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Coming into a full sense of belief around something that we have personally created is one of the most empowering things that we can do because it changes how we see ourselves.
– Bryna Haynes
Darla LeDoux: Hello and welcome to today’s retreat and grow rich podcast. Today, my guest is inspirational speaker, philosopher, way maker, coach and award-winning bestselling author Bryna Haynes. She is the creator of Choose Your Evolution.
She helps conscious entrepreneurs, change makers, leaders and influencers navigate growth and change so they can step into their biggest vision in the most intentional way possible. Her unique Quantum Evolution Process empowers her clients to align with what they want and who they’re being in their lives every day, ask the right questions and live into their genius through conscious choice and inspired action. Welcome to Retreat and Grow Rich. Welcome Bryna.
Bryna Haynes: I am so excited to be here Darla. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Darla LeDoux: I am so thrilled to give people a behind the scenes into you and what it is that you do in your business and really you’re jumping right in to hosting events, not just like in a little way but going all in. I know people are going to love this conversation today but first, I’d like to share a little bit about who you are with folks.
Bryna Haynes: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I’ve had a very interesting evolution personally and for about 12 years prior to doing what I’m doing now, I actually worked in the publishing field. I was an editor, ghost-writer and book coach, and so I worked with a lot of people in inspiration and personal development and with some really incredible people doing incredible things and supporting them and getting their message out there. I feel like I’ve been able to leverage that into this new venture. What I realized and we can talk more in depth about this later as I kind of share a little bit more about my story but when we have these big realizations about ourselves, sometimes they hit us in a such a profound way and there’s no going back from it. For me, part of what I realized is that I was doing a backstage supporting kind of role and I was really good at it but I have never in my life been a backstage kind of person.
I was feeling really not very purposeful, not very fulfilled and wondering why when I literally had the best job in the world. It really came down to how I was showing up in my space and I think that is a huge theme for anyone who is leading retreats, who is hosting workshops, who is setting space for people to how am I showing up in my space and what impact does that have. When I have that realization, I also came into the knowing that I have a lot of ideas of my own. I have a really strong talent for putting together concepts and information in a way that’s accessible for people, often from multiple seemingly unrelated modalities and I love talking to people about personal development and becoming the best versions of themselves.
Rather than asking why didn’t I create this or asking unhelpful questions, I just started kind of asking how do I do more of this? How do I have more of this thing that I would do forever and ever, even if I didn’t get paid for it? The answer emerged very quickly and it was very much a business model based on events and live interaction with people. Now, what I’m doing is I’ve created a project called Choose Your Evolution and based on events and retreats as well as digital learning and presentation, it’s really a project dedicated to helping people become the best versions of themselves, to ask better questions.
To understand both their spiritual side and their human side and the technicalities of how our brains work and how they support us or don’t support us in what it is that we’re trying to create and kind of straddling the physical and spiritual worlds in a way that feels balanced and makes sense and actually propels us forward.
Darla LeDoux: That’s so awesome. I have so many questions based on that. We’re going to dive in a little bit to the quantum process that you use, your quantum evolution process and you used the word evolution about yourself even but before we dive into that, you were in publishing and then you said, book coaching. Did you build a business as a book coach?
Bryna Haynes: Absolutely. Yeah. Yes, I was working with authors in the inspirational space for 12 years. I started off, doing some editing work. When I started the business of course, like most of us when we started business, I would just do anything that came my way but it very quickly became apparent that my niche was inspirational books and I worked with Inspired Living Publishing as a chief editor for that company, from 2010 until this year and worked to the authors on multiple levels that way but it was in coaching that I really tapped into my passion for talking about personal growth and personal change because honestly, if you want to write a book, all the information you need is out there.
If you want to do any kind of business in any field, all the information that you need is out there. You have to transition into a way of being that allows you to utilize that information and so, that became a big theme in the coaching I was doing and I realized that I had a much broader implication. Yes, book coaching, editing, ghost-writing, all of that were my former business, is the heart of writing.
Darla LeDoux: That’s awesome. I love that … it’s the same thing with retreats, right? There’s no rocket science really to hosting retreats but it’s being the person who can make the decisions and invite the people and take a stand for transformation and leave the room and all of that. The how to is the easy part. It’s becoming the person who can hold that, is the real gold.
Bryna Haynes: Exactly and in essence, I know that’s what you’re helping people too, right? It’s not the physical action taking and so many of us make that mistake, right? If I just do X, Y, and Z, I can’t help but be successful but if our mindset and our way of being and the way we show up in our space does not align with that, in some fundamental way, no matter what actions we take, we’re going to hit a wall. This has been demonstrated very clearly to me throughout my life in several different ways and it took a long time for me to get it. It’s really important to me now to kind of help people understand that, that creation is an experiential process.
