Welcome to Style Your Mind, a podcast for women who are ready to choose themselves, become their own permission slip, and create a life and career they're obsessed with.

I'm your host, Carol Alba Laba,

best-selling author of Girl Code and more,

master life coach, and Mentor to Women Entrepreneurs.

I am obsessed with women on the edge of change, and I've worked with hundreds of women

around the world to help them curate a gorgeous mind and a fabulous life.

Join me each week for empowering conversations and actionable tools you can use right now to

design your thoughts, step into your power, and fulfill your potential.

Are you ready?

Let's do this. Hi guys and welcome back to the show. Around 2014 I met a woman named Noel Santos on the internet.

Neither of us can recall exactly how we met,

but we both recall Noel contacting me through Snapchat,

asking for advice around an idea she had to bring a bookstore to the Bronx where none existed at the time.

At the time, Noel was working a cushy corporate job on Wall Street, earning six figures and putting her accounting degree to good use.

She was comfortable, but after seeing a petition on Facebook to urge her local Congress members to build a bookstore in the Bronx

after the last Barnes & Noble went out of business.

She became extremely uncomfortable.

Just to put this in perspective for you guys, the Bronx is a borough of 1.5 million people in 10 colleges, and it's also Noel's hometown where she currently lives.

Furious and frustrated, she signed the petition, but she immediately decided she wasn't about

to wait for the politics to a line to get her bookstore.

And in that moment, Noel got to work.

I sat down with Noel recently at the Lipp Bar.

...