Leah Gervais: Hey visionaries. Welcome to the last episode of 2020. I am so excited to do this episode with you. This one is really going to come from the heart. So this is a story I kind of want to tell, and I want to tell it because I believe it has quite a few layers of lessons for women, for entrepreneurs, for overcoming fears. I think that there’s a lot kind of embedded in it. I’ll begin by simply saying, you never know who’s watching.

 

So I honestly just kind of really want to tell this story and you know, make this space for you to get out of it, whatever you want to get out of it. And I will kind of tell you what I’ve learned, but I just first want to say, thank you all so much for being a part of this podcast. Thank you so much for being any part of the community that we have built online, whether this is the first time you’ve ever listened to me, or you have been with us for every Monday, every podcast all year, I truly, from the bottom of my heart, I’m grateful for you and for your presence.

 

And I just know that if you’re listening to this podcast, it’s because you have a vision and it’s because you have a dream and you have goals and you are spending your time learning more information to try to achieve them. And that is honestly one of the most admirable things humans can do. I believe that God put us all here with purpose and with the destiny to thrive, not just to survive, not just to get by, not just to live on just enough. And by honoring that and exploring that I believe you are pursuing what, what we as humans, the highest thing we can do for ourselves and for others and for God, which is to try to make the most of ourselves so that we can help others inspire others and show up for others in the most fulfilled way. So thank you. Thank you for being here.

 

Thank you for, for giving this space, um, the space it deserves, and thank you for listening to this podcast. And I am wishing you a very happy, healthy new year. I, you know, I know I’m not going to go on about the challenges of this year, but I have to say, and I don’t want to sound insensitive saying this, but I have heard so many people find silver linings from this year. And not even just silver linings. 

 

I’ve heard so many people do some really life-changing things, um, because of the kind of required pause that happened this year, whether it was start a business or realize they were not in the right relationship that they wanted to be in or uncover some old hurts or traumas that they have kind of covered up with just day-to-day momentum for years, or found their own creativity or moved or started a family because you know, their career may be slowed down.

 

Whatever the case may be. I think that there has been so much beauty that came out of this. And once again, this is not an attempt to be insensitive to the very heaviness and realness that did happen this year, but I’ve heard so many people say that they feel guilty about how good this year has been for them. 

 

And I think that that’s actually a good sign. Like if so many people are feeling guilty, then that must mean that there must be a lot of good going on. It’s not good. People feel guilty, but if it’s because they feel like they are, you know, finding so much light in a dark time, that’s, that’s the goal here. That’s what we’re here to do. Life is going to have its darkness. It’s going to have its dark moments of the soul, whether that’s for us personally, or this year, us collectively, and life is not about dodging those moments.

 

It’s about what you do through them. So anyway, I just wanted to say that I hope you have found your light in the year. And of course they are looking forward to the new year. I think it’s going to really be a good one. Um, and I, from the bottom of my heart, you directly, and not just you, the masses, but you, the person listening to this, I am sending you energy and gratitude for you for your presence and for pursuing your vision. 

 

So with that, I want to take you back a little bit. And this story is a story of what it means to lead with your heart. It’s a story of what it means to leave a legacy and to build a legacy. It’s a story of what it means to build a business with impact. And it’s a story for you to get out of your own head.

 

So where do I even begin a two years ago in 2018, you might know if you followed me that I lost my dad, uh, suddenly. And it was a very tragic, uh, loss and the whole year was traumatic in so many ways. And loss brings up so many different things for so many different people. And I think it teaches you a lot about yourself because in those moments, whatever your pattern of negative self-talk is, I found, will just be so amplified because you’re feeling heavier than ever. You’re feeling more tired than ever. You don’t really have the strength to kind of fight it off in the way you normally do. And some of your faith might be questioned, not going to get too deeply into that, but some of your faith around what you thought to be true, what you believed in, what you thought you could rely on.

 

Some of that has changed. Now, what I know about myself now, I don’t know if I had fully this awareness at the time, but I know that myself and all of us, every one of us have what are called core wounds. Some of us have one, some of us have a few. I don’t, you know, I’m not a therapist, so I don’t feel totally qualified to diagnose any of that with anyone. But the point of this episode, I want you to one recognize if what your core wound might be. If you have one and how that could be holding you back. 

 

So core wounds develop when we are quite young, usually from our parents or a church that we grew up in or a society community we grew up in when, when our subconscious mind is forming, which happens before the age of seven. Now, because these sort of wounds or challenges form at such a young age, typically they are reinforced through adulthood until we’re 18, because we still are usually in those same situations, in the same religion, in the same household with family in the same communities that we were when they started.

