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What are you afraid of being judged for?
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Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Retreat and Grow Rich, the podcast. I’m Darla LeDoux. I am the host of this fabulous podcast. I’m the author of the book, Retreat and Grow Rich, which you can find on Amazon. And I am the queen of transformational retreats.
In this episode and in this series, my intention is to really bring forward a different conversation about what transformation really is and what it means. One of the things that I’m incredibly passionate about is educating every single human being on the planet about how our energy works, how our perspectives, our vibration, our fears, our passions, our loves, our excitements, all of these things, affect the results that we have in life.
And when we can’t see how we’re being in life, we feel perplexed and uncertain about why we keep attracting the results that we have. Because we can’t always see our truth from within ourselves. Einstein has a quote, “I don’t know who discovered water, but it sure wasn’t a fish.” That’s really alluding to the idea that our beliefs, our energy field, which go hand in hand- so our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our vibration, which we put out into the world, which affects our results. Another way to think about it is, what we think about or feel and believe, that is what we tend to see in the world.
So it’s not like it vibrates into us, but we put ourselves in situations to have certain experiences based on our vibration. So the more we’re aware of this, the more that we can understand that the energy we’re putting out is at source in our results. And none of this is good, bad, right or wrong, but that as a human being who’s going through an experience, we can’t always see the energy we’re putting out.
This is because it’s locked in our subconscious. So whether it is something we’ve experienced before the age of seven, before our conscious mind is fully formed. So our conscious mind can accept and reject ideas. When we’re conscious of what’s going on, we can go, “yeah, I believe that. No, that doesn’t resonate for me” and we can choose what we receive and what we store in our energy field. But when we’re either triggered really emotionally, so our conscious mind shuts down, this happens. Or before the age of seven, before our conscious mind is fully formed, we actually don’t have a choice about what goes in.
And so the energies, the thoughts, the beliefs that we experience when we are young before seven, they just go right in and it becomes part of the water we swim in, and we don’t even realize. This is the thing, and this episode is going to get really clear about how blind we can be to our beliefs. We don’t even realize that they’re there.
Whatever we’re programmed with as kids becomes our truth and how we interact with life, and it just is, it’s not even something that we question. Only our truth is also there. So the story I’m going to share today has to do with my truth being there and present and under the surface. And then this other belief I was given that kind of came on top of the underlying truth to hide the truth. When those things happen, we have this kind of tension. Right? It’s like our soul knows our truth but our ego mind is programmed to deny the truth or hide from the truth.
When that’s happening, there’s a conflict. And that conflict, we hold that. There’s like a resistance within us and we actually hold that in our energy field. We’re holding it like a shield that says, “don’t see my truth.”
So I want to share a story with you today that is from a time in my life that took a lot of courage for me and a lot of trusting myself, trusting spirit, trusting the world in order to step into this truth that came through. That I really, in some sense, I was very prepared to hear it, and in another sense, I totally wasn’t prepared to be with this truth.
So I want to take you back to early on in my business. I had been in business maybe three or four years. I’m going on year 10 at this point, so this was quite a few years ago. I had grown my business really quickly. I love transformation. I love the work I do. I fell in love with transformation when I experienced my own profound shift on retreat and woke up to a truth that was brand new to me. I suddenly could see the world in a whole new way, and it was so beautiful and so amazing, and I loved it. I wanted everybody in the world to know that you could transform, that you could shift from one energy to another and your world would look totally different.
So I had gone all in on my business with this total passion, even though I didn’t know really how to run a business. I was totally afraid of what people would think of me. I wasn’t very good at sharing my opinions, because I didn’t like when people disagreed with me. I had all of these things going on that were barriers, but I was passionately committed to the work and I allowed myself to keep putting myself out there, and putting myself out there, and putting myself out there because of that commitment.
So fast forward, my business grew pretty quickly. I went from a couple hundred dollars a month with kind of, sort of, clients to hiring a coach and really getting myself aligned and getting also knowledge about business, which, this is why I’m so passionate about the way we design our programs in my company. We both do inner work of alignment and we also do the practical work of understanding how to run a business and how those things come together. So I had stepped into this coaching program where I was getting both of these things. I was really learning a lot and I grew really quickly.
