In this episode of the Genius Activation Podcast, you’ll get an understanding of the Genius Journey, which is a very important distinction in the Genius Thrive Method. We all have lived lives full of experiences and have a rich history of growth opportunities. As I share my own journey, I’ll reveal the process of deciphering your gifts genius on your own adventure.
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In this episode of the Genius Activation Podcast, you’ll get an understanding of the Genius Journey, which is a very important distinction in the Genius Thrive Method. We all have lived lives full of experiences and have a rich history of growth opportunities. As I share my own journey, I’ll reveal the process of deciphering your gifts genius on your own adventure.
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About Your Host:
Yvonne’s unique expression of genius is in creating joy, healing, and fulfillment. Some of the many vehicles she uses to express her genius are as a singer-songwriter, author, speaker, podcaster, coach, and healer. Her work is guiding people to live in their genius. This requires mastering the Resilience Response™ which is the complete rewiring of your Survival Codes™ into Genius Codes™.
A partial list of her training includes master certifications in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), life/executive coach, timeline therapy, hypnotherapy, emotional release, massage, and Reiki. She’s integrated decades of these studies into successful practices and processes to adapt to the energetic and linguistic changes one needs to make in their both subconscious and their daily life to allow her clients to immediately release negative, self-sabotaging behavior patterns and instantly transform and replace them with positively integrated, desire focused activities, techniques, tools, and outcomes.
The Play To Win Podcast is her first international* platform to be a visionary catalyst for entrepreneurs to discover how to master the art of fulfillment. *Currently in 44 countries! Now, she’s bringing her proprietary systems of working with personal energies and internal language directly to you with the Genius Activation Podcast!
To find out more about the core distinction of GENIUS in Episode Three.
Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Yvonne, your host. I just want to say, I am so super excited about you beginning this adventure of learning how to thrive in your genius so that you can live your legacy life and experience incredible joy, passion, and fulfillment in all areas of your life and in order to do that, there's a distinction of your genius journey, that is really important to begin to understand because it's actually the access to you, discovering what genius is going beyond what people believe genius to be as a concept, and beginning to see your genius, being realized through different moments in your life, and evolving and expanding.
And in order to help you begin to see this for yourself. I am going to be sharing my own genius journey as I see it, up until this point, and I do want to be really transparent and say that it's not always easy to see. And for me, I have been in this conversation for a lot of years, a lot of years helping other people see their genius, trying to excavate my own thing that seems to really make an amazing difference is being able to get into a conversation with someone who really knows you and loves you and cares about you and is just really crazy inquisitive, like just has all of these really great questions and they're really curious.
And so, I have had such conversations with people and so I'm going to share my genius journey, as I am aware of it at this particular moment in time, and I know that as I continue to grow and expand and evolve. I'm gonna learn more things and I'm gonna be able to make more connections but as I begin to share this with you. I hope that you are able to see some things that resonate with you and open up, like, memories and connections so that you can begin to understand your own genius journey, and I just want to also say that in this process, what becoming aware of your genius journey begins to unlock for you is where, in life, you have been operating from something that I call survival codes, and where in your life you can begin to create something that I call genius codes.
So, during the course of this podcast you're going to learn all about the genius Thrive method you're going to hear about my Crush It Without Compromise Program, my Unleash Your Genius Three Day Live event, my year-long Genius Zone Mastermind, each one of these episodes will open up new things for you and help you connect better with this really incredible body of work that has come together during my whole life, but actively really for the last 25 years that I'm consciously aware of putting all of my attention into this.
So, I will now begin with my own Genius Journey, and why it is so important. I know that I said a little bit at the beginning of the welcome episode about why I'm so committed to serving women entrepreneurs, but I'm just going to go a little bit deeper into that in my own genius journey so in my own genius journey, I, I feel blessed enough to be born into a family of entrepreneurs generational entrepreneurs like everyone on my mother's side of the family, we're entrepreneurs, like, all the way back to Great Grandpa, you know that I'm probably beyond that. So that was what was normal for me.
