By The first time I saw a picture of Lisa Canning, I thought, But she’s so young!
Canning, 39, is a wife, mother of nine children on earth and one in heaven, and a successful Catholic business coach. She has 10,000 YouTube subscribers and 16,000 on Instagram. And her house! It’s beautiful! And clean!
She seems too good to be true – especially in light of my own struggle to reconcile my vocation as mother with my firm belief in my calling to write music, nonfiction and novels. (Especially the novels!) The obvious question is how she does it all. But perhaps the more important one is: how does she give herself permission to do it all?
The key to understanding Lisa’s success lies in her willingness to embrace a simple truth: God reveals His plan for us through the burning desires of our hearts. These longings are holy – knit by God into our very being. We are meant for more than a daily grind and a to-do list. When we trust that we are beloved, that God has a unique and unrepeatable purpose for us, we can use that security as a springboard to propel us toward a healthier, holier future.
The minivan meltdown
Lisa Canning didn’t always have all this figured out. She grew up in a faithful Catholic home in which education, achievement and a meaningful career were highly valued.
She flourished in this environment, and shortly after graduating from college was offered a job helping design a home on the HGTV show “Marriage Under Construction.” She got married in December, and the show aired while she was on her honeymoon. She came home to an inbox full of interior design requests.
She threw herself into building a business – and a family. Her first child was born in April 2009, and as she became active in Catholic mom circles, she recognized a disconnect between her life and the conventional image of a “good Catholic woman.”
Canning family
As her family grew, Lisa felt as if she were standing in a giant divide. Her parents and university professors affirmed her passion for her career. Yet whenever she asked Catholic women, “How do you make money if you just stay home and raise your kids?”, the answer was always: “You don’t.”
“Motherhood is the most important thing you can do,” people told her.
“It was black and white, totally binary,” said Lisa, who now splits her time between Ave Maria, Fla., and Toronto, Canada.
The trouble was, Lisa wanted to please everyone. So she tried to do it all. And for a few years, she managed.
Then came the minivan meltdown. “I’d just given birth to baby No. 4 in five years,” Lisa said. “I felt so pressured to show people you can do it all, you can be a great entrepreneur with a baby on the hip. I took her to a job site seven days out of the hospital.”
That day, Lisa found herself sitting in her van: delirious with exhaustion, still sporting a bandage from her epidural, with one bag full of baby paraphernalia and another with interior design material, painfully aware that, although her business was flourishing, her husband felt their life was a mess.
She fell apart. “God,” she prayed, “this cannot be what You want for my life!”
God’s answer? “Trust Me with the plan. Trust Me that you can do things differently.”
So she did. From that day, Lisa set out to reorganize her life to reflect her priorities.
She asked herself, “‘What do I really want in my life?’ I want more time with my children. So I created blocks of time for my children. I want a healthy, amazing marriage! So we started scheduling weekly date nights. And then work had to fit around those things.”
But what work? Clearly, the everything-everywhere-all-at-once model wasn’t sustainable.
Lisa found someone to help her identify her strengths and her passions. Then she reverse-engineered a business to suit it: 2-hour consults with interior design customers, who then carried out the work themselves.
Eventually, her business evolved into mindset and business coaching. Most of her clients were Catholic, and so she leaned into that niche, helping Catholic moms restructure their lives through the same questions she’d asked herself: “What keeps you up at night?” “What do you fight for?”
It wasn’t a slam dunk, making this leap. After all, who was she to claim to be a Catholic life, business and mindset coach? She was no theologian. Surely she needed somebody to give her an imprimatur!
But the fruits of following the unique path God set for her have been marvelous. These days, Lisa runs two online academies: Motherhood Without Guilt and Wealth Without Guilt, with different levels of membership and the option of personal or group coaching.
“I love coaching by exploring the idea that the change agent in your life is the grace of the Holy Spirit,” she said. “I love coaching in a way where relying on God is the measure of success.”
Not selfishness, but self-gift
What made it possible for Lisa to give herself permission to pursue new paths was a deeper understanding of the theology of the body principle of self-gift.
