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In this episode, I’m sharing how RICH entrepreneurs

So, by nature, embracing your RICH skills is a non-linear way of living life.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of Retreat and Grow Rich the podcast. This is Darla LeDoux and we’re here with our RICH Revolution series.

Just as a recap, the RICH Revolution is all about this movement toward using our RICH skills, valuing our RICH skills, and receiving money for the skills that come most naturally to you.

What are the RICH skills? The RICH skills are the Right-brained, Intuitive, Connected, and Heart-centered abilities that you have naturally, and that you’ve cultivated through courageous self work, inner work, alignment work, and trusting yourself in the face of no agreement. Learning to trust yourself and your connection to what’s true for you regardless of what’s going on around you, all of the noise in our society, and in our media, and all of the ways in which we are trained that we “should do” things in a certain way that may or may not fit for us.

So the RICH Revolution, the right-brained, which is that creative, non-linear part of you, the part of you that doesn’t have to do step one, two, three, four to get a result but can actually skip to step twelve and co-create with Spirit outcomes that maybe aren’t predictable. That’s what I mean when I say right-brained.

Intuitive. Trusting that knowing or that felt sense of what’s so for you. Sometimes this comes as messages, or divine guidance, and sometimes it’s a feeling, a physicality, or just a knowing that is always there to guide you, but our society doesn’t necessarily value it or listen to it, right.

As a recovering engineer, I was trained that I needed data to make a decision, not necessarily to say, “well this is what my gut is saying,” right. That wasn’t necessarily an explanation, or a reason that was valued in the corporate world.

C is for “connected” and that’s really connected to yourself, to your truth, to what’s true for you, right. Because you are the center of your world. You are the center of your universe and so all we can know is our self, is what’s true for us, and what’s right for us, not projecting onto other people or allowing other people to project onto us what our truth is.

But for us to really know and be centered, and clear, and grounded in our own truth. That’s what it is to be connected. When we are that, we open up the energy flow to be connected to others in a real, truthful, authentic way.

We also open up the flow to be connected to the universe, spirit, source, God, however you like to think about that. When we are in that place of being totally connected, or tuned in, as a way to think about it, we know that our energy is the source of every outcome, that we are energetically connected to every single outcome we create. So if we have an amazingly positive outcome, right, in the judgment of society- we make a ton of money or meet the love of our life- right, our energy sourced that. Our vibration put out into the universe brought that back.

Similarly, if something’s showing up that we aren’t loving, that isn’t working, that feels problematic to us we were also the energetic source of that, right. There is something in our vibration that’s having that show up for us. It’s not like punishment. It’s like a mirror, right, it’s revealing what’s so for us

So here’s what’s cool, is if we know that, if we’re connected like that, we are at cause of whatever outcome. So if we created an outcome we didn’t love, we can just as easily create an outcome that we love when we are connected to the truth of our energy field, when we can feel our vibration and we sense “oh, this is who I am being in the world, that’s why I created that outcome” right.

It puts us at the source of everything. Your past doesn’t predict your future when you’re connected, because you know: I can shift my energy and I can connect to a whole different vibration like “that” and I can allow my future that I envision to dictate my vibration, or my energy, which then creates my results.

So there’s this whole level of empowerment that comes with being truly connected. And then age is heart-centered. I did a whole episode on heart-centered and what that truly means– to lead from the heart and to let your heart lead. So if you haven’t heard that, go back and listen to that because heart-centered does not mean bleeding heart, doesn’t mean over-giving, overdoing, over-serving. It has a distinction, which we talked about in the other episode.

So that’s what it is to be RICH and as I tuned into this conversation I said “what else needs to come through about this” and I came to the topic of today’s call, which is being magical in a linear world. Being magical in a linear world.

So here’s the thing. Our world is quite linear. The way that we think, the way we’re trained to think is quite linear, and I’m going to share a story about that.

So if your goal is to really honor your RICH skills, they were quite nonlinear, right. Right brained is non-linear. Intuitive, our intuition often will give us information that we can access without a linear or logical path to accessing that information. Connected to ourselves and to source, there’s no time involved in that, right, time is linear. So when we’re connected, we’re present, we’re in the moment, it’s by nature non-linear, we’re not thinking about time, or the future, or planning things out, or controlling things. We are in the present. And heart-centered, our heart might lead us to places that our mind wouldn’t.