It’s not theoretical, it’s not cerebral and if you’re like me and you’re a super mental person, that can be a hard bridge to cross because I know all the stuff in my head, it really should work, okay but I’m not showing up that way in my day to day and yeah, we want it to be easy.
Darla LeDoux: Tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. That’s so juicy. I am a recovering engineer, I call myself so I have a lot of that mental talent so to speak which doesn’t necessarily help.
Bryna Haynes: Well, it’s funny because I often joke that like the smarter we are, the harder time we have with some of these basic level evolutionary concepts because we really do think that we can figure it all out in our heads. There’s a lot of resistance I think that comes from this knowing of information because input it to the daily practice, we can’t just think. We have to feel, we have to do, we have to experience, we have to play. We have to screw it up royally and get that information and then do it again. The more in your head space you are, I think the more you get pissed off with having to like do the actual drudge work of putting some of this stuff into play.
It’s okay and it’s okay that we have been there because we’ve … as people, as a society, we valued intellectualism so much and we put it on such a pedestal that we pushed off to the side other aspects of being that are necessary for integration and evolution.
Darla LeDoux: A hundred percent. I knew there was a reason we connected.
Bryna Haynes: Sisters souls.
Darla LeDoux: Exactly. It makes me think of this story, I talk about this in my book about a client, we’re at a retreat and it was all about money and receiving and asking and the energy exchange of that and her assignment was to ask someone for something, right, like a granola bar, $5, you name it. It took a good 10 minutes and we all sat in silence and waited for her to start by asking someone for their kind bar. Now, in her mind, she knew like “Oh, I just need to ask,” right? It’s like, we know what we need to do but actually doing it is such a vulnerable act and she had everyone cheering for her and holding the support and making that decision to ask changed everything.
It’s one thing to know it and to say, okay, when I go home, I’m going to start asking and it’s another thing to start right away.
Bryna Haynes: Absolutely. Absolutely and if we don’t give ourselves … and I think this is, it’s so important and it’s kind of glossed over and so much manifestation work and teaching, is that if we don’t give ourselves an imperative to make these small changes vital and important, the big stuff we want is going to be perpetually out of reach because if you can’t ask for a kind bar, how the hell are you going to ask someone to give you $2,500 to come on a retreat? It’s not going to work. There’s a fundamental disconnect there. When I talk about evolution, this is such a key piece of this because most of us think about changing our lives. We’re waiting for … what did they call it, the cosmic two by four, right?
For the universe to basically smack us upside the head and say, “Time to change. You’re all done with the space. Now, you get to move on.” If we’re lucky, we might get one or two of those in a lifetime. Usually, they suck. Someone dies, we lose our job. We get really sick, it’s like that’s the cosmic and you’re going to wait around for that to give yourself permission to change? Absolutely not. We can’t do that. The world will not wait on us doing that anymore. We need to think about changes, this tiny evolutionary process, these series of little steps forward. We ask for the kind bar then we ask for the $5, then we ask for help because we’re in the weeds.
Then, we ask people to show up for us in a different way. Then we ask the bigger, the bigger, the bigger steps and we get confident in our ability to receive and obviously, that’s why you teach it that way. That’s why we need to start with those small things, that might not feel so important in the moment and people have that disconnect still, like what the heck does this have to do with my retreat? I’m sure you get those questions …
Darla LeDoux: We talk ourselves out of it.
Bryna Haynes: Yeah. Exactly.
Darla LeDoux: It’s not that important …
Bryna Haynes: Exactly. Exactly, it’s not that important if I do this little thing.
Darla LeDoux: I love what you said, we have to give ourselves an imperative. What have you discovered about that?
Bryna Haynes: Well, a lot of people talk about this as the big why and I think that gets confusing because the big why often gets lumped in with purpose and mission and all these things that feels so big and for those of us who have actually found purpose and mission, it’s like, that’s awesome. That feels really good and that becomes our why. For so long, I was not in the space of purpose and mission and even though I was doing this amazing work with some of the most incredible people on the planet, I was not connected to a sense of purpose and I think it was because, I was showing up in a way that wasn’t congruent with who I know myself to be and what I know myself to be capable of. Again, it was like that backstage thing when I’m not really a backstage person and I was creating a sense of dissonance and suffering around that.
How that manifested at the time because obviously, everything is clear in hindsight, right? How that manifested at the time was why don’t I feel purposeful. Why don’t I feel like I have this big why and it became … for those of us who work in the inspirational community, purpose is everything. What’s your mission? How are you changing the world? I was like, I don’t freaking know, right? I took on this sense of shame around not having a purpose, like everyone else around me did. Silly. I started looking at a different version of why, of imperative for doing those things I knew wouldn’t be forward. Initially it just started off as what’s going to feel good today? Not tomorrow, not next week, what’s going to feel good for me to do today?
