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In this episode of the Retreat and Grow Rich podcast we begin a new series, The RICH Revolution.
More money in the hands of woo woo entrepreneurs gives us more influence.
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This is Darla Ledoux your host for retreat and Grow Rich the podcast and welcome to this new series called The RICH Revolution.
As you know, this podcast is called Retreat and Grow Rich, and it’s also the name of my book which you can find on Amazon. And it really is a nod to Napoleon Hill and his work in Think and Grow Rich and really understanding that creating wealth or abundance, or generally having life flow the way you want, is actually about more than doing the practical steps.
It’s about your mindset, it’s about the way you think, it’s about the energy you embody, and the energy that guides you in the way that you work. That’s what creates that wealth and abundance in our practical, physical results in life. So the title, of course, is a nod to Think and Grow Rich. It is about creating abundance and wealth and having the lifestyle that you truly desire.
RICH is also an acronym and it stands for a Right-brained, Intuitive, Connected and Heart-centered.
I’ll say that again right-brained so that creative part of your brain, the nonlinear part of your brain, the part of your brain that can make quantum leaps very easily because it’s not stuck in the linear constructs of time.
Intuitive, that is your guidance, your inner knowing that will guide you according to truth regardless of what the mind thinks.
Connected. This has to do with being connected to yourself, to your own inner knowing; it’s very, very related to intuition and also connected to source or spirit- God, the universe, however you like to think of it – and connected to one another when we are in this place of knowing we’re connected. We have so much more personal power, we are connected energetically to all that is to the collective consciousness. So when we have an awareness that we’re connected to something greater than, we can feel free to know that our growth is the growth of others. Our growth is the growth of the connected or the collective consciousness, connected consciousness also. And when we grow we make space for others to do the same. That’s connected.
Then that H is heart-centered, coming from love, coming from the truth that only our heart knows how to guide us, because everything is love and when we’re present to that love that we have in our hearts it shifts the way we show up in the world, it palpably shifts the energy and it changes everything.
This series is called The RICH Revolution because my mission is to get more money in the hands of RICH entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who are operating in this right-brained, intuitive, connected, and heart-centered way in the way they run their business.
I want to talk about the title of this particular show which is Money Makes the Woo Go Round.
So if we were in a room, I would ask you to raise your hands and say how many of you when you hear “right-brained, intuitive connected, and heart-centered,” and what that really means, feel like that’s a little bit woo or woo woo, if you want to go with the double woo. Our spiritual, esoteric principles of energy, they can sometimes get a bad rap in our society, and for me personally, I’m a recovering engineer.
As you may know, my original career is as a chemical engineer. I worked in a Fortune 20 company. We made rational, logical decisions with data to support the direction. The idea of having RICH skills and using them and having them be valuable was a little bit foreign to me. So it actually took me some time to embrace and embody my own inner Woo, even though my original training as a coach was as an energy leadership master practitioner, which is all about energy. Energy is the source of everything- our vibration is the cause of our results in life. I believe that at the core of my being. In fact, one of our upcoming episodes is all about energy and I was still a little bit afraid to let that side of me show. Who am I kidding, a lot afraid to let that side of me show in my business because we’re trained that the practical, logical is what sells. We’re trained that we have to give people a formula or a tangible thing they can buy in order for our work to be valuable.
I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had who have come to me and said some other coach has told them, “you can’t sell transformation.” I know transformation is all I’ve been selling, we do need to frame it up to meet people where they are. But transformation is absolutely desirable people want your RICH skills. One of the reasons I have Retreat and Grow Rich and I focus on my retreats is that the type of person who’s drawn to host retreats is the type of person who holds these RICH skills. You may question “do they have value”? Can I really sell this gift? But if you’re drawn to host retreats there’s some part of you that knows that your energy, your particular form of magic, that you hold the space for on retreat is real. It is palpable and it does matter and it does make a difference. The format of a retreat is the best way for a RICH entrepreneur to show up and use their best skills. Now I want to share a little bit about why I’m so passionate about this.
I mentioned I’m a recovering engineer. My original degree is as a chemical engineer. I graduated at the top of my class because I wanted to get a job at the hardest company to get a job with on campus, which at the time was Procter and Gamble. I went to work for Procter out of college and I loved it. I felt so cool having this important job and this amazing degree and there were a lot of things I really loved about my work. Actually, it used a lot of my natural skills and in the beginning, I was working with polymers and creating packaging and new package designs to protect our products, to display our products, make them look pretty easy to use, all of these things, right. But from a very technical standpoint, and as I was doing that work over time, I noticed that there were roles in the company that were even more in alignment with what I loved and what my gifting was. And they were the consumer research roles. They called it “Products Research” at the time. So I personally started gravitating toward the work of products research so I found a mentor in products research. I got myself assigned to projects that overlapped or were led by products research. I started doing that work; we would go shopping with our consumers and go to their homes and talk to them about how they used our products talk to them about the context of their life and the value our products or our competitor’s products had in their life. What were the gaps? What were the places where we could have them fall in love with us even more, etc.?