So, by nature, embracing your RICH skills is a non-linear way of living life.

So I want to address that, because we’re raised and trained in a linear world, and we’re declaring “hey, I want to follow my intuition, I want to be connected and act on my truth, regardless of what’s happening around me, I want to allow myself to create outcomes that are unpredictable, and I want to let my heart lead.” That, by nature, we’re going to bump up against some resistance because the bulk of the world is embracing and embodying linear thinking.  

So I’ll give you an example of this. When I worked in corporate, after I left my engineering job, I worked in marketing, and I was a marketing and brand manager for a huge company with retail stores all over the world. And one of the things, among several that we did on our team, was to plan out our annual marketing calendar and our promotions for the year.

So the context for this was, you know, how we defined success was that week over week- so looking at this week this year compared to the same week last year. Right. So if it’s the third week in February in 2019, we’d compare that to the third week in February in 2018 and we’d set our financial goals accordingly.

So if the goal was to increase sales by 10 percent, then our goal for that week would be what we made last year plus 10 percent. So we had this laid out for the whole year, so we had our sales goals for every single week for the whole year and we used that to create our promotional calendar.

So what that led to- as you can imagine that’s very linear, right, week after week after week we’re comparing to last year and we want 10 percent more, very linear. So based on that goal we had very linear actions, well, can we do 10 percent more advertising? Can we do 10 percent more placements of the same thing we did last year? Right.

And here’s the other thing- so someone, somewhere in the history of the company started a certain promotional cycle, so twice a year we would offer a discount that was 50 percent off half of your product. OK. Twice a year. And then twice a year we would offer a promotion, a discount, that was Buy One, Get One Free. So similar discounts, the Buy One Get, One Free would create more- there is a bigger discount, but we’d create more revenue because people would buy more things because one is free. Right.

OK so you get the picture. So based on that, when we’re doing planning and we know, “oh this eight weeks last year we had this promotion,” then guess what, how are we going to beat that number this year? We have to have that promotion, right. And so what happened was eventually we trained our customers that this is what we always do.

And I mean, they were eight week promotions, so it was a long time period, which means nobody ever purchased. Very few people purchased, I should say, when things weren’t on sale. Anyone who was paying any attention knew that there would just be another sale and they would wait for that time.

Now, there’s all kinds of- I have all kinds of philosophical issues with discounting products that you feel are valuable and having that be the source of your traffic and your revenue- but what I really want to highlight is that with this system, we were automatically limiting ourselves. So if our sole focus is to to make 10 percent more sales this week this year than this same week last year, we’re very confined in our thinking, right. There is no room or space for coming up with an idea that would sell as much as we sold all quarter last year within a week, for example. Right.

There was no space for breakthrough thinking when we’re in the linear world.

If you sold, if you know, well exceeded expectations in one particular week, guess what? Next year, now you’re trying to beat that, right. So inherent in that, people wouldn’t want to go too much above the 10 percent, because they want to get their bonus, and then next year they want to do the next 10 percent, and the next, it’s inherently limited. Right.

That is a prime example of the linear world that we live in. It’s linear, it happens in time, and we measure in time, and we set goals in time, and we use percentages, we use math and time to create a linear world, right. There is no room for magic in that world and that’s the world that most people live in.

Now, it has a place, right, like we do have time, and we have money and we have to pay bills on time, for example. So there is a place for that. Yet it’s inherently limiting the possibility of magic, the possibility that we can create from source and we can bring forward unexpected gifts that want to come through us, because they want to come through. Right. Because we won’t actually see them when we’re in that context.

So the world is linear.

The second thing is the world is rational. What does that mean, rational. We require a rational explanation for things. Tina Forsyth-  I interviewed her recently, and actually that’s coming out soon- and she spoke about this idea of a particular decision that she wanted to make and she stopped herself from making it for a long time. And the reason she stopped herself from making it is because she was thinking “well if I made that decision, how would I explain it to people?” How would I explain it to someone? Right.

Because the world is rational, we want a rational, logical, explanation for our choices and that often keeps us from deciding.

I want you to think about that for a moment. What’s something that your intuition knows to be true, yet you stopped yourself from embracing it because you don’t have a rational explanation for why. And maybe it’s going to affect people, or people are going to ask, and they’re going to want you to give a rational explanation and if you can’t justify it then you don’t do it.