More yoga, okay, I can do that. Okay, meditate. Okay, yes, I can do more of that. Take the day off and go shopping. I can totally do that, are you kidding? Listening for that inner guidance about what would actually feel good in the moment, because those of us who are go getters we push through. We don’t listen to that as much as we could or should. Then, it became a little bit bigger. What really makes me happy. What’s going to feel good to me to do this week, this month, this year? The imperative behind those small evolutionary changes, if you’re not already connected to that giant sense of purpose and mission, don’t go for that because all it’s going to do is keep you stuck.
If you’re not there yet, take a smaller step, give yourself a reason for doing what you need to do, that’s good enough to get your butt out of bed and get you doing what you need to do, in the moment. That could feel entirely self-centered. It could be, well, you know what, I want to make X number of dollars this month because I want to take myself on a vacation. If that gets you out of bed and going in the morning, do that. Eventually, you will come to that intersection of what you’re great at and what you love and your purpose lives there, but you have to walk that path to find it before you can tap into that energy. Imperative I think is different for everyone.
Sometimes, it’s a little bit more femoral, like I want to learn how to receive. Okay, what do I do to put myself in a receiving space today? Little things, ask for the kind bar, right?
Darla LeDoux: I love it. When you were working as a book coach and I’m assuming you’re working with a lot of people who know their purpose and they’re passionate about what they’re writing about in this inspirational space, and you’re behind the scenes so you’re kind of out of alignment with what you came here to do and you’re working with all these people who maybe know what they came here to do or maybe not, maybe, maybe not but what was that like for you?
Bryna Haynes: It was so interesting because on the one hand, I was so in love with the work that they were doing and I wasn’t putting my stamp on it because that wasn’t my job but my job was to help them flush out their ideas and bring them into a space where they could be consumed by general public. I felt like I was making a contribution there but there’s this balance I think when we’re in a supporting role, where is our voice heard and how do we make what we have to bring to the table known? I felt like I was doing that in some capacity and I always felt very loved and valued by my clients, that was never an issue that I’ve had but it was knowing that I have something more to say about each subject and swallowing that, because it didn’t serve my clients or their work for me to bring that forward in that space.
I think that was where my disconnect around purpose came in and it was painful to realize that about myself that I had been keeping myself small even in service to something that was so big. Yeah and it felt a little bit selfish to step away from that work and go onto my own path and at the same time knowing that it was right.
Darla LeDoux: Yeah, you’ve used the word, selfish, you said, it can feel a little self-centered to say I want to go to Yoga today, has that been a part of your journey?
Bryna Haynes: Well, yes, absolutely. I’ve actually been a yoga teacher since 2009 and I was lucky to train with some of the most amazing teachers in the country and I still have a really amazing community in the yoga arena and one of the things that comes up for so many people in and around this care taking of themselves, which is of course part of our evolution, right? We need to take care of ourselves in order to bring our best energy into the world but there’s this element of I’m not serving if I’m taking care of me. This comes up mostly for women honestly, almost exclusively for women if we’re telling the truth, that we’re supposed to be in service.
Even in our inspirational community and as teachers and leaders, we are expected to be in a space of service and purpose is often tied in with that. How are you serving? Who are you serving? These are the kinds of questions that we ask and we often run into resistance most of the time just from within ourselves, especially if we have a good community around us but most of the time, there’s this little bit of inner resistance to the self-care and it does feel selfish to put ourselves first and for me, that translated … because quite honestly, I’m only just now 40 years old, learning to take care of myself proactively, as supposed to retroactively. For me, it ran directly over into my career, is that I was caretaking everyone else’s beautiful babies. They’re both babies.
Darla LeDoux: Yes.
Bryna Haynes: Not doing anything to nurture what was happening inside of me and what was wanting to grow inside of me.
Darla LeDoux: Everyone else is …
Bryna Haynes: Yeah.
Darla LeDoux: Projects being nurtured came first.
Bryna Haynes: Always. Always. I mean, I would miss meals. I would miss workouts. I would miss meditations to meet deadlines because that was what was important to me and when I started thinking about transitioning into a space where I was leading and I was teaching and I was bringing my ideas forward, honestly, the first thing that came up was, what is everyone going to do without me, right? So many of us feel that responsibility that isn’t ours to bear. I think, especially for those …
Darla LeDoux: Well, they could feel important, right and needed and if we didn’t have that sense of being important or needed when we’re younger, in particular being important, right? It’s like, of course, we put ourselves in a role where we’re indispensable.
Bryna Haynes: Always, and I think for anyone who’s thinking about starting a business, who’s thinking about launching a project, that includes retreats or anything, really, where we are no longer in a service role but instead in a leadership role, we have these thoughts about who’s going to step into our shoes and do this work that we are now leaving behind. The same thing comes up when we’re hiring a team. Feeling like we’re indispensable to our own projects when we’re really not. It’s this constant sort of pause and reflect, pause and reflect, pause and reflect, where we do need to be selfish, in the ways that move us forward, right? Not in the ways that alienate relationships. Not in the ways that damage our businesses but in the ways that move us forward.