 

So not only do the wounds form when you’re young, but then they’re reinforced and just kind of become stronger as you get older until, until you turn 18, until you leave the nest and this message isn’t about faulting, your parents or your church or society. It’s not about judging anyone or even that they did anything inherently wrong. They could have done the absolute best they could have, but we’re all imperfect humans. And unless they have, you know, really dove deep in this, on their own, we are going to make mistakes. 

And we’re going to with our children pass on probably some of our own insecurities or our own judgements or our own fears to our children because we’re human because we never, you know, you don’t get pregnant when you’re like I have now mastered life and I no longer have any fears. And I completely understand what it means to be in alignment with, you know, a higher power and therefore I’m ready to reproduce.

 

No, never that never happens. You’ve never master humanity. So anyway, we all kind of inherit a for lack of a better word, some of these, you know, soft spots or tougher areas. And sometimes it’s really obvious, like if you were abused as a child and other times it is not so obvious. My purpose for telling you this is to one consider what some of yours might be. And two, I’m going to share with you what mine is. 

 

And it’s actually such an empowering thing to recognize. I had a lot of resistance toward this when I first started learning about it because my dad had just passed away. I didn’t want to even consider that my parents had done anything wrong. You know, I didn’t want to look at my dad that way. Um, and once I realized it’s not about my parents at all, it’s just about how I can move forward. That became a different narrative. 

 

But my point is, I didn’t really feel like I knew what I had now, what I’ve seen from my clients, um, working with entrepreneurs is that a very common one is a wound around feeling like you’re not, not good enough. You’re not good enough because you didn’t make a certain team. 

 

You’re not good enough because your older sibling always out showed you, you’re not good enough because, um, you were raised in a religion that threatens you quite a bit, threatens you with things like if you don’t do this, you could go to hell. These are very, very scary, heavy things. And what happens is when we discover our core wound or wounds, it’s so empowering because you start to realize that a lot of the fears you deal with on a day-to-day basis are not actually fears on their own.

 

They are just manifestations of that single wound. And the pattern will come up time and time again in different parts of your life or in different ways to reinforce this wound because this wound is what you know to be true. And it’s how your brain thinks you’re safe. Because if that’s how you function as a child, when you literally needed your parents to survive, it doesn’t really want you to do without that wound. 

 

So let me give you my example. I don’t know if I’ve ever even openly shared this before in a podcast, but I think if it’s useful, it will be worth it. The wound that I realized I had, or rather the pattern I realized I had because I had a great childhood. I did not have a traumatic childhood by any stretch the imagination. So it’s more just that I started realizing I constantly had this pattern of wondering whether or not I was actually worthy of the things that I achieved.

 

So I don’t really have fears around not being good enough for the things I want. I always go for things. I am like an executor to my core. I like to plan things and I make things happen. But once I achieve them or have them, my brain will start second guessing whether or not I actually deserve them. I will go through these doom scenarios where I envisioned things getting taken away from me. I wonder if it’s, um, you know, too good to be true. There’s lots of different interpretations. My brain has come up with this single narrative. 

 

Now, if like you can try then to imagine how someone who has her whole life kind of had this underlying truth that I don’t maybe deserve some of the things I have in my life when my dad passed away, this like blew up in my mind. And it was such a dark time because I felt so alone. I mean, obviously it was so dark because my dad had passed, but even with my own sisters and my mother, and you know, other people who had gone through loss or relatives, I felt alone in this feeling of potentially cosmically or through divine intervention, like partially lost my dad because I didn’t deserve him. This still chokes me up to think about. And I just wished that I could just be sad. I just wish that I could just miss him, but I had this unexplainable feeling of guilt and I still can’t totally put my finger on it.

 

I think that a lot of the times grief can come with guilt of like what you could or should have done better. And I didn’t really have that form of guilt. I had a great relationship with my dad. And the last conversation I had with him was such a blessing. So I didn’t have guilt of what I could have done better when he was here, but I had a lot of guilt about why he left and, you know, did I not deserve him? 

 

And was there some sort of like soul promise before I was born that, you know, I just wouldn’t have a dad my whole life. And I don’t know it was, it might sound ridiculous now saying it, but you got to understand. I was in a ton of shock. My brain was completely not making sense. And, and long story short, this is how this manifested for me for a long time.