In other words, everything in you maybe wants you to leave a relationship, yet everyone else sees “oh this is just this really good person,” right. They show up as this good person for everyone, “well how could you leave that?” Right. It doesn’t make sense. And if you can’t explain it then you can’t take that action. Where does this happen?

And we’re systematically trained for this too- show your work, right. You have to show the explanation for how you got the answer. Now there’s something great about that- I was a teacher for a while, I taught high school math for a couple of years- where you need to show your work and, you know, I would give partial credit if someone’s thought process was sound even if they got the right answer. If I could see the way they were thinking about it, and it made sense, they would get some credit for that.

So, you know, good, bad, right, wrong. There is a way in which, hey, if we can explain it, if we can rationalize it in a way that makes sense to someone, we get credit for that. Right. As opposed to I just know, I just know this is the decision that’s right for me.

So the world is rational and Kurt Wright in his book Breaking the Rules talks about the rational mind and the intuitive mind. So we have two minds, we have a rational mind and an intuitive mind, and I remember reading this way back in coaching school years ago and thinking “yes that’s so spot on.” This was before I really knew, I just knew that that was truth.

And Kurt says that the rational mind is not capable of discerning truth. So the rational mind is simply designed to help us frame up the right questions of our intuition. So of the rational mind and the intuitive mind, the intuitive mind can discern truth, the rational mind cannot.

So if you think about it, when we need to rationalize our decision then we let our rational mind make the decision. And this generally doesn’t work, an aligned decision is coming from the intuition- your rational mind might have said “hey, intuition, I want to accomplish X Y Z what do you feel?” Right. What’s the path to truth? What is the truth here? Our intuitive mind knows the truth.

If we are coming from, in the forefront, how do I rationalize my decision, there is no intuition there. We’re totally skipping that part. And by the way, generations of humans are totally unaware that they have an intuitive mind, let alone educated on how to use the rational to speak to the intuitive. Therefore we have a world that expects rationalization- we expect you to justify your decision with reasons, right.

Look around the world, when we’re just in the rational mind and we’re justifying our decisions with reasons, and we’re not engaging our intuitive mind, we can rationalize our way into anything. I was chatting with someone about this recently who said they took statistics, or somewhere, they got a book about how to make statistics tell whatever story you want. In other words, how to twist your numbers to get a certain outcome.

I saw that in corporate, right. The- whatever the numbers were, whatever story someone wanted to tell, they could make the numbers tell that story, right. So the same thing happens with all kinds of things where we rationalize our way into making decisions that really aren’t in alignment or for the greatest good.

And if you look around our society, you look around governments, we can see that in action, right. We can talk our way into things and convince other people to go with us based on rationalizing, and it’s totally dysfunctional because it’s not grounded in truth.

When we are- how many times have you had an argument with a loved one? Maybe a partner, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a very rational argument. You are bringing up facts from the past and evidence of, you know, why you’re right about this and why that means this and all of a sudden you realize that you’re arguing about something you don’t care about at all. Your rationale makes total sense, but it’s irrelevant to what the truth is of this situation. That’s a prime example of what happens in our society and our world.

When the rational mind runs the show, which is happening, right. Which is why it takes great strength and courage to be a RICH human being, a RICH entrepreneur in this society, because you’re operating differently.

So what does it mean to operate as a RICH entrepreneur? What does it mean to operate differently?

If we let go of the idea that we have to be linear, and that we have to rationalize our choices, we can turn ourselves over to that right-brained, intuitive, connected, and heart-centered self that wants to come through. And what that looks like is then we can create magic, we’re freed up from the constraints that keep us from generating magical outcomes

This morning, I saw a note from the universe, if you’re familiar with those, and- it’s at www.tut.com and I went to post it on my wall and when I did, what was interesting is Facebook was popping up a memory for me from a year ago- it was several years ago actually- from this same day, and it was another quote from Napoleon Hill that said almost exactly the same thing. Which, by the way, is part of this message coming through me today for you.

So the note from the universe said, “it’s kind of strange, Darla, but first you have to know what you want, defined in terms of the end result, and then you have to physically move toward it, without defining the how’s- at which point the thing you want actually starts to come to you on its own terms, from a direction completely unexpected.” And then it says, “not unlike a cat. The Universe.” We sometimes joke that our dog is like a cat in terms of his attitude.