When we take these sort of small evolutionary steps into putting ourselves first, so that we can fill up our cups and give to everyone else, it’s those small things that we avoid, like you said, I can skip today’s meditation, I can skip today’s yoga class but we really can’t and it’s in those moments that we need to be selfish in order to do more good throughout the rest of our day.
Darla LeDoux: Yeah, amazing. What did you discover in being behind the scenes and knowing … like when you learned, “Oh, my gosh, I’m meant to be out front,” and we’re going to talk about your event in a minute here, what did you discover about why you didn’t know that before, right? It’s like, usually I’ll cheer for myself, I was trained as a coach in my corporate engineering job and I loved it, I instantly fell in love with the work and like the way it had changed my life and I thought, if I could just do this for a living but everything I knew about myself and how I got love and how I was valued in the world, was not that. It was like, “Oh no, that’s for you.” What was your journey to discovering, “Hey, I’m meant to be on stage, not in the supporting role,” and why do you think that you’ve had initially, I say sentenced yourself to the behind the scenes.
Bryna Haynes: Well, how far back do you want to go because it’s really I think so many of us who know that we’re called into leadership and yet resist it, have some part of our past where who we were or what we had to bring forward was minimized. As a kid, I remember so many times where the conversation went something like, it’s okay that they don’t like you, they’re intimidated by you. Well, maybe you shouldn’t be such a know it all or why are you so loud or you need to step back and make room for other people because what they’re doing is more important or people like them better or whatever, it’s some sort of sense of minimization of who we are or some sort of sense that we need to be small in order to make other people comfortable.
I think for those of us who have experienced that, there’s a sense that our entire job in life is to put other people first and make them comfortable, because when we are in our bigness, everybody else somehow in our perception and this is actually true but this is what we’re taught. When we are in our bigness, it makes other people feel small and we don’t want that because most of us aren’t sociopaths and actually care about how other people feel, right?
Darla LeDoux: What was the time … Can you think of a time when you’re being in your bigness and you got that like correction?
Bryna Haynes: God, so many time. I mean, it happened in school. I remember, in my senior high school, I had two girlfriends and we were like the smart girls and also very loud and opinionated. I remember we had one teacher who told us about midway through first quarter that we were not allowed to talk in class anymore because we intimidated the other students. For the rest of that year, I couldn’t offer an opinion in my English class which was the only class that I actually wanted to attempt. I understand her reasoning because as teenagers we did get rather loud and opinionated and I’m sure that we trampled people because we didn’t have the social skills or awareness to do otherwise. Looking back, I can understand where she was coming from in some ways but it felt like very like, who are you, just speak and be heard.
I think we can go all the way back to being a kid and most of us have storylines that we can trace that way and for a lot of us, I think when we do too much restrospection into that, it becomes a crutch or something keeping us where we are because now, we have all of these reasons and why we are who we are, I can justify being where I am because all this stuff happened. I think it’s super valuable to know sometimes why we feel the way we do and there’s an excavation process around that but at a certain point you have to say, yeah that sucked but why am I going to let experiences that happened 20 years ago, dictate who I’m being today. I have to make a determined choice to be different and part of evolving this new project for me was exactly that, to stop listening to those voices that said, you’re too much.
Nobody likes you. You have to be quiet and small because you make people uncomfortable and actually realizing that part of my job in this world is to make people uncomfortable because we don’t change when we’re comfortable. We don’t grow when we’re comfortable. We don’t step out and make changes in the world when we’re comfortable.
Darla LeDoux: They love that so much because so many people who want to leave retreats also want to keep all of those old way of being that make them in their comfort zone, right? How do I create a retreat that makes everybody happy and they want to come and they have a great time and they never bump up against resistance yet the resistance is really what makes us grow. Anyone who’s drawn to this work has some version of being put on this planet to make people uncomfortable.
Bryna Haynes: Exactly. Exactly and I’ve been doing a lot of research so again, so much of my previous career was in inspirational books and works and one of the huge themes that always come up, when you talk about personal growth is law of attraction and manifestation.
Darla LeDoux: Right.
Bryna Haynes: I felt for a long time as I was having my years long pity party of why do I not feel purposeful, blah, blah, blah. It’s like why doesn’t the law of attraction work for me, because I think all these good thoughts and I always think about how I want things to be and I keep my attention fixed on that. I don’t dwell in the past and everything. What I discovered as I started researching quantum physics and neurobiology and neuro-hacking is that we don’t create through our thoughts. Our thoughts are only an inception point. We have to change our ways of being, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually, everything.