That's what I was used to seeing is my family members having something that they were passionate about doing for a living, and committing their whole self to this thing. And with that, I saw I mean I got so many amazing lessons about life and about being responsible and accountable and working hard.
And probably the person that I saw this with the most was my own mother. And I saw her go from, you know one expression of her genius to the next expression of her genius with the various businesses that she had, as I was growing up, a costume designer seamstress cake decorator, you know, all the way to the last thing that she did which was a daycare for like several decades, but she went moved from one thing to the next and some of these things were her primary source of income and some of these things were her like secondary like passion projects or side hustle or whatever but I just remember my mom always working so hard like working all the time, and that's the picture that I got that.
It's all about work. And the good thing is that it created a fantastic work ethic in me, but this is something that wasn't necessarily fully distinguished, like what it takes to be in business by yourself and not compromise in the various areas of your life.
So all that to say that as I have gone through my path, you know, I have had some jobs in my younger years, I did start with my own business. My very first sale was somewhere around the age of, like, I don't know, five or something. So, you know I had a lot of things over the years.
But the reason why this is so important for me to share this is that I just saw how hard she worked and how exhausted she was in the, you know, toward the end of her life, and how she was just exhausted with the process, and definitely ready to go long before it was her time.
So I've always felt like that was the reason like the whole reason why I was so passionate about this particular group of people that I want to serve, and, and that's why I've chosen to work with this group of people that, as I said, in this conversation with a friend of mine just digging a little deeper, like making sure, is there something else. Is there something else that I'm just not seeing,
And it was really interesting because I am about to be an author in a compilation book coming out in the next couple of months, and in this process of writing this chapter, I got to this vulnerable place of why it's not just important, but I'm compelled, is something that compels me, and that is actually what I'm going to share right now.
So a point in my life that I couldn't even recognize that life was just completely like going up in flames, but I feel like I was actually it had already gone up in flames, and it was a situation where I didn't know that I had this story going on in my head that was dictating everything that I was doing in life. That story, unconsciously, was that I believed that I had no value and that I didn't matter, and it was something that got formulated super early in life. The first five years of my life were really crazy, very unstable, very traumatic. There was some neglect and abuse from one side of the family. And that's where I decided this thing that I didn't have any value in didn't matter. Not that I wasn't loved and cherished in some situations, but there was half of the time I was that half of the time I was.
And so, during the course of sorting through all of this, I actually created this coping mechanism of performance. So performance of all kinds, Seeing acting. Great behavior, you know, producing the right result, even as this little tiny child just being very strategic about every single thing that I did, and throughout my life, the praise and acknowledgment that I've received from just going above and beyond, like really overcompensating, has been fairly satisfying.
And, and so it just became such an automatic way of being, it's something that I call a survival code, and it's just it became so automatic that there's no contemplation about new things that I would go into. It was just it's just on autopilot, all the time.
So, over the years, once again, being born into this family of entrepreneurs, of course, I grew up to be that successful entrepreneur who could outwork and outperform anyone and everyone around me, and I literally just became completely obsessed with the image of success.
So when I say that there came a time that everything was like up in flames, I got into this relationship in 2006 that I had really been into this person for a lot of years. He was a very attractive person, a very successful person, we had both done a lot of growth and development work together, some of the same work and, you know, other work, Tony Robbins and stuff like that. I didn't do that but he had done that, and I just felt like wow this is gonna be the most incredible power partner for me, and I wasn't actually seeking out this relationship when it came to me, but I got into the relationship because it seemed like this was the last thing that I like was missing in my life to appear as like having it all like completely just completing that image of success that I have my personal relationships are fantastic, my self-expression in the world is amazing. My business is amazing and I just need that, you know, personal, an intimate relationship so I got into that relationship without any question I jumped in and dove into the deep end.
Essentially, in doing that when I was looking at my genius journey I realized that there was so much that happened in that relationship that allowed me to grow and expand and to try out different things that I had learned about, you know, relationships and partnerships and being an extraordinary woman inside of a relationship.
