We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elyse Douglas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Elyse , we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
Self-esteem and confidence came late in life. Due to my fathers job, our family of six was constantly on the move. We were relocated approximately every two years which had a huge impact on my ability to form meaningful bonds with my peers or establish relationships with mentors. This, along with the challenge of growing up in a dysfunctional family atmosphere due to my parent’s alcohol abuse, had the biggest impact on the formation of my personality. Most of my encouragement came from my mother. She praised my artistic abilities all of my life and encouraged me to become involved in the arts and so it has been my pursuit practically all of my life. I married very young, which in retrospect was a way to disengage from my unhealthy family dynamic. I left home at the age of 19 and moved to California where the marriage ended in divorce only 2 years later. I was lonely and on my own, looking for a way to support myself. I took a few college classes and worked fulltime as a gas station attendant but had no reliable transportation. In this process, I took a jewelry making class which introduced me to the basics. Up until then, most of my experience was in drawing and painting. This three dimensional art form made an immediate impression on me. I new that this was the right direction for me. From then on, I focused on acquiring skills I would need to design and manufacture my own jewelry. It became my one and only passion from the age of 20. I made a study of gemstones by enrolling in correspondence courses offered by the Gemological Institute of America and looked for jewelry apprenticeship opportunities in jewelry stores that were willing to pay me minimum wage to be a salesperson while learning as much as possible about the manufacturing part of the business. I taught myself how to sketch my designs and carve custom wax models that I could sell to local jewelry stores, worked in a lapidary store to familiarize myself with stone cutting & polishing, setting gemstones and learned how to wield a torch to make jewelry repairs on silver and gold jewelry. In five years, I became proficient enough to land my first real job as the jeweler in a well established retail jewelry store in Sonoma, CA. This is where I met and fell in love with my coworker. I was finally able to earn a living doing what I loved with a partner that I loved! I honed my skills for eight more years before moving to Oregon . This is where my husband and two small children relocated and where we made the decision to become self employed. At the time, it was a decision made from necessity. It turned out that there was no work for us in our new community that used our jewelry making skills! For ten years we provided services to multiple jewelry stores on a wholesale basis, working out of a spare room or garage in our home. Times were tough during these years. The town we lived in was small enough that it was hard to find enough work to support our family of four.
This is when I started an unusual side pursuit. I was still struggling with self-esteem issues, unhappy in my current circumstances, having trouble supporting my family or giving my two boys the opportunities that I wanted for them. Since I had no college education or other career to fall back on, I became interested in teaching fitness classes at the local gym to supplement my income. It turned out that I had the “right stuff” genetically speaking. I was able to become quite muscular with weight training. I was encouraged to take it to the next level by my new friends in the gym. This is what led me to becoming a competitive body builder. It was a huge stretch for me as a shy, reserved and introverted personality to dream that I might be able to do this. I made a conscious decision to go in this direction, to at least try. I had been feeling that my self-esteem issues were holding me back from being the best ME and I was tired of feeling powerless, unfulfilled in my art and disappointed in what I had become. My day started at 4:30am, I trained for five hours a day, six days a week for a solid year and began competing in all natural body building competitions and WINNING! This made me feel special and uncommon among my peers. It was just the boost I needed at the time. My hard work and persistence in body building made me stand out so I had to face fears about being noticed. I spent so much of my life trying to be invisible! After only three years of training, I travelled to Chicago for a National Competition and won 4th place.
This process made me realize that I could change and achieve more. My husband and I started reading self help books about building confidence. We were both in our mid 40s when we started to think that we could improve our economic situation, which was pretty dire by that time. This is when we started to explore the idea of opening our own jewelry store instead of working for other jewelry stores. Neither of us new ANYTHING about running a retail business. We had no background in business and only ever took a few college classes. We enrolled in the Small Business Development Center in Bend, Oregon and this is where we developed the skills and acquired the tools we needed to move forward with our new dream. They taught us to write a business plan, get a small loan, look for a retail site and in a year we signed our first lease, opening up as Douglas Fine Jewelry. This was in October 2001 right after the 9/11 attacks.
Twenty four years later……..we are still here! A quarter of a decade later we evolved into The Sunstone Store, closed our retail store during Covid, and now operate an international on-line business, supplementing with consignment outlets in other retail jewelry stores in Grants Pass, Ashland and Sisters, Oregon.
Jewelry making and designing has always been our passion, for nearly 50 years! And now, Oregon Sunstone has been added to the list of passions.
At nearly 70 years old, I have learned to be fearless by pushing myself hard, into situations that are very uncomfortable. Confidence has come from recognizing my fears and challenging myself in those areas. My most recent challenge has involved learning to sing in public at the ripe age of 50. I now am the lead singer in a rock band called Rock Steady, which is another story to be told.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
The Sunstone Store evolved from our first retail store which was then called Douglas Fine Jewelry Design. We were a traditional jewelry store selling all manner of gemstone jewelry that was of our own design and offered other services like jewelry repair and appraisals. The jewelry industry is very competitive and is focused on gems that are sourced in questionable ways. The movie “Blood Diamonds” made us all aware of this. It became harder and harder for me to feel good about our product at this time. Other gems were being modified and treated in undisclosed ways that made it hard for us to represent them with confidence. We slowly became more and more involved in Sunstone which is our Oregon State Gem. This is a sustainably sourced gem, untreated and locally mined. It felt right for us to move towards this relatively unknown gemstone and support a cottage industry in our home state. My husband and I were partners in all things and so we invested in mining claims that specialized in extracting sunstone from the area of Oregon known as the Oregon Outback, a desert like region of Southeastern Oregon. Sunstone was what we wanted to focus on and so we changed our store name to reflect this. Sunstone is a beautiful, rare feldspar mined ONLY in Oregon that contains copper.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think that tenacity, stubbornness and willingness to change and learn are the skills that helped me most in overcoming many demons that were holding me back and making it hard for me to be my best. My advice is to try new things, even when you aren’t excited about doing it. Be open minded and a life-long learner. I read constantly and draw inspiration from the Stoic philosophy and the Japanese teachings of “Kaizen” which encourages constant, incremental improvement.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
The most impactful thing that my mother did for me was love me unconditionally and encourage me in my art, as a child and all of my life. This was the one thing in my life I was sure of. The rest of life was a complete unknown.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sunstonestore.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oregonsunstonejewelry/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSunstoneStore/
- Youtube: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2F%2540SunstoneStore%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3ndHMhAD03pqg4JfN3HUQSWevuTb-oo7H_c_1m9k93f7oMvVBuFblpgZU_aem_KpHjUi2iiSro2V4Yln89IA&h=AT0nBsw2XZ5jghh6xDtmlxcT6tqkGAPkdZyUXfVS_wexm7xYqFT1vjnDe0xv1tq3poOVacBTa5b2WBL-Hj7mZgF7Gfg8FZCe9-85Kyu6NZVG3hmoKXkyedyl9twqQGT2Gw
Image Credits
All photos taken by Elyse Douglas.
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
