Today we’d like to introduce you to Traydon Inspires.
Hi Traydon, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I found poetry in school, and it found me at the right time. I was a kid growing up around poverty and violence, held together by a mother who loved me and did everything she could with what she had. Poetry became the place I could put what was happening inside me — a way to make sense of an environment that didn’t always make sense.
But the fascination started even earlier. Back in elementary school we’d have these word contests — you had to use a word correctly in a sentence — and I’d win them. Out of all the kids, I’d win. I just had this thing with words, this pull toward how language works and how it lands on people. I also loved to sing, loved to move. It was all the same instinct showing up in different ways.
When I started doing poetry for real, I noticed something that changed me: people respected me differently after they heard me speak. Same person, same room — but my words shifted how they saw me. That stuck with me. I published my first poetry book at twenty, performed all across the St. Louis area with Story Stitchers, and picked up the handpan a couple years ago, which opened up a whole new way of moving people without words at all.
That whole journey turned into a body of work. Today I run ELVERSI, a company built around transformative experiences and consulting, and I’m the creator of Neomysticism — my way of making old wisdom usable in modern life. I work as a Human Systems Architect, which really just means I help people and organizations see how the pieces of their world fit together: their story, their work, their message, their money. It’s the same question I’ve carried since I was that kid winning word contests — how does what’s inside a person actually get out and land on someone else?
A lot of my focus now is on young people on the South Side. I work with EncoreSTL and run youth programming at Gene Slay’s Girls & Boys Club, and I serve as Youth Council President at Thomas Dunn Learning Center. I came up performing in this city, so building real opportunities for the next generation of St. Louis artists feels less like a job and more like paying it forward.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No, it hasn’t been smooth — and looking at where I started, it was never going to be.
I didn’t come from a household of college graduates or six-figure earners. I came from food stamps and Section 8, off-brand versions of the clothes other kids had, lights cut off more than once, learning young how the “status world” worked by being on the outside of it. I grew up without my father in the home, raised more by emotion than by principle and order. And as the firstborn son, I was carrying the weight of becoming a man without anyone around me to show me what that even meant.
The hardest part wasn’t just the lack of money — it was the lack of a map. I couldn’t talk to my mother about college, because she had no experience with it. I couldn’t talk to the people around me about business, because they didn’t either. So I had to keep going outside of everything I knew, over and over, learning things nobody near me had ever had to learn. I was paving a road that hadn’t been paved for me, pushing myself into unknown territory because I was the only one who could see where it led.
That came with a specific kind of struggle: being underestimated systematically, and misunderstood by almost everyone around me, for most of my life. Not knowing my worth, or how to price what I make, or how to stand fully in my value when I’d never been in an environment that taught me how.
And recently the ground moved in real ways. My father passed in September of 2025. The organization I’d been part of since high school began falling away as its funding dried up. Those moments taught me what’s become the core of how I work: the journey is renewal and rebuilding. You pivot by being in it. You don’t get the lesson first and then walk the road — you walk the road, and the road is the lesson.
That’s not a smooth story. But it’s mine, and every hard part of it is now something I can hand to a young person coming up behind me who feels just as unseen as I did.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about ELVERSI LLC?
ELVERSI is a St. Louis company built around one thing: transformation that actually holds. We work in two lanes — transformative experiences and consulting — but underneath both is the same craft. I help people and organizations get clear on who they are, what they carry, and how to move it into the world in a way that lasts.
The framework behind the work is something I created called Neomysticism — my way of taking timeless wisdom about how humans actually change and making it usable in a modern life and a modern business. I work as a Human Systems Architect, which means I look at a person or an organization the way an architect looks at a building: I see how the parts connect — the story, the message, the offer, the money, the meaning — and I help redesign it so the whole structure stands on its own.
What sets me apart is that I come at this as an artist first (Traydon Inspires). I’ve been on a stage since I was eleven. I know how to make something land in a room, how to move people, how to find the truest version of a message and say it so it’s felt, not just understood. Most consultants come from spreadsheets. I come from the stage. So the work I do tends to reach the parts of a person that strategy alone never touches.
I work with both individuals and organizations, and there are a few main ways in. The first is a Read — a focused one-on-one session where I help you see what’s really going on beneath the surface of your story or your situation. From there, some people want to go deeper through direct one-on-one work with me over time. And for those ready to fully step into it, I host retreats — immersive experiences where transformation happens in a held space, away from the noise of everyday life.
What I’m most proud of is the youth work, honestly. Through my partnerships with EncoreSTL, Gene Slay’s Girls & Boys Club, and Thomas Dunn Learning Center, I get to hand young people on the South Side the exact tools I had to go outside my whole world to find. That’s the brand to me — not just transformation for people who can afford it, but building real paths for the next generation of St. Louis artists and leaders.
If there’s one thing I want your readers to know, it’s this: what you carry inside you isn’t too much, and it isn’t dangerous. For a lot of us, the most alive parts of ourselves got labeled as the problem. My whole work is about reversing that — helping people stand fully in who they are and build a life and a livelihood out of it.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I’ll give you a real example. When I was active in the military, I was on a Zoom meeting about goal-setting, and they had all of us privates go around and say what our goals were. When it got to me, I said mine plainly: I’m going to be someone who hits seven figures. I said it with full confidence and boldness — and what I didn’t know was that two of my leaders, the ones over my company, had actually done exactly that. They heard me say it, and they reached out and sat me down.
Later, when I went overseas, my major mentored me in a way that changed my life. He’d hand me book after book — and he’d only answer my questions if I’d actually read the book first. I’d read it, come back, ask my questions, and he’d break it all down for me. That taught me what mentorship really is. It found me because I spoke my goal with boldness and then proved I was coachable — willing to read, willing to do the work, already moving toward something.
That’s my whole advice on finding a mentor: be bold enough to say what you’re after, and be the kind of person worth pouring into. Nobody wants to carry someone who’s standing still. But if you’re already in motion and you’re genuinely coachable, the right people show up.
On networking, I’ll be honest — I think the word itself is incomplete. “Networking” is just working your net, and a net that hasn’t caught anything isn’t finished. Until something of substance comes out of it — a product, a project, something real — the networking isn’t complete. So you have to already be working. Use your vision to pull in the people who can cover your blind spots, and actually build something together. Don’t just meet everyone in the room. Meet them with a purpose. Otherwise you walk away with a phone full of contacts and no memory of who they were or why you connected.
Pricing:
- The Read — a focused one-on-one session to see what’s really going on beneath your story or situation. Starting at $199.
- One-on-one work — deeper, ongoing engagements priced by scope.
- Retreats — immersive transformational experiences; pricing varies by format and length.
- Organizational consulting — custom-scoped to the engagement.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://traydoninspires.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/traydon.inspires
- Other: https://calendly.com/traydoninspires1/connection-calls
