What Running a Toronto Carnival Section Taught Me About Leadership, Audacity and Being Wrong

Okay so. Let me tell you what actually happened the last four or five months, because if you've been watching my content you've probably been like "did Lauren quit coaching to become a Carnival or fitness influencer?" No. But also, kind of, for a minute, I get why it looked that way.

Here's the truth: I was never more "in the work" than I was during the launch of Mash Majesty (our inaugural Toronto Carnival section with Tribal Carnival). I just wasn't posting about it, because I was too busy living it and occasionally lying awake at 2am wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.

The thing I'd stopped even questioning

I love Toronto Carnival. Like, deeply, culturally, this-is-mine kind of love. But if you've ever played Carnival, you know the other side of that coin. The chaos. The disorganization. Somebody's cousin handling "logistics." The quiet understanding that a slightly miserable, confusing lead-up is just the cover charge for one incredible day on the road. I'd made peace with that. We all had. It was just "how Carnival is."

Then the proposition arose to lead a section, and this annoying little thought showed up: what if someone who actually knows how to run a business and lead people stopped tolerating that and just... fixed it?

Famous last words, honestly.

The audacity of it all

I said yes with a weird combo of total confidence and total ignorance. I know leadership. I know operations, project management, communication, building a culture people actually want to be part of. What I did not know was a single thing about the Carnival industry, its vendors, its real costs, or its many, many unwritten rules that nobody tells you until you've already broken one.

Doing this with my sister, Shan Boodram, made it more special and also, let's be honest, more chaotic. She brought her platform, her celebrity, her media world, an audience that trusted her on sight. I brought the leadership and business brain. Getting to build something with her again meant something to me way beyond the costumes.

And here's the part that made my stomach hurt the whole time: I built my entire brand on excellence and execution. So this wasn't a cute side quest. It was me putting my own credibility on the line, publicly, in an industry I'd never worked in. If it went badly, it wasn't just "oh well, bad Carnival season." It would've been evidence against everything I teach for a living. No pressure, right?

Expertise does not exempt you from being a rookie

I did the thing I tell my clients to do when they don’t know where to start: I asked for help. I interviewed people who'd run sections before, fishing for the playbook, the real numbers, the "here's what nobody tells you" download.

There wasn't one. Or if there was, nobody was handing it to me.

So I priced things off estimates. I planned around costing that turned out to be wrong. I ran into unknown unknowns constantly, the kind you can't Google your way out of because literally no one has written it down anywhere. My skills made me faster and sharper than I would've been otherwise. They did not save me from learning this the hard way, in public, with my name stitched to the outcome.

The financial truth, no cute spin

We did not make money the first year. I'm going to say that plainly because I think we all do each other a disservice when we only ever post the redemption-arc version of a hard year. Some of what we made cost more to produce than we sold it for. There was a feathered backpack that cost us about two hundred and fifty dollars more to make than we charged for it. That's not a "lesson in disguise." That's just a loss. It sucked. I remember doing that math and just staring at my laptop with tears in my eyes like, cool, cool, love that for us.

But here's the part I haven't actually said out loud publicly yet, and it's the part that matters more than the backpack. Every hour and every dollar I poured into learning a brand new business from scratch was time and energy that wasn't going into my actual coaching business. You know, the one that pays my actual bills. Which, by the way, had already taken a hit at the top of 2026 because of my primary clientele being targeted for layoffs and corporate cutbacks completely outside of my control. Cool timing, universe. Really appreciate it.

So this wasn't just "new hobby cost more than expected." This was me choosing, in real time, to keep pouring energy into learning and launching Mash Majesty instead of putting that same energy into client acquisition and new business, at the exact moment my existing income had already gotten shakier. That's a real risk, not a cute Instagram-caption risk. It's the kind of risk that eventually meant I had to ask people for help covering some of the financial gaps that decision created (ugh! this one hurt). And if you want to know what really tests your sense of security, it's needing to ask someone for money after you've spent years being the "I've got it handled" person (any other first-born daughter’s out there who are feeling the sting along with me?).

There's a Jim Carrey quote that's lived in my head for years: if you're afraid to downgrade your life for one year in pursuit of a bigger dream, you probably care too much what other people think. I lived that once already back in 2021, when I quit corporate, left a big house and an established community and a multi-six-figure salary, and moved to a brand new country to start completely over in a condo, relearning everything from zero. I spent years clawing back stability after that. And here I was, willingly cracking the foundation again, on top of an economy that was already making things hard enough. Not my finest moment of self-preservation, honestly. But also, maybe exactly the point.

