Everyday Extraordinary: Leah Lahkiah

After graduating college, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. My partner at the time was flipping houses, and he introduced me to the idea of real estate. I’ve always been into interior design and DIY projects, so I took on some painting tasks and fell in love with the process. 

That chance opportunity snowballed into a full-time job. I got my real estate license and  established my house painting business, Let’s Paint. While my career was picking up, my relationship was slowing down. After we broke up, I realized how much of myself I had been suppressing so I could be seen as “wifey material.” My heart wanted to be in LA, and to pursue a career in singing and songwriting. So, I followed it.

When I got to LA, I sent out over 200 mailers advertising my painting business to support myself while I followed my dreams. The first month, I got nothing. In month two, just when I started to get worried, I got my first few job hits — and from there, it was on! 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize how surprised everyone would be to find out I’m the painter. As a realtor, my gender was no shock. But as a painter, someone who’s going to put overalls on and paint the interior and exterior of your house, I didn’t have a single client that wasn’t utterly astonished. 

I take so much pride in the work I do, and every job I complete gives me an enormous amount of confidence. There’s joy and satisfaction in doing a job with your hands, putting in the physical labor, and creating something that enhances people’s lives. 

So often, the message is that confidence comes from the way you look, or that it can be achieved through affirmations and mental focus. While those things are certainly true, I’ve never felt better in my skin than becoming an expert at a skill. It makes me feel a different, more permanent kind of beautiful, and I think it’s important to explore this side of ourselves so we can truly be in the fullness of our personal power.

There’s also freedom in learning a skill or a trade. These are things that will always be profitable — like painting, landscaping, and plumbing — yet, they often fall to men, in part because of the way knowledge gets passed down, and in part because we traditionally view those jobs as masculine and encourage boys to do them. 

How would your life change if you devoted time to learning a new skill each month? To look up information we may never have otherwise received because we wouldn’t be in the rooms where it’s shared? The internet is a lot of things, but one of those things can be a path to a reclamation of knowledge that women and minorities have traditionally been excluded from. Let’s reclaim it all, and pass it down.