At the same time, there were all these other things that I didn't realize the relationship was providing me which was this mirror, this reflection, this reflection of being obsessed with success. This person was even more obsessed with that. And so in order to, you know, maintain this relationship, and this image over the course of eight years, I actually ended up compromising everything else. Everything else I compromised, like different business ventures that were coming my way, my finances that had been in perfect order. Weren't the end of this. I had this amazing full social life, and my personal relationships were fantastic and my self-expression in the world I was out like living my dream of why I moved to LA. I sacrificed all of that. I compromised all of that as well as my, my, my values. And quite honestly, I ended up putting my own personal dream on hold indefinitely to support him in achieving his.
Honestly, it was just so much work and a lot of sacrifices and coming out of it. Assessing everything really, I realized that there was no payoff, and I was so crazy miserable and everyone around me knew that. So about three years into this I started to listen to the advice of my friends and I actually drafted and delivered a breakup letter.
And then the very next day, Mother's Day. My mother died. And I was, I was completely heartbroken, I was devastated. And like she was everything to me. And without her. I just felt lost. With all of that, I didn't. At that moment I actually could not access my, my strength and my courage to follow through with breaking up.
So, in order to maintain a false sense of security and support, just to cope. I turned to another survival mechanism which was alcohol, and the next five years ended up being just a crazy roller coaster and a haze. The alcohol, and so much happened, I was just trapped inside of this illusion that someday, something would change. And I couldn't in my wildest dreams fathom getting out of this relationship.
Thankfully, a glimmer of hope came my way I had this loving friend at one point asked me a series of subtle questions inside of a conversation about my previous relationships, and she had an agenda, I didn't know she had the agenda, but she had the agenda and thank God that she did because it worked. And inside of this conversation, I realized that I was not in a loving relationship of my dreams, and that even though I loved him and, honestly, to this day I still love him, that I could actually love him from a distance.
So, one evening, I was just blessed with the courage, the strength, and the words, it just came to me and through me, in the most loving kind way I just shared what needed to be shared in order to end the relationship, the conversation ended with this just amazing, loving hug, and, you know, we were able to take part in a good state.
Unfortunately, though, things actually ended up getting worse. And I really struggled with it, as I reflected on the relationship and the eight years I struggled with. How did I get to this place where I compromised, everything for this one thing, and how could I, how could I go there, when I had so much training and spiritual and energetic and emotional, tools, and so much growth and development and so much knowledge so much studies like how on earth could I get to this particular point where I was capable of compromising everything for this one thing.
I was in this vicious cycle of inner conversations and just telling myself that I had nothing to show for eight years of my life, and so I decided that I had to make up for the lost time. So now, I was actually in hyperdrive I was building two businesses simultaneously I was putting in 16 to 18 hours a day, shot around 100 professional training videos for one of my online training courses.
And everyone around was seeing me like everywhere they're seeing me everywhere in person everywhere online social media, and so all of a sudden, praise and acknowledgment started pouring in, and I was, you know, at some times buying into it like yeah I'm kicking butt, but then other times, I was like, really struggling to hear it because it wasn't congruent it wasn't true, it was I felt like a fraud.
People were saying, Wow, you know that relationship was the best thing for you and look at everything you've created and, and, you know, just really amazing things!'' So like in those conversations I feel amazing, but then when I was alone. I was still, I couldn't get over, I couldn't get over what it was that I had compromised all those years and I just couldn't do enough to make up for what I felt I had lost. I couldn't. I just couldn't get over it. And all I felt was empty and exhausted and just so much pain is, I just couldn't escape this sense of emptiness. I even wrote a song about it. Typically I sing it. Everybody cries. I think because all of us can relate to the universal message inside of the song.
I just all of this just created so much more mental and emotional confusion. And I just kept suffocating, all of this with, with more alcohol. So essentially, I was creating success but on the backside, I was sabotaging all of my success and so it was creating even more chaos and devastation, and then I had even more reasons to feel like I was a failure, so it was just this crazy, ridiculous vicious cycle of negative self-talk that continued to get more and more brutal.