So I went from basically 0 to $78,000 in my business the first year, to $150 the next year, to $250 the next year, and I was just growing. For me, someone who had kind of assumed that to do the work I love I was going to have to sacrifice earning a living, this was amazing. So everything felt amazing to me in my world and I was just so excited about all of the possibilities.
I was living in Cincinnati, Ohio when I began building my business and I got to a certain point where I was finding most of my clients online. I still was networking locally and meeting clients locally, but many of my clients were coming in through online marketing, and so I became what everybody dreams of, which is location independent.
I didn’t have to live anywhere in particular anymore and I started getting the nudge to move. It was one of those signals from the universe. I actually started seeing mountains everywhere. I remember really clearly- I don’t know where I was, like at Target or something- I was walking through Target and I saw a puzzle on the end of the aisle that was mountains, and it just caught my attention. Then I was checking out and in the kiosk, the magazine kiosk, there were mountains on the cover, and it was like … I got home and I flipped on the TV, there were mountains and it was like spirit was saying, go to the mountains. That was my interpretation.
Of course, then I moved to Denver and people would ask, “did you move for your job?” And I didn’t want to tell people, “I saw mountains.” So I moved to Denver. So it was interesting. I had to make some things up until eventually I just started telling the truth.
So anyway, I’m living in Denver and life is going really well. I was really following the guidance of my mentor who taught me about abundance and the laws of the universe. I rented a house that I loved without considering the price tag, which was a huge shift for me. I didn’t make a pro and con list or like, analyze the cost per square foot. I just picked the place that resonated.
So I’m living in this house that I love in a new city. Everything is possible, right? I felt so excited to be there. Then all of a sudden, things started going wrong. Things started breaking down in my world, and I mean, literally breaking down. For example, I broke several pieces of jewelry, which when you hear this whole story will be interesting that it happened to be jewelry. A light bulb exploded. I broke a tooth, actually, like cracked a tooth right off. And I broke my car. I ran into a light pole outside of my own driveway that I pulled out of every single day. So very strange occurrences. Like, hey, pay attention.
One of the things we’ll discover is a lot of times when we are in a mode of transformation, it will look like things going wrong. So I was in this place of all of these things are going wrong. This is strange. Like, I’m supposed to be in this massive flow, right? I’m following my passion, I’m growing my business, I get to work at home in my slippers and life is good. But all of a sudden all of these things are breaking down.
Now, the other thing that was happening in my life is I relocated and I felt like okay, I have this beautiful place to live that I love, I have this business that I love, what’s missing in my life? What’s missing is relationships. So even though on the surface everything was working, like my money was working, my clients were getting great results and all of that, but I didn’t really have a lot going on in my life. In fact, the thing that would distinguish my work day from my evening was I would switch to the couch and I would drink a beer. So that signified I no longer have to be on or be on the phone with clients or anything like that. So that was my way of being off of work.
So my life, even though many things were working, it really wasn’t working. So all of a sudden, all of these things started breaking, and it really got my attention. So fast forward, and I am going to a series of retreats, of course. So the first one was, I was actually an associate coach with one of my mentors at the time. I was coaching one-on-one the clients in a program he was running, it was like a certification program and the training was being delivered in live retreats. So I was there and I was co-facilitating this retreat with him and supporting my clients that I was going to be working with one-on-one.
So we’re having this retreat and somewhere during the course of the retreat I had shared about these things breaking in my life. I kind of just let him know something’s up with me that there’s something that needs to shift. So I had kind of shared that during the retreat. And a lot of things, you know, we’re working with these clients who are totally transforming their life and you cannot be in the energy of transformation without your own stuff bubbling up. So even though I’m on the team, I’m hearing things and I’m kind of getting myself primed for transformation.
So we’re at the end of the retreat. And we went out for a team dinner. We’re at a celebration dinner, we have a reservation, a big long table, we’ve got the whole team there. I’m sitting across from my mentor, and for some reason we were talking about retreats. I had said, “hey, I really want to take people on retreat to Vietnam.”