We need to update who we are being in the world in order to have what we want because what we’re doing is we’re sitting in this vibrational … electromagnetic stew that is vibrating at a certain frequency and it was super cool to look at quantum physics and wave theory and realize that that’s what Abraham Hicks is talking about when they talk about vibration. We’re in this vibrational frequency but it’s not just created by what we’re thinking. It’s created by the friction between us knowing that we should be doing something and then not doing it. It’s created by the habits that we have. It’s created by the amount of piece that we feel on our day.
It’s created by our entire state of being and that is the vibrational conglomeration that is us and until we update that, we’re going to keep getting more of the same, just in different packages and that’s where we bump up against this evolution. To go from vibrational level two to vibrational level 10 in order to get what we want, that’s a tall order but to go from step to step to step and see it as an evolution, where I know that I’m heading to level 10 but if I can just get up to level three today, that’s a victory, right? That’s something that we can bring into our retreat design, is that on a scale of one to 10, where are my people at in terms of attaining their dreams?
If I can bring them two steps beyond where they are, that is a huge victory and that’s also, it’s a stretch of their comfort zone but it’s not like a, let’s blow your part and put you back together kind of stretch, right?
Darla LeDoux: Yeah. Bryna when you made the decision to host your event, what was that like for you? Where did that idea come from and how did you make the choice to go there?
Bryna Haynes: Well, it was actually inspired by a discussion with my business coach and she was having her own event and was talking about that and what that meant and I started thinking for so long, I prefer to do things virtually because I have two little kids and when I conceive this idea, my daughter was not even a year old and my other daughter was not quite four and just like, all right, how do I do things virtually? I kind of started thinking what is the difference between doing something virtually and doing it in person? When you look at the actual science and biology of human interaction, there is a huge difference between being with someone virtually and actually being in their presence.
If we as retreat leaders can create a vibrational space, that we hold, that we define and that we navigate and allow people to navigate within, the impact we can have is so much greater because they’re literally touching our vision for them. They’re in it physically. They’re in it experientially. They’re in it in terms of the people that they’re surrounded with because what is the saying, the five people closes to us were the sum of the five people who were closes to … I forget exactly the quote, but when we are around other people who share our goals, who are on the same trajectory as us. We come together to make something exponentially more powerful.
Darla LeDoux: I love that phrase, literally touching our vision for them.
Bryna Haynes: Yeah, absolutely.
Darla LeDoux: I would say like they’re stepping into the energy field.
Bryna Haynes: Exactly, exactly and I believe Bruce Lipton refers to it as like … it’s like vibrational congruence or something. If you’re like in this electromagnetic field and you’re vibrating in X frequency and you need someone who is doing the same thing and at the same level, your waves sync up like ocean waves, they become more powerful. If you do that with eight or 10 or 20 people, the power of that is like a tsunami of forward-moving energy. You can create that in a digital space but it’s a heck of a lot harder because you don’t have multiple senses engaged for your participants.
Darla LeDoux: Yeah.
Bryna Haynes: When I started thinking about what kind of impact do I want to have? What do I want people to leave with when they’re done with this event? How do I want them to feel? I was able to design this three-day event on multiple levels to feed into exactly that.
Darla LeDoux: Here you are, you’re sitting here with two young kids. You’re building everything virtually because I mean that would be the logical thought, right, I’ve got … if I want to be home and yet, something is showing up for you saying, “Hey, transformation is more powerful when we’re together physically,” so you decide to do an event.
Bryna Haynes: I decide to do an event and …
Darla LeDoux: I would really love to hear the story of the event and I know you have another one coming up so will definitely tell people about that and how they can register and come to your event. I’d love to hear the story of it from the process of how did that decision call you to grow and what was your personal transformation in stepping in to being the person who can leave this event?
Bryna Haynes: Yeah. I want to preface this by saying that prior to Evolution 2019 which took place this past May, in Providence, Rhode Island, I have never led anything on that scale before. I mean, I taught yoga classes, I participated in teaching yoga teacher trainings but I had never held a space that was entirely my own on any scale, let alone of the scale that I was going for. What it really called forth in me … and I’m that kind of person, and not everyone is like this but I know that for myself, I have to make my goal and my vision feel almost completely out of reach, otherwise, I get bored with it and move on to something else. If I don’t set myself a really big challenge, it doesn’t feel like it calls me forward in a profound way.
The advice I was getting was, we’ll do like a half-day workshop or do a one-day event and just get people there and start something and I’m like, no.
Darla LeDoux: Boring.
Bryna Haynes: What I want to teach cannot be taught in one day. I need three days for this so we’re doing a three-day event. I hired an incredible event planner. I want to also say that this was not something that I did on my own. I had someone who was able to do the physical task of creating the vision that we established. We started about nine months out, planning everything from where do we find a hot pink couch to how do we leverage our resources …
Darla LeDoux: Obviously, the first presence.