And I just couldn't figure out how to be happy. I just wanted to feel like me again, and I just desperately wanted to escape. And, like I said I was just so exhausted because I literally could not do anything more, I was going at 110% I was not just burning the candle at both ends, had drilled holes into the candle everywhere and I was just like, stuck wicks in everywhere, I was just burning the candle from all over the ends, and, like, literally, I was just hustling and grinding myself into the ground.
And there came a moment. That was incredibly impactful for me, I know it was impactful for a lot of people on a global level, but this was in 2014 August 11, that we all discovered that Robin Williams had passed away, and I was just in my room, bawling my eyes out. It had been reported that it was a suicide.
And I felt as I was there crying. I felt like I knew how he felt. And I realized in this moment, that something would have to change or I wouldn't be here much longer. And I'd already had several experiences with friends around me, saying just incredibly brilliant gifted intelligent people losing the battle to suicide.
So at this point, this is where I began to redirect my attention and my focus to solving this mystery of, you know what causes these incredible people. Yes, I do I know that I'm exceptional, and even I like why, how did I get here, how, how do people with so much wisdom and knowledge and skills and talents and gifts and brilliance, how do they get to this place where they can resort to suicide. And my other question was how can we disrupt it and just eliminate it.
So, as I began to spend quite a bit of time pondering this looking at my own experience, it seemed like the best answer I could come up with was that at some point, you just lost, who you were like I lost who I was, I had lost the connection to who I was, what the meaning of my life was and tying this back to what I shared before like not knowing that I had any value and not knowing that my life mattered like this conversation that was created, the story in my first five years, was at the source of the source code, it was, it was the source of this chaos and confusion and devastation that was my life for all this time.
And it's not to say that there are clearly genius codes that we create in our life that are an expression of our highest self who we were put on this planet to be. So, any given time you're going to tap into one or the other, but in this very long period of time. A lot of people say dark night of the soul, I don't feel that it's a night. I think that every single time that we allow ourselves to disconnect with the genius with who we are the source of our greatness is when we experience the dark night, the separation.
And when we reconnect to that when we get back into alignment with that when we're back in sync with our genius, that's when we are just fully in the light, and fully empowered and joyful and passionate and fulfilled.
So when I finally realized for myself that I had lost value and purpose and meaning, when I chose to compromise, who I was, to be in that relationship. That's when I went on another iteration of my genius journey and this was that I was going to go all-in, and instead of being obsessed with success. I was going to be obsessed with fulfillment.
So at this point, I dove back into the deep end instead of the relationship I dove into the deep end of growth and development and spirituality, and my own healing, and in this process, you know, each little step along the way I was retrieving fragments of my soul and fragments of myself, and as much as I wanted to be the person that I used to be I wanted to like just wanted to get back to that person. The truth was I wasn't I'm, I was never going to be that person again.
Part of my genius journey is experiencing those things so that I could discover these elements of my genius, have compassion and empathy and understanding and patience and generosity connections so many different things that this process allowed me to gain access to.
So, as I found these fragments of myself I found grace for myself, and compassion and forgiveness, and instead of getting myself back. It was like I had a rebirth, I got to become whole new like evolution of myself, and I started to get more passionate and more joyful and everything began to feel authentic and congruent, and I was getting connected to people that were of like mind and really wanted to impact, impact and influence the world,
And so I had this idea that someone planted this little seed that someone planted to start a podcast, and this was amazing because with this podcast I centered it around fulfillment. I started this podcast on how to master the art of fulfillment called The Play To Win Podcast, and what that allowed me to do was interview, just the most amazing highly successful people who had already gone through this struggle of prioritizing success over fulfillment and during the course of this, like journey for them, their genius journey, they figured out how to have both success and fulfillment.
So, what I noticed as this common thread through each of these interviews, was that the common denominator was that it was genius. It was genius, they had all found their genius, and they built their whole entire life around that when they found what their genius was they redesigned and they restructured their life to support them in living in their genius.