So it’s unexpected, the how. So here’s how that works when you’re really creating magic in a linear world, the first thing is this to own your commitment to creating magic. And when the world wants to bring you into rationalizing or setting linear goals in the way that, you know, I want to call it old school, in the old school way that we’re taught, that you stand firm in your ability to create magic, right. Just because you made this much money last month doesn’t mean anything about how much you can make this month. Just because x y z happened in the past, that has nothing to do with what’s happening now or what’s happening in the future, right.

So you have to own that and have faith in that. So we create the vision, the clear vision. Then we take action. Now that might look like sharing it with someone. It’s like, whatever first action we can think of to take. And then the how starts to reveal itself.

But we have to put ourselves out there so we can actually see the divinely in-line, aligned how coming our way. So Napoleon Hill, who was the other quote, you know, he talks about what he calls the “sly disguise of opportunity.” He said “opportunity has a habit of sneaking in the back door and it often shows up in the form of misfortune or temporary defeat.”

So this is the interesting, right. So opportunity is coming to us. So we set the vision, we start to move toward it, an opportunity shows up, but we may not recognize it because it probably doesn’t look like something we’re familiar with. Most likely the action to get this breakthrough kind of result isn’t an action we’ve ever done before. It isn’t an action we’ve ever done before, because if it were, we would already have that result, right.

This is not about just doing more of what you’ve already done and expecting a different result. Possibly, if you have like a funnel set up and you’re getting, you know, X results, sometimes you can amp that up and get to 2x results or 10x results, there were a lot of times when you start to amp it up you get different results, so it’s not linear.

If you’re looking for a certain outcome, stop thinking you have to control exactly how it will happen, and that’s where the magic shows up. Now the world wants us to know exactly how it’s going to happen. So we’re trained that way. So our mind automatically kicks in and says “how.”

I remember in the beginning of my business I incessantly worked this spreadsheet where I would put if I have two clients a month, two new clients a month, and 50 percent of my clients renew, eventually I’m going to get to this amount. And I would, you know, work that over and over again. Now there’s a place for that- to get some context, and to get a sense of “am I charging enough to hit my goal.” We need to have is a math in that regard, but it was very controlled, right. And it was coming from, well if I can, you know, do 10 percent more or 20 percent more, right. That kind of thinking was dictating everything as opposed to the vision and then saying, “ok universe, how do I deliver this vision.”

The vision could be a financial goal, it could be a number of clients goal, it could be a this is where I want to live or how I want to live goal, or it could be a this is how I want to serve goal- alright Spirit, show me how to serve this mission, even if it might look different than anything I’ve ever known before.

So, often, we don’t even know why the vision is coming. It’s just like, I don’t know, I think I’m doing a podcast today because Spirit gave me a really clear message to create a podcast and I didn’t have all the reasons, and it wasn’t linear, and it’s not a clear, you know, direct path, it’s not direct response advertising such as Facebook ads, which I’ve done a lot in the past.

I don’t know why, I still don’t know fully why, right. I just trust. I trust. So you don’t always need to know the why. And even in the explaining of why, you lose energy, as opposed to if you can get the message and take action without needing to run it through the mind you keep the momentum. So you definitely don’t need to know how- you start and how shows up. And often you don’t even need to know why- you need to know your personal why, right, like the the reason you would break through whatever you need to break through to be this leader on the planet, -but you don’t need to micromanage why a particular goal is coming up.

So your intuition says “yes hire this person,” your intuition says, “yes fire this person.” Your intuition says, “yes this client is aligned,” your intuition says, “no this client isn’t aligned, even though they might have money to pay you and so therefore look like a good client” right. It’s not linear and it doesn’t always make sense, and we don’t always need to know, we need to become accustomed to not needing to know so much.

The people who don’t need to know often are the most successful. I want you to look around at that. Your intellect, your ability to figure things out is very likely your biggest detriment in having these kind of magical breakthrough results.

So this is the RICH Revolution. The RICH Revolution is creating breakthrough outcomes in the face of no agreement in society. In a society that says “think linearly, rationalize” we’re saying, “hey I trust my intuition and I know I can create this vision, and I don’t have to know the how, and I’m going to hold the vision anyway” and knowing that the energy, the energetic alignment, creates the results. An energy shift can create tangible breakthrough results.

