Hello friends welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs, the business questions you can't google. If you're new here, my name is Ellen Yin, I am the host and founder of cubicle to CEO. And I love using these bonus Wednesday episodes to share the Behind the Business Insights I'm learning as a founder and as a self funded entrepreneur.
So recently, I got to spend three nights away at a personal wellness retreat in Laguna Beach, California, which is so gorgeous, if you've never been, it's the sleepy beach town, right on the Pacific Coast Highway. It's a it's a, oh, my goodness, it's beautiful. And I have never really invested in an experience that was purely focused on my personal well being and my personal development only. Typically when I'm investing in event experiences, or masterminds, or just any sort of ongoing education, there's always some sort of a business element tied to it. And so this was really the first time that I stepped outside of my comfort zone and decided to invest in something that I knew would nourish me just as a person, regardless of any impact that it would have on my business. Although, of course, any of us who know and have been in this journey for many years understand that your development as a person and your health and well being as a person absolutely impacts the way that you show up in business, especially if you are leading others in your business as well.
So anyways, I attended the permission slip retreat by my friend, Carmen Ohling, who I actually met in the strangest way, she is just generosity embodied. And I remember last summer, when we hosted our first live event for cubicle to CEO, let's get visible here in Oregon. Some of you may have attended that. I remember, I woke up one day to just a slew of Facebook notifications on my post sharing this event. And it was actually Carmen, and she was tagging all of these friends who lived locally in Oregon and telling them, Hey, you should go to this event, I think this would be really great for you. And here I was thinking who is this woman, like I had never heard of her before, I had never, you know, just had no interaction with her on the internet or otherwise. And here was this complete stranger showing up with such generosity. And taking her time and leveraging her networks to encourage these women, her friends to attend my event. And I just I thought that was the coolest thing.
So I ended up connecting with her and found out of course, through these conversations that she's from Oregon, I'm from a small town near where I grew up, but is now living in Miami. And she is a wonderful person and incredible holistic wellness and life coach. And I have been wanting to experience one of her retreats for a while now she does a few a year and I had heard amazing things from others who had attended. And so I finally jumped on this one because it was in Laguna, which is a short flight away from where I live. And also it was happened to be you know, going into Easter weekend. So I knew I could extend my trip and spend some quality time with my sisters down in LA. So anyways, it all worked out.
And I just wanted to share three quick things that I learned from that experience. Because like I said, I think as leaders, it's so important that we continue to develop ourselves and to invest in our holistic well being. And there were three big takeaways that I got from this retreat that have really stuck with me and enriched my life for the good. So I wanted to pass these off to you in case they enrich your life as well.
So lesson number one, this was from the get go and Carmen models this so well is this mindset of expecting miracles, to look at the world through this lens of miracles are normal, and they happen for you all the time. If you pay attention rather than thinking of miracles as this once in a lifetime event or a stroke of luck, or whatever it is to actually live each day as though you expect miracles is just such a joyful way to live. And the way that Carmen embodies that or models that for us is she has a saying, of course that happened. Thank you. So anytime something good happens in her life, no matter how small. She always goes. "Of course that happened. Thank you." And it's just this like constant practice of gratitude and receiving and just living in the belief that you deserve the good things that come to you and that they are normal, right that they are to be expected and to show that instant gratitude for it and recognition for the amazing things in your life. No matter how small like I said, it could be just the most micro moment. But to constantly hear her say that throughout the weekend, of course that happened, thank you. I just really, really loved that. So I wrote that down. And I've been trying to practice that more often in my own life. So I thought I would share that little nugget with you in case you want to also start using that phrase whenever you notice something good happened for you or the people around you.
Now, number two is this thing that we did, I can't remember which day it was, it might have been day one or day two in the retreat, she had us do this exercise where we took a bunch of name tag stickers, and she played a song, set a timer. Actually, it was kind of fun, because of course, like she played to our competitive side, it wasn't I don't think intentional, but a lot of the women who showed up to this retreat are business owners, or are entrepreneurial in some sense of the word. So of course, we all kind of had this a little bit of a competitive edge in a good way, you know, like in a fun, like self motivating type of way, not in a competitive mindset against other people, if that makes sense. But anyways, she was gamifying it right?