I had personally been to Vietnam and I loved it and I had a definite soul resonance with Vietnam. So I was sharing that and he said, “interesting.” He was just kind of curious. He said, “what did you love about it?” I shared that I had felt when I was in Vietnam this energy of complete non-judgment.
Now, that was my personal experience there and the perfect experience for me. This energy of complete non-judgment. I was there with a friend of mine and we were kind of going in the markets and just felt so accepted and connected. She and I looked very different. Her little son was there. They were so embracing of all of us. I just loved it. So I had shared this and he said to me … he said, “what are you afraid of being judged for?” So first of all, I want to kind of underline, right, I had a resonance with this place because of this energy of non-judgment.
Now, I could go take people there because of it. It may or may not be truth that there was non-judgment, but that was my experience being there. So his question is amazing. So I’m sharing this as a retreat leader, you’re going to want to be listening for what’s not being said. Listening for the truth behind what someone’s sharing.
So he said to me, “what are you afraid of being judged for?” I kinda wrinkled my nose, that crunchy face like, I don’t know. I don’t know. He said to me, and I want you really to get this because as a retreat leader, you want to really not be afraid to say what feels true for you in the moment. And trust your client to be able to be with that.
So I had worked with … this was my first mentor and now I was back working on his team. I had a huge trust in him and he had a trust in me to be able to be with this. Okay. So he said to me, he said, “you know, as long as I’ve known you, there’s always been something.” He kind of motioned his hand like in a circular motion. My interpretation of that is indicating my energy field. Saying, there’s always been something in your energy field. He said to me, “you kind of have the energy of someone who’s gay and doesn’t know it.
Now I really made this crunchy face like, what? He said, “I’m not saying it’s that, but it’s something like that. Sit with it.” He said. And he got up and walked away.
So there I am sitting with this statement, you kind of have the energy of someone who’s gay and doesn’t know it. My mind started racing, immediately trying to figure out- because he said, well, it might be that but it might be something else. So I immediately start thinking of what else could it be that’s not that?
So I want to share this because I got to see my ego mind in action, going to work on this problem of trying to figure out some explanation that wasn’t, that didn’t involve coming out. I literally was thinking like …this is gonna sound crazy, but my brain was thinking like, did I kill someone and I don’t remember it? That’s the level of fear that I had about this conversation. I was grasping at any other thing it could be other than that.
So, fast forward, I went from this retreat to another kind of bigger event that I was a participant in- and it was immediate, I went from one venue to the other, and it was three days. Over the course of the three days, I overheard three conversations of people talking about someone being in the closet, coming out of the closet, or being gay, like newly out.
I kind of got increasingly uncomfortable every time I heard a conversation like this. To the point there was one conversation that a whole group of my mastermind buddies was having, speculating, like joking, that one of our friends was in the closet and he should come out because our other friend had a crush on him. Like, extensive conversation about people being gay and not knowing it.
And as I had mentioned, I moved to Colorado because I saw mountains. So I know spirit gets us the messages we need to get. I’m sitting like listening to this conversation and laughing as they’re talking about our friend being in the closet. And meanwhile, I’m going, “this conversation is for me,” and “oh shit.” If anybody had been paying attention, I probably was like getting red on my neck all the way up to the top of my head.
So, I left this event thinking, gosh, there’s something here. So I flew back, the events were in Phoenix, I flew back to Denver. And on the plane, I said a prayer. I remember it so clearly looking at the little air vents up above kind of saying this prayer and saying, “okay universe, if this is real, I will listen and I will check this out. But I need you to make it abundantly clear.”
The reason I was open to this is I had become aware that things weren’t working for me, things had been breaking. So I was really attentive. I knew I was having trouble finding a mate, and I was thinking I manifested all these things in my business and my life, and why am I not finding a partner? What’s up with that? Then the other thing that I knew, or a memory that came back, was a memory of quite a few years earlier that I had had.
I was having coffee with a friend of mine, I was living in Cincinnati, and it was before I started my business, but I was kind of getting into transformation. So I had a friend of mine who was also into transformation, who happened to be a lesbian, and she invited me for coffee, and it was when The Secret had come out.
