WASHINGTON, D.C. -- There were plenty of great moments for Alina Liao '09 throughout her career as a gymnast at Yale -- she competed at NCAA Regionals every year, won six individual Ivy Classic titles and was a nominee for the NCAA Woman of the Year Award. But it was during the occasional tough times that she learned some of her most valuable lessons. Now -- inspired in part by those lessons -- Liao has developed into an entrepreneur focused on helping others deal with life's challenges. Within a decade of graduating she had founded two companies, including her latest: Zenit, a radical wellness company whose signature product is custom-designed wellness journals.
 
Admittedly, Liao did not have all this in mind when she graduated in 2009 having majored in economics and English. Her lone job opportunity, working on economic litigation consulting at the boutique consulting firm Criterion Economics, led her to Washington, D.C.  There, she steadily rose through the ranks to become vice president within three years. 
 
While Liao was happy at that job, she eventually realized her true calling was elsewhere. She had always enjoyed working with youth. At Yale she volunteered as part of the Athletics Department's Bulldog Buddies program, helping elementary students with their school work. Experiences like that helped her determine her first major career move.
 
"I was doing a lot of soul-searching, figuring out what I really wanted to pour my energy into," she said. "I kept coming back to education, and equity in education … I enjoyed working with youth, and the mentoring and tutoring process. I also knew that I had a lot of privilege and opportunities in terms of education -- I grew up going to a good public school (Saratoga High School in California), but I had seen the inequities. So I kept coming back to that as something I had a lot of feelings about."
 
That led Liao to Stanford, 30 minutes from her hometown of Saratoga. There, she enrolled in a unique joint MBA and M.Ed. program. Her goal, she said, was "to make a big career switch into the education sector, and apply the organizational development lens to try to advance equity in education."
 
That switch wound up paying off quickly. By the time Liao earned her degrees she was on the road to co-founding her first company: MindRight, a 501c3 tech nonprofit providing mental health coaching to youth via text message. 
 
"While I was at Stanford, I got to take classes around entrepreneurship, including some experiential ones where you could work on a startup idea," Liao said. "Through my education courses, I was drawn to topics around mental health in education, learning and development, and how trauma affects learning and educational outcomes ... It clarified a lot of what I had experienced working with kids, and personally. So I and my cofounder were drawn to that and decided to work together on a potential startup idea around making mental health support for youth of color exposed to trauma more accessible."
 
Through work for her courses, Liao and her cofounder came up with the idea for providing mental health support via text message. They would train volunteer "coaches" from the community to work with kids identified through partnerships with high schools and youth organizations in California, D.C., and New Jersey. 
 
Liao utilized her skill sets in organizational development and program management to get MindRight started, working directly with students in the early going before eventually building out a roster of coaches. 
 
"It was really valuable for me to do that, and see what worked, what didn't work," she said. "But also to interact directly with the students we were trying to support. To see some students be reserved at first -- we would text them and check in with them, 'How are you doing?', and see a limited response like 'Hey I'm fine' -- then over time see them really open up about what they were going through."
 
Liao also saw the value that the coaches got from the program and the training it entailed.
 
"I remember one coach I trained was a new father, and he said 'This is going to make me a better parent'," Liao said. "To hear that type of feedback was really powerful."
 
After more than three years Liao made the difficult decision to move on from MindRight, unsure of what her next move would be. Journaling -- the process of writing about events, reflections, thoughts and feelings to understand them more clearly -- wound up providing her with the answers she needed in many different ways.
 
"I took some time off," Liao said. "At the time I was working with a therapist and coach, and they both kept encouraging me to journal. It was kind of funny -- I had done this startup focused on mental health and trauma, and I had known journaling would be good for me. It's something we recommended to the students we worked with. But I never journaled. I always struggled to keep it up, but then one day I came up with a few prompts."
 
Seeing those prompts written on a page helped Liao start journaling daily, giving her a sense of clarity and self-awareness. That wound up being the inspiration for Zenit, which she founded in June of 2019 in D.C.  
 

So Liao now makes journals … literally. In a move that many entrepreneurs can relate to, she went on-line and taught herself what she needed to know -- in this case, skills like how to bind books. Every journal is hand-made and unique, designed by the customer using Zenit's website at zenitjournals.com. There, they can choose from a diverse list of prompts such as "What gave me energy? What drained my energy?" and "I experienced joy when…". 
 
And until she is able to build out her staff and production facilities, Liao -- the founder and CEO -- is the one making all those journals.
 