Bryna Haynes: Of course, it’s all about the couch, right? Yeah, it’s …
Darla LeDoux: Actually, I think about that because sometimes it’s like, the strange little vision that actually makes it all come to life. It’s like not necessarily logical so it could start with the hot pink couch.
Bryna Haynes: Totally. I mean, there were certain things that we were open to and certain things that we weren’t willing to negotiate on. Everything came back to this vision for transformation and so, the food was designed that way and so many people commented on the food, like we were super clear with the hotel, like please find us organic produce and a friend of mine who is a blue diamond in doTerra is also a mixologist and she came in and did organic fresh-pressed juice elixirs with essential oils and like, it was this little touches that fed into this idea of upleveling our consciousness that created the vibrational tone of the event. By the time we were done designing that, we had set the parameters of a space that felt like it could hold itself.
I’ve been to so many events that have such a grand vision but the environment is not supporting that vision and it feels like you’re being pulled up and then you’re fighting all the silly details that should be supporting you, like that food or the space isn’t setup in a way that encourages interaction, or like little things like that. We were really careful about those details and it was good for me, I mean, it wasn’t just about the end product of the experience but it’s actually good for me because I knew that I was going in to lead this space with all of the details that would support people in rising to what I was calling them to. They were already in place and I didn’t have to think about them.
I didn’t have to constantly be pulling people back from distraction like we didn’t feed people sugar in the middle of the afternoon. Actually one person did comment on that, like where were the brownies, I wanted brownies. No, sorry, I’m not pulling you back from your sugar high, we’re in a spiritual space here. It wasn’t that I was trying to dictate to people what was necessary for their evolution but I really wanted to know that what we were providing was going to be in line with that energetic space.
Darla LeDoux: Yeah.
Bryna Haynes: Then, when I got on stage, for the first day, everybody had come into the room and felt that and I didn’t have to do anything to get them ready to receive what it was that we’re creating because all the sensory details and the way that the room was setup and the conversations they were already having and what we provided beforehand did all that for me. That was so cool and the event itself was just … it was so easy and surprisingly so and it really felt like affirmation that I was on the right path. I think partly it was because of all the work we did beforehand. I think that I have been trying to teach what I was teaching and share what I was sharing, in an environment that hadn’t been so quite so deliberately created, it would have been a huge struggle and I would have felt like I failed and I would have been discouraged for round two.
Darla LeDoux: Well, so I’m curious because you said because you said it was so easy because you had thought about the details in advance and set things up in that way and yet, what I personally am seeing is every single client we’ve worked with, there are some point in the journey when their own stuff comes up to heal in order to become that person. I love that, it was smooth and I love the tip around all the details, being handled in your environment which is so awesome and I got to wonder if there was a point where shit hit the fan.
Bryna Haynes: My god, yes.
Darla LeDoux: We get the brick from the universe and it’s like well, the more we’re aware, the less we need bricks which is great. What was it like for you or when was that point for you in the process?
Bryna Haynes: There were several but the biggest one I think was about eight weeks out and I mean, it’s so interesting trying to, for the first time negotiate the promotional process for an event like that. I have a lot of things in place and some of them worked really well, some of them really didn’t and there were learning curves but I have carried a story for a long time, previous to this event that I was not supported by the women in my life. I had asked a lot of people for support and promotion and a lot of them didn’t step up and I realized of course, theoretically of course because we’re super good at realizing things theoretically that it really didn’t have anything to do with me, that they have their own stuff going on and it wasn’t a deliberate whatever.
I came to the point where I felt like once again, I have to carry everything on my own and I don’t know if I can do that. I felt really … I was terrified honestly because I wasn’t … eight weeks out, I wasn’t seeing the sales I wanted. I haven’t sold enough tickets to even cover my cost. It was like, “Oh my god, no one is coming. I have this whole thing set up and no one is coming.” Everything that that brings up about who we think we are, it was horrible. I mean, it was definitely an entire evening of curled up on the couch with tissues and a glass of whisky and feeling bad for myself, right? What I had to decide and it was really a breakthrough moment for me was would I be able to own this, despite what I was feeling as other people’s lack of belief in it.
Could I step up and say, this is mine. I am doing it. I am owning it. I don’t care what you think or how you show up. This is about how I think and how I show up and how I feel about it and how I am connected to this as my purpose. I’ve never owned anything quite on that scale before. It was always like, well, I guess people don’t value this and maybe, I shouldn’t be doing it or like wishy-washy because I wasn’t receiving the support I wanted and it was like this subconsciously calculated way of keeping me small, right, because we do that to ourselves all the time. Hey, the rest of the world isn’t quite at this point where I am with this and so I should just give it up because I’m not receiving the validation I think I must deserve.