And it just made so much sense, The struggle came from going against the flow going against what your natural abilities were, and not being in alignment with what you're passionate about and being in your genius, everything is honestly divinely guided is just divine, you're in the flow you're in the it's like the natural order of things.
So, once I got this answer, now I'm ready for my next phase of my genius journey. I had to... There's a saying about, in order to get traction you have to sometimes slow down so for me I like, you know, rather than pump the brakes, I just like practically put it in park. I had to like, just pause and look at everything with this new insight, and so that's what I did from April 22 2019 To around October of 2019 it just took a really long time to... it seemed like a long time, it really isn't that long but seems like a really really long time. When you, when you move at the pace that I move at. You can even hear it when I speak. That's a really long time.
So anyway I did slow down, and I did a whole bunch of soul searching, and as I started to look back, I was connecting dots, and I was asking my friends and my clients, what is my genius. What I found in these conversations, what was reflected back at me was that my genius was resilience. It was the thing that I had been doing already, with my clients for 25 years.
And what's really intriguing about this discovery was that it was so automatic that I couldn't even see it. It was just something I did so naturally, but when I was able to see that this is the calling this is really how I have begun to relate to genius is that it's like our soul's calling that we get to live out and express through our life.
Once I got that I was actually able to look back at my entire life, and reframe everything. When I got that it actually gave my entire life, meaning, and purpose every single event that I had gone through, up until that moment, made sense. It had meaning. I could see the gift. With the capacity that I gained, the insight, the wisdom, the experience, I could see how each and every event, added to my ability to bring resilience to the world.
Then, the huge aha, I'm sure you've heard this by now that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, this calling is something that I get to give throughout my whole entire life, as the Spirit, you know, the spiritual being having a human experience.
A lot of times people struggle with finding out what their purpose in life is, and I believe that calling and purpose are just slightly different. So when people are trying to find out their purpose, they start to take inventory of, you know, the intellect and wisdom that they'd gathered up until now, their talents and passions, their soft and hard skills and they try to figure out from all of those components what their purpose is…
But it's my belief that these things are just the gifts that are the vehicles through which our genius gets to be delivered in the world. So, that is always evolving. And that is also why I call this process, a genius journey. It's always evolving. Your genius is always finding new ways to expand and express and evolve. If you are allowing it to do that. If you're not if you're in that period of the dark soul and it's it has no room to flourish.
So, the most recent at the time of this podcast being recording the most recent results of last year, March 2020 rolled around the work that I had already completed around knowing what my genius was. I mean, day one. March 2020 March 20 of 2020.
I immediately knew exactly what I was supposed to do, it was crystal clear what my job was, and I felt like my whole entire life had prepared me for that moment and all that I had to do was figure out how to deliver this virtually, so that is where this iteration of my genius is at this point, it is in helping people with the six-week Crush It Without Compromise Program, it is the delivery of this three-day course and my year-long mastermind. And this podcast is this every single episode of this podcast is me getting to let my genius express and find words for it. It’s letting myself, my human self, and my ego and all of my fears and worries and concerns just get suspended for a little bit to allow the genius to come through.
And, you know, in doing all of this. It is really my deepest desire that you are able to benefit from this, that you are able to see your own genius, that you are left inspired to take massive action in your life, and that you know, you begin to tap into living your legacy life that you begin to experience a profound sense of joy, passion, and fulfillment.
So with that, I am going to wrap up this episode.
Originally when I was working with my mentors for the podcasting world. The idea of this particular episode is more of a biography and a timeline, I guess, for people to get to know you and me. I recorded that one, and I thought, This is ridiculous. Like, I like I recorded it, I edited it, it was like ready to upload I was like this just feels weird.
So I thought, over the years. Well, the weeks, and the years to come. You'll learn all those things about me, there's no way that I can not talk about the cool events of my life. After sharing, you know some of these more challenging events, but you'll hear those things over time, and that will make it more fun.
So with that, thank you so much for tuning in, and tune in for our next episode which will be about the distinction of genius. Bye for now.