So she started telling me all about The Secret. I just remember she had a notebook, and she was like drawing circles, and talking about possibility, and like, if you just be this in the future, the thing will come to you or … I don’t know. Because I stopped listening. She’s all excited sharing this and I totally stopped listening. Because a thought ran through my mind before I could stop it that said, “what if you’re gay?”
I’m at coffee with my friend who’s a lesbian, who was just talking about whatever, and I’m totally not with her because my brains said, “what if you’re gay.” And the moment I had that thought, this peace washed over me that I had never experienced before. It was like physical, palpable experience of peace. It scared the shit out of me.
So rather than listen to that piece that I felt in my body in that moment, I immediately went to work on finding a way to explain and rationalize why it wasn’t true and to shove it away. It makes me emotional just thinking about that moment.
What my brain did is my brain…I was in my early 30s, I was probably like 30, 31 at the time. My mom had been talking to me a lot about am I gonna get grandkids? So in that moment, what my brain did is it rationalized. It said, “you know what, if you were a lesbian, you wouldn’t have to have kids and your mom would stop bugging you.” And so instead of exploring that thought that I had, “maybe I’m gay,” I instead said, “okay, I won’t have kids.” I put a lid on the possibility of having kids in that moment as a way to cope with my experience. I never thought about it again.
Interestingly, about a year later, I met someone who I ended up marrying who had a kid. So I kind of got all of that out of the way at once. It was my celebrity marriage, very short-lived, that I talked about in the first episode in this series. So if you think about it, had I listened to that intuition in that moment and trusted what my body was telling me, I would have bypassed that whole experience. Now, something like that may have come up in some other way, so we don’t know. But I didn’t listen, because there was so much fear within me at the thought of that possibility that I shoved it aside.
Now, why was there so much fear? I grew up in a town of 500 in northern Minnesota and I was raised by my mom primarily in my early years. Like, my parents divorced when I was young, and there was a time period where it was just my mom and I. My mom was a single mom. And she went through a series of different relationships with men. We would live with someone for a while until it ended, and then we would move in with someone else until it ended, or we’d like stay with them or whatever, maybe not move, but kind of go back and forth.
So I had this experience of watching my mom, and what I took from her behavior was “as a woman, you need a man to survive.” Like there was never a moment where she thought “I’m just going to be on my own” Or maybe she did, but it didn’t seem that way to me as a kid. I should probably ask her. But it was like she had a program that you need a man. So I internalized that program as a kid and I very much lived that way. I mean, I was always in relationship my whole life. One relationship to another until after my divorce when I finally had some time off.
So I had this program, “you need a man.” I also grew up in a town where there wasn’t a lot of diversity. There weren’t people who were out and proud in my town of 500. Quite honestly, I had never thought about it. I had just never thought about it.
There was one other memory that came up on that plane ride home from Phoenix to Denver, which was a memory when I was a kid. I was probably like 12 and I was at church. I went to church, and got confirmed, and did all of that stuff growing up as a Lutheran, and we had a visiting choir at our church.
I remember kind of watching this visiting choir and there was someone in the choir that I thought was so cute. This boy that I thought was so cute in the choir and I found myself feeling really attracted to him. Then, when they kind of quit singing and they moved, what I discovered is that he was actually a she, and I was mortified. It was like, oh, my goodness.
I have this split second memory and I had shut that down. I had come back to that memory over and over, over the years, of like, “remember that time where you thought that girl was a boy.” But I never had entertained it. It wasn’t even like a thought that that meant something. But I knew I felt shame about it and I had shoved it down.
So I had these series of memories come up as I’m flying on this plane from Phoenix back to Colorado. So even though I had been in lots of opportunities, I played sports, I was in locker rooms with women, all of these things- because people ask me this. Like, “how did you not know?” I had no idea. But I had these couple of memories that came back to me on that plane ride home. So I said, all right universe, if this is meant to be, I will listen. But make it abundantly clear.
So I get home to Denver and I start unpacking my suitcase and I flip on the TV. On TV, there was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. And in this episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I kid you not, there was a woman, you know there’s always a woman on her deathbed, right? So there was a woman on her deathbed and her son was there and he wanted to take her home and have her moving with him.