It was really, really powerful. I decided to sleep on it. I woke up the next day and I said, am I canceling this event or am I actually doing it? I sat with that for a couple of more hours and I did some meditation on it and I really had to ponder. Here I am, eight weeks out what are the pros and cons of canceling. I decided that this wasn’t about the numbers and it wasn’t about the women who did or didn’t show up to support me. It was about me and my belief in what I was creating. Once I made that decision, to keep moving forward, everything changed. It was amazing because we had a lot of last minute sign ups and we had … from that point on, the conversation around the event changed and even if people couldn’t come, they were sharing it. They were talking about it.
It was like, I had given permission to become its own thing. Yeah, and it was really, really cool and in the end, we had a fantastic group of women. It wasn’t quite the turn out that I had set my intention for but it was the perfect number of women to have exactly the level of transformation that we determined and I’m still hearing from people five months later that like … and I heard you talking in my head the other day and telling me, what was the version of me who has what I want to do right now because that’s the question I ask people a lot.
Darla LeDoux: Yeah.
Bryna Haynes: They’re still coming back with this feedback about how they are launching their dreams based on what they learned at that event and how should it would have been if I canceled that and just because I couldn’t be with my own doubt and move past this part of me that wanted validation before I did my thing.
Darla LeDoux: I love this so much Bryna, like I got chills so many times in that story because we have a four-step process and the very first step is own it and it’s like, until you can own it, the rest is you’re doing a lot of things without a lot of results. It’s a lot of spinning of your wheels, yet if only it were so simple to sit at home and go, “Oh, I’m just going to own my mission and my purpose and then everything is going to be awesome,” that moment of reckoning, of saying, is this important enough to me to birth it with no approval. It’s like, gosh, it’s so beautiful, it is the definition of owning it. I love that so much.
Bryna Haynes: I think some of us need that lesson in a hard, hard way more than others because we all have our own journeys and we all have our own stuff and some of us need that lesson around other things. Maybe it’s organization or maybe it’s marketing and networking and for some of us, it’s the owning it. I think not coming in to a full sense of belief around something that we have personally created is one of the most empowering things we can do because it changes how we see ourselves. This is actually part of what I teach in this process of personal evolution is that we have our conscious beliefs and how we know that we should be or that we want to be in order to create what we want. We have the action steps and we have the goals and we have the plans.
If we are not doing the things that are going to move us forward, there’s a part of us that is still not able to visualize ourselves as the kind of person who has, or says or does that. That’s the part we need to look at because if I’m not owning myself as the kind of person who other people want to listen to or want to learn from or want to be with, if I’m still running that replay in my head, from when I was 10 years old and everybody was saying, nobody likes you, you’re a know it all, shut up. If I’m still running that team and I’m trying to invite people into a space that I’ve created, that is not going to work …
Darla LeDoux: No, not very attractive.
Bryna Haynes: I have to become this version of me who can hold that space and so much of the time, it is a painful decision because we want to stay in that smallness. We want to stay in that resistance because that’s what we’ve known forever and ever and ever. If we’re being taught something bigger, we have to chose it.
Darla LeDoux: I have an experience recently, not that long ago really Bryna that someone disappointed me and I was in this process where I was relying on this person and I couldn’t, like I just became aware, “Oh, I can’t in this moment,” and I had to rely on myself and it was like, I was forced to birth my own knowing in a whole new way, it’s very, very similar and what I noticed is the story that I was telling myself about why I couldn’t trust this person, in one perspective it’s true, right? It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I see this is happening and so I need to take this over myself. I need to own this myself.” On the other hand it was like a story, right?
Just like a tape playing, like I could hear myself telling myself, you know when you’re sitting there and you’re rationalizing to yourself in your free time. You tell it, like, “Oh, if someone ask me about this, here is how I would explain how right I am.”
Bryna Haynes: Totally, all the time.
Darla LeDoux: Do you do that?
Bryna Haynes: Yeah, I do all the time.
Darla LeDoux: Well, that, I know that that’s BS, right? For you, you were having this story of I’m not supported by the women in my life and you could have stayed there like, “Oh, it’s all about this conversation in my mind,” but you chose to have a different conversation that was about, “Oh, this is an opportunity for me to really own this.” I think that’s so beautiful. I guarantee that there’s a lot of people listening who have a similar story about not being supported. How has that changed? How has that idea of support changed?
Bryna Haynes: Again, it’s a process because I’ve had some experiences like you over the past month that have really thrown me for a loop and I’ve had to reorganize some ideas that I had about my business and where it was going and where I was going to call on support and team and all of that. At the same … there’s that story like you said that runs, like, “Oh, well, this person is doing this and so, X, Y, Z.” It always comes back to us either telling a story about ourselves that is then reflected in them or telling ourselves a story about who we’re not that is reflected on them. Either way, it’s like resistance. Most of the time, there is a lesson buried in that, that we need to be patient and aware enough to see.