Remember, we’re the source of everything. Our energy has to do with our motivation for why we’re doing things, where we’re coming from when we take action, that is the energy, right. And it has a literal vibration and it affects our literal results, so if the outcome isn’t what we want, what we envision, we have to look “ok, what is going on in my energy, where am I coming from in this goal that these results aren’t- that this is the result I’m getting as opposed to the one I think I want.”

So, for example, let’s say, you know, everything is flowing in your business. Money is flowing, you make some hires, and you’re feeling really good. And then money stops flowing. And now you’re struggling to pay everybody, you’re struggling to pay yourself. You’re concerned about your cash flow, etc. So then you look around and you go “oh yeah, well, you know what I did is, I hired my cousin to do this thing, because I thought I should because they needed a job,” right. Then you start to look “oh, actually I made that decision totally out of obligation and fear, and my rescuer came out, and I wanted to save, and I wanted to support, and be a nice person, and be a good person, and all of that” and ever since I made that higher, the money stopped flowing. So perhaps that was out of alignment, right.

Perhaps the energy you stepped into in that moment was this saver, fixer energy. And if that’s true, it’s just something from the past that you learned, right. And to shift the results you just shift that energy. So you say “ok, if I didn’t have to, you know, save anyone or hire out of obligation, what decision would I make?” And maybe you let the cousin go and you get re-aligned with what’s true, which is you’re creating an economy for the people who are divinely aligned to work with you. Period. At which point your energy shifts and all of a sudden cash flow shows up again. Right.

So everything’s connected and we can create breakthrough results, and it’s not related to the past, and it can happen like “that.” An example I love from early in business, when I first started my business I had this interesting thing happening where- it really relates to the world being rational- where I was so afraid that people were going to say “I don’t understand, why are you becoming a coach, it doesn’t make sense. You’re an engineer, you do marketing, like, you know, looking at your resume this doesn’t make any sense.”

And I had a real concern about that. It had to make sense. I had to be able to rationalize and explain it. And when I held that concern, by the way, whenever I would talk to people that’s what they would say, “I don’t get it.” You know, “explain it to me, help me understand.”

And I was having those conversations a lot, to the point where I went, ok, why am I, how am I sourcing this? And I started to look in the mirror and see oh, I have a real concern about this. And I did some work about that, right. Like, why do I care if people understand why I’m doing what I’m doing? And I let it go. And A. never had that conversation again, like literally never, and B. the tangible action I took, once I let that go, was I went and updated my LinkedIn profile to say that I had a business and that I was a coach. And I can  still think back to that, how terrified I was to update my LinkedIn profile, because that was my professional resume. That all made sense, right. It really didn’t, because I was an engineer, and a teacher, and a marketer, and all these different things.

But to me, I was trying to control that, it made sense. When I let that go, and I updated my profile, I got three clients within the week. Just flowed right in, right. So- and prior to that it had been a month since I’d brought in a new client- so when we shift our energy, our results shift, and it happens like “that.” And we don’t often know the how until we see the how, right, we don’t know until we start to take action and then we see and then we adjust and we shift our energy and we get the result.

And this is a process that continues. When you’re living as a RICH leader in a rational world, right. You’re seeing the energy behind, you’re feeling the energetics behind a situation, you’re able to sense energetically “this is off” even though rationally everything lines up, on paper this makes total sense.

You’re sensing that energy and you’re trusting it. You’re trusting your own discernment, your own RICH skills, your own knowing of that which exists that is beyond the rational, logical, and sometimes even visible, right. You’re trusting that which exists- that our society may or may not accept- and when you’re doing that, you’re operating on a different energy plane and your results therefore don’t follow the same rules. They don’t have to be linear.

So I would love to hear from you. What are you taking away from this conversation? What is this conversation opening up for you?

It is an act of courage to operate in this way in a world that doesn’t condone it. Right. You’re not asking for permission, you’re owning your own leadership, and your own knowing of what’s beyond the scene, and you’re acting on that. And in doing so you’re giving others permission to do the same.

See, the more of us who own these RICH gifts, the more we’re giving permission to others to say, you know that thing that hunch you have? That intuition, that sense you have, that dream you have, that, you know, place your hearts leading you? Trust it. You can trust it. It’s safe to trust it.

And that’s what we’re paving the way for, is a whole different context for living and a whole different conversation for society.

This is Darla LeDoux of Aligned Entrepreneurs and thank you for tuning in. Please share your insights and further this conversation.

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