Humbled....

The last couple weeks have been amazing, I have been meeting the most incredible people, so many inspired souls on missions of their own... so many striving towards expanded personal growth, honoring their own health and beauty, deepening their connection to their planet and all those who live upon it.
I am not the most social creature. I can be shy around new people, of which many are entering my life right now in this place of growth. I am quiet by nature, unless I have something real to say and then I can be quite fierce and direct. The social networking part of business always presents a challenge to me.
I believe in what I am doing, am confident in my skills and the importance of the journey I am on. But talking to people about it... explaining just WHY this is so necessary, why change is vital, why healthy beauty as I wish it encompasses so much more than looking pretty for a night out. What gives me the authority to educate on these things? What credentials do I have that allow me the ability to charge fees for my time and services? Because this is such a passion, I struggle with the business part of things, with the technical side of relating all of this into concise words and plans and a bottom line.
A woman in full support of me asked the other day, what can I tell my clients about you? How can I explain what makes you different? Another asked, where were you trained? I feel the need right now to be open.
To the first, I wrote the following in an email.

The truth is that there is no standard for this. I am exploring a territory that is fairly new, at least to the mainstream and certainly to the entertainment industry. I had to create my own standard, my own set of rules. I utilize the SkinDeep Database regularly to keep ingredients in check and to establish some kind of set guideline so as to not let things slide or get lax when I find products I love that are ALMOST clean enough to use and endorse. Research has become a regular part of my everyday. I am the first to admit that I know just a sliver of what there is to know. I am not a chemist. I do not have a formal eduction on these subjects. I am not licensed or certified or regulated because there is no standard for what I do. There is no guideline that says where to go from here for me. This is a new venture. What I know, I know because I researched it on my own, with other people who know more than I do, by reading, by talking to others, by trial and error, by having lived and worked as a model and in the beauty industry for the last decade. I was a standard makeup artist years ago. I know this world thoroughly in the practical sense. I do struggle with words, with having the facts to state to make information palatable and retain-able when I am speaking on this subject. This is far from the easy part for me. I fumble all the time when questioned. There are so many in this community that are incredibly well versed and know far more than I do in the technical sense. I welcome their questions and their intensity. I do get intimidated, but it drives me as well to continue to learn. I am a makeup artist. My roots are deeply green. I have passion that drives me. This is something I care about intensely. Time will provide credibility for me, time to establish more information and a deeper understanding of it so I can communicate it with ease, time to establish a clientele as invested as I am, time to re-build a book that stands on it's own even without the tag of green, time to line up the business with the heart and bring it to a successful place where I can prosper as a business woman as well as a caring partner in the search for a healthier way of approaching beauty.
There is a very large hill to climb in front of me but I embrace the challenge.
I very much welcome your input. It is people like you, like the others I have been meeting lately, all coming together that make scaling mountains possible for all of us.