So she's like, Alright, I'm gonna set a timer and just jot down every single word you can think of that describes, you know, filter, just whatever comes out, write it down. And let's see who can get the most words out in two minutes. So I didn't win spoiler alert. But I did end up writing out I think, like 22 different words that I thought described me. And it was really interesting actually, to observe this exercise once we were done. Because, you know, some people, they wrote a mix of like nouns and adjectives, and some people only wrote adjectives, some people wrote things that were both positive. And I don't know if negative is the right word, but like, things that they liked about themselves and things that they wanted to work on within themselves, like things they recognized as their own hindrances, or perhaps weak spots, weak areas, while others completely put that aside and only focused on their positive attributes. So it was really interesting to see what came through in the exercise. But after we did that, Carmen basically explained, these are the labels, right?
The labels that we move through life with, because it's either something we've been conditioned to think about ourselves, for example, like, if you've been told your whole life, you're shy, you probably have adopted that identity. And you just think of yourself as a shy person, whether or not that's actually true to who you actually are. But you know, that's like an easy example to think of. So whether you've been conditioned to think of yourself that way, or whether it is something you actually do identify with, like, you're a mom, or you're an entrepreneur, or you're a daughter or a sister or a wife, or like whatever that is, right. It's interesting to like, look at all these labels of yourself and ask yourself this question of, if I didn't have these labels, if I wiped them all clean, and it was a clean slate, who would I be without these labels. And obviously, some of them are labels that you don't necessarily want to read right of yourself, like many of us are proud to be someone's sister, or best friend, or mom or daughter, or whatever it may be. And these are things that are core to who we are in our identities.
But there are other labels, I'm sure we can all relate that we don't necessarily know that we would love to keep if we had the choice to keep that about ourselves. And one thing that I realized the aha moment I had from doing this exercise was not so much about which labels I wanted to shed versus keep. But more around this concept of realizing that, you know, growing up, and I've talked about this a little bit before in different episodes, but for those of you who again, are newer to me, I am an Enneagram type three, which is the achiever. And growing up my sense of self identity and self worth is very much tied to this idea of achievement, right? And in whatever form that looks like. And so, because I've always been this way, since a very young age, it's very ingrained in my habits and like how I perceive myself and like how I, I guess I just like live in my in my life. And so I what I realized is that I've always held myself to this really high standard of what I think I should be doing or should have achieved or should have done or whatever that looks like. And I realized if I didn't have these pre existing labels, I would probably not hold myself to such impossible standards at times, because there would be no reputation to uphold.
And that was like my, oh, aha moment because I realized looking back at, you know, my performance for lack of a better term over the last you know, almost three decades now, that when you look at your pre existing reputation, right, especially if it's a reputation that's perceived generally positively by society, it's really hard to move away from that reputation. Because it's, it's like your historic actions. And so people expect you to live up to what you've always lived up to. And so that was kind of my aha moment is, Oh, interesting. Like do I continually set these really high benchmarks for myself, and feel like I need to achieve them to continue to live up to this reputation that I've built over many, many years of being in that achieving mindset. So that was a really interesting just like introspective moment for me.
Another thing I wrote down this like phrase, just kind of like jumped to mind. And I shared it with the other women in the group when we were doing our reflections. And it resonated with some of them. So I thought maybe, maybe this will hit a point for you. But I wrote this sentence, I wrote mediocrity, could that just be my egos way of rejecting what is actually contentment. Let me give a little bit of context to this. So again, ever since I was a young child, I feel like I've always wanted to distance myself as far as possible from this concept of being average or mediocre. And I don't even really know in my own mind what that means to me necessarily, but I just knew, like, I wanted to be a big dreamer. I wanted to be extraordinary, in whatever I chose to do. And so this idea of mediocrity was like, that was like, the antithesis of everything I wanted my life to be. And so, you know, for years, I've like, run away from this concept of mediocrity, like, I want to be anything but mediocre. I want to be excellent. I want to be extraordinary. And I don't know why I had that, like that download of Oh, like, could that just be my egos way of rejecting what is actually contentment? Do I associate being content with being complacent? Like, in my mind, are those two things the same thing, even though they're actually not in reality, right, but in my mind, do I associate them as one in the same? So that was another really interesting kind of question for me to ponder. I'm still not sure if I've fully developed my answer there yet.