 

And I just felt like I just wished that I could have just purely been sad that he wasn’t there, but instead I had so much selfish drama around it and it made me feel like I wasn’t making it around him enough. Anyway, the point is that was a huge underlying theme of my life and my thoughts in 2018. And I just started to really not trust myself, like with little things. Like if I decided not to go to the gym one day because I was tired or I didn’t feel well, or I was, you know, hustling my butt off so that I could leave my nine to five job. And I was working like 18 hours a day. And also I was grief-stricken like very normal reasons. And I was in my twenties. It’s not like, you know, I have go to the gym every day or my health is going to be at jeopardy.

 

I would beat myself up for the whole day. Why couldn’t you do this? Right. Why don’t, you know, this is why you don’t have what you want in life because you never follow through for yourself. Like it was so dramatic. And so this pattern just started showing up everywhere, everywhere in my life. Like even in my relationship, um, in my business, I just really struggled to think that I deserved what I wanted or what I had or what I worked for. 

 

And, um, it robbed me of a lot I think the happiness that could have come with some of those times, anyway, I’ve done so much work on this now. And I’m so aware of it. And actually it’s, it’s so freeing to be where I am now, because now when I hit a new level and these voices come up or these insecurities come up, it’s like, Oh, I know exactly what this is.

I’m just going to like, let it chill here for a second. Cause I’m not at the place where I can just totally get rid of it. But I also do not like I no longer make decisions around it or like, believe that it’s the case now, where am I going with this story? Why am I telling you all of this? 

 

Well, two years ago I was scrolling through Instagram, which was probably not one of the healthiest habits for that kind of already weak state of self-trust where you already felt like you weren’t maybe making the right decisions for your life. And I saw the Instagram account, the champagne diet who is run by Kara Allwell, um, post, uh, very simple. I actually saved it and I am looking at it to read it.

 

It’s said, “What would it look like if you just owned it? All of it, what would it look like if you owned everything?” That’s all it said. And then advertise her podcast about her. She talks about it in a new episode and for whatever reason, reading that at the right moment at the right time was exactly what I needed. 

 

Like it was exactly what I needed to snap me out of this pattern of self, like a lack of self-trust and a pattern of thinking. I was always doing things wrong. It wasn’t an original idea. And I don’t mean that in any way, negative to her. I think she’s brilliant, but it’s like anyone could have said that and I’m sure other people had said that in the past, but for whatever reason at that time I saw that and I was like, Oh my God, this is what I needed to hear.

 

And then just every time I made a decision, I’m not going to the gym today. I own that. I am proud of myself to listen for listening to my body. I am proud of myself for resting. I am proud of myself for not burning out and I’m moving on. You know, I owned my, I started just owning little decisions, little things, and then slowly but surely I was able to own bigger decisions and bigger decisions. And that year I started making really big decisions. 

 

And that’s when my life really started changing. Now the point here, obviously I wanted to share all that core wound background. In case you are recognizing that maybe you have a core wound or more like the easier way to kind of pick it out. If you can’t really think of one off the top of your head is start writing down your fears or things you have regular anxiety over. 

 

I’m not going to be able to quit my job. I don’t know if I’ll be able to have this money back. Like, was this investment the right thing to do? Do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? What if things don’t work out, start to recognize patterns in them because, and ask yourself, like, why am I afraid of that? And if you usually, if you kind of look close enough, we’ll see why you were afraid of it in the past. 

 

Or maybe how something in the past happened that supports why this could happen. Now you will start to see it. But now I kind of want to shift to the other lesson, which is an entrepreneurial lesson. So Kara wrote that post, right? And I still haven’t saved. I looked at it and Kara has like, I think 150,000 followers on Instagram.

 

She has a very big Instagram following. And that particular post still to this day, two years later has 15 comments, which isn’t that many comments. And you know, who didn’t comment on it, yours truly. You know, who didn’t message her saying, Oh my God, I lost my dad six months ago. And this is exactly what I need to help me trust myself again.  Thank you so much… me. You know, who didn’t, you know, even DM her and say like, thank you so much, me. 

 

So she may have had no idea that that posts literally changed it life. And like literally helped someone that was going through total grief and sorrow and really help them step back into themselves and kind of made a domino effect on my life for the rest of it. And so now, and then now fast forward to this year, this past year in 2020, I did a mastermind with her.

 

I told her this story, um, and you know, now I so it was a good business decision. And I want to share this story because I think so often us as entrepreneurs and especially with social media, we get so caught up in the numbers and we get caught up in the followers, is anyone reading? My emails are people messaging me back? Why didn’t want to respond to this? Why is no one booking a call from this post that I thought was so great? 