I loved this kind of work. I was naturally gifted at putting the pieces together. I could hear a handful of customers share their product experience stories and I would intuitively be able to discern what it was that was really going on under the surface. What were they really wanting? What did they really need? What role were these products serving in their life? And because of that, I would be able to predict, or have a sense of, the trends in the market based on what people were really wanting and needing and it felt like a real gift. And I loved it.
So I’m doing all my regular techie projects and then I’m doing this consumer work and I have a performance review and it happens to be a review where I get promoted. I’d been with the company like three years- just shy of three years- and I got promoted, which was amazing. And in my review my manager said to me, he gave me a lot of good feedback obviously because I was getting promoted, but he said to me, “you know your soft skills are great, Darla but you might want to tone them down a bit because they’ll only get you so far here”.
What do I mean by soft skills?
The intuition, the connection with our customers, the ability to communicate to understand what’s going on beneath the surface, to connect to the truth of a situation, the truth in the market. All of those things- generally talking to people or caring about people. Those soft skills were a career path within the company, which was great. But what he was saying to me is that the people that choose that path don’t become directors, don’t become vice presidents, to get to that level in the company you need to tone that down and take a techie route because that’s what the company values. It’s the technical innovation as opposed to the people innovation. It was very clear feedback and based on his experience it was very much the truth. In watching how the career paths go, and the progression of people in the company, the people who choose the tech path were tending to get promoted at much higher rates than the people that chose the people path.
That really stuck with me. And that’s one of the reasons it was so challenging for me when I started my own business to embrace what I knew was the truth. I knew that the inner work the transformation or work was more valuable than all of the practical things I was seeing people teach and talk about. And in fact, it was the thing that mattered most to me. It was when I invested as a business owner into programs, offerings, coaches, and support that were transformational in nature that helped me shift some pattern or belief at the core so that I could access more of my truth and my own aligned guidance that those were the things that made the difference.
When I invested in things that taught me a formula and a how-to with all the swipe files and all of those things. Some of them may have been helpful but honestly, most of them hindered me more than helped me. My brain was engaged in trying to figure out how to fit myself into that framework as opposed to allowing my RICH skills to be engaged and allowing myself to intuit and create and pull forth from my own divine guidance my direction my spiritually aligned direction. So for me, the things I’ve always paid the most for have been transformation. Yet as the leader even though I sold transformation anyone who came to any of my retreats and who comes to my retreats today knows their transformational in nature and that is the value that is the gold in the way I work. It is my brilliance to bring truth to the room so people can see their truth in a way they’ve never seen it before.
That shift is palpable energetically and it creates all kinds of breakthroughs as a ripple effect in their business. Since the beginning of time in my business people who work with me have known that, yet to own that directly took something, and I still continue to see ways where I can own it more directly. In fact, I wrote a whole series of blog posts a while back called your spiritual side is showing all about my journey to really integrate the spiritual into the way I work. So when I really got present to this, and it was probably at the time as several years ago when I was writing those posts and really feeling into what’s next for me and what’s next to my business, is when I developed the acronym RICH- Right-brained, Intuitive, Connected and Heart-centered and I wrote a manifesto at the time called The RICH Revolution.
The RICH Revolution is all about getting more money in the hands of people with RICH skills.
More money in the hands of people who are using their intuition, their understanding of our energetic connection to all. That is like a fierce understanding of that and using that in the way they lead their business. By the way, I say a fierce understanding of that because when we’re truly in our RICH skills there’s never anything wrong. There’s never a problem. There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to solve because nothing is actually ever broken, because all is coming from source and when you can hold that as truth- your power as a transformational leader, your power as a coach, your power as someone holding space on retreats- is amplified. Your power is amplified when you know that everything is connected and there is nothing that is not. Source Energy. Nothing.
Why is your power amplified? Well, first of all, how I define power, my definition of power is being free to be fully yourself speak your core truth and accept what comes and the key is in accepting what comes so when we know we are connected and everything is source energy what comes is always divine so a lot of times we give away our power or we suppress our truth.
What is coming intuitively through us in order to get a result that we want because we’re not willing to accept what comes? In other words, what my manager was coaching me to do was to suppress who I truly am and be more of who they want me to be so that I could get another promotion right. That was this feedback. But that’s not power. That’s not being free to be my authentic self and speak my core truth and accept what comes. True power would be embodying my unique skills, my unique genius. What spirit is calling me to do. And trusting if I am meant to grow in this company, I will get promoted for being me. And if I’m not, and I don’t either, I don’t give a shit about the promotion or it is guiding me out of the company.
Now obviously, ultimately I left the company. But when you are in that place of knowing that we’re all connected and that whatever is unfolding is unfolding in alignment with what it looks like when we’re winning. And this is an energy thing. This is what it looks like when I’m winning. So when you can truly embrace that if you have someone in your retreat who is going through something challenging who brings forward something. A truth that maybe feels like it makes us nervous. Like for example, I recognized I was gay on retreat. Could make some people nervous. Or it could be. wow cool, I wonder why this thought is what it looks like when you’re winning, right? Or if someone decides they need to leave a marriage or a relationship or a job or whatever. Something “bad” happens that we can hold that you know what that is all part of the evolution of the collective consciousness and it’s perfect.