So often we swallow the false message that pursuing dreams is selfish. However, if our deeply-rooted desires are a gift from God and they reflect something given to each person uniquely to accomplish, then expressing that gift, pouring it back out into the world, is an act of discipleship.
“I wish I had known sooner that the Lord has a unique path for everyone,” Lisa said. “And this is what will make you set the world ablaze. The Lord loves diversity! He did not create us all to be carbon-copy Catholic moms and women! We all have been blessed with gifts and life experiences that can build the kingdom here on earth and contribute to the world, to our families, and to our domestic churches.”
A write-from-home mom with a published novel and a home-schooling mom who just wants to be able to enjoy the moment – both of these are holy endeavors. “Women wearing dresses, women wearing pants; women veiling, women not veiling – God loves diversity!” Lisa said. “If you think, ‘I am less than because I don’t do fill-in-the blank,’ take a moment and ask instead, ‘Lord, how do You see me? What do you want from my unique life and my unique domestic church?”
Who I’m meant to be
It was profoundly affirming to speak with Lisa Canning about these issues. For so long, I felt torn between being a “good Catholic mom” and the passion for creative writing that simply would not be squelched.
I began writing ensemble music for Catholic worship late in college and began submitting to publishers in 1997. By the time I received my first acceptance, I had been through grad school, three years’ worth of infertility and I was a mom of a newborn. In fact, I got the email while I was breastfeeding. I screamed so loudly I scared him half to death!
At the same time, I was a closet novelist. I’d been writing stories as long as I could remember, but it was a guilty pleasure, something I rarely admitted publicly, and only sheepishly, the same way my husband reacts when he’s scrolling Facebook while there are dishes to be done and broken fixtures to repair!
Even as I began to write for Catholic magazines, I felt guilty, as if I was somehow cheating my family by nurturing these passions.
It took time and a lot of spiritual wrestling to realize that the stories and songs were something God had placed within me specifically to give to the world. My fiction is not religious, but it reflects a broken world populated by broken people in need of healing. It is formed by my faith, and by the desire to grapple with difficult questions in a space where maybe, just maybe, a deeply divided people can find empathy for each other.
It turns out my writing is a vocation. Who knew?
The blue flame
At the age of 49, my husband, Christian, doesn’t really “do” high-flown religious language anymore, but he, too, has a God-given dream. He calls it making a difference.
Sixteen years ago, when our newborn daughter, Julianna, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, “Everything was a nightmare,” he said. “We were fighting the doctors and nurses, so we just circled the wagons. Times like that, you don’t go outside the comfort zone, and the comfort zone is really small.”
But shortly after Julianna’s birth, I started a blog, intending to build an author platform. The most popular posts were consistently the ones about our “chromosomally-gifted” girl. For Christian, those glimpses of her life were eye-opening. “I saw how she impacted people, even at a really young age,” he said. “Where people in the grocery store came up and said how pretty she was, or the way she’d lunge toward someone who needed a hug at that moment.”
As spokesperson for the University of Missouri, everyone in town knows him. Plus, we’re highly visible in the local Catholic community. We are pastoral musicians who got engaged during the announcements at Mass at the local Newman Center, and for four years, I worked as liturgy-music director for the biggest parish in the diocese. By the time Julianna was born, we were co-directing a 35-member contemporary ensemble at our parish. “Given our visibility, I almost felt an obligation to look for opportunities to look to educate people,” Christian said.
It started small: pushing back against the “r-word” in one-on-one conversations with colleagues and family members. Personal witness made an immediate impact. Over time, our yearly music recital morphed into a fundraiser for Down syndrome services.
And when advocacy in the school district yielded more frustration than progress, Christian decided: Why not focus in his own wheelhouse, the university?
In 2018, Julianna’s Special Olympics cheer squad performed on campus. There, in the middle of an academic hall at a major university, they did their routine for students, faculty – and the special education department chair. No time like the present, Christian decided. He approached her and asked, “Would you be interested in starting a college program for people with intellectual disabilities?”
The answer was a resounding yes. They had to start from scratch, learning what had to be done and what they needed to learn. It was slow going. Often, months went by with no measurable progress. Yet just when he despaired, another piece would fall into place.
In 2020, I read Jennifer Fulwiler’s book Your Blue Flame. I told Christian, “I think disability advocacy is your blue flame.” Next thing I knew, he was getting a blue flame tattooed on his arm, nestled inside a Down syndrome awareness ribbon.
And now, after five years of work, my husband’s dream is becoming reality. In August 2023, PAWS – “Preparing Adults for Work and Society” – will open on the Mizzou campus.
“In high school graduation speeches, people always say, ‘Let’s go out and make the world a better place,'” Christian said. “But who actually does that? Twenty or 30 years down the road, with 3 or 4 kids, is that on your mind? Or are you just thinking about getting through today – ‘I have to do my job and feed my family’? That’s very important! But I didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that we’re not here for a very long time. I asked myself, ‘Is there a way I can make the world a better place, not just for Julianna, but for a lot of people?'”
Everyone needs to have a “blue flame,” he says – “that hotter-than-hot flame that gives you a purpose in life. It’s the parable of the talents. When you hang onto what you’re given and don’t use it, no one benefits. When you use it and invest it, you can have an impact.”
Self-gift, indeed.
Living holistically
The story no one else can tell. The music no one else can write.
The ability to leverage existing connections to launch an opportunity for people with disabilities.
A vision of helping Catholic women balance health, faith and the well-being of their families with building a fortune that can be re-invested in communities.
Each of these big dreams expresses the reality that the body and soul are one. We cannot shut off one part of ourselves and claim to be following God wholeheartedly.
“I thought business development and spiritual development could not co-exist,” said Lisa Canning. “But they cannot be separated! Your Catholic anthropology does not allow this! God made us as whole, integrated people.”
In her coaching business, Lisa sees the fruit of living holistically. There are big projects launched and fortunes being built.
But some of her favorite client success stories are quiet, hidden things:
I no longer yell at bedtime.
I no longer leave my kids’ rooms feeling frazzled and desperate for a glass of wine.
“People might not know you didn’t have to reach for a glass of wine to cope,” Lisa said, “but you and God know when you’ve exercised that virtue of temperance.”
Helping clients exercise discipline over their emotions gives them agency over their own lives.
“Because let’s not be naive,” Lisa said. “Motherhood can be overwhelming. Prior to getting on the phone for this interview, I left the room to go to the bathroom and came back. And during that trip I had four people talking to me at the same time. I had a small toddler grabbing my leg and my 13-year-old asking about some book he wanted from the library. The reality of a large family can be overwhelming, when a baby cannot sleep for hours and hours and you cannot sleep.”
But by renewing our minds, we can turn away from reactivity and toward peace and docility, Godly obedience, humility. We can “grow into beatitude.”
Lisa is grateful for the understanding God has granted her and how it has transformed her life.
“There’s room for improvement, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “But my children can say, ‘My mom was there for me. She worked hard, but she was present and available.’ “
Lisa leaves us with a series of beautiful questions to ponder:
What is your unique call?
How are you going to serve the world?
How are you going to be light to others?
Photos by Michael Dave Dizon
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Overcoming Mom Guilt
In her coaching, Lisa Canning has seen a lot of unnecessary misery among Catholic moms. And a lot of it boils down to guilt. Guilt around how we spend our time, and with whom. Guilt surrounding our need for fulfillment beyond our families.
“Guilt can be a helpful tool for one to assess one’s life,” Lisa said. “But more often than not, it’s toxic. It’s a massive obstacle to becoming who you’re created to be.”
Again and again, Catholic moms tell her, “There’s something wrong with me. I don’t love motherhood enough. I’m just not holy enough.”
Well, let’s face it; none of us are! But more than likely, Lisa says, you’re also miserable because God has given you something to do, and you’re not doing it.
“We’ve been conditioned to believe that since motherhood is the highest goal, everything else is optional,” she said. “But these passions are going to be life-giving, a gift to your family. They’ll give you energy. They’ll fuel your family – as long as they’re used in appropriate blocks of time.”