 

And we have to remember that engagement is just a number. It is a metric engagement is no indication of the power of the message that you’re spreading. It can help, right? Like if you have a lot of followers and a good bed, is that a lot of people like what you have to say, but it, by no means has any indication on whose lives you’re touching, how deeply you’re touching their life.

 

And from a sales perspective, it also doesn’t mean that you can gauge where you’re meeting people on their journey to buy from you. So I always tell my clients, you can think of people in kind of like a fast, medium and slow lane. When they come into your world, some will buy right away. They’ll see you, they’re decisive. They know, and they want it. Others need a little more warming up. Others need maybe a year or two or more. And that’s okay, your job isn’t to need to control that. I mean, you definitely can use some numbers around like the average amount. So you can just have that and know that. 

 

But you, if you really care about the message you’re sending, and if you really care about the people you’re helping, you don’t care what lane they’re in. You just want the message to reach them wherever they’re at. And so I think there’s two lessons here. One don’t, don’t worry so much about the metrics, the followers, the people that do, or don’t comment because you never know who’s watching. And two, when you really care about what you’re sharing and you’re here to make an impact, it will bring money into your life. It might not do it at the time. I’m you think it’s going to, or how you think it’s going to, but that’s the magic of this all is that there’s always more opportunities for things to come to you.

 

So as we wrap up this year and as we go into the new year, I just wanted to share that story because it has so many, excuse me, layers of lessons and brilliance underneath it, both in terms of what we can learn about ourselves as entrepreneurs and, um, you know, how our own fears hold us back from sharing things, how sometimes we overly focus on engagement or numbers or, um, whatever timeline we think we’re on and how that’s not always the most effective.

 

And the reminder that we’re not building an Instagram account, we’re building a brand, we’re building a legacy, we’re building impact. We’re building a message. And when you really lead with that, when you really lead with service, that’s, that’s when you always will be compensated. And if you want more on that topic, I recommend the book, The Law of Divine Compensation by Marianne Williamson.

 

It’s one of my all time faves and I read it early on in my business. And it helped me think so differently about how we receive money and how money kind of like moves throughout the world and, um, moves throughout humans. And, and I think that this is a good example of it. You know, that she said something I needed to hear. 

 

She contributed to the principle of more life, which is what allowed me to snap out of that fund, which allowed me to move faster, which allowed me to believe in myself more, which a lot of my business to grow, which allowed me to help more clients, which allowed me to make more money, which allowed me to hire more people and so on and so on and so on. And it just happened to come full circle. But even if it wasn’t me, because she was invoking that law, that universal law, it still would have come full circle to her.

 

So anyway, I hope that this is helpful to you. I have had this lesson be taught to me time and time again. I’ve had people join my programs that I didn’t even know followed me or anything like that. And they shared that, you know, they’d been reading my emails for two years and they’ve never responded to an email. They’ve never clicked on a link. They’ve never done kind of any of the metric type things. 

 

Conversely, I have people that, you know, have been very active and, um, participated in so much of myself as so much of my free staff, um, for years and on the surface, like numbers would suggest that they’re the most likely to buy. And sometimes they, it takes them a while to do so, usually because of fear. So we don’t need to always, um, follow these metrics so closely, we have to follow what we know is right.

 

And what we know is has the potential to truly make, to truly make an impact. Um, and yeah, I have so many examples I could think of like that. I’ve had people become my clients that I knew 10 years ago, over 10 years ago or so that I haven’t talked to since then. And I didn’t even know that they still followed me on social media or that they even knew what I was up to. 

 

So you never know, who’s watching keep showing up, do not be so worried about what other people think of you, because you never know whose life you can change. And I always, that’s always what I think about when I’m afraid to post something on social media, instead of like, what are people gonna think of me? Are people going to judge me? I think the best question to ask yourself, and this is what I’ll wrap up with is could this help someone?

 

And even if it could only help one person, in my mind, that’s always worth it. So who cares about the judgment and maybe 10 people that comment something mean, or a DM that you get that’s mean or whatever, if it helps that one person that is, that’s what we’re here to do. That’s the impact that we’re here to make. So wishing you very happy holidays. I hope that you’re ready for the new year. I am very excited about 2021.

 

I feel like so much of the growth that we had in 2020 as a business and as a team is going to bring together some really exciting things that honestly, I couldn’t have even imagined for myself and for my life just a few years ago. So things can happen very quickly. Things can change very quickly. And, um, I hope that you have some quantum leaps in your future, if that’s what you desire, no matter what, I just hope that you follow what’s true for you and that whatever you hope you see change between now and the next new year’s, um, that the year is full of it. Okay. Sending you lots of love, happy new year, everyone.

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