I had a client in my Mastermind who grew up in a traditional household.
While she had lots of ideas, her father often dismissed them.
As an adult, she toed the line. She went to the college her parents wanted her to go to. She studied the major her parents wanted her to major in. She got married to a successful doctor as every Indian parent wanted. On her wedding day, she danced, danced, danced. She wore the most gorgeous of dresses. But a niggling thought wouldn’t go away.
Nobody had ever asked her what she wanted.
Several years and 2 kids into the marriage, she was standing at the kitchen sink. Alone. The voice grew louder. Nobody had stopped to ever ask her what she wanted.
She didn’t want this anymore. She had ideas.
She shared the idea of leaving her marriage with her folks. They dismissed it.
“Try harder,” was their response.
She chose to listen to herself this time and filed for divorce.
It’s been a hard road, but she has rebuilt herself. She has a good job. She’s invested in a business that was her idea. Her kids are flourishing.
During the Mastermind retreat, I shared a series of questions. Each of the attendees had to pick 5 to answer. Over dinner one night, she elected to answer “ Is your inner voice truly yours? Or is it someone else’s voice influencing it?
She had grown so accustomed to having her ideas dismissed, she thought ‘why even bother trying?’ So she evaded answering the question. But today I wasn’t letting her off the hook. We started during the pandemic, so it was easy to elude while on Zoom call. But now we were in person, and I kept pressing, “Whose voice is she hearing and influencing her actions?”
Through a long series of queries, we arrived at an important conclusion: Yes, she had made a quantum leap by listening to herself about marriage, but her worthiness had not caught up. The voice she constantly heard—was her fathers. Dismissing her ideas.
Jamie Kern Lima, author of the book “Worthy” and co founder of IT cosmetics, spoke at the Tony Robbins Unstoppable Summit yesterday. She was someone who also had big ideas. But they were dismissed. She eventually sold her big idea to L’oreal for $1.2B dollars.
“We can have a vision for something, we can even take action, believe its possible. But if deep down inside we don’t believe we are not worthy of it, we will never go for it or we will sabotage it along the way,” said Lima from the stage. “When it comes to your goals, your dreams, your dreams, we don’t soar. We stay stuck at the level of our self worth. You don’t rise to what you want you become. You settle at what you believe you are worth,” Lima concluded.
When we concluded the Mastermind, my client shared that she had bid on a $10,000 item at an auction. Something she would have never dreamed of doing before. But her worthiness level had
Finally.Caught.Up.
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I host a business Mastermind for women leaders. Our work for the year together is building a powerful personal brand. But we spend 50% of the time on the personal development. 50% of the time on the professional development. I’ve learned myself that our businesses will only grow as fast as our healing does.
Want the series of questions I had shared with my Mastermind members on that retreat? Download here
https://joyadass.lpages.co/download-shadow-work-journal-prompts-here/to