But I just wanted to pose that as a question to you. Because I know there's a lot of you who are similar to me who listen to this podcast. So I know, I can't be alone in feeling that way. So anyways, that's a question to maybe marinate on. And of course, when I, when I said this out loud in the group, I can't remember who but they were like, Oh, my God, that was so profound. And then I I was joking. I was like, Well, don't worry, because, like, the very next word that I wrote after this, you know, quote, unquote, profound thought was Idk. Like, I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. Like, it's just, it was just a thought that came to my head. And it's an interesting one to really unpack, right.
Okay. The third and final takeaway that I got from this retreat that I really loved is when you're stuck, when you're in a season of either season, a moment, whatever it looks like, where you feel really stuck in your in your life and your business, whatever that may look like. Three ways to refresh yourself to get out of that feeling of stuckness is through sound, breath, and movement. And this is just such an easy thing to remember. Right? So like, anytime you feel just not yourself, or you feel like you can't get out of the rut that you're in just thinking about how can I incorporate sound? How can I incorporate breath? How can I incorporate movement into my day to break things up. And one of the really fun things we actually did at this retreat, while there was I mean, we did all three modalities like sound, we did like a sound bath, which was really fun at the end, really relaxing, like in there's so much science behind like sound therapy, and how all sorts of sound, you know, including of course music, how that impacts our brain in our in our mental health. So anyways, sound was a really cool thing to experience at the retreat. We did breathwork and then also movement.
So this was the one that was kind of a fun experience I wanted to share with you all on day one when we got there. One of the first activities we did together as a group was Carmen brought in this belly dancer, which was so much fun. And basically her the concept behind this was she was like, you know, it's really easy when you walk into a room or you walk into a new space where you may not know everybody, your ego very quickly takes over both for bad or for good, right where you compare yourself to people around you. Especially if you're in an uncomfortable situation or, I mean it doesn't even have to be like uncomfortable. Just it could just be any news. situation, right, where you automatically kind of measure yourself up to others. So you either perceive yourself as better than someone or worse than and you compare, right. And so to help break through that, she wanted to bring in an activity that we could all do together, that puts all of us on a level playing field, and puts us all back in a beginner's shoes. So she assumed correctly, of course, that none of us were professional belly dancers, or really even experienced in that at all. And so all of us were beginners in that moment, and all of us had to be humbled and, you know, try something that we were not super familiar with. And just kind of let go of any ego, or, I guess need to judge ourselves or others, because we were all in the same place. So I thought that was such a cool concept.
Like, yes, the belly dancing was fun, but even more, so I just loved that she was able to bring that perspective. And that reminder. And I think this is actually such a great tool for any of you listening to us, if you facilitate any sort of group programs, or retreats or in person experiences, like Carmen, where you're bringing together a group of strangers, and maybe it's hard to break the ice at first, or you want people to kind of let their guard down. I think this is such a great idea to encourage people to participate in something that puts everybody kind of on that same level playing field and reminding all of us that we all are beginners in some way or another in different areas of our lives. And that it's okay to not know everything and it's okay to stumble or to look silly, or whatever that may be and to just like be present in the moment and let loose and have fun and be free. And not always be thinking about like what will someone think of me for doing this, that or the other.
So, anyways, that wraps up my personal takeaways on what I loved about this experience. Thank you so much, Carmen. By the way, if you're listening for putting on such an amazing retreat for all of us, if you're interested in hanging out with Carmen or me at a future retreat, I think I'll definitely return to another one. I don't know when yet but I do know Carmen is planning another one in the fall, probably won't be able to attend that one because it'll be right after my wedding. So we'll be you know, in the midst of honeymooning and other fun things, but if you're interested, I'll I'll leave Carmen's information below her Instagram handle and her website, but her retreats are called permission slip retreats, and her community has permission slip communities. So she's an amazing person. And I hope even if you don't end up attending a personal wellness experience yourself anytime in the near future, that these three takeaways are easy to remember nuggets that you can implement in your own life for positive impact. So I will catch you all in the next episode.
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