She was being real resistant, and everybody’s trying to figure out what her deal is and why she’s so resistant. Well, it turned out that she actually had a lover, who was a woman, who had been in her life forever, even when she was married to her son’s dad and all of that. Like, she had been in this relationship with this woman her whole life and had never told her son. So she had this process of coming out to him.
So of course, I look up at the ceiling, which represents God, the universe and said, “really?” Like, “really? Grey’s Anatomy.” But that was my kind of final signal and I chose to listen. I immediately started Googling. By the way, I lived by myself in a big old house, but I hid in the basement, myself and my dog, and I googled, “can you be 40 and gay and not know it?” Those were my exact Google search terms. So if you ever have been like me and think like Google Search doesn’t work, I just want you to know that people do Google interesting things. I began to explore, and watch different videos, and really start to be with this possibility that this might be true for me.
A couple days passed and I called a friend of mine, who’s also a lesbian who was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I said, “hey, are you around this weekend? I need some help.” She told me later that she immediately knew what I needed. She immediately knew because she had kind of known, she had kind of suspected. So I flew to LA and she took me out in West Hollywood, which is where what they call the Gayborhood, and I gave myself a new experience. I did this all within like a week.
The reason I did this all within like a week is because I had been teaching and guiding transformational experiences and finding alignment for several years in my business now. And what I knew is when we see a new truth, what we need to do is experience the new possibility. We can’t just think about it in our mind, but we have to actually experience it viscerally in our body so we can’t deny the truth. Like I had done so many years earlier when I had the thought and I shoved it away without a exploring it and giving myself an experience.
So I made the commitment to give myself a new experience. I flew to Los Angeles, I kissed a girl and I liked it. There’s much more to that story but I won’t go into that at the moment.
And I knew. I literally cried. The moment that that happened, I cried. Just tears of relief streamed down my face because I knew I was home. I knew in every cell of my being that I had found a truth that I had hidden from myself for years. I’m going to share a little bit more about that in a moment.
But what I want you to know is that when we are in discordance with our truth, when there’s something about us, and for most people, it’s not that. For some people, some people listening this might be your Grey’s Anatomy, okay. And let it be your Grey’s Anatomy. Let yourself listen.
For most people there some other truth that they don’t want to see. Whether it’s a truth about your relationship, whether it’s a truth about a desire that you really have in life that you’re not wanting to admit to yourself, whether it’s a truth about how you’re showing up in your job or where you’re holding back on sharing who you really are. Whatever it is, when we have this truth that we’re trying to hide from, and especially if we’re trying to hide it from ourselves, but if we’re trying to hide it from other people, what happens is we put up resistance in our energy field and it’s like a shield.
Retreats are all about intimacy- into-me-see. The healing magic that happens on retreat happens from letting ourselves be seen. Kurt Wright says, “we cannot accept a part of ourselves that we haven’t shared with another human being and had validated rather than violated.” I had never shared this part of me with another human being. I had never shared it with myself. I’d never let myself be with the possibility of it long enough to actually explore it, let alone share with someone else. So there’s no healing there.
On retreat, one of the things you’re creating space for in your retreat is the possibility of healing for people to be able to have their truth be seen and validated rather than violated. Well, in order to be a space or a conduit for that, we need to see ourselves. The more we can see, and own, and love about ourselves, the more we’ll be creating that space for our clients to really be seen.
I’m sharing this because I want to take you back to this conversation I had with my mentor where he said, “ever since I’ve known you, there’s always been something” and he gestured with his hand, indicating my interpretation, like a shield or a block. Like, there’s some kind of block going on.
Well, that block had to do with my fear of people knowing the truth about me. My fear of myself knowing the truth about me. Because the truth about me went against everything I learned growing up- that a woman needs a man, and that you conform, and you are in the social norm, and all of these things. So my truth was in resistance to that, and because I was so terrified to see it … there’s a lot of reasons I was terrified- because my parents had divorced, and my dad in my mind had left me, I didn’t want my mom to leave me also. Even though I’m a grown adult, these fears are still in my system. So I didn’t want anybody to see it, so there’s a shield up.
