored to the exact season of life you’re in and what your soul is actually craving from this trip. It includes planning around: accommodations, curated experiences, meals, intentional packing, journal prompts, and much more. All to help my clients meet the version of themselves they are stepping into.
My true mission is to help people feel tapped into their journey. In this day and age we are very distracted and over stimulated, it’s easy to fall into a state of auto consciousness where we are just going through the motions and very rarely are consciously dropped in.
The power we have within, our light, our energy is so sacred. These autopilot motions distract us from being in our energy, it can have us completely ignoring the plot of this life which is: we are the main characters, we are so blessed to be alive and we deserve to be fully awake at the driver’s seat. We have full agency to choose the lives we want to live but society and expectations have a funny way of pulling us away from knowing what we truly want and what our purpose is.
And with every bone in me I want people to be in love with themselves and the lives that they’re building and be awake at wheel.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Oh no, not at all. But that’s the point isn’t it? Once we have a goal the universe initiates a series of encounters to strengthen us, so we can really be the version of self that can hold that goal. Because I started my journey already doing inner work, I’ve found this entire process to be equal parts external and internal.
Three major struggles were: the fear of being seen, monetization and burnout.
1. The fear of being seen was immediately activated since I was recording my podcast on video and posting to Instagram and YouTube. Having this vision of myself being seen by the masses, being invited to panels and other podcasts has been in my head since I started and I knew I had to get over this fear. Because it wasn’t JUST about being seen, it was about being misunderstood. I’d find myself editing my words to be palatable, or forcing certain hooks and trends so my content would be liked. But even the algorithm can sense inauthenticity lol. I really had to face myself and understand why I even had those blocks or wounds around being seen and misunderstood.
Because I talk about things that may trigger people I had to get comfortable with that as well. Being misunderstood is a part of the business. I learned that triggering each other is a natural thing. Being triggered awakens us. It’s the universe’s way of showing us what we need to work on. But this took a while for me to get comfortable with because I had my own inner wounds from childhood that I had to integrate and understand in order to move forward with confidence.
2. Monetization – coming from a corporate background and making money from the traditional sense, I didn’t really see how I could make money myself at first. Carving out my own portals of income felt foreign and very uncomfortable. I started following people on Instagram that had their own businesses in a similar field so I could start believing that it is possible. I studied the market to see how it was done. I had to apply the same methods and realize what works or doesn’t work for me (I’m still figuring this out today!). Being an entrepreneur wasn’t something I studied to become, I just dove in with wishful thinking. But I needed that, I needed and still do need to stay optimistic, believe in what I haven’t seen yet, and build something that only I fully believe in.
3. Burnout – as a mom of 2, a wife, a home manager – my career is like my 4th job. And because I am building it from the ground up I had the tendency to put full force into every idea that came through my brain. My business became a bit scattered and I was burnt out. I was pulling late nights after my kids would go to sleep. I was working in a way that wasn’t sustainable and honestly I wasn’t feeling lit up. So I had to do something about it, I took a beat and got INTENTIONAL about my work. I asked myself: what lights me up in this work? I put my full force into 3 things instead of 7. And gave myself the reality check that this is just the beginning and all of the ideas I have can be put on a list and know that they will organically evolve and come to fruition when they are meant to (aka when I am fully lit up by them).
It’s easy to want everything perfected before the show starts, but the most effective way to grow, for me, is to jump in on the first idea then learn and grow and perfect along the way. I had to apply own rules of Pouring Back Into Me to get to a place that I have balance in the amount of energy I am putting in for every job in my life.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Ah, I love this question. I’m a storyteller, traveler, podcast host, and someone who is endlessly curious about what it means to live a really fulfilling life.
I’ve traveled to 46 countries, lived abroad for six years, walked away from a corporate career, and navigated some pretty significant life transitions along the way. Every one of those experiences has taught me something about myself and sharing those discoveries has become the foundation of my work.
My specialty is conscious living, intentional travel, and self-discovery. At the core of everything I do is this belief that the more we understand ourselves, the more intentionally we can experience our lives, the more awake we are at the wheel.
My podcast, Late Checkout, is where I share personal stories, realizations, and conversations about everything from travel and relationships to spirituality, identity, and the inner work that comes with being human.
My Pour Back Into You series is an extension of my own journey of learning how to reconnect with myself, especially through motherhood and all the different seasons of life. What started as sharing simple monthly rituals has grown into challenges, group experiences, and one-on-one sessions designed to help people get curious about themselves, reconnect with what brings them joy, and make more conscious choices about how they want to live day to day.
On the travel side, I created the Intentional Travel Blueprint, where I help people approach travel with more purpose, creating experiences that align with what they’re craving in their current season of life. I also offer two free resources: an Ibiza Solo Retreat Guide, inspired by a solo trip I took to reconnect with myself after leaving my corporate career, and a Pour Back Into You Planner, a simple tool to help people make space for themselves in their everyday lives.
I think what sets me apart is that I’m sharing from the middle of the experience. I’m living it, questioning it, experimenting with it, and sharing what I discover along the way. I don’t believe we need to have everything figured out before we can share something meaningful. Sometimes the greatest connection comes from being willing to say, “Here’s what I’m going through, here’s what I’m learning, and maybe there’s something in this for you, too.”
What I’m most proud of is that I’ve created something that feels genuinely mine. My love for exploring the world and exploring myself used to feel like two separate passions. Today, I see how deeply connected they are. Whether I’m traveling somewhere new, recording a podcast, or creating a space for people to reconnect with themselves, it all comes back to the same thing: living life fully, paying attention to what it teaches us, and having the courage to keep becoming who we really are. I’m also incredibly proud that I’m building all of this while raising my two boys, because motherhood has given me an entirely new perspective on what it means to stay connected to myself while showing up fully for the people I love.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
My definition of success has evolved so much over the years.
Today, I measure success by how deeply I’m experiencing my own life. How dropped in am I to the present moment? How much am I enjoying the journey toward whatever it is I’m working to create?
Of course, there are tangible measures of success, like financial freedom and reaching certain goals, and those matter to me too. But I don’t want to be so focused on arriving somewhere that I miss the entire experience of getting there.
Another huge measure of success for me is impact. How many lives have I touched, inspired, or positively influenced simply by sharing my own experiences.
It’s the community I’m building. The comments, the emails, the conversations that spark from something I’ve shared. It’s when someone tells me that a story I told made them question something in their own life, see things differently, or feel inspired to make a change.
There’s something so fulfilling about knowing that something I created from my own curiosity or personal experience has found its way into someone else’s life and meant something to them.
That metric tells me I’m playing my part in this world.
To me, that’s success. Being fully present for the life I’m living while creating something meaningful that reaches beyond me.
Pricing:
- Pour Back Into You 1:1 – $187
- Intentional Travel Blueprint – $444
- Pour Back Into You: The Planner – Free!
- Solo Retreat Guide: Free!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://stan.store/laurajanela
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurajanela_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@laurajanela
- Other: https://laurajanela.com/podcast/