If the story feels familiar and easy, chances are, it’s something you’ve been living with for a long time and chances are it’s contributing to the stuckness you feel around that area. I think the reasons that I started my work as an editor … well, okay, I have to be honest with you, it was the reason I started working as an editor is because way back in the day, this is 2006 when I launched my writing business, what I really wanted to do was write an epic fantasy novel but I was so terrified of putting my work out there that I decided to learn more about writing by editing other people’s work, and that like launched my entire business.
I did not want to be seen for what I had to offer and so I created this, granted, magnificent business about not being seen and here I was deciding to be seen and then getting the story back about this is why you can’t be seen. People don’t want to be with you. People don’t want to hear you. People don’t support you, right? It was all those old stories coming up because they needed to be done away with. We cannot move forward into the work that we’re called to do in the world. What we are carrying is low vibration stories inside ourselves. We cannot do it and so what’s going to happen, the more you step out to do your work in the world, the more the shit is going to hit the fan, and you have to be prepared to come back to you, I think again, it’s that inner imperative, that big why, right?
I am willing to look this in the face because I have something more important to do than to let myself limited by this story. When we’re in that space, we step into our power in a way that we had no idea was possible. I anticipate that that old story is probably going to come up again in some form but it’s okay, I’m okay with it because now, it’s becoming less and less about who I think I am and more and more about who I need to become in order to hold the space that I’m creating.
Darla LeDoux: That’s awesome. One of the things you help people with is asking the right questions and you’ve mentioned this a couple of times in this interview of like the questions you’re asking yourself in your mind. You have a resource for people that will help them ask the right questions and of course, I’m always an advocate of people coming to get in the room live and practicing, asking the right questions which is coming up again next April. Your next event. Tell people about this free gift that you have where they can start that process with you.
Bryna Haynes: Absolutely. The questions we ask ourselves are one of the most important tools in our arsenal. We have this mental reflex called instinctive elaboration that basically means if we ask ourselves a question in our heads, our brain has to answer it. You can notice this, right? Any question that you ask yourself, your brain will go to work to find the answers and most of us ask crappy questions. We ask why can’t we have what I want. Our brain will answer that based on all the old stories we tell. Well, you can’t have what you want because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, or my god, why is that person such a jerk? Then, you’re going to get all the answers as to why that person is such a jerk and why you should hang out with them and whatever.
If you practice asking better questions, you’re going to get more useful answers. I created … it’s just the short PDFs, Morning Questions for Manifestors and it’s basically some journaling questions or questions to use in your meditation that will point your brain in the right direction for the day because what you do when you first wake up establishes the mental and emotional tone for the rest of your day. There’s a ton of information out there about morning routines so I’m not going to go into any of that but if you can spend even five minutes when you first wake up, before you look at your phone, before you check your email, before you get pissed off at the world.
Whatever is going on in politics, sit down and ask yourself these questions and what that’s going to do is it’s going to send your brain on an excavation mission because your mind has to answer the question you post to it. Questions that are going to get you answers that will bring useful results. They’re very simple, you can adopt them in any way that feels good but if you take nothing else away from this part of our discussion, going down on the PDF but even before you have a minute to do that in your day, just pause and ask yourself this question and it comes from the access consciousness practice, is what else is possible. If I am telling myself a story, I can stop and I can say, what else is possible?
My brain will go to work, thinking about all the other things that are possible. Yeah, it is possible that this thing that I’m doing is going to completely crash and burn and I’m going to be humiliated and everything is going to suck. It is also possible that this will be amazing beyond my wildest dreams, that this is the start of a career that I never could have envisioned before, that I’m going to impact thousands of people from around the world. That is also possible in a universe that is filled with endless possibility. If you add questions like that, simple questions to your arsenal and practice using those when you feel stuck or triggered, your entire life will change literally within days.
Darla LeDoux: I love it, I love it. They can get these questions right over at brynahaynes.com, and we will also put this in the show notes. Bryna, anything you would want to leave people with, who are thinking about stepping in front of the room?
Bryna Haynes: If you feel like you have something to say, you do. If you feel called to share something whether it’s your story, whether it’s your knowledge, whether it’s your process or some combination of all three, there is a reason you feel that call so question everything but don’t question that call, right? Recognize it for what it is and then ask better questions around it. How can I bring this to the people that need to hear it? Not is this valid, not am I enough, right? Those are not questions that are going to move you forward. Just remember that there is a reason for what you’re being called to do and trust them.
Darla LeDoux: I love it, asking questions that will move you forward.
Thank you so much for sharing your energy with us. I love your perspective, I love the … kind of where you’re coming from in the study you’ve done and your commitment to being the energy that people can step into and really transform their lives so thank you for who you are and for taking your place in front of the room.
Bryna Haynes: Thank you so much for the opportunity to share. I love spending this time with you and thank you, everyone, for listening.
Darla LeDoux: Bye everyone. We’ll see you on the next episode.
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