I sometimes show photos side-by-side of me, of pre-gay Darla and the Darla who’s out of the closet, and you can literally see the difference in my eyes. It’s like the shield has been lifted. And you can see it.
Now, here’s the thing. We all have different layers of shields. We all have things that we are afraid to see, that we’re afraid for others to see. Some are more scary for us than others. Some we just move through like no big deal. We become aware and it’s like, I wasn’t aware I was being that way. Okay, let’s let it go. And others feel like we’re fighting for our last breath at the idea of shifting this story about ourselves. But we all have these things that we put up as a shield and the thing is to be your most powerful self is to let yourself be seen.
So many entrepreneurs have these complaints that “people don’t see me.” I’m putting myself out there, but people don’t see me. They don’t hear me. My message is convoluted. It doesn’t make sense. All of that. But we have to let ourselves be seen. That doesn’t necessarily mean for everybody sharing your deepest stories, your coming out story publicly like I am. But it might mean that you do this healing work in a retreat, or in private with a mentor, or someone who can help you see the water you’re swimming in. And you let it go and you start being that more real, and authentic, and vulnerable version of you out in the world. We have to let ourselves be seen.
The other thing that happened for me, which when I share this people really kind of get it for themselves, their version of it. So it was shortly after I had flown to LA, I had the new experience, I realized, yes, this is true about me. Now what? I started sharing it with people close in my life and kind of coming out, I made a coming out project because I knew I didn’t want to live in secret a minute longer. So I did it very quickly.
But one of the things that I was worried about immediately was, here I was having this coaching business all about alignment, and I was out of alignment. How could I be leading other people on this journey and be so clueless about myself?
So I literally thought, “I have to close my business.
I have to close my business. There’s no way anybody’s ever going to trust me again. I am pretty unemployable at this point. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do instead?”
Luckily, I had a coach I was working with at the time who said, “it only took you like 15 minutes to come out to me. So I think you’re probably okay. You’re probably really honoring your truth and it’s going to be okay.” So I took that on and I made a decision, okay, I’m going to share. I’m just going to share. I’m going to share it first with my clients, and then with my list, and I’m just going to share, like this is now what’s true for me.
In the meantime, I had started dating women and I actually met the woman who I am now married to. So I was feeling like really great about that. But still this fear of, like, what are people going to think? So I wrote a letter, like a coming out letter, to my clients to start with. Before I sent it out to my clients, I sent it to my best friend and I said, “hey, could you just read this and tell me what you hear. Like, is this okay?”
She called me immediately on the phone and she said, “girl, I don’t know. I don’t know if you should send this because what if you’re wrong?” So this is my best friend telling me that I should suppress what’s true for me just in case I’m wrong.
In that moment, I knew in every cell of my physical being that I was not wrong. What I realized is, oh my goodness, people will have an opinion about everything. People will have an opinion about how you feel about your sexuality. Like, if people have an opinion about that, think about all of the opinions that you face every single day about how you choose to run your business, what you invest in, the type of work you do, the people you’re in relationship with. If you fly to go on retreat, people have judgment about that. People have an opinion about all the things that they say is coming from wanting to keep you safe, but what it’s really coming from is not wanting to disrupt their comfort zone.
I got to see that with my friend firsthand, that my changing my sexual identity was really hard for her to receive, because it changed something for her somehow. So her words were, “I don’t know, girl. What if you’re wrong?”
This launched a whole campaign for me that I did for quite some time called the Believe Yourself Challenge, and really got me feisty about this idea of trusting your own intuition, which I teach a lot now. But I was afraid that I was going to have to close my business by stepping into my truth. The truth is, it didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter. So how you’re being about your truth puts out into the ethers energetically how other people will respond to your truth.
So when I sent the message to my friend and I said, “hey, what do you think?” I was nervous. And I was the space for her to question my communication. When I put it out to my list, and to my clients, and all of that, I was in total truth. Like, this is my truth and I’m sharing it, and I’m not a space for questioning, and I’m not really a space for you to judge me. And if you don’t like gay people, unsubscribe, and let’s move on with our life. So there was zero backlash or negative impact, and if anything, people felt really inspired to share their own closets that they were coming out of.