What "success" looked like anyway

Here's what the spreadsheet didn't capture, but our post-Carnival survey did.

We sold out the section, and once Carnival was over we asked everyone who played with us to be honest, brutally if needed, because we genuinely wanted their fingerprints on whatever we chose to build next, not just their applause for what we'd already done. Nearly seventy percent of the people who responded had never played Mas before in their life. Which, if you think about it, is kind of a wild number of people to hand a brand-new section leader with a spreadsheet and a dream.

The overall experience rating landed at 4.33 out of 5. Over seventy percent said yes, without hesitation, they'd play with us again. Over seventy percent said they'd recommend the section to a friend. For a first year run by two sisters who'd never done this before, I'll take it, thanks.

But the numbers aren't even the good part. The good part is what people actually wrote when we asked how the experience made them feel. "Included like a Queen." "ALIVE." "Full ah vibes." "At home." One woman said it made her feel like "it's never too late to celebrate yourself with the body you have." Someone else said Mash Majesty gave her "a part of a community when I live so far away from my roots and culture." I read that one twice.

And then there were the notes people left for me and Shan directly, unprompted, that I did not see coming and honestly got a little emotional over. One woman wrote that "accomplishing this as first time section leaders while juggling your other responsibilities was no easy feat," and that we gave her "a personal-sized hole to fit into in an unfamiliar space." Somebody else called it our "bravery." Somebody else just wrote "thank you for your idea turned into an endeavor."

I promise you, none of them knew about the feathered backpack that lost us two hundred dollars and fifty a pop. They didn't need to. What they experienced and what my spreadsheet was telling me were, somehow, both completely true at the same time.

Was every review glowing? No, and I'm not going to pretend it was. And to be fair to us, some of what people flagged wasn't ours to fix. Stormers crashing the road, chaotic lineups, general parade-day disorganization, that's the reality of Carnival itself, not something a first-year section leader controls no matter how good her spreadsheet is. Other feedback was fair and squarely on us: some assembly-area confusion, some costume coverage that didn't land right for everyone. I'm not interested in blurring that line. Some of it was Carnival being Carnival. Some of it was us, still learning. Both things get to be true.

The Mayor of Toronto, who has played Carnival for thirty-plus years and could've picked literally any section in the city, picked ours. A rookie section. That happened in the same year the business lost money. Both of those are true at once. That's the whole point, actually. Leadership isn't "make a good decision and the universe rewards you." It's making the smartest decision you can with incomplete information and then having the discipline to separate "was that a good call" from "did every uncontrollable variable cooperate."

Was I just bored of selling coaching?

I asked myself this before I said yes to any of it, because I wasn't trying to lie to myself: was I chasing Mash Majesty because I was genuinely tired of selling coaching, and this was just a shinier, more exciting distraction dressed up as a business decision?

I made myself answer to some actual criteria before I let myself proceed. Did it align with my message? Would it grow my audience? Would it create visibility I couldn't manufacture through coaching content alone? Did it have real cultural purpose beyond selling costumes? Could I demonstrate the exact expertise I coach on, just in a completely different arena?

It cleared every single one. An Amazon Music partnership and Carnival playlist. A billboard with me and Shan smack in the middle of Toronto. A panel at Soho House with Mayor Olivia Chow and Celena, CEO of Tribal Carnival, talking about what's actually happening behind the feathers. An invite to walk the game ball out at an AFC match. CP24 coverage. None of that came from selling costumes. It came from building something with an actual purpose, next to a partner whose reach could carry that purpose further than I ever could solo.

What I want you to actually take from this

You do not need certainty before taking a smart, intentional risk. Audacity gets you through the door. That's it, that's all it does. It cannot teach you a single thing once you're standing inside the room. Only humility does that, and only if you're willing to be honest about what a decision actually costs you, not just the highlight reel of what it might return.

If you've ever heard a story like this and thought "I could never do that" because of your body, your age, your career, your responsibilities, or the security you've worked so hard to build and are terrified to touch, I wrote a whole book for you about exactly this. Be in the Room is about what it costs to stop shrinking, and what's actually possible once you stop waiting for permission.

This is the actual work I help people do. Making clear decisions when the stakes are high, the information is incomplete, and you cannot think your way into certainty before you act.

And honestly, there's more to this story, including what this whole thing exposed in me that my competence could not hide. That part's coming. If you want it, join the newsletter and stick around for the rest of the series.