When you can hold that, you can hold your power.
A lot of times what happens in the traditional realm of coaching, like performance coaching, we want you to get a certain outcome or a certain result. I’m not going to say we, I’m not going to include myself here, although I resonated with this in the past. A lot of coaches can feel attached to you winning in a way that they can traditionally measure. Like winning looks like you had a six-figure month, winning looks like you having X Y Z success, and that’s ego- that’s not RICH. That’s coming from the linear logical “if you work with me then you will get this specific result because that’s the result I promise because I am, you know, in control of your future,” which is totally unhealthy.
As opposed to a RICH leader who’s holding space for your truth. Which in the clients I work with, when someone does this work to truly hold a rich space for themselves they tend to make more money. They tend to have clients flow, they tend to be totally surprised with referrals out of the blue, and things like that happen. Yet it’s not because they’re trying to make that happen, it’s because they’ve done the inner work of alignment and they are in total faith of their ability to create to intuit their next move, to trust their spiritual connection, and trust that all is unfolding perfectly, and know that love is the answer. And hold that love in their heart. And when they do that they tend to make more money, but we can’t be controlling that. So what would it be like?
If you knew that your soft skills, your RICH skills were as valuable or more valuable than the practical linear logical way of approaching things whether it’s a business, health, weight loss, juice products, which is what I worked on what would it be like if you knew at the core of your being that your unique skill set was majorly valuable what would that shift on the planet money makes the world go round.
More money in the hands of woo woo entrepreneurs gives us more influence. It gives us more power to make buying choices in alignment with what’s true for us. It gives us more power to have political influence. It gives us more power to be able to hire other people who are in alignment with our way of doing business, with our way of doing life. And the more we can employ people who are in this world, the more attention this world gets, the more people opt out of checking their heart at the door to go into a job to make money because it feels secure logically but they’re losing their soul. The more of those people who opt out of that and into this economy the more influence we have. We can also bring the woo into the corporate world.
So the same thing when people are truly grounded in their power and owning their RICH skills and using them in their corporate world and trusting they can accept what comes they may actually get promoted. I had one client who when she knew she was leaving her job she decided to be fully herself in the end of her career and it was amazing how she was rewarded for that right. She unleashed this whole realm of energy that she had been holding back and suppressing in order to keep her job without even realizing it. So this isn’t just about everybody quitting corporate and becoming entrepreneurs, but bringing these skills into corporate and living like, “I’m not attached to the outcome.” We might be surprised. In fact, I continue to be surprised that people get it. People are hungry for this.
They’re craving this sense of connection in their life and in their work, so more money in the hands of entrepreneurs with these kinds of skills and this kind of awareness truly shifts where we spend our money. It shifts what gets valued and it shifts the balance of power in our culture. And that look around is needed more than ever so I want you to imagine living in a world where you didn’t have to hide that part of yourself, where you could say, “oh this is what my heart says” or “this is what my gut says” without having people argue or want you to explain it, or rationalize, or logic-ize it. Imagine living in a world where you could bring your oracle cards to a meeting in corporate and consult in that way.
Imagine a world where companies are tuning in to source before choosing, before making choices. Where companies are only creating products that are aligned spiritually, aligned with the collective consciousness, and what’s truly needed and what’s truly valuable with the greater good. Imagine a world where companies are only creating aligned marketing. Where the marketing isn’t coming from fear, it isn’t coming from scarcity, it isn’t coming from trying to get you to buy something because you’re somehow inadequate, but it’s actually coming from this RICH place.
Imagine that world. I believe that world is possible and it happens because more and more of us- each individual human being- opts to embrace and own and love up our RICH skills. We don’t hide them. We don’t put them in the background. We don’t suppress them. We don’t like to do it in secret without letting people know. But we truly embrace this new way of being and put a freakin price tag on it.
Put a price tag on your personal growth.
What have you invested in your own growth to come to this place of divine alignment? Put a price tag on that. Do not be afraid to offer transformation and charge for this energetic space that you hold because it is so rare and valuable on the planet right now. I invite you to do that.
This is the beginning of this series called Rich Revolution. I’m going to be interviewing several different entrepreneurs who offer work in this realm. I’m going to be talking with people about their journeys of selling the intangible-selling space, selling connection to truth, selling transformation energetic alchemy, and the like. My goal is that this will embolden you to own what you truly believe in, what you truly know in your heart. And don’t be afraid to share it.
Have you been called to integrate transformational retreats into the way you work with your clients?
Do you want to be known as a masterful leader of experiences that permanently shift your client’s mindset and energy, so their results with you quantum leap? Would you like to receive great money for those magical and unique parts of you that you’ve likely been sneaking into your work for free because you’re not sure how to market them?
We’re now taking applications for March in the Beautifully Aligned Retreat Leader Collective. Spots are limited in this 12-month container of support for your business vision. You will rock the front of the room with the latest techniques and skills, and have the inside scoop on venues and creating amazing experiences. You’ll learn to streamline your business model and marketing so you aren’t always in search of your next client, and you’ll connect at a heart level to others on this journey who speak your language and uplift your work in their communities. Apply today.