So a lot of times people become nervous, especially when you have a business and you’re kind of coaching one-on-one and you’re moving into retreats, when you’re doing the retreat, you’re kind of sharing your work and you’re taking people on a journey that you’ve created personally. A lot of times people get scared about that. They get scared because they have this little thought in their mind, “what if I’m wrong?” Like, what if I have this vision for this journey to take people on, but then I discover I’m wrong. That, you know, how horrible is this.
I’m telling you that I discovered I was wrong about my sexuality and I lived through it. And it actually wasn’t a big deal. So if this can embolden you to move forward with…before I knew this information, my truth was that I was straight. That was all I knew. Then I could discover a new truth, and embody that, and integrate that into my world, and that became my new truth.
If we’re so afraid that … because I see this a lot, having a business about alignment for years, people come in and they’re like, what they really are saying is “I want to make sure I’m in full alignment so no one can ever question me and I’m never wrong.” But the thing is, we are evolving beings. We don’t know all of our truth. Today, as I sit here and speak to you, I don’t know the full extent of my personal truth, because it will continue to reveal itself as I live through and grow through life.
So if you have this idea, like, I have to be in total alignment with my truth of who I’m going to be in the future, now in order to lead my retreat, or do my business, or speak about these things, then you’re going to be waiting a long time. Because we have a truth that what is true for us in this moment, in our greatest awareness now, and we have to move forward. Had I not moved forward in the truth of what I knew, I would have never been in that room to receive the next level of truth. So we just step in, and we step in, and we step in.
So what is your closet?
What is your version of some part of you that either you don’t know is there- I know that’s a tricky question to answer. If you’re not sure, put yourself on retreat, come on retreat with us, we’ll help you see it. That is my genius. That is my thing I love to do. Come on retreat with me- or, you know it’s there, but you’re not even realizing how important it is to bring it out.
Maybe it’s your spirituality. I walk hand-in-hand with a lot of clients as they come out with their more spiritual side, their inner shaman, or maybe even their training as a shaman that they’ve been kind of keeping in the background. They bring out maybe this part of you that is more masculine. Where all the rage about feminine right now, which I am totally on board with that too, but maybe you have this corporate badass part of you, that you set aside when you became a coach. And you really want to bring that in and integrate the masculine and feminine in a certain way.
Whatever it is that you’re not bringing forward, if there’s an energetic resistance in your energy field that shows up as a shield. That’s what we want to let go of. One layer at a time, one truth at a time. Just let down the shield, let down the shield, let down the shield. I would love to support you with that. We have a couple of retreats coming up in May. Message our team support@alignedentrepreneurs.com if you want to find out more.
Thank you. Thank you for who you are in the world. Thank you for your commitment to this conversation for transformation. Thank you for witnessing my journey and I’m trusting that my sharing my journey opens up a little piece for you where you can have a little more courage. Remember, I hid in my basement to Google about how to tell if you’re gay. I hid in my basement because I was that scared. If I can walk through that level of fear, you can too, and we can do it together.
So continue to join me in this series where we hear other people’s stories of transforming out loud, and if you’re feeling the nudge, come with me on retreat. I will hold the biggest space of love and courage for you to see your truth that you’ve ever experienced before. This is Darla LeDoux with Retreat and Grow Rich and we’lll see you soon.
“People won’t pay for transformation” they told me when I started my business.
Thankfully, I didn’t listen, or at least I didn’t listen for very long. This is Darla and I have been offering transformational retreats as a part of my business model for years. I’ve earned millions of dollars through hosting retreats. Here’s what I want you to know. It just may be that overtly adding the transformational component of your work into the way you offer your services is the most powerful and profitable choice you can make right now. I’m talking about not sneaking transformation in the back door, but actually designing your business around this work you hold so dear.
If you’re intrigued, I invite you to check out our brand new live retreat experience just for leaders like you over at retreatandgrowrich.com/retreat. Extraordinary retreats require exceptional leaders, and we can’t keep sneaking our magic in the back door a minute longer. The world needs your genius. Head on over there today.