"I'm the type of person that, once I decide there's potential here, I just dive all in," Liao said. "I knew from doing MindRight that I really enjoy creating and building my own business. I enjoy the freedom that comes with it, and I enjoy creating user experiences that meet people where they are and support their healing.... Fortunately, it has gotten traction. I get good feedback, customers that say 'I'm finally journaling with my Zenit!'. That's important … I want to create something of substance. That's what keeps me going, knowing that it really does work."
 
Liao has recently expanded her product line. She partnered with a social worker to create customizable "Centered Self Planners", designed with organizational planning and cognitive-behavioral strategies to help customers accomplish short- and long-term goals. She has also partnered with activists and diversity, equity and inclusion coaches in creating journals for racial healing.
 
"That was a project that we started working on last summer," Liao said. "That's been really powerful, to embed that lens of racial healing and equity as crucial to wellness." 
 
Liao notes that the customers' ability to customize these products helps separate Zenit from other companies, whose journals and planners are either blank or contain a standardized set of prompts.  
 
"Wellness and mental health and healing is such a personal journey," Liao -- who has made journaling a part of her daily morning routine -- said. "I don't want to tell you what to write about. I've made it so that you can choose the prompts." 
 
Minding every detail, Liao refers to Zenit as a "radical wellness company". The word choice is deliberate -- this was never designed to be an "ordinary" wellness company.
 
"I call it radical to push myself and hold myself accountable," Liao said. "The philosophy there is that everything we do as a company needs to support the wellness of all our stakeholders: our customers, our employees (when I get employees) and the communities we operate in."
 
For Zenit's customers, that means a product that is personal and makes it easier to journal.
 
"Wellness should not be a luxury that only a few of us can do after we are exhausted and go on a retreat for weeks in the mountains," Liao said. "It needs to be an everyday thing."
 
For Zenit as a company, being radical means operating differently from other companies.
 
"That really drives me in being an entrepreneur -- getting to define what we stand for as a company," Liao said. "I outright reject that our sole purpose as a business is to maximize profits. No, it's to maximize wellness. Yes, we want to make a profit to be financially sustainable, but that's not the end goal. It's about wellness for everyone that we touch."
 
Liao's values were developed and reinforced throughout her career at Yale, where she recalls having her passion for the sport re-ignited by what she experienced from the time she first arrived in New Haven.
 
"There was such a strong team element in college gymnastics," Liao said. "I fell in love with the whole sport all over again. Being part of the team, traveling with the team -- feeling I was representing something more than myself when I competed. That was really powerful for me. Just the level of camaraderie ... I really loved that."
 

Those feelings came in handy as Liao learned valuable lessons through adversity. Though she eventually earned three Ivy Classic individual titles in all-around competition -- along with two on beam and one on floor -- her earliest memories of that annual event were of struggle.
 
"The Ivy Classic my freshman year, as a team things didn't go the way we wanted," Liao said. "Our first event was the balance beam, and I was the last up. Each person who went before me fell. It was boom, one after another. First event and it already seems like this opportunity is slipping away, and then it was my turn. I had always had nerves competing ... but at that moment there was no other option but to hit this routine. It was like a Zen moment -- I was so calm and so confident. I thought, 'My team needs me to hit this routine and so I will, period.' I had never felt so calm before, and I hit my routine. It was in that moment that I learned how to compete."
 
Those lessons carried her through the rest of her Yale career, including her time as captain when she was a senior. The team had a large first-year class that season, but many of them were beset by injuries. The way Liao saw her team respond to that adversity stuck with her.
 
"What was really amazing was seeing my fellow teammates and my fellow seniors step up and compete events they had never competed during college," she said. "That was really inspiring ... I had so much respect for my teammates."
 
At Yale Liao also experienced what it was like to compete for Barbara Tonry, the legendary coach who has led the Bulldogs' gymnastics program since its inception as a varsity sport in 1973.
 
"It's so evident how much she cares, the heart and the passion she puts into the team, how she fights for YGT with every fiber in her body," Liao said. 
 
As Liao now looks to the future both for her as an individual and for Zenit as a company, she sees how valuable the lessons from her time at Yale can be. She feels that with Zenit she is building a culture that pushes back against the notion of "working until you drop", instead choosing to listen to one's instincts and value one's health.
 
"I gained a lot from my time at YGT, especially my senior year, when we really had a rough year because of all the injuries," she said. "Going through that with the team, being captain of the team, it pushed me to -- I can't just tell people to be positive. I had to learn how to really understand how everyone was feeling about the situation ... It pushed me in terms of understanding interpersonal dynamics, connecting with people on a deeper level, figuring out how to hold people accountable, how to build morale, how to keep us motivated. I think back to that now when I'm going through a down week and I feel stressed and fearful. That's just the nature of the beast, so how do I keep going during those times?"
 
As Liao has learned, the answers to questions like that can be found through something as simple as a daily journal.