Form Follows Function: How Myisha Battle Built a Sex Coaching Business on Her Own Terms
"If I could tell that little 12-year-old girl, 'One day you're going to be writing for Time magazine. You'll have a published book and people on public radio are going to be listening to what you have to say about sex.' Like, unbelievable. I don't think that she would have been able to comprehend that."
Myisha’s business has evolved a lot since we first met in 2017 when she hosted an event at my first business, New Women Space. Back then, she was just a year into launching her sex coaching practice, describing that time as "throwing a bunch of things against the wall to see what sticks." Today, she's a certified clinical sexologist, sought-after coach, Time Magazine columnist, and author of “This is Supposed to Be Fun: How to Find Joy in Hooking Up, Settling Down, and Everything in Between”.
What makes Myisha's story so compelling isn't just her career success, but how she built a thriving business around topics many consider taboo while staying true to her values and what business practices actually made her feel good.
The Middle Schoolers Wanted to Know
Myisha's journey as a sex educator began long before she had any formal training. As a middle schooler in the Bible Belt South, she was selected to be a peer counselor based on her academic achievements. Though she was trained to help with certain issues and escalate others to adults, her peers wanted to talk about something else.
"All they wanted to talk to me about was dating and what was happening for them," (read: sex) she recalled. "This was in the Bible Belt South, so not a lot of good sex education. And that meant that there were a lot of unanswered questions and I didn't have the answers to them."
One memory stands out vividly: her school's new sex education textbooks being confiscated by concerned parents and returned with sections blacked out with Sharpie markers. For a "gifted student" taught to excel in every subject, this censorship felt… wrong and weird.
"I was really upset that we had such terrible sex education," she said. "No other subject has a group of parents touching our textbooks."
This sparked what would become a lifelong mission to fill the gaps in sexual education. After studying health education and sex education in college, Myisha eventually pursued a master's in psychology at The New School in New York.
Feminist Principles as Business Foundation
What distinguishes Myisha's approach to business is how she's integrated feminist and intersectional frameworks into every aspect of her practice. After completing her master's with a focus on feminist psychology, she decided not to pursue a PhD, realizing she wanted to work with a different population.
"In coaching, you're working with populations that are pretty resourced," she explained. "They work with me to create an action plan around their sex and dating life."
Rather than following conventional business wisdom, Myisha operates from a principle she calls "form follows function" — allowing the structure of her business to be shaped by the impact she wants to have. This approach manifests in everything from how she prices her services to how she handles scheduling flexibility.
"The thing that I think people get really caught up on is that they have to do things a certain way in a certain order to be successful," she said. "If I had followed all of the rules of marketing, of content engagement, of how many followers you're supposed to have and all of these things, I actually probably would not be in business."
Instead, she focuses on what makes her good at her work: coaching. Her three-month packages include sessions every two weeks, but she's not rigid about this structure. When clients need to pause because life gets complicated, she encourages it — seeing it as an opportunity for them to practice important relationship skills.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Myisha’s first ideal client was a Type A high achieving woman. We often choose to help the people that we relate to. Offering more flexibility and modeling what it’s like to cut yourself some slack is particularly radical to someone who is used to putting a lot of pressure on themselves to achieve and push themselves to their limits.
"Part of the service is showing you that your priorities will ebb and flow and change, and sex may be deprioritized from time to time. And that is okay because you can always come back to it," she explained. This flexibility reinforces her core belief that "we're not these fragmented pieces. We are whole human beings who are impacted by all aspects of life."
The Financial Turning Point
For the first four years of her business, Myisha supported herself through retail jobs, at one point juggling four different positions simultaneously. The breakthrough came when she connected with another sex coach offering training on client work.
"I pulled a lot from her," Myisha said. "I started using how to structure my coaching packages, how to use a bit of psychological tactics to come up with pricing that people couldn't automatically do the math and come up with 'you're this much per session, that seems unreasonable.'"
This shift in pricing strategy transformed her business from a "churn and burn" cycle to one where clients committed to longer-term coaching relationships at higher dollar values. It gave her the financial freedom to leave her retail positions —luckily, just before the pandemic hit in March 2020.
Despite her anti-capitalist sensibilities, this sex coach mentor helped Myisha come to recognize an important truth: "When we undercut the value of it and we charge less because we're doing good, we are actually saying to the world that this is not valuable."
She acknowledged the tension in this stance: "I am as anti-capitalist as one can be at this stage in my life. Like I'm really there, but I still have to eat and I like nice things. This is the world we live in, right? And I can't consider that just because this [my service] is a good thing, that it doesn't have monetary value and that I can't benefit from that."
Expanding Her Impact Through Writing
While one-on-one coaching remains central to her work, Myisha has created a constellation of offerings that extend her reach. Her book allows her to connect with people who might never become coaching clients, providing accessible information and exercises. She writes a column for Time Magazine called "Real Love" and recently launched a newsletter, "The Pleasure Dispatch."
Through these platforms, she's increasingly addressing broader social issues that impact our sex lives and relationships. "I do think economics play a role in how we're experiencing our sex lives. I do think that the current political moment should not be dismissed as something that's happening over there and not having real world implications, because I'm seeing it in my practice every single day."
This willingness to address intersecting issues comes naturally to someone who grew up as the child of an interracial relationship in the Bible Belt South. "I've been challenging racists since 1990," she noted. "This is nothing new for me."
Bringing Your Whole Self to Your Work
What makes Myisha effective as both a coach and a writer is her ability to create judgment-free spaces. "I'm just endlessly curious about sex and relationships. And I can hold that curiosity with non-judgment," she explained. This quality has been with her since those middle school peer counseling days.
Her clients frequently tell her it's "the first space that people have had no judgment about this aspect of their life." This non-judgmental stance doesn't mean avoiding difficult conversations — quite the opposite. She helps clients examine cultural messages about sex and relationships through feminist, queer, and racial justice lenses.
As she expanded into writing for broader audiences, Myisha brought this same commitment to inclusivity. When planning her book, she told her publisher she wanted it to feel like a queer POC party she'd attended where organizers deliberately created space for marginalized people.
"I want people to pick this up and know this is a queer book. It's a queer-friendly book. You're included here. This is a disability-friendly environment. This is a space where we can talk about how all those things impact dating."
Looking Forward
Today, Myisha is moving into her first dedicated office space, working on a second book scheduled for 2026, and continuing to build her newsletter community. Through it all, she maintains the tenacity and organizational skills (hello Virgo) that have served her well, along with a genuine love for writing.
For those building businesses in unconventional fields or around taboo topics, Myisha's journey models what it can look like to create structures that reflect your values, charging appropriately for your expertise, and finding ways to reach those who might never become clients.
Most importantly, her work demonstrates that it's possible to build a successful business that honors the whole person — both yourself and those you serve — without fragmenting or compartmentalizing complex human experiences.
As she puts it: "Making changes in your sex life also has a ripple effect in all aspects of your life." The same could be said for her business approach: by centering wholeness, flexibility, and feminist principles, she's created ripple effects that extend far beyond